Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,69

had the classical beauty needed to play Juliet.

“I had concert tickets,” he said, like he was up before a judge.

“Wait,” Nora said. “You dated Sadie?”

“A long time ago. Casually.” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to qualify the past. Yeah, he had dated Sadie. What was the big deal? Everyone liked Sadie. Having dated her would only reflect well on him.

“Yes,” Rohan said. “And they took off the day of the play, so Maya had to cancel it. She’d made the sets and costumes herself and all that. That was her first play, so it was still all kind of homespun. She was inspired by the Leonardo DiCaprio movie version, so she’d painted a big backdrop of that Mexico City Jesus statue.”

Well, shit. “She didn’t have understudies?” Law remembered a production of The Tempest when Prospero broke his ankle during the dress rehearsal and Alan Hemming had to fill in. Maya had been worked up because the high school teacher had been all of thirty if he was a day, and Prospero was supposed to be wise and old.

“She does now,” Rohan said. “She’s never done a play since without understudies. In fact, she memorizes the entirety of every play she directs but isn’t in so in theory she can step in and play any role.”

“She’s blown me off more than once because of play memorizing,” Nora said. “I always kind of thought it was overkill, but I get it now.”

Oh God. How many hours had Maya sat at his bar, memorizing lines? He’d always thought she’d been working on the roles she’d been playing. But she’d been memorizing entire plays?

“Yeah,” Rohan said to Nora. “She was really affected by that first disastrous show. She’d been planning to film it as part of her college application package.”

This just kept getting worse. Law never would have tried to lure Sadie away that weekend if he’d thought— But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He hadn’t thought. He suddenly remembered arguing with Sadie in the car about whether Romeo and Juliet was a stupid story or a romantic one.

It was like finding out your favorite superhero had an origin story you had somehow missed. He’d always thought he and Maya fought because…they just did. He barely remembered a time when Maya wasn’t sniping at him.

But think: she’d been away at college for four years.

Had she sniped at him before that?

It was hard to say. She’d been a kid. She hadn’t really registered for him.

Until she turned nineteen and came into his bar and started snarking at him. Sting Day. A day he had imbued with origin-story mythology, but apparently he’d gotten it all wrong. Holy shit.

He looked over at her, but she wasn’t paying any attention to him. She was bopping around with Holden.

“Oh my gosh, is Holden teaching Maya the ‘Petal Power’ choreography?” Nora exclaimed. “I gotta get my big pregnant ass in on this.” She grabbed Eve. “Come on. We can come back for drinks later.”

“So hey,” Rohan said, drawing Law from his thoughts. “Pearl told me this place was written up in a Globe and Mail article?”

“Yeah.” Law had to force himself to focus on what Rohan was saying. His brain was occupied with freaking the fuck out over the bomb that had just been dropped on him.

“I’m working on a publicity plan for Much Ado about Nothing,” Rohan said, “and I was thinking I’d try to get a theater critic out here by shamelessly dangling Holden’s name. But then I thought maybe I should email that journalist, too, and build on this idea that Moonflower Bay is a cultural hot spot, you know?”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Do you remember the name on the byline?”

“Yes!” Anything he could do to help make the play a success. He grabbed a pen. “I’ll write it down for you.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” It was, it turned out, the least he could do—do his part to ensure the success of Maya’s latest play, since apparently he was responsible for the failure of her first one.

Maya was learning that trying to coax what she wanted from Holden in rehearsals—including getting him to learn his lines, which was what she wanted most of all—was not the most effective method. He responded better to “spontaneous” conversations in social settings than he did to overt direction. Which was annoying, given that she was literally his director, but it was what it was. So she’d taken to strategically hanging out with him, often at the bar. And although the