I broke apart because my leg was wet. Jennifer was licking my calf, her way of saying time’s up, lady. She batted her big brown eyes at me and nudged my leg once more.

  “I need to walk her back to my parents’ house before we head out,” I said, glancing at her jowly face.

  “I’ll walk with you.” He reached for my hand. “I hope you know I adore kissing you.”

  Kisses with him were spectacular. Add in his flirty, swoony words, chase them with a touch of naughtiness, and I was quickly sliding down the path to a frazzled brain. Like a marble rattling down a chute, he was poised to knock my carefully controlled life out of orbit.

  The only saving grace was that his future was uncertain. He’d be leaving the country in two months if he didn’t land a job with a company that would sponsor his work visa. I held onto the possibility that we would never become more than a brief interlude our senior year of college. Neither one of us had the bandwidth for a relationship, or even for more regular dating. There were built-in barriers to protect me from falling.

  I could erect more, though, just to keep my untamed heart and mind safe as safe could be.

  “We should go,” I mumbled even though I wanted to sing, to shout, to tell everyone that I adored kissing him, too.

  So. Very. Much.

  2

  Jess

  * * *

  William parked himself in a chair at the corner café next to J.P.’s office. “Back in five. I’ll tell your former short-lived employer you said hi,” I said as I opened the door to the building. I needed to get paid, and get the afternoon assignments.

  “Yes. Please do that,” he said as he pulled out his iPad to work on homework while waiting for me.

  “You liked my surprise pic?” I asked J.P. as I entered his dark and dimly lit confines.

  “You made my day with it,” he said, swiveling the screen around to show me where the shot of Jenner at lunch had landed—the website On the Surface.

  “Good. Now make my day, J.P. Why was Jenner Davies having lunch with a guy who runs a photo agency?”

  “Huh?”

  “The guy in the photo,” I said, pointing to Keats on the computer screen on his desk. “The guy he’s having lunch with.”

  J.P. stabbed his meaty finger against the other guy in the picture, the one who looked like a carbon copy of Keats.

  “That guy,” J.P. said, gesturing to the older of the small-nosed brothers, “is Jenner Davies’s publicist.”

  My eyebrows knit together as I tried to process what he’d just said. “What?”

  “Name is Wordsworth Wharton,” J.P. said and laughed loudly, then rolled his eyes. “Can you believe it? What am I going to learn next? That his brother is named Keats?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Even so, I whispered yes. But I still didn’t move a muscle; I sat in the rickety wooden chair by his desk, with some kind of strange, unexpected shock on my features. Keats’s older brother was Jenner’s publicist, and the trio of them had seemed immensely pleased. A sense of unease rolled through me, as if the joke was on me, only I had no clue what it was.

  J.P. stared hard at me as if I were two puzzle pieces he couldn’t quite align. “Jess, what’s the big deal? Actors have lunch with their publicists all the time.”

  Right. I couldn’t let on that Jenner wasn’t just having lunch with his publicist. Jenner Davies was having lunch with his publicist and also his publicist’s younger brother who happened to run a rival photo agency that had happened to contract for shots of a secret tryst between a young actress and a married director. I had inside information, but the information didn’t add up, so I plastered on my best game face as I tried to mentally connect the dots between Jenner and the poetically named pair of brothers. Maybe they were all buddies. Maybe Wordsworth was helping Keats grow his business. Maybe their get-together was simply the next item on Keats’s agenda for the day.

  But that moment of laughter when they all seemed to be in on the same joke weighed on me.

  Not wanting to be surprised again, I made a mental note to add faces of publicists to my flash cards, because I hadn’t recognized Jenner’s publicist.

  I shifted gears. “I’ve got a lead on the wedding. Looks like I might be able to get in,” I told him. I didn’t want to promise too much too soon.

  “Tell me more.” J.P. licked his lips in that way he did when he was getting excited for a shot, and the greenbacks it would bring. “Because I heard from someone at WAM that the ceremony starts at two on Saturday,” he said, referring to the biggest talent agency in town that happened to rep Chelsea Knox, Bradley Bowman, and both Veronica and Riley Belle.

  His source at WAM had gotten the time right. That was good corroboration. Inadvertent, but good. The fact that his source knew the correct time also meant that details on the wedding were starting to leak out, so I’d need to keep the ones I knew close to the vest. I didn’t tell J.P. where the ceremony was really going to be. J.P. had unleashed what he had presumed was the competition on me earlier in the week in the form of William; I wasn’t going to disclose the most precious detail I possessed, even though J.P. was good to me.

  “I know someone on security detail,” I said, once again keeping my cards to myself. “Says he can get me in. All I need is a fake ID. Got any idea where in this town I can get one of those bad boys on short notice?” I asked with a wink.

  He held his arms in the air, the sign of victory. “I knew eventually you’d cave, Jess! Damn, I impress myself.”

  “Yeah, preen later. Anyway, I need it tomorrow.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Fast turnaround? That’ll cost you double.”

  “You’re not honestly going to charge me for a fake ID so I can get into a wedding and deliver you exclusively a shot of the most sought-after photo Hollywood has seen in years?”

  “Just kidding.” He rose and walked over to the one plywood wall in his office that didn’t have posters or frames of his greatest photographic hits on it, then yanked down a rolling white blind.

  I handed him my camera, stood in front of the blind, and gave a scowl.

  “C’mon. Say cheese for the fake DMV.”

  “Cheese,” I said as he snapped a picture. Then I remembered a key detail that rendered this photo shoot moot. “Crap. I’m going to wear a wig on Saturday. I can’t use this shot.”

  “What color wig?”

  “Brunette probably. Why? Got extra in your drawer?”

  “Yeah. I make fake IDs,” he said, as if it was obvious to anyone that he’d keep a stash of wigs close at hand. “’Course I have extra.”

  I contemplated putting on a wig that someone else had worn. I pictured getting lice. I knew better than to wear someone else’s headgear.

  “If I send you a picture later of me in the wig I’m going to wear, can you just Photoshop it in front of the background? I mean, you were just going to Photoshop me anyway in front of the California license background, right?”

  “Get it to me by eight. I’ve got a hot date, and I’m going off the clock tonight.”

  “I’ll send it to you by then.”

  “All right. Now do you think you can get your pretty little butt out of here and take some pictures for me over on Melrose?” he said, rattling off the names of several TV stars whose assistants planned to take them shopping today.

  “I’m on it,” I said. Besides, there was a wig shop on Melrose where I could grab Claire Tinsley’s ’do. After all, I had a wedding to crash in less than forty-eight hours.

  I found William at the table outside, looking cool and casual and completely kissable. My stomach twisted in knots with wanting him, and then once more with wishing I didn’t want him so much.

  I tried to tell myself he wasn’t the guy I was falling for. He was only my partner-in-crime, and nothing more.

  But the rush of heat in my veins, and the fluttering in my chest, said otherwise.

  I proceeded to share with him all that I’d learned about Keats and Wordsworth, hoping the focus on work would distract me from matters of the heart.

  3

  William

  * * *

  A font of celebrity insight, Jess knew everything about every star, from their relationship status, to their list of credits, to their shooting schedules. She also knew about gene structure, and biology, and cells—not that we discussed science—but I found it insanely hot that she was so smart. While I still possessed a supreme lack of knowledge about celebrities, I knew a tad more from spending the time by her side, taking notes on how she documented shopping habits of the stars in a pocket-size black-and-white notebook.

  First, she hustled bracelet-shopping photos of Emily Hannigan, who had a regular role on a hospital show as a one-legged doctor, Jess informed me.

  “She’s on Trauma Tonight. And is in consideration for the Gretchen Lindstrom role on We’ll Always Have Paris, I read earlier today. You really don’t recognize her?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I’d said, shaking my head. “Though it could be that the pair of limbs are throwing me off.”

  Next, she nabbed a shot of two mustached young actors who held hands while perusing polo shirts in a nearby shop. “How about those guys? They’re all over the magazines.”

  I shook my head.

  “They’re Jim and Jack Turner-Grace. They play rival detectives on a set-in-the-seventies cable show. They fell in love on set,” she explained. “I thought for sure you’d recognize them. The press loves them and so do their fans. They’re about to adopt two little girls from Vietnam.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Jess? It’s like you’re speaking Russian.”

  “Because that’s the only language you don’t speak.”

  “In addition to celebrity.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she’d said, bumping my shoulder playfully as we left the shop. “I don’t understand how you can live in this town and not be addicted to gossip.”

  “You’re such a junkie.”

  “Card-carrying member.”

  Then, through the window of a sneaker store, she spotted the fifteen-year-old rising pop sensation Rain Storm—yes, he claimed that was his given name, a Google search on my phone revealed—who’d become a hit after several Ivy League water polo teams had performed lip syncs of his latest tune on YouTube. She snared a picture of him wearing a red plaid vest as he purchased a pair of matching red high-top sneakers.

  “That’s for Anaka, but I’ll give it to J.P., too, because they both find Rain amusing,” she said, then snapped a few more shots of other celebrities along Melrose, including one of the stars of LGO’s Lords and Ladies, when Anaka’s cousin texted her with a tip she’d just landed on their whereabouts.

  “Her mom produces the show. But evidently that tip came from some hot guy. Which means Anaka and I are going to have to get the full story on her cousin’s romantic situation,” Jess told me as she sent the final set of shots to J.P.

  Not a bad take for her for an afternoon’s worth of trolling, plus I’d gleaned plenty of intel on a day in the life of a paparazzo. We were both getting something out of this partnership, and I wanted it to continue in all ways. When we were finished, I suggested we stop at the Busy Bee Eatery for a bite to eat, so we snagged a table at a diner decked out in black-and-yellow decor, matching the name.

  “Now it’s my turn to help you,” I said, and after we ordered, I did some digging online on my iPad, quickly finding a photo of the poet brothers. They wore white linen shorts and blue button-down shirts, and smiled for the camera from the deck of a big boat floating on the water. God bless Facebook, and the ease of finding someone’s life story on the site.

  “I seriously cannot believe their parents really named them Wordsworth and Keats. It’s so affected,” I said, as I showed her the picture of the two brothers.

  As she studied it closely, I studied her. The gray T-shirt she wore fit her snugly, making her breasts look even more enticing. My eyes drifted to her curves for the thousandth time today, and my mind meandered back to last night and the memory of how soft and wonderful they’d felt in my hands. How she’d grabbed my head and pulled me in close. How her skin smelled so enticing. I shifted in the booth, grateful we were sitting down. Then I returned to the matter at hand because if I lingered on last night, I wouldn’t be able to form coherent sentences.

  Fortunately, any discussion of Keats and Wordsworth was a huge boner killer, so I closed the Facebook shot and returned to the unposed images Jess had captured at Rosanna’s Hideout of the three guys toasting.

  “Let’s figure this out,” I said.

  “Do you think they were all toasting to the photos I took? The Riley and Avery shots that I had just handed over? Your client is a publicity shop. You must know something about how publicists operate. Do you think Jenner’s publicist wanted those shots? The pictures of Riley and Avery haven’t shown up on any of the gossip sites, and it’s been more than four hours since he’s had the pictures.”

  She tapped her watch to make her point. It was now five o’clock.

  “They’re really not anywhere?”

  “I’ve checked everywhere. All the usual suspects,” she said, then rattled off the names of several celebrity sites. “The pictures aren’t anywhere. And they don’t show up on a Google search, either, nor on a Twitter search, so they must not have been posted anywhere. It makes no sense. Why would you spend that kind of jack for photos and not get them out immediately? Those kind of pictures drive an insane amount of traffic to a website.”

  “It’s weird,” I said, contemplating the scenarios.

  “It’s weird?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird.”

  “That’s it? It’s weird? That’s your assessment as a private detective?”

  “Yeah,” I said firmly. “It is weird. Weird meaning fishy. Suspicious. Not quite what it seems.”

  She nodded with enthusiasm. “Exactly! That’s my point. So what do we do?”

  “What do you want me to do? Follow Keats? Follow Wordsworth? Follow Jenner?” I asked, offering it as a joke at first, but as soon as the suggestion left my mouth, it seemed Jess and I felt the same way.

  Her eyes lit up. “Actually, that’s a brilliant idea.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, barely able to contain a grin.

  “I’m like your personal PI now, right, Jess?”

  “Personal PI,” she said in a deep TV show announcer voice. “Premiere episode tonight at nine p.m. When our red-hot hero tries to nab a pair of poet brothers.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Red hot?”

  Her tongue darted out to lick her lips.

  “You do that as if it’s playful, but you look red hot, too.”

  The waitress arrived with my chicken sandwich and French fries and Jess’s coffee and fruit cup. “Need anything else?”

  “Yes, please. Some actual food for my friend,” I said, eyeing Jess’s plate of rabbit food.

  “I’m fine. This is completely fine,” Jess said to the waitress, who turned on her heels and walked away.

  I narrowed my eyes at her plate. “I will follow the Chia Brothers with the tiny noses and matching Oxford shirts under one condition.”

  “What is that condition?”

  “I want you to have one of these French fries,” I said, leaning back against the light blue vinyl of the fifties-style booth. There was a jukebox at the edge of the table, and soda shop music played overhead.

  She shook her head, and bit the corner of her lip.

  “I can’t,” she whispered and pushed her fork through the melons and pineapple pieces. “You don’t have to follow them.”

  This wasn’t the strong, confident woman I’d gotten to know. This was another side of Jess. I sensed it was a side she didn’t show anyone. It was what lurked beneath all that tough-girl armor.

  I stripped all teasing from my tone, wanting to reassure her. “Hey. It’s okay. You don’t have to eat any fries. I’ll still check out those guys for you. But you know, Jess, I have to say this. You look fantastic, and you’d look fantastic if you were this big,” I said and held my hands out wide, then brought them closer together. “Or this small. What I mean is, I don’t have a clue about sizes, but you look amazing now, and you’d look amazing if you ate French fries and more ice cream. And you’re just cool, too. And smart. And funny. Even though you totally ride me, and hate me, and think I’m clueless for not knowing celebs. I still think you’re funny and fun to hang out with, so I guess I’m a masochist.”

  That earned me a big grin. “I don’t hate you, William. Not at all. Not in the least,” she said, her pretty blue eyes locked straight on mine as she spoke.

  I knew she meant it earnestly, but I couldn’t resist teasing her. I steepled my fingers together. “Thank you so much for not hating me.”

  “You know it’s not just not hate.” Her voice was gentle, sweet even.

  “All the double negatives are confusing me. Why don’t you just spell it out?”

  “You’re fun to hang out with,” she muttered, as if she were pretending it cost her something.

  “I knew I could wear you down,” I said, and picked up a French fry, dragged it through some ketchup, and happily ate it. She looked at the French fry with longing, blinking her eyes once then tearing her gaze away. In that moment, I understood her. Throwing away the ice cream on the beach, turning down my offer for pizza, eating only air-popped popcorn—they weren’t part of her hard edge. They were real struggles. Food wasn’t a struggle I knew personally, but being in Southern California for even a short while had taught me that body image was a battle for many men and women, guys and girls.

  “Jess,” I asked carefully. “You know you’re beautiful, don’t you?”