A Modern Cinderella. Kate Hardy

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       CHAPTER SIX

      WITHOUT any idea why she felt compelled to correct his assumption, Cassidy found herself on her feet, matching glass in hand, and following him into the kitchen. ‘Wait, Will. You’re wrong. You didn’t get an answer.’

      Turning in the middle of the room, he lifted his chin and looked at her with hooded eyes.

      Which left her squirming inwardly as she tried to find the words to explain it to him without giving too much away.

      ‘I’ m not…That is it’s not that I’m not…’ She puffed her cheeks out in exasperation, and avoided his gaze by glancing at random points around the room. ‘I guess I just—’ A deep breath and a grimace, and then she silently said to heck with it and took a run at it. ‘I feel a bit—lost, I suppose. You and me? We’re not the same. This living together under the same roof—’ One of her hands flailed in the air in front of her body, towards him. ‘Well, we’re not the same…’

      ‘You already said that.’

      Cassidy scowled at his calm tone, and the fact that her gaze shifted to meet his and discovered what looked like a glint of amusement only made her feel more stupid than she already did.

      She sighed heavily. ‘This is your life, Will, not mine. I’m just a visitor here. But this script…it’s important…it means a lot. I don’t want to mess it up.’

      When there was silence it drew her gaze back to him again, then he took a shallow breath and asked, ‘Why is it so important?’

      Now, there was a question with a loaded answer.

      Her hesitation brought him a step closer, his hand reaching out to set his glass on the nearest counter top. ‘I get the not wanting to mess up part. Everyone feels that way when they work on a script. Or on any kind of a project that means something to them. There was a time you wanted to succeed in this business as much as I did…’

      Cassidy smiled wryly. ‘Apparently not quite as much as you did…’

      The low words were enough to tug on the edges of his mouth. ‘Okay. Fair enough. We had different motivations but the same goal—at least I thought we did. Maybe I was wrong about that?’

      If she had, she’d have left everything behind to go with him to California. That was what he was intimating, wasn’t it? Yes, Will had been driven for different reasons from Cassidy. But the goal had been a dream they’d shared. What had broken them apart had been Cassidy’s starry-eyed romanticism over the life they would have together weighed against Will’s need to be successful enough to prove to all those people who had thought him worthless that they’d been spectacularly wrong in their assessment. Cassidy had believed they would achieve their dreams together. Will had left her behind and done it on his own. But she’d let him go, hadn’t she?

      Will took another step closer. ‘Why is it so important, Cass?’

      She took a deep breath, while warily watching to see how close he planned on getting. ‘We bombed last time, Will. You remember how bad that felt as well as I do…’

      ‘Oh, sweetheart, I’ve bombed a few times since then—trust me. It’s par for the course out here.’

      The use of the drawled ‘sweetheart’ made her cock a recriminating brow at him, but she let it slide when she saw the light in his eyes. ‘But you’re a success, Will. Look around you—this house, your company, the awards you’ve won—you’ve made it. I’m a schoolteacher. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s one of the most honourable professions on the planet—but it wasn’t something I’d planned on doing for the rest of my life.’ Any more than living on her own had been. ‘The last script I cowrote with you is the only thing I have on my movie-writing CV. The script for a movie that bombed at the box office and gave movie reviewers globally the excuse to ramp the venom volume up to high—remember? I ended on a failure. A very public failure. I don’t want another one. Seriously, I don’t think I could take it…and…And I’m babbling again, aren’t I?’

      ‘Like a brook.’ He smiled indulgently.

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