Free Crashing Into Love by Melissa Foster Page A

as she was.
    “I’m too tired for this,” he mumbled. Maybe that was it. Like hell that was it. Fiona had gotten under his skin.
    “Jake Braden too tired for sex?” She moved to his side, and he shrugged away from her pawing fingers. “I’m sure I can wake you up.”
    Everything felt wrong and grated on his nerves. The music was suddenly too loud. Jerria standing in his living room in a bikini with lust in her eyes made him feel dirty. The din of his friends out back felt like an intrusion. All combined, it riled him like fingernails scratching a blackboard.
    He needed to escape. He snagged his keys and headed out the front door.
    It was dark, and the cool night air woke him up. What was he doing? His eyes swept over the four-car garage, his Harley and Ducati sitting out front, and past that, the seven-acre estate. He debated climbing on one of his bikes and driving fast and far, but something told him that when he returned home, the demons would still be haunting him.
    He headed back inside and did what he’d never done in all the years he’d lived in Los Angeles. Instead of opening his doors to stars and models, he kicked them out, reclaiming his house. He ushered his friends out the door with excuses of needing to prepare for his upcoming gig.
    Unfortunately, that left him with silence.
    Jake wasn’t very good with silence.
    He sank into the couch and palmed his cell phone. There were any number of people he could call and shoot the breeze with, but that would negate having the house to himself. He didn’t want to shoot the shit. He wanted to understand what the hell was happening in his head. He leaned his elbows on his knees, then sat back with a frustrated sigh and stared up at the ceiling.
    Jake clenched his jaw against the nagging realization that he’d been pushing so far away that he’d fooled himself into believing it didn’t exist.
    Fiona hadn’t just gotten under his skin—in sixteen years, she’d never left.

Chapter Seven
    TUESDAY MORNING WAS a blur of activity. Trish’s meeting with the set director went on forever and turned into a meeting with several other “set” people. Working on the set of a movie was much more chaotic than Fiona had anticipated, and she was only Trish’s assistant. It seemed everyone was always rushing, and tension simmered among the people in charge. Almost everyone had a radio or a headset, and messages were constantly coming through. Fiona made the mistake of asking someone if he needed to respond—she’d thought he hadn’t heard the message squawk through. Then he’d shot her an arctic stare, shaken his head, and walked away without responding. Luckily, Zane Walker’s personal assistant, Patch Carver, a brown-haired twentysomething guy with chiseled features and a sleeve of tattoos, had clued her in to the fact that no one answered radio calls unless they were meant for them, even though they were all relaying messages on the same channels.
    Now it was midafternoon, and Fiona was watching Trish await her scene. Trish looked cute in a pair of khaki shorts and a white button-down top that was open to her naval and tied at the waist. She wore leather hiking boots and thick socks, and all Fiona could think about was how hot it was on the set with the bright lights and how hot Trish’s feet must be. They were filming on a set that had been constructed to look like the inside of a cave. Fiona was trying to remain silent, having already seen too many glares from the director aimed at two men who must have made sounds that she hadn’t heard.
    Fiona knew Trish was nervous by the way her finger kept dragging against the edge of her shorts. That was her thing. She used to do it before exams. Fiona called Trish’s nervous habit fringe-seeking therapy . She wished she could run over and tell Trish how great she was going to be and make her laugh so she would calm down. But she didn’t dare move as Trish walked onto the cavernous set and recited her lines while Fiona