Free A Beaumont Christmas Wedding by Sarah M. Anderson Page B

was the sort of thing that someone who had never been on the receiving end of the paparazzi might say. Normal people had personal space, personal boundaries that the rest of humanity agreed not to cross. You don’t grab my butt, I won’t have you arrested.
    Those rules hadn’t applied to her since the days after her show had been canceled. The day she’d bolted away from her mother’s overprotective control.
    “It’s fine,” she insisted again. “It’s normal. I’m used to it.”
    “It’s bullshit,” he snapped. “And I won’t stand by while a bunch of idiots take liberties with you. You’re not some plaything for them to grope or insult.”
    She did turn to look at him then. He had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as he glared at the traffic he was speeding around. He was serious.
    She couldn’t remember the last time someone hadn’t just stood by and watched the media circus take her down.
    Like the time she’d flashed the cameras. She hadn’t had on any panties because the dress made no allowances for anything, the designer had said. Yeah, she’d been high at the time, but had anyone said, “Gee, Whitney, you might want to close your legs”? Had anyone tried to shield her from the cameras, as Matthew had just done, until she could get her skirt pulled down?
    No. Not a single person had said anything. They’d just kept snapping pictures. And that next morning? One of the worst in her life.
    He took another corner with squealing tires into a parking spot in front of a tall building. “We’re here.”
    “Are you on my side?” she asked.
    He slammed the car into Park, causing her to jerk forward. “What kind of question is that?”
    “I mean...” Was he the kind of guy who would have told her she was flashing the cameras? Or the kind who would have gotten out of the way of the shot? “No one’s ever tried to defend me from the crowds before.”
    Now it was his turn to look at her as if she were nuts. “No one?”
    This wasn’t coming out well. “Look, like you said—in the interest of transparency, I need to know if you’re on my side or not. I’m not trying to mess up your message. I mean, you saw how it was.” Suddenly, she was pleading. She didn’t just want him on her side, watching her back—she
needed
him there. “All I did was take off my hat.”
    He gave her the strangest look. She didn’t have a hope in heck of trying to guess what was going on behind his deep blue eyes.
    “That’s just the way it is,” she told him, her voice dropping to a whisper. Every time she let her guard down—every time she thought she might be able to do something normal people did, like go out to lunch with a man who confused her in the best possible ways—this was always what would happen. “I—I wish it wasn’t.”
    He didn’t respond.
    She couldn’t look at him anymore. Really, she didn’t expect anything else of him. He’d made his position clear. His duty was to his family and this wedding. She could respect that. She was nothing but a distraction.
    A distraction he’d almost kissed in a crowded restaurant.
    So when he reached over and cupped her face in his hand, lifting it until she had no choice but to look at him, she was completely taken off guard. “I refuse to accept that this is ‘just the way it is.’ I
refuse
to.” His voice—strong and confident and so close—did things to her that she barely recognized. “And you should, too.”
    Once, she’d tried to fight back, to reclaim her name and her life. She’d tried to lend her celebrity status to animal shelters. It’d gotten her nothing but years of horrible headlines paired with worse pictures. She hadn’t done anything public since the last incident, over two years ago.
    She looked into his eyes. If only he were on her side... “What I do doesn’t matter and we both know it.”
    He gave her another one of those looks that walked the fine line between anger and disgust. “So what are you going to do