Beautiful Stranger by Zoey Dean Read Free Book Online Page A

screenwriter and the director—this particular reversal was too much. The dissonance between he’s-going-to-dump-me and he-asked-me-to-marry-him was just too great. Sam felt dizzy and kind of nauseated. Her mouth was dry. She thought it was a miracle that she could even form the words. Fortunately, she could form one.
    Samantha Sharpe, who had recently turned eighteen, who never, ever,
ever
thought she’d get married young—if at all—found herself saying, “
Sí.”
    “Eduardo, I’m only eighteen.”
    “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
    It was thirty minutes later, the diamond was still in its box—though on the table between them—and they were sitting outside at a café called Pauletta’s by the Sea, right there on the promenade. Eduardo had ordered a Dos Equis, Sam a lemonade. She wanted to have this particular discussion fully sober. It was one thing to say
sí
in front of a crowd just begging for a happy end to the movie moment they’d just witnessed, and quite another to move on to the actual holy-fuck-I-just-said-I’d-marry-him moment. That’s why the diamond wasn’t on her hand. A movie moment was one thing. Reality was quite another.
    Fuck that.
The voice inside her was insistent.
You said yes. You mean yes. Just put on the ring.
    “Eighteen is too young to get married,” Sam pointed out. “Hell, look at my father. Forty-five is too young to be married. No
one
stays married.”
    He reached across the table to caress her hand. “You think this because you are swimming in the tiny fishbowl of American movie stars. My parents have been married to each other for thirty years, and they adore each other.”
    Sam had to admit, when she’d met his parents, they had seemed to adore each other. But they had to be what was known in Hollywood as a nonrecurring phenomenon. Also known as: a freak of nature. She did not hesitate to share this point of view with her sort-of fiancé.
    He was unfazed by her hesitation. “I’m not surprised that you would say this. And please understand: I am not proposing that we start a family for a long time. But when I look at you, and I look at the last months since I’ve met you, this has been the most wonderful time of my life. When you find true love, you do not throw it away because of age, or distance, or a fishbowl.”
    “And what are we supposed to do now?” Sam remonstrated. She knew she was looking for every possible reason not to do what her heart was screaming for her to do.
    “You’re going back to Paris. I’m going to USC. That’s not a marriage. That’s a separation.”
    He smiled tenderly. “We can work all of that out. I’m sure we can.”
    “Such as?”
    “There are always options. I can transfer. You can transfer. Maybe I’ll defer a year and stay at the consulate here.” He reached across the table. She thought he was going to take her hands again, but instead he opened the box. The diamond ring gleamed. “Look at it. It is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, Samantha. If we want to make it happen, we will make it happen.”
    Well la-di-da, didn’t he make it sound simple. She squinted, doing everything in her power not to look at the ring. If she looked at it, she would put it on. If she put it on, she would never take it off.
    “Can I ask you something?”
    “Of course.”
    She cocked her chin back toward the Peruvian musicians, who were still holding forth up the promenade, their music still spirited but much fainter now that she and Eduardo were sitting on the patio. “All that stuff you said, about it being traditional in the village for a man to ask a woman an important question. When your father asked your mother to marry him, did he do that?”
    Eduardo threw his head back and laughed.
    “I’m serious!” Sam told him.
    “To tell you the truth, I wanted it to be memorable. So I had to—how do they say it?—punk you.”
    Damn. Well, he sure as hell had done that.
    She looked at the ring. He saw where her gaze