When the Stars Come Out by Rob Byrnes Read Free Book Online Page B

lush. Noah decided that he should neither dismiss her nor underestimate her.
    He glanced at the clock on his nightstand.
    “It’s only four o’clock,” he announced. “Isn’t it a bit early?”
    “Why, Noah! I didn’t know you were such a stick-in-the-mud!”
    Tricia leaned against the door frame. “Never heard of Happy Hour?”
    He was wary. “I’ve heard of it.”
    “I want to go.” She affected a pout. “Take me out to Happy Hour.”
    “You are a very strange stepmother.”
    An index finger wagged in his direction. “Ah-ah!”
    “Sorry. You are a very strange wife-of-my-father.”
    To which, she said simply, “Thank you,” and—with a toss of her
    hair—left to change into more appropriate attire.
    Chapter 2
    People surprise you.
    The ones you expect to be stuffy turn out to be down to earth.
    The ones you think you’ll never see again become your best
    friends. The ones you hate, you learn to love, and the ones you
    love, well . . . maybe, maybe not.
    When I first arrived in Hollywood I was twenty-three years old
    and had never been west of Cincinnati. And yet for some reason
    I was convinced that I could be an actor. After being cast in that school play when my knee injury kept me out of sports, I guess I
    thought I was a natural.
    Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one. After three months of wait-
    ing tables to put bread on my table I met a casting agent who looked me over, said I had just the “naivety” he was looking for
    to play a college kid in a movie he was casting.
    I was fired two days into shooting. I guess he was wrong.
    But right or wrong, that casting agent didn’t give up on me.
    In fact, he went in a completely different direction, and one
    week after I was fired he slipped me into a stylish crime drama
    called The Fresh Kill . And a star was born, all because he had faith, and because he could see beyond that naïve twenty-three-year-old carrying trays and busing tables . . .
    f Noah had any lingering doubts that their time together could
    I still turn into a trophy-wife bistro excursion, they evaporated when he met Tricia in the foyer fifteen minutes later. He had used the time to freshen up and change into something more respectable; she, however, had used the time to dress down, exchang-
    ing the business casual attire she wore to the hospital for a casual jeans-and-top ensemble. And, in her designer jeans, he had to
    admit, in a gay sort of way, that his father’s wife was kind of hot.
    “So where do you want to go?” he asked. “I assume by the way
    you’re dressed you want to mix with the masses this afternoon.”
    “I am the masses. I love being married to your father, and the way we live, but I’ll always be a girl from Buffalo.”
    “Okay, Girl from Buffalo. Since you’re apparently keeping it real
    this afternoon, where do you want to go?”
    “Take me . . .” She paused and thought for a moment. “Take me
    to one of your places.”
    “ My places?”
    “Where do you go out when you’re in the city?”
    That was a good question. It had been so long since he’d been
    home that he struggled to recall the name of a bar. There was The
    Penthouse on the Upper East Side, but that would be too snooty
    for the dressed-down Tricia. There were the bars in Chelsea and
    the West and East Villages, but it had been so long, he was drawing a blank on specific locations, and at the rate bars came and went, he doubted that many of them were still in business. And in any
    event, all the bars he could think of—his old haunts—were gay,
    which he didn’t think would hold much appeal for either of them.
    “There are a few places,” he finally said. “But I can’t think of anywhere you’d be interested to go. Me, either, for that matter.”
    “You’re such a snob. Do you think these bars are too downscale
    for me?”
    “No. But all the ones that come to mind are . . . well, they’re definitely too, um, gay .”
    “Perfect.” With that, she flung open the front