Page 18 of Total Obsession

Me? I had a code.

A code I lived by.

Sure, some people may not have understood it, but that was okay.

I didn't need them to understand it. I just needed to ensure that I followed it.

Where Zoey landed on this I still haven't quite figured out.

"Are you sure it's okay that I'm here?" she asked.

I chuckled as I put my magazine down. "It's a little late for that now, don't you think?"

She looked out the window, as our Boeing 747 with precisely two passengers lifted off the ground. Its furnishings inside were extremely lavish and not at all to my tastes. It was one of the many private jets of my employer, and I was given free rein to use it at will, as long as it was for a job.

Technically, this whole trip worked out nicely. I had a job to do in London, so it was easy enough to pass off a refueling stop as a legitimate expense. A bit of a white lie as far as my employer was concerned, but nothing I was going to lose sleep over.

"I guess so," Zoey finally said, seemingly deflated when I gave my answer.

I realized she was looking for reassurance from me. "Besides that," I added, "it's more than okay that you are here."

She brightened up instantly, and I realized another thing about her: she was incredibly insecure. I pulled a little black moleskin notebook out of my jacket pocket and quickly wrote down the observation.

"What's that?" she asked, catching me at the tail end of tucking it away.

"Just a work thing," I said casually, brushing it aside. I didn't want her to know that I was building a profile on her.

"I can't believe you own this whole thing," she said, looking around in awe.

I shook my head at her. "I don't own it. I'm just given free use of it. Better deal if you ask me," I said with a wink.

"So then who owns it?" she asked.

"The people I work for," I said, knowing that we were treading into dangerous territory. "But let's not talk about my boring corporate job," I said, anticipating her next question and putting it to rest. "I want to hear about you and everything you're up to." I patted the leather cushion on the sofa next to me, and she made her way over to me with an uncertain smile.

"Why do you want to hear about me? My entire life has been in one tabloid or another. It's you that's the mystery."

She was persistent, I had to give her that. Usually, when I gave a woman the opportunity to talk about herself, she took it immediately and didn't look back. I couldn't decide whether Zoey was not taking the opportunity because she was self-conscious or if she was genuinely interested in me.

It would be so much easier if it were just the former.

"I want to hear about you," I said, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and pulling her a bit closer to me, "because I'm interested in you and all that you've accomplished while we've been apart."

She blushed. "That's sweet," she said, looking down, not able to meet my gaze.

"So, tell me, what exactly happened to get you from our little town to here?"

I listened to her recount the tale that I actually knew all too well. I knew it because I lived it. Most of it, I set up myself. She had to have some talent to get her where she was now, that was for sure, but I put the stones down so that she only needed to walk on them.

"Well, my senior year of high school, our singing group was performing in Florida at one of the big amusement parks. It just so happens that there was a scout in the audience at the time."

She didn't know this, but I put him there.

"He offered me an opportunity to audition for really small roles. I'm talking super small at first. Like, just extras in the background, but it sounded fun and exciting and so I decided to put college on hold in order to pursue it.

"I moved out to Los Angeles where I worked for a few years just doing odds and ends on television shows, while also waitressing because it really didn't pay enough. But, eventually, I caught a break. A modeling agency saw me in a television commercial and decided that they wanted me."

Another thing she didn't know, but my influence at the time was growing. I was able to get an agency to reach out to her, and that was the line they were supposed to read to her.