Unbound by Olivia Leighton Page B

hot in a weird rugged sort of way. And I hadn’t been absolutely certain of it, but I thought that he'd flirted with me at one point. I thought about his face and wondered what he might look like if he shaved his goatee. I had nothing against them per se, but while they did look good on some men, I had never liked kissing a man with a ton of facial hair. I also wasn’t a fan of the way it scratched certain areas of my body, particularly the ones that were usually covered by clothing.
     
    Wow… simply thinking those thoughts were enough to color my cheeks with warmth and awaken parts of my body that had long been neglected.  Huh.   I put the wine glass in the sink, cautious of what a fourth glass would do to me. Four years, I thought. Has it really been that long?
     
    The idea of heading down to the Salty Dog became all the more appealing. Before I could act on my carnal thoughts, I changed into my pajamas: a tank top and a pair of sweat shorts that had been with me since my college days.
     
    I grabbed a glass of water, cut the music off, and vegged out in front of the TV. I flipped through the channels, watching snippets of syndicated reruns like How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I ended up stopping on one of those gossip shows that seemed to forever be on those channels near the end of my subscribed channels—the ones usually spouting off the latest exploits of Lindsay Lohan or the Kardashians.
     
    I wasn’t one of those women… I could care less about the lives of spoiled and entitled celebrities. But every now and then, as bad as it sounds, I’d check out these sorts of shows just to make myself feel better. If these famous glitzy people could make train wrecks of their lives, then certainly there was hope for me. I’d been busy at the store and with the novel, so it had been a while since I’d indulged in this guilty pleasure.
     
    I watched through the usual ass-smooching stories about how a mediocre actress was supposedly the next big thing. I also watched an interview with a kid that the media was billing to be the next Justin Bieber. And then they got into the good stuff: a celebrity marriage that ended in divorce in less than six days, an actor getting arrested for cocaine possession, and an a-list actor that had seemingly just disappeared.
     
    The last story seemed interesting. The way the show painted it made it seem like the story was something that should have been on Unsolved Mysteries. They showed a few cheesy slow motion shots of a smiling Devlin Stone during interviews and press junkets. He was one of those men that looked like he fell out of his mother’s womb absolutely perfect right down to his drool-worthy six-pack.
     
    I knew his story well enough and absolutely loathed him because of it: he was a war hero and was plastered on every newspaper and magazine cover for months.  When he came back from Afghanistan, America fawned over him and he let it go to his head. He sold his heroic soul to Hollywood and became nothing more than fodder for these shows. I had seen a few of his movies. He was a decent actor and rather good looking, but that’s where it stopped. He had quickly become typecast in the same roles the movies had kept getting worse and worse.
     
    That’s just my opinion, anyway. I was more of a Chris Evans kind of girl. Not that he’s necessarily the best actor in the world either, but that’s beside the point.
     
    The show was telling the story of how Devlin Stone had been missing for roughly six weeks. He’d last been seen at the red carpet premiere of Killing Floor and had then simply disappeared. Aubrey Henning, an actress that was a few decent roles away from becoming a Hollywood mainstay, was the last person to have seen him. As the show played a clip of the two of them kissing on the red carpet, there was a voice over from the actress where she sounded both irritated and sad.
     
    The reporter wrapped up and I was rather disgusted that I found myself