Regardless of what he’d been experiencing, she’d felt so close to him that she hadn’t even tried to get up and leave after it was over, and neither had he. They’d spent the rest of the night together.

Did that deeper connection mean anything? Would he ever allow it to?

She couldn’t imagine he would, which brought her back to trying to protect herself by putting more distance between them. She should move back to the guesthouse, but she knew he’d never let her, not while Kouretas posed a threat. And now that they’d crossed certain boundaries, it was going to be all the more difficult to make sure they didn’t cross them again—and again and again.

“I’m heading for another crash,” she grumbled to Kiki as she fed and played with Maxi’s pet. “Only this one is going to shatter my heart instead of my face.”

Kiki was beginning to recognize her and vocalize more often. Tia found it funny that the bird had said hello when she entered the atrium today. She doubted Kiki understood the meaning of the sounds she made, but the bird had impeccable timing.

After spending two hours trying to teach the parrot some new words—again without success—she let herself out of the atrium. She wished she could go swimming. The pool was heated, and she was itching to do something—another sign that she was healing. But she didn’t dare. For all she knew, Kouretas was perched on the fence with a telephoto lens just waiting for her to step outside.

She wasn’t going to make it that easy.

Instead, she used her ear buds so she could listen to music without disturbing Seth and carried her laptop to one of the recliners in the living room. She couldn’t go out in the real world, but she could venture into the virtual one, as long as she was brave enough to face whatever she might read about her role in the movie, her accident and public speculation as to the cause and aftermath. As much as she tried to convince herself that she didn’t care who was nominated for an Oscar this year, she couldn’t help being interested. What names were being bandied about? And was hers one of them?

She checked her email first. She’d received hundreds of messages. Most were spam, but there was also a decent outpouring of support from people she’d gone to acting school with and various other people she knew in the industry and from other jobs where she’d worked. There were even some messages from people in her hometown—an elementary schoolteacher and the owner of the feed-and-tackle shop where she’d worked after school and on weekends for two years.

She could get past this, she told herself. She had no choice.