Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: The Deck

The camera on the stoop was pointed right at me.

I was standing in Ward's parlor window in Ward's undershirt with my hair in a knot from his pillow.

Ward reached for the curtain.

"Leave it," I said.

"Cleo."

"They've already got it. If you close the curtain, it's a story about hiding."

I lifted my coffee mug to the camera, the way I had in the alley on Tuesday.

Then I turned around and walked out of the frame.

"That's going to be on every phone in New York by noon," Ward said.

"Good," I said. "Then they'll all know where to find me at two."

I went upstairs and put on my blacks. Jeans, sweater, the headset around my neck.

I called the press agent from the stairs.

"Invite them," I said.

"Invite who?"

"All of them. Every reporter who's ever written the word 'runaway.' Front row of the Stanton, two o'clock. Tell them the stage manager's going to ride the deck."

"Cleo, that's insane."

"It's a ferry," I said. "Ferries are safe. My father rode one to work for twenty years."

At ten to two the front row was full.

Twenty reporters, four cameras, and a man from a morning show who kept checking his hair in his phone.

The city inspector sat in the center seat with a clipboard and a hard hat on his knee. He was about sixty and looked like nothing had surprised him since 1990.

Ward stood at the back of the house. He'd wanted to sit on the aisle. I'd told him to stay out of the shot.

The whole crew was on headset. Every one of them had come in on a canceled day, unpaid, without being asked.

I walked out to the center of the deck in my sneakers.

"This is the storm sequence from The Last Ferry," I told the house. "It runs six minutes twelve. The deck pitches twelve degrees each way, eight shows a week."

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