She was beginning to feel like a teenager, always seeking reassurance and refuge in the mirror. She filled the sink with tepid water and splashed it on to her dusty heat-fried cheeks. Had those women in Wal-Mart recognized her? Would she wake up to find some sleazebag from one of the entertainment rags camped outside her door, gleefully exposing her riches-to-rags story? She gripped the edge of the basin. Perhaps she was worrying too much. It wasn’t as if she resembled her TV persona anymore. The TV Robyn Sparrow people tended to remember was a cute kid, not a 25-year-old has-been. Sometimes even she found it hard to believe that, along with her two sisters, she’d been famous, the youngest cast member in a popular family comedy show that went on for way too many years. God, had Dakota worked out who she was? Was that why he’d come on to her and been so keen to get her out of the store? She drained the sink, scrubbed at her face and stormed back into the bedroom. Dakota lay stretched out on the bed, his bare feet crossed at the ankle, watching TV.
