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  Cracking my neck and squaring my shoulders, I strolled into the room and headed straight for the bagels. “Ah, just what I needed this morning…a good glycemic index-loaded breakfast.”

  Erica noticed me first, and I smirked when she had difficulty swallowing the next bite of her breakfast. Gwen whirled around and immediately swallowed her shock.

  And I had to admit, so did I…

  Had my jaw not been held together with flesh and pride, it would have hit the floor. Gwen was a knockout from head to toe with green eyes, full pouty lips, and a light dusting of freckles across the curves of her cheeks and bridge of her nose. She had a holier than thou air about her and a contrasting fresh-faced beauty that left me panting.

  On the inside, of course. Right now, I was all aplomb and casual interest. The heat in my head rushed south, and I assumed a casual stance to conceal my conflicted feelings. It was hardly fair that I found her irresistible when she couldn’t care less for me.

  “You’re—” she started before her hair had even settled into place on her shoulders from the whiplash. Her gaze immediately homed in on my black eye and her lips pressed together tightly.

  “Hi.” I smiled what 99.99% of women considered to be my devastating smile. Gwen fell into the other 0.01%, of course. “Garrick Maze, in the flesh.”

  “Um, yeah…G-Gwendolyn Vickers,” she stammered, scrambling to reassemble the pieces of her sophistication.

  Her full name jogged my memory into a mad sprint. Gwen Vickers, the soap star? Oh, I’d heard of her. “Is that so? Your frigid reputation precedes you. Good to know it’s not inaccurate. I hate false gossip.” I turned and nodded at Erica. “And Miss Erica Ellis. I’ve heard nothing but great things.”

  “Likewise, Garrick.” She glanced at Gwen. “That is…um…”

  Gwen shifted uncomfortably. “How long were you standing there?”

  “Long enough.” I grabbed a plate and placed one piece of cantaloupe on it.

  “You know, you shouldn’t lurk in doorways,” Gwen said with a nervous laugh. “It’s probably the one good piece of advice Disney taught us. Is that what happened to your eye? Did you sneak up on someone who didn’t react well?”

  I flashed my teeth in an exaggerated grin. “Just living up to my narrow-ranged unattractive hyped-up action hero image.”

  Gwen’s cheek flushed a dark red and her throat rippled as she swallowed hard. I should have been thrilled she felt uncomfortable, but when she bit her lip all I could think about was kissing her. My teeth nipping at her mouth. My tongue slipping inside.

  Erica thumbed behind her. “I’m going to go grab a cappuccino.” Quickly making her exit into the adjacent room lined with various vending machines, Gwen and I were left all alone. The tension mounted the longer we stared at each other.

  “Ah, Garrick,” boomed a voice from the same doorway I had been standing in. Over my shoulder, I spotted Lyle Steinberg, dressed to the nines in one of his infamous mismatched suits. His thick, black-rimmed glasses sat askew on his face, which he corrected after pushing his thinning black hair out of his eyes. His bushy beard made seeing his smile unnecessarily difficult. Aside from losing a little weight, as evidenced by the way his slacks sagged, he hadn’t changed since we’d worked together on another project last year. Creating a square lens with his hands, he placed them over his view of me. “So glad you could make it. Doozie of a shiner there, but if it doesn’t fade completely by filming, make-up can deal with it. If not, I’ll have Erica write something into the script.”

  I hadn’t realized how anxious I was about Lyle seeing my eye until then. The guy was scattered but cool. “Sounds good, Lyle. Thanks.”

  “When were you going to notify me that you accepted the role?”

  I laughed, and tossed my plate and uneaten fruit in the garbage. “I replied to your email the same day you sent it, sir.”

  The director’s hands danced a flurry of gestures. “Dreadful thing, e-mail. Anyway, I see you’ve met Miss Vickers. Wonderful, just wonderful. What a pair you two will make. Splendid. Grab some breakfast, and we’ll get started in the conference room across the hall. Or maybe it’s the one next door. What room is this?”

  I cast a glance at Gwen then at her drowning bagel. Drawing my attention back to her annoyed face, I played the winning hand just as Erica breezed back into the room with a steaming Styrofoam cup. “I already ate.” I patted my abs. “I never do bagels anyway. Trying to do the eat-clean thing. Gotta take care of my body, right?”

  Gwen frowned. Erica brought herself to an abrupt halt, closed her eyes, and exhaled an ominous sigh. Lyle, on the other hand, was perfectly happy in his oblivious corner of the universe. “Ah. Well, then, why don’t you come along with me now? I need to run off a few more copies of the script, and I’m dying to know what’s new. And maybe you’ll tell me the story behind that black eye.”

  Not going to happen. Not the true story anyway. “You got it, boss,” I said, turning to bow to the girls. “Ladies.”

  With a farewell nod, I turned on my heel and strolled out with Lyle. A moment later, I heard the rustling of plastic and a dull thud, as though someone had dropped an untouched bagel into the trash.

  * * *

  Lyle presided over the meeting, as Gwen, Erica, two other guys, and I took our seats in the conference room. I recognized Tyler Tapia—about five-foot-ten, brown hair, eyes outlined by black-rimmed glasses, and glued to his phone. The other guy—blond, blue-eyed, and built like a jock-boy-next-doorsy type—topped my own six-foot-one by a couple of inches and took a seat quietly.

  Tyler was an enigma to me. He sat on a strangely untouchable tier of the acting world, in spite of his age. I’m pretty sure he was only twenty, even though he’d been in the business for over a decade. A tad nerdy at first glance, he radiated a suave sexiness when the glasses came off. With mussed hair and a tight, graphic tee that showed off his lean, muscular build, I was fairly certain he could pass for my brother. Mysterious and inventive, he could be and do anything with unnatural ease. Guy could have probably gotten into Harvard and joined NASA, for all I knew. Yet he never graduated high school, was always glued to his phone, and was too busy to give the world the time of day.

  If the rumors were true, it was one of his healthier addictions, the kind that wouldn’t land him in rehab for the second time. Or third or fourth. I’d never actually seen him drunk or high, and I was hoping I never did. The guy was too talented to throw his career away, which almost happened when he was fifteen and disappeared from the spotlight for three years. I’d worked with out-of-control addicts before, and the drama was a royal pain in the ass.

  “As you may have guessed,” Lyle began, tapping on the mahogany table, “I’ve gathered you all here today to get acquainted before we start shooting. Straightlaced will follow the book as closely as possible. I’ll be working hand-in-hand with Miss Ellis”--he gestured to one side, then, realizing she wasn’t sitting there, quickly corrected his hand to the other side--“to minimize inaccuracies and misconceptions. Let’s go around the room and share a bit. Garrick, we’ll start with you, since you’ve got top billing.”

  Comfortably settled into my chair with arms folded and heels crossed, I grinned at everyone, lingering the longest on Gwen who avoided my gaze like bad sushi. “Morning, everyone. I’m Garrick Maze. I started acting when I was fifteen. This will be my first TV show. Until now, my work has largely been in film. I’ll be playing Payton.”

  Gwen smiled, though she still avoided looking directly at me. “My name is Gwen Vickers. I was on the daytime soap series, Diamond Eyes, for three consecutive years until my role wrapped up before Christmas. I’ll be playing Lacey.”

  Lyle nodded to the jock guy in the seat next to Tyler. “And you, sir?”

  “Hey, I’m Shane.” A dazed gleam hung in his eyes, as though he were trapped in an alien world, and we all spoke foreign languages. I could have guessed his next statement before it even left his mouth. “I’ve uh...never acted before. I’m
playing Mitch.”

  “What?” Gwen’s tone was incredulous and for a half second she looked embarrassed by her outburst before she wiped her expression clean.

  “I’m playing Mitch,” the guy repeated, checking the rest of our faces for any sign of support.

  “No. Before that.” She rewound an imaginary tape with her fingers.

  Understanding dawned on Shane who repeated himself a second time with less enthusiasm. “This will be my first acting job.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Gwen said, looking like she’d swallowed a bug.

  “No,” Shane said. “My little sister was auditioning for Lacey. I just drove her and happened to get the part, I guess.”

  “You guess,” Gwen echoed then turned to Lyle. “Mr. Steinberg, this book made the New York Times Bestseller List. The fan base is huge—they’re expecting seasoned professionals. I’m sorry, Shane. It’s nothing personal.” She glanced at Shane for a moment. “But Lyle...isn’t this a bit of a risk?”

  Lyle’s chest filled with air, as he considered his response, but all heads turned when Tyler spoke.

  “Actually,” he said without looking up from his Galaxy, “the success of a book turned visual doesn’t necessarily correlate with that of its printed parent, let alone the popularity of its top billers.” He paused to scroll down something on his screen. “Look at Eragon, The Great Gatsby, The Golden Compass, The Scarlet Letter, Bicentennial Man, Stardust, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Water for Elephants, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Inkheart…” he rattled off.

  Holy crap. It was like he had the line memorized long before the meeting.

  “All of them bestsellers with a star-studded cast, yet they crashed and burned at the box office. Why? Because literary stardom doesn’t necessarily translate to visual success. So, it’s not so much us, the actors, but our screenwriters who dictate whether we’re eventually picked up or not.”

  I looked at Shane. “That’s his way of standing up for you.”

  Gwen crossed her arms and glared at Tyler. “I wasn’t speaking to you. I was speaking to our director. And your attitude could use some work.”

  “My bad.” Tyler let out a long, heavy sigh. “Are we disputing my argument or my attitude?”

  Again, Gwen looked flustered before quickly regaining her composure. I found it fascinating, the way she could so quickly hide her reactions. Sure, she was an actress, but she wasn’t playing a role right now. Did that mean she was always on? That she never just let herself be who she was, shields down? And why did the idea of that bother me so much? Why did it make me want to take her aside and spend time with her and keep at her until I learned everything about her that she normally kept hidden? Because I got the feeling, despite her balls-to-the-wall attitude we were getting glimpses of, she hid a lot.

  She folded her hands on the table, the wooden surface holding up against the burden of her strained smile. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”

  “This is Tyler Tapia,” Lyle introduced with a wide swipe of his arm. “Our resident prodigy.”

  “Yep,” Tyler acknowledged. “That’s me.”

  Gwen, looking like she had swallowed her tongue, volleyed her attention between the director and Tyler’s bored face. “Didn’t you win an Academy Award when you were twelve?”

  “Yep.” Tyler still sat there, not looking up from his phone.

  “Wait,” Gwen said, picking up a pencil and tapping it on the table. “If Tyler has an award under his belt, why does Garrick get top billing?”

  I straightened in my chair. Her question indicated that despite trying so hard to ignore me, she was still thinking about me. Maybe she’d never stopped. Sure, it could just be annoyance that I caught her talking shit about me, but I was hoping it was more than that.

  I immediately frowned at my thoughts.

  I’d known Gwen for less than an hour. She was my co-star. Yes, I screwed around a lot, but I never screwed around with someone I was filming with, ever. So why the hell should it matter whether Gwen was attracted to me or hated my damn guts?

  “I do mostly indie films,” Tyler answered in a flat-lined tone before Lyle could scrounge up an explanation. “Greater depth, deeper meaning.”

  Swallowing her envy in light of his potent indifference, Gwen sighed. “Well, Tyler, care to turn your phone off and join us in some greater, deeper team bonding? Today is the first day of work.”

  Five points for Gwen. As much as I liked Tyler in spite of his aloofness, the phone thing was getting to me. Even I made sure to turn mine to vibrate before we started.

  Tyler didn’t miss a beat, the inflection in his voice and expression almost undetectable. “The average human brain can handle only three to four tasks at once on top of maintaining all bodily functions.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “Oh, boy, here we go.”

  “I can easily process twice that much. So not only can I walk, talk, and chew gum, Gwendolyn, I can also write blogs, read articles, and solve three Sudoku puzzles in the time it takes you to do your makeup.”

  “It only takes me fifteen minutes to do my makeup,” Gwen said.

  “Well, then, I rest my case, don’t I?” Raising his eyes, he leveled Gwen with a stare that could have stopped an oncoming train. “The phone stays on.” With that, he resumed his mad thumbing across the screen.

  “I don’t know about you all, but I’m impressed.” Shane glanced around, suppressing a chuckle.

  I turned to Gwen, wanting to get her to relax. To stop worrying so much and just enjoy getting to know her co-stars. “Tyler gets cranky when he’s bored,” I said. “You’ll learn to love him.”

  “That seems unlikely,” she said flatly, turning to Lyle to bring some sense of order to this melee. Tyler looked at me briefly and rolled his eyes. I could tell he thought Gwen was an uptight bitch. I’d tend to agree with him if it wasn’t for the way her face had paled and the near-desperate look that had come over her since the meeting had begun. In truth, she looked a little like she wanted to hurl, and she was biting her lip punishingly, the way girls sometimes did when they wanted to stop themselves from speaking…or crying.

  Interesting.

  Lyle offered Gwen an ignorant smile. “This is going splendid, don’t you think?”

  I suppressed a smile when Gwen tapped the pencil a little harder to drive her point home, unable to help admiring her tenacity. “So we have an action hero, a know-it-all brainiac with a phone for a limb, and a third unestablished person, no offense Shane, who has absolutely no experience whatsoever…”

  “No acting experience,” Shane cleared up for her.

  “I’m sorry. No acting experience for this acting job.”

  I threw my hands up, wanting to get the meeting moving but more than that wanting to stop Gwen from alienating Tyler and Shane before things even got started. “That about sums it up.” I leaned in Gwen’s direction and mock-whispered, “Wait, I’m the brainiac, right?”

  Her eyeballs shot mental bullets at my forehead before turning to Lyle. “And you think this is the right formula for this TV series, Mr. Steinberg?”

  “Said our leading lady who’s never done anything but Kellogg’s commercials and one daytime soap in her life,” Tyler added. “Lucky for you—or unlucky depending on who you ask—you’re Richard Vickers’s daughter.”

  Richard Vickers’s daughter? Executive producer of Fluidity Films, the production company filming Straightlaced? The same man with over two hundred producer and executive producer credits to his name who used to hit it out of the stratosphere every time but had suffered a major fall during the past few years thanks to a number of box office flops? It had gotten to the point that being connected to a Fluidity Films project was considered somewhat of a curse. If not for Lyle’s involvement in Straightlaced, I wouldn’t even have considered joining the cast.

  I suddenly realized why Gwen would be taking this project even more seriously than the rest of us. She was under enormous
pressure, not just to advance her own career, but also to help her father and Fluidity Films save face. Even as she was doing so, she’d have to face accusations, just like the one Tyler had made, that the only reason she’d even gotten the role was because her father had influenced the final casting decisions.

  My gaze shot to Gwen, and to my surprise, instead of looking uncomfortable, her eyes blazed with pride and genuine passion.

  “I am lucky to be my father’s daughter, Tyler, and if you choose to think that means I was granted special treatment, I’m not going to waste my breath trying to change your mind. On the other hand, don’t diss soap operas. At least not the one I worked on.”

  Tyler’s eyes flashed with a hint of respect just as Erica held a hand up. “I think that’s enough team bonding for today. Don’t you, Lyle?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Lyle removed his glasses and ran a wrinkled cleaning cloth over them. “Erica, why don’t you tell them a bit about the book and our vision for the series—food for thought before we break off for the day. Tomorrow, we’ll reconvene for part one of the read-through.”

  “I think that would be a great idea,” Erica said, sitting up a little straighter.

  I listened while Erica laid out the book’s plot and points most critical to emphasize in the show. The gist of her explanation, like most romance novel summaries, boiled down to two people in opposite walks of life who were never supposed to fall in love, but did. Surprise, surprise. Such bullshit. Everyone knew love didn’t actually work that way and if they didn’t, they should. I may have experienced my fair share of heartache at a younger age, but it taught me a lot just the same.

  After a while, she began repeating her same points, and Lyle did nothing to stop her, so I found myself tuning out and becoming far more interested in the super-composed way Gwen held herself. She still refused to look at me even though she had to feel my eyes locked on her.

  Clearly, I had gotten under her skin.

  It was only a matter of time before I got into her head too.