CHAPTER 1
Christopher
“Cut!”
I pulled back from Adrianna Cux’s face and let out a breath I’d been holding since take five. Maybe six. I’d lost count somewhere around the third time her tongue tried to stage a hostile invasion of my mouth.
“Christopher.” Max, our director, pinched the bridge of his nose from behind the monitor. He did that a lot around me. “You’re supposed to be a man consumed by passion. A man who would burn down the world for this woman. Right now, you look like a man being forced to eat something expired.”
“That’s not far off,” I muttered.
Adrianna’s eyes narrowed. She was still close enough for me to smell the remnants of whatever she’d eaten during the lunch break. Onion. Specifically, onion-flavored pizza, which she’d polished off enthusiastically, untroubled by her breath and apparently convinced that her beauty exempted her from basic courtesy.
She was wrong on both counts.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, loud enough that three crew members turned their heads.
“It means we should go again.” I stepped back, putting distance between us. “From the top.”
Max held up a hand. “Take six, everyone. Christopher, a word?”
I followed him to the edge of the set where the lighting rigs cast long shadows across the concrete floor. Max was a good director. He had an eye for detail and the patience of a saint.
He also had the unfortunate habit of thinking he could fix my performance with a pep talk, which was like trying to fix a plumbing problem with poetry.
“You have to sell it,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The audience needs to believe you’re in love with her.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m an actor, Max. Not a magician.”
He gave me a look. “You’ve kissed women on camera before.”
“Women who don’t taste like a gas station pizza parlor, sure.”
He gave a tight smile. “One more take. Give me something I can work with. We’re already two hours behind schedule, and if we push to tomorrow, the studio’s going to have my ass.”
I'd done a hundred things I didn't want to do in my career, and most of them involved less physical contact with people I couldn't stand.
We reset. Adrianna fixed her hair, reapplied her lip gloss, and positioned herself in front of me. She'd always treated every scene like a personal audition for a role in my life. She’d been doing this for months. The lingering touches between takes. The suggestions that werehearse privately. The time she showed up at my trailer at eleven at night in a silk robe, claiming she wanted torun lines, as if any dialogue in our script required that much cleavage.
I’d said no. Every time. Politely at first, then less politely, and finally with a bluntness that would’ve made Trisha proud. Adrianna took each rejection as a challenge rather than ananswer, which told me everything I needed to know about how she processed the wordno.
“Action!”
I pulled her close, tilted her chin up, and pressed my mouth to hers, thinking about literally anything else. The craft services table. Tax returns. The probability of asteroid impact. Anything to get me through three seconds of contact without my face betraying the fact that I would rather be kissing a cactus.
“Cut! That’s a wrap on scene forty-two!”
Thank God.
I released Adrianna and walked off set before she could suggest we celebrate the final take. I passed the wall of blinding key lights and the backdrop the size of a billboard, the crew moving around me in a busy rhythm. Sound techs adjusted mics, a PA hauled cables, and wardrobe was already swooping in on Adrianna.
Behind me, I heard her call my name. But I kept walking. Three months of filming with that woman had taught me that engagement was a trap and eye contact was an invitation, and I had no interest in either.
My phone buzzed as I pushed through the studio doors and into the Miami heat. The sun burned overhead, baking everything beneath it. I hated this city. Hated the humidity that made my shirt stick to my back, the palm trees that lined every street like they were trying too hard to sell paradise, the memories that lived here—buried under expensive real estate, family money, and thirty years of being the wrong son.
But mostly, I hated that I couldn’t leave.
Five weeks ago, I could’ve been anywhere. Vancouver for a period drama. London for a limited series. Tokyo for a press tour. My career let me disappear into other people’s stories across half a dozen time zones, and I’d built it that way on purpose. Movement was freedom. If you stayed in one placelong enough, people started expecting things from you, and expectations were just disappointments with a longer fuse.
