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“Jesus, Willa,” Madeline Beckingham scoffed. “A substance abuse problem? I’ll be sure to fire the whole cast then.”
“Ms. Beck—”
“I don’t give a shit what her problem is as long as she can make me look good on HD film in natural sunlight. She can bathe in the blood of virgins for all I care.” She smiled. “Maybe that’s why she’s in Wyoming. Virgins are few and far between in Southern California.” She laughed at her own joke again, but nobody else in their little group laughed. That didn’t bother Madeline. She just chuckled and shook her head. “Come on, Cole. Let’s find Bill.”
Cole. Great. Just great. Grace didn’t turn around to look at him. She waited for their footsteps to fade away. She waited for Willa to huff and stalk off. And then she made herself meet Eve’s gaze.
“It’s not true,” Grace repeated, her voice hoarse with emotions she still couldn’t feel. “I swear. It’s not true. I mean, I was fired by Frank Edison, but it had nothing to do with my work or alcohol or anything. It was a personal disagreement. And the other thing, the money, that’s about an ex-boyfriend. We broke up and—”
“Okay.” Eve’s expression seemed purposefully blank. “We’ll talk about it later in private.”
“Sure. I…I’ll be back in an hour then.”
Eve’s gaze touched on the keys in Grace’s hand.
Oh, God. “I’m sorry. I can see if someone else could give me a ride. Maybe…” But there was no one else. Maybe if she asked Cole—
“Just be back in time to do her makeup. And charge production your normal fee for makeup work, okay?”
“Sure. Yes.” They both stood there for a moment. Eve had to be wishing she hadn’t volunteered her car, and Grace wished she could think of a way to let her off the hook. But she needed to get to town, and Eve couldn’t lose two or three hours of her day driving her. “Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll be back as quickly as possible. Without speeding, I mean.”
“No problem.”
Newfound maturity or not, Grace hoped she ran into Willa alone sometime soon. She wanted to slap that bitch across the face. She wanted to hurt her. Because the feeling was returning to Grace’s body and she felt like she might throw up. That’d be a nice, funny way to reinforce the rumors that she was some sort of addict. Thank God she hadn’t eaten since eight that morning.
Face burning, she got into Eve’s car and pulled carefully away, determined not to even stir up one piece of gravel. She just disappeared as quietly as she could and tried to decide if she should keep on driving. Because the worst part about the lies Willa had told was they were so close to the awful truth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I’VE GOTTA GET THIS,” Cole ground out to the production assistant who was trying to get him to agree that the barn corral could indeed be easily moved to a place that got better natural light. “Excuse me.”
Cole glanced at the screen of his cell phone, didn’t recognize the number, and still breathed a sigh of relief. Whoever it was had to be better than this boy who looked eighteen years old and didn’t have a lick of common sense.
“Hello?” He headed straight down the trail that led from the barn to the meadow corral. The background noise of two dozen people began to fade behind him. But there was no answer on the phone. “Hello?” he repeated.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” a rushed female voice said.
“Okay. Who is this?”
“There’s no spare tire in her car.”
“Grace?” he asked, feeling stupid even as he said it. Of course it wasn’t Grace. She was… He glanced around, realizing he hadn’t seen her since—
“I’m sorry to spring this on you, Cole, but I don’t have a credit card to pay for a tow and the spare tire isn’t in the trunk and I can’t be late or they’ll think…”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. About halfway toward the ranch after I turn off the highway?”
“Okay, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Really? You’ll come?”
Cole looked at the people milling about. The crowd had thinned out, at least. But Madeline was still here, ruling over them all from the front porch of the big house. “Yeah. See you in a few.”
Just like that, he escaped, the way he’d been wanting to all day. But the escape was bittersweet, because he knew he’d be returning in half an hour. But he had work to do. Real work. The horses were stressed from the ruckus and traffic, and Cole had decided they’d be better off at the meadow corral than in the barn. These were ranch horses. They could handle sleeping in the lean-to for a few nights during the summer. They didn’t need blankets or even a roof over their heads, and they could take on coyotes with a well-placed kick.
But like Cole, they couldn’t take these people with their earpieces and notepads and sunglasses and hard laughter.
