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Julian felt it, but he didn’t take advantage of it. Instead, he just looked down at me, his blue eyes glowing with a strange light I’d never seen in them before. “We have to get something straight, Laurier. Cards on the table. I don’t trust you on my set, but I want you in my bed, so I’m not going to fire you. But it’s going to be on you to come to me.”
I lost my breath. Words had been letting me down before, but now they completely failed me. Julian seemed satisfied by whatever he was reading on my face, though. He nodded slowly. “You’re going to come to me.”
I shook my head. “No,” I whispered, and I believed it. I wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past. He was the same kind of man as my father, but Iwouldn’tbe my mother.
Julian’s gaze dropped to my mouth. My lips were parted, my breath was coming too fast. “I think you will,” he murmured. “Eventually. And I won’t lay a finger on you until you do. Because make no mistake, Willow. I might be the head of the company, butyouhave all the power.”
12
JULIAN
Imanaged to keep my word over the next week. I didn’t go by their filming locations, and I sent all my threats about cutting the trailer before the end of the week directly to Miller.
And every night, I waited for her to come to me. I’d sent her my address even before I left my building, with a quote note.For when you change your mind. I’d been feeling cocky. I couldn’t imagine that with that kind of energy flowing between us, charging us,bindingus, that she could stay away. As the days drained away, though, I wasn’t feeling cocky anymore.
I was feeling edgy, desperate. I kept my cool at work, but Dana could see I was on edge. Thankfully, she chalked it up to Miller and O’Conner. One was complicating the other. Despite my increasingly profane threats, Miller wasn’t sending me the cut I wanted. Despite the studio’s increasingly generous offer package, O’Conner still wanted proof we could handle it.
She got it, she thought.
My friends suspected there was more to the story.
“If you just need to get laid, why don’t you just go get laid?” Landon asked.
“You know Julian isn’t that kind of girl,” Dominic smirked. “He likes to be romanced.”
But I didn’t need romance. I just needed Willow to fucking give in already. I was parched for her, starving. The taste I’d gotten hadn’t done a damn thing to quench my curiosity. It had only whetted my appetite. One-night stands had never been my thing, but if that was all she gave me, I’d take it and worry about getting my next fix later.
But she didn’t give me anything. Not a single phone call under the guise of business. Not a single late-night text.
No, I wasn’t cocky anymore.
I stayed home more that week than I ever had, only going out Tuesday night to meet up with my friends. But on Friday, I didn’t have a choice. It was awards show season, and even if we hadn’t made any Oscar contenders, we had some Golden Globe and critic’s choice nominations.
“It’ll get your mind off the girl,” Garrett advised. He was going, too. His wife was a nominee.
“What girl?” I bared my teeth at him, daring him to say her name.
“Right,” he said dryly and didn’t take me up on it.
I didn’t have a date, but at the last minute, I called up Shelly Monroe, Dana’s fiancé, to see if she wanted to go with me. We’d been friends for longer than she and Dana had been dating. The press generally assumed that it was Shelly and I who were together. Neither of them liked to publicize their personal lives. Hell, Dana had even let our father believe it for a while. He wasn’t exactly the most enlightened guy in town. He’d come around eventually, though.
Shelly was a statuesque model with skin the color of the night sky. So perfect and poreless that magazines didn’t even bother to airbrush her. She’d shaved her head recently, and without hair, the perfection and symmetry of her face was even more stunning.
“I really think we could make this work,” I said when I answered the door and saw her in a white, raw silk shift that glowed against her slender, sculpted limbs. In another century, she would have been a queen instead of a supermodel.
She rolled her mocha-colored eyes up. “No, we couldn’t, Lewis.”
“You like men, too.”
“Yeah, for fun now and then. But you know what I don’t like? Siblings.”
“Fucking Dana,” I sighed.
“My fucking fiancé,” she agreed, wriggling the fingers of her left hand, even though she wasn’t wearing the engagement ring I knew Dana had given her for a third time.
We took a company car to the show, skipping the dog and pony show that was the red carpet. I always walked it a few times a season, but I was skipping it tonight. If Dana didn’t like it, she could fly her ass home from Amsterdam.
The reception area was full of the usual suspects. Most of the A-list, all of the B-list, a few lucky C-listers. Miller was there in an ill-fitting suit, wearing his beat-up Vans like he didn’t give a shit, even though he salivated at the thought of these things. Take away Miller’s soap, his toothbrush, his pretentious, hipster flip phone, but don’t take away his invitations to celebrity suck-up fests. He couldn’t bear it.
