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“Action!”
7
DEAN
Even eight thousand miles away from home, Brooke was a pain in the ass.
All I wanted to do was shoot my lines, then hide in my trailer and play the guitar, but Brooke kept screwing up and Preston made us shoot the same scene over and over again. It was a simple one that we were shooting in a refurbished cafe. But no matter how many times she checked the script, Brooke couldn’t remember what to say.
“Cut!” Preston shouted for what had to be the hundredth time. “That’ll do for now — we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.”
I yawned and reached into the air, stretching my back. Hopefully, now that the day was over, I could head back to the motel and convince Brooke to give me a few hours alone. But of course, Brooke hadn’t finished being a diva.
“Where did you find these amateurs?” she demanded as she stormed over to Preston, gesturing at the poor extra who’d returned the script to me that morning. The extra wasn’t looking at us, but I could tell from the way she dropped her head that she’d heard what Brooke had said, and I felt horrible for her.
“You can’t say things like that,” I hissed. “She’s a person, not a prop.”
Brooke rolled her eyes.
“I’m not here to babysit wannabe theater kids who can’t shut up and do their jobs.”
The extra was still facing away from us, so I couldn’t see her face, but her ears were red and her friend pulled her into a hug. Tension flared through my neck as I remembered our flight to Brisbane, where Brooke was more interested in flirting with the guy serving drinks than reading the script.
“If you don’t want to waste your own time, why didn’t you learn your lines on the plane like I did?”
Brooke ignored me. She stood with her hands on her hips, her storm-filled eyes boring into Preston as he packed up his equipment.
“Well?”
“It’s the studio’s funding deal with the Australian government,” he said. “We have to film the movie in the middle of nowhere and hire a certain percentage of local talent to be eligible for the money.” He gave her a disinterested look. “What can I say? The world’s butt crack doesn’t have a big talent pool. We used everyone who applied.”
If Preston hadn’t been the director, I might have called him out for speaking so dismissively in front of the people he was talking about. But on this set, he was my boss. I couldn’t undermine him like that without risking my job. If I broke my contract, I would owe the studio millions of dollars, and the idea of seeing my younger siblings living in the back of mom’s sedan again made me keep my mouth clamped shut.
Instead, I moved past the crew to where Isaac and Wyatt had been waiting for their cue to enter — which, thanks to Brooke’s inability to film an entire scene without screwing up, had never come.
They both gave me sympathetic looks that I ignored.
“I’ll call the car to come around,” Wyatt said, referring to the driver the production company had hired to shuttle us from our motel in town to the movie set. “Will Brooke be joining us?” He raised an eyebrow.
I shrugged.
“Ask her.”
Both men looked at me with confusion. Brooke and I were a Hollywood power couple, and thanks to a mammoth effort from my publicist Tonia, the entire world knew it.
The only thing was… the relationship wasn’t real. Tonia had orchestrated it to clean up the womanizing image I’d earned in my first few years as an actor, and it had worked. Teenage girls loved me and middle-aged women respected me, all because I’d cleaned up my image and agreed to play the role of Brooke’s loving boyfriend.
It was the toughest acting gig I’d ever done, because IhatedBrooke. Being her boyfriend was a constant slog. She was the polar opposite of my type: vain, superficial, and lazy. She wasn’t bad to look at, sure — but spending time with her felt like torture.
And because you never knew who you could trust in the entertainment industry, I had to assume these guys wouldn’t keep their mouths shut. We’d traveled in the same circles, but we weren’t friends — they were the kind of people I’d bump into sometimes at awards shows and Hollywood parties. But this is the first time we’d worked together, and I wasn’t about to trust them with my biggest secret.
“I mean… yes. She’s coming with us.”
As though I’d summoned her, she appeared next to me with her battered copy of the script under her arm. I pulled her close, focusing on keeping my movements fluid rather than stiff. I was a good actor. If I could convincingly die from a war wound, I could fool these guys into believing this relationship was real.
Wyatt called the driver, and we waited on the pavement outside the cafe. We were alone — this exit was blocked by a burly security guard, and the extras and crew had been ushered out in the other direction.
Rainforest Resort was an apt name for the jungle-like area we stood in now: the road was in bad shape, and was overgrown by ancient trees and thick green vines. The car approached slowly, the driver wary of potholes and a lizard that scurried across the gravel.
