Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (27 page)

“Yeah,” he says. “Apparently, her date
isn’t going so well, so she’s on her way home now.”

“Oh no, trouble with the pincushion?” I
ask.

“She didn’t say exactly what happened,”
Damian says. “She just said that she left him rolling on the floor after she
gave him a knee to the groin.”

“Your sister kind of scares me,” I tell
him.

“Yeah,” he says, “me, too.”

I finish up my drink and we head inside.

I’ve grown to really care for Danna, but
there’s a very specific reason that I’m eager to talk to her. Along with being
Damian’s agent, she’s my agent, too.

The idea was Damian’s, originally, but
Danna and I both rejected it then out of hand. It wasn’t until we got together
alone a few weeks later that we actually started to take the arrangement
seriously.

There are still offers coming in all the
time, but I have, very recently, been informed about a job that I think would
fit my abilities remarkably well. The trick is going to be getting Damian to
leave the two of us alone for five seconds so Danna and I can talk about it.

I pop into the bathroom and take a quick
look at myself in the mirror, but
Late
Night with the Stars
did a pretty damn good job making me look absolutely
sumptuous.

Danna gets home and I try to talk to her,
but Damian walks in, interrupting us. When I tell him that it’s professional
business with my agent, he pulls up a chair.

He’s not dumb, but sometimes Damian isn’t
very smart.

Danna and I agree to talk later, but that
doesn’t happen until we’re at the restaurant and Danna “accidentally” spills
her water on Damian’s lap. He goes off to the restroom to dry off and Danna
leans toward me.

“This is what you really want to do?” she
asks. “They need a firm answer pretty fast or else they’re going to start
making other calls.”

“Yeah,” I tell her, “let’s do it. I heard
the synopsis and I just knew that I had to be in this movie.”

“Save that for the interviews,” she says, spearing
a piece of broccoli with her fork.

Danna’s not big on enthusiasm.

“You don’t think there’ll be any fallout
if I take the part?” I ask.

“How should I know?” she asks.

“Well, you’re my agent,” I tell her.
“Isn’t that part of your job?”

“
That
,”
she says, “is most certainly not part of my job.”

“Remind me what I pay you for again?” I
ask.

“I get you exposure, give you a bargaining
chip and I’m easy on the eyes,” she says. “I think any one of those is worth my
fee. You people really don’t pay me enough.”

“We’re both paying you fifteen percent,” I
tell her. “That’s really not bad.”

“I guess,” she says and Damian comes back
to the table.

“I always get a little nervous when I
leave the two of you alone to talk,” he says.

“What do you think we’re going to do?” she
asks. “Do the end around and scam you out of a role—ow!”

My toes hurt a bit and I feel a little bad
about kicking her, but without any calls having been made yet, I’d really like
to wait before I tell Damian the news.

I wonder if we’ll celebrate tonight the
way we usually do when one of us lands a hot role.

Dinner is reasonably uneventful, but
Damian keeps shifting his gaze between Danna and
I
as
he tries to figure out just what we’re up to.

“Why don’t I make that call so we can talk
about this?” Danna asks.

“Fine by me,” I tell her.

“Still don’t know what you’re talking
about,” Damian says.

Danna excuses herself and takes a walk
outside to make her phone call and I’m running my foot up Damian’s calf,
wondering how far he’s going to let me get before he scoots back.

He doesn’t.

When I get up to his knee, I use it to
slip my shoe off my foot and I give him a touch of quick, covert pleasure before
I pull my foot back and kick my fallen shoe toward me.

“You know,” I tell him, “that might be a
pretty long phone call.”

Damian smiles and says, “You think?”

“It’s hard to say,” I tell him. “Sometimes
she’s quick like a bunny. Other times, she’s on the horn for hours trying to
work out the details, but either way, I bet we could slip into the ladies’ room
and back before—”

“So I talked to Chet,” Danna says,
startling me as she returns to the table, “he said the role’s yours if you want
it.”

“Congratulations!” Damian says.

And this is where it gets a little
awkward.

“Yeah, about that,” I tell him. “Listen, I
took that role you told me about by the pool.”

“You’re in?” he asks. “That’s fantastic!
I’m telling you, it’s going to be a good thing, us working together.”

“That’s the thing,” I tell him. “I still
feel really strongly that the two of us should keep our projects separate.”

The childlike excitement drains from his
face.

“You’re telling me that you’re taking a
role in the movie that I told you about and I’m not allowed to take the role
that I was offered in that same movie because you want to keep our projects
separate?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him, “pretty much.” I turn
toward Danna and ask, “Have either of you had the dessert here? I’m not totally
full, but I’m close enough that if I’m going to have anything else, it’s going
to have to be really worth it.”

Damian just sighs and slinks back a little
in his chair.

“I love you,
pookie
,”
I tell him and blow him a kiss.

Click here to continue to my next book.

ESCORT

By
Claire Adams

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams

Chapter
One

The Last Time I Saw Me

Grace

“You’re not listening to me,” John Parker,
my outgoing boss says, leaning back in his oversized office chair. “We just
don’t have the kind of support we’d need for a move like this.”

“We’ll get the support,” I tell him.
“It’ll take a little bit of time, but I’ve been working on this for a while,
John. I know what I’m doing.”

I think he’s just pissed that he’s going
and I’m staying.

I’m not too sure about the specifics, but
I know that whatever the reason is that he’s resigning, it’s the kind of thing
that could seriously damage our stock prices.

“Well, I know you’ve put a lot of time
into this,” he says, “but we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the
personnel. We don’t have the support, Grace. Ainsley’s not going to go for this
unless you’ve got everything locked down tight, and we both know you’re not
there yet.”

The problem is that I think we — that is,
Memento Entertainment — should expand into additional markets. John, though, is
of the old hat. He thinks that by staying small, we stay secure.

On the other hand, I think that staying
small will only prevent us from growing to our potential.

“John, with a little investment and some
good faith right now, we’re going to be in a better position to take on the big
guys and maybe we can stop being the station that people flip past on their way
to NBC or CBS,” I tell him.

“You’re delusional if you think we’re
poised for that kind of an uptick,” he answers. “I respect your ambition, I
really do, but at some point, you’re going to have to learn to be realistic.
Otherwise, you’re going to end up driving the company under or, best case
scenario, someone realizes that’s where this thing is heading and they’ll have
no choice but to fire you before it gets that far.”

John and I have always had friction.

I graduated from high school early: three
years early, to be exact. I was eighteen when I graduated college with honors
and, rather than do what mommy and daddy told me to do and go for a higher
degree in a more respectable field, I decided to use my Bachelor’s in
Communications to get my foot in the door.

I can always get a doctorate in something
boring when I lose interest in media.

Anyway, I’m not sure if our friction stems
from the fact that I’m smarter than John and he knows it or that he was
pressured into hiring me by Ainsley, a family friend and CEO of Memento
Entertainment.

It very well may be a combination of the
two.

“I’m just saying,” I start again, “if we
purchase a few stations in markets where we don’t yet have a foothold, we can
lay the groundwork for a lot more down the line. I’m not saying it’s going to
happen overnight, but if it doesn’t happen sometime soon, we’re not going to be
around long enough to-”

“What?” he asks. “We’ve been around for
nearly fifty years, Grace. If we were going to go under, it would have happened
by now. You’ve got to realize that our business model works because we don’t
take unjustifiable risks. That’s why we’re still here and why so many of our
competitors have lost out to the bigger guys over the years.”

“I get that we’ve got longevity,” I tell
him. “What I’m saying is that we could have longevity
and
profitability.”

“Oh, come on, Grace,” he says. “What kind
of car do you drive?”

“That’s not the point, John,” I start, but
he picks up before I can continue.

“The point is that you’re pushing for us
to do something that we’ve never done and it’s going to kill the company if any
single part of your plan doesn’t pan out.”

“Oh, we’ve moved into new markets before,”
I argue.

“After a great deal of careful
consideration and planning,” he says. “We never dove in somewhere without
knowing just how warm the water was going to be.”

It’s a stupid metaphor. He’s only trying
to cover the fact that his work at the company has been marked by advising our
CEO, Ainsley Winters, and the rest of the members on the board not to run
before we can walk.

We’ve been walking twice as long as I’ve
been alive.

Still, I’m not sure if it’s what he’s
saying or the way he’s saying it, but my palms are sweaty and I’m struck by a
sharp feeling of terror and panic.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I breathe, but my throat has
gone dry. “We need to do something, John. If we stick with the same old
approach, we’re going to get the same old payoff right until the moment when
one of those companies whose jingles people actually recognize swallows us up
and you can say goodbye to Memento Entertainment.”

I reach down and pick up my purse.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “We’re not
done here.”

“I’m not leaving,” I tell him and grab a
piece of gum. Out of nowhere, my mouth tastes like I just finished eating
pennies and blueberry pie. It’s not a good mix.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks.
“You don’t look so well.”

We’ve done this before. We’ve had this
exact conversation before, only I can’t actually place when it would have
happened. The feeling, though, is overwhelming.

My mind races as I think back, trying to
pin it down, but I can’t think of anything that would fit.

“What the hell was that?” I shout.

John’s brow furrows. “What the hell was
what
?”

“It sounded like someone was trying to
break…the door…with a…”

I’m dizzy and my head hurts, but my legs
are numb and my vision’s gone double, so I don’t feel confident excusing
myself.

“Grace?”

“I’m…fine…” I mutter and that’s the last
thing I remember.

After that, my consciousness is an
infrequent series of pictures and words in a language that I’ve never heard.

I’m not in the office anymore, and for a
while, I don’t know where I am at all.

There’s a man standing over me now,
shining a light into my eyes, and I’m asking him, with great difficulty, what
he’s done to me and why I can’t move.

He answers me, saying, “You’re in a
hospital. You had a seizure.”

I try to respond, but it’s difficult for
me to find my tongue to speak again.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

I look up at him, the world slowly coming
back into focus. “I don’t…” I start. “What’s happening to me?”

“It takes a little time to regain yourself
after a seizure,” he explains. “Do you remember anything?”

It takes some time to get the words out,
but I tell him about the pictures, the unrecognizable sounds.