Breaking the Rules: A Billionaire Romance

by Sarah J. Brooks

  I sighed a big laborious sigh as I tried to think of how I was going to continue at the pace I was going. It just wasn’t possible. My body and mind were exhausted. I hadn’t had more than a couple of hours to myself in months, and those hours usually revolved around sleep. I needed some time to decompress, and if Jeremy didn’t find it for me soon, I was likely to find it for myself.

  “Jeremy, I’ve got my make-up line. The movie. The blog. Social media. All the interviews. It’s just too much for me. I’m coming to you and saying it’s too much; you have to hear me.”

  “Okay darling, here’s what I’ll do. I got a job that will be fun for you. It’s for Instamatch. It’s going to pay over a million easily and likely up to ten million if you get a post or two to go viral on your social media pages. You’ve got a lot of followers, and this is just in your wheelhouse.”

  “A hookup app? What am I supposed to do with that? I barely have time to sleep. I certainly don’t have time to date or hook up with guys.”

  “It’s a dating app. They are trying to appeal to a wider audience. All you have to do is go on a date or two and post about it on your Instagram. I’ll send over the exact wording for the post, but basically talk about how great a guy you met and you met him on Instamatch.”

  “Ugggh,” I groaned at the idea.

  The last thing I wanted to do was go out with some loser I met on a hookup app. Instamatch was well known for guys who just wanted to screw and leave.

  “Drop all my interviews this month, and I’ll take on the Instamatch contract,” I offered.

  Swiping right on some pictures and eating a meal or two with a guy was much less stress than doing television interviews. I didn’t have to dress up, and I didn’t have to worry about what I said; I could simply eat some good food and maybe even chat up a hot guy. If a loser showed up for the date, I could just cut him loose and move on. If Jeremy dropped the interviews, I could see a semi-relaxing month ahead of me. Well, maybe not relaxing, but at least not dying from overwork.

  Jeremy smiled at my offer. He was a smart man, and I knew he could tell I was tired and needed some sort of concessions from him. My endorsement deals, movies, and television deals all made him ten percent. At some point, if I collapsed from exhaustion, that was going to come out of his pocket too. He couldn’t afford to lose me, his most profitable client.

  “I can’t cancel the Late Night show.”

  “Fine, I’ll do that one. As much as possible is canceled for the month. Deal?”

  “Deal. Now let’s get your profile up and running. I have just the right photos I want to use.”

  Jeremy proceeded to take my phone as I closed my eyes and grabbed a few minutes of sleep. I didn’t care what pictures he used or what he said in my profile. This job would be a piece of cake. I would just find a hot guy to go out with, take a selfie with him, and post something adorable on my feed for my fans to see. I’d do it again at the end of the month, and then bam, my contract was completed.

  I didn’t need to care about the guy. Hell, I didn’t even really need to like him. I’d just find someone my fans would get excited about and post some teasers on my social media. The more I thought about it, the more I was getting excited.

  A whole month off from radio and television interviews would free up a lot of my time. I could travel somewhere fun, maybe even sleep in. Sure, I still needed to finish filming my movie, but that would be a piece of cake if every minute I had off weren’t spent in some sort of interview.

  I’d find a cute, all-American sort of guy that the fans would adore. Maybe even go out with him a couple of times. There had to be some decent guys on the app if I looked hard enough. Maybe even a guy that I could stand to spend an evening with. A hot night of sex wasn’t totally out of the question if I found a hunk.

  “Can I go yet?” I asked with my eyes still closed.

  “I’m going through some of the guys, just a minute.”

  An hour later, Jeremy had swiped right on every hot guy in L.A., and I was finally leaving his office. My film was shooting in New York for the next few weeks, so I was excited to have a break from all the paparazzi. New York just didn’t have the same amount of smut hunters as Los Angeles, and the ones who were there were obsessed with the music scene and probably wouldn’t even know I was in town.

  Besides, if I were really going to do the Instamatch thing, I’d rather find a nice normal guy from New York than some wannabe actor from L.A. It was tiring always dating guys who suddenly wanted to be famous when they met me. Even the ones who weren’t into acting at all decided to act when we broke up and the agents came knocking on their doors.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did, but fame seemed to suck for everyone. Even the halfway decent guys fell prey to the fame bug when they were around me for too long. Finding a guy that I could actually date was nearly impossible. Other actors had too big egos to be seen with me and listed as the second name in a story. Non-actors all ended up hating the fame, and as soon as we broke up, they went right toward their own 15-minutes of fame. I just couldn’t win in the dating world.

  If finding a real man to date wasn’t possible, I could stand to have a little fun in the Instamatch dating world. But I wasn’t going to settle for some con artist who wasn’t who he said he was. If I was doing this thing, I was only going to do it with a real guy. For better or worse, he better be the real deal if I was going to build up his fame factor by posting about him on my pages.

  “I’ll call you when I get to New York,” I said as I was leaving.

  “Be good.”

  “Always.”

  It was our little joke. I was never all that good, but I was trying to stay out of the press and really trying to make an effort to be a real actress. Reality fame wasn’t at all what I wanted to be known for; I wanted people to know me because I was a great actress, and that was going to take some work.

  My family’s television show had given me the gift of celebrity, but I needed to use that gift wisely so I could build a lasting future for myself. People were too finicky for me to last long in the spotlight as a reality star; it was time to make a real transition.

  That night I hopped a plane and was in New York before midnight, nothing fancy, just a first class seat on a non-stop flight. I didn’t call up my friends in town, and I didn’t update social media to tell everyone where I was at. I had the next two days all to myself, so I was just going to sleep as much as possible. I had to get my head straight so my acting didn’t look horrible in these final scenes.

  As I slipped into the soft sheets of my Times Square hotel room, I opened the Instamatch app and looked at the profiles. My hotel room was lavishly appointed with gold and white linens and a large fresh fruit basket on the entryway table.

  I wasn’t about to swipe right on just any guy. They had to have good looks, a decent profile, and above all a little sense of humor. I swiped right on stockbrokers, artists, all American college boys, and even a Dean Morrison look-alike. I had to laugh at that guy’s profile, though; his name was Dean, and he looked a hell of a lot like the actor. It was likely a fake account, but I couldn’t bring myself to swipe left to the man I’d had a crush on since I was a little girl, even if he wasn’t the real guy.

  Chapter 3

  Dean

  “Bella, I don’t think I can keep going with this Instamatch thing.”

  “What? Oh, no you’re keeping it. Have you seen the press today?”

  I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. There did seem to be more paparazzi in front of my building than normal that morning, but that happened sometimes. It all depended on which desperate story the tabloids were running on that day. The paparazzi were all about money, and I could never really figure out why some days they loved me and some days they were nowhere to be found.

  That morning, I had been warned by the front desk of my apartment that I needed to take the back door. It wasn’t common that there were so many paparazzi out front in the mornin
g, but it wasn’t totally unheard of either.

  “You know I don’t keep up with that stuff,” I said to Bella, my agent as I plopped down in the large cushioned chair across from her desk.

  “Hollywood hottie Dean Morrison caught in bed with a barely legal girl,” Bella read from a tabloid in front of her. She then flashed me the picture they had, although I knew which picture it was going to be.

  It looked bad. I couldn’t deny it. The bright pink sheets and boy band poster on the wall made me look like one sick dude for going home with this girl. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer that she really was of legal age. She had to be; I mean, she was living in New York with roommates and had handed her identification over to the waiter for verification. But I still needed a little reassurance after I looked at the absurdity of that photo.

  “She was twenty-two,” I defensively added. “Really, she was. I saw her hand her identification to the waiter. This is not my fault. I wasn’t even going to go home with her, but I got drunk and caved in.”

  “Hey, I don’t care if she was eighteen. As long as she’s legal. This is so great!”

  “You are a strange woman. You know that right? I look like her father,” I said as I disgusted myself with the idea of it all. “God, this is so bad. I’m sorry. This is bad.”

  Typically, I didn’t care much for what the tabloids said, but obviously, I didn’t want to look like some creep. It was all because of that Instamatch app and my friend Ren for forcing me to meet up with this girl. I wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t feel bad he had already told her I’d be there.

  “It’s good Dean, it’s very good,” Bella said with a huge smile. “The girl did an interview with the tabloid and reports she met you on Instamatch. Dean, this is huge. Your rate for that contract just skyrocketed. You’re going to be pushing two million in only a couple of days. This story is going to go national, maybe even international. This is so perfect.”

  “Did Ariel at least confirm her age? God, please tell me she confirmed her age.”

  “Yes, she told them she was twenty-two. This is the biggest celebrity news of the day. We need to get you on some talk shows, or maybe radio; I’ll make some calls. We are going to take advantage of this for sure.”

  I didn’t share my agent’s enthusiasm for the story or the news that it was going to go national. Being a celebrity was hard. Having every decision play back to you with the spin of the media didn’t make life move forward at all. Instead, I felt like I was constantly stuck in a tabloid version of my own life. Every decision had to be curated to ensure my public image of myself didn’t look bad. If I made a wrong decision, I lost money and my livelihood. If I made the right decision, I had a stable couple of months. I was getting too old for this shit. and just wanted to go about acting in my Broadway show and land another damn movie so I had some stability after the show was over.

  My previous finance people had mishandled all my earnings up until about a year before. Of course, they had enough money to pay themselves very handsomely, but all my other investments had turned into crap, and I was left with barely a penny to my name. Luckily, I still had my assets and the ability to get my job on Broadway while I pulled my life back together. It had been a horrible time in my life, and it was all caught by the paparazzi. My downward spiral was to their enjoyment as they posted picture after picture of my failings.

  New York was better, though. The few paparazzi that stood in front of my building were polite. They followed me occasionally, but my life was pretty boring in New York, and they had money to make, so they weren’t around very often. I liked who I was in New York. I liked acting on Broadway and hanging out with my investment friends on Sundays. In New York, I had started to feel like a normal person and not just a piece of meat that sold stories.

  “How is this even a story? Basically, I slept with a girl I met at a bar. Like every other adult man on the planet. Are they really just excited that she’s so young looking? I don’t get this tabloid fascination, and I will not be doing interviews,” I said grumpily, although I knew exactly why they latched onto the story. Ariel was a pretty, young girl, and there was proof that I had been in her bed; the salacious nature of the media was just too much to resist that sort of sexual story.

  “Dean, it’s a story because there’s a picture. Don’t grump about it. This is a good thing. Women are going to have you on their radar again. They’ll be remembering just how handsome you are. Men are going to admire you for landing a hot young chic. Nothing about this story is bad.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was totally off of anyone’s radar,” I said under my breath.

  I knew not to argue with Bella. She loved the public relations and marketing world. I hated it. But my life was in the public eye now; there was no changing it, and my goal was to land a good movie after my show ended, so I just had to roll with the media punches and use that momentum to get me what I wanted in the end.

  The actors that were tortured by their careers were the ones that never learned how to use the media. Instead of always letting them use you, a long-term actor had to learn to use them. The media were so easily manipulated that it was like a child’s game. It had taken me losing everything to realize just how powerful the game could be.

  The problem with the mainstream media was that they waited for the tabloids to release something before they looked into it. Regular media outlets were hardly doing their own research at all and certainly weren’t putting the work into developing their own stories. Back when I had first started making films, I often had news reporters who would contact my agent and set up in-depth interviews. They usually had some interesting angle they were pushing, and there was an actual storyline, but not anymore. Social media, tabloids, and reality television ruled the airwaves more than movie stars.

  “Okay, so they have their story. How do you want to use this to our benefit? Remember, I will not be doing interviews right now, though.”

  “I set up a couple of social media accounts for you last year that I’ve been posting to for you. I think you should start making an effort to use them. Your fans want to see what you are doing. They want to see your posts, not your agent’s posts.”

  “Bella, I can barely handle this stupid dating app. Plus, I don’t want to get into the whole social media thing. It’s just one more thing I’m going to have to keep track of.”

  “Here, let me show you this one app. It’s the easiest. You can post short 140 character statements and even add photos if you want. It’s called Twitter.”

  I rolled my eyes. Even I had heard of the app before; I wasn’t a dinosaur. I still didn’t want to mess with it. I didn’t want to be known as the old guy who posted stupid things on the apps, and Twitter seemed harder than Instagram to me. At least on Instagram I could just post a photo and be done with it.

  “Okay, so is it on my phone? I think I would prefer Instagram, though. That’s the one where I just post a photo, right?”

  “Yep, I have them both on here. Now just type something in this section for Twitter. If you want to upload a picture with your post, then you click here.”

  “I love beautiful women. Thanks for a fun date last night Instamatch,” I said as I typed and laughed.

  I was being facetious and hadn’t expected her to take me seriously at all. It was a joke. I was joking with the amount of information and joking about my own personal life; it wasn’t something I actually wanted to post. I would never really post something like that for everyone to read.

  “Perfect! Wow, that’s so perfect. Here, let’s make sure we have linked to the Instamatch account. You need to put the ‘at’ sign in front of their name. Also, it helps to see what hashtags are trending right now and see if any will fit with your post. Oh, great here we go, hashtag ‘he’s still got it’ that’s all about you.”

  “You really expect me to post this?” I asked after she had edited my post. “This is such a blatant manipulation and advertisement for Instamatch.”

  “Yes! Dean,
this is how you make millions with social media. This is exactly what you need to be doing. If you want to send a text to me before posting, I’ll help you edit and get it ready. But I want you posting once a day at least. It doesn’t have to be about Instamatch. Post your thoughts. Pictures from your day. I really don’t care. Just get your face out there now. We’ve got a hold of the public interest. We can’t let go of it if you want to get some movie offers again. You can alternate between Instagram and Twitter if you’d like. Do you want me to go through Instagram with you?”

  “No, I’m sure I can figure it out. You know I am sick and tired of feeling like a doormat to the media. I’ll do my best, but I really don’t understand all this social media stuff. I also don’t want the media spinning my life to their whims. I’m happy with my life right now, and I don’t think they need to make me look like a sad ‘has been’ in every story they do.”

  “I think the tides are turning, Dean. This dating app is just what we need.”

  “If we can turn this into a direction that I want to be seen in the media, then that would be worth my time.”

  “It’s going to be worth your time, Dean. I’ll help you. Bam, we are going to kick ass this year; I can feel it.”

  Bella was standing up and literally bouncing from excitement. I couldn’t help laughing at her enthusiasm over a one sentence post. I found it unlikely that I would get all that much attention from posting to social media, but I sent the post through and hugged Bella as I headed to the theater for my show that night.

  Luckily for me, Bella had picked up a couple of other clients in New York, so it made her flying back and forth a little more worthwhile. She still preferred to spend her time in Los Angeles, though, and I couldn’t blame her. The sunny skies and beaches were really hard to give up when I had to move to New York.

  Acting in theater was so much different than acting in films. On a film, I could do as many re-takes as I wanted until I got a scene right. On the stage, I had to do it once and hope it was good enough. The mental side of theatrical acting was much more emotionally charged because the stakes of each scene were so tremendous. If I did horrible in one scene, it would leak over to the other characters, and we would all be agitated with each other by the end of the show. Because of that, each of us put our heart and souls into the show. Each of the other actors and I wanted to ensure we didn’t disappoint our fellow castmates as well as the audience.