by Meg Collett
“At least that’s done,” Stevie said.
Cade waved a hand in front of his nose. “And it smells like they set off bug bombs after the night crew finished.”
“There you are!” Emilie rounded the corner in the hall and powered toward them in her Converse. She wore shredded, acid-washed jeans and what looked like a flea-bitten sweater. All the rage back in L.A., Stevie assumed. Probably cost thousands of dollars too.
“You’re late,” Emilie barked when she finally reached them. She put her hands on her hips and glowered up at Stevie like it was all her fault.
“Five minutes is not considered late.”
Her button nose scrunched up. “Oh, really? That’s five minutes you don’t have to finish tonight.”
Cade frowned. “Won’t a crew finish up for us tomorrow before filming the final touches?”
“Does no one look at my schedule?” Emilie ripped her headset off and threw it to the ground.
Stevie took a careful step back, along with Arie and Cade. They were cornered in the bathroom if the bull charged. Emilie took a long, deep breath, chanting something under her breath that sounded like something she might have learned in an anger management class.
“We’re sorry?” Arie offered. He even shot her his best smile, probably his version of a panty dropper, but Stevie needed a set of dimples for her to react like that. She couldn’t help it—her eyes slid to Cade. His eyebrows were drawn tight together, his frown deepening.
“It’s fine,” Emilie breathed out. “Due to time constraints on filming tomorrow, your team and three others won’t get final touches, so you’re finishing tonight and we’re going to use the footage.”
“So we have to do all this without the night crew’s help?” Stevie asked.
“Correct,” Emilie said, leveling a long stare at Stevie.
She understood then.
Shepherd wanted them here all night so she could give the cameras all the juicy stuff.
* * *
Hours into the “renovation,” Stevie decided they’d made a huge mistake.
A special kind of hysteria was bred from six human bodies—Cade, Stevie, Arie, two cameramen, and a sound guy—crammed in a six-by-four-foot coffin with the fumes of grout, paint, and fried plastic from the small electrical fire Cade had accidentally started. After a few hours of shuffling around in the small space, Arie had given up and laid his prosthetic leg on the vanity. They weren’t even halfway done with the night’s work.
A glob of white paint splattered across Stevie’s forehead. She left it. Her shoulders screamed as she painted the ceiling with an extended paint roller. Tiny sprays of paint coated the tops of Cade’s and Arie’s heads as they worked in tandem to get the walk-in shower tiled.
Someone—and by someone, Stevie meant Emilie—had purposefully placed their design order wrong. Instead of the standard-size subway tiles Cade had ordered before they left yesterday, they’d opened the box to find thousands of minuscule, one inch by one inch, mirrored tiles. Cade had looked up at Stevie, his handsome face creased in horror, and said, “The shower is going to look like the inside of a disco ball.”
With the cameras rolling, Stevie had carefully arranged her expression into one of confusion—a wide-eyed head tilt with her mouth hanging slightly open—and taken the fall for the wrong order. Cade couldn’t look like an idiot on national television, even if they all knew it was Emilie’s fault.
Now, Cade and Arie were slapping teeny-tiny mirrors into the shower like freaking Pez dispensers, and Stevie was making sure the cameras caught her stealing glances of Cade’s ass as she tried not to paint the sound guy’s boom microphone or knock Arie’s prosthetic off the counter.
From where she sat in the hall next to the monitors feeding back images the cameras were collecting inside the bathroom, Emilie held up a sign for Stevie to read.
“The cabinets will be here in five minutes,” Stevie told Cade.
He groaned but didn’t look away from his tile work, a mirrored piece held between his teeth. “Okay, I’ll go . . .” He placed a tile on the itty-bitty plastic spacers, nearly went cross-eyed, and pulled the second one from his mouth. “. . . meet them in . . .” He placed that tile and picked up two more from the over half-full box at their feet. “. . . a minute.”
Stevie rolled her eyes at Emilie, who was shaking her head and pointing to Arie.
“Send Arie,” Stevie said.
“No problemo.” Arie was already reaching for his leg. The cameraman sitting where the toilet would go, whenever the toilet was delivered, zoomed in on Arie.
“We still need to order accessories,” Cade muttered mostly to himself; he hadn’t even turned around or looked up from the endless tiling.
“Don’t forget we still have to finish painting and tiling, put in the cabinets and countertops, hang the mirror, wire the lights, connect the new toilet, and put up a new door.” Stevie liked repeating their impossible to-do list every chance she got, because it always upped the panic until it was an almost tangible taste in the air.
Cade muttered some more under his breath, and Emilie almost looked like she might smile from where she stood in the hallway, leaning around the sound guy to see into the bathroom.
Stevie finished off the ceiling and dropped her roller in the paint tray. “Here, I’ll help you with the tile while Arie works on the cabinets.”
Cade was too busy feverishly placing tiles to answer. He kept his head an inch from the shower wall as she stepped inside the narrow space, making certain she brushed by him, her hand trailing across his back. His attention snapped onto her profile as both cameramen moved in for a better angle.
“It’s tight in here,” she said a little breathlessly as she wiggled into position.
“Uh.” The tile between his lips fell to the floor and shattered. He was already flushing at her proximity as he bent to retrieve another tile. “Yeah. I mean, it is. T-tight. In here.” He picked up a few tiles and started rising back up, when he realized he was at eye level with her crotch.
He reared up, blush spreading into his cheeks, and almost smacked his head against the wall. Stevie had to fight to hide her smile.
“Where do you want me to start?” she asked, sidling a little closer. “Here?” She pointed to the spot Arie had left off, her arm reaching over Cade’s shoulder. Her breasts brushed against his chest. Instantly, her nipples pebbled beneath her thin cotton t-shirt.
Cade peeled his eyes off her face to see where she meant, his breath warming the bare skin of her arm. “I can—” He cleared his throat. “Go there. I mean, since I’m cl-closer. You can start here.”
Stevie placed her hand on his shoulder as she twisted around, pretending to look. The shower wasn’t nearly this tight, but it was an excuse to practically crawl all over him, and the camera angles would make the space look tighter than it was, further selling her act.
Cade’s hand went to her waist, to steady her or pull her back. “Stevie?”
She turned to him. Thick furrows creased the smooth skin between his hooded eyebrows. He shot a sideways glance at the cameras. He opened his mouth, most likely to ask what the hell she was doing, but before he could, Stevie wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled herself onto her tiptoes.
His mouth was still open when she kissed him.
His lips were fuller than they looked, and he tasted like orange Tic Tacs. He probably felt her heart pounding against his chest and her sweaty palm against the back of his neck, but she angled her head away from the cameras like a pro and arched her entire body into him.
Finally, he moved, responding to her kiss with a hesitation that broke her heart, his mouth moving against hers with caution. His arm wrapped tighter around her, and he shifted his weight so they didn’t fall over.
A crew watched them—filmed them. The sound guy angled the mic above them to catch the tiny noises she was certain to make. It was all so fake.
But then Cade forgot. She sensed the moment he lost hims
elf. He lost track of the cameras and only thought about her. His hands splayed up her ribs, almost lifting her off the ground so she could reach his tall height better as he leaned down for her.
He deepened the kiss, taking it to a place she’d never meant for it to go. This was only supposed to be for the show—for Emilie and Shepherd so they would leave Cade alone. But he’d changed that.
His tongue swept along hers, the motion of the kiss tipping her head back. Her stomach pooled with heat and her spine ached as he pushed deeper into her mouth. He scraped his teeth over her lower lip, and she moaned. Her limbs were liquid and useless, and her energy centered solely on his mouth working over hers, kissing the breath straight out of her.
She’d never been kissed like this in her life. Never been kissed like it mattered so much.
“This is Hank, the cabinet guy.”
At the sound of Arie’s voice in the room with them, Stevie jumped back and hit the shower wall, smacking loose a few spacers. Cade’s attention locked on the shower floor as he fought to collect his breath, his chest expanding against his paint-splattered button-up.
Stevie took in the cameras, the boom mic, and Emilie smirking behind it all. She let out a shaky breath. She’d made an awful mistake.
“This is really awkward,” Arie added.
10
They worked until four in the morning. The bathroom wasn’t even close to finished. The shower remained half tiled, the granite countertop was misaligned and jagged where Cade had tried to cut it down himself, and the room flooded every time the toilet flushed. Since they wouldn’t get to film a Finishing Touches segment today, they would be up for “elimination.”
After taking a quick nap behind the clothing racks in Wardrobe, Stevie, Cade, and Arie plied themselves with caffeine before filming resumed with the entire cast for the first judging segment. Things were moving so fast and they were all so exhausted that the kiss between Cade and her hadn’t come up.
The soundstage for the judging segment was cordoned off in one of the duplexes’ living rooms. The space was lit like the sun and wired for sound. The sound guys had stapled foam insulation to the ceiling to reduce the echo, and cameras were already in position at one side of the room. Where the contestants stood, a row of curtains hung from the walls. It was cramped and musty smelling, the ceilings were low, and the air conditioner was broken, but on television, it would probably look like a ritzy ballroom.
The host of the show stood in front of the contestants. He wore more makeup than all the contestants combined and had teeth so white they looked radioactive. The judges lined up next to him. They were various “field experts.” One was the editor-in-chief of Homes and Gnomes magazine, another was the CEO of a popular hardware store, and the third was the star of another construction show. Technically, they’d inspected everyone’s bathroom renovations and would deliver their critiques today, but in reality, they were reading from a teleprompter mounted off to the side and would say what Shepherd wanted them to say. They hadn’t seen any of the rooms, and they hadn’t met any of the contestants until today.
It was going to be a long day, and Stevie hadn’t had enough coffee to last through it. Then again, there probably wasn’t enough caffeine in the world to make her feel awake enough after last night.
When the judges finally reached their critique of Stevie and Cade’s bathroom, she tried to perk up for Cade’s sake. He looked ready to puke.
“Team Cooper,” the editor judge said, reading from the teleprompter, “what happened? Your room was barely finished!”
Stevie took her cue. “We ordered the wrong tiles for the shower.” She swallowed and pasted on a nervous expression, pretending to care about the shower tiles. “They were so tiny and took so long—”
“Who ordered the wrong tiles?” the hardware CEO judge interrupted.
“I did,” Stevie said. She sniffled. “We were in such a hurry—”
“Every team has the same amount of time each week, and they all managed to order the right supplies. This isn’t an excuse, Stephanie,” the editor read from the teleprompter as the sentences scrolled upward. “It could cost you the competition. All the other teams completed their rooms on time.”
“We understand,” Cade said. Stevie and Arie gave the judges weak nods.
Emilie gave them a thumbs-up from the back part of the room, where all the producers were watching the bank of monitors.
They went through a few different takes, adding in different versions for the editors in postproduction to deal with. It felt like barely organized chaos, with nothing filmed in normal sequence, or, at least, in an order that people would watch on television.
The producers filmed a few different winning team options, as well as losing team options, just in case viewer opinion changed the direction the show needed to take. The production was basically like herding cats, and Stevie pitied the editors in post.
“And the winner is . . .” the host said, white teeth flashing and hair-sprayed hair barely moving as he gestured wildly “Helena and Marsha Evans!”
From where they stood next to Cade and Stevie, the Evans sisters erupted in high-pitched squeals that pierced the part of Stevie’s brain currently fueling her raging headache. They hugged each other, and then Helena turned to Cade and threw her arms around him, her chest pressed flushed against his.
Taken aback, Cade hesitated before he put his arms around her and patted her back. Helena’s eyes found Stevie over Cade’s shoulder. Helena’s knowing smirk was pure evil, and Stevie fought the urge to stab her three-inch stiletto into Helena’s Charlotte Russo–clad back when she finally released Cade and joined her sister up with the judges, where they continued cheering and jumping up and down. None of the other “winning” teams had carried on like this. Stevie sighed heavily, knowing the nearby cameraman would catch it, just like he’d caught the look Helena had given Stevie while she was hugging Cade.
When the Evans finally returned to their spot among the other contestants, the producers got the other shots they needed before the cameras turned off. Part of the teams had to start filming demo today for the next phase of competition, but at least her team was getting the evening off, though they were scheduled for a late-night demo tomorrow.
Stevie almost couldn’t contain her excitement.
Almost.
* * *
“Mirrored,” Hale said, drawing out the word as if puzzling out its meaning. “Mirrored . . . tiles. You put mirrored tiles . . . in the shower. Inside . . . the shower. Mirrored—”
“Okay!” Stevie flicked an olive at his face. She missed, and it bounced across Kyra’s patio and away from where they sat at her picnic table beneath a string of softly swinging lantern lights. “We get it. Mirrored tiles. Blah blah blah. Move on.”
“You put mirrored tiles in my shower,” he said, not letting it go.
Stevie half choked, half snorted out her water through her eyeballs. “Your shower?” She swiveled in her chair toward Cade next to her. He’d been quiet through most of dinner. “Are you just going to sit there and let him dis our bathroom?”
“He’s just messing with you,” Cade said.
“Maybe I am,” Hale admitted. “But I can’t imagine how awful it must look.”
Stevie caught the flash of hurt in Cade’s eyes at Hale’s careless words. Whatever insecurities Cade felt, he shoved them aside and pulled up a laugh, though it sounded pained to Stevie’s ears. “It does look pretty bad, but Stevie said the producers will do stuff like this during filming to mess with us.”
“They’ll do anything to manufacture drama,” she said, meaning the kiss in the shower, not the mirrored tiles.
Cade didn’t respond or even look up from his food after she spoke. Things had been off between them since yesterday. Since before. Even during the drive back to Canaan, the mood in the truck had been awkward at best and downright tense at worst, like when Stevie had caught Cade tossing quick glances her way, as though he was thinking about the kiss
and no doubt questioning what he’d gotten himself into.
Kyra started gathering the dirty dishes and leftover vegetarian lasagna as Hale and Cade continued into a conversation about the new plan for the next reno. They’d already gone over the plan countless times before, and Stevie wanted a few moments away from the painful awkwardness between Cade and her.
She stood and started taking the plates from Kyra. “I’ll get them.”
“You sure?” Kyra looked at her like she’d grown a second head.
“I do know how to use a dishwasher, you know.”
“I mean, it’s just that yours had purses in it. Not to mention your stove was packed with shoes.”
“Storage, Kyra. Storage.”
Stevie triple-stacked the plates and balanced the lasagna platter on her arm. Her friends’ chatter faded as she toed the glass doors shut behind her before heading into the kitchen. The night was a balmy one, and clouds hung low, threatening an evening summer storm. So far, it hadn’t rained. Kyra had opened her windows, and as Stevie rinsed the plates, she enjoyed the slight breeze against her face, her eyes briefly closing.
She didn’t care about her team having to film an elimination shot today; it didn’t matter because the outcome of the show all depended on who the network liked best, and Shepherd had brought her around for a reason. For now, she was Cade’s best insurance. If she could stay in Shepherd’s good graces without whoring herself out too much, she might be able to get Cade to the very top. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so insecure around his big brother once he and Hale were covered up in work.
She let the cool water from the faucet run over her hands, the plates long since rinsed and ready for the dishwasher. Opening her eyes, she took in the moonlit view. From this angle, she could see part of the beach and part of Gardenia Street. The street lights were off, the road quiet. The neighbors’ lights glowed like fireflies, and if she was quiet enough, she could just hear the hum of a radio drifting out from someone’s open window. And in the middle of it all, straight out through the window, was her little navy home.
