by Josie Brown
Which meant that I, too, would need an early wake-up call—that is, if I went to sleep at all. Six o’clock was only three hours away. If I ran every light between here and Venice, that would still take me, minimally, forty minutes, and forty minutes back—
That was ridiculous!
As if reading my mind, Louis offered, “Of course, you could sleep here—”
(Oh, I get it. And, no!)
“Uh, look, Louis, if this is going to work, then I think we should get something straight right up front—”
“Hannah, it’s okay.” One eyebrow arched upward, contradicting his angelic countenance. “I thoroughly apologize for that ungentlemanly behavior earlier this evening, at your expense. It was very, very cruel of my friends, and of course, of me. You don’t yet know my sense of humor, which, I’m sure, made it even more unseemly.” He paused and ran a hand through his professionally tousled hair. “Look, I’m being honest: I, too, want our relationship to stay strictly professional. I’ve—well, I’ve seen it otherwise, and I know it never works out. Never.”
His emphasis was comforting—and, I had to admit, disappointing at the same time.
“I know I can be a bit demanding. And with all you’ve been through this week, I’m sure that the last thing you need is some whiney bloke sending you up and down this bloody hillside on a whim.”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. He joined me, and for once I felt thoroughly at ease with him.
“Okay, look, we’ve got to be up in less than three hours. Go ahead and catch a nap in the cabana. It’s got everything you’ll need. G’night, sis.”
With that he leaned over, gave me a very chaste kiss on the forehead, and headed off toward his own room.
He didn’t need to wait for my answer. He already knew it. Despite the sumptuous amenities in the cabana (feather mattress, down pillows and comforter, and 700-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets on a Dux 8888), I tossed and turned all night, running over my mixed feelings about both Louis and Mick.
Here was my conclusion:
First of all, I could not deny that I was attracted to Louis. And, unless I was totally delusional, he was also showing signs of attraction—which scared me, because, in my book, he already had three strikes against him: in the past five years he had been involved with what averaged a different woman every three months; he was currently dating the number-one swimsuit model in the world; and then there was the “actor” factor.
Bottom line: Take the paycheck but pass on any inevitable heartbreak.
Next on the agenda was the issue of Mick: Louis’s best friend was making no bones about the fact that he saw something in me.
Did I mind? Heck, no!
Did Louis mind? Heck, yeah—and he wasn’t afraid to mark his territory.
Should what he want really matter to me? No, not really. . . except that, for some odd reason, I did care. It was as if, knowing that Louis just might . . . just might. . . I dunno, maybe, like, really like me . . .
I can’t deny the fact that you like me! You really, really like me.
As opposed to Mick, who might actually. . . fall in love with me.
And with that thought, I dozed off with dreams of men on motorcycles revving wildly in my head.
Chapter 4: Welcome to the Galaxy!
Galaxy: Vast star system containing millions and possibly billions of stars, dust and gas, held together by gravitational attraction.
Globular Cluster: A spherical cluster of older stars, often found in various galaxies.
Dwarf Star: A star, having relatively low mass, small size, and often below average luminosity.
The limo was late.
Of course, Louis was pissed. This, despite my letting him sleep in an extra quarter hour. (“Whah. . . wake-up time already? Love, you’re yanking my wanker, right? Be a doll. . . another fifteen, eh?”)
And despite refusing the breakfast I made him—Zone, of course. (“Sorry, love, I’m not a morning man. . . no pun intended, so don’t take that in the wrong way, right, my darling? How about something simpler, say, a nice cuppa Jamaican Blue Mountain? What, none in the house? Perhaps you can go down the hill and see if Urth or the Bean or something is open at this ungodly hour!”)
And despite my warning that Malcolm would not be his driver. (“What do you take me for, love, some kind of Hollywood prima donna pouf? Bollocks, worst case scenario, you’ll drive me down in the Ferrari. . . What do you mean, you can’t drive a stick shift? Wasn’t that in your job description? ...Oh, it wasn’t? Not that it would have made a difference, love, because you know I can’t live without you. . . ”)
By the time the driver arrived—he claimed to have gotten lost finding the house—Louis was sullen. He did not say one word during the whole ride to the studio. When we finally got there, he jumped out before the driver even had a chance to pull over in front of his dressing room. Stymied, I jumped, out too. Before the door slammed shut, I was able to follow him in.
He was already undressing. Having taken off his leather jacket and T-shirt, he turned toward me, his rippling biceps, expansive chest and washboard abs bare except for a burnished tan, courtesy of his daily poolside vigils. On Louis, these perfect features weren’t just a cliché but primo romance novel cover art in the flesh.
I stood there, speechless and embarrassed at my intrusion on his privacy, and perhaps for my own modesty and in light of none coming from him.
Grinning wickedly, he taunted, “So, you like beefcake for breakfast, do you, love?”
“I’m—I’m sorry. I just thought—well, I thought that perhaps we should talk about what got you so upset.” I blushed and turned to leave. “But I know you have to get ready for your first scene. I’ll—I’ll wait outside.”
“No, I’d prefer you’d stay.” I could hear him unzipping his jeans in preparation for putting on a less movie-star-like/more cop-like pair of pants he was to wear on the set. “Help me run some lines, okay? Say, could you hand me that?”
“What?” I cautioned a peek. He was wrapping himself in a robe, and he grinned devilishly when he saw the relief on my face.
“That script. There.”
I lunged to where he pointed: a bookcase beside the couch. “What page?”
“It’s marked. Here—”
With catlike grace, he walked over to me and stood so close that our faces were almost touching. He ran his hand over mine (could he feel it shaking?), moving it toward the earmarked page I had missed. His robe fell open slightly—enough that I couldn’t help but notice the not-so-slight bulge in his dark gray RIPS boxer briefs. Fumbling with the script, I dropped it on the floor. As I started to pick it up, his arm snaked around my waist. I stopped cold.
“Why are you so nervous? I’m not going to fire you.”
“It’s not that,” I mumbled. “I’m just . . . I’m just—”
“You’re afraid I’m going to make love to you, aren’t you?” he murmured teasingly.
“No! Not at all.” Yes, that’s exactly it.
“If we did make love, here and now—” he paused, as if finding that thought tantalizing—“I would have to fire you. We both said that, right? And we meant it, didn’t we?”
“Of course. I know that,” I stuttered, confused. “Uh, Louis, look, I had no right to just walk in here like this. It’s just that I could tell you were mad, and I know it was because of the early wake-up, the breakfast, the limo—”
“Don’t you feel I have the right to blame you for all of that?”
“Well, yes . . . I mean, no. I mean, well, how was I supposed to know that you’re grumpy when you don’t get enough sleep, or that you don’t eat breakfast in the morning, or that you only drink Blue Mountain, or that Malcolm was already booked?”
“Stop me if I’m wrong, Hannah, but isn’t that your job?”
“Yes, it is—but only as of fourteen hours ago. So perhaps you could cut me some slack!”
We were eye to eye again. I saw a million expressions cross his face. He
settled on stoic indignation—an Oscar-worthy choice, I might add.
“Fair enough,” he retorted. “But grant me the same courtesy.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that, yes, I understand that I can be a bit testy, particularly when it’s this god-awful time in the morning. And, yes, I didn’t warn you that I don’t eat food before noon, or that my beverage of choice wasn’t in the house. And I’m not pissed at losing my driver this morning—well, maybe I am a bit miffed that I lost him to some junior executive on his way to LAX, or whatever.” He stopped to catch a breath. “Still, has it crossed your mind even once that maybe—just maybe—it’s not any of those things that have me pissed? That maybe it’s just the natural anxiety I’m feeling for having to carry this lousy movie on my shoulders? And knowing that if this one’s a clunker, then it’s more than likely I’ll keep getting offered lousier and lousier scripts, and if the next one bombs, too, and then the one after that one, that my career will be in the crapper? All because this day, of all days, started out wrong from the get-go, and now everything is quickly going to hell in a hand basket, and I feel like bloody shit anyway, which means I probably also look like shit—”
He was scared. And vulnerable. And oh so human.
All that despite the fact that he was Louis Trollope: actor, heartthrob, and perfect male specimen.
“No, no, Louis, you don’t! You look—well, just look at you! You’re . . . you’re Louis Trollope, for God’s sake!”
That stopped him cold. Warily he glanced at himself in the full-length closet mirror.
Did he see what I saw? Louis Trollope, broad of shoulder, strong of chest, narrow of hip, with those slightly tousled gilded locks and those piercing blue eyes that held—as claimed in O—“a mouthwatering soulfulness?”
Of course he did. It was obvious by the loving look in his eyes as he scanned his own reflection in the mirror.
There was a knock on the door.
“Mr. Trollope? You’re wanted in the makeup trailer.”
“Thank you. I’ll be right there.” Louis cocked his head and grinned shamelessly at me.
“You’re right. I am perfect. And no matter what, I should never let anything, be it bad luck, or trivial mishaps, or others’ incompetence—yes, meaning you, my darling Hannah, beautiful fuck-up that you are—stand in my way.”
With that, he clutched me close, gave me a heart-stopping kiss, and bounded out the door.
Exhausted, exhilarated, scared, I sat down. Hard.
That was no sisterly kiss. And he had called me beautiful.
Then again, he had also called me a fuck-up.
Fuck-up? Me? Why, what an overbearing narcissistic blowhard—
And for the record, I had never, ever said he was perfect.
He stuck his head back in.
“Of course, I’ll expect no more of these kinds of inconsistencies. Your trial period can’t go on forever, you know. In light of that, I’ll make you a deal: I won’t dock your pay for today, but any further transgressions will have to be considered. That’s only fair, right? Now, grab the script, go dig up another Jamaican Blue, then meet me in the make-up trailer in five. Hmmm. Make that two.”
* * *
Louis was right: Breakneck, a modern-day cop-gone-bad noir-ish whodunit, had the potential to be a thermonuclear bomb at the box office.
Yes, it had Louis going for it as its star—no thanks to Randy, who’d talked him into it over a year ago in order to fill the newly transplanted Louis’s dance card and, at the same time, bolster the crumbling career of another client, a third-rate director with a reel built on lascivious teen gross-out flicks.
In Hollywood, though, timing is everything. Once Louis had broken out with Fast Eddie and his career path was set, Columbia was hellbent on holding him to his obligation with Breakneck. Unfortunately for Louis, by the time shooting began, any other A-list supporting actors who might have given its barebones script some heft were already signed up elsewhere.
That left Louis with a supporting cast of mostly B players. In other words, the other actors could say they were in a Louis Trollope film, while he could only grin and bear it—and pray that the studio would hold the film’s release until February, when the news that he had indeed garnered those much-coveted Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Dead End would either give this turkey some gravy or allow it to become a subtle reminder to Academy voters that Louis, too, had paid his Club Hollywood dues.
Did I say B players? Let me clarify that, since, in fact, Louis’s cast members ran the gamut:
There was Simone Cavanaugh, who, in the 1950s, had been a winsome ingénue with a slew of Academy Award nominations of her own. Never having won, though, she did what all actresses of a certain age do: she took all roles offered—any role at all, no matter how bad the movie might be—then chewed up the scenery in hopes that the nostalgia bug would bite enough voting members to give her one more shot at Oscar gold. To do so with Breakneck, however, she’d have to convince her fellow SAG members that her role as a drunken down-on-her-luck Beverly Hills movie star wasn’t just typecasting.
Donnie Beaudry, now fiftyish, was always the sidekick, never the lead, as he was here, playing Louis’s partner on some prototypical L.A. police squad. Donnie was most definitely a B, having never ever gotten anywhere near an A movie.
Still, to Donnie’s credit, he had over a hundred films on his resumé. What, you don’t remember Western Horizon, or Café California? Perhaps that’s because those films never made it onto a marquee. However, if you’ve got a couple of spare brain cells to kill, check out the straight-to-video titles on Netflix and you’ll find a trove of Donnie’s duds. There was one way in which Donnie had put himself on the A- list, however. He’d married onto it: Bethany Revere, a starlet with a fembot physique and a black belt in judo who had found her niche playing woman-in-terror-who-later-get-revenge-by-kicking-butt roles, was now being groomed by the producing powers-that-be to take it up a notch: say, save the world, as opposed to just her own skin and that of an interchangeable significant other. When asked by the curious tabloids (in the nicest ways possible, obviously) just what she possibly saw in Donnie (who’d had a walk-on in one of her very first made-for-TV movies), Bethany purred, “Let’s just say he’s got a very slow touch. . . ” That immediately had the paparazzi asking the local L.A. madams if any of their girls, or, for that matter, their Bel-Air matron clientele, could verify—off the record, of course—that his very slow touch was in fact accompanied by a very long schlong.
And, finally, Rex Cantor, a chiseled-cheeked Actor’s Studio grad who’d had a couple of costarring roles in a few highly acclaimed indie films. And yet, somewhere in the past eight years or so, his path to stardom had somehow veered off course. Why? That was hard to say. Perhaps he had said “No thanks” to too many of the kinds of projects that might have catapulted him onto the A-list. Or, perhaps he had stuck it out with the wrong agent for too long. Or, perhaps he’d developed a rep for drug use that had film producers and their insurers running in the opposite direction. In any regard, playing the bad guy in a Louis Trollope film could only work for him if he had the chops to upstage Louis, which he did. (And maybe that was the real reason Louis was so rattled.)
While Louis played his scenes, I stood on the sidelines ever at the ready, gray cell in one hand, red cell in the other, finalizing the New York and London arrangements. By 10:30 the hotel reservations had been confirmed, Tatiana’s tulips had been ordered, and all was good in the world—at least, good enough that I could sit down for a few minutes.
Donnie’s pert PA, a chesty, corn-fed Midwestern blond cutie named Christy Tanner, offered up a hot cup of coffee and a croissant.
“Want to join us?” She pointed over to a table behind the set, where two other PAs were huddling, well out of audio range of their various bosses.
“Sure, I’d love to,” I said, taking a long sip as we walked over to them. The only guy in the group, the slightly bu
ilt baby-faced Freddy Pugh, who was cuddling a chubby pug dog with a rhinestone-studded collar, readily owned up to being “Simone’s eunuch.”
“And this is Bette,” he cooed, introducing me to the dog. “She’s Miss Simone’s baby—and I do mean baby. Believe me: I ought to know, I’ve diapered both of them.”
The thought of Simone Cavanaugh in Attends left a lot to be desired.
The other PA, Sandra Chapman, a plump, sturdy forty-something with a tentative smile, described herself as Rex’s “executive assistant.”
“Oh, drop the airs, Sandy!” Freddy sighed. “You’re just like the rest of us: there to wipe brow and kiss ass. Or, is that kiss brow and wipe ass?”
Christy giggled knowingly. “Well, personally speaking, I’ve done neither—although, I have to admit, Donnie did once give me a kiss—”
“Do tell, sister!” exclaimed Freddy coquettishly. “Are we talking the noble brow here, or your very desirable ass?”
Christy blushed deeply. “It was nothing like that, really! What I meant was that I—well, Bethany yelled at me for making the temperature for her leg wax too hot, and Donnie saw that I was upset, and, well, he—well, he was sweet enough to give me a tiny kiss—on the cheek!” She paused, totally confused. “Believe me, it was all very innocent!”
“Of course, sweetie,” cooed Freddy. “And if you had offered to blow him, I’m just certain he’d have turned you down.”
“Freddy, that’s just—well, that’s just disgusting,” sniffed Sandy. “Unlike you, Christy and I have a totally professional view of our jobs. We’d never cross that line with our employers, right, Christy? And they know that and appreciate it. Why, Rex has only the most honorable respect for me—as I’m sure Donnie has for Christy.”
Christy had to think hard about that before nodding halfheartedly, obviously too chicken to admit a less noble rationale.
“Don’t kid yourself, Sandy old girl! Rex ain’t showing you ‘respect.’ He’s just not into lollypop love that way. At least, not with the ladies!”
