Catch a Falling Star (Second Chances Book 3)

by Farmer, Merry

  “My thoughts exactly.” Yvonne gave Jo’s shoulder a pat and stood.

  Jo had the feeling she wasn’t talking about sleeping arrangements for the night.

  Chapter Twelve

  It took exactly three days for Jo to find out how fast things moved in the world of television. Nick grumbled over the idea of filming in their family home, especially when Second Chances’ showrunner, Moira, informed them that standard industry practice was for owners to be exiled from their own house during filming. That tiny little detail sent Jo into a tizzy too, especially since it dashed every plan she had to spend more time with Ben.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Yvonne reassured her and Nick both as they sat in the dining room going over the contract. “I’ll pull a few strings.”

  The next day, Yvonne returned to the house with Moira and Charles and a new contract which allowed Jo and Nick to stay in the house. Moira was irritated by the outrageous concession. Charles was suspicious. Yvonne looked like the cat that ate the canary. Negotiations continued, and Nick asked Moira and Charles a hundred questions that Jo never would have thought of about legalities, payments, and liability, but in the end they agreed to allow one episode to be shot in their living room, library, and one of the upstairs bedrooms…without them being kicked out.

  Three days later, Ben was helping Jo move her desk, computer, and anything invented after 1952 out of the library and across the hall to an empty sitting room.

  “Where do you want these speakers?” Ben asked, holding up the items in question as he strode into the room.

  She would never get tired of watching him walk. Legs weren’t something she usually noticed on a man, but Ben’s were somewhere between “cover model” and “Olympic swimmer.” Or maybe it was just the butt they were attached to and the way his hips moved like they knew what they were doing.

  “Attention, Josephine Burkhart. Where would you like the speakers?”

  She snapped to focus at his teasing comment, but the knowing grin that reached his eyes was as likely to distract her again as not. “On the desk for now. I’ll figure out where to put them later.”

  “Works for me.”

  She watched him walk across to the desk. Was Yvonne right about him using that walk and the promise that came with it to make the wrong sorts of friends? Jo didn’t want it to be true, but it gelled far too well with the rumors that were circulating about him now. And if he had, in fact, slept his way to his award, where did that leave her?

  Still horny, unfortunately. And still out of her league and fresh out of ideas.

  “Stop worrying.” Ben strode over to her, rested his hands on her shoulders. “I promise you that we won’t disturb you—at this read-through or with filming. You’ll have plenty of time and space to work until your fingers bleed.” He kissed her forehead.

  She wished he’d kiss her lips.

  Which brought with it a level of discomfort that she wasn’t ready to cope with. Not with everything else going on.

  “It’s not the time and the space that bother me,” she sighed. “It’s the plot.”

  “Or the lack thereof?” he suggested.

  “You got it.”

  “It will come.” He squeezed her shoulders.

  She sent him a doubtful glance. She’d barely written a hundred words in the last three days, and half of those had been deleted. The pressure was mounting. Ben’s smile was warm and comforting, everything that he was supposed to not be. Everything that she wanted him to be. Was she fooling herself by letting him stick around?

  He swayed as if he would move away to continue setting up her new workspace, but stopped. One blink, and the understanding in his eyes changed. His hands slipped further up her shoulders, danced across her neck, and caressed the sides of her face. She was absolutely certain he was going to kiss her then, the way he had on the beach.

  He slid closer, his gaze dropping to her lips.

  He stopped when there was less than a foot between them. Tension rippled from him.

  “You will come up with an incredible idea for an army of novels if I have to act out every part in each one myself,” he pledged.

  Her eyes nearly rolled back in her head, the promise was so perfect and so tempting. Never had she skated so close to wanting to write erotica before. With Ben acting it all out? Hell. Yes.

  An instant later, when she tried to press into him to claim the kiss that naturally went with that promise, he stepped back. “All we need now is to bring in that beat up old rolling chair of yours, and you’ll have a veritable writer’s paradise.” He took a huge step back and fled for the hall.

  Jo rocked back to her feet from having lifted to her toes. She balled her hands into fists at her sides, practically panting with frustration. Rumor had it that he slept with everyone on Broadway, but now he wouldn’t even kiss her?

  A tiny, far too reasonable voice at the back of her head whispered that that was probably a good thing.

  She waved it away as if it were a gnat and marched across to her new computer set-up. Seconds later, Ben wheeled her chair across the hall.

  “Voila. One desk chair. Now you can settle yourself in and create magic.” His smile was tighter than it should be, and he kept the chair firmly between them.

  Jo wondered how he would react if she pushed the chair aside and launched herself at him, pushing him up against the wall and peeling off those tight jeans of his like a banana.

  “Easier said than done,” she answered both him and herself. She made a mental note to use the pushing up against a wall and peeling like a banana bits in a book at some point.

  “Don’t let the pressure get to you,” he advised, crossing to lift a handful of books out of the box they’d been stored in for the short journey across the hall. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working under a deadline, sets not finished, lighting barely hung, sound as disorganized as it could possibly get, with investors breathing down my neck. The last thing you want to do in situations like that is let it get under your skin.”

  Jo laughed. “Any other man I know would have used a football metaphor. Fourth down with ten yards to go, or something like that.”

  He straightened, setting the pile of books on her desk. “Fortunately for you, I’m not your ordinary man.” He punctuated his statement with a grin designed to make panties drop for miles around.

  She laughed as Spencer Ellis called, “Ben? Are you back there?”

  “I guess Nick let him in.” Jo continued laughing, turning her attention back to her desk. “You’d better go see what he wants.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need help? I’ll stay here until this is finished if you want.”

  Her heart squeezed at the thought. Just what every woman wanted—a man who would stay with her until everything was finished. Or forever. That would work too.

  “There you are.” Spence appeared in the doorway. Jo greeted him with a smile, noticing that Ben was staring at her with particular intensity. It vanished as soon as Spence arrived. “Moira changed her mind about the read-through. She wants us to set up in the living room instead of the dining room. The director of photography for the episode is coming, and she wants him to get a feel for the space as we read.”

  “Are you okay with that?” Ben asked her.

  “What, reading the script in the living room?” She shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “You can come watch, if you’d like,” Spence offered.

  Ben broke into a sudden grin. “We’d love to have you, but if you have to work…”

  Jo bit her lip and sent her computer a wistful look. “Well, it’s not like I’m going to get any writing done with a script read-through happening in the next room.” She sounded far more casual than she felt about it. The giant, internal clock that ticked away the words she wasn’t writing started moving faster.

  “Perfect,” Ben said. “I’ll see if Moira is okay with letting you sit in.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “Because she
’s the showrunner, and we’re already way, way outside of how filming is usually run for this episode.”

  “What’s a showrunner?” Jo asked, following Ben out to the hall.

  “A showrunner is god for a television production. Moira has the last word on everything from front office to props and make-up,” Ben answered. “She controls the universe.”

  Jo laughed. “I thought Yvonne controlled the universe.”

  Ben’s answering laugh was downright ominous. “Don’t let Moira hear you say that.”

  Half an hour later, Jo sat with her legs tucked under her on the long sofa facing the windows, next to Ben, a fire crackling merrily in the fireplace, half a dozen big name celebrities, several guest stars, and crew members stretched out in other furniture and the floor, while they read through a yet-to-be-filmed episode of a top-rated television show. Jim, the director of photography, stared up at the ceiling beams with an eye as sharp as a real estate agent. It wasn’t writing a novel, but it was certainly unreal.

  “You can’t walk away like this,” the guest star—a middle-aged woman named Theresa who Jo vaguely recognized from other tv shows—read the scripted line. “Not after everything we’ve been through together.”

  Jo jiggled her pen in her fingers, staring at the script. She couldn’t resist crossing out the line and rewriting, “Don’t leave me, Derek. Don’t be so cruel. Not after what we shared,” then returned to jiggling her pen.

  “I can’t stay, not like this,” the actor playing Derek—a young actor named Devon, who Jo didn’t recognize at all—read. “You wouldn’t want me to.”

  “But I love you. I need you.” Theresa put feeling into the line, even though it wasn’t a performance.

  Jo crossed through the line and wrote, “What if I said I love you? What if I said I can’t live without you?”

  “Love isn’t enough, Bobbie. If it was, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place,” Derek read.

  Jo jiggled her pen, hesitated, jiggled some more, then crossed out the second half of the line, leaving just the statement. She returned to her pen-jiggling, accidentally tapping the edge of her script.

  Ben reached out and closed his large hand over Jo’s fidgeting one as Theresa read, “I’ll get rid of the baby. I’ll find a doctor and get rid of it. Would you stay then?”

  Jo peeked up at Ben. He was doing his best to swallow a playful grin. His hand stayed locked around hers, and his eyes sparkled with mischief. It was all Jo could do not to laugh. She relaxed her hand to let him know she would behave. Ben’s grin widened, and he let go.

  His eyes drifted over to her script as everyone turned the page. The lines she’d crossed out weren’t the only ones she’d rewritten. Ben’s expression shifted as he inched to the side and read her improvements. As the cast read on, he nodded, tilting his head to her page.

  “Keep going,” he murmured.

  “What?” Devon asked. He looked as though Ben had bitten his head off.

  Ben raised a hand. “Not you. It’s all right.” He gestured for them to read on.

  Devon cleared his throat, face flushing beet red, and continued. “It’s not the money, it’s my parents.” Jo had the impression this was his first important acting job, and he didn’t want to screw it up. Heck, she’d felt that way the first few times she’d pitched books to agents.

  “Keep making changes,” Ben whispered in her ear. Every nerve down her neck and several that appeared to be wired directly to her core tingled at the warmth of his breath, the deep bass of his hushed tone, no matter how mundane the words were. “I’m going to send your script to the script supervisor when we’re done.”

  “The who?” Jo whispered in return.

  “The guy who keeps track of changes in lines, positions, props, things like that.”

  “Oh.”

  He straightened, his attention instantly shifting back to the read-through. Jo’s attention had a harder time bouncing back from the intimacy of something as silly as a whisper. She flipped the pen in her hand, then traced it along the page to figure out where they were. It took her far less time to determine that than it would to figure out where she was with Ben.

  Ben hadn’t been sure inviting Jo to the read-through was a good idea. He felt bad enough about the trouble she was having finding the time and inspiration she needed to write. But her instincts had been spot-on with the script.

  “Take a look at this,” he handed her copy of the script over to Charles once the read-through was done.

  A few people had left, but the rest had stayed. Jo and Nick were treating them all to snacks in the dining room now. Charles had stayed in the living room, discussing logistics with Moira. He frowned as Ben handed him the script, a few pages folded over to the point where Jo had started making her changed.

  Charles read, then his brow flew up. “Jo made these?”

  Ben nodded. “She is a writer, after all.”

  “And you’re showing me this because you want her to write?” Skepticism hardened Charles’s already stoic features.

  “I’m showing you this because Jo can write, she made this script better, and—”

  And what? She needed the money that a little script doctoring could give her? He thought she should try writing some scripts? And why on earth would he think that? Jo had her world. She was successful in it. Just because it wasn’t his world didn’t mean it wasn’t the world she wanted to be in.

  He’d be lying if he said the idea of landing Jo in a position where he wouldn’t have to say goodbye to her the second they were done filming didn’t appeal to him. And why was he thinking of the day this would all end anyhow?

  Because whenever that end was, it was going to come too soon.

  Charles continued to flip through the script. “I can put her in touch with the writers if you want, although I don’t think they’re looking to add anyone to the team. She’s not union, I assume.” He continued to scan the script.

  “It’s only an idea, is all. I haven’t even talked to Jo about it.” But he would. Yvonne’s words from the other night and Jo’s easy agreement with them hadn’t left his thoughts, not for one second. It wasn’t Broadway, but he had a perfectly viable career right here, right in front of him. He had an intriguing life peeking up around him, whispering to him to come explore.

  The sudden buzz of his phone in his back pocket pushed him away from those thoughts. As Charles continued to read the script, and Jo and the rest of the cast chatted in the dining room—Simon regaling them with a story that had everyone in stitches—he stepped aside to look at his phone.

  His heart dropped. He swallowed and answered the call, retreating down the hall as he did.

  “Hello?”

  “Benjamin,” Jett and Ashton greeted him in unison on speakerphone.

  “Boys. How are you?” It was easy to play it cool, far too easy, in spite of the fact that his heart thudded in his throat.

  “We’re fine,” Ashton answered. “We’re more concerned about you.”

  “You haven’t been getting out much this week, have you?” Jett’s voice dripped with false concern.

  A deep revulsion that Ben had always ignored before swept through him. “I’ve been getting out plenty,” he replied. Whatever shit they wanted to throw at him, they could bring it on. He stepped into the heavy silence of Jo’s library, taking strength from the books.

  “We heard about your little fiasco at Adam’s party last week,” Jett said.

  I’m sure you did, seeing as you probably orchestrated it.

  Aloud, Ben said, “Little is right. As soon as I caught on that it was a set-up, I saw no reason to stay.”

  A pause followed before Jett said, “Running away to Maine, I hear.”

  “Having fun with your little television friends?” Ashton added.

  Ben scowled out the window. A week ago, the taunts these two had come up with had hit home. Maybe it was the physical distance, or maybe it was the crowd of people in the other room who, by all appearances
, were supporting him, but now it seemed like pointless buzz.

  “If you have nothing constructive to add, I’m a bit busy at the moment.” Ben turned to the door, ready to end the call.

  “Whispering sweet nothings in your new little writer friend’s ear?”

  Ben froze. If either of these two vampires so much as looked funny at Jo…

  “I picked up one of her books and read it over the weekend,” Ashton went on. “Very interesting stuff.”

  “Very,” Jett seconded. “So interesting, in fact, that it gives us ideas.”

  “Well, it’s about time you learned about the birds and the bees,” Ben fired back at them. He sounded far more casual than he felt.

  “Cute,” Jett answered. “We had no idea you’d made such a talented friend. This changes everything, of course.”

  Hang up. Walk away. Protect Jo.

  “Look, Jett, I haven’t got all day. Tell me what you want.” He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing his temple.

  “We want to produce your next show.”

  The bomb was dropped so subtly that Ben wasn’t even sure he’d heard it. Jo laughed in the dining room, the sound echoing down the hall, into the library. It was like a hook tugging him in that direction.

  “Oh, now you want to produce Last Closing Time,” he nearly shouted into the phone, hot with frustration. “After ruining my credibility and crushing my reputation?”

  “No, no. You misunderstand,” Ashton said.

  “We have no interest in producing Last Closing Time,” Jett said. “We have an idea for a new show.”

  Ben froze. “A new show?” He should be ecstatic right about now.

  “A sure-fire winner,” Jett continued. He couldn’t have sounded more like a cartoon villain if he’d tried.

  “What?”

  “Actually, you inspired us.” Ben sighed and began pacing. Jett was going to draw this one out. “Plays, musicals even, are based on books all the time. The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Les Misérables.”

  “So we thought, why not a play based on a romance novel?” Ashton blurted.