Chapter 1
Autumn
The oppressive whirl of helicopters echoed endlessly through the massive skyscrapers. It was almost loud enough to drown out the thunderous heartbeat in my ears. A line of ten cars littered the length of the empty road, all wired up and rigged to explode automatically when the director gave the order.
And I must’ve lost my damn mind because I was standing smack dab in the middle of it all, desperately trying not to have a panic attack.
I'd been told this one scene took two weeks to set up and it cost production three-point- two million dollars.
“Quiet on set! Speeding. Sound…” The assistant director shouted over a walkie-talkie as the director of photography lined up his shot. Both men were suspended high above us and the rest of Boston’s busy financial district from a crane’s hanging basket. They looked like royalty addressing an anxious kingdom.
The Production Assistants and Location’s Support parroted the Assistant Director’s directions through the small army of crew, cast, Boston’s police, rescue details, and of course the gawking onlookers and passers by who’d never seen a movie getting filmed before.
I wasn’t the star of the film, but I was the star of the scene. The thought of screwing up twisted my whole body like a towel getting wrung out. Breath came to me in short, staccato bursts that if translated into Morse code would spell help me! Or at the very least, what the hell am I doing here!
And it was becoming an active effort to force only air out of my mouth and not vomit.
“Keep it together, Autumn,” I mumbled softly, needing to hear the words out loud even if I was the one to say them. It’s only two lines. Then the air ram and rigging team would pull me to safety. I practiced for this a thousand times. “You got this!”
I desperately wanted to believe the lie.
“SFX go,” the A.D. squawked over the walkies. The special effects team was up. Large and small pockets of fire sprang up along both sides of the road. After the initial oohs and ahhs from the onlookers, for one surreal moment the whole city froze in place. Even the gently, cascading bay breeze that wove through the skyscrapers held its breath.
I always thought phrases like sweating bullets and buckets was a little dramatic. But as heat rolled off the blacktop in sheets, enveloping me, and turning an already hot summer day into the surface of the damn sun… I didn’t think that anymore. Fortunately, I was too terrified to feel gross.
The stabbing flyaways from my tight ponytail and stinging sweat dared me to wipe my eyes, but I couldn’t do that without destroying a half-hour’s worth of makeup. That wasn’t the hardest part though. I grabbed my thighs not only to keep my hands from shaking, but also to stop myself from rubbing my ear. A nervous habit. It was a stupid, little thing, but something about touching my lucky silver stud always calmed me down a little. I felt naked without it, but there was no way the costuming department was letting me keep it on for the shot.
Speaking of feeling naked…
I unclenched my thighs and smoothed out the wrinkles in the skimpy, dolphin-cut, nylon shorts they had me wear. Originally I was only supposed to wear that and the world’s most revealing sports bra. Literally two bands of clothing. And here I thought I was cast as a jogger, not a stripper.
Eventually I whined enough that they let me wear a light linen button down over it as long as it stayed open.
Why had my stupid YouTube channel been discovered? That was the nagging thought that did loops in my mind like a small yippy dog excitedly chasing his own tail. Well that and, I’m such a fraud and I have no idea what I’m doing here. And, God, I hope I don’t mess this up!
Six months ago my only concern was which movie I was going to do a goofy, three-minute parody of, or which celebrity meltdown I was going to talk about with my small, but steadily growing fan base. Now I was in a big budget monster movie with enough explosives around me to level a small country.
They never told me how dangerous this was going to be when I signed up!
Swallowing? Ha! My throat became a desert of boiling sand and powdered glass and from how loud my heart was beating in my ears, I was pretty sure it was fit to burst any second now.
How the hell did I convince everyone including myself that I was capable of this?!
“Psst!” Came an urgent whisper from the sidewalk.
Apparently, I didn’t convince everyone, I thought, glancing over at the one man whose strikingly brown eyes tore through me like X-rays. There was a warning in his intense gaze. The full weight of it sent a shiver made of licking flame crawling down my spine. It was the first time all day he’d looked directly at me and when he did…my lungs tightened.
I was told his name was Dante Marks.
He was the main villain’s stunt double. He was also about two-hundred-something pounds of sculpted danger and sex, who scared the hell out of me in a way that made my panties vibrate.
His jaw line was strong and defined, and when he clenched his teeth the sinewy muscles in his face subtly flexed. He had A-list celebrity looks and the fearless I-can-handle-anything temperament of an extreme sports athlete. Dante’s tanned features could only be described as roguish; they melted over my brain like a warm, rich chocolate that made my fucking teeth ache.
I’d only ever seen him in his practice gear on set, which was usually indigo or black jeans, big fuck-off boots, a tank top that showcased his gigantic tattoo-covered arms, and various elbow, knee and back pads depending on what the stunt team was doing that day. Today however, on my most important day of shooting—when it felt like the whole world was watching me—Dante was doubling the lead villain who was mostly CGI. That meant he had to wear a whole body motion capture suit.
The green, mocap outfit they had him in was so skintight that he might as well have been wearing just a coat of paint. It was easy to tell he had nothing on under the spandex, because his every gloriously defined ridge and corded muscle was on display for all to see.
As you could probably imagine, that distracted the fuck out of me.
I couldn’t imagine being that exposed. But Dante… That cocky bastard loved every second of it. I only knew because I’d been stealing glances at him…and the massive outline of his cock all day.
Fuck! Everything about him was unfair. It was hard enough to concentrate without someone like him around!
“Go on background,” the A.D. called out and a flood of extras ran down the street toward me, flailing their arms and pantomiming terror. The eerie thing was how quiet it all was…
No one made a peep.
Since sound was added in post production, the dozens of extras weren’t allowed to actually scream out loud. All you heard was the crackling fire set by SFX, the helicopters roaring crazy low overhead and the stampede of hundreds of footfalls.
“AND ACTION!” the A.D. yelled.
Nothing prepared me for what came next.
It didn’t matter that I read the script a hundred times or that I knew the shot list and sides better than my best friend’s phone number. No amount of words on a page could’ve prepared me for what came next. My flight-or-flight mechanism kicked on when the first car at the far end of the street exploded into the air, flipped over, and landed on its roof.
I flinched violently from the sudden apocalyptic noise. The next car didn’t just catch fire either. It rocketed up in the air, then the cables mounted inside of the car’s frame snapped taught, jerking it into a barrel role onto the sidewalk, crushing a half full bike rack.
As the other cars began firing off in the similar way, I was legitimately awestruck by the incredible spectacle of it all. When watching some CW show or other world-ending action epic it was easy to take for granted scale of everything.
That was impossible for me this time. I was in it. It was as if some great invisible monster was rampaging down the street toward me, tossing vehicles like they were children’s toys.
“Hey, Shakespeare-in-the-park!” Dante shouted at me, recapturing my attention. This time he pointed at the ground in front of me. There was no playfulness in his hypnotically dark eyes, only stern—almost angry—insistence.
Shit! I was off my mark! I lurched forward on to the square pad of the air ram just as the camera panned over to me.
My character was supposed to be terrified and completely out of her depth as she feared for life. Yeah, nailed it. I was barely able to stammer both my lines.
“You’re going to have to act terrified,” the scriptwriter told me when I auditioned. Being on camera and surrounded by things exploding left and right, yeah I didn’t think it would’ve been possible for me to act any other way.
The editors were going to add the CGI monster’s arrival and ensuing shockwave in post. With my job technically finished, all I could do was wait out the four second beat, then brace up as I was thrown backwards into the bright blue crash pad like I had practiced countless times before.
Finally, I heard the air ram hum and I prepped myself like Roger, the stunt coordinator, showed me. This was actually my favorite part of the training. The pad I was standing on would fill with pressure, then abruptly extend, launching me backwards in the air. The winch and pull line that was attached to the harness I was wearing would pull me safely off screen. It was the closest thing I’d ever felt to flying.
Only this time there was a loud fizzling pop instead, and a puff of electrical smoke spurted from the air ram. Something was definitely wrong! My heart leapt into my throat as I stepped forward off the pad, fearing it had caught fire.
Bad move.
The whole complex system was on a timer to avoid human error. When the winch went off, it thought I was in the air, so it pulled the rope that was attached to my harness. My heels clipped the pad as I was jerked backwards and dragged. The hot, unforgiving pavement wore painfully scratches and scrapes all down my legs.
I skidded to a stop with a heavy thud as my head smacked against something hard and unyielding. The world started to spin on me. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t remember what. I don’t like this. I want this to stop.
People were yelling at me from somewhere. Between the chaos designed for the scene, and something actually being wrong, everything was all so disorienting. The din of panic all around me was punctuated every few seconds by a sharp CLICK, and deafening BOOM.
“Ow, shit!” The heated metal I was leaning against burned my arms and shoulders. What happened to my linen shirt? I could’ve sworn I was wearing one, wasn’t I? It was grey, think.
“Run, Autumn!” Someone shouted. “Get out of there!” Autumn? Was that my character’s name too?
CLICK. BOOM.
This time I felt a wave of heat wash over me. A flaming car landed on its side about fifty feet away. A warning from the SFX safety meeting before filming slowly returned to me. The cars were all rigged together like dominoes and the loud click was the automatic ignition firing off the pyrotechnics and hydraulics. What followed after was the thunderous explosion that rocketed each car into the air.
“Oh shit…” That groggy, dazed feeling I got from hitting my head was completely gone. Adrenaline was a sudden bucket of ice water dumped over me when I realized where I was.
Paralyzed with fear I looked to the crew and emergency personnel for help. All I saw were hesitant, terrified faces and shame. So much shame. Everyone stood safely out of danger and watched. No one dared come any closer. We all knew that once started there was no stopping the chain reaction and I was standing beside the next car that was set to blow!
I’d never felt more abandoned.
Oh no. I’m going to die. My last thoughts were of my mom.
The next blow I felt wasn’t from an explosion, at least not the kind I was expecting. I was hit from behind and scooped up like you might cradle a small child. All I saw before hearing the loud CLICK of pyrotechnics firing behind us was a steely set of dark brown eyes and an old scar dividing his left eyebrow.
BOOM.
The detonation was so close that I felt it in my bones. The car I was just next to erupted, shooting into the air like a roman candle. Dante and I hit the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of me.
“Close your eyes and don’t move,” Dante growled, crawling on top of me. He lowered his forehead down touching mine as a massive plume of flame billowed, roaring into the sky behind him like an angry volcano. At this distance the orange, yellow fire cloud was brighter than the sun; it backlit Dante, robbing him of everything, but his stark, blocky silhouette. Heat and sound viciously crashed over us like the frothing, crest of a tidal wave.
Less than a dozen feet away the car’s blackened metal chassis crashed down. It landed so close, that it bounced us off the pavement a few inches. Convinced we were dead, I’d stolen only enough air to scream my lungs out. I’d never been more scared.
I clung to Dante as if my life depended on it. Because it most likely did.
Dante shielded me, bracing against the fiery bits of exploded car that clattered all around us like twisted, smoldering metallic rain. I could feel the debris impact though his thick body. The sinewy muscles in his clenched jaw flexed as he let out a few soft grunts to ward away what must’ve been excruciating pain.
Then in a blink it was all over. The fireball dissipated just as fast as it arrived.
No one waited for the AD to call cut. When the danger was over, the crew burst into motion. It felt like the whole city collectively exhaled then exploded again with pent up energy. The crowd of hundreds that gathered outside the police barricades to watch cheered at the show, having no idea I was almost killed. PAs wrangled dozens of laughing, excited extras out of the way so that the safety teams could extinguish the fires and the medics could survey for wounded.
And high above us in the crane basket I could hear the director screaming at the botched shot. A thousand things should’ve swirled around in my mind, like whether or not I’d get blamed for screwing things up and be fired on the spot.
But with Dante still hovering over me, his skin tightly clinging to mine, everything else felt so far away. Dante’s scorching exhales cascaded over my neck and chest, instantly prickling them with goosebumps.
I couldn’t find the words to thank him or even reply at all. I was sweating, frazzled, and weirdly freezing all at the same time. Was that a near-death-experience sort of thing?
Concern sent a flare rippling through his strong, stubble-shadowed jaw line as Dante looked me over to make sure I was alright. I didn’t know if it was my hyperventilation or the fact that his whole body was pressed on top of mine as I stared into his charcoal eyes, but my toes and fingers tingled when he finally spoke.
“Looks like we made it.” His thick eyelashes and piercing gaze made my stomach tremble a little.
A man like Dante Marks could only be described as brutally handsome.
His tussled coffee-brown hair fell carelessly across a thin scar that divided the brow over his left eye. Years of dangerous stunt work was carved across his skin like a tombstone epitaph. I could only imagine what the rest of his rock hard body must look like…
Glancing past him to the fire blackened spot where the nearest car had been. I would never know for sure whether he’d saved my life, but I’d at least be covered in third degree burns if it wasn’t for him.
I wrapped my still shaking arms around him and hugged tightly, trying not to cry. When a stinging heat bit into my fingers I gasped, and pulled away. I was horrified to find that my hands came back bloody.
I quickly realized it wasn’t my blood. That’s when I saw the wisps of smoke dotting his back. Dante’s mocap suit was ripped to shreds. The flaming bits of metal that hit him had melted the spandex to his skin!
Empathy pangs at was he must be feeling rippled through me. It was horrible.
“It’s nothing,” he said, somehow impossibly unconcerned with the pain.
To say I was ill prepared for a brush with death was a hilarious understatement. How the hell did guys like Dante do this for a living? The thought of ever going through something like that again made me suddenly tremble. My nerves buzzed so hard it made my skin itch.
“Take it easy. You’re OK.” The smooth, confident texture of his voice was so incredibly reassuring that it was easy to believe him. I buried my head in his broad chest and started to cry.