Chapter Three
Eden
“Eden! There’s someone here who wants to speak to you!”
I heard a junior show assistant calling out to me, and I cringed, hoping to god that it wasn’t Troy by her side who wanted to talk to me. I was still pissed that he didn’t even remember me after how much he’d hurt me back in school, and I’d managed to avoid him over the last day and a half by doing prep jobs around the set which were nowhere near him. Luckily, I could get away with that seeing as I wasn’t his main producer—his producer was my colleague Wren.
When I turned around, I breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that it was Cailin with the assistant instead. Cailin was one of the twenty-four contestants who’d arrived earlier this morning, and was one of the four whom I was directly responsible for. It was my job to ensure she was happy, performed to expectation, and produced enough drama-worthy moments for the show, among other things.
She was a pretty ballet dancer with willowy limbs, mocha skin and hazel eyes, which were currently wide with concern.
“What’s up, Cailin?” I asked.
“I need to talk to you about the food here again. You know I’m allergic to peanuts, right?”
I smiled patiently and took a deep breath before replying. She’d already told me four times about her allergy, and in turn, I’d told her four times that it was fine, and that the chefs were under strict instructions to be very careful.
“Yes, Cailin, I’m aware of your allergy. Don’t worry, the chefs are—”
She cut me off with an impatient wave of her hand. “That’s what I need to talk to you about. The chefs! You said they’d be careful, but they just put out some pesto pasta salad on the buffet table over there, and I know that pesto is made from peanuts! It’s lucky I have my Epi-Pen on me all the time just in case.”
Oh, for the love of…
“Cailin, pesto is made with pine nuts, not peanuts,” I said, mustering up another patient smile. “Believe me, the food is fine. We’ll take care of you.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief, and she gave me an embarrassed smile. “Oh. I’m sorry to bother you about it, then. You must get so many ridiculous questions like this from all the girls.”
“Don’t sweat it. It’s good to make sure sometimes,” I said. She was right; we did get a lot of ridiculous requests when it came to food, like exclusively gluten-free food for contestants who didn’t have celiac disease or any other conditions that would warrant a gluten-free diet, and raw dairy-free vegan food for contestants who claimed to be vegans and then wolfed down a double cheeseburger the minute they got drunk. Cailin’s peanut allergy was real though, so it was a serious concern, and she had been nice enough to apologize just now for the pesto complaint. I could already tell that she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and she was likely going to be set up as one of the nice ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’ sweethearts this season.
“When are we filming the introduction interviews?” she asked.
“Soon. You’ll need to head over to the confessional room, which is over there,” I said, pointing. “And remember, try to be charming yet honest. Smile a lot. They cut a lot of footage from these interviews, so try to condense everything. Got it?”
“Yep. You’ll be there, right?”
“Of course. You can head over to the room now, if you want. I’ll be there in a minute. I just need to sort some stuff out first.”
She smiled and walked off towards the confessional room, although ‘strutted’ was probably a more apt term than ‘walked’ given the five-inch stilettos she was wearing. Almost every contestant here was dressed to the nines in gorgeous dresses and towering heels with perfect hair and makeup courtesy of our hairdressers and makeup artists, and it made me feel positively boring with my plain clothes and ponytail.
Then again, I wasn’t here to look beautiful in an attempt to win the heart of the Stud, otherwise known as my ex.
I watched to make sure Cailin found the confessional room, and then I turned my attention back to my clipboard as I waited for my final girl to finish filming her outdoor shots. The outdoor shots were just bits of footage we got of the contestants doing ‘active’ stuff outdoors to splice into the introduction videos, and what they did in the shots was related to the direction we wanted to take her in for the show. If we wanted a woman to come across as one of the show’s potential mean girl ‘villains’, we’d make her look like a total Glamazon, wearing an expensive bikini and designer sunglasses while sunbaking out by the pool. If we wanted her to come across as an outdoorsy ‘girl next door’ type instead, we’d film her doing something like jogging by the lake, or pretending to muck out one of the old stables here at Palomar Horse Stud, where the show was filmed.
The old horse stud was on an enormous expanse of land in Marin County, and another reality show about city people living like cowboys and cowgirls had been filmed here about nine years ago. After that show was cancelled, the network had bought the rights to Glenn’s idea for a show, and The Stud was born. There’d been eight seasons now—two of which I’d worked on—all filmed out here on the old horse stud, and I had to admit, it was the perfect location. There were old but classic-looking farm buildings for pretty exterior shots, a picturesque lake on one side, rolling hills and plains, and even a forest towards the far-right side.
On top of that, there was also what the crew members referred to as the Castle—a three-storied Spanish-style villa with thirty bedrooms (each with their own personal bathroom), four kitchens, and a spacious ballroom, among other amenities. There was also a gorgeous courtyard near an azure-tiled pool and Jacuzzi, and all in all, it was a little piece of paradise.
Too bad we didn’t get to stay in it.
The mansion was for contestants and suitors only, and the rest of us lived in trailers on the property while the show was filmed before returning back to our regular places in the city during the off-season. My apartment was in San Francisco, and while I missed the buzz of the city, I also loved being out here during the filming season. My trailer might’ve been small and cramped, but the scenery out here was expansive and beautiful, which was more than enough to make up for it.
“Eden! I’m done. Do I need to go and get into a dress like all these other girls now?”
I glanced up at the sound of the feminine voice calling to me, and I broke into a grin as I saw Blair rushing towards me. She’d been a little down on her luck over the last six months—her boyfriend had dumped her, she’d been fired from her job, and her online handmade jewelry store was failing to take off. While commiserating with her over a bottle of wine when I’d gone to visit her in L.A., where she now lived, I floated the idea of her becoming a contestant on the next season of The Stud. After all, she fitted the mold—beautiful, young, and vibrant, with a need to promote herself and her business. A lot of the women on the show applied for the same reasons; they had a business which needed promoting, and being on such a popular reality show helped immensely with that.
I also thought it would be a great opportunity for us to spend more time together, because now that we were adults and living in different cities, we didn’t get to see each other as often as we used to, and we’d drifted apart a little.
When I floated the idea, Blair thought I was kidding at first, but then she realized how useful it could be to kick-start her jewelry line, and she applied. Seeing as I knew her and helped her get on the show, she was also one of the four women I was responsible for…and she was going to freak out when she found out who the Stud this season was. If I’d known it was Troy sooner, I never would’ve suggested she apply.
I nodded at her. “You can wear whatever you want for the interview, but a lot of the girls like to get dressed up. It really depends what kind of image you want to put across. And tomorrow night, when they film the unveiling of this season’s Stud, you’ll definitely need to wear a gown. Everyone does.”
She smiled. “Okay. God, this is so exciting. I can’t wait. You can’t tell me who he is, can you?”
Troy was currently being hidden in a separate wing of the mansion, so that none of the contestants know who he was. The idea was for their surprise to be genuine when we filmed the scene where he ‘arrived’ (even though he’d already been here longer than them), although we usually ended up having to reshoot the scene five times anyway.
I shook my head, hoping my eyes hadn’t already betrayed who it was. “No, I can’t tell you who it is,” I replied. “But I’m sure you’ll be….surprised.”
Blair must’ve caught my slight pause, because she arched a brow. “Surprised in a good way or bad?” she asked.
“I really can’t say.”
She arched an eyebrow. “One of the girls I was talking to earlier claims she overheard one of the assistants talking about who it is. But she kinda seems like an attention seeker, so I bet she was totally just making it up.”
“Oh?”
“She tried to tell us the Stud this season is Troy Ballard. But there’s no way you would’ve made me apply for the show if it was him. God, can you imagine?”
Wow, one of the assistants really did have a big freakin’ mouth. She or he wasn’t going to get very far in the business with that trait, and I had a feeling they’d be fired once it got out that they’d been overheard by the contestants.
Blair saw the look of horror in my eyes, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh…my…god…” she said, enunciating every word. “It is him, isn’t it?”
“I can’t confirm that.”
“Jesus, Eden, why didn’t you tell me?”
I sighed. “Like I said, I can’t confirm it’s him. But hypothetically, if it was, we didn’t find out till the other day, a long time after you applied. Only the top executives and the showrunner knew who it was going to be.”
“Should I quit?”
I shook my head. “Hell no. Get as far as you can to get attention for your jewelry line. You’ve already come all this way.”
“True. Shit, I can’t believe it’s really him. How are you feeling about it?”
I shrugged, dropping all pretenses of not being able to confirm who The Stud was. Blair was my friend, so I knew she wasn’t going to rat on me and tell all the other contestants. “I dunno,” I said. “I saw him when he arrived yesterday, and he didn’t even seem to remember me.”
“Wow. What a dick,” she said. Then her face broke into a smug smile. “Well, don’t worry, I won’t let him get away with being a prick to you again.”
“I know. Anyway, you better go get changed and wipe that sweat off. The introduction interviews will be starting any minute in the confessional room.”
“Where’s that?”
I pointed to the same place I’d directed Cailin to a few minutes ago. “Over there. Near the old stables.”
She bounded off, and I spent the next few minutes dealing with other contestants who had myriad questions and demands of me and the other producers. One particularly awful woman, a tall and striking redhead named Anya, actually demanded that we immediately hire a contractor to pave all the dirt areas around the old farm buildings, because in her words, ‘I can’t wear Manolos in the dirt!’
We just had to smile patiently, knowing that this was a good thing. If her claws were already coming out this early in the game, then she was a good candidate to be this season’s mean girl villain.
And every season needed a villain, right?
Once the introduction interviews were shot, the other producers and I helped our editing team condense them into shorter segments and narrow down any soundbites which could be used in either a positive or negative way, depending on how we wanted any given contestant to be portrayed. It was a long, tedious process, and by the time we were done, it was almost ten o’clock at night. All of the contestants had long since retired to their bedrooms.
“Okay, you all know what time it is! Who wants to play?” Candice called out as I stood up and stretched my legs.
One of the brand new producers turned to me. “What’s going on?” he asked.
I grinned. “It’s a little thing we do to unwind at the end of the first major day, after we’ve done all the introduction interviews. Candice will explain it all to you.”
Candice pulled out a bottle of whiskey and several shot glasses, and she smiled as she placed one glass down in front of each of us and filled them all. “Okay, here’s the rules of the game. We’re going to watch all the edited interviews. We all have a few girls each, and when their segment comes on, you need to take a shot if your girl says she’s ‘looking for her Prince’ or describes her ideal man as having a ‘beautiful soul’.”
The other producers and I snickered at those clichés. They were pretty standard here in the reality TV world. The ‘beautiful soul’ one was the most irritating—I bet hardly any of them would love a man with a beautiful soul if he also happened to look like the love child of Quasimodo and Voldemort.
“You also need to take a sip every time anyone says ‘soulmate’, ‘here for the right reasons’, ‘taking this journey’, and ‘connection’,” Candice added.
The new producer turned to me. “That’s practically all they say in those interviews!” he said. “We’ll be drunk as skunks by the end of it.”
I held up my shot glass. “That’s the point.”
“Let’s get started,” Candice said. “First up, we have Anya!”
There was a collective groan at the mention of her name; during her interview she’d well and truly established herself as this season’s mean girl. She’d given us one of those whole ‘I’m not a bitch, I’m just brutally honest!’ speeches, and in ninety-nine percent of cases, I’d found that people who said that were actually massive bitches.
By eleven-thirty, we were all well and truly tipsy, and I stumbled to my feet. “I’m gonna call it a night, guys. One more shot would probably kill me.”
“Wimp,” Candice said in a teasing tone, sticking her tongue out at me. “Night!”
I waved and bid everyone else goodnight before heading out of the editing room, and I took a right turn near the old stables to head towards the patch of land where all the crew trailers were. My head was spinning, and my eyes were slightly blurry, so I reached up and rubbed them. As I did so, I missed where I was going for a few seconds, and I walked smack bang into another person.
“Shit! Sorry,” I said automatically before looking up and realizing with a sinking stomach that the mountain of tanned muscle I’d bumped into was Troy.
Dammit.
“Eden! Nice night out, huh?” he said, his deep masculine voice sending unwanted shivers down my spine. “I thought I’d go for a late-night walk to stretch my legs after being cooped up in the villa all day.”
“Oh, so you actually know my name now?” I replied. I’d usually never speak to someone so rude and sarcastically, even someone I despised as much as Troy, but the several shots of liquor I’d had were currently fueling my rage towards him.
“Of course I do,” he said, his forehead wrinkling with apparent confusion. “How could I not remember you?”
“Funny way of showing it yesterday,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest.
His gaze lingered on my cleavage for a second, and then his eyes moved back up to mine. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I was being a jerk. I’m sorry, I didn’t want it to feel awkward in front of everyone, so I figured it was best if I acted like a stranger to you.”
“Right. Fair enough,” I replied. He had a point. What had I expected him to do yesterday when he arrived? Grovel on the floor and beg my forgiveness in front of the whole crew?
“I’m really glad to see you, though,” he continued.
I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes right out of my head. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because I wanted to see you. I saw your name on the credits for the show, you know. That sealed the deal for me coming on it.”
I narrowed my eyes. Was he seriously trying to say that he’d only come on the show to see me? What a load of crap. Why was he even trying this bullshit with me? Did he think that because everything between us happened so long ago that I’d just be magically okay with it all by now, and that I’d fall straight back into his arms?
“So what, did you finally manage to go through every single woman in Northern California, and now you’re cycling back through your old girlfriends, starting with me?” I said, giving him a scathing look.
He chuckled, obviously thinking I was kidding, but then he realized I was serious. “No, Eden, I just really wanted to see you again,” he said. “You’re a hard woman to track down; you don’t use Facebook or Instagram or anything like that. And then—via the show—I found out that we’ve both been living in San Francisco this whole time, and…I dunno, I felt like I needed to find you. Like it was a sign.”
“The only sign you need right now is a big red one that says ‘stop’,” I replied, holding my hand out to stop him from getting any closer to me. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to bed. You should go too.”
“Eden, I…”
He tried to say something, but I was already stalking away from him, heading towards my trailer. I was proud of myself for sticking up for myself against Troy like that, rather than falling back into his embrace like he’d so clearly expected. Back in my earlier years, I might not have had the strength to defend myself like that, especially against someone so annoyingly sexy, but things had changed now. I was harder, more jaded, and I wasn’t going to let an asshole like Troy Ballard affect me like he used to.
If he actually thought I was going to be an easy lay for him during his time on the show, then he had another thing coming.
I wasn’t his anymore, and I never would be again.
Never.