CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Paige woke in the early dredges of dawn to the now familiar feel of Gannon’s heat enveloping her. She breathed in his scent. He’d slept in her bed for the past three nights, and every morning she’d wake with the weight of his arms around her, his scent and heat comforting her.
They’d never discussed it.
It felt too… intimate.
And Paige hated to admit it, but she thought if they did talk about it, he’d stop coming to her bed. As bad as an idea that she knew it was, she still wanted him there.
She was healing, slowly but surely. The throbbing pains were fading to dull aches, her bruises and scrapes changing colors and becoming less tender. The stitches would dissolve on their own, and providing she wasn’t leveled by another tent, she’d be just fine in another week.
There was just one issue she’d yet to deal with. She wanted Gannon King fiercely.
Seeing him naked had only tweaked her curiosity at what it would feel like to touch him. And when she woke up every morning, feeling him hard and throbbing against her back, well, it was getting harder to focus on maintaining a strictly professional relationship with him.
She’d never felt this enamored. She supposed that was the right word. When they were on set, she found herself keeping tabs on him. And the long looks they’d shared were enough to send her blood humming. He hadn’t tried to kiss her again. Not since the day of the accident, and she worried that playing doctor had pushed him out of attraction mode and into the friend zone.
It should be a relief. She didn’t need a complication like Gannon. What she needed was to heal and to focus and in another year she’d finally be on the path she’d set for herself.
But.
There was something so right about being wrapped in his arms. She’d never been a cuddler. She liked her space in bed to sprawl as it suited her. But Paige had also never slept better in her life than she had these past three nights. Gannon’s warm body next to her was a comfort… and a torture.
She felt the steely length of his erection nestled against her lower back and shifted her hips back into him. God, she could feel him throbbing against her, she thought, clenching her jaw. She wanted to roll over, to throw her leg over him and pin him down. Strip him of the useless boxer briefs he wore to bed, notch his cock in place, and ride.
She was starting to want that more than she wanted to steer clear of any kind of personal relationship with him. Entering the danger zone, she wrinkled her nose in the dark. But Gannon was in full-on nurse mode, making sure she wasn’t overdoing it, keeping track of her eating, her sleeping. It was annoying but sweet.
Her mother hadn’t been impressed with Gannon during the phone call Paige had been both horrified—and maybe a little gleeful—to hear about. Paige had gotten an earful of her mother’s criticism for her “friend’s attitude,” though that did come after Leslie had made sure her daughter was physically okay.
Her mother viewed Paige’s entire adult life as a rebellion of sorts. She was convinced Paige would eventually give all of this up and go to grad school for a respectable career. It wasn’t that her mother looked down on her, Paige thought. It was more that the St. James women had responsibilities to be respectable, contributing women in the world. A psychologist and a neurosurgeon, yes, were perfectly respectable. A field producer of a reality show just a handful of steps up from the all-out brawls of the housewife spinoffs? Not so much.
In fact, Paige was fairly certain her mother wouldn’t be any more thrilled with her documentary dreams than she was with the stint in reality TV. Unfortunately for Dr. Leslie St. James, she’d raised two independent, headstrong daughters, and Paige was going to shape her own life in the way she saw fit.
Gannon’s alarm sounded, and he stirred next to her. And for just a moment, Paige let herself pretend that it was a lazy Sunday morning in the offseason, and she’d have the luxury of rolling over and waking Gannon up in her own way.
He slapped at his phone on the nightstand and then flopped back down on the pillow, his arm anchoring her against him again.
“Uh-uh,” Paige yawned. “You’ve gotta get out of here before someone busts in here and jumps to the wrong conclusions.”
He yawned mightily, stretching his body until she could feel his tensile strength against her. “It’d be a lot more fun if they were the right conclusions, but someone had to go and get the shit beat out of her.”
“Har. Har. Now get out of here.”
To antagonize her, he dropped a peck on her shoulder. “See you on set, princess.”
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Day five of shooting dawned bright and warm enough that Paige went with shorts instead of the jeans she’d been wearing to cover the bruises and cuts on her legs. It was going to be too hot to be vain, and she’d be able to stay on set longer if she were comfortable.
The house was transforming quickly. Slate blue siding had replaced the dingy white and a crew of masons worked to finish the brick on the expanded front porch. New dormers broke up the expanse of new roof that had been re-shingled.
The yard, on the other hand, had been destroyed by production tents and an army of people tromping over grass and plants and bore none of the signs of early summer that the neighboring lots did.
Paige called up the contractor’s schedule on her iPad and checked the landscaping timeline. They were definitely going to need an extra day for construction and filming, and she was glad she’d squeezed two in. Everyone had been staying on set much later than usual, busting their asses to help Brunelli’s crew and lending hands wherever they were needed.
There was usually a family or two that the crew really connected with, and for this season, that family was the Dufours. The handful of hours they’d all spent with Carina and Malia had cemented everyone’s resolve to do the best job possible.
Satisfied that the schedule was intact, Paige opened Facebook to check the show’s page. Cat’s blog posts were shared there as well as behind-the-scenes footage and pictures of jobs in progress.
Meeghan Traxx’s name jumped off the screen at her. She didn’t want to tap on the link, Paige told herself, but that damn index finger betrayed her and opened the article.
The article led with a splashy picture of the busty blonde in a skin-tight red dress wearing safety glasses and wielding a sledgehammer. Her bloody-murder red lipstick matched her glossy, talon-like fingernails.
Meeghan Traxx doesn’t let rumors about her boyfriend bother her. “Things with Gannon and I?” she laughs. “What’s better than perfect? He’s the kind of guy who holds my purse while I try clothes on because he doesn’t want to be too far away from me.”
Paige felt twin urges to vomit and smash the iPad over Gannon’s head. But since he would be wearing a damn hardhat to help with drywall, it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying. Compelled by righteous anger and a sick sense of masochism, she couldn’t stop herself from reading on.
Recently Traxx’s relationship with rising star Gannon King hit a public rough patch when rumors linked him to his show’s production assistant Paige St. James.
“I’m a field producer, not a production assistant,” Paige muttered to herself.
Traxx laughs off the idea that King’s eyes would wander. “Believe me. There’s nothing some star-struck coffee fetcher could do to tempt Gannon away from me. He’s incredibly loyal to me…”
Paige dumped the tablet on a work table rather than giving in to the urge to toss it over the fence into the neighbor’s koi pond. Cognizant of the microphone that suddenly seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, she kept her string of four-letter words to herself and buried herself in work.
Paige kept her head down and slogged through the morning, avoiding eye contact with Gannon and focusing on the job at hand. Drywall was a pain in the ass without filming, but throw in a camera crew, and things got even more hectic. Thankfully no viewer wanted to watch drywall be sanded so that stage of the operation usually afforded her crew a little time off.
Unfortunately, in order to get to that step, they needed to have the plumbing and electrical inspected, which is why an entire reality TV crew was waiting around with nothing to do while a middle-aged, bespectacled Tim Conway lookalike poked his way through two floors of chaos.
Paige paced through the Dufour’s now open living space and tried not to look at Gannon who was deep in discussion with Tim Conway Jr. Andy caught her eye and jerked his head toward the door. She followed him outside, and he handed her his phone. “They just sent me the teaser for this season,” he told her.
“The way you’re looking at me makes me think I’m not going to be happy,” Paige guessed.
Andy scratched behind his ear and moved the claw hammer someone had left on the railing out of her reach.
Oh boy.
She hit play and kept her face expressionless as clips rolled to the show’s theme song. There was Gannon looking sexy and broody, Cat mugging for the camera, then the action picked up with Cat throwing a volunteer’s axe through drywall and Flynn, Gannon’s foreman, chucking a toilet through a plate glass window. Both toilet and glass rained down in slow motion into a Dumpster.
The announcer’s voice, a favorite talent for the network, came on.
“You never know what disasters you’ll find in a renovation…”
Clips of termite damage and plumbing leaks escalated into a heated argument between Gannon and Paige. The next shot showed stone-faced Paige storming away from Gannon while he watched appreciatively. They wrapped with footage Rico had captured of the storm and Tony running toward the house with the little girl under his arm, the tent collapsing behind him. The shot went dark, and Gannon’s voice shouted her name.
The announcer wrapped with “Sparks are flying on Kings Construction.”
“Gimmie the hammer,” she demanded.
“Uh-uh.” Andy shook his head and pried his phone out of her hand.
She stood rooted to the spot shaking her head back and forth as if she could dislodge the visual from her mind.
She wanted to yell, to throw something, to do anything to let this buildup of anger out. She wanted to pull a Gannon and throw a hissy fit that someone else would have to clean up. They’d pasted together a relationship and deliberately waited to release it until Meeghan had made her statement, guaranteeing huge views. It was diabolical. She kicked at the freshly painted newel post, winced.
Everything she had hoped had blown over was going to roar back to life. Her name would once again be appearing at the top of internet searches relating to the show and the higher ups would eat it up like the asshole vultures they were. And no #NapsWithGannon would deflect it this time.
“I thought you should see it now rather than…” Andy trailed off, either unsure how to finish the sentence or unsure of his personal safety in her vicinity.
Mel stuck her head out the door, “Hey Paige—”
Andy jumped in front of Mel before she could finish whatever she’d wanted or needed. “Now’s not a great time.”
Yeah, now was not a great time. Now was a clusterfuck, the fuckiest clusterfuck in the history of clusterfuckery. And her career, her reputation, were at the center.
Paige inhaled slowly and with great effort and, deciding it still wasn’t safe to talk, yanked off her mic and bodypack and stalked down the porch steps. She’d take five, try not to give herself some kind of brain aneurysm, and then get through the rest of the day. Then tonight, she’d lay on her bed alone and try to figure out a way to salvage this disaster.
She made it halfway down the block when she heard him. “Paige!”
She hunched her shoulders and wished she was healed enough to run. He caught her easily, his big hand grabbing her by her good shoulder. Even through her fog of anger, she realized he did it on purpose. He’d kept track of her injuries to make sure he didn’t accidentally hurt her.
But he sure as hell had hurt her on purpose.
“What do you want, King?”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I thought you were upset, St. James. My mistake.”
She stabbed a finger at his mic. He rolled his eyes and yanked the power pack out of the back of his shorts and shut it down. “Better?”
She wanted to let it out. But if she started, she wasn’t going to stop, and it would just be an indecipherable load of verbal vomit.
“I’m fine. I just needed some air.”
“You know there’s only so much bullshit a man can take in a day, and when he works in reality TV, he reaches that level pretty quickly.” His tone was so amicable she wanted to slap him across his sexy face. “So why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell me why you’re limping down the block away from your job.”
“Why would I be upset? What could I possibly have to be upset about?” And she’d snapped. Oh well, might as well embrace it. She stepped into him and jabbed a finger into his chest. “Could it be the fact that your girlfriend just proclaimed to the world what a loyal loving boyfriend you are when you’ve spent the last three nights in my bed? Or that she calls me a production assistant? Nah. That’s just par for the course in Gannon’s world. Maybe it’s the trailer the network is wheeling out as we speak that paints a nice little love story between you and me.”
Her voice had risen so high that dogs were barking in the neighborhood.
“Whoa.” Gannon grinned. “So that’s what goes on in there.”
Paige had to restrain herself from stomping her foot. “You said you weren’t dating Meeghan.”
“Not this again.” Gannon made a fatal mistake and rolled his eyes heavenward as if asking for patience.
Paige gritted her teeth. “Look, Gannon. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but I’m not interested in any kind of relationship with you beyond professional.”
“Paige, you’re back to lying again. I don’t like it.” His tone held a warning in it, one that she was happy to ignore.
“I’m not getting involved with you. You’re the ‘rising network star.’ Another network star seems to be convinced that you’re in a serious relationship with her. There’s too much attention. I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“What are you so afraid of?”
“Everything that has happened!” Her hands were fisted at her sides. “You’re like Kryptonite to my career. Besides, I don’t think your girlfriend would like it,” she retorted.
This time it was Gannon fighting for control. “She’s not my fucking girlfriend. She never has been. The network paired us up for ratings. That’s it. And I told them at the beginning of the season that I was done with that. The show can carry itself now. It doesn’t need to drum up ratings from a fake relationship.”
“I guess you haven’t seen the teaser yet then,” Paige quipped. “God, you’re ruining my career, and it’s like you don’t even care!”
“You’re so ready to roll over and play dead. Why don’t you fight for it?” Gannon snapped back.
Paige’s phone vibrated in the pocket of her shorts, and she yanked it out. Reading the text she felt her blood pressure rocket up into the danger zone. “Oh, great. Just fabulous. Eddie says the network wants you and I giving on-camera interviews together.”
“Well, that should be fun,” he drawled.
It should have been the last straw, but somehow there was no more anger left to feel. She just felt a dark numbness sweeping over her, an acceptance of defeat.
“Sleep in your own room tonight, Gannon, and leave me alone.”