Miranda sat in the hotel café with her tablet and didn’t bother looking up from the adjusted budget for the Final Choice shoot when a shadow appeared, hovering over her espresso and biscotti. “Spit it out, Emily.”
“We might have screwed up.”
Miranda lifted her eyes to the wide-eyed PA. Had she ever been that young? “I don’t like vague, Emily.”
The girl wet her lips, shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Craig spent the night with Marcy.”
Miranda frowned. “Linus told me she threw him out and slammed the door in his face last night. We have footage of it.”
“He must have gone back,” Emily squeaked. “When Amelia went in this morning to run through the previous night with Marcy for the confessional, he was still there.”
Miranda pinched the bridge of her nose. “Tell me we got footage of his walk of shame,” she said without much hope.
“Amelia didn’t bring a mobile camera team because she thought it would just be standard confessional footage.”
“And we didn’t put hidden cameras in the suite. Shit.” She pursed her lips. “We have no video evidence of them entering the room together, being together inside or him exiting the room. Were the mics hot at least? Audio?”
“Indistinct. It’s very muffled. And then they took off their mic packs.”
“Of course they did.” She cursed softly. This is what happens when you fucking delegate. She’d been so much better lately. Letting her people do their jobs, actually getting nearly normal amounts of sleep each night. She’d finally learned how not to micromanage every little detail and now this. Fantastic. “So who am I firing? You? Is that why Linus and Amelia sent you to deliver the news? Did they think I would kill the messenger?”
Emily’s face drained of color. “I—I didn’t—”
“Relax. I’m not firing you. Yet. I still need you to coordinate the drivers to get us out to that god forsaken lake for the Final Choice shoot.”
“Ms. Pierce—”
“Emily. This is an epic fuck-up. Someone is getting shit canned, but it won’t be you because it wasn’t your epic fuck-up. Tell Linus and Amelia to stop being cowards and get their asses in here to face the music.”
“Asses already present,” Linus stepped forward from a nearby alcove, Amelia at his side.
“Sending a PA to deliver the news was cowardly, Linus. I expect better from you.”
“You would have fired me on the spot if I’d told you myself.”
“Probably. It’s still an option. Our job is to get footage of everything and you let Miss Right get laid without even a PI-style still shot of our boy entering the room. Care to tell me how that happened?”
“It was the roof shoot,” Amelia complained. “We weren’t prepared for being on battery that long and when they ran downstairs, we lost them for a minute. One of the camera guys caught them outside the room and managed to get the shot of Marcy kicking Craig out, but his battery was dying and it was late and we didn’t think there would be anything more that night—”
“And no one thought to track either of them down to get their reactions to the fight while they were still worked up?”
“We did, but we couldn’t find Craig.” Amelia swallowed nervously. “His mic pack was off by then so we figured he must have gone to walk it off or something. I knocked on Marcy’s door but she didn’t answer and her mic was dark so I figured she was asleep.”
“I’m really liking the idea of firing you, Amelia. When did you think to playback the audio?”
She wet her lips. “This morning. After I saw…”
“Sadly we can’t put your account of what you saw on the air.” Miranda cursed again, closing the budget report.
“We were actually thinking maybe this is a good thing,” Linus put in.
“Oh this should be good. Please enlighten me how not getting footage of one of the most pivotal moments of the show is a good thing.”
“We couldn’t show it anyway. We wouldn’t want to. Not when she chooses Daniel.”
“It would make her look bad in the eyes of the audience to be sexing it up with one guy immediately before getting engaged to another,” Amelia picked up where Linus left off.
“If she becomes engaged.”
Linus and Amelia’s matching expressions of shock would have been comical if there were anything funny about the situation. It was hard to laugh when Miranda could lose her job as well, thanks to their fuck-up.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Linus blurted.
“I know she seemed ambivalent at first, but lately all the confessional footage has been pointing toward Daniel,” Amelia insisted.
Miranda felt old suddenly. Ancient and weary. “Don’t put too much stock in the confessional footage.”
Amelia’s face melted into horror. “You think she might actually pick Craig?”
“I know he’s cute and all,” Linus protested, “but he would have to have a magical penis to change her mind. Marcy is practical and Daniel ticks all the boxes. He’s perfect. Besides, you had Pendleton film the job ultimatum with Craig already—he’s going to dump her at the Final Choice altar. If we had footage of them getting it on just two nights before, he’d be the most hated man in America.”
“And he would deserve to be.”
It was too late to worry about footage they didn’t have now. As much as she wanted to keep venting her frustration on the pair that had likely just cost her her job, Miranda reached for her tablet instead. “You both have jobs to do. I suggest you do them to perfection for the next forty-eight hours. Get us through the Final Choice ceremony flawlessly and you might still have a prayer of ever working in reality television again.”
Her two minions, suitably cowed, retreated, taking Emily—who had been watching the whole conversation with wide-eyes—away with them.
“Amelia,” she called after them, before they could completely escape the cafe that the crew had commandeered. “Don’t tell anyone else what you saw this morning. As far as we know, nothing happened. Understand?”
Amelia nodded frantically and Miranda turned her attention back to her tablet, though she didn’t see the screen, her brain working frantically.
She could make this work. If Marcy’s choice went the way she thought it would, the dramatic door slamming would play just as well as a late night booty call. America never needed to know that anything had happened—or if they needed to find out, it would make a juicy tidbit at the reunion show.
Craig had been given his choice. Marcy had been given hers. Now it was a game of wait-and-see.
Kind of like Miranda waiting to see if she could hang onto her job. Her first chance at the helm of the show and she had to get curveball after curveball. It still remained to be seen if she could hit them out of the park.
The chance was slight, but there was still hope for a happy ending for all of them. Miranda, heartless reality show producer, stared sightlessly at her tablet and prayed that just this once love could conquer all.
Because if Marcy could get her happy ending, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.