CHAPTER SIX
JORDAN
I brought his coffee. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because in my mind it meant a fresh start. One that had nothing to do with him hitting on me or me being responsive to his charm. It was a coincidence we met at a bar first, but now it was all business. Maybe the fresh start was more for me than him. I needed some sort of symbol that what was between us was business and that I was completely capable of playing nice.
Coffee. It was a peace offering, as if I’d just walked into the UN building wearing a MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR T-shirt. I bring him coffee, offer a smile and a pat on the cheek, and suddenly we’re best friends. Laughing at each other’s jokes. I scratch his back, he scratches mine.
It made sense.
After all, he was a man.
Men are easy.
Taking care of a male actor? Even easier. It was like selling cake to a cake shop. As long as I stroked his ego, kept him well fed, and made sure he was in bed at the proper times, I really never had any issues.
My job was kind of like being a nanny to the wealthy.
Did you take your pills?
Did you eat breakfast?
Remember, you have a peanut allergy! And yes, there are peanuts in peanut butter.
Oh, I’m sorry, you’re on a diet. No, cheese isn’t a vegetable.
Nap times are encouraged, yes.
No, you can’t stay up to watch yourself on Jimmy Fallon. Of course, I’d love to tape it for you!
See what I mean? Easy.
And Reid. Well, with his good looks, I could only imagine his brain, or lack thereof, was about as small as the rest of the men I worked with. How hard could it be? He was my meal ticket, my gold-crapping goose, my yellow brick road.
“Miss.” Some geeky-looking techie charged toward me, alternating between giving me the stink-eye and talking into his giant walkie-talkie. “You can’t be here.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m here to see Reid Emory. I’m his—”
“Oh!” The man held up his hands. “No need to explain.” He blushed a bright red. “I’ll just show you to the, er, rest of them, and he can, um, take it from there, I guess?”
“Sure?” Clearly the poor soul was overworked, but I wasn’t one to judge considering the morning I’d had. I followed him wordlessly through the band of vehicles and trailers.
“Must say . . .” Nerdy guy coughed into his hand. “I’ve heard of actors really taking on roles in a serious way, but I never thought it would be this . . . intense, you know? Everyone’s talking about it. On set, I mean.”
“Talking about it?” The hairs on my arm prickled. “His devotion, you mean?”
“Oh, yes.” Could the stars in Geek Man’s eyes get any bigger? Reid was an actor. He hadn’t discovered a new planet! “I mean, ever since this morning.” He shook his head as his eyes welled with tears. “He’s a legend, a legend in the making. Everyone thinks so.”
“Right.” I was starting to get a little uncomfortable with the hero worship. I’d had a few people on set stalk my actors, and it wasn’t a laughing matter. Terrifying was more like it.
“And the women.” Geek Guy’s eyes went wide. “Well, they’re crazy! I mean, no offense.”
“On behalf of women everywhere, I accept your apology.” I licked my lips and decided to take a sip of my coffee. I needed something to do, something to distract me from shaking the small man and asking him to walk faster and stop talking.
“Well.” He held up his hands. “Here’s the trailer. You’ll have to fill out a form like the rest of them. Reid’s cautious like that.” He elbowed me in the side. “And I’ve been told by Max, Mr. Emory’s personal assistant, that if you’re in the running we’ll get back to you in four to seven days.”
“In the running?” My eyes narrowed in on the ten or so girls standing around the small trailer. “The running for what?”
“The shrew, of course.” Geek Guy shrugged. “You know, for the taming.”
“The—” I choked. “Taming?”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s why you’re here, right? To try out for the real-life part of Shrew in Mr. Emory’s dating calendar? It’s already hit all the big news stations. To think, he’s taken it this far so that he can know the true emotion that goes into taming a woman.”
“Yes,” I said through clenched teeth. “Because that’s what all women want, to be tamed.”
Geek Guy nodded sympathetically. “It’s not your fault you’re mean.”
Holy shit on a stick! I was going to fillet Reid Emory with a machete, then set him on fire! What? In the span of a few hours after signing his name on the dotted line, he’s already doing his own messed-up PR stunt? I stopped walking. Wait a second. With a groan I pulled out my phone. I’d forgotten to put a Google alert on the guy. I furiously typed in his name. Rage washed over me. Twitter alerts popped up all over the place, along with TMZ, Fox News, Kelly and Michael. I placed a hand against my chest and told myself not to freak out. It, whatever it was, would blow over.
I clicked on the first article just as the geek guy spoke in hushed tones into his headset. He led me a few more feet, then stopped.
“I gotta run back to set, but Mr. Emory should join you shortly. Try to keep it to a three-question minimum. After all, you’re technically trying out for the role of a lifetime. To think! Mr. Emory’s real-life girlfriend! And it’s all going to be documented on YouTube!”
“YouTube?” Reid was dead. So dead. Deader than dead. Pretty sure that meant the contract was now void, considering I no longer had a client and I couldn’t exactly work for someone who was no longer breathing. Strangulation. That’s what I was contemplating.
“See ya!”
I turned on my now stable heel—thanks to the shoes I kept in my desk for unlucky situations like this morning—and glared.
Ten women, all beautiful, all Botoxed within an inch of their lives.
“Get in line!” one of the girls spat. Ah, the shrew speaks.
Pretty sure I’d be grumpy too if I had someone poke my face with needles while I tried to stuff my curvy body into Spanx ten sizes too small for my body.
“Yeah.” A short, blonde-headed witch turned in my direction. “We were here first, and Max said that . . .”
I was seriously going to find whoever this Max was and beat him with a baseball bat.
Max, why did that sound familiar?
Max, Max, Max.
“Max!” I shouted. Then I stomped my foot.
“Shit, what did my brother do now?” Reid said from behind me.
I was about to answer when the girls all but lost their minds and dignity and started shouting, “Pick me, Pick me!”
“This isn’t kickball,” I muttered under my breath.
“If it was”—Reid winked—“you’d be the ball, you know because of your hair—oh, wait, that’s a frizz ball.”
“Funny.”
He grinned. “No, seriously, why are these women shouting?”
“For you.” I patted him on the back. “Something to do with the real-life taming of a shrew? Oh, and tryouts.” I looked down at the sheet the geek had given me. “And apparently we need to list our food allergies. I can’t eat shellfish. That gonna be a problem?”
“What the hell?” Reid jerked the sheet out of my hand and scanned it, his face paling by the second. “Who knows about this?”
“Everyone!” one of the girls squealed. “I was at the gym on the elliptical—”
“Of course you were,” I said under my breath.
Reid leveled me with a glare and cleared his throat.
“You were?” I said in a fake cheerful voice. “On the elliptical reading Cosmo, huh?”
“How’d you know?” She jutted out her bony hip, then pouted. “Anywaaaays . . .” She dragged out anyways like a pubescent teenager at a One Direction concert. “I was on the elliptical.”
“She said that already,” I whispered.
Reid elbowed me.
“When”—she clasped her hands in front of her—“I saw it on the noon news! ‘Up-and-coming actor Reid Emory takes Method acting to the extreme!’ I wasn’t the only girl either. Tons of us started screaming when they gave us the location and what you were looking for, and honestly, I may look sweet, but I can be a real bitch. I mean, that’s what a shrew is, right? And you’re going to tame me . . .” She full-on purred the last sentence as she blinked heavily in Reid’s direction.
“Something in your eye?” I asked sweetly.
Reid grabbed me by the elbow and led me away. “Just a sec, ladies.” He hauled me around the trailer and cursed. “Do something!”
“Wait, what?” I jerked away from him, spilling coffee onto the ground. “I should kill you for this!”
“Please, that’s what you do! You spill things!”
“How do you even know that?
“Chocolate stain, right corner of your shirt, near your ear.”
“Why!” I yelled into the universe.
Reid held his hands up. “Look, I know this has been somewhat of a bad morning for you, but if we don’t fix this . . .”
“We can’t just say it was a practical joke, now can we?” I tried desperately to keep my voice even.
Screaming erupted. We both peeked around the trailer to see hair pulling and one of the girls banging her fists against her own chest. Her boobs were immobile.
“Huh.” Reid frowned. “That’s not normal.”
“Nothing about this is normal,” I hissed as one of the boobs in question made an appearance. “How is it that we’ve been working together for less than three hours and you’re already a bigger pain in my ass than the clients I’ve had over the last five years?”
He smirked. “I guess I’m just that special.”
The crying got louder.
Reid looked like he was ready to cry himself.
“Okay, okay.” I handed him his coffee. “Drink this and I’ll figure it out.”
“If we don’t pick one, I have a feeling we’re going to be worse off.” Reid shook his head, then took a long sip. “Oh, wow, you actually remembered.”
“Best friends, you and me, until the six months of filming and postproduction are complete.”
He held up his hand for a high five.
I flicked it away.
He jutted out his lower lip.
“I’m ignoring the pout.” I closed my eyes so my treacherous body wouldn’t lean toward him.
“Holy shit,” Reid murmured. “They’re rocking my trailer.”
“It’s like a Justin Bieber concert gone wrong.” I nervously glanced around us as people started holding up their camera phones. The situation was going downhill fast. The girls were screaming, demanding that Reid return to their side of the trailer. Thankfully security was already standing in front of the women, keeping them from full on charging us. They would rip him to pieces if I tossed him out there, and even though that idea had merit, something told me he’d just make the situation worse by picking every last one of them and making my life even more of a living hell.
“Back off, bitch!” a girl wailed.
Reid gave me a panicked look. “Isn’t this what you do? Fix things?” His look went from panicked to doubtful.
Irritated that he was challenging me when I should have home court advantage, I thrust out my chin and marched around the trailer. If he wanted me to fix it, I was going to fix it, all right. “He’s made his choice!”
The girl first in line caught my eye. She was jumping up and down. At least her boobs moved. She’d do. And if she was nice instead of shrewlike, we’d simply tell everyone that she hardly needed any work and set her free. Problem solved.
Immediate silence.
I cleared my throat and pulled at my chocolate-stained collar. “He chooses—”
“The lovely . . .” Reid wrapped his arm tightly around me. What was he doing? Mind reading? Picking his own girl? “Jordan . . .” His eyes narrowed as his lips brushed my ear. “What’s your last name?”
“L-Litwright.” I stumbled over the word like I’d just learned how to spell out cat.
“Sorry, girls.” Reid hugged me closer. “But she’s the shrew for me.”
My lips trembled behind a suppressed moan. Dead. He was dead to me.
“But”—Reid released me—“how about some autographs and pictures for the road?”
The squealing continued.
And I was left standing by the trailer, wondering how the heck I was going to explain to Ren not only that I was fake dating my new client but that my new title was no longer just publicist.
But shrew.