Off Script

by Anna Paige

  Yeah, never mind that he probably saw you naked and thoroughly explored your body with that massive boner of his, hearing you pee would be too much information. Idiot.

  The little voice in my head was a real bitch when she had a hangover.

  With a bottle of aspirin in one hand and a couple of bottled waters in the other, I took a deep breath and stepped back into my bedroom. Gavin was still in my bed, awake and propped against the pillows as he rubbed his temples with the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, his eyes shielded.

  The sheet was covering him up to his waist but his entire delicious chest was on display and it was hard not to stare. He was toned, muscular, and sculpted but not so much so that he would be uncomfortable to snuggle—I knew that much for a fact.

  At least I had that memory to hold onto.

  His eyes were closed against the glare, so I cleared my throat to announce myself and waited for him to look up. When he did, his green eyes shone in the light and his sleepy morning smile made my heart flutter, like having a million butterfly wings batting against my ribcage.

  Jesus, he’s gorgeous.

  I held up my offering. “Aspirin?”

  “Yes, please.” He winced at the sound of his own voice and regarded the windows through squinty eyes. “Can you close the curtains?”

  I was all too happy to oblige. As soon as I set everything on the nightstand, I hurried over to adjust the blinds and pull the curtains closed over them, making it as dark as possible. There was still enough light to see each other, but it was a far cry from the retina-incinerating rays that had greeted us when we awakened.

  “Thanks,” Gavin muttered, leaning across my side of the bed to grab the aspirin and a water.

  My side? What, like he has his own designated side now? I must still be drunk.

  I moved to sit on the edge of the bed, on the side I’d vacated—not my side because the whole thing was mine; every side was mine—and snapped up the remaining bottle of water before opening the cap and drinking long swallows until Gavin tapped my arm with the aspirin bottle.

  I accepted it with a nod and swallowed three before finishing off the rest of my beverage. When I was done, I finally looked him in the eye, confused by his smirk. “What?”

  “Just remembering last night,” he chuckled.

  Oh, shit. I must have been awful if he was laughing right in my face. Kill me now.

  Dear lord, if you have an extra lightning bolt handy…

  “Is everything dry?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?” I was taken aback at his question. Was he insinuating that I…that my… “What the hell are you talking about?” Why was I blushing? If anything had been dry, wouldn’t that have been his fault?

  “I mean, you soaked us both pretty good,” he chuckled, shaking his head.

  “Wait, I’m confused.” I frowned and searched my foggy brain.

  He watched me for a minute, still smiling. “You don’t remember any of it, do you?”

  I groaned and leaned against the headboard beside him, keeping myself on top of the covers and hiding my face in my hands. “No, I don’t. I don’t know what I did or what we did or who started it or even if I was any good.” My eyes burned as humiliated tears began to well.

  “Kaiti.” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “Will you look at me, please?”

  “No.” I shook my head, not moving my hands. “Just go. Leave me here to die of embarrassment.”

  He gently gripped my wrists and began tugging them down, but I resisted. “Kaiti, come on. This isn’t you. Look at me.”

  “How do you know it’s not me?” I mumbled, fighting his grip. “Oh, right. I guess you think you know me now that we have carnal knowledge of each other.”

  He laughed, still tugging on my wrists. “We don’t hide from each other, remember? You’re still the same girl who was brave enough to tell a moderately well-known actor to go fuck himself as she threw him out of her apartment, aren’t you? Stop trying to hide yourself from me and act like it.”

  “I didn’t tell you to go fuck yourself. I told you to fuck off. There’s a difference,” I corrected, finally looking at him.

  “Not much of one.” He winked when I met his eye. “Now, will you let me talk or should I fuck off?”

  I blinked several times, trying not to cry. “Go ahead, talk. I’ll just be over here wishing I was invisible.”

  He shook his head at me and reached for my hand. I let him take it, knowing I was going to need the comforting touch for whatever he was about to say.

  “We didn’t have sex.”

  I jumped slightly. “We didn’t?” I looked at his bare chest and quirked a brow at the sheet that had pooled around his waist.

  He followed my gaze and pushed the sheet down to reveal the waistband of his boxer briefs. “No. We drank entirely too much, and I suggested we switch to water to ward off a hangover—something I’ve done for years. It really does work. Unless someone trips on the way back to the couch and dumps an entire pitcher of ice water on themselves, me, and the couch in the process.”

  “Oh, shit.” I covered my mouth.

  “Yeah, no offense, but I wouldn’t be able to procure carnal knowledge of anyone after an ice bath like that.”

  I started to smile, finally, and shook my head at my own stupidity. “So, that explains my change of clothes, your lack of clothes, and why you shared my bed instead of crashing on the couch.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, there’s sleeping in the wet spot and then there’s needing a flotation device to keep from drowning in it.”

  I burst out laughing, so relieved I almost wanted to kiss him. No, there was no almost about it. I wanted to kiss him. And that wasn’t a good idea, so I focused on the conversation. “And I’m betting I put our clothes in the dryer before we passed out, right?” Which was why he’d asked if everything was dry.

  “Yeah. I opted to keep my boxers and let body heat dry them, though you did offer me a pair of thin, lacy shorts to wear instead. I declined.” Laughing at my embarrassed groan, he tilted his head and asked, “Should I be offended that you’re so happy to have not slept with me?” His gaze roamed over the tussled sheets. “Well, we slept together but you know what I mean.”

  I blushed again, moving off the bed to go check the dryer. “Don’t take my relief as an affront to your desirability. I just wouldn’t want to have drunken, black-out sex with anyone. I prefer to have complete recall of my…um…activities in that department.”

  “Agreed. And I’d like to think it’d be an experience worth remembering.” He winked again and I quickly turned and hurried out the door to gather his clothes. Before I did something I might regret—while totally sober.

  After I took our clothes from the dryer and stopped off in the bathroom, switching the barely-there pajamas I was wearing for my more modest outfit from the night before, I brought Gavin his things.

  I started to offer to scrounge around for some breakfast, but he snagged my wrist as I handed him his clothes and motioned for me to sit next to him on the bed. He was still bare-chested and looked amazing, so I kept as much distance between us as I could, resting my ass on the edge of the bed. “Everything okay?” I asked, wondering why he was looking at me with such intensity.

  The edges of his mouth turned up but he didn’t give me a full-on smile. “Read lines with me.”

  It wasn’t a command, exactly, more like a plea. He was so serious, almost sullen, and it made me want to bring back his smile. “I don’t know…”

  He pinned me with an earnest expression. “Not at the studio. Just you and me, here.” He glanced at the nightstand, where his phone rested beside mine. “And maybe we could Facetime with Bryce so he could see what he needs to see without making you come down and audition in front of a bunch of people.”

  The familiar coldness washed over me—the first wave of anxiety—and I shook my head. “Gavin, I like you a lot, but I don’t think…”

  “Just you and me, then. No Bryc
e if that makes you uncomfortable. Run lines with me. Let me see if this chemistry I feel with you will shine through in our work.”

  “You think we have chemistry?” I barely got the words out on an uneven croak, my anxiety ratcheting up exponentially.

  He smiled then, wide and brilliant. “You have no idea.” His eyes dipped from mine, taking in my lips and neck before returning my stare. “I think you could set the screen on fire with or without me, but there’s something about you, about how I feel when I talk to you, that tells me we could be the one-two punch that blows the roof off that studio. You just have to trust me. Can you do that?”

  God, I wanted to, but trust was really hard for me—for a lot of reasons. “I don’t know…”

  “I have the audition script in my car, courtesy of Bryce. I wasn’t going to waltz in here and wave it in your face because I meant what I said about not wanting to play games. But—and I fucking hate to admit this, so please don’t ever tell him I said it—I think Bryce was right. I think this could be something amazing. So, if you’ll let me, I want to go get the pages from my car and go over them with you. No obligation; only a test run.”

  I didn’t say anything because I was struggling so hard with what I wanted to say versus what my anxiety was trying to force me to say.

  “Please, Kaiti.” His voice was so sincere, so genuine. “I need you to trust me.”

  I blew out a big breath and forced down the terror. “I trust you, Gavin. Get the script.”

  He instantly leaped from the bed and kissed my forehead. “You won’t regret it. I’ll be right back.”

  He snatched his phone and keys off the nightstand on the way out of my room.

  I called out behind him, “Bring coffee when you come back up.”

  I might have to add some Bailey’s or bourbon to it to make it through this next part, but at least for today, I was going to be the woman he thought I was.

  If only this one time, I was going to make anxiety my bitch.

  Five

  Gavin

  “So, this chick—Meadow—is supposed to be a newly discovered heir to the company?” Kaiti was reading over the character bio.

  “Yeah. You watch the show, right?”

  She nodded absently, still reading. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Up until now, only four heirs have been introduced. Tyler, Tia, Warren, and Layla. All the offspring of the founding four. Well, actually only three of the founders were thought to have heirs.”

  “Enter Meadow,” she muttered, pursing her mouth to one side.

  “Exactly. The previously-unknown, illegitimate child of the fourth partner.”

  “I forget, did they ever say whether there was foul play behind the plane crash that killed the founding four?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet, but there are mutterings around the set that there may be something coming on that front. Of course, they say that every season and nothing ever comes of it.”

  “Damn teases,” she said, chewing her lip as she concentrated on the lines. “And Meadow doesn’t have any clue what she’s gotten herself into, I see. I can relate to her already.”

  “You’ll do great, Kaiti. And even if you don’t, it’s only you and me here. We can keep trying until you get it perfect.”

  She huffed out a breath and met my gaze. “No, I don’t want this to be a long, drawn-out process. I can either nail it in the first couple of read-throughs or I can’t. I won’t keep trying to coax out something that may not even be there.”

  I raised a brow. “So…?”

  “So…call Bryce. Skype or Facetime with him, and let him know we’re doing no more than two passes on this. Period. After that, he can either cast me as Meadow or leave me the hell alone.”

  I had the overwhelming desire to kiss her obstinate little mouth just then, and I barely fought back the urge.

  She really was amazing. Even as I made the call, I knew this was only the beginning for us.

  As future co-stars, as friends, and maybe as a hell of a lot more, if this yearning in my chest was any indication.

  “But I don’t know anything about running a business, much less a Fortune 500 company.” She paced nervously as she spoke, shooting me disbelieving glances. “When I was eight, I had a lemonade stand that went belly up…in the south…in freaking July.” Her exasperated tone was spot on, her body language exactly suited to the scene we were portraying. She was so good, in fact, that I was too dazzled by her to fully immerse myself in my own role.

  “There are no sales involved. It’s strictly financial management.” I wasn’t feeling Tyler’s presence, but faking it was easy enough. I wasn’t the focus of this little exercise anyway. I shot a glance at my phone, having propped it up on the windowsill so Bryce could see as much of the room as possible. The screen was small but I could make out enough to know he was nodding in approval.

  “Oh, that’s much better.” She poured on the sarcasm, throwing her hands up. “Until a week ago, I had eleven dollars and thirty-seven cents in my savings account. Clearly, I’m the one to go to about financial planning and money management.”

  “Meadow, breathe,” I told her—settling into my own role, like pulling on a perfectly tailored suit. “You’re freaking out now, but trust me, you’re going to be fine.”

  “No offense, Mr. Savage,” she said with thinly veiled exasperation, “but how the hell would you know that?”

  I strode across the room and placed my hand on her shoulder. “Because it wasn’t so long ago that my sister and I were in your shoes. We were thrown into this just like you, and we figured it out. You will too, probably faster than we did because you have an edge we never had.”

  “And what edge is that?” She looked up, meeting my eyes with a combination of wariness and vulnerability that made me—Gavin, not Tyler—really want to kiss her.

  “You have someone watching your back,” I told her earnestly. “You have me.”

  She shook her head, pulling away as she resumed pacing. “I don’t need anyone to look out for me.”

  “No, Meadow, you’ve never had anyone to look out for you. That’s not the same thing.”

  Her hair swirled around her face as she spun toward me, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you care so much? What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing. I just know how vicious this business can be. It’s brutal. There are a lot of back-door dealings and you never know who you can trust. My sister and I learned that the hard way; I see no reason for you to have to do the same.”

  She pursed her lips and considered for a moment. “Is it really that bad? Everyone here has been so welcoming; all smiles and open arms.”

  “Something I’ve learned in the last few years—never take anything at face value.”

  “Even your offer of friendship?”

  I gave her a half smile. “Even that.”

  “So, what ulterior motive do you have?”

  “I want to keep you from getting swallowed up by this place. I’d hate to see you become one of them.”

  “So, Savage might be your last name, but the real savages are all around us?”

  “Bingo.” I gave her a slow wink.

  We’d reached the end of the scene, but I kept my eyes on hers, watching as she slid out of Meadow’s head and back into her own. It was like she’d been acting her whole life—she had great instincts and presence. She delivered the lines perfectly and put enough of her natural spark into them to make them sing.

  “Excellent, Kaiti.” Bryce’s voice cut into the heavy silence between us.

  She blinked, turning toward the phone as she nodded. “Thanks. We can do the second pass now if you want. Just give me a minute to grab some water.” She looked to me, her eyes never actually touching on mine. “Thirsty?”

  I shook my head, though my mouth was dry as the Sahara.

  “Not necessary,” Bryce said, sounding excited. “I’ve seen all I need to. Kaiti, the part is yours. You’re absolutely the right person for it, as I
suspected. Take the rest of the weekend off and I’ll see you first thing Monday morning. Gavin can give you directions to the set.” He paused and cut a look in my direction. “Or you can carpool if he’s still staying over at that point.” He gave her a pointed look and that signature brow raise that he deployed when he wanted to appear intimidating. “And Kaiti, leave the stun gun at home, will you?”

  I wanted to snap at him for being a shit, but he gave a little wave and hung up before I could call him out.

  “Taser,” she corrected absently at the darkened screen and froze.

  When I looked over at Kaiti to apologize for his rude assumption, she was white as a sheet, still staring at my phone like it was about to explode.

  “Kaiti?” My heart kicked up at the sight of her like that, the slow blink and blank expression was so removed from the spirited, fearless girl I’d met only the day before that it freaked me out, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. I dropped the phone to the coffee table and grasped her upper arms. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Shit,” she breathed, searching my face.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think it would happen this way.” Her eyes widened further and she kept blinking like she was hallucinating. “I was supposed to suck. That was what I expected.”

  “Well, you didn’t. You’re a natural.”

  She drew in a breath and nodded, apparently realizing I was right. “Shit.”

  “Want that water now?”

  She moved to sit on the love seat. “Put a little bourbon in it, will ya?”

  “It’s a little early for that, but under the circumstances…”

  “Breakfast of champions,” she muttered, beginning to laugh.

  It was the laughter of someone on the edge of losing their shit; that shrill ‘it’s either this or fucking cry’ kind of laugh. I grudgingly left her to it while I made her drink, mixing it as weak as possible and returning to her side just as tears joined her laughter. Both her hands were doing that thing where the fingers touched to her thumb, but they stopped as soon as she realized I was back.