by Ally Decker
He smiled at her, and she managed to answer in kind. It will be fine. It has to be. She turned to Greg, and they looked at each other for a long moment. Sylvia needed him to make the final call, because she was still feeling guilty and didn't want to pull him into anything against his will.
I'm game if you are, she wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn't come out. Finally, he had to have read it on her face, because he nodded and turned to Shawn.
"So, what's the plan, exactly?"
CHAPTER FOUR
BY EIGHT the next morning, Greg had managed to go back and forth about a dozen times on whether this plan would work or not. They stayed at the Foster, Young, and Urban office until almost two, then he went back to the hotel, called his agent and publicist back in L.A., and then caught a few hours of uneasy sleep. Now he was meeting Sylvia for the first of their pretend dates, and he was still on the fence about their chances. On one hand, it should be easy enough—spending a few weeks going out with an attractive woman and getting himself photographed while doing so wasn't exactly a hardship. On the other hand, what if nobody would buy it and they only made things worse?
Too late for that now. Greg straightened in his chair. He wasn't used to sitting right at the front of a café or restaurant. Usually, when he went out, he tried to hide in the back or in a private room where he could avoid being spotted. He might be used to the constant attention, but it didn't mean he liked it. Except this time attention was the goal. They needed to be seen and photographed.
For now, everyone let him be. Apparently, it was true what the New Yorkers among his friends always told him—people in this city were too cool to stare or come up and interrupt him. The waitress only raised her eyebrows for a moment before asking if he wanted more coffee.
Greg had been a little early, so he was waiting in the café for about ten minutes before the door opened and Sylvia came in. She had a dark blue skirt on that drew attention to her legs, and Greg caught himself before his gaze lingered there for too long. He noticed she was attractive last night, but today there was something different about it. Don't go down this road, he told himself firmly as he watched her scan the room quickly. She offered Greg a small smile when she noticed him, and he stood up as he watched Sylvia come up to him. He leaned in to kiss her cheek, inhaling the scent of coconut as he greeted her. "Hi."
"Hey." She sat down when Greg offered her a chair. "How are you?"
"Not enough sleep and nervous twitching whenever my phone rings, but fine otherwise. You?"
"Half-convinced I'm living in some kind of weird alternative reality," Sylvia admitted, one corner of her mouth going up.
Not a bad start. Joking their way through the awkwardness was more than fine with Greg.
After the waitress took their order and left, he lowered his voice. "Have you heard from your brother or his friends?"
"No, but I'm heading up to work right after our…breakfast, so if you walk me back, you can talk to them if you want."
"You work there?" He raised his eyebrows. That was a surprise.
"Didn't I tell you this last night?" When he shook his head, she winced. "Sorry, it must have slipped my mind. I'm their office manager."
"So you're not a fixer?"
She chuckled."No, the only thing I'm fixing is their paperwork. They're all brilliant, but keeping documents in check is apparently beyond them."
"Do you like working there?" he asked, relaxing back in his seat. He was having breakfast with a beautiful, funny woman. He was going to have a good time and not worry about anything else."Working for family can be tricky."
Sylvia made a weird gesture that was half nod, half shrug. "It's fine. It's not all that exciting, since, as I said, it's mostly paperwork, but I'm good at it." She paused as their waitress came back with their food—scrambled eggs for him and pancakes and orange juice for Sylvia. " I get what you said about working for family, but Nate and I get along really well, so it's nice. And Shawn and Dean are like my brothers, too. They're Nate's best friends from college, so I've known them for years. With all of them there, it's the best job I've ever had." She smiled, picking up her fork. "And what about you? Do you like your job?"
Greg nodded as he watched her drown her pancakes in syrup. "I do. I love the actual acting part, especially on those days when everything just seems to work—the right co-stars, the right script, the right director. The high I can get from that is like nothing else. Not every day is like that, of course, but it happens often enough." Especially now when he could pick and choose not only the scripts, but also the people he wanted to work with. The only exception was the Collectibles franchise. He had no say in those films, but he had still lucked out with them. As a whole, the cast and crew were great. The only problem was Marlow, but Greg had to suck it up for only one more year.
And then never sign a contract like that again.
"Which part don't you like then?" Sylvia asked before taking a sip of her juice.
He shrugged. "Promoting the movie. It gets exhausting. A few days or even weeks would be fine, but it stretches into months these days when the movie is huge, and that's way too much."
"Don't you get asked the same questions over and over again?"
"Yes." He pointed his fork at her. "You try answering the same question differently when you hear it twenty times a day."
"No, thank you. I would just repeat the same thing over and over again. The most boring person ever."
He snorted. "That's not as easy as it sounds, either. During our last press tour, me and the rest of Collectibles' cast had a bet going on who would manage that for the entire day and nobody was able to do it. It screws with your head. You need to say something different."
"Broadway's nothing like that," Sylvia said between the bites. "It's usually low-key, unless the show really blows up."
Greg nodded. He had seen some of the stuff that counted as promotion on Broadway. "Yeah, I'm jealous of that. But speaking of… Tell me about your musical theatre addiction."
Sylvia laughed and Greg was struck for a moment, his gaze dropping to her mouth. He wanted to trace her smile with his fingers…and his tongue.
He took another sip of coffee instead and reminded himself that this breakfast date was a pretend one.
"Famous last words, I warn you," Sylvia told him when she stopped laughing. She was glowing with an energy she didn't have before. "I can talk about it for hours."
"Start with the history part then," he said, leaning on his elbows on the table. "How did it start?"
"I was nine when my parents took me and Nate to see Wicked." She looked down at her pancake, and her smile gentled as she probably got lost in a memory. "I fell in love by the first song, and that was it, I was gone. Every birthday, we'd go to see another show—just me and one of my parents, because Nate didn't care for it at all. I collected playbills, tickets, merchandise. With all the stuff I have in boxes in storage, I could probably open a small Broadway museum."
"You still can."
"And maybe I will, someday. I still collect stuff." She paused to eat another bite of her pancake. "I have a Broadway vlog, too," she said, and her cheeks and neck turned pink.
"Wow, that's great." Greg loved meeting a person so openly into something, so passionate. He made a mental note to check out her vlog. "Are you doing reviews, or reaction videos, or interviews?"
Sylvia raised her eyebrows at him, pausing with her glass halfway to her mouth.
"Did I say something wrong?" he asked, rewinding the conversation in his head.
"No, no! I'm just surprised you're asking. And that you even know what reaction videos are." She worried her lower lip with her teeth, and it was terribly distracting. Greg blinked and looked down at his plate.
"Collectibles has a huge fandom, so I picked some stuff up along the way. I asked because I'm curious, but if you'd rather not talk about it, that's fine."
She shook her head quickly. "No, as I said, I can talk about it for hours, but I know it's boring
to most people."
"I like how passionate you are." At her raised eyebrows, he chuckled. "Okay, maybe if you were passionate about nuclear physics, I wouldn't ask so many questions, but that's only because I wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. I'm pretty sure I can hold a conversation about Broadway." And if he couldn't, he would call up one of his friends currently working there and ask about stuff before the next date.
The next date. He was already thinking about meeting her again and the word "pretend" slipped from his mind completely. Damn it. He had to be careful or this would end in a disaster. He needed to be on his perfect behavior and not get himself into more trouble.
"I barely passed physics in high school, so you're safe from that." Sylvia scrunched her nose. "Anyway, my vlog is just me in a big, pink wig that started as a cure for my self-consciousness in front of the camera and quickly became a running joke." She ran a hand through her hair and blushed a bit. "I have an occasional guest, but they're my friends and fellow fans—no one actually involved in any production. I talk about the shows I saw. Sometimes, when I haven't been to a show for a few weeks, I do a news video—like when there is exciting casting news or something new in development." She glanced through the glass but then winced and looked the other way.
Greg turned to see what made her react like that, and he noticed a guy with a camera and three or four people taking photos with their phones. Something turned in his stomach as he looked back at Sylvia, who was biting her lip again, her previous excitement gone.
"I'm sorry, I know that's the point, but I…" She sighed. "I forgot."
He smiled at her, leaning a bit closer over the table. "I forgot, too. And don't worry, your reactions are fine. If it were…" He couldn't quite push the word "real" out of his mouth, so he changed the course. "We're supposed to be natural, and this is what's natural. I'm not going to smile and wave at them—that's not who I am, either."
When he smiled, she answered in kind, even if hers was a bit shaky.
"You were telling me about the vlog," he said, trying to distract her from the onlookers.
"Actually, I was trying not to ask about the elephant in the room," she admitted.
He frowned. "Elephant in the room?" Their situation was so bizarre, he didn't know what she was referring to, exactly.
She tilted her head in a gesture of obvious disbelief. "Your new project. The one you've come to New York for."
Oh. Right. He looked down at his half-empty plate. "I'm sorry, but I can't talk about it. I know we have a NDA, but I have a different one, too, and it's…complicated." He tried to hold his grimace back.
"I get it. That's why I was trying not to ask." She glanced down for a second before lifting her head to meet his gaze again. "Can you tell me what made you do it, at least? Without giving me any details?"
"My friend has been trying to drag me here for years now." Greg smiled at the memory of various projects Charlie had wanted to pull him into. "And I wanted to, but every time, the details didn't come through—either the people, the scheduling, or the project itself. But last year, I started to think about it more and more."
He'd wanted a new challenge and a break. He and Janice, his co-star in the last Collectibles movie, had decided to split after dating for a few months, and while it was amicable for the both of them, it seemed to infuriate Marlow, who thought their relationship was marketing gold. If the man had hated him before for no reason Greg could figure out, after the split he finally had one. But Greg had had enough of the guy's growing pettiness at that point.
"Then this project came along, and I jumped at the opportunity," he continued out loud. "This time, everything came together nicely, even it was a hard battle with the studio."
"Until the fiasco last night," Sylvia added quietly, and he nodded.
A second later, his phone started ringing, and when he pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the caller ID, he winced. Speak of the devil. It was Michael Lee, his go-to person at Dot Entertainment. Greg excused himself from the table and went to the bathroom to take the call. When the door closed behind him, he took a deep breath and swiped to answer.
CHAPTER FIVE
SYLVIA WATCHED Greg go and curled both hands over her almost empty glass of juice. The phone call broke their cozy little bubble, and now the reality hit her once again. When she braved a glance through the window, the guy with the big camera was still on the other side of the street, and there were a few different people with their cell phones out.
Great.
She let her hair fall onto her face. She knew being photographed was the plan—knew it was what they were counting on—but it was still hard not to jump out of her seat and run away to hide. And now that she was here alone, it seemed even more difficult than before.
To distract herself, she pulled out her own phone. There were a bunch of texts and a few calls, and Sylvia realized she had forgotten to turn the sound in her phone back on this morning when she woke up. Judging from the number of the notifications, she could guess the story had broken, but she decided not to check what it turned out being. She would learn all about it when they got to the office.
Or when Greg came back to the table.
Sylvia glanced at the bathroom door. She hoped it wouldn't be bad news. And sure, a part of it was her own desire to see him on stage, but she also wanted it for Greg. It was important to him, if the way he smiled as he talked about it was any indication, and she could understand that. She knew how it felt to try to do something for herself against other people's opinions.
She would agree to much more than pretend dating to help make it work for Greg.
That was a realization that needed a close inspection—and possibly a lot of denial—but for now, she had to push it aside for later, since her phone vibrated in her hand. Nate was calling.
"Hello, big brother." She tried to put as much cheerfulness in her voice as possible, but she winced at the results.
"Hey. You still suck at acting, so don't bother," Nate told her dryly.
"Shut up. I'm playing the role of my life right now." Sylvia glanced at the bathroom door. Still nothing.
"Yeah, I'm sure playing Greg Abrams's girlfriend is a hardship."
Nate got her there.
"Listen," he went on, dropping the teasing, "the photos are out, but it's not as bad as it could've been. In print, it's out in Seen Out, and online sites are picking it up, but Kevin has already found a few amateur photos of your breakfast date, too, so it's going well."
"Already?" Sylvia glanced through the window. The paparazzo was gone, and only a couple of teenage girls were still standing on the other side of the street, staring at her without shame. Their phones were pointed right in her direction, and the girls were probably waiting for Greg to reappear.
"Social media is both the cure and the cause of a lot of problems of today's world." Nate's dry tone in her ear stopped her from getting anxious again. "Let's be glad it's on our side for now."
Sylvia sighed. "I'll take it."
"How's Greg?"
She stared at the bathroom door, willing it to open and dreading it at the same time. "Went to take the call a few minutes ago and hasn't come back yet. What do we do if they tell him to return to L.A.?"
"Don't stress over it right now. They shouldn't make any sudden decisions. They're well aware that if he ran back home now, it would look worse. That's not what they want. If they care about his reputation backfiring at them at all and the whole thing isn't just a power play, of course."
If. Sylvia didn't like the alternative. Greg mentioned someone having it out for him, but it couldn't be this bad, could it?
"They should have no problems buying the girlfriend story," Nate continued. "Media will move on from the photos from last night to the ones from your dates, and then Dot should let it go. They're difficult, but they don't want to be too difficult either. They know the actors talk, and if the word gets around that they're being unreasonable, they may not get people they w
ant in the future."
"I hope you're right." Sylvia sat back in her chair. "Otherwise, this whole thing would be a waste of time."
Nate snorted. "As I said, it's hard for me to believe you're suffering that much."
"We're only pretending," she reminded him in a low tone to make sure no one would overhear.
She got a laugh and "See you in a bit" in response before Nate disconnected the call, but before the irritation could settle in, the bathroom door finally opened and Greg walked out.
His face was blank and Sylvia couldn't read him. As she watched him move through the café, various scenarios ran through her head, and most of them involved some guy in a suit on the other side of the country, screaming for Greg to get on the next plane to L.A.
She waited until he sat down before asking, "And?"
Greg shrugged and tilted his head. "It's not as bad as I was afraid it would be, which is great. But they're watching closely now, so we'll see."
"And how are you doing?" she asked, looking at him carefully. At some point between last night and now, Greg had stopped being a movie star, a surreal occurrence in her life, and had become just a man—with his own feelings, hopes, and frustrations. A man whom Sylvia felt drawn to, despite all the pep talks she'd been giving herself.
"I'm okay." He finished his coffee. "Maybe it's time we head out to the office, though?"
Sylvia nodded but couldn't help being disappointed. Their bubble from earlier was gone, and it was hard to come back to reality, even if the photos hadn't become a disaster after all.
When they left the café, Greg caught her hand in his and tangled their fingers together, squeezing them for a moment. Sylvia wasn't used to holding hands in the street—even if any of her ex-boyfriends had been inclined to do it, the fast-moving crowd made it difficult a lot of the time—but she relaxed into it and enjoyed it. Greg's hand was warm and solid, and she only hoped she wasn't blushing as she squashed the giddy feeling in her stomach at that simple touch.