The Monday Girl (The Girl Duet #1)

by Julie Johnson

  “God, your face,” he gasps. “Firestone, I’m just fucking with you.”

  “You’re joking?” I pull in a relieved breath as I watch him wipe tears from his eyes. “You’re joking,” I confirm, crossing my arms over my chest. “Asshole .”

  He’s still chuckling when the door swings inward to reveal a middle-aged bald man in wire-rimmed glasses. I recognize him from numerous award shows — not one’s I’ve attended, of course; one’s I’ve watched from my couch dressed in ratty pajamas, eating whipped cream straight out of the can as I critique red-carpet dress choices like I’m some kind of haute couture authority.

  Sloan Stanhope is barefoot and grinning as he gestures us inside, booming out a greeting.

  “Wyatt, my man!”

  “Sloan, good to see you.”

  The two engage in a strange handshake-hug ritual. When they break apart, I find myself the subject of Sloan’s acute study.

  “So,” he murmurs, examining me like an inscrutable piece of artwork in a modern museum — the kind you squint at as though that might somehow help discern its meaning. “This is her .”

  Wyatt nods. “Perfect, isn’t she? Knew it the moment I saw her.”

  Sloan continues to stare at me.

  Wyatt continues to congratulate himself.

  I continue to pretend it’s not strange that they’re discussing me like an inanimate object, or that I still haven’t the faintest idea what’s happening here.

  “It’ll all depend on the chemistry between them, of course,” Sloan murmurs, then claps his hands. “Let’s get to it, shall we? No point waiting. Come on, come in.”

  “Is Dunn already here?” Wyatt asks, following Sloan deeper into the house.

  “Oh, yes, he’s around somewhere. Probably out by the pool.” Sloan leads us into a gorgeous kitchen full of white marble and stainless appliances. He pulls a bottle of green juice from the transparent sub-zero refrigerator and holds it out to me. “Kombucha?”

  I shake my head and try to hide my revulsion. Wyatt’s snort when he catches sight of my expression indicates my efforts were wasted.

  “Wyatt, you want one?” Sloan calls, his head inside the fridge.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Something else? Purified water? Cold-brew? Oh, I have this excellent new pressed chia-seed juice you should try, it’s chock full of antioxidants—”

  “Actually, I’d like something,” I interject.

  Sloan whips around at the sound of my voice and blinks as though he’s just noticed me for the first time. “Name it.”

  “An explanation would be great.”

  “An explanation?”

  “Yeah.” I lean a hip against the white marble island. “You know… as to what the hell I’m doing here.”

  A bemused expression twists Sloan’s face as he glances at Wyatt. “You didn’t tell her?”

  “And spoil the surprise?” Wyatt laughs. “Of course not.”

  I take a deep breath and remind myself it would likely be a bad career move to crack glass kombucha bottles over the heads of two of the most powerful men in Hollywood.

  “Can someone please just tell me?” I ask between clenched teeth.

  “All right, all right. No need to torture her anymore.” Sloan sips his vile green juice as he walks across the kitchen toward a set of sliding glass doors that lead onto his patio. As I step out after Wyatt, I bite my lip so I won’t gasp at the incredible view of the valley below. I’ve never seen LA from quite this angle before.

  “Nice, huh?” Wyatt mutters.

  I don’t say anything; I’m too busy gawking.

  “Dunn!” Sloan is standing by the side of a large infinity pool at the edge of the patio, intermittently sipping his juice and bellowing at the tanned, male figure swimming laps. “DUNN! Get out of the damn pool!”

  The swimmer finally seems to realize he’s in demand because his arms stop windmilling through the water and a second later, he’s braced his hands against the side of the pool and heaved himself out. Dripping wet, he grabs a towel off the nearest chaise lounge and walks to Sloan’s side. I linger in Wyatt’s shadow as we approach, staring at the water droplets making slow trails down the swimmer’s washboard abs and reminding myself to breathe.

  “No need to yell, Sloan,” the water god says, his voice muffled by the towel as he dries his face and dark head of hair. “I’m here. I have plans at six, though, so can we get this over with as soon as possible?”

  Sloan’s expression turns thunderous. “Since it’s your fault we have to recast this role in the first place, you will stay and read lines until we are satisfied, plans be damned. It takes as long as it takes. But now that we have—” He glances at me a bit desperately.

  “Kat,” I prompt.

  “Right, now that we have Kat here to read with you, I hope we can put all this nasty casting drama behind us and make a goddamned movie.” He takes an aggressive sip of his juice and looks skyward. “Actors. If I could somehow make movies without them, I wouldn’t need to meditate…”

  He murmurs something else under his breath, but I’m too busy staring at Wyatt to pay much attention. Wyatt looks entirely relaxed, grinning back at me.

  “I’m here to read for a part?” I hiss at him.

  “Of course,” he says cheerfully. “Way better than spending the night as a call girl, am I right?”

  I shake my head, exasperated.

  “Kat,” Sloan says, calling my focus back to him. He gestures to the man at his side, who’s finally stopped toweling off, and my entire body goes rigid when I catch sight of his face. “This is Grayson Dunn,” Sloan is saying, but his voice sounds far away. “If your screen test goes well, you’ll be co-stars in my new project. Assuming you’re free to start filming next week. We’re on a rather tight timeframe…”

  I’m frozen, starting at the chiseled features of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” four years running. His gorgeous face puts his perfect abdominal muscles to shame, but that’s not why I’m suddenly finding it so hard to breathe.

  I know Grayson Dunn.

  We met ten years ago, long before he was the biggest action hero in Hollywood, on a daytime kids’ show called Busy Bees . He was older than me by a handful of years, and his time on the show didn’t last long — at fourteen, he landed his first big movie contract and disappeared from the ranks of our cast like a phantom, leaving half the girls nursing broken hearts they never fully recovered from. In the years since, his rise to fame has been meteoric… and his heartbreak record has only grown more impressive.

  His eyes meet mine, green and bottomless, and suddenly my tongue feels swollen to three times its normal size. I open my mouth to say something witty and memorable — like hi or long time no see, asshole — but before I can vocalize a single word, he’s shoved his hand into the space between us.

  “Grayson Dunn. It’s nice to meet you.”

  I flinch, stunned, and feel my back hit the solid warmth of Wyatt’s chest. His big hands close over my shoulders to steady me.

  Of all the things I thought Grayson Douche-Nozzle Dunn might say or do if we ever crossed paths again, pretending not to remember me wasn’t one of them. After what he did when we were kids… after the hell he put me through…

  A split second later, it occurs to me that perhaps he truly doesn’t remember me — that I was such an insignificant thread in the woven patchwork of his past I’ve simply been deleted from recollection, like a foreign language you don’t use daily or the ability to read any sheet music more advanced than Chopsticks .

  I’ve still made no move to take his hand, and the air grows stale and awkward the longer it remains suspended between us. If he’s not going to acknowledge that we know each other, I’m certainly not going to.

  “Does she speak?” Grayson mutters out the corner of his mouth at Wyatt.

  “Usually,” Wyatt replies, giving my shoulders a small shake. “You still with us, baby?”

  I sigh and pull out of his grip. “K
at Firestone,” I murmur slowly, reaching out and sliding my palm against Grayson’s.

  There’s a flash of something in the depths of his stare as his large hand engulfs mine, but it’s gone before I can decide if it’s attraction, recognition, or the simple interest that comes along with meeting someone new. He releases his grip almost instantly, then turns to Sloan.

  “So, are we doing this now? I really do have plans at six…”

  “Yes, yes, we all know how important your social agenda is.” Sloan drains the rest of his juice and walks back toward the house. “Then again, if you’d been a little less focused on the women in your life, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

  Wyatt scoffs. “He has a point.”

  “Am I missing something?” I ask.

  “No,” Grayson mutters.

  “Yes,” Wyatt counters. “Our golden boy here couldn’t keep it in his pants with the last actress we’d lined up to play this part — they hooked up, he pulled his usual vanishing act, and that was it. They couldn’t work together. Set us back months.” Wyatt shoots Grayson a sour look. “Only silver lining of the whole damn mess is that we hadn’t started filming. That would’ve been an even bigger nightmare.”

  “You talk like I’m the first actor in history to date a co-star.” Grayson’s tone borders on petulant.

  “That’s the thing though. You didn’t date her.” Wyatt shakes his head. “You added her to your fuck-buddy roster.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Grayson insists. “You’ll get the wrong idea about me.”

  “The thing is, I already have a pretty good idea about who you are,” I inform him, tilting my head and contorting my features into something of a grimace. “And, to be candid… I doubt anything you say at this point is going to alter my perception.”

  Grayson’s eyes narrow and he opens his mouth to speak, but I cut him off.

  “What is this mystery project, anyway?” I ask Wyatt. “I can’t picture Stanhope taking on an action blockbuster, but… based on current casting choices…” My eyes dart to Grayson, who looks suddenly insulted.

  “I don’t only do action movies,” he growls. “I have range.”

  “Range,” I echo dryly. “Like… sometimes you play a shirtless military general, and other times you play a shirtless superhero?”

  Wyatt snorts.

  Grayson’s eyes narrow. “Did I do something to offend you that I’m unaware of? Because you seem to have a problem with me.”

  “Nothing at all,” I say sweetly. “No problem here.”

  Our eyes clash like swords on a battlefield. Wyatt coughs gently to break the tension.

  “Katharine, the movie is called Uncharted . In a nutshell: it’s a love story about two people who are the sole survivors of a plane crash on an uncharted island in the South Pacific, who fall in love while they’re stranded, despite the fact that he’s married to someone else back in the real world and she’s several years younger than him. Sloan and I have been working to adapt the screenplay from the original novel for a few years now, and we’ve finally gotten it to the point where it actually reads like a movie. I’m funding this independently, without AXC Studios, so we’ve got a limited budget… and Sloan has three projects lined up starting next month, so we’ve got a much shorter shooting schedule than any of us are accustomed to… but that’s half the fun of it.”

  “Wait… did you say Uncharted ?” My eyes fly to his face and my heart starts beating faster. “Based on the book?”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Only about six times.” Excitement is churning through my veins. “It’s brilliant.”

  Wyatt’s face contorts in surprise and he stares at me in stunned silence.

  “You know,” I say dryly, “If I were a lesser girl, I’d be insulted that you’re this shocked I know how to read.”

  “No, no.” He shakes himself out of his stupor. “It’s not that you’ve read it, it’s that you’ve even heard of it.” His lips twist. “It wasn’t exactly a New York Times bestseller.”

  “Who gives a shit?” I ask, shrugging. “Some of the best books I’ve ever read are the least critically acclaimed. In fact, the more praise something gets from the masses, the less I seem to like it.”

  Grayson mutters something that sounds like “hipster” under his breath, and I shoot him a dark look before turning back to Wyatt.

  “Anyway ,” I say pointedly. “It’s a great book. Poignant. Packed with gorgeous prose. It has a kickass heroine. A badass hero. A slow-building, self-destructive love story… What’s not to like about that?”

  Grayson snorts.

  I ignore him, sighing dreamily as I recall the first time I flipped from cover to cover, clutching the paperback with white-tipped fingers until the wee hours of the night, desperate to know what would happen to the couple in the story — two people who’d learned to survive, to even thrive , on their isolated island, and ultimately been ripped from it… and each other… when the rescue they’d once prayed for finally arrived.

  The story of Violet and Beck touched me deeply, in a way only the best books can. It was the most delicious kind of novel. Sumptuous, sensual. I wanted to race to the end but also savor every word, to let the author’s thoughts roll around in my mouth for a while before I swallowed them down and made them a part of me. Alone in the darkness, I’d traced my fingertip across the embossed letters of the name on the front cover, feeling sad and strangely lonely at the thought that I’d never meet Tywin G. Hassat, the man responsible for inspiring such emotion inside me.

  The first time I read Uncharted , I actually Google-searched for any scrap of information I could find about him — desperate to know who this stranger was, out there in the world, who could create a piece of art so profoundly personal to me. To my lasting disappointment, scouring the internet uncovered almost nothing about the author or his life.

  “Besides the original crash scene, most of the movie is just the two of you,” Wyatt says, bringing my focus back to the moment.

  “So… I’d be playing Violet?”

  Wyatt nods. “Yes.”

  “Shit.” I’m barely breathing as the prospect of bringing one of my favorite literary heroines to life on screen tumbles around inside my head. Violet . The off-beat protagonist who sucked me into the pages of a paperback and held me captive for days; the girl who falls for a man she spends half the novel hating; the woman who falls for her own damn self as the story unfolds. One of the best parts of Uncharted is watching her discover how badass she is over the course of three hundred pages.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit ,” I repeat under my breath, barely able to believe this is happening.

  “I take it this means she’s excited?” Grayson asks.

  “I assume so,” Wyatt agrees. “She hasn’t even heard the best part yet. I’m worried it might break her.”

  “What could possibly top this?” I demand, dumbfounded.

  “We’ll be shooting the plane crash scenes here on an AXC soundstage, taking advantage of the green screens and sets we’ve already constructed, using some extras to play the other passengers and flight attendants… but the rest will be filmed with a small crew on location.” He pauses, grin widening. “A beach in Oahu.”

  “Hawaii?” I suck in a breath. “I’ve always wanted to go to there.”

  “Well, aloha , baby. We’ll be there next week.” He sobers slightly. “Tricky part is, we have less than three weeks to get everything done if we want it ready in time to debut at the film festivals this spring. Editing and post-production take at least three months.”

  I blink. “You want to film the entire movie in three weeks.”

  Wyatt nods. “Starting Monday.”

  “Starting Monday,” I echo faintly.

  “You’ve read the book, which should help you get in character relatively quickly — that’ll definitely help.” Wyatt’s eyes scan my expression. “Breathe, Katharine.”

  I suck in a breath as I
glance over at Grayson. His exquisite green eyes are watching me carefully, waiting for me to put the pieces together.

  “So, you…” I swallow hard. “I assume you’re playing—”

  “Beck,” he supplies, winking. “Your onscreen love.”

  I glance at Wyatt. “You sure he’s cut out for it? Beck isn’t your average action movie hero. He’s got some heavy emotional shit to contend with.”

  Wyatt frowns at me, but his eyes are laughing. “Part of the reason we cast Grayson is that no one will expect him to star in a film like this — especially an indie film. Not at this point in his career. The shock value of an action star in a quiet, character-driven project about loss and love and learning to survive when you’ve lost everything you’ve ever known… It’s going to rock Sundance and the rest of the festivals.”

  “I can see that, I suppose,” I concede.

  “Generous of you,” Grayson says, scowling.

  “You know…” Wyatt is looking slowly back and forth from me to Grayson. “Normally, I don’t encourage such open hostility between co-stars… but I think it’ll actually be perfect for Violet and Beck. If you remember, they pretty much loathe each other at the beginning of the book.”

  “So, you think there’s a chance I might actually get the part?” I ask, barely daring to hope.

  Wyatt nods. “I’d say more than a chance.”

  “If I were a hugger, I’d hug the fuck out of you right now, Wyatt Hastings.”

  “Not a hugger?” Grayson asks quietly. “What does that even mean? Who doesn’t like hugs?”

  “Me.”

  Wyatt laughs. “Well, thank god for that. Really trying to maintain an air of professionalism. You know, since I’ll basically be your boss, if you get this gig. Hugs tend fuck with my street cred as a producer.”

  I roll my eyes. “You have street cred?”

  “You can try to act aloof and indifferent, but I know you’re excited about this part.” Wyatt leans in, eyes twinkling. “Admit it.”

  “I’ll admit no such thing.” I shrug, trying to act nonchalant and not like every dream I’ve ever had is suddenly within reach. “If I got the part, it’d be cool. I guess. Whatever.”