Falling into You

by Abrams, Lauren

  It’s never been my intention to play games with Hallie, but Sophia doesn’t need to know that. It would just be more ammunition for her. The way she’s talking about Hallie like she’s some science experiment is making me angry. On the other hand, she seems genuinely protective. I nod at her.

  “It’s a fling, and she knows that,” I offer. That’s an opinion I plan on changing, but I keep that part to myself.

  She’s satisfied. “Well, good, then. Are you planning on returning my friend in the near future? I have plans, you know. There’s a club downtown that we’re supposed to go dancing at and there’s a party there…”

  I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to propose my deal. “I’m not trying to intrude on your trip. But I do like her. I’m going to be busy next week, so you’ll have plenty of time to play with your friend. I’m hoping she’ll agree to stay with me until Friday. I have a lot going on, and it would be nice to have a distraction. I promise I will be careful with her. I fucking realize she isn’t my usual fare.” I’m trying to keep my voice as casual as possible.

  Sophia tilts her head, pondering. “Five days? That’s it? And then she’ll be back here for the last week of her trip?”

  We’re bickering over her, wheeling and dealing over a real, live person and it makes me a little bit sick, but I can’t help it—I want her with me. If that means I have to barter with Sophia Pearce, then I’ll barter.

  “Five days.” For now.

  She lifts her glass to mine. “I assume the two of you have discussed this? That you’re not enslaving my friend without her consent?”

  “No.”

  “I guess five days will have to do. I expect her here on Friday so that we can hit the party circuit. I’ve gotten a few calls requesting her presence.” She laughs at the look of anger on my face. “All it takes is a little red dress. Speaking of, I should make sure she doesn’t need any help getting ready.”

  Sophia’s taking off down the hallway, and then she turns back to me. “Tell her that she really does need to call Ben, though. He means the world to her. There’s history there, you know. They’ve got something that you just can’t compete with.” She winks at me before disappearing into her room.

  I’m still thinking about Hallie and Ben and history, whatever that might be, fifteen minutes later.

  “Okay. You have to work with what you’ve got,” Hallie calls out from the hallway. She twirls in front of me, handing over a large canvas bag. “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing. Just looking at the most beautiful girl in the world.”

  And she is. She’s somehow managed to get ready in under thirty minutes. With two sisters, I understand that this is something of an accomplishment. She’s wearing a low-cut black dress and her hair is loose over her shoulders.

  When she smiles at me, all thoughts of asking her to clarify exactly what “history” means are forgotten.

  Chapter 19

  HALLIE

  “It’s going to be fine.” Chris’s hand is on my arm, and he trying to steady me as we’re weaving through white-clothed tables. We’re following the hostess, who is at least six feet tall and is in desperate need of a sandwich and some dye to cover up her dark roots. While these weren’t exactly charitable thoughts, I wasn’t blind to the way her eyes attached themselves to Chris as we walked in, or the way in which her hands had lingered on his arm just a little too long as she took my bag to put it in storage.

  “You know I have that verbal diarrhea thing going on. There’s at least a 75% chance that I will completely screw up this movie deal for you.”

  “You absolutely will not. And the verbal diarrhea is one of the most charming things about you.”

  Ugh. He really wasn’t going to let me get out of this.

  I glance back up at the crystal chandelier, and giggle a little bit at the over-the-top décor. Apparently, the designer had been going for a New Orleans bordello. There are fleur de lis symbols everywhere, dark booths are covered in red velvet in the corners, and the candlesticks look like they came directly out of a bad vampire novel. The costumes also seem to have been designed with prostitutes in mind: fishnet stockings, short black skirt and bustiers.

  I snicker quietly as a waitress offers a “lan-nappy” (I think she was going for lagniappe) to a table.

  Chris grabs my arm. “Ce la vie.”

  I look at him curiously.

  “It’s the only bad French I know. I suppose you speak it fluently, judging by your conversation with the Maître D.”

  “Peut-être.” His eyes widen. “My dad was French-Canadian,” I offer.

  “Alan’s a sucker for French. Use that.”

  Chris had briefed me on both Alan and Marcus while we had ridden over in the car. I’m trying to remember the little factoids when we arrive at one of the red velvet booths.

  “Here you are, sir,” the hostess says, smiling at Chris and dismissing me.

  There’s a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice, and a hulking man with thick brown hair is shaking Chris’s hand vigorously.

  “So glad you’re on board,” he tells Chris, his eyes all lit up. “Just those pesky fucking details to work out and we will be all set. I wanted to get started on the character tonight, but since your agent is being a giant pain in my ass, we’ll just have to wait on that and celebrate instead. The rest of the cast is pretty much set up, and there will be a read-through in a few weeks to get you all comfortable with each other…”

  The man is droning on and on, only stopping to speak to the waitress to order more champagne. I paste a polite stare on my face and look at the other man across the table, who’s staring at me suspiciously.

  He smiles and holds out a deeply tanned hand to me. “The date, I presume.”

  “Marcus, I presume.”

  “Chris does manage to find himself some pretty ones. Let me guess. Waitress slash actress?”

  I bristle at his presumptuous words and smile sweetly at him instead. Chris is absorbed in talking to the director.

  “Hallie,” I offer.

  His eyes roam over me and they turn to ice quickly. “The last thing Chris needs right now is any fucking distractions. What do you want? Bit part in a movie? TV show? I should be able to find your something in the lower tier, as long as you’re willing to work a little bit of your magic on the fucking casting couch.” He hisses the words under his breath, only halting to shake Chris’s hand briefly.

  I burst out laughing, because this Marcus is exactly as I pictured him. All of the phone calls and Chris’s expressions while speaking to him had drawn a pretty close approximation of the man standing before me. Both Chris and Alan turn to us, and I cover my mouth. Marcus is just staring at me like I’m a crazy person.

  “Sorry.” My earlier nervousness is lost at my amusement in finding Marcus almost exactly like the Hollywood agents in the movies. “I’m Hallie,” I offer to the burly man.

  “Enchante,” he replies, kissing my hand.

  “Parlez-vous Francais?”

  “Oh, no, no.” He lets out a long belly laugh, and I warm to him immediately. I’m deciding that this dinner might be fun after all. “But I wouldn’t say no to learning some.” He glances over my body with the same appraising glance as Marcus and I’m strangely pleased that he nods at Chris approvingly.

  Marcus is still looking at me like I’m crazy, and as Chris and Alan settle in the booth, he whispers in my ear. “Think about it.”

  “I’m not an actress. Or a waitress. Just a college kid on vacation from real life,” I whisper back to him, smiling over my shoulder. “No worries.”

  Two hours later, after endless shop talk and some discussion about the best vacation destinations in Asia, and what I think was a very successful attempt at beefing up some of the dialogue in the script so that the actors didn’t sound like wooden toy soldier spies, I’m actually having a pretty good time. If anyone had tried to tell me three days earlier that I would be sitting and making jokes with the director of Aliens and Huma
ns in Love (actual title, seriously), a Hollywood agent, and the new James Ross, I would have laughed in their face. But here I am.

  I’m comfortable enough to call Alan out on what’s an obvious lie about a round of gold he recently played.

  “You did not shoot an 83 at Augusta.” I’m completely confident in my assertion.

  “I did.”

  He’s holding out his hands in front of me in a mock golf grip, and I’m staring at it and shaking my head.

  “Maybe on the Par 3 course. For one thing, your grip is all wrong. I would estimate your handicap at closer to 25. That means that the 83 was more like a 103 at Augusta, if you had a good day.”

  I take his fingers in mine and twist them, showing him alternate grips.

  “You have to hold the club loosely enough so that you can use your legs and shoulders to generate power. You, on the other hand, are definitely a hang on to the club for your life kind of guy. That leads to either a slice or a hook. Basically, a day at Augusta for you is torture. How many balls did you lose in the trees? 10? 15?”

  He gasps with laughter. “It was 12. How the hell did you know that?”

  “I’ve been playing since I was four.” I shrug.

  “Handicap?”

  “You really don’t want to know.”

  “Why not?”

  He doesn’t want to know. I really have been playing since I was four, and honestly, anyone who’s been playing since they were that young has to get pretty good eventually. It was my parent’s compromise—my mom forced the dance lessons, my dad forced the golf ones. Twice a week for fourteen years. Endless putts and chips and driving ranges and junior championships.

  A girl who can beat the boys in golf has a better resume than summa cum laude at Harvard, he would tell my mother, who would moan and groan and say that it was going to ruin my posture.

  I stopped playing for three years after he died, because I couldn’t face the thought of a weekend round without him sitting beside me in the golf cart. One day, when I was mad at the world, and him for leaving me, and Ben for failing to notice that I was a real, human girl, I dusted off the clubs and went out alone for a sunrise round, and I felt my father there, on the golf course, sitting beside me, offering a million suggestions about my stance and swing and club selection. I’ve played a couple of times a week since. It keeps him alive for me in a way that nothing else does.

  It also looks like my dad was right about the resume, too. Golf stories have gotten me through more than a few awkward dinners when Greenview parents have come to visit, and Alan’s looking at me with new respect now.

  “It’ll crush your ego.” I grin at him. I’m starting to like Alan better and better.

  Chris is staring at me like I just landed from an alien planet.

  Alan’s bellowing at the waitress, ordering more champagne. “Tell me.”

  “4.”

  “From the girls’ tees?”

  “From the back ones.” The expression on his face changes into amusement.

  Marcus is laughing now, too. I guess my comment about being a college kid soothed his nerves, because he’s been perfectly composed all night, telling stories about his earliest days in Hollywood, slaving away as a delivery boy and getting his first clients (a pair of screenwriters) into a meeting with HBO.

  “This I have to see,” Alan’s booming voice announces.

  Apparently, everyone in Hollywood just screams at each other all day, because if anything, Alan’s voice is even louder than Marcus’s.

  “Next time you make it to Georgia, we can play. You can sneak me into Augusta and I’ll see if I can work on that swing of yours.” I grin at him. It’s a joke, but only kind of. It’s been my dream to play there since the first time I saw it on TV when I was a kid.

  “You live in Georgia?”

  “I do now. I go to Greenview.”

  “Greenview? Well, I’ll be damned.”

  His oldest daughter is currently scouting colleges and harbors some fantasy of going to school in the South. Thirty minutes later, after imparting some of my infinite wisdom about the mysteries of teenage girls (after all, I’m still technically one), we’re old friends.

  “Ok, ok, you’re softened me up.” He hands a credit card to the scantily clad waitress and turns to Marcus. “Your little ringer here should have handled the negotiations, though. She got me to admit my real handicap and managed to soothe the nagging thought that my daughter is secretly involved with a cult, so I can only guess how much money she could have taken out of my pocketbook.”

  Marcus gives me a sidelong look and then turns back to Alan. “The last offer stands.”

  Alan groans. “Fine. I’ll get our lawyers to send a copy to you first thing in the morning. Get it signed and everything will be ready for the press conference on Friday.”

  Marcus slaps Alan’s hand and grins at him. “Then, we have a deal.”

  Alan turns to Chris, then. “I’ll think about your ideas about James.” He turns to me with a smile. “I will consider your notes on the script, too, even though I still think you’re wrong about the Jane angle.”

  I grin at him before he addresses Chris again. “I’ll be at the press conference Friday to introduce you before you answer some of the questions. There’s the read–through in a couple of weeks, so you better get your ass ready. I’ll be in touch with Marcus.”

  Chris shakes his hand. “I’m looking forward to it, Alan.”

  Alan barks at the waitress. “Bring them another bottle of champagne. And anything else the lady wants.” He winks at me as he gets up from the table, and I stand up to shake his hand, but he pulls me in for a hug instead.

  “Good luck with Lily. I promise that it’s all downhill from here. I think you’re through the worst of it. And tell her to text me when she gets the visit date set up, so I can blow up my air mattress for her. I do think she would really like Greenview.”

  “I’ll do that. And you and I need to have a golf date.”

  “I offer reasonable rates on lessons.” I should have just shut my mouth. I’m sitting here, teasing the big-time Hollywood director like he’s no one at all. I cover my mouth in horror.

  Instead of getting angry, he merely smiles. “I’ll have to take you up on that.”

  He looks at Chris and opens his mouth as if to say something, but just shakes his head again and looks at Marcus instead. “Ah, Marcus, to be young again.”

  Marcus gets up with Alan. “Young and foolish.” He slaps Chris on the back. “Let’s leave the kids to it, then.”

  He air kisses my cheek and leans in to whisper in my ear. “The offer still stands. I may have to up it to one of the first-tier shows, judging from your little performance with Alan. Come on. Everyone wants to be an actress.”

  I slap his arm away, because he’s joking. At least, I think he is. “Maybe I could be an agent instead.”

  He laughs and it’s the first genuine sound I’ve heard from his mouth. “Now, that could be arranged.” He leans closer to whisper again. “As long as you drop my boy here, that is.”

  I glance at him, and his eyes are serious. “Nothing personal, sweetheart,” he adds, throwing his hands up. “But love is a far more dangerous thing that other kinds of addiction.”

  I shake my head and shrug in response. He’s an asshole, but he’s trying to protect Chris, which is kind of sweet in a weirdly deranged way. Marcus is still hustling Alan about another one of his actors as they make their way through the restaurant, which makes me smile.

  After they leave, I grab the bottle of champagne greedily and pour myself a glass. All of the food had come in portions that hardly filled a fork and had layers of foam and little clear beads of chemicals, so I also take the opportunity to dig into the bread basket. I’m shoving the bread into my mouth and washing it down with the champagne when I realize that Chris is staring at me.

  “You’re amazing,” he says softly.

  “No, you’re amazing. They absolutely loved you. Alan even sai
d that he would think about changes to the script. So, maybe you won’t be the star of the worst-written action series of all time, after all.” I grin. “Seriously, though. You killed it.”

  “You just made me look good. All that stuff about Greenview? He was practically eating out of your hand.”

  I shake off the compliment. “It’s nothing. He seems like a pretty good dad, and it sounds like Lily would really like Greenview, so I was happy to try to sell it to him. I’m a Greenview ambassador anyways, so I host visiting students all the time…”

  I’m babbling again, and he silences me with a look.

  “I’ve never even seen Alan laugh before. And I’ve certainly never seen anyone call him out on his bullshit. How did you know that he was lying about the gold?”

  “There’s no way he shot an 83. Not at freaking Augusta. No way. I knew it from the second he showed me that terrible grip. He definitely crosses over on his swing, and there’s no way you get around Augusta at 9 over or 11 over or anything under 100 with that grip.”

  Chris laughs in amusement, and covers my hand with his. He glances at his phone, which is buzzing at him. “It’s Diana. I’m just going to tell her that it went okay, so she doesn’t go crazy.”

  I take another long sip of champagne as he talks to his sister. I use the opportunity to stare at him. If it’s even possible, he gets more handsome each time I look at his face. I slide my hand under the table to touch his thigh as he hangs up and he grabs my hand in his and kisses my palm. I take a deep breath.

  “Five days,” he says, looking at me directly in the eye.

  “And then you become a movie star and I go back to Sophia’s,” I say, trying to make my voice bright. Five days. It would have to be enough.

  “Hallie, I want to talk about what this is. What we are.”

  I put my finger to his lips. I don’t want to hear promises. I want to be with him in the here and now.