by April Fire
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
A-List Temptation
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Cutting Ice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Hit Hard
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
Take the Leap
April Fire
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Author April Fire. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the author, except in the brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover Artwork – © 20XX L.J. Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations
This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences only. All sexually active characters depicted in this publication are 18 years of age or older. Please do not buy if strong sexual situations and explicit language offends you.
Chapter One
Tennessee
“Dominic fucking Callahan? He’s going to be working here?”
My jaw hung open when I heard the news, my brain ricocheting around my head as I tried to make sense of the words. It was just a name, like any other, but to me, that name sounded something like a curse to my ears.
“Yeah, he’ll be starting sometime later this week. What about him?” Natalie, the woman helping strap me into the safety gear I’d need to perform the scene, replied. The safety harness, which usually felt comfortable, suddenly clutched at my chest and knocked all the breath from my body at once and now I was struggling to keep upright. I planted my hands on the desk in front of me, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth.
“Nothing,” I offered in response, but I knew she wasn’t buying it. She cocked an eyebrow at me in the mirror.
“Come on, tell me,” she urged me. “It’s been so boring around here today. I need some gossip.”
“He’s…” I trailed off. How was I meant to tell her about Dominic Callahan? She probably had her own opinions on him, anyway – she’d been working in the industry for years, and anyone with that much experience behind them had caught up with his reputation. It was impossible to ignore, even though I’d managed to avoid him up till then.
“We had a thing, ages ago,” I waved my hand, and found a lump in my throat threatening to make my voice crack. Where the fuck had that come from? It had been years since I’d last laid eyes on him, and yet here I was acting like a crazy schoolgirl with a crush.
“Oh, really?” Natalie grinned at me. “How long ago?”
“Back when we were both training,” I replied. I hadn’t let myself think about this shit for a long time, and now all the memories were coming flooding back to me. Some of them welcome, some of them not so much.
“So, what, seven, eight years?”
“Something like that,” I nodded.
“And how did it end?” she asked.
I turned around and stood up; the harness was on now, and I didn’t want to answer any more questions.
“Am I ready to go?” I replied as though I hadn’t heard her second question. She nodded, and her eyebrow flickered upward to let me know that she could see that I was avoiding the question at hand.
“Good, thanks.” I turned and walked out of the trailer. It was blazingly bright outside, the heat stifling through the layers of safety gear I had to wear to make sure I didn’t end up with a serious injury from what I was about to do. Back when I’d first started, I’d though the rules were tight, but now it seemed like I had to go through four hours of prep just to take a punch.
“Is that her?” I heard a voice squeal from a few feet away, and turned to find myself faced with Julia McMahon. Short, curvy, and ridiculously beautiful, she was the kind of woman people thought of when they pictured a movie star. She paused in front of me, arms spread wide, as the entourage lurking behind her came to an awkward halt and waiting impatiently for her to finish up her encounter with me.
“You’re my stunt double, right?” she remarked.
“That’s me,” I nodded, and she slowly walked around me. I caught the eye of one of her assistants, and we exchanged a look that said just wait till it’s over and she’ll get bored soon. Julia meant well, but being the enormous star that she was meant that she was often way out of touch with how the real world actually worked.
“That’s so cool,” she sighed as she found herself in front of me once more. “Good luck with the scene!”
“Thanks,” I replied, smiling at her tightly, and continued my journey over to set. Julie was a sweet kid and I did like her, but she always seemed to pick the worst possible times to appear and insert herself into situations that had nothing to do with her.
***
The scene didn’t take long, and soon enough I was back in my trailer being freed from all the safety gear they’d put on me to make sure I didn’t come away with so much as a single scratch. Natalie was the one unpacking me, and I could tell that she was bursting to ask me more about Dominic and our relationship but was too polite to bring it up. Thank God for her Southern manners – I cringed at the thought of running through everything that had happened to a stranger after I’d done such a good job putting it from my mind for the last seven years.
“So, what are you up to tonight?” Natalie asked, cocking her eyebrow at me teasingly. “I think Dominic’s going to be heading into town tonight. I could find someone with his number if you want-”
“No, I’m good,” I assured her. “I’m just going straight to the gym and then home. Thanks.”
I ducked out of there before she had a chance to say anything else – or to lock the doors to keep me from leaving until she’d gotten the amount of gossip that she deemed necessary to continue – and blinked against the sunshine burning into my eyes. I hurried to the sidewalk outside the studio, pulling my hood up over my head so no-one would see the insane amounts of make-up I had plastered to my face so I could closer resemble Julia. Maybe that was how I could avoid Dominic when he ended up on set; ask the make-up artists to keep sculpting me into a different
person so he could never figure out who I actually was. Did he even know that I was working on the same set as him? Did he even care? I forced my eyes to the pavement and started counting the cracks under my feet, anything to get my mind off the paranoia currently pulsing through my head. How could it be that I’d spent seven years away from this guy and he still had this kind of power over me?
I arrived back at the apartment building where I was staying for the duration of the shoot and went straight down to the gym. It was pretty tiny, and nothing compared to the enormous space I usually trained in back home, but it had a free weights section and a TV showing some crappy reality show and that would do for now. The place was empty, which was a gift, as I planned to be as loud as humanly possible to work out all the fucking feelings that had come flooding back since I’d heard his name again.
Dominic Callahan. That name used to be something so good to me, so sweet and so pure and so hopeful. We’d met when I was eighteen and he was twenty, just a couple of young nobodies training hard and trying to get their break into the industry. I’d looked up to him so much – he had always been the most daring, the most hard-working, the most adventurous. He was the kind of guy who’d leap from the highest point of our training set just to see how the landing felt, and then go out and spend the night barhopping in LA with nothing but ten dollars in his pocket, just to see how many drinks he could get bought for him. He was savagely smart, the kind of gorgeous that stops traffic, and he knew both. And he was my downfall.
I wasn’t sure when he set his eyes on me specifically. Because he’d worked his way through most of the girls in our course, to the point where his name was usually met with an eyeroll and a knowing sigh. He was the kind of guy that I had dismissed months before he turned his attentions on me, because I wasn’t going to be the one to fall for him. I was going to turn him down and move on like a grown-ass adult and that was going to be it, because I had better things to do than spend my time pining after some playboy when my career was just getting off the ground.
And then, of course, we were paired up to work together on a project. It was the sort of shit you might expect to see in a fish-out-of-water comedy, the nerdy chick focused on her grades getting matched with the gorgeous jock who’d never really paid her that much attention before. I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to let this increased closeness get under my skin.
“Hey,” he sidled over to me on our first day working together. “So, you ready for this?”
“If you are,” I shot back, and he cocked an eyebrow and grinned – a megawatt smile that seemed to put every one of the stage lights around us to shame.
“Tennessee, right?” he confirmed, and I nodded. My name on his lips felt natural, obvious.
“Let’s get this done,” he held his hand out to me. “I want us to be the best couple here.”
I looked down at his hand, debating whether or not I was going to take it. Because it felt like, right then, if I touched him, it would be giving in to everything I had promised myself that I wouldn’t. I had told myself I was better than this, that I was more than this, but there was something about being the center of his attention that seemed to wipe my brain clean. I reached out and slid my hand into his, and he pulled me off in the direction of the safety equipment and just like that I was falling for him.
The next few months were crazy. I was living by myself for the first time, something close to a real adult, and falling in love in a way that no relationship had lived up to before or since. Maybe it was just the intensity of working together on top of dating, but I fell for Dominic faster and harder than I’d ever fallen for anyone before in my life. He was exciting in a way that no-one had ever been exciting to me before – he made me feel alive, when he’d scoop me up in his arms and carry me to the bedroom and throw me down and fuck me senseless. I had never felt that full-body adoration for someone before, the very tips of my fingers tingling every time we were together as though my entire being was trying to tell me that this was it, this was the one. I couldn’t believe I’d been so lucky as to meet the man of my dreams at eighteen. I really, truly believed that Dominic and I were meant to be together, that some cosmic force had drawn us in and guaranteed us this future. He stopped dating anyone else, and soon we were the golden couple of our training group; people asked me what I’d done to tame him, and I didn’t know what to tell them because he hadn’t changed a bit. The only difference was that I was there with him now, and every time he slung his arm around my shoulders and planted a kiss on my temple I still couldn’t figure out what I’d done to earn a guy this perfect.
Back in the gym at my apartment building, I started lifting, pouring all my energy into my squats, dead-lifts and halo curls. The gym had always been my happy place, ever since I’d first walked into one when I was about fifteen. Fitness, strength, power – those were the things that mattered to me. It was why I’d gone into stunting for a living, making my money throwing myself around and pushing myself to limits that I didn’t even know I had. Well, that, and I kind of liked being on camera. So sue me. Whenever life got the better of me, I found that the best way to work out the kinks was to remind myself of everything that my body was capable of. And right then, I sincerely needed something to stop my brain running loops around what had happened between Dominic and I all those years ago.
Because he’d left me. Of course he had. Looking back, I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it sooner. I was always just a fling to him, someone who’s adoring attention he enjoyed while it was convenient for him to indulge me in the delusion that we were actually together. That he felt for me the same way I did for him.
When I told people that I literally got up one morning in the apartment that we had all but moved into together and he was gone, they assumed I was exaggerating. But I wasn’t. I crawled out of bed, yawning, and made my way from the tiny bathroom to the kitchen to the living room, even out in the hallway to see if he’d wandered out there to pick up a package or something. But he was gone. Vanished. I furrowed my brow and returned to the apartment, and went to grab a cup of coffee – and that’s when I saw the note.
I still wasn’t completely sure what it actually said. I had read it a dozen times, maybe more, but the words slipped down and off my brain like drops of water on a windshield, refusing to sink in. All that mattered was that he was gone, to pursue a job with a studio across the country, and that he loved me and that he was grateful for all the time we’d spent together, kiss, kiss, kiss.
“Ah!” I let out a loud cry as I dropped the weights back on the ground below me, not realizing just how much my muscles were screaming as I did everything I could to wipe the memory of receiving that note from my brain. The barbell landed with a clang on the barely-padded ground below, loud enough that the maintenance man working at the end of the hall lifted his head and glanced over in my direction with a concerned furrow in his brow. I lifted a hand in acknowledgment and apology, and wiped the sweat off my brow and turned to get on the rowing machine. Maybe something a little quieter would do for now.
I sat down on the machine and started to work, my breath coming faster and that lump in my throat returning. I knew I should have slowed down and taken it easy considering all the stuff I’d already done that day, but this was the only foolproof way I knew of to work out all my stress. I needed to remind myself that I was good at this, that there was something in my life that I had excelled at, before I let the memory of Dominic and what a fucking asshole he was throw me off my game. It wasn’t my first blockbuster, but I wasn’t so far in to the game that I could rely on my credentials the way he did.
Because that was the most galling part about all of this. I would have felt something like triumph had he dumped me to chase a job that had wound up blowing up right in his face, but it hadn’t. He had soared, taking the industry by storm and making his name as one of the most relentlessly sought-after stunt-men in the business. Daring, wild, and hard-working, the stories I heard told me nothing had changed since we
were training together. His eye for the ladies was just as intense as it had ever been, too, if the grainy paparazzi shots on the back of gossip rags showing him with a variety of assorted starlets was anything to go by. Not that I kept up with him, or found myself idly Googling his name once in a while. Nope. Because that would have been creepy and clingy and might indicate that I had never fully shaken him and that no-one since him had ever quite added up even if he had left me more heartbroken than I’d ever been in my life. Nothing like that.
I realized I was panting hard and sweating harder, and swung my feet off the rowing machine and glanced in the mirror. I offered myself a smile, and, for a second, the girl who had started training eight years ago was back. Hungry, nervous, passionate, and dead certain that this is what she was going to do no matter how often her parents told her that it wasn’t a suitable career path. I was still that girl, deep down, except now my parents called to ask about work instead of tentatively broaching the topic assuming that I was still unemployed. I was better than I had ever been right now, and there was no fucking way I was letting Dominic Callahan walk into my life and blow it up all over again.
I grabbed my coat and headed back up to the tiny apartment that was to be my home till the end of the shoot. I needed something to eat – something high-protein and something that I didn’t need to cook. And then I needed to spend the rest of the night doing everything in my power to keep Dominic out of my head. He wasn’t arriving till later in the week, and I had a few days to get my head together yet. And I was going to build up a wall so impenetrable that not even Dominic could leap over it.