Pretending to Be Us

by Taylor Holloway

“Why the hell would you want to watch that? It sounds incredibly boring, even by CSPAN standards.” He said ‘CSPAN’ like I might say ‘hardcore furry pornography’ or ‘the Miss America swimsuit competition.’ I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes at him.

  “What’s wrong with CSPAN?” I asked. My voice, unlike his, was reasonable and pleasant, although slightly more tart than it had been. I just wanted to watch my program and was starting to lose my patience. “I was watching it. It’s educational. No one else was paying any attention to it. Why can’t you just go drink your beer with your buddies and let me work?” I truly didn’t understand some men’s attachment to watching grown men in tight pants throwing themselves into one another’s arms. For being such a popular pastime amongst straight men, it seemed like a deeply homoerotic game. The players even swatted one another on the ass.

  Ward didn’t answer my question. He simply reached up again and turned off my program.

  “No one wants to watch anything educational in a bar but you,” he told me. His voice was light and teasing. “Watching some football will do you good, anyway. Think of it this way, it’ll be educational for you.” He paused. “Unless there’s an actual reason you want to watch CSPAN. Or are you just being stubborn to mess with me?”

  Don’t let him fool you. He’s the one messing with you, I reminded myself. Don’t let him see you get annoyed. It’ll only encourage him. And don’t tell him why you want to watch it so badly.

  I smiled and nodded, and then, once he walked off and sat down, I clambered up on a barstool to hoist myself atop the bar. I tuned the channel back to CSPAN. I wasn’t even off the barstool before I heard him clearing his throat directly behind me.

  “Really?!” he asked loudly, right behind my ear.

  I heard a sharp, unladylike squeak escape me. Surprise made me gasp and slip, and I turned and nearly fell backwards off the barstool. Ward’s strong hands shot out to grab me, gripping my shoulders and under my knees and then setting me on my feet and pinning me to the bar before I could regain my footing.

  He’d caught me. Damn, he was fast.

  We were now only inches apart. My heart thudded against my ribs. His lips parted in surprise, and I remembered kissing them. My mind was a thousand miles away…

  Ward was tall. At least a full foot taller than my five-one-and-three-quarter-inches. I had to look up and up to see his eyes, which looked surprised, and then confused. We stared at one another for a long, long moment.

  Suddenly, he released my shoulders like I was on fire and stepped back. His face went blank as if remembering something. I was too shocked to speak, so I just stared instead.

  But it was his fault I’d fallen in the first place. Belatedly, I felt myself scowling. I drew myself up to my full height—all five foot two inches—and glared.

  “Come on, Emma. You’ve lost this round. Give it up,” he ordered me before I recovered the powers of speech. With his height, there was no need for him to climb up on a barstool precariously. He just reached up around me and returned the channel to football. “Also, you really shouldn’t stand on the barstools or the bar. They aren’t meant to be climbed on. Perhaps you’re used to dancing atop bars, but this isn’t that kind of place.”

  He let out a small chuckle and looked me up and down appreciatively.

  “Excuse you?” I hissed. He might own the bar, but Kate managed it. I dropped the sugary tone from my voice. He no longer deserved sweet Emma.

  “Nobody here likes CSPAN.”

  “I do. Please turn it back on.”

  His eyebrows lifted in apparent amusement and he laughed at me while shaking his head. “Yeah, I don’t think so.” Perhaps being so ridiculously sexy meant women just did whatever he ordered them to do. Likely so. It was time someone knocked him down a peg. And these days, I was just the woman to do it.

  “Listen Ward, you need to—” I started.

  At the same time, he said, “Last time I checked, this is still my bar.”

  I made a dismissive, huffy little noise that silenced him—at least temporarily, because he chuckled. It wasn’t exactly a dignified noise and his reaction seemed to indicate he found it cute rather than intimidating, but I used the moment to explain,

  “Your bar or not, I’m a human being who doesn’t appreciate being talked down to! I don’t put up with jerks ordering me around for no reason and being condescending, sexist, and high-handed.”

  He laughed. “I’m hardly a sexist because I want to watch football. By that logic, all men are sexists.” He looked down at me like he was having the time of his life. He was definitely getting off on this little spat, and it was infuriating me. Another part of me—a small but vocal part—was enjoying his attention and our fight way too much. I shifted from foot to foot as my brain pinged between anger and attraction. Anger won. Nobody calls me sweetheart.

  “Not everyone likes football. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to mop in peace and have the TV tuned to something that isn’t boring sports.”

  “Boring?!” He looked horrified. You’d have thought I’d just personally insulted him or blasphemed against the lord himself.

  “Boring?!” I repeated Ward’s previous words, complete with a rude exaggeration of his slight southern accent.

  My impression only made him laugh. When he spoke, he was still grinning, “Woman, you are in a bar. My bar. TVs in bars play sports. What the hell is going on here?” he asked the air around him rhetorically. “Is this the twilight zone?” Clearly, he was not used to being challenged.

  Willie pulled his newspaper up higher around his face, insulating himself from the conversation despite being only two feet away. I thought I could hear him sniggering behind it. Coward.

  “Is it really so surreal for you that someone might stand up to you? You’re a walking stereotype.” I shook my head at him.

  He smirked. “Says you. I bet you live entirely off a diet of quinoa, kale smoothies, and smug superiority.”

  I happen to like quinoa and kale smoothies.

  “While I suppose you like to spend your time drooling in front of the latest Sharknado sequel when you aren’t reliving your glory days on tape. I’ve seen your silly truck, too. Are you compensating for anything?” A couple of his buddies laughed.

  He leaned in close to whisper in my ear, “You know there’s absolutely nothing I need to compensate for, now don’t you, Emma?” When I felt my blush burning my cheeks, his smile was knowing. His voice was soft and amused when he added, “You have no idea what’s going on here right now, do you?” His utter confidence was sexy as hell. It was also obnoxious as hell. Being turned on and angry wasn’t something that I was used to.

  “Clearly, we need Kate to come and talk some sense into you. I’m going to go get her.”

  He nodded and sunk down on a barstool. A frustrating smile was still on his face. “Yeah, you do that, Tinkerbell.”

  Tinkerbell?! I stormed off toward the office, practically quivering with anger, attraction, confusion, and embarrassment. I was so stuffed full of emotion I worried I was going to spontaneously combust, and I definitely didn’t want Ward to see it.

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  Baby and the Beast

  Special Teaser

  ‘Baby and the Beast’ is the first book in the Princes of Hollywood series, featuring Isabelle and Connor.

  Chapter 1: Isabelle

  The sexy homeless man in the elevator with me dropped something.

  I knew he couldn’t really be homeless; the movie studio I worked in was more secure than Fort Knox. But he kind of looked like he might be homeless. Tall, huge beard, giant muscles, hands like catchers’ mitts, dark sunglasses, hoodie pulled up. Transient chic. Or maybe fugitive chic. He was actually very attractive, with the high cheekbones and sharp jawline of a movie star under all that hair. Regardless, he definitely fit the type. And in Hollywood, we’ve got all types.

  Despite the somewhat threatening appearance, he was probably just another actor wa
iting for his big break. He might have an audition for Vikings or something later in the week. Or maybe he just liked ZZ Top a lot. Or perhaps he was a part-time wizard. Like I said, all types.

  “You, um, you dropped something,” I told him, picking up the pink leaflet as he stepped off the elevator ahead of me. He paused and turned around to stare at me imposingly.

  “What?” The guy’s voice was as intimidating as his looks: low and growly. Luckily, I’m not easily frightened. Especially not on a day like today when I was running on empty and fresh out of fucks to give. I stared back at him, undeterred.

  “You dropped this pamphlet for,” I paused, looking at it, “um, Orange County Surrogates?” My voice went high and questioning, turning the sentence into a question.

  Huh. Weird. Did the mysterious bearded hot guy want to rent a baby mama? He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d need an agency to get himself one…

  I took a better look at the pamphlet in my hands. The service offered up young, healthy, educated, American women to bear children for the wealthy. They then paid these women between three and four hundred thousand dollars a pop. Dang. Baby making was much more lucrative than my job. Then again, I currently made zero dollars at my job. The bar was low.

  “Thank you,” the man said, taking the pamphlet back from me. He seemed vaguely embarrassed to be carrying such a thing around with him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to talk to me. His big hand brushed mine and a little electric tingle shot through me. I told it to shut up. I didn’t have time to flirt with strangers in the elevator today.

  “Is that real?” I asked him anyway. I was simply too curious not to.

  He looked extremely surprised that I was engaging him in conversation. “Is what real?”

  “That service,” I pressed him. “Is it real?”

  He nodded, staring at me intently. I was getting the feeling that my attraction to him was not reciprocated. Was it the overalls? It was probably the filthy overalls I was wearing. Or maybe the fact that I’d braided my pigtails crooked.

  “I’m in the wrong line of work,” I said, as much to him as to myself as the elevator doors started to close and separate us. I laughed. “I could really use that kind of money.” He smirked at me and I caught a flash of bright blue eyes over the tops of his sunglasses while the doors snapped shut.

  But I didn’t have any time to dwell on those blue eyes or the possibility of becoming a surrogate for some poor childless couple. I didn’t have time for anything else because then the elevator doors were opening again.

  Time to work.

  I was a set designer’s apprentice, specializing in practical effects and props. I worked mostly on action and horror films, like this one, ‘Night Stalker.’ One might think that would mean that my job was creative, interesting, and fun. One would be only half right.

  The other half of my job was routine, boring, and stressful. As an unpaid apprentice to my dad, I mostly served as a glorified gopher and adjunct carpenter, fixing and fetching. It wasn’t all bad, and everybody in Hollywood pays their dues somehow, but on days like today when anything and everything was going wrong, it was draining.

  So far today (it was only ten a.m.), we’d had two disasters. The first was that our lead actor had inconveniently discovered a latex allergy, which was what his werewolf mask was entirely lined in. We’d asked if he was allergic in advance, of course, but he’d forgotten. Now he was all swollen up like a tick and spending the rest of his day in the hospital.

  The guy we’d called in to do the scene instead—since after all it was under a mask—was on his way. Once we got him outfitted, we’d be able to continue shooting, but we had to rearrange a bunch of things. Disaster averted.

  The second disaster was that my dad had an unexpected appointment pop up that was now conflicting with the puppet scene that we’d subbed in because we couldn’t do the werewolf transformation scene. He couldn’t operate the puppets because he had to sit down with some studio big wigs. I’d just been downstairs in my dad’s workshop making sure he had what he needed, but this all meant I was on point for the puppeteering in the scene.

  “Where are the—” a production assistant wheezed at me, coming to a stop two feet in front of me and too out of breath to finish her sentence. It didn’t matter. I knew what she was asking about.

  “The puppets are already in the shot.” I told her. “The controls are up their little puppet butts. I’m ready to start as soon as I get the controls.”

  She nodded, turned, and ran back the way she’d come.

  I trotted along behind her, smoothing down my paint-splattered overalls and praying to the puppet gods that the remote-controlled werewolf puppets behaved today. If practical effects were going to survive in the world of CG, we had to make sure everything worked right the first time. Otherwise the director would just wave his hand, say they’d ‘fix it in post’ and we’d be out another job. The future was scary for old fashioned practical types like me and my dad.

  When I finally got to the soundstage, the director and all of the actors were already in position.

  “I’m the substitute puppet mistress,” I announced to their collective relief. That was definitely a sentence I never expected to utter, especially not to Ashton Radley, rising Hollywood beefcake and co-star of Night Stalker, but whatever.

  I was going with the flow today, and that meant using the aforementioned life-sized werewolf puppets to repeatedly menace and then eat Ashton Radley on film. I had a job to do. I either needed to do it or rock slowly back and forth in the corner. I’d made my choice somewhere between when I injected an EpiPen into a dude’s ass this morning and when my dad told me I’d have to do the puppets five minutes ago. All I needed to do now was deliver.

  “Great,” the director said, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Let’s get started.”

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  XOXO

  Taylor

  Also by Taylor Holloway

  Lone Star Lovers

  Admit You Want Me - Ward

  Kiss Me Like You Missed Me - Cole

  Lie with Me - Lucas

  Run Away with Me - Jason

  Hold On To Me - Ryan

  A Bad Case of You - Eric

  Touching Me, Touching You - Christopher

  This one’s For You - Ian

  Bad For You - Brandon

  Pretending To Be Us - Peter

  For fans of exciting, romantic mysteries full of twists and turns, check out my Scions of Sin series!

  Prequel: Never Say Never - Charlie

  Bleeding Heart - Alexander

  Kiss and Tell - Nathan

  Down and Dirty - Nicholas

  Lost and Found - David