Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Deacon
“We're losing daylight!” Gavin lamented, practically falling from his director’s chair. “Where is she?”
One PA, clearly the sacrificial lamb, finally faced him with a grimace and admitted, “She says she’s not coming out of her trailer.”
“She what?!”
The PA didn't repeat it, just moved away an inch, half-disappearing into the shrubbery behind her. I rubbed my forehead with a groan, and my makeup artist instantly ran in to touch up the smudged, fake dirt splatters on my face. I had hoped this movie would be a fun, lighthearted break from my more serious projects, but I’d take CGI dragons over Hollywood divas any day.
“Do we even need Ivy for this? It’s a simple shot,” I called. “There's not even dialogue. We can shoot it with her stand-in.”
“Someone call Carol,” Gavin shouted.
“She’s already left for the day,” the PA chimed in, now fully ensconced in the protection of the hedge. By the time she delivered the third piece of bad news, she’d be on the other side of the fence where a bunch of sun lorikeets were currently watching the production.
“We didn’t have the budget to keep her until the end of the day? I swear to God, Deacon, I’m never doing you a favor again!” Gavin wrung the script in his hands and looked like he might wallop me with it. “By the time we get her back in hair and makeup, we?—”
“Will lose the light,” I finished, letting out a long-suffering sigh. I’d been a part of massive studio-sized projects before that were less of a clusterfuck than this one. “What if we?—”
I saw Dove trying to dart around the film crew with a bucket full of seeds in one hand and a spray bottle in the other.
“Dove!” I called.
She froze like a deer in headlights before slowly turning to look at me.
Gavin hustled over and looked between us. “Deacon, bud, what are you doing?”
“Finding a solution,” I grumbled as Dove wandered over. I slung my arm around her shoulder and held her tightly to my side to keep her from shirking my hold. I looked at Gavin as I waved her up and down. “Solution.”
Gavin adjusted his baseball cap and pursed his lips as he considered her.
Dove muttered from the corner of her mouth, “What is going on?”
“I need a favor,” I whispered back.
“What kind of favor?”
“I need to borrow your legs.”
“My legs?” she snapped, and I finally released her to turn my pleading gaze toward her.
“Ivy won't come out of her trailer and her stand-in has already left for the day. We're losing light, and it’s the second to last day of production, and all I'm doing is dipping you and pretending to kiss you.” I put a heavy emphasis on the word pretending . “My head will be in the way. We don't actually have to kiss. It will only be your cargo shorts and boots and maybe a little hemline of your shirt. It’s the climax of the movie. We have to get this shot.”
Dove seemed entirely unsympathetic to my pleas. “So why not use a blow-up doll or something?”
“You think we just have sex dolls lying around that we can dress up?”
“Hey, you said sex doll, not me,” she quipped.
“Please?”
“Don’t you puppy eyes me,” she snarked. “You already used up all of your ‘pleases’ to rope me into the conservation trust.”
“You owe me for the helicopter,” I countered, folding my arms in a mirror position to her.
“Ugh! That is low.”
“I’ll go low if I have to,” I confessed. “You still owe me.”
I could see the night of Simon's birth flashing through her mind, see how angry she was that I’d used it as leverage, and I knew I’d won before she even spoke.
"Fine, I’ll do it,” she groused. “But then we're even. No more calling in favors.”
“Deal,” I said, giving the director a thumbs-up.
“Yes? Yes!” He fist pumped the air before pointing at a bunch of people to draft up paperwork for our sudden impromptu extra.
“How long is this going to take?” Dove grumbled. “I have a mountain of work to do now that Hawk and Hannah are both off the roster.”
“Ten minutes tops,” I promised. “And I’ll help you finish your shift.”
“Your help is the last thing I need.” She pursed her lips at me, taking in my pleading urgency. “Damn, you really do need this shot, huh?”
“Yes.”
“What do I do?” Dove eyed the crew as if suddenly realizing they were all there. She held her hands out awkwardly like her sides were made of wet paint.
I chuckled and smoothed my hands down her arms. “Just relax. They won’t bite, unlike your co-workers.”
“There are like twenty people staring at me,” she whispered.
“They're staring at a million other things: the lighting, the juxtaposition of the shot, the costumes,” I assured her. “You think they’re looking at you, but they're actually just doing their jobs.”
“That doesn't comfort me.”
“Here.” I took her by the shoulders and shuffled her over to her mark so that I was standing in front of her, my back to the camera. My broad shoulders obscured her from view. “Just us now.”
She glowered up at me. “For some reason, I don’t feel any better.”
“Have you ever been dipped before?” I asked.
She screwed up her face. “This might surprise you, but I don’t frequent many fairytale balls.”
“It's just this.” I wrapped one hand around her waist, shifted the other up her back to her neck, and dipped her to the side, taking some of her body weight into my arms as I lunged. “Good?”
We stayed there, her leaning back in my hold to meet my eyes. “Does your face have to be so close to my face?”
“Yeah,” I replied with a grin. “We're supposed to be kissing, but we'll film that bit tomorrow when Ivy finally leaves her trailer or her assistant breaks through her barricades.”
“She barricaded herself in?”
“She has a flair for the dramatic.”
“Actors,” Dove muttered as I pivoted us back to a stand.
“Right, when he calls action, I'm going to do that just a little faster, okay?” She nodded and shook her hands out like we were about to start sparring. I winked. “You’ll be great.”
When Gavin called action, I grabbed her and dipped her . . . apparently with more urgency than she was expecting, and Dove let out a little screech as her arms flew out to catch herself.
“Cut!”
“Okay, that was good,” I assured her, trying to drown out the sounds of Gavin bitching behind me. “Just leave your arms at your sides this time, okay?”
“Oh my god, I can't do this,” she whined.
“You're doing great.”
“Liar.”
When Gavin called action again, this time she was prepared. I dipped her without any hand flailing. As we held the position, I tried really, really hard not to think about how easy it would be to breach the distance between her mouth and mine.
“Why are we still dipped?” she whispered, her breath hot on my lips.
“Because he hasn't called cut yet,” I whispered back. “I think they're slow zooming in.”
“I'm sorry my breath smells like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” she replied, and I laughed. “I would’ve brushed my teeth if I had more warning.”
“Cut!” Gavin barked from behind us, and a chorus of whispered groans sprang out across the set. “It's not working. The head is weird, and the angles are wrong. It's just—” The vein in his forehead bulged. “Can you just kiss her? It'll look better from this angle if you just kiss?—”
“No. It’s unnecessary and I’m not springing that on an actor who hasn’t agreed prior.” I held up a hand, positioning myself farther between Dove and Gavin. “We can do it as many times as we need to get it right, but I’m not going to?—”
“Oh, just kiss me,” Dove cut in, making me choke on my words.
I spun toward her. “What?”
“I have a lot of work to do today,” she said. “And while I appreciate you trying to defend my honor or whatever it is this puffed up gorilla pose is”—she waved at me and I quickly shifted my posture—“I want to spend time with my new nephew. I might implode if we have to do ten more takes, so just kiss me and then it'll be over faster."
“There's my girl,” the director cheered as if he knew anything about it. I did not like the way he called her “my girl.” It made something dark and ugly rise in me as he winked at her and said, “Way to be a team player, Duck.”
“Dove,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” he replied. “Let's reset.”
I turned back to my mark and looked down at Dove. “Are you sure about this?”
She looked up at me with those big brown eyes, ones I could easily get lost in. Pull it together, Deacon.
“It's just acting, right?” Dove assured me.
Nerves started swirling in my gut. “Right.”
“I’ll pretend you’re Rook Valestrider and you pretend I’m Rogue Hellfire.”
“Hellfire for a pyromancer seemed like a very creative name when we were twelve,” I joked.
“Hey, you had a sword called Doomfang, so . . .”
“Doomfang is a really cool name?—”
“Quiet on the set!” Gavin shouted, and I knew he was pretending to scold some poor crew member when he was in fact yelling at us.
I held my hand lightly on Dove’s hip as we waited for him to call action, regretting all of my life choices that had led me up to this point.
I should've just kissed her that night in the prep kitchens. I’d felt something in the air between the two of us and I should've just acted on it. I didn't want our first kiss in fifteen years to happen in front of a bunch of people. I didn't want to pretend she was Rogue Hellfire or Ivy Blanc or anyone else other than Dove Lachlan. And the way she seemed so unbothered by it made it a million times worse. Clearly Dove didn't care about me enough to even mind that I was about to kiss her.
“Nervous?” Dove whispered tauntingly.
I narrowed my eyes, accepting her challenge. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“So long as you don't knock your teeth into mine this time.”
“It was you who knocked your teeth into me .”
“Yeah right, Casanova.” She chortled. “You came at me teeth first like you were a horse and I was a carrot.”
Before I could protest again, Gavin called, “Action!” and I grabbed Dove with all of that pent-up frustration and even more fervency, determined to prove to her that I'd learned plenty since our first kiss.
I dipped her, my lips crashing into hers with a lust-laced swiftness, but thankfully no teeth. I kissed her deeply, not holding anything back as my hand slid into her hair and held her face to mine. She matched my frenzy with her own as her palms pressed tighter, pulling me closer.
My tongue skimmed the seam of her lips and she opened for me, our kiss deepening until we were truly devouring each other. A rumble caught in the back of my throat as she clung to me, kissing me like it was her own personal vendetta. A decade and a half of unspoken angst unleashed into that one kiss. She tasted like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and smelled like bird seed and none of that should’ve been hot, but when she let out a little moan against my lips, I groaned back.
My cock throbbed, a deep, aching lust rising in me and stomping out all other thoughts. Fuck could she kiss. Real and raw and passionate and so unlike all of the people I'd been linked up with who kissed as if someone were always watching. Not Dove. She was so attuned to me and I to her that we moved like we’d been doing this for years. Not performing, just melting into each other.
She wasn’t the one that got away—she was the one who could’ve been but never was. With a little more time and age and maturity, what we could’ve been . . . I let my lips tell her all the things I couldn’t say, kissing her like I knew I’d never get another chance. Why couldn’t she feel that way about me? Why didn’t she also wonder about what could’ve been?
Gavin called “Cut!" three times before I pulled Dove back to a stand. My head spun as I took in Dove’s swollen lips, mussed hair, and glasses askew.
But the spell was quickly broken by Gavin calling, “That's a wrap on Duck.”
“Dove,” I barked out, my eyes never leaving hers.
“Good job,” Dove said, lifting her hand for an awkward high five, and I guffawed as I slapped it.
A high five?
“Good job,” I echoed, horrified that the all-encompassing kiss that had rocked me to my very core was only casual high-five worthy in her books.
As my libido crashed back down to Earth, Dove hustled to her bucket and spray bottle and darted off without another word. I watched her run away, wishing she felt even half of what I had in that moment, wishing that a million memories and years wasted had flashed through her mind too, wishing she wanted to find another way for my mouth to be on hers as badly as I did. But Dove ran off with quiet determination to finish her shift and didn’t glance back once.