Wonderstruck (Starstruck Love Stories #5)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Derek

As far as bad dates go…I’ve never had worse.

And that’s saying something. When I was in junior high, I took my crush to the Snowball Dance and someone stepped on the hem of her dress on our way in, ripping the skirt from the bodice entirely.

We were luckily right next to the women’s restroom, where she hid until an assistant principal brought her some clothes from the lost and found.

Or, fairly early into my days in Hollywood, my date and I got cornered by paparazzi, who threw increasingly invasive questions our way.

She answered every single one, including the ones directed at me despite knowing next to nothing about me, and eventually left with one of the reporters to hook up with him, leaving me on my own.

Those dates were bad. Terrible. But this? This was worse.

“Why do I even try?” I mutter, dropping my head against the seat in the back of my SUV and letting my breath out in a slow stream.

Hunter, my bodyguard, is clearly trying to hold back laughter as he responds from the driver’s seat. “Because you’re lonely.”

He can’t see me in the darkness of the backseat, but I glare at him anyway. “I don’t need the reminder.”

Los Angeles passes by the windows as we drive, bright even this late at night.

I love this city and always have, but lately it’s had a dullness to it that is entirely a matter of my perception.

In a city of almost four million people, how in the world can I not find one?

One who isn’t interested in my fame? The loneliness didn’t hit as hard as it did before my friends all found their significant others, though I’ve done my best not to think about that.

The last thing I need is to resent their happiness when it’s so well deserved.

Hunter’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. “This is going to be all over the internet tomorrow,” he warns, as if this is my first rodeo.

I pinch the bridge of my nose, hoping to stave off a coming headache. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Absolutely nothing. People will say what they say, and the worst of the tabloids, Hollywood Hot Scoop, will somehow turn tonight’s disaster into praise for my charitable efforts or something equally ridiculous.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I try to guess which of my friends is calling, since my publicist knows better than to reach out first. It’s early in Candora, so I should be safe from Freya’s lectures until tomorrow, and lately Bonnie avoids the internet like the plague.

Cole is too busy hovering over his very pregnant wife, Carissa, to bother paying attention to gossip. That leaves one option.

I answer the call without looking at the screen. “Liam.”

“Dude.”

Sighing, I sink a little lower in my seat, wishing I could lie down and escape the world for a minute. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“And I thought I had bad luck! You might have just won the trophy for worst public moment ever.”

If Liam already knows about my disaster of a date, I’m not sure I want to know what’s on the internet. “How bad is it?” I ask, even though I’ll get a full rundown from my publicist as soon as I call him. “How much did people see?”

“Are you telling me it’s worse than the flashing and the cheesecake temper tantrum?”

I groan. “It’s worse.”

“Tell me everything.”

I imagine him sitting in his hot tub, his wife on his lap as he waits for me to spill all the details. I like Kasey, especially with Liam, and I’m sure they’ll both get a kick out of tonight’s mess. But I’m still processing and don’t want to relive the evening.

“If you don’t tell us,” Liam says, confirming Kasey’s presence, “we’re just going to have to assume everything we’re reading is true.”

It probably is. Taking a deep breath, I take a moment to consider how best to relay my evening. I can usually minimize the drama of things when I need to, but no one could make tonight sound less crazy than it was.

“We went to Félicie for dinner,” I say, keeping my voice even.

“Our date was going great until we got dessert, and the cheesecake had a strawberry on top.” I shake my head, hating every word coming out of my mouth.

“Shannon claimed she’s deathly allergic to strawberries, though she failed to mention that to anyone ahead of time.

” I add that last bit in a grumble because I’m too tired to hold it back.

Based on the rest of what she did tonight, the ‘allergy’ was a complete lie. Just part of the show. “And she…”

“Flipped her lid,” Liam finishes for me. “Yeah, we saw a video of that part. Girl’s got an arm, I’ll give her that.”

Outraged by the alleged attempt on her life, Shannon grabbed the cheesecake with her bare hand and threw it into the waiter’s face.

It was at that point that her dress, which had been putting in a valiant effort in staying on her body all night because it was clearly too big for her, slipped.

And by slipped I mean fell off entirely. At least she was wearing underwear.

“And that’s when she stuck her tongue down your throat?” Liam asks.

I groan. I don’t care about decorum anymore. Flipping my phone to speaker, I twist until I’m lying on my back on the seat, my knees in the air. “No, first she licked the cheesecake off the waiter’s face. Then she kissed me.” Kiss being a loose term, of course.

Hunter chuckles in the front seat. “She was impressively bold,” he says.

“No cap,” Liam agrees.

I roll my eyes. “Whose side are you on, Wright?” I ask Hunter, though his joking is making it easier to breathe.

He was never truly worried about my safety tonight, despite Shannon’s wild display, which kept it all from getting too crazy.

I can generally take care of myself, but it’s nice to have backup.

“Always yours, Derek,” Hunter says. “Liam, ask him about the soup.”

I tense. “Don’t ask about the—”

“Well now I have to hear about the soup,” Liam says with a laugh.

I sigh. He’ll hear about it sooner or later.

“I convinced Shannon to leave once we, uh, helped her become decent again.” AKA when I wrapped my suit jacket around her after Hunter dragged her off my lap so I could breathe.

She still has my jacket and will probably sell it on the internet for some quick cash.

She’ll need it after tonight. “She grabbed a bowl of soup from a random table on the way out and dumped it on the head of a man sitting outside, claiming he looked sad and hungry.”

Liam whistles low, and he sounds a little more serious when he asks, “What happened to her? She wasn’t like this on your first few dates with her.”

No, she wasn’t. Shannon has actually been really nice.

We met at an audition, and she was sweet and witty, with a genuine quality about her.

She’s just starting out in the film industry and has a lot of potential, and it was nice to be around that kind of untarnished enthusiasm for acting.

We seemed to have a connection, one I was eager to explore.

“Fran happened,” I mutter, exhausted.

Liam swears, and Kasey speaks up for the first time, asking, “Your old publicist?”

The publicist I should have fired long before I did.

“I found out tonight that she’s working for Shannon, and I’m eighty percent confident she put Shannon up to it after Hot Scoop called Shannon unremarkable.”

“Only eighty percent?” Liam asks. “That’s not very Derek Riley of you.”

Yeah, well, I’ve been faking my confidence more and more lately, and I’m tired. The exhaustion goes far beyond tonight. “I feel bad for Shannon, more than anything,” I say with a sigh. “This could ruin her.” With the way Hot Scoop has been writing about me, it will ruin her.

And there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s the worst part, having no power over this situation.

“She’s smart enough to know better,” Kasey says. “She made her choice when she agreed to go bat crazy.”

Kasey and Liam are my only friends who have met Shannon so far, since a movie Shannon auditioned for is one whose screenplay Kasey is helping revise.

I was planning to bring Shannon to our Sunday brunch next week to introduce her to the rest of the gang, but that plan’s out the window. It’s for the best.

It’s not like I’ll ever find someone who can both handle my fame-packed life and keep me grounded. I can’t even do that for myself lately.

“Hey,” Liam says, his tone soothing. “At least you can bet Hot Scoop will spin the whole thing in your favor, right?”

I huff a laugh. That stupid site has never had a negative thing to say about me despite constantly tearing down my friends.

Even last fall, when they uncovered a long-buried secret that my cousin Elliot is really my half-brother, they were still mostly in my corner.

“I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse,” I say.

“Definitely a blessing. It’s brutal when you get on their bad side.”

Every single one of my friends has been on Hot Scoop’s bad side.

Relentlessly. A gut feeling that won’t go away tells me their battles with the tabloid have somehow been my fault.

I wish I knew how—why—so I can fix it, but that website has become the bane of my existence.

My white whale. The sharp rocks at the bottom of a slope I’ve been slipping down for years.

“I’m sorry you had to endure the date from hell,” Liam says. “Don’t let it bug you.”

“Does anything bug Derek?” Kasey asks. It’s a joke. I think. But it almost sounds like a genuine question.

Yes, things bother me. Plenty of them. I just don’t let anyone know that they bother me.

I feel Hunter’s eyes on me in the mirror again, and I’m pretty sure he has something to say.

Something only for me, or he would have said it by now.

He’s never been shy about voicing his opinion, which is one of the reasons I’ve kept him around as long as I have.

Honesty is hard to come by in my line of work.