Chapter 3
THREE
Katie
I was frozen in my chair in this very nice kitchen.
I was a professional actress. I had started in theater and improv. It had been years since I had missed a cue or forgotten a line. And right now, the entire script had left my head, possibly forever.
Travis White—world famous rock star, sex god, lead singer of Seven Dog Down, a man whose music I had listened to and who I had drooled over in countless TikToks, because of course I had a top secret TikTok account—was smiling right at me. And he was…agreeing?
He was even better looking in person. I hadn’t thought that was possible, but here we were. His dark blond hair was bed-tousled, from an actual bed and not from a stylist. His eyes weren’t just blue, they were cerulean, or turquoise, or something else wildly poetic. His face was perfectly shaped, with high cheekbones and a flawless jaw, but the appeal of Travis White had never been that he was something as simple as handsome. His appeal was in the wild air about him, the sexy and knowing look in his eyes, the slashes of his brows.
Travis White wasn’t the nice guy who would take you on a date to Olive Garden. He wasn’t the guy who ran the Christmas tree farm or the royal prince who marries an everyday girl or the guy you kissed at your high school reunion.
No, he looked exactly like a guy who would throw you on the back of his bike, drive you for hours, then set up camp at sundown and screw you in a sleeping bag, and you’d love every dirty, windblown minute of it. You’d be on your deathbed sixty years later, surrounded by your loving husband and your precious grandchildren, remembering that guy who’d fucked you silly in a sleeping bag and thinking, Damn, I had a good life.
I had been speechless even before he entered the room, because as we were sitting down, Andy Rockweller had gone out back to retrieve Travis, and we had all heard him say, Hey, kid. You’re naked.
I had made a small sound in my throat, and my knees had given out as I sank into a chair. I was still wearing the scarf and sunglasses I’d put on to be incognito, and I hadn’t been able to lift my hands to remove them. It was like I’d been hit over the head in an old cartoon. Stella had been too busy texting to pay attention, and Jonathan Kim had only rolled his eyes in annoyance.
Then Travis White had walked into the kitchen, no longer naked, wearing low-hanging shorts and a worn T-shirt. He had dressed so quickly that I was suddenly sure he hadn’t put any underwear on under those shorts. He had been naked a minute ago, twenty feet away. Honestly, I was nothing more than a straight woman on planet Earth, so I’d had to take a few minutes to recover from that fact while I hid behind my sunglasses.
While Stella and Jonathan had sniped at each other, Travis had rubbed his arms, and my gaze followed his hands, hypnotized. A tattoo of a snake wound over his left forearm. The snake’s head was placed on Travis’s wrist, its eye dark and gleaming against Travis’s golden tan. Travis’s hands were capable musician’s hands, and I heard the soft rasp of his palms rubbing his own skin. I thought I might be pregnant.
This meeting was going all wrong, though. I’d thought the idea was crazy when Stella first mentioned it, but Stella was a great agent because she was an incredible saleswoman. She’d convinced me that not only was this idea good, it was essential . The only way to get the role in Edgar Pinsent’s next movie was to have a fake, wild fling with Travis White, and Stella had connections to get a meeting with him. She said that if we could get him to agree, it would be easy from there. We even came up with a script.
When I came to my senses in the middle of this meeting—when the words I need a boyfriend had unbelievably come out of my mouth—I had wanted nothing more than to slide under this table and pretend I no longer existed. The embarrassment was immense. I had begun to wonder where the farthest point on earth was from this very spot, and how quickly I could go there. Did they take just anyone at research bases in Antarctica? Where could I buy a coat? How soon could I get a flight?
Then Travis had smiled at me and said he would do it.
Why? I wondered past the screeching in my head. He hadn’t asked any questions. He didn’t even know who I was . I should probably be offended by that, but in the moment, I was only grateful. If Travis White forgot my name five minutes after this disaster of a meeting was over, it would be merciful for all of us.
His blue—cerulean! azure!—eyes were mesmerizing as they fixed on me, and his smile was so effortlessly cocky that it should have been fake but it wasn’t. His posture was relaxed in his chair, his hand curled on the table. He wasn’t tense or forced into this. He wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t drunk or high. He was just… agreeing, and I didn’t know why, and suddenly I couldn’t let him do it.
“Don’t,” I said, surprising all of us. Jonathan’s eyebrows went up. Beside me, Stella went so tense I practically felt vibrations through the floor. Behind Travis, Andy Rockweller watched the scene and sipped his lemonade, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
This felt good, felt right for the first time in this meeting, so I said it again. “Travis, don’t do it. Don’t say yes.”
Travis’s smile had faded and he cocked his head, ignoring everyone but me. “You think so? Why?”
“Because it’s a bad idea.”
“I like bad ideas,” Travis shot back. “They’re my favorite kind.”
Beside me, I heard Stella whisper under her breath, “My god, he’s perfect.”
“This one’s really bad,” I persisted. “We can’t pull it off.”
His voice dropped just low enough to vibrate. “Oh, I can pull it off.”
My breath choked in my throat.
“I’m a fucking genius,” Stella whispered to herself.
Travis’s gaze still hadn’t left my face. “Can’t you do it?” he asked me. “I thought you were an actress.”
“I am. But doesn’t this seem crazy to you?” I gestured around me, to the others in the room. “Stella and I drank wine the other night and wrote a script.” I pulled a wad of folded-up pages from my handbag and smoothed them out. “It has three acts. The first meeting and the first dates, the middle part of the relationship, and then the breakup.” I waved the pages at him, trying to emphasize my point. “There are lines, settings, and stage directions. A complete fantasy relationship between you and me. Doesn’t that seem nuts to you? You should be calling the police, not talking to us.”
Travis held out his hand. “Let me see.” When I hesitated, his brows lowered. “Everyone in this room has read this script except for me. Even Andy. Right, Andy?”
“I read it,” Andy replied from his spot leaning against the kitchen counter. “It’s a humdinger.”
“It seems I’m the last one left in the dark,” Travis said without glancing at Andy. He still held out his hand. “I might be somewhat deserving of being treated like a child, I admit, but it ends now. I’d like to see the script.”
He talked like this sometimes, I knew. He was capable of elaborate sentences that he’d sprinkle into conversation, because yes, I had watched interviews with Travis White.
I handed over the pages, and he took them, shuffling them together. He started at page one and leafed through. The silence was heavy in the room.
“We meet at a Lakers game,” he commented without looking up.
“Courtside seats,” I croaked. “We’re randomly placed next to each other when someone swaps their tickets with us.”
“So we’re on camera when we meet, and everyone sees us. That’s pretty good.”
I pushed down the glow I felt at his approval. The Lakers game was my idea, partly lifted from a romcom I’d done in which the hero had proposed on the jumbo screen at a sports event in the climactic moment.
Travis turned a page. Even scruffy and unkempt, there was no other word for Travis—he was golden. His skin had a radiant glow, his hair a sun-kissed shine. He was clean shaven, and he wore no jewelry, not even rock star rings. He’d truly been naked when we arrived—so naked that he had tanned evenly all over. I felt my cheeks flushing hot.
“A restaurant date,” Travis commented, flipping another page. “Then a breakfast date. Cheeky.”
“The implications, you know,” I said weakly. The idea was that Good Girl Katie had done the unthinkable and hooked up with a hot rock star.
“I get it,” he said, flipping the page casually, as if he read scripts of fake sex hookups with strangers every day. “Shopping trips. A weekend in Cabo.”
“We don’t have to do that one if you don’t want,” I said hurriedly. Stella kicked me under the table. The Cabo trip was her idea, and we had hotly debated it. Stella insisted that pictures of me and Travis frolicking on the beach would be irresistible. Everyone does it! It’s sexy! That was her argument.
My argument was that I’d have to wear a bathing suit for that, and we were doing this to avoid me needing to get naked in public. Even though I had never looked closely at my own butt, I knew there was jiggle in it.
Travis shrugged and said, “I don’t mind,” because he was not only perfect, he was a man, and butt jiggles had never occurred to him. Life was unfair.
He flipped another page. “Premiere or awards show optional,” he read.
“It depends how it’s going,” I explained. “People might like to see us dressed up.”
He frowned for the first time, as if this concerned him. “I’m not invited to any awards shows right now. And I’m definitely not nominated.”
I laughed. “I’m never nominated. I make romcoms. According to awards shows, my genre doesn’t exist, and even if it does, it requires no acting talent.”
“Awards are overrated,” Travis said with a shrug. “We got a Grammy once.”
“For The Serpent soundtrack,” I said.
He raised his gaze from the script, and we locked eyes. He was surprised that I knew that.
“I saw the movie,” I said lamely. “It was a great soundtrack.”
Travis frowned slowly, as if I had said something in another language. He didn’t even thank me for the compliment. “We can do an awards show if you want. Or a premiere.” His tone was reluctant.
“Like I say, we’ll see how it’s going,” I told him. “Assuming we actually do this, of course.”
“We’re doing it,” Travis said. Behind him, Andy grinned like this was making his day.
When Travis flipped the script closed and dropped it on the table, I protested. “You haven’t read the last part. The part about our breakup.”
“Is it bad?” he asked. “Am I a dick in the breakup?”
“Of course not. We get seen separately a few times, and then we split amicably and give statements that we grew apart and we’ll always be friends. Why would I make you a dick in the breakup?”
“To make yourself look good. Making me look like a dick is easy.”
I had seen the headlines about his bad behavior lately—fistfights and a wrecked hotel room. “This is supposed to benefit you,” I said, pointing at the script, “just as much as it benefits me.”
He cocked his head. “And how, exactly, does all of this benefit you, Katie? What do you get out of breakfast dates and fake hookups with me?”
I had honestly forgotten the other people in the room. They were figments of imagination. There was only Travis, with his wild attractiveness and his magnetism and his everything . My embarrassment burned away when I realized truly, deep down, that he was right for this. This whole crazy idea was somehow right.
“I get a ticket out of romcom land,” I told him, leaning forward. “I get to be seen as a three-dimensional woman instead of a goody-two-shoes cartoon. I’m tired of playing the girl who only wants the shirtless contractor to notice her or the cute lumberjack to kiss her. I want to do something out of character. I want to be sexy and unpredictable and hot. And if you help me be those things—even if it’s fake—I just might get taken seriously in this business.”
The blue of his eyes blazed right into me, straight through me as I said this speech. I didn’t want to sink under the table anymore. I locked eyes with him and stared back.
When he spoke, his voice was low, like he was speaking only to me, even though the others in the room could hear. “So you want to be bad,” he said.
“Yes,” I shot back.
“You’re on.”
Next to me, Stella smacked her palm lightly on the table. “Thank God,” she said. “We have a deal.”