Chapter 31
GRACE
Ineeded to move. Get up. Get dressed. But his lips were in my hair and his heartbeat was thumping the sweetest bassline.
I wanted to stay right where we were. I loved being in his arms. I loved the smell of him, especially after sex.
His hands slid up and down my back. My leg draped across his hips, my hands caressed his arms.
Content. That was what I felt. Bliss.
I could lie here all day. No food. No water. Just him.
Then my brain came back online.
“Shoot.” I untangled myself from him and rolled toward the edge of the bed, scanning the floor for my clothes. “What time is it? I have to be in makeup.”
“You have forty-five minutes.” Micah didn’t move. He just lay there, one arm behind his head, watching me scramble with a grin that was entirely too pleased with itself. “God you’re sexy.”
“Flattery will normally get you everywhere, but not right now. We can’t show up later—together. We can’t look like we did what we just did.”
“Baby, you’ve got the hottest post-coital glow.”
I laughed and started collecting my clothes, something that seemed to happen often when I was around him. The clothes just fell off.
I yanked the ugly t-shirt over my head, shoved my feet into my sandals, and dragged my fingers through my hair before putting it back up in a truly messy bun. I stuffed my bra in my shorts pocket. I did my best to make myself look decent. A look that didn’t scream I just had sex.
Micah got up and crossed the room, gloriously unbothered by his own nudity, and kissed me once, slow, like we had all morning.
“I have to go get ready for work,” I mumbled against his mouth.
“I know.”
“Patty’s going to blow up my phone any second.”
“I know. Go.” He reached past me for the door handle, doing his usual routine. “Let me check the hall.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You’re buck naked. If there is someone out there, they’re going to see a lot more of you than they should.”
I opened the door, my mind calculating time to shower before I had to meet?—
Chantilly Montana was standing six inches from my face, her hand raised in a fist, frozen mid-knock.
I forgot how lungs worked.
For one endless second, the three of us formed a perfect little tableau of guilt.
Me, rumpled and flushed. Her, in a tennis outfit that had never seen a tennis court, sunglasses pushed up into artfully styled hair.
And behind me, Micah, in nothing but his birthday suit caught with absolutely no way to be dignified about it.
Chantilly’s gaze traveled over me but seemed focused on Micah. I glanced over my shoulder and noticed he’d had the decency to grab a throw pillow to cover himself.
She smiled. Slowly. The cat. The canary. The whole fucking thing.
“Did I interrupt something?”
“No,” I said, at the exact same time Micah did.
We both stopped.
“We were having a discussion,” I said, hearing my voice climb an octave. “About the cliff sequence. From the other day. I caught him coming out of the shower. That’s it.”
“Grace had some thoughts about the way I handled her coverage. Safety stuff. She came to rip me a new one before set.”
“Because you don’t get to decide what is and isn’t safe for me in a scene,” I said, latching onto it like a lifeline. I even managed a little righteous indignation, which wasn’t hard, because I meant every word. “That was the discussion. A heated professional discussion.”
Chantilly looked at me. Then at Micah. Then, deliberately, at the bed behind him, which was a crime scene of twisted sheets.
Silence stretched between the three of us.
I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me.
Chantilly loved this. I could see her little scandalous brain spinning content.
“Well. Don’t let me keep you from your next vigorous disagreement.
I just came to tell Micah the video hit nine million views, but I can see you’re both very busy.
” She tilted her head, and her smile turned into something I could not read.
“Later,” she said in a cheery voice.
She walked down the hallway toward the elevator. I decided to take the stairs. I could not be in a small box with her. I should have let Micah check the hall.
“Oh, God,” I whispered, my voice echoing in the stairwell.
I knew what I looked like. Lips swollen. Neck blotched. Wild hair. Bra half hanging out of my pocket. If Chantilly had any doubts, they were gone now.
My phone exploded the second I got into my room. Six texts from Patty. I called her, walking to the bathroom to take a two-minute shower.
“I’m fine. I’m in. I woke up early and went for a walk and left my phone.”
“I have your coffee,” she said.
“I’m going to take a quick shower and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
In the shower, the hot water pounding the tension out of my shoulders, I let myself spiral in the privacy of the heat and steam.
Chantilly knew.
Maybe she didn’t have proof. But that woman had built an empire out of leveraging gossip and innuendo. She didn’t need proof. She needed a story, and I had just handed her one on a platter.
I pressed my forehead against the tile.
I’d just survived one fake on-set romance. Weeks of being America’s homewrecker, death threats in my mentions, strangers analyzing my body language. And that had been over something that never even happened. Now here I was, sprinting directly into a real scandal.
Actress sleeps with director. It was the oldest story in Hollywood and the ugliest. Nobody would believe he’d cast me for my talent.
Nobody would believe I’d fallen for him after the casting, not during.
Every performance I gave in this movie would get retroactively re-graded through the lens of our sexual relationship.
Micah had already blown up the studio’s PR strategy once to protect me.
One whisper of he’s sleeping with his lead and Breathless stopped being his breakout and became his scandal.
That video would also be taken apart and people would decide he did it to protect me. Yes, he did, but they’d make it ugly.
I shut off the water and stood there dripping, glaring at myself in the fogged mirror.
“Get. It. Together,” I told my reflection.
One more day of shooting in Hawaii after today. One more day. Then we wrapped, flew home, and whatever this was between Micah and me could exist in a world that wasn’t a pressure cooker full of cameras and gossip. I just had to hold it together for two more days.
How hard could that be?
By the third hour on set, I had my answer. It was extremely hard. I was jumping at shadows. Convinced everyone was talking about me. Us. I’d only seen Chantilly once, but she was around. What did she tell Jack? Did she already record a video? Were we going to be a blind item?
We were back on the beach for a sequence of quiet scenes—Elena walking the shoreline, a phone call, a confrontation with Buzz’s character setting up the final act. Easy stuff. Talking stuff. The kind of day I should have been able to do in my sleep.
Instead, I read into every word and look.
Every time Chantilly appeared on set, my entire body tightened. She lounged near the monitors in a floppy hat, phone in hand with her fingers flying across the keyboard. Who was she texting? TMZ? Page Six?
Every time she laughed at something on her screen, my stomach dropped. Every time she pulled Jack aside to whisper, I was certain she was talking about us. Telling him all about her evil plans to expose Micah and me.
At one point, two grips passed behind my chair murmuring to each other, and one of them giggled. I whipped around so fast I nearly took out the script supervisor.
They were looking at a video of a dog on a skateboard.
I turned back around and told myself to stop. I was freaking out and it was going to affect my work.
“You’re in your head,” Micah said quietly during a reset. He kept it professional, didn’t crouch down or touch me. He stood where the camera required him to stand and spoke to his actress. But his eyes were searching my face. “Stay on the beach. Elena’s in the moment.”
“I’m trying,” I said through my smile.
“Try harder. Chantilly isn’t going to say anything.”
I nodded, reset, and got through the take.
Over and over we repeated the scene. When Micah called cut, he didn’t say anything for a long moment, just watched the monitor with that stillness he got when something had actually worked.
“That’s the one,” he said finally. “Moving on.”
The crew moved. I stayed rooted, wrung out.
Patty materialized beside me with water and a protein bar.
“You’re off today,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I forced a smile. “Tired. Ready to be done.”
The afternoon dragged on. Every setup felt like an eternity. Every take felt like I was swimming through molasses, trying to find Elena underneath all the noise in my head.
Micah called for another take of the phone call scene. I reset to my mark, the sand warm beneath my bare feet, and tried to remember why Elena was scared. Why she was desperate. Why any of this mattered.
“Action!”
I lifted the prop phone to my ear and delivered the lines. They came out flat. Lifeless. I knew it before Micah even called cut.
“Again,” he said. No notes this time. Just the word.
We went again. Better but not good. The desperation wasn’t there. I was too busy watching Chantilly in my peripheral vision, her phone raised like she was filming something.
She was probably just scrolling Instagram. Or maybe she was documenting my meltdown for her followers. Either way, I couldn’t focus.
“Let’s take five,” Micah announced. “Grace, can I see you for a second?”
My heart stuttered. We shouldn’t be seen talking privately. Not after this morning. But he was the director, and directors talked to actors all the time. It was normal. Professional.
I walked over to where he stood near the monitors, keeping a careful three feet of distance between us.
“You’re spiraling,” he said quietly. His voice was calm, but I could see the concern in his eyes. “I can see it. You need to let it go.”
“I’m trying.”
“No, you’re not. You’re watching Chantilly like she’s about to detonate a bomb. You’re second-guessing every line. You’re not present.”
“She saw us, Micah. She knows.”
“She doesn’t know anything for certain. And even if she did, she’s not going to say a word.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
He glanced toward where Chantilly was now chatting with one of the costume assistants, her laugh carrying across the beach.
“Because I know people like her,” he said. “She’s not going to give up that spotlight. If she tells anyone, the focus shifts to you. Me. She’s thrilled with the bump of publicity right now. Trust me, she’d rather push you in front of a bus than share that spotlight.”
He was right.
I nodded. “Okay. I’ll get it together.”
“You’re doing fine, but you can make it better.”
I offered a smile. “I can. I will.”
“Good.”
By the time we wrapped for the day, I was exhausted. My brain felt like it had been through a blender.
The van ride back to the hotel was quiet.
I sat in the back, staring out the window at the passing scenery without really seeing it.
Patty sat beside me, mercifully silent. She’d stopped asking if I was okay around hour five.
Now she just handed me water bottles and protein bars and made sure I didn’t collapse.
Back at the hotel, I went straight to my room. I needed to decompress. Needed to get my head right for tomorrow.
Tomorrow was our last day in Hawaii. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I couldn’t afford to give anything less than my absolute best.
I ordered room service and ran through tomorrow’s scenes in my head, trying to visualize the movements, the emotions, the beats I needed to hit. I wasn’t thinking about the trainwreck I could see coming from a mile away.