Love a Comeback (TV Detectives #2)

Chapter 1

Back in the Leather Corset Again

Crouching on a dirty soundstage, Sam Farmer tried to find the place inside herself where she had invited her character, Theomina, to live.

Small bits of grit dug into her naked kneecaps. When she adjusted her position, the boning of her leather corset caught painfully against her rib cage. Ignoring the discomfort, Sam listened for the voice of the dragon rider inside her.

Theomina had lost everything she loved. Her father. The witch who was the only mother she’d ever known. Her beloved dragon. She was tough, but she’d reached her limit. She was tired. Her heart hurt.

A tear raced down Sam’s cheek as she stared up into the ice-blue eyes of her costar, Chad Bevington.

His eyes were the only part of him she could see clearly, since his face was covered in the green fabric of his chroma-key suit.

The evenly spaced markers sewn into it would allow the CGI people to do their postproduction digital magic and turn him into the soul-sucking beast that Theomina was fighting.

It wasn’t hard for Sam to access the part of herself that believed Chad made a credible soul-sucking beast.

“Cut!”

Sam relaxed her body as much as she could in the dragon-riding leathers of her costume. She looked past the lights pointed at the studio stage. “Did we get it?”

“Your nose is running every time you cry.” The assistant director sighed at her clipboard. “Take five while we decide.”

Goddamnit. Sam had wrapped this movie almost two months ago.

She’d wrapped it so hard, thrilled beyond description to be finished in Vancouver and finally able to unpack her suitcases at home in the Hollywood Hills.

But compositing issues with some of the green-screen shots meant she’d been called to a borrowed L.A.

soundstage at StudioHonor for reshoots at five a.m. on the same day her former costar, recent sleuthing partner, and current long-distance girlfriend, Bex, was finally coming home.

“When I need to cry on camera, I like to remember when my dog died,” Chad said, stretching his arms above his head. “Nice clean tears.” He winked at her.

Ugh. Sam didn’t mind so much that Chad was vain and entitled.

Vain entitlement came preinstalled in this town.

What she did mind was his tendency to try to control everyone and everything that happened on set.

This was a man who’d threatened to call his “legal team” so often that it became an inside joke among the cast and crew.

Sam had said nothing about Chad’s behavior. Like the character she played, she was tough. She’d grown up with four older brothers and knew how to fight hard and dirty to maintain her ego under the attack of entitled boys.

Though Chad was not a boy. He’d begun his career as an icon of nineties cinema, and he remained as familiar to movie and TV audiences as popcorn.

Still. Not worth the energy.

After a long stretch of lights going on and off, crew yelling directions, and conversations between the director and his assistants, the main bank of lights went down.

“Thank you, everybody, that’s a wrap!” the director yelled.

“Get the fuck out of here, and stay out of my face until I see you at the premiere.”

Sam blew out a breath in relief.

“Except for you, my queen.” The director turned to point at Sam. “I’ll see you in a week.”

Sam gave him the wide, affable smile that was her trademark, most recently reproduced on the plastic face of her Theomina action figure. “Looking forward to it.”

She was not.

Making movies about magic was not a magical experience.

Sam had adored Theomina when it was a postapocalyptic fantasy novel.

She’d given copies to her nieces and nephews, and they’d been the first ones she called when she was offered the part in the film.

I’m going to play Theomina! she’d told them over Zoom, and everyone had cheered.

Then she’d spent most of the shoot grateful beyond words that the novel’s author had promised to only ever write one Theomina book. No more books meant no sequels. Sam would never have to play Theomina again.

Or so she’d thought.

The author’s artistic convictions, it turned out, hadn’t stopped her from licensing the IP to Howell Motion Pictures.

Just yesterday afternoon, Sam had received an excited phone call from her manager letting her know that blockbuster-maker Bradley Wilhite had attached himself to a Theomina and the Dragon of Shadows limited series in the role of Theomina’s romantic interest.

The one and only novel characterized Theomina as ascetic, with no other love than for her kingdom, and definitely not for a giant creep of a man who was more than twenty years older than Sam and didn’t believe in intimacy coordinators.

But Theomina and her fictional principles were no match for heteronormative Hollywood.

Bradley Wilhite wanted Sam to report to his ranch in Telluride in seven days for a chemistry read, and she was expected to pack lip balm, drink plenty of water, and smile.

The director gave her a wave on his way out.

Soon, Sam was surrounded by costume assistants who unbuckled her from the leathers down to the singlet and bike shorts she wore underneath.

Chad was still being freed from his suit when she booked it to a dressing room to remove her makeup and fake blood.

She brushed the special effects dirt out of her hair and slammed on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a ball cap.

They were her comfy clothes, designed for utility and escaping the set quickly.

In her bedroom at home, Sam had something a lot more special laid out for when she saw Bex.

On the open-air top deck of the studio’s parking garage, she unlocked her Audi and flung her hat onto the passenger seat.

The first thing she did after a long, desperately needed exhalation was dig her phone out of her bag, swipe past three million notifications, and tap the only name in her saved contacts that she’d marked with a star.

Bexley Simon.

“Hello?”

Sam winced. The familiar voice sounded distracted and like there were a lot of people around. “Bex?”

“Sam? Fuck! Hold on—I’ve got it, for Christ’s sake!” Bex said this last to someone else. “It’s a carry-on. I’ll carry it!”

Sam’s girlfriend was a small woman, short, curvy, and deceptively cute, with a face that could make a person fall in love or weep from across an entire theater and into the cheap seats, but she was not quiet.

A Broadway theater critic had once admiringly mused that given the pair of lungs on Bex, her body couldn’t possibly contain much else besides her artist’s heart—and what’s more, she needed nothing but that heart and those lungs to keep herself upright, dancing, and singing.

Sam put the phone on speaker and turned down the volume.

“Okay. My god. Sam? Are you still there?”

“I am.”

Bex gusted a breath out into the phone. “Give me one second, I’m at the entrance of the VIP lounge.” The background noise dropped away. The sound of Bex breathing into her phone became all-encompassing, then inaudible. “Now I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

Sam laughed. “I can hear you. You must be at the airport.”

“Indeed.”

“LAX, I hope?”

“I should be at LAX, but my flight out of JFK was diverted to Denver because apparently it’s hard to fly through something called—a derecho?”

“Sounds fake.” Sam made her voice as loose as her hands, which she laid palms up on her thighs to keep from squeezing the steering wheel in bloodless fists.

“Doesn’t it? They made us get off the plane.

I’m supposed to stay in this room they are calling a VIP lounge.

At some point there will be a new crew, and I will get back on the plane.

” Sam heard a loud rustling that she recognized as the sound of Bex digging through her bag for whatever gross nutrition bar she currently believed would solve her problems. “I should’ve taken Frankie up on her offer to drive cross-country with her, but I feel like I’m not made for road trips. ”

“Absolutely, you are not.” Bex was a lot of things, but a woman satisfied with any kind of passenger seat was not one of them.

Sam loved that about her.

It was a helpful reminder. She held onto it and made herself take a few beats to recenter.

She’d been looking forward to Bex’s return more than was good for her.

Possibly, a little bit, Sam had been clinging to a fantasy of what Bex’s return would be like.

Daydreaming about surprising Bex at the baggage carousel.

Flipping through a mental carousel of potential outfits and imagining how Bex would react.

Thinking up menus for a romantic evening meal they would share poolside, just the two of them.

None of that was going to happen, or at least not tonight.

Even so, it was a perfect May afternoon in Los Angeles.

Hot, but with a nice breeze. The sky was clear.

She’d been released from the clutches of Theomina.

Nothing was fucked here, as her brother Fergus liked to say.

No one had abandoned her. Sam would see Bex soon.

Six months, though. It had been six whole, entire months since they’d been in the same room.

Their work had pulled them apart, throwing their relationship into the kind of long-distance, not-quite-there-yet limbo that made Sam worry, sleepless in the middle of the night, that she’d left it too long and missed her one cosmic chance at love.

She and Bex had been together almost every day of the six years they spent costarring on Craven’s Daughter, a TV procedural about a kindergarten teacher (Bex’s character, Cora Banks) who takes over her dead father’s detective agency and teams up with a disgraced former FBI agent (Sam’s character, Henri Shannon) to solve one murder per week.

Those were heady years for Sam, with an undercurrent of doomed pining for her fellow TV detective.