Extreme Bachelor (5 page)

Subject: Re: The Mess You Got Us Into

From: Mikey thrillsanonymous.net
>

To: Jack <
[email protected]
>

Time: 3:00 am

What’s the surprise?

Subject: Re: Re: The Mess You Got Us
Into

From: Jack <
[email protected]
>

To: Mikey <
[email protected]
>

Time: 6:00 am

Well Raney, it would be a pretty sorry
surprise if I told you, wouldn’t it? So when are you back?

Subject: Re: Re: Re: The Mess You Got Us
Into

From: Mikey <
[email protected]
>

To: Jack <
[email protected]
>

Time: 4:00 pm

I’ll be on the set Monday morning. That’s
when I’ll show you schoolgirls how to handle a couple of women.
Sheesh. You’re embarrassing me with all the whining.

MICHAEL coasted into a parking spot with the
new 4 Doors Around CD up full volume to test the speakers of his
brand-spankin’ new silver Thunderbird convertible. Satisfied that
the Bose speakers were adequate for his driving needs, he stepped
out, locked her up, and then looked around.

The Downey lot was literally teeming with
women. Tall and short; reds, blondes, and brunettes; long legs,
great racks, and fabulous derrieres. This film was truly a gift
from the gods of Guy Universe—Michael was just glad he’d been able
to talk his partners in T.A. into it.

They hadn’t wanted to do it at first—what
with their extreme sport adventure business taking off so well, the
four of them had more on their plates than they could handle. They
were already coordinating two action films this year in addition to
having booked a half dozen extreme adventures with the extremely
wealthy, and the prospect of adding a third film to the mix seemed
too much. But Michael reminded them that in addition to the
compressed schedule—the studio didn’t want a long shoot on
location, given the number of actors and costs involved—there would
be twenty to thirty women. Twenty to thirty good-looking women.
Women who were, relatively speaking, available.

“Why do you want to do it?” Jack demanded
the day they had discussed it over a plate of nachos and a pitcher
of beer. “It’s not like you a need a shot at twenty or so women to
hook up with one. You have them hanging all over you as it is.”

“Yeah, right,” Michael said with a snort.
“That’s why I’ve been available for so much of the extreme sports
work lately. They’re not hanging off me. And besides, I just really
like women. Don’t you?”

“I like women a lot, only one-on-one,”
Cooper interjected. “Women in a pack? Forget it—they’re awful. They
gang up on you, and you don’t have a chance.”

“Okay, forget it then,” Michael said with a
shrug. “I just thought it would be fun to hang out with twenty
good-looking women for a few weeks.”

No one said anything for a long moment. For
a bunch of guys who didn’t have the sort of job that afforded them
the opportunity to hang out with women that often, it proved to be
an argument none of them could resist—they signed up for the
film.

Michael’s only regret was that he had earned
the lead on the Costa Rica trip and had missed the first week of
boot camp. That was one week of being surrounded by women he’d
never get back, and if there was one thing Michael Raney loved, it
was to be surrounded by women.

There was no time like the present, and as
soon as he got through this studio budget meeting Jack had asked
him to attend, Michael was ready to go play.

He started across the
parking lot, making eye contact with as many women as he could, who
in turn gave him a smile, a smile, a smile . . . oh,
ouch
. No smile there.
That was a definite glare from ah . . . Linda. Yeah, Linda, that
was her name.
Linda
. . . the production assistant, right, right. Or was it
Lindsey? He couldn’t really recall much about her, other than that
he’d been involved with her for a very short time once. She didn’t
have the looks most guys wanted, but Michael had liked her a lot in
the beginning—she had a wry wit. Unfortunately, it turned out that
she was funnier in a weird way than a ha-ha way, and he hadn’t
pursued it.

And as she was still staring daggers at him,
Michael looked in the opposite direction.

Well, shit.

He knew that one, too. Jill, perky Jill with
the brand-new, perky breasts. Nice perky breasts. Nice perky
breasts attached to someone with stalker-like tendencies.

Okay, so there might be a couple of rough
spots in this dream gig, but nothing to worry about. There were
still more than a dozen women he hadn’t been involved with, and one
with golden hair was walking toward him that minute. Michael
smiled, slowed his step. “Excuse me, can you point me toward the
office?”

The golden-haired woman smiled brightly and
offered to take him there herself.

Was America a great country, or what?

THE women gathered on the basketball court
to play dodge ball, or as one of the stunt coordinators put it,
“practice teamwork.”

“I don’t know how in the hell we are going
to learn teamwork playing dodgeball, but whatever,” Trudy said on
an impatient sigh as she studied her hand through giant black
sunglasses she had yet to remove. Trudy was a single mom with a
useless boyfriend and an unusual fetish for showy sunglasses. She
had more pairs than Leah could count.

At that moment, she was wiggling her fingers
at Leah. “So what do you think of this color? I got it from my
daughter Aralia.”

Leah looked at the fingernails Trudy was
wiggling at her. The color was a little too bubblegum pink for her
tastes, but looked like something a fifth-grader like Aralia would
like. “Fabulous,” she lied.

“Don’t look now, but here comes the Stud
Strut,” Jamie said. Jamie and Michele had migrated toward Trudy and
Leah early on, and now the four of them were inseparable. Jamie
nodded her dark red head in the direction of the door to the
basketball court. “Hey, you know what T.A. stands for, don’t you?”
she asked as they watched two of the three stunt
trainer-slash-coordinator hunks, Cooper and Eli, stroll in.

“What?” Leah asked.

“Tits and Ass,” Jamie said, and then
guffawed. “Get it? They have a thing for tits and ass!” She
laughed. Leah, Trudy, and Michele rolled their eyes.

“Ladies, if we could have
your attention!” Eli, the one with the sandy blond hair was
speaking. He was a quiet guy who Leah thought looked pretty damn
good in faded jeans. Hell, they
all
looked good for that matter, from Cooper’s dark
locks, to Jack and his thick brown hair, and then of course they
were all tall and built like a brick shit house.

“We finished up our first phase of intensive
gym work,” Eli said. “You did good, ladies. Real good.”

Several of them cooed like a flock of
doves.

“This week, we’re gonna focus on
team-building exercises. And then next week, we’re going to work
hard to block those two big battle scenes with the team skills
you’ve learned. We won’t lie to you—this is going to be a lot of
hard, physical work. But if you do like we ask, and we get those
battle scenes down, we’ve got a little surprise for you.”

“I hope the surprise has
the name
Gucci
in
it somewhere,” Leah muttered.

“The studio has okayed us to go on location
a couple of days early and do a final weekend of team building on
some of the best white water in the country. In other words, we’re
going rafting.”

That was met with a lot
of
ooohs
and
aahs
,
and of course, one of the Serious Actresses (as they had begun to
think of a few of them, as opposed to the young, eager,
will-sleep-with-anyone Starlets) began applauding, because she
applauded
e-ver-y-thing
. And naturally, once she started, everyone started
applauding because no one wanted to be the lone non-applauder.
Personally, Leah thought the constant applauding was way out of
hand and only gave it a halfhearted effort.

“Okay, all right,” Eli said, signaling with
his hands for everyone to quiet down. “Before we get to the gravy,
we need you to focus,” he said, pointing at his head. “When we
start shooting in a few weeks, you all need to be fit and ready to
go. To get fit, you have to focus, and that means leaving your cell
phones in the locker room.’

And that was, of course,
the precise moment Leah’s cell phone started to ring. She
frantically dug in her bag for it as the ringing got louder. She
looked at the display—Frances! Unfortunately, the whole room had
quieted—everyone was looking at her. Eli was looking at her so
intently that she flinched a little. “Ah . . . I’ve really got to,
ah . . . take this,” she muttered, and flipped it open, whirled
around, and whispered, “
Hey
.”

“Bad news, sweetie.”
Frances had never been one to beat around a bush. “You got passed
over for the spot on
Desperate
Housewives
.”

Leah’s heart sank. “Why? They said I was
perfect for the part of the preacher’s wife.”

“I’ll put it to you straight. You’re too
fat. If you lost ten pounds, maybe. But don’t worry—we’ve still got
a couple of auditions outstanding.”

“But what if I lose the—”

“Ooooh, I really need to take this call,”
Frances said, and clicked off.

Leah sighed, shut her phone, and turned
around. The meeting had resumed. Eli was explaining what the next
couple of weeks looked like.

“Ohmigod, he’s so
cute
,” Michele whispered
to Leah as she stuffed the phone back into her bag.

“Question!” Tamara Contreras’s hand shot up,
as if Eli and Cooper didn’t know who’d be asking a question after
the two bazillion she’d asked every day. Tamara was an
ex-soap-opera diva (killed off by her murderous twin disguised as
her ex-husband on a remote island with an invisible and
impenetrable barrier, which naturally meant she could not seek
medical treatment) who had begun annoying Leah and Trudy on the
second day, when she announced she had a problem with perfume. Not
any particular perfume, but the amount of perfume that was being
worn. It gave her a headache.

The entire cast spent an hour arguing about
it. The stunt guys had been so agitated that they’d had to caucus.
After fifteen minutes of shuffling feet and a lot of head
scratching, they had come back with, “Use your best judgment.”

Trudy, Leah, Michele, and Jamie had howled
about that over drinks after work. Men could be so stupid
sometimes. But they decided that Tamara had so many things wrong
with her—perfume sensitivity being the tip of the proverbial
iceberg—that she wouldn’t last.

“I give her two weeks on
set,” Jamie had said. Jamie was short and had red hair that in
concert with her boob job, preceded the rest of her when she walked
into a room. She was a great person, but all Leah could think
was,
character roles
.

“I give her two weeks before someone kills
her,” Michele had responded before wrapping her collagen-enhanced
lips around a straw. Michele was really a beauty with long golden
hair and big green eyes, plus the requisite fake boobs and
lips.

At the moment, Tamara’s arm was about to
come out of its socket as she tried to get Cooper or Eli to look at
her.

“Yes, Tamara?” Cooper finally asked,
exchanging a weary look with Eli.

“If the studio okayed the white-water
rafting, are they going to okay the wet gear? The water can be
pretty cold this time of year.”

“We’ll worry about wet gear later,” Cooper
said.

“Okay, well, I just want to go on record as
saying I’ll need full-body wet gear,” Tamara said, oblivious to the
sighs and eye-rolling around her. “I have a low tolerance for
cold.”

Cooper and Eli looked at one another. “I’ll
tell you what, Tamara. Let’s just make sure we get to white-water
rafting first,” Cooper said. “So all right, ladies, let’s start by
breaking up into our armies. West team on that end, East team on
this end. We start in five minutes.”

“You know what?” Trudy asked casually as the
guys began to try, enthusiastically and in vain, to corral them
into their respective armies, “I think I am going to have to change
my vote for who is the hottest stunt trainer.”

It was a question they’d been debating for a
few days.

“Don’t change your vote until we get a load
of the fourth one,” Michele advised Trudy as they strolled to the
team on the left.

“A fourth?” Jamie exclaimed. “A fourth
what?”

“A fourth stunt trainer guy. He’s coming in
later.”

Trudy, Leah, and Jamie all came to a stop
midstride and looked at Michele. “How do you know? And why isn’t he
already here?” Trudy demanded. “We deserve to have all of them
present and accounted for so we can make a fair comparison of who
is the hottest.”

“I don’t know why he isn’t here,” Michele
said, and glanced over her shoulder, as if anyone could possibly
hear her in the din two dozen female voices created in the gym.
“But apparently, he’s a real player. I heard it from one of the
Serious Actresses—seems like a bunch of them know him. Some of them
have dated him, too. And get a load of this—they call him the
Extreme Bachelor. Isn’t that hilarious?”

“Why?” Trudy asked.