Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (33 page)

"Okay, speed...marker..." the board clapped together.

The extras started chit-chatting and I strolled by, turning to do a double take toward Hailey. She was preening in a way that was completely overplayed. I expected nothing more or less from her than this bullshit, but I kept my face in the position of ‘Holy shit, that woman is the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen in my entire life, I want to fuck her right now.’

And that's when I looked past the camera and saw her.

My dream girl.

She was standing three feet behind Fox, holding a clipboard and a pen and staring directly at me. Her long, blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. I almost didn't recognize her with makeup on. She was fucking stunning.

Even more so than she had been years ago.

Seven years ago. I'm not going to pretend like I didn't remember the date. It was April 29th.

I had been with three dozen women before her and a hundred since. But she was always the one that I was thinking about when I fucked movie stars, supermodels, and singers.

It was always her.

I'd asked around a few years ago and heard she was working as a script supervisor. I'd always hoped to run into her at a party or on a set but it had never managed to happen. Now, there I was, standing on the streets of Milan –

"Ruining the first goddamn take again! Cut!
Cut cut cut
. Christ. Can someone check him to see if he still has a pulse? Did you just have a goddamn stroke, Wilde? What the hell has gotten into you. You look like you've seen the ghost of Christmas fucking past."

I looked around me and saw that the entire set was gaping at me, including the extras. I nervously combed back my hair.

"Sorry guys," I replied. I saw the look on Marge's face behind the camera. She clearly wasn’t pleased with the masculine catch-all term I’d just used. "Not guys. Everyone. Apologies." I glanced over at Hailey and saw that she knew what - or, rather -
who
I was looking at. Her eyes narrowed viciously.

"Can we run that again?" I asked.

Fox threw his hands onto his hips. "
Can we? Can
we? If you want to make the fucking movie, we can. Jesus Christ on a goddamned bicycle. Okay. Is everyone ready, including Mr. Daydream here?" Fox looked around the set. "Let's do this."

We managed to get the shot, though the entire time my mind was on Olivia standing twenty feet away from me. The wind shifted at one point and I swore I could smell her perfume. My dick could smell her, at any rate.

I had to shift my legs multiple times once I sat at the table with Hailey. Acting across from Hailey was like acting to a brick wall. Actually, a fucking brick wall would have been my preference.

At least then I wouldn't have to stare into her overly-eager eyes miming what should be genuine human emotion - something I didn't think she was capable of even when she wasn't trying to act.

After an hour of sitting in the increasingly hot sun, Fox called a break for lunch so we could reposition for the next scene. Movies seem like glamorous things, but only when they are finished. Most of it is sitting around and waiting.

The second Fox cleared the set, I was on my feet. Even if I had
wanted
to stay away from Olivia, I couldn't. I'd waited this long. I wasn't missing that chance. I nearly sprinted over to her. When I was finally two feet away, she was still staring at her clipboard and scribbling furiously.

I cleared my throat.

"Hang on a minute," she said to me without looking up.

I was so surprised I actually took a half step backward. Nobody talked to me like that. Not anymore. I literally could not remember the last time somebody told me no. Fox had been correct about that days ago back in Los Angeles.

I felt my fist ball up, but this time it wasn't from anger. It was to keep from grabbing the back of her head and sticking my tongue into her mouth so hard that she wouldn't be able to walk away from me ever again.

Like the way she had in that auditorium that night
.

I was
the one who always did the leaving. It was true then, and it was a hundred times more true now. And here she was, once again rebuffing me. I'd never been so turned on in my life.

I stared at the way her teeth bit her bottom lip in deep concentration. I thought about being on the receiving end of that bite and a shiver went through me. She was still scribbling fiercely when a woman I didn’t recognize walked up to her.

"Oh, hey, Jennifer," Olivia said to the woman while still ignoring me. "Can we talk about this next scene? I want to make sure that the details here are consistent."

Jennifer
. That rang a bell. I was pretty sure she was the screen writer.

"Sure thing," said the woman. "You grabbing lunch at craft services or did you want to head around the corner?"

"Craft is fine, actually," Olivia said. "I’m on a budget."

And here was the next shock of the day. No one - and I mean no one - on a Hollywood film set admits they are hard up for cash.

Olivia flipped her long, blonde ponytail over her shoulder. I realized her face was glimmering slightly from a fine kiss of glitter. I fought a sudden urge to lick it off her cheek.

"You ready now?" Olivia asked Jennifer.

"Sure thing, but,” Jennifer looked up at me with an uncomfortable grimace. "I think Mr. Wilder wanted to speak with you."

Olivia flipped the pages of the script back over onto themselves and tucked a pen underneath the clip at the top of the board.

"Mr. Wilder?" she asked, her voice laced with sarcasm. Her full, gloss-covered lips were arranged in a sexy smirk.

"Uh," I said, opening and closing my mouth several times, struck speechless. I clenched my other fist, feeling like an absolute fool. Nobody made me feel like this.
Nobody
. Then a wild thought occurred to me. "I was actually hoping to talk with both of you about the script. I had a few questions."

Jennifer looked at me, surprised. "Really? You weren't that interested in L.A." she said. “I don’t remember you being at any of the meetings where I was.”

I felt like punching a wall at that response. Olivia was smirking as if this were completely expected behavior for me. As if she expected nothing more.

"Well, I was juggling a lot of things back in the States. Now that we're here, my focus is capable of being more...singular."

I said this last word while looking directly at Olivia. She didn't flinch or respond in any way. If she had been hard to reach when I'd walked into that coffee shop all those years ago, it was absolutely nothing as to how she was now. It was like there was a glass wall between us. I wanted to drive a truck through it, douse gasoline on the remains of the shards and light them on fire.

Jennifer looked between both of us, and Olivia spoke. "Let's hurry. I have a few things to do before we get back to shooting, and I'd like for lunch to not take up the majority of the next hour." And with that, she turned around, swishing her long ponytail behind her and giving me the best view of her ass I could possibly receive.

She was fucking with me. And it only made me want her more.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

OLIVIA

Wilder wouldn't stop looking at me the entire time we were sitting at the table. It was actually intensely embarrassing in so many ways. Jennifer was babbling on about something. I was having a hard time keeping my focus.

The three of us were clustered foolishly around one of the miniature bistro tables that were intended, at most, to hold two diminutive cups of espresso and maybe two small pastry plates.

We had three scripts and enormous plates piled with fresh salads and meatballs. It was all I could do to not stuff my face with the food that was currently in front of me. I was ravenous from the jet lag, and the smell of the fresh marinara made me want to eat my hand. But Wilder was six inches away from my left elbow and looking at me.

Looking at me
hard.

"So I was thinking the part where James and Margot end up running off to the countryside for their secret rendezvous - I thought that it could be interrupted by the international mob looking for James. Thoughts?" Jennifer was still talking and I'd said nothing, barely hearing what she was going on about.

"Uh, so we've got sex at sixty," I said, referring to the Hollywood slang that described the two-thirds point where the lovers usually banged each other, "As well as having the violent mob interruption? Does that mean guns in bed, then?"

Jennifer nodded. "Yeah, it would. Which would be ridiculous but also kind of sexy."

I scratched my head, suddenly feeling that Wilder's knee was digging into my thigh with a ferocity that assured me he wasn't doing it accidentally. I couldn't believe how much more muscular he was than when we'd been together all those years ago.

Well, I could sort of believe it. I'd seen his most popular movie four times in the theaters, sneaking into the back row of the on-campus movie theater at the studio that employed me at the time. It was his most popular movie for a reason: there were three different sex scenes in it with three different women.

The film was based off of the most popular modern romance novel of all time, where a billionaire ends up seducing three young college students into a BDSM-lite menage. The movie was so sexy it narrowly avoided the death sentence of an X rating.

They hadn't put makeup over his tattoos for that movie. I'd had enough dreams about him since my multiple viewings that it nearly qualified as pure porn for me. I'd referenced it along with our own sexy night so many times the two had overlapped in my brain, where the new, muscle-bound, tattoo-covered Roman "Nick" Wilder was fucking me on that stage.

"Olivia? The scene? You were saying?" Jennifer prompted me. I dropped my pen in my spaghetti sauce. I wondered how long I'd been ignoring her and felt myself blush intensely.

"Sorry about that," I replied. "I was just thinking; I don't really want a scenario where it just seems like Nick's character has to save the woman."

Jennifer tilted her head. "Sorry? Who is Nick?"

Oh, God.
I’d used his real name accidentally. I had no idea where that came from. I glanced up at Wilder, and he was smiling at me so broadly both of his dimples were like caverns.

He spoke for me. "Nick is my real name. The name I had back in college."

Jennifer looked at both of us, her eyebrows furrowed. "Oh. So you two...know each other?" she asked.

Wilder nodded. "Oh, yeah. Intimately," he said. Under the table his knee pressed into my thigh.

My eyes went wide, tingles going up my spine, and I pushed back with my thigh against his knee, hoping to smack it away. He was so muscular it barely moved a single inch. Instead, my own thigh went flying upward and smacked into the table, knocking over Jennifer's water glass and spilling it on her script.

"Shit!" I said. "I am so, so sorry. I was...moving my leg to get some circulation. Oh, God. Here.” I handed her my cloth napkin. Wilder stood up and grabbed a towel that was draped over the side of the railing, offering it to her.

"It's fine, it's fine," Jennifer said, fanning out the pages. The water droplets fell to the flagstone patio and shone there like diamonds in the Italian sun. She sat back down along with the rest of us. "Okay, yeah, I agree with that. Huh. So…what if it turned out that Margot is also a spy? And an assassin."

I leaned forward, interested for the first time in this complete turd of a story. "Now
that
would be interesting. It could also turn out that Margot has made him her mark this whole time. And they've banged, but it turns out that she's just using him. I like that. That's really, really good."

I chewed on the end of my pen, turning frantically through the script and making notes. "Oh, and I really hope you don't mind...I know the script supervisor normally doesn't do stuff like this."

Jennifer shrugged. "This is the first time I've ever been called to an actual set to rewrite a movie. I don't think they could get anyone else, honestly. It's my first script alone, too, and it's been a total bitch to work through. I appreciate the feedback and input. And it's not like it's my baby."

I realized Wilder was still silent. "I don't like that plot line," he said. "I just don't buy that he would be tricked like that by a woman. And it doesn't totally seem fair to him that she would use him and discard him like that."

I shrugged. "Men do it all the time in real life. Why can't a woman?"

"I’m not saying that women can’t do it," Wilder snapped at me viciously. "I'm just saying that this is fantasy. People want something more enjoyable that the nightmare of real life betrayal and rejection, I think."

I suddenly realized that Wilder was genuinely upset.

Jennifer was still eyes-deep in her script. "Yeah, but there has to be conflict and I don't want the damsel in distress if we don't have to have it. I mean, how many times have you seen a naked woman caught in bed and cowering from violence in the corner while wrapped in a bed sheet? I'm just sick of that trope, honestly."

I nodded. "I agree with Jennifer. But we can run it by Fox, see what he thinks."

Wilder stood up, gathering his empty plate. "Whatever you want, Liv," he said. "It's your show apparently." Then he walked away.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WILDER

Of course Fox loved the change to the script. If I was being honest, I did too. It was better than the damsel shit, as Olivia had so aptly pointed out. I just didn't like the real life parallels. She was blocking me from her, and it was driving me up a wall.

I refused the car that the studio had provided at the end of the day, choosing instead to walk alone through the streets of Milan. Strangely, nobody bothered me. I actually had no idea how famous I was over here; but it certainly wasn't anything like back home in the States. I was enjoying the anonymity.

When I reached the street in front of the Four Seasons, I saw that Hailey's car had pulled up directly in front. The paparazzi were still camped out.