Step Wilde: A Stepbrother Romance (7 page)

I realized I was holding my breath the entire time I read his words. Tears pricked at my eyes and I wished Lydia were here to slap me. These were the same jeans I'd worn that night. Wilder had obviously put the note into the pocket of my pants. But when had he done it? Before sex? When he was taking my pants off? After?

I held the paper in my hand and walked over to a trash can. A group of giggling students tossing a Frisbee ran by me. I hesitated, and then placed the paper back into my pocket. As unlikely as it seemed right now that I would ever, ever want to even
look
at Nick Wilder again, something told me to hang onto it.

Maybe later I would burn it in a display of cathartic anger.

CHAPTER SIX

OLIVIA

SEVEN YEARS LATER

"Spinach and artichoke salad, please," I said to the young man behind the salad counter. The restaurant around me was filled with Angelenos: skinny, beautiful people busy
not
eating the overpriced, organic salads they had ordered. Half of them were on their cell phones the same way that I was.

I could barely hear the studio executive I was speaking with on my cheap flip phone. "Sorry, Jerry, you're going to need to say that again," I said loudly into the phone. I handed over a crumpled twenty-dollar bill to the cashier, who took it with an overly-cheery smile. I was probably the only person to pay in cash in the entire eighteen months this place had been open.

I glanced down at the Apple Pay pad that I'd seen the four people in front of me use. One day I hoped I could afford to be that willy-nilly with my money. Until then, I was using an envelope system filled with twenty dollar bills. Even eating this lunch was a splurge, but it had been a long week and I didn't have the stomach for another PB&J on white bread.

"I said - the trilogy has been
cancelled
," Jerry enunciated through the phone. "Look, Liv, I gotta make another thirty phone calls. Sorry this isn't going to work out."

For a wild moment, I considered reaching into the cash register, pulling back my twenty, and running out of the restaurant without my meal. But the apple-cheeked, gorgeous young woman who I would have bet money had just fallen off a bus from Boise handed me back my meager change. Jerry had hung up, so I snapped the clamshell of my phone shut and slipped it into my purse.

I examined the pile of coins in the palm of my hand. "Wow, not as much change as I thought I'd get," I replied, hoping to joke with the cashier.

"Did I not count it right?" the girl asked, panicked, her eyes filling up with tears.

I held my hand up. "It was a joke. It's the right change. Thanks," I said quickly, turning around before I started crying too. It was an obnoxious habit that I had – getting misty-eyed when someone else did. Even nearly seven years in the city that killed dreams faster than you could think of them had not cured me of this. I never cried otherwise; it was always this annoying automatic reaction that I couldn’t control.

I walked over to a tall stool facing the window and sat down. There was a business man sitting next to me, his Aviators still on his face. He was talking loudly. I took one look at his expensive suit pants and perfectly starched white button down-shirt; the sleeves of which were rolled back - just casually enough - to his elbows and knew that he was a producer of some kind.

Besides that giveaway, he was bragging loudly about the new movie he'd just cast. I tuned him out. I was good at that. I knew it wouldn't lead anywhere for me to network and besides that, at this point his conversation would just remind me how jobless I was.

I was supposed to be the script supervisor on the latest young adult fantasy trilogy. Something about kids being sent to the moon to start a new civilization. Apparently the outspoken author of the books had turned out to have a nasty habit of snorting blow off of hookers' stomachs and inviting his young fans to come along with him. The backlash had been so severe the studio had cancelled production.

The trilogy was thrown out the window and my contract had been tossed with it. This was supposed to be the three-movie job that meant I could finally move out of my eccentric aunt's apartment. She owned six cats, and I was allergic to every single one of them. I'd been consuming my weight in antihistamines since moving in with her right out of college.

I chewed my overpriced salad, wondering sullenly why I hadn't gone to McDonald's for a Big Mac instead. It would have been a quarter of the price and had six times the calories, meaning that I could skip dinner. Then I remembered that I would have had to sit in forty minutes of traffic to get to one. I was in the part of the city that only served "clean" food, whatever that meant.

Besides that, it was difficult to be inclined to stuff myself with a greasy burger when everyone around me was a size double zero. I choked down the rest of my lunch. It tasted like rabbit food drizzled with Pine Sol extract.

This was the breaking point. I either had to get another job rapidly, or move out of L.A.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WILDER

I was only sort of drunk.

Okay, a little bit more than sort of drunk. More than buzzed, less than blackout drunk.

Not
smashed
the way that I used to get in college - I still prided myself on being able to hold my liquor. Even back in my undergrad days, most people couldn't ever tell that I was three sheets. But I was drunk right then, and I had the luxury of being drunk
at work
; a luxury that the vast majority of sorry motherfuckers do not have. But I’d always had the ability to do whatever the fuck I wanted, and that hadn’t changed. If anything, it was more true now than it had ever been. Why?

Because I was Roman Wilder.

Roman Wilder, God of Hollywood. Except I’d been caught with my pants down more than once in front of the paparazzi and was now known to most of the world as Wilde - the bad boy who could charm his way out of any situation. The day the New York Post cover hit - a photo of me with my parts blurred out, holding my arms up in a touchdown position - with the headline “WILDE CHILD" on it, I knew I'd have a nickname for life.

I'd even told my manager, Kimberley, how unfair it was that if a woman had been caught in the same position, she'd be slut shamed and told she was losing it.

"Then use that white man privilege, make both of us some money and you can donate it to every woman's rights cause on planet earth, okay?" She'd said this to me before firing off a few dozen phone calls to get me the opportunity to be interviewed.

She was such a genius at publicity that she'd gotten me a cover of
Vanity Fair
where I recreated the now-infamous candid pose but with a cadre of feminine hands covering my junk and some better lighting. Annie Leibovitz shot the cover. The issue sold out in an hour.

I was on set. My head was pounding. Normally I don’t get hangovers but I was still jet lagged from the flight over. I'd spent the weekend in New York City doing shots with supermodels and my on again, off again girlfriend, Hailey Holliday. The bright lights of the set made me feel like someone was drilling a hole into my skull through my eye socket.

"Wilde, I need you to run to the left slightly," Fox, the director, barked at me. His hairy, skinny legs were sticking out of his iconic, worn cargo shorts, and I'd noted earlier that his rotund midsection looked even bigger than the last time we worked together. It never ceased to amaze me that someone with so much money couldn't find better clothes to purchase. Or maybe he just didn't care. 

I moved my head infinitesimally and somehow the lighting people were thrilled by the minute adjustment.

"Okay," Fox yelled. "We're ready to go."

The assistant director counted down and snapped the board. "Speed, marker, and ACTION!"

I squinted my eyes up into the light that was supposed to simulate a klieg light in an interrogation chamber. I opened my mouth to say my line and the words flew completely out of my head.
Shit.

I wondered boldly for a moment if I could somehow play this off the way Harrison Ford did in
Indiana
Jones
when he shot the guy instead of engaging in the long sword fight. But I was no Harrison Ford, Fox was no Spielberg, this movie was no Indy sequel, and this scene was supposed to be moody and discreet.

Discreet. Perfect
. I tugged hard on the bindings that were only loosely draped on my wrists, and dramatically threw the rope on the ground. I stood up, shaking out my limbs. Then I reached into the pocket of my black leather jacket to pull out an herbal prop cigarette. I lit it and took a drag, turning around and walking to the faux-rusted metal warehouse door and opening it without a word. I looked back at the camera and gave a flash of my famous half-cocked grin before slipping through the doorway.

The room behind the fake warehouse set was the props room. I walked in to see Aldo, the fake gun guy, bent over a black pistol with a paintbrush. He had on a pair of magnifying glasses and a light on top of his head. "Oh, hey Wilde," he said, turning the light off and flipping the lenses up. "What's up?"

I walked over to a stool and moved the fake Uzi resting there to one of the empty tables. "What's up is that your peace and quiet is going to be severely interrupted in approximately ten seconds.” I sat down, leaning against the wall and extinguishing the cigarette on the bottom of my shoe. "This shit tastes like rosebud soap," I explained to Aldo, holding up the butt and throwing it into a trashcan halfway across the room.

On cue, Fox burst into the room. A vein was going at his temple. I knew this was a terrible sign. He held his hand up to Aldo in a perfunctory wave. "How's it going?" he asked him in a forced display of amiable kindness.

This was an even worse sign. Aldo shrugged and smiled. "On schedule as always," he replied. He pointed at the door. "Should I leave you two alone?"

Fox smiled and shook his head. "Nah, I'd like a witness to hold me back in case I strangle our leading man here," Fox said, still beaming sarcastically.

I adjusted myself on the stool. This was going to be a doozy.

"Wilde, you like making money, right?" he asked, taking the chair next to me and sitting in it.

"Well, you know, worse ways to spend time, I'd say," I replied.

Fox smiled even wider, though I knew he didn't mean it a bit. "You know who else enjoys money? My wife. My darling, darling wife of forty years. So do our kids, since it will one day be theirs. So do our grandkids, who enjoy the private schools they go to. You know what I
don't
like?"

I figured this was a rhetorical question so I didn't bother responding, still holding his gaze.

"I don't like know-it-all actors who start out promising and then wash their careers down the drain with a potent mixture of alcohol, women, and being surrounded by an abundance of people who can't seem to use the word
No
."

Fox leaned forward, his smile disappearing. "What in the
hell
was that out there? You had one line. ONE, Wilde. One. And you blew it. This is day one of the shoot and you're already fucking up." He stood up, his anger in full flow now. Aldo seemed paralyzed, not sure if he should look away and get back to work or keep observing the situation in case Fox did actually attempt to kill me.

"This script is a load of shit," I said to him. "It was fine in the early draft that I got but now it looks like it was cut apart by seventeen different screenwriters and a half dozen studio executives who have a Michael Bay fetish."

Fox threw his hands onto the top of the worn bucket hat he always wore. I wasn't sure he actually had skin or hair under there. I'd never seen it and neither, as far as I knew, had anyone else.

"Of course that's what happened! That is what
always happens
, Wilde. You've done this long enough to know that perfectly decent scripts get cut up into a million pieces by old man executives in custom Italian suits.
Your job
is this: you take the shitty script, you say the shitty lines, you smile your fifteen-million-dollar smile into the camera, and then we all get to go home early. Okay? Got that?"

I leaned forward. "I don't like the script. I want someone to fix it. Someone better than who we have now. And I don't want the execs messing with this version." I stood up, feeling excitement rushing through my body. "And I want to film it in Italy, not on a soundstage."

Fox shook his head and laughed. "Well, buddy, unless you have 20 million dollars to invest in this movie, I highly doubt that's happening."

I stopped. "Are you serious? Is that all it would take?"

Fox guffawed and stared at me in awe. "Is that seriously how you'll be spending the rest of your day? Making phone calls to see if you can take over this train wreck of an action slash romance slash comedy film?" Fox exhaled loudly and then held his hands up in surrender. "You know what? You go right on ahead. I'm sending everyone else home before the traffic gets completely out of control."

Fox left the room. I looked over at Aldo who shrugged. "I've always wanted to see Italy," he said with a smile. Before I could respond, the door to the set opened again. My assistant Harrison, a diminutive man with an irritating fucking penchant for bowties and pompadours, rushed through holding my iPhone.

"Mr. Wilder," he said briskly, "Your father called again."

I felt a surge of anger course through my body. "Ignore it," I replied tersely.

"Sir, he's called twice a day for the last week. I really think you should take it if you want him to stop calling you."

I clenched my fist, trying to hold my anger. "I don't fucking care what he has to say to me. I talk to him once a year on Christmas. I don't want to break my routine. It's been working really well." I waited for Harrison to respond to this, but he said nothing.

"Got it. I will block his number, if that would be easier."

I nodded. "Fucking do it. And get Kimberley on the phone. I've got a movie deal to negotiate."