Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story (34 page)

The next couple of days were a whirlwind of activity that kept us busy from sun up to sun down. Our mornings were spent hiking the lush temperate rainforests of the island, our afternoons surfing the beach outside our house with Hal and Drea – or in my case, attempting a handful of times to get up on a board before rolling to shore and then giving up to watch Cameron take to cold water surfing like a seal – and our nights drinking beer and eating fresh-caught seafood with our new friends.

And our nights? In a word, they were magical. I’d never felt more connected to Cameron than I did during those long, languid hours we spent making love. Whether he cornered me in the shower after a long, wet day in the surf, laid me down in front of the fire where flames danced over his muscled back and sculpted chest, or carried me upstairs to bed at the end of the night, we couldn’t seem to get enough of each other. Though our days in Eagle Harbour were dwindling faster than I would have expected, I never wanted our trip to end. 

As November came to a close and December loomed around the corner, I knew we’d have to speak with Broderick before the entire crew descended on Vancouver for the start of filming. Cameron knew it as well, but neither of us made the effort to reach out to our boss. He hadn’t tried contacting us either which we knew was a very bad sign. Broderick wasn’t exactly the type of man who kept his feelings to himself, much less when he thought he’d been wronged. And whether or not what we’d done was the right thing for our relationship, Broderick would have viewed it as the worst kind of professional disloyalty.

On the morning of our eighth day we lay in bed, our limbs tangled up in rumpled sheets, when my phone buzzed loudly on the nightstand next to my head. 

“Ignore it,” Cameron groaned, his arm thrown over his eyes to block out the bright rays of a full winter’s sun. “Nothing can be as important as sleeping for two more hours.”

“Ha! As if you’re sleeping.”

“Well, maybe not.” He rolled over, his big body looming over me. “I can think of other ways to spend the morning.” Then he leaned down and kissed me in hopes of distracting me from the phone that was now practically vibrating off its pedestal. I expected the call to go to voicemail, but after the sixth ring there was a pause indicating the caller had hung up and then the trilling started all over again.

“I have to get it,” I told Cameron, breaking away from his lips. “It might be an emergency.”

Cameron dropped his forehead to mine in resignation. “Fine. But I’m not done here.” He flopped over and resumed his previous position, as if he’d never tried to seduce me into ignoring my phone.

I pulled the device to me, checking out the name on the screen before answering lest it be my mother calling with another one of her gossip emergencies. Cameron and I had agreed not to check Twitter or Facebook for the remainder of our trip, so if people were talking about us, we didn’t know. My mother, we knew, was sure to inform me.

“It’s Shanna,” I told him.

“And so it begins. Be brave, my sweet girl.” He sat up in bed and grabbed his own phone. As he typed out a long text to someone, I sighed and answered the call.

“Hi Shanna, what’s up?”

“Don’t play coy with me Sarah. You know exactly what’s up.” Instead of censure, her voice held a note of humor. “Broderick is in the kitchen right now cursing the day he hired you away from me and the moment he signed Cameron to play Xander.” Laughing, she added, “You guys have been naughty.”

Slipping out of bed, I walked naked down the stairs to stare out windows that looked onto Lester Beach. “Before you say anything, you have to know it was an accident—”

Shanna didn’t let me finish, interrupting to say I better not dare apologize. Rather, she said, everyone else should be apologizing to me for putting me through this horrible stunt in the first place. “You did nothing wrong. And besides, it doesn’t matter now. I’ve taken care of everything.”

I pictured Shanna waving a hand in front of her face as she normally did when brushing aside something that was of no consequence to her. A woman in her position – married to a major Hollywood director but with significant cash and power of her own – could choose to ignore anything she damn well pleased and think nothing of incidents that were very much consequential for people like me. Shanna knew exactly her place in the world and the benefits her status afforded her.

“I was talking Broderick down from the ledge last night and I have to admit it wasn’t pretty. He’s very angry with you, by the way. He trusted you to do right by him, Sarah. He feels you deceived him. Rather, he
felt
that way until I explained to him, at length, how ridiculous this whole PR campaign was from the get go.

“There is no way Cameron and Jillian could have kept up this farce over the course of the five years it’s going to take for all of the movies to be filmed and released. And there’s certainly no way I was going to let you put off marrying him for the sake of a movie that doesn’t need the extra publicity in order to succeed. People are intrigued about who Cameron and Jillian are, yes, but it’s preposterous to think in order to keep the public interested in Xander and Arabella those two have to pretend to be in love! That woman Aerin … Well, let’s just say the less said about her, the better.”

This was unexpectedly fantastic news. There was only one person in the world whose opinion Broderick trusted more than his own, and she was currently telling me she had my back. “Thank you so much Shanna. Your support means the world to me.”

“How could you have doubted it? I just wish you’d have come to me instead of having me hear about all this from my girlfriends. You know you can trust me, right?” Unless I was mistaken, I thought I detected a hint of vulnerability in her tone, which was surprising because I wouldn’t have said Shanna had an unguarded bone in her body.

“Of course I know that!” I rushed to reassure her. “I just didn’t want to bother you with something like this when you have your own family and husband to worry about. I respect and admire you so much Shanna, but I didn’t want to lay this problem at your feet.”

“Pshaw,” she exhaled on a disgusted sigh. “When it’s my husband’s fault and I can fix it, I damn well expect you to tell me exactly how I can help. Speaking of, I was talking with my sister over lunch the other day and I told her all about you and Cameron.” Shanna had been one of the only people who’d known how I felt about Cameron, but even though I’d confided that I’d fallen in love with him, I’d never told her what had happened back in June.

“You never shared all of the details, of course,” she continued, “but I know something major went down between you two this summer. Now here you are months later, finally able to tell the world you are in love each other, and there’s my dolt of a husband trying to force you to keep it a secret.

I’d forgotten that when Shanna got wound up about something she could talk a mile a minute. I had to really focus on what she was saying to keep up with the conversation and all the various twists and turns she included while telling a story.

“And do you know what Marnie said to me? She said that Broderick should scrap the movie he’s working on since it’s much too sinister and dark, and make a movie about your relationship instead.”

As she finished, I heard the excitement in her voice echoing across the line. Shanna’s emphatic words were eerily close to what I had said to Cameron as we stood on the roadside just days before, vowing to put an end to the PR campaign once and for all. While no one doubted
The Ties That Bind
would be a huge international hit Shanna and I both recognized there would always ben an audience for stories like his and mine.

“Hello, Sarah. You still there?”

“Yes, um. Yeah.”

Shanna misunderstood my silence as anxiety and rushed to assure me everything was going to be okay. “Oh sweetie, don’t worry. Broderick isn’t going to fire Cameron. Oh, he might say he wants to but he knows damn well the gold mine he’s got with your man. Cameron might have been a nobody—” I winced at the classification “—six months ago but already he’s got the world’s attention and Broderick knows it. There’s no one out there with his good looks and versatility. He’ll never want for work again.”

I let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, relieved to receive Shanna’s guarantee.

“Oh Sarah honey, did you really think Cameron was going to be fired for refusing to hide his love for you?”

I finally found my words. “Um, yeah. That’s exactly what I thought, especially since Broderick hinted heavily at the possibility.”

She muttered something that sounded like “that goddamn bully” under her breath before continuing. “I’m going to play it straight and I expect you to do the same. You’re not one of those dumb women that arrive in L.A. by the boatload, and since you fell in love with him, I’m going to assume Cameron has some brains in that pretty little head of his as well. You know this business and how it works. Broderick fires Cameron for not complying with a PR campaign the studio set up and what realistically happens?”

I waited a heartbeat before answering. I’d known Shanna for years and if ever there was a person I could trust, it was she. But still, she was Broderick’s wife. Would she play me like this? I didn’t think so, and yet …

Almost like she could read my mind through my hesitation, she said, “I’m not going to tell Broderick anything we talk about here.”

Choosing to believe her, I shared everything I’d told Cameron he could do to get even with Broderick if push came to shove. “He goes on the talk show circuit and tells the world how he stepped away from the movie because it conflicted with his personal life. The tabloids start digging, they find out about me and when they put the pieces together and Broderick looks like a dick.

“Then Gramalkin has to cast someone new but by then most actors who’ve already auditioned have landed something else or are too gun shy about to work with him because they don’t like the idea of having their personal lives managed the way Cameron’s was. Or, you find an actor who is slimy enough to do whatever it takes to get the role, including letting Aerin tell him exactly what to wear and who the fuck. But it doesn’t matter because by then the fans have to be convinced all over again that this new guy – whoever he might be – is the right Xander, the one they should have cast from the beginning. But unfortunately you’ve already got fans and critics who’ve bought into Cameron and they start going nuts on social media.

“Suddenly the studio has a
legitimate
PR nightmare on its hands, a scandal worse even than its mega hot star marrying a fat girl who was the director’s assistant.”

“Bingo,” Shanna said into the receiver. “Except you’re wrong about that last part. You’re gorgeous, Sarah. I don’t know why you don’t give yourself more credit. You’ve got Ginger’s body with Maryanne’s face. You’re every guy’s secret fantasy.”

I didn’t believe a word of that for a minute, but it was a nice thought. Objectively speaking, I knew I was a moderately attractive woman, but I hadn’t quite recovered from the reactions some of Cameron’s friends had to news of our engagement. When you paired their befuddlement and disgust with Aerin’s “hide the fat fiancé” plan, my ego and self-worth had taken a battering.

“I mean really, have you looked at yourself lately?” Shanna continued. “What I wouldn’t do for your some of your curves. Young, stupid girls straight off the bus to Hollywood pay ridiculous sums of money to get boobs like that … and Mother Nature bestowed them to you for free.”