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“That scene went so much better than it would have without you. It’s what Zoya wanted and the show needed. And that’s because of you.”
She shook her head and got to her feet. “It was you, Cole. You and Rhiannon. I just hope I helped.”
“Wait, leaving so soon?” Cole said it jokingly, but under the question, he knew he was serious. He wanted Maggie to stay, to keep chatting with him, to tell him more about the kids she’d worked with and the plays she’d directed. To give him the perfect word when he couldn’t think of it.
The moment stretched out. Her standing, one hand still on the table. Him sitting, staring up at her, with what was probably a pathetically needy look on his face.
But honestly, he was feeling pretty pathetically needy.
Maggie’s gaze on him ... he couldn’t have begun to make sense of it. She was watching him so intently, she might as well have been sending sonar waves through him. He could only hope his echo sounded good.
Please.
But he didn’t even know what he was asking for.
After a few beats, Maggie yawned, comically exaggerated. “You may be used to movie star hours, James, but I am not. And I have more work to do tomorrow.”
He almost wrapped his fingers around her wrist. But before he could do something so stupid, Maggie was gone.
Which was ... good. She’d been kind, professional. Her work had made the shoot go well, and then she’d helped him set down his stress about the character. And that, and only that, was all Maggie owed him.
Whatever he’d been imagining in her face had been exactly that—imagining. Cole might want her, but he wasn’t going to have her. He had to bury those feelings deep and pretend they didn’t exist.
Chapter 10
INT. HOTEL CONFERENCE ROOM
If Tasha had scheduled this meeting in the hotel parking garage, Maggie would’ve been certain it was the pretense for a hit job. Since it was in a conference room, the odds of that were only, like, 33 percent.
Maggie pushed the door open. “Tasha?”
The lights weren’t on. A folding table leaned against the wall. A few chairs were strewed about the room almost randomly. But just before Maggie left, chalking it up to Tasha changing her mind or Maggie having the wrong place or time, she noticed the starlet standing at one of the windows.
In her movies, Tasha never seemed to stop moving. She was a creature of constant action, always punching someone, kicking a door open, or jumping out of a plane.Tasha Russell does stuffwas practically a genre category on Videon.
But now, she might as well have been a statue. One of Tasha’s hands was curled around the base of her throat. The other held the flimsy curtain open a crack so she could see the street below. She was so still, she was almost camouflaged.
“I thought I had the wrong room.” Maggie closed the door behind her.
“Traffic is really soothing. To watch, I mean. Not to sit in.”
For about the one hundredth time since taking this job, Maggie wished she were a psychologist. Tasha was like one of those glacial lakes: far deeper than she appeared from the outside yet strangely disconnected from the rest of the world. But the only way for Maggie to do her job was if she better understood Tasha’s hang-ups, which were clearly numerous and painful. Maggie had to dive in.
“Why?” she asked.
Tasha took and released a deep breath. “In traffic, everyone works together. They follow the rules ... ish. We make allowances for the rat bastard that’s speeding or the lady who didn’t use her damn turn signal. I’m honestly amazed there aren’t more car accidents. It’s kind of uncanny we all get into murder tanks every day and more people don’t die.”
“In fairness, driving is probably the most dangerous thing we all do daily.”
“But we don’t think of it as being scary. When you consider how much humans hurt each other in other ways, you’d think it’d be likeJohn Wickon the 405. I guess I’m perverse, but that soothes me.”
That we should hurt each other more—and we don’t?
But Maggie was going to keep tiptoeing after Tasha’s lead here, hoping they ended up plumbing the contours of this lake of secrets.
Tasha finally turned toward Maggie, and it was honestly unfair for anyone to be that beautiful. She didn’t have on a lick of makeup, her hair had clearly dried after her shower without any styling, and she was more arresting than any person Maggie had ever seen in her life. People who looked like Tasha had called movies into being. It was the only explanation. Humans had had to create some medium to record their beauty. Tasha wasthatlovely.
“I’d never thought about traffic like that,” Maggie said. “But I’m guessing that’s not why you wanted to chat.”
