With a good deal of reluctance, Jason turned his attention away from Taylor and pulled his phone out of his jacket. He checked to see who was calling, then glanced over in explanation. “Sorry—it’s my publicist, Marty. He has a fit if he can’t reach me.” He rolled his eyes in exaggeration.

Taylor smiled. Kind of like partners, she thought.

“Marty! How are you?” Jason answered his phone with affection, knowing full well that he drove the man crazy. As Jeremy liked to joke, Jason’s publicist was the busiest man in show business.

Taylor watched as he listened to whatever news his publicist conveyed. She saw that his expression turned strangely serious.

“I understand,” Jason said, sounding very disappointed. Taylor wondered if he had just lost out on some part. “I guess it was to be expected.” With a terse good-bye, he hung up the phone.

Taylor noticed that Jason stared at his cell phone for a moment longer. When his eyes looked up and found hers, she could’ve sworn he seemed angry.

“Well, Ms. Donovan. It seems we have a problem.”


TAYLOR STARED OUT the lobby windows of her office building, at the enormous mob of paparazzi that had gathered outside. Hovering like vultures and perched with their cameras, they waited in anticipation for their five-hundred-thousand-dollar shot to emerge. She saw that a few photographers had even gone so far as to climb the trees that flanked the building’s courtyard.

“It’s a madhouse out there,” she murmured in amazement, taking in the scene. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cameras in one place.”

Jason stood behind her, not amazed in the slightest.

“Any idea how they found out I’m here?”

Mesmerized by the media circus, Taylor didn’t notice the sharp edge to his voice.

“Probably one of the secretaries, if I had to guess.”

She looked away from the windows and noticed that the office building was deserted. She had worked late many evenings since coming to Los Angeles, so she was familiar with the routine.

“They lock the other doors after seven,” Taylor said. “This is the only way out.”

“How convenient.”

Jason didn’t bother to hide his bitterness. For some reason, he felt like he’d been punched in the gut since the moment Marty had called to let him know that someone had tipped off the media to his whereabouts. Of course, he should’ve known that Taylor Donovan would inevitably use his name to make one for herself. How typical. He just couldn’t figure out why it bothered him so much this time.

She suddenly turned away from the windows and faced him. This is the part, Jason thought, where she feigns annoyance, then asks how she looks as she primps for the cameras. Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

And so Taylor shrugged, as if accepting the fate of their situation. “Well, I guess this is where you do your thing,” she said, gesturing to the door that was their only way out. “Have fun.” And with that, she did the unthinkable.

She walked away.

She had gone only a few steps when she glanced back at Jason, apparently with one final thought. “It’s been . . . interesting, Mr. Andrews,” she said. Then she hurried off toward the elevator bank.

Jason stood there, speechless. Funny how he seemed to be like that quite a bit whenever he was around her.

He watched for a few moments, thoroughly confused, as Taylor walked away. Then he finally managed to find his voice.

“Wait!”

She stopped abruptly when he shouted and turned around. He gestured questioningly to the door.

“Aren’t you coming, too?”

Taylor stared at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? There must be a hundred cameras out there. I’ll leave later, when everyone’s gone.”

Jason’s jaw almost hit the floor. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You don’t want to be seen with me?”

He then looked at Taylor with such disbelief she couldn’t help but smile. He was quite cute when utterly clueless.

“I have a trial in one week,” she told him. “I can’t risk being accused of trying to bias the jury pool by being seen in the media with a celebrity. The judge could throw me off the case for that.”

Then she looked at Jason pointedly. “Besides, my client is trying to beat sexual harassment charges. They need to look as morally upright as possible. It would border on malpractice for me to link them to you.”

Jason blinked and almost laughed. No offense taken.

And it was in that moment, at her refreshing disinterest in the publicity that constantly surrounded his life, that Jason felt the strangest sensation—a slightly panicky, breathless feeling, like riding on a roller coaster.

It was an odd feeling for him—something he couldn’t quite identify—but he knew one thing.

He didn’t want her to leave.

“But what about the film?” he blurted out, trying to think of something, anything, to keep her from walking away. “You said it yourself, there are problems with the script.” He looked at her pointedly as his words tumbled out in a rush. “And how about me? We didn’t cover all of my courtroom scenes—I need to be sure I look like I know what I’m doing.”

Taylor turned all the way around to face him. She took him in for a moment, then smiled.

“You will make a great attorney. Jason.”

It was the first time she said his name.

Then, just like that, she turned and sprinted off to the elevator bank. And before Jason could say anything further, she was gone.

He stood alone in the lobby, staring after her. Oblivious to the fact that the paparazzi were on the move, that they had caught sight of him and were beginning to descend with their cameras. They lined the windows and surrounded him, moving in as a pack. But Jason didn’t notice the bright, burning flashes that exploded all around him, because he had only one thought on his mind.

There was no way this was over.

Eight

JEREMY WAS ABSOLUTELY correct in calling Jason’s publicist the busiest man in show business. Marty Shepherd, cofounder of the Shepherd/Grillstein Company—the top publicity firm in Los Angeles—could not recall the last time he had slept more than four hours in a row.

Being the eyes, ears, and voice of most of the film industry’s top acting talent was no easy feat. Not that he had any problem representing directors or writers, but no one ever cared what they did. Ron Howard or M. Night Shyamalan could snort cocaine off the ass of the script girl in the middle of an on-set orgy, and that still would be less gossip-worthy than whether Jennifer Lopez wore her wedding band while eating lunch at the Polo Lounge.

For a de minimis 5 percent of all gross earnings, Marty’s responsibilities could be boiled down to one pithy mantra that every associate in his firm was expected to eat, sleep, and die by: make sure your client is someone whose fuckups are newsworthy, and fuck anyone that makes up news about your client.

It was the second half of Marty’s mantra that kept him in the office so late on this particular Friday evening. Rebecca, an associate whose only assignment was to assist Marty in the various issues that arose with one particularly challenging client, had just stopped by his office.

“We’ve gotten calls from Us Weekly, In Touch, and Star. They want to know what Jason Andrews was doing in an office building downtown,” Rebecca reported. “They claim he was with a woman, although she apparently slipped off before anyone snapped her picture.”

For a brief moment, Marty wondered how the woman—who he assumed was this Taylor Donovan person Jason insisted on working with—managed to get out of the building without being photographed. Not an easy feat when traveling with Jason Andrews.

“Tell them he was getting cash from the ATM”—Marty almost laughed at the idea himself—“and that the woman was a building employee who stopped him for an autograph.” With those instructions, Rebecca nodded and left.

And then for the next half hour, Marty sat alone in his office and contemplated just how big of a problem Taylor Donovan was going to be.

It went without saying that Jason Andrews was his top client. In fact, Jason Andrews was the top, period. The biggest name in Hollywood—a status he had held for a long, long time.

Which was precisely what worried Marty, who got paid to worry when no one else did.

God knows it wasn’t easy to get to the top. But staying there was even tougher. Jason had that rare kind of star quality that came around only once a generation: women loved him, and men wanted to be him. Rolling Stone magazine had hit the proverbial nail on the head: his quick wit and easy charm did indeed call to mind Cary Grant or Clark Gable. But there was something about Jason that was just that little bit more down to earth than the icons of the classic films. Marty had never been able to figure out exactly what that “something” was, although he secretly suspected it had something to do with the fact that Jason was from Missouri.

Unfortunately, Hollywood—like many of its inhabitants—had a wandering eye. There was nothing the town liked more than the “new face,” or discovering the next person who everyone would hail as “up-and-coming.”

And after sixteen years in the business, being an undisclosed “thirtysomething” years old, Jason Andrews was neither of those things.

Luckily, the end was nowhere in sight. Jason’s next movie, Inferno, would be released in just a few weeks and had been predicted to be the blockbuster of the summer. He would follow that tent-pole pic with the legal thriller he was about to begin filming for Paramount, a film for which Marty had high hopes of a third Oscar nomination.