Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
She blew out her breath. “I called my dad.”
In my stomach, the threads of tension turned themselves into a double knot. I groaned out loud; embarrassment and disbelief made my heart palpitate harder in my chest. She’d called her dad. “You didn’t,” I said weakly. “Halley, come on.”
“I did,” she said, lifting her chin. “And I know you’re so pissed right now, but I’m not sorry because I was right—he can fix it.”
Behind her, the sky was more blue than gold. The beautiful stone house rose up against it, a symbol of everything that Halley had that I never would. I shouldn’t be surprised she was trying to force her dad’s help on me. All throughout our friendship, she’d wanted to share everything she had with me. We were the sisters the other had never had. Still, there were limits to what I could accept, and Halley had a hard time accepting that.
“Call him back,” I said finally. “Tell him I already fixed it myself.”
She put her hands on her hips again. “Have you?”
No, of course I hadn’t. But the real possibility of poverty was better than letting Conall Walker think of me as his daughter’s charity case. Unwillingly, I pictured him. He wasn’t like the other dads who dropped their daughter off at college in the fall and picked her up in the spring. There was no frayed baseball cap or soft paunch beneath his t-shirt. His hair didn’t thin at the top or gray at the temples. He was only forty. Imposingly tall, almost always in dark suits that had been tailored to fit his wide, sculpted shoulders, lean torso, and long legs. Crisp white shirts, shoes that cost more than my college education. Always in dark, frameless sunglasses that hid his eyes and made his expression impossible to read. He never smiled just to be polite, and the few times we’d met, I’d quailed under his direct gaze. Not that he ever really seemed to see me. He only had eyes for his daughter, always making sure she had everything and the best of it at that.
“Don’t you want to at least know what I thought of?” Halley wheedled after my prolonged silence confirmed what she already knew. She didn’t wait for my answer but plunged ahead. “You’re going to have a paid internship with his agency. It’s a salaried position, which kind of sucks because you won’t get overtime, and believe me you’ll work overtime, but you’ll have benefits.”
A salaried position at Walker Entertainment Agency. Against my will, my heart beat faster at the possibility. It wasn’t a direct line to entertainment law, but I would make good connections. I flattened my lips, trying not to show Halley how interested I was. She grinned triumphantly, knowing me too well to be fooled.
“And,” she said with the flair of someone putting a cherry on top of a dessert, “you can stay in my condo for free. It’ll just be sitting there after I go back to school in August.”
“I have to pay rent,” I said automatically.
“There is no rent—it’s paid off.”
“Then I have to pay the association fee, or whatever,” I insisted. “Seriously, Halley. I can’t stay there for free.”
“Okay fine, you can pay the association fee.” She stuck out her hand. “Deal?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it, feeling like I’d been neatly boxed in.
3
CON
I couldn’t give Halley’s friend an entry level job, big sister or not. We got almost as many applicants for those as we got headshots. Hundreds of people fighting for the opportunity to grasp the bottom rung of the tallest, shiniest ladder. I wasn’t above a little nepotism, but since Lily was going to law school in a year, it didn’t make sense to give her a job in the mailroom. Instead, I had HR set up an internship that paid just as much as an entry level position, but it had a hard end date. Then I had my house manager prep her condo and asked Maureen to pick the girl up at the airport.
And then I forgot about it.
I had a lot on my plate. The industry was coming back to life after a lean couple of years that had seen productions delayed and projects stopped altogether. I’d finally found Julian’s actress for Stasia, but that didn’t make a dent in my to do list. Some guys at the top of an agency figured they’d earned the right to coast. They let other people do the pitching and following up and negotiating. I couldn’t do it though. Maybe it was because I was younger than some of the other industry vets, but I still wanted to get my teeth in. Leave my mark. Earn my millions. Right now, I was fighting to get one of my actors top billing in a movie he was clearly the star of, but he was playing opposite an established star who felt entitled to it.