Regency Romance: The Rake's Fake Marriage (Historical Arranged Marriage Romance) (19th Century Victorian Romance) (46 page)

Ray laughed. “We might have to. My dad is going to have a fit when I tell him.”

“When you tell him what?”

“That I’m going to be a dad.
That I’m going to be with you.
Telling me about your father…
I know that this was just…. an accident, but you know, thinking about it, maybe it’s
exactly
what we need. I love
you,
Danielle. I do. And if I
weren't
already married to you, I would want to marry you.”

Danielle grinned and threw her arms around her husband. They kissed, and she knew they would be together forever.

*****

THE END

The Billionaire’s Secret Love Child – Rae’s Story

1

Rae Coleman couldn’t believe her luck as she walked onto the movie set. She had been waiting years for this, ever since her mother had agreed to move to Los Angeles when Rae was sixteen so she could try to get into commercials. She was a
pretty
girl, then at sixteen, and now at twenty-four, and she had gotten the commercials. Her skin was the dark brown color of mocha, her hair brown and kept short. Her legs stretched on for miles, and her hips were pronounced and feminine, without being large. She was pretty, beautiful even. But that’s not all you needed to make it in Hollywood.

For one thing, she was black, and there just never seemed to be as many roles for her as there were for her white peers. Rae had lost count how many times she had lost out on a role for being “too urban.” She had never been urban, having been born and raised in an affluent Cincinnati suburb. Often at her schools, she was one of only a few black kids.

But she kept landing commercials, and at age eighteen managed to get in a pilot, which tested poorly and never got picked up. Back to commercials she went. Her mother had gone back to Cincinnati when Rae turned nineteen, but the young girl wouldn’t give up. She couldn’t. She got a little apartment with another struggling actress, an Australian girl named Gillian, and she kept grinding, filling in the time between commercials with waitressing jobs.

And then last year she landed the role of a lifetime. A movie. A true blue, play across the world
movie
.

And not only was Casey Denning producing it,
but he was also
going to star in it.

Casey was one of the most
popular
actors in the world. He had gotten his start as a young man in a couple of horror films, but he quickly transcended
them
and got the roles his talent deserved.
He
was forty-two now, and he was on the cover of magazines more than he was on the silver screen. Every stay at home mom loved to read about him, and needed to know who he was sleeping with, and what car he was driving, and where he ate.

Casey was
Caucasian
and had salt and pepper hair, and a dimple in his broad chin. His eyes were cold and gray but expressive, and his smile could light up a room. He had been in the room when Rae had auditioned for the movie, and it made her nerves even worse than they had already been.

He had spoken to her, sitting there with two others at a long table. A woman producer and a man. The man was directing the film. He was older than Casey, with red hair that was thinning. Rae had smiled to each of them, but her eyes kept going back to Casey.

“You’re Rae?” he asked, looking down at a sheet with her information on it.

“Yes sir,” she said, and Casey had laughed, an easy
laugh
that was full of warmth.

“Sir? I like that!” he had said. “Unless you’re calling me that because I’m old.”

Rae felt her cheeks burn, and she shook her head. “No, not at all!” she stuttered. Casey held a hand up and smiled at her.

“I’m only messing with you,” he said. “Can you go through page twenty-one with me?”

Rae nodded and
lipped
through the thick script she was holding. The film was a drama called When Love Speaks, and it was about an older married man who had an affair with his secretary, even as his son battled cancer at home. The man felt great guilt about the affair, but the stress of his son’s sickness had created a rift between he and his wife, and he found solace in the arms of the beautiful secretary. Rae was trying out for the role of the
secretary
. She had been in the waiting room with seven other girls, one of which she recognized from a number of films. There was no way she was going to get the part.

When it was done, she had felt good about her reading. She had been to a hundred auditions, and some of them she knew she would get it, and some she knew she had messed it up, but this one, she felt she had done well, but she wasn’t sure what would happen.

Her agent called her the next
day
and told her she had the part. There had been a script read through, and costume fittings, everything working in that whirlwind Hollywood way. A script could languish for years, but when the ball got rolling, you had better stay out of the way.

She had seen Casey again at the reading of course, and he had hugged her and congratulated her. She had met her other co-stars, including Amelia Stevens, a
well-known
actress who was playing the wife. She had been just as kind as Casey.

There were a number of people on the set, but not as many as Rae expected. It was her first day, and they were shooting a scene from the middle of the film, a sex scene on the office set. It was the second to last day of shooting
at
the
set
. Not many people realized they shot films out of order, depending on what sets or locations they had, and for how long. Every scene set in the office would be shot in a block of days, and then after that they would move to the next location or set. Rae wasn’t introduced in the office though, she was introduced while Casey’s character was on a business trip with her. They almost make love at their hotel, but he refrains. So though Rae was in the film for three scenes before the first sex scene, she had the unfortunate duty to
film
the sex scene first.

It was unfortunate because it was the scene Rae dreaded filming the most. The idea of kissing Casey was pleasant enough, but doing it in front of twenty people scared her to her core. Not to mention the fact that he would be ripping off the tight blouse she had
been fitted
for, and groping her breast through her bra, and then pushing her
backward
onto his characters desk and climbing atop her. There would be a close up of his hand on her bare thigh, pushing her skirt up, and then the scene would be over, the rest of the juicy details left to the audience's imagination.

The red haired director was named David Greene, and he had worked on a number of films which most people knew and loved. He made his way to Rae as soon as he saw her, stopping to point to something on the set while he told someone to move it. When he stopped in front of her he held his hand out, and she shook it.

“Great to see you again, Rae,” he said with a smile.

“You too, Mr. Greene,” she said.

“It’s David!” he said, and then laughed. “Hey, I have a closed set today. I know this is your first big thing, and it’s a bit of a doozy, I know that. If I could have started
with another scene
I would have. But the guys tell me we have to go on
this, then
we have to.”

Rae smiled and nodded. David had a Brooklyn accent, and he was animated when he spoke.

“So we can go through it once or twice, with minimal contact, just to get the blocking down.”

“We can go however you like,” Rae said. “Contact is fine.”

She felt a bit more comfortable when he told her it was a closed set. That meant the only people there were people who had to be there. No extraneous crew, just someone holding the boom mic, a cameraman or two, David, and makeup and costume people. Of course Casey would be there as well.

He stood by the desk on the set, his eyes closed and white earbuds in his ears. Rae made her way up to the
desk
, and started her breathing exercises. She had just closed her eyes when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw the impossibly handsome movie star smiling at her.

“What a way to get to know each other, huh?” he asked, and Rae laughed.

“I guess you could say that,” she said.

“I don’t want to be forward, but I learned something on one of my first films, and I thought it might help you,” Casey said.

“Okay, let me hear it,” the
pretty
young woman said.

“When you have to kiss someone in a scene, you shouldn’t be kissing them for the first time. I know we’re going to a bit of rehearsal, but David likes to be sneaky and have a camera running. Sometimes he uses the first take.”

Rae nodded. “Well, that makes sense, I guess, to be comfortable with someone. Familiarity.”

“So, we should
kiss,
” Casey said, making sure she understood. “For the role.”

“For the role,” Rae said, and then the man was dipping his head and stepping closer to her. One of his hands went down to her hips, and the other reached up, his fingers resting lightly along her jawline. She closed her eyes inhaled deeply as their lips met. He smelt of expensive cologne, and he tasted of mint. He had just brushed his teeth, as she had as well. She wondered if he was as nervous as she was.

The kiss was light, but it was long. Finally he pulled away, and she opened her eyes. For some reason she had expected him to have turned away, to be busying himself with something else,
simply
trying to prepare for the scene, but he was looking right at her.

“Wow,” he said.

“Wow,” Rae agreed.

“Alright you two, ready?” David called, and Rae jumped. For a moment she had somehow forgotten where she was, even though there were three bright lights directed at her. They dimmed now, and the set was filled with blue, a pretty good approximation of moonlight coming in through the large window of the office, with the fake city background behind it. Rae knew it would look exactly like they were in a high rise office building on film, but it was a little bit ridiculous to be standing on a set in a large warehouse with girders running across the ceiling.

“Sure,” Casey called, and Rae turned to find her spot. She could be knocking on the open door, and they had a bit of dialogue before she entered and they began to kiss. A cameraman was set up just outside the set, and another with a camera on his shoulder
entered
the
set
and stood a bit behind Casey.

A young woman came up with a
clapboard
and held it in front of the main camera. “Scene seventeen, take one,” she said, and clapped the board together.

“Sound. Rolling. Action,” David said.

Rae knocked on the door, and they began. David stopped them three times before they got to the part where they kissed, but on the fourth they must have given him what he wanted, because he let it continue. She stepped in. Casey said his last line, and she replied with hers, and then they were kissing again.

This kiss was deeper than the one they had shared before they started. Their tongues met, something that rarely happened in film, but here it felt natural, and Rae welcomed it. He tasted of mint as well, toothpaste and floss. Casey’s hands were strong upon her, and he ripped open her shirt, and then his hand was groping her, and she felt her nipple harden against the material of her bra and his palm. He pushed her slightly backwards and went with her, still kissing her. His hand went
on
her thigh, pushed her skirt up. They still kissed. Somewhere someone was saying something, but Rae was lost in a world of ecstasy.

Finally,
Casey broke the kiss and got up off of her and the desk. “Woah,” he said to her as he offered her his hand. Rae took it and stood. “Sorry about that.”

“I called cut about fifteen times,” David said, and Rae looked to him. He was sitting next to a small bank of monitors, where he could watch what the cameras saw.

“That’s my fault,” Casey said.

“Do yourself a favor Rae, don’t be pulled into this guys world of tabloids,” David said with a laugh. Rae knew what he was referring to, Casey never seemed to settle on a lady for long, and each new one was splashed across the pages of Us Weekly alongside him.

“Hey, there’s fancy yachts and trips around the world that come with that tabloid stuff,” Casey said to the young woman with a grin and a wink. She smiled.

“I’m sold then,” Rae said.

“I give up,” David said with a laugh. “Let’s go again
from
the top.”

The scene wore on for some time, and when David finally called cut for the last time, Rae was
tired
and anxious to get out of her uncomfortable heels. Casey had one more scene to shoot on the set,
a short
transition, but she
was done
for the day. A black sedan drove her back to the hotel the cast and crew were
staying at
. They were shooting in Toronto, a popular city for such things, and Rae had never been there, so she was anxious to see the city, but all she wanted to do right then was take a hot bath, and climb into bed.

Her room was large but not luxurious, and as she filled the tub with steaming hot water she found herself wondering what kind of
room
Casey was getting, or even Amelia’s room. They were both stars, surely they had whole floors to themselves.

Still, the room was nicer than anything she could afford herself, and she even had a little plastic card which would bill any room service to the film company. She had gone from a commercial every few months to the big times, and she couldn’t be happier.