Starstruck: Hollywood Heat, Book 3 (14 page)

“You need to tell me when you’re going out with girls like that so I can manage it. ‘No comment’ makes it look like you’re hiding something.”

Bracing the phone between shoulder and ear, Micah shoved his legs into the sweatpants that had been draped over the weight bench. “
Girls like that?
What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Except Micah knew exactly what Jack meant. The girls Micah had spent his entire career avoiding. The users and fakes that Jenna most decisively wasn’t.

She couldn’t be.

“Don’t be a dumbfuck, Micah.”

“You manage my career, not my personal life.”

“Your career and your personal life are one and the same right now. You know that as well as I do. Give me some credit here. We’ve been working together for over a decade. I’ve taken care of you all this time, and I’ve done a damn good job of making sure you don’t fuck up your career. So start talking so I can fix this for you.”

“Fix what? That I have a girlfriend?” He paced the room, weight bench to treadmill to elliptical, wishing he had a punching bag to abuse. “And how the hell do you know her name?”

“Everyone knows her name now, man.
Everyone
. Your little paparazzi escapade went viral, and
bam
, someone, somewhere, recognized her and now her name is everywhere. She’s a wannabe actress at some bullshit Hollywood dinner theater who, aside from pretending to be real actresses like Marilyn Monroe, starred as Maria in
The Sound of Music
in some no-budget community theater production. A resume to nowhere, unless she could find a big-ticket ride. TMZ.com has the full story, front-page news, with the grainy YouTube video of your
girlfriend
…” the word couldn’t have sounded more virulent, “…being interviewed about her starring role in
Sound of Music.
The best part was when she said she’d do anything to make it big in Hollywood. I hope she at least made it good for you.”

“She’s not like that.” The words should’ve come out stronger, but the knot in his stomach made it difficult to speak.

“Bullshit, she’s not like that. She’s no one, trying to be someone. Who do you think benefitted the most from yesterday’s debacle? Who’s the new household name? Dr. Dale Jameson? No. He went out with some floozy, and now he’s gonna be demoted to hawking Botox and drugs with anal-leakage side effects. I thought you knew better than this.”

He did know better than this, except his Jenna wasn’t the one Jack was talking about. His Jenna, who’d told him just last night that she’d succeed, no matter what it took. His Jenna, who’d wrapped him around her little finger until he’d offered her the stars…

No. Not his Jenna.

“Let me talk to her. I can—”

“Is she there? Now? Un-
fucking
-believable. If you needed to get laid, you could’ve made a better choice than an ambitious prop that eats.”

Micah squeezed the phone so hard he was surprised it didn’t crack under the pressure. Fucking metaphor for his life right now. “Hanging up now, Jack. Call me back when you stop being an asshole. We’ll figure this out then.”

“You need to get rid of her. Now. Like, in the next five minutes. Before she completely wrecks everything you’ve worked for and you end up kissing that Emmy goodbye. I’m calling Jerry and Lance and am going to kiss their asses on your behalf so that maybe, just maybe, you get to keep your job next week. You better damn well pick up the phone when I call back. We’re going to have some serious work on our hands today to keep you employable.”

Micah hung up. It wasn’t like he wanted to hear anything more Jack had to say. He needed to talk to Jenna before this got further out of hand. She could make this make sense. Jack was a cynical bastard who could make Mother Teresa sound greedy. Just because a few of the things Jack said made Jenna look bad…

Micah opened the door to his bedroom. His empty bedroom where Jenna should’ve still been waiting for him so they could clear the air, laugh about Jack’s misconceptions, then take the phone off the hook and go back to bed.

He checked the bathroom and the closet—why the fuck would she be hiding in the closet, this wasn’t a game of hide-and-seek, for God’s sake. The cookie plate he’d knocked to the floor was gone. Maybe she’d taken it to the kitchen. That sounded like something Jenna would do. There was nothing suspicious about her absence.

He believed that too, up until he found her at the nook, cell phone glued to her ear, the dress he’d stripped off her last night draped over the crook of one arm. Not completely damning, but it sure didn’t feel right either.

At his approach, she looked at him, eyes wide…with surprise, or a damn good facsimile?

“My agent left me a message,” she said, her voice full of happy wonder.

Jack’s condemning words pin-balled through his head.
Who do you think benefitted the most from yesterday’s debacle?

“You have an agent?” He tried to make it a question, but the bite in his words turned it into an accusation. If only she’d say the right thing, talk about him and her, and not the career she wanted so badly she’d do anything, use anyone, to get it.

Concern crinkled her brow. “Yeah. I met her at Stars a couple weeks ago. She’s brand new. Got me a few auditions, but nothing’s panned out. She swears I’m ready, but now she says something’s come up and we have to talk. What does that mean? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

It was a bad thing. A huge fucking bad thing. For him. He’d fallen in love, and she’d stepped right in and taken the express paparazzi train to her fifteen minutes of fame, leaving him behind to deal with the fallout.

Jack was right. Jenna was benefiting, and Micah was going to pay for it.

“I guess last night really worked out for you, didn’t it?” He didn’t bother hiding his bitterness this time.

“Micah?” That sweet voice, the hurt in her eyes… God, she did it so well, because a part of him still wanted to wrap his arms around her and promise her the world. “What’d I miss?” She stepped toward him and put a hand on his arm. She was wearing one of his shirts and nothing else, from the looks of it. The classic morning-after look. Kittenish. Vixenish. Fake.

“Everyone’s talking about you today. My agent, your agent, TMZ. Is that what you had in mind?” He didn’t push her away, but she jerked back all the same.

“Micah? What the hell’s going on?”

“Who were you on the phone with last night at dinner?”

Jenna shook her head slowly. “I didn’t talk to anybody.”

“The phone was in your hand when I came out of the bathroom.”

A blush stained her cheeks, her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Guilt. Pure and simple. She couldn’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.

“It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“No? So was it your agent who called the paparazzi? I bet she was thrilled to hear you were out with me. Makes her job a lot easier. Bet she’s having fun today, probably submitting your headshot all around town while you’re still the shit. Hey, if you’re lucky you might get cast as hot-tub girl number three in some straight-to-DVD shlockfest. Maybe even get a line or two before the thrill wears off.”

Jenna pivoted and stalked into the kitchen. “You’ve got me figured out already, huh? A gold-digging opportunist taking advantage of you, right?” Bending down, she scooped her shoes off the floor before pinning him with a hurt, resentful glare. “Yeah, that’s me. And I must be damn good, because the way I remember it, you’re the one who came to me. You followed me to holding after our on-set
incident
. You hunted me down at Stars. You asked me out. You followed me home.
You
asked me to move in with you. This is not my script, it’s yours. I never asked for this.”

Her hand jerked out, snatching something small and red from the countertop and hiding it in her clenched fist. Jenna’s panties, the ones he’d peeled off when he’d had to take her, right then and there, no waiting. When cookies and milk and house keys and a future with Jenna were the only things that mattered.

Whoa, this had gone way off course, wrong on every level. He needed to backtrack, pull back the words. “Jenna, wait.”

“No. No waiting. Let’s get it all on the table, shall we? How about all that trust we established last night, hmm? Maybe you should’ve decided you didn’t trust me before you fucked me bare. And maybe I shouldn’t have believed an actor’s words about
real
feelings and emotions, because Lord knows you can’t trust an actor. Right, Micah? But I’m sure all that’s my fault too.”

“Shit.” This was wrong. He needed to clear his head, calm down, start over—

Except his phone was ringing again. Fucking Jack, couldn’t even give him three damn minutes to talk to Jenna.

Not that he’d needed more than two to completely fuck everything up.

Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. They could take a breather, calm down and think more clearly. He’d get Jack off his case and then spend the day focused on Jenna.

“Let me take this,” he said, one hand already lifting the phone to his ear, the other held up in a conciliatory gesture. “Just…give me a few minutes, okay?”

Her quiet words followed him as he left the room. “I’ve got nothing left to give.”

After fifteen minutes of yelling at Jack and being yelled at, Micah hung up the phone, sick to his stomach and minus one agent in his life. Fucking Jack had called the paparazzi on him last night. His own damn agent, who thought Micah needed to be trending on Twitter and the news story of the day, had decided to get him some buzzworthy press in case he was written off
Sexy M.D.
and they had to find him another job. When Micah had called his agent on his actions, Jack had beat Micah to the punch and fired
him
, refusing to work with an actor who wouldn’t jump through his hoops. Now Micah got to find a new agent and deal with the ugly press backlash caused by his former one.

But first he had to deal with the backlash in his personal life. He had to apologize to Jenna, somehow make up for all the awful shit that had flown out of his mouth. She wasn’t guilty of a single thing he’d accused her of, and he was nothing but a selfish, bitter asshole.

The kitchen was empty. Not that he’d expected her to be waiting there for him. He stalked through the house, checking the living room, dining room, breakfast nook, balcony. She wasn’t waiting for him anywhere.

His bedroom was empty too, though she’d been there. The shirt she’d been wearing lay sprawled on top of the tangled sheets.

Micah jogged through the house, checking every room again. The more his search came up empty, the worse he felt. Where was she?

He returned to the kitchen, the last place he’d seen her, as though it could spill the secret of where she was. No such luck.

The little office nook held the answer. Jenna’s purse was missing, but she’d left something behind. The familiar set of keys he’d given her lay in the middle of the desk, a clear answer to the question he hadn’t wanted to ask.

Jenna was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

In the last twenty-four hours, Micah’s world had gone from shit to worse.

His head throbbed to the beat of the music blaring from the laptop as a video played on the homepage of TMZ under the headline “Micah Said Knock You Out”. Clips of every time Dr. Dale Jameson had pushed, shoved or punched someone were accentuated with comic-book-style
kapow
s and
bam
s. And not just Dr. Dale moments. Oh no. Apparently his entire career was full of violence, from his role as a high-school thug on
Dawson’s Creek
, all the way back to the bully he played in one of his earliest gigs on
General Hospital
.

But the highlighted portion of the reel, the one the creator had interspersed most liberally, was the outtake from
Sexy M.D.
of him knocking Jenna to the floor followed by him shoving the paparazzo in front of the restaurant. All of this was set to L.L. Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”, creating an unfortunate montage of aggression and rage.

As the video started over again automatically—because once just wasn’t enough—Micah shut the laptop and looked to Steve. “Wow, they dug pretty deep for that GH clip from when I was eight. Guess they needed to prove I was an asshole from day one, huh?” His fingers tapped on the closed computer, beating out L.L. Cool J’s rhythm. Dammit, he used to like that song. He curled his restless hand into a fist before asking the question that actually mattered. “Who the hell leaked the
Sexy M.D.
footage?”

“We don’t know, but we’re trying to find out.” Steve picked up his laptop. “We will find out. I just wanted to make sure you knew about thi—”

“Yeah, thanks.” Micah didn’t want to think about it anymore, let alone discuss it. “See you on set.”

Bounding down the stairs outside the production office, Micah wondered what the rest of the day had in store for him if this was how it was starting. Every violent moment of every show he’d done immortalized in one three-minute mashup that would probably have three million views before lunchtime.

He was beyond caring what this did to him or his career, but whoever had leaked the
Sexy M.D.
outtake had dragged Jenna into it too. That he couldn’t stomach.

Pulling his cell phone from the pocket of his doctor coat, he pressed the speed dial for Jenna. What was the definition of insanity? Trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome? Yet he kept hoping. And he kept talking to her voicemail.

All the sincerity in the world hadn’t gotten her to call him, not after the first message he’d left, or the hundred or more since then, but still he tried.

“I’m sorry, Jenna. So damn sorry. Please call me back. Call me an asshole. Call me on every shitheaded thing I’ve done. Just…please…call me.”

He texted too, a truncated version of his plea, in case she deleted all his voicemails without listening.

There’d been no interviews with her. Jenna’s fifteen minutes of fame were almost up, and she hadn’t used a single nanosecond of it. Why was it that TMZ could find him anywhere, but they couldn’t find her? She’d fallen off the planet when she’d disappeared from his house. He needed to talk to her, not just to apologize, but so he’d know that she was okay, that nothing had happened to her because of him.