Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
“To often,” Mr. Anderson said with soft sympathy, and settled down on the sofa next to Cillian with a rather obvious careful distance placed between them. “It just never gets talked about enough.”
Wincing, Cillian looked down at his hands, his knuckles, these bony things that made his hands so awkward, as awkward as he felt inside. “Then…I’m going to have to deal with it, won’t I.”
Maybe he really was as naïve as his parents thought.
All these lofty dreams of making it big under the lights.
Only to find out those bright, shining lights just illuminated how ugly things really were, where they couldn’t be hidden.
But, “No,” Brendan said sharply. “You absolutely do not have to deal with it.”
Cillian jerked his head up, staring at the black, heavy scowl turning Brendan’s sculpted features into the forbidding visage of a thunder god, casting down bolts of judgment from on high with every flashing, dark look.
“What’s my other option?” Cillian demanded. He hated how small his voice sounded, how desperate. “Quitting acting?”
“Is that what you think you have to do?” Brendan shot back.
“I’m probably already fired.”
Brendan’s eyes narrowed, gleaming faintly. “You will not be fired,” he promised softly. “Not with two witnesses. Newcomb wouldn’t dare.”
There was something unspoken there, something that made Cillian shiver with a strange sense of the heavy, dangerous portent lurking in that deep-vibrato voice. This…this wasn’t the charming, arrogant man Cillian had seen in countless red carpet interviews.
He didn’t know who this man was, but his quiet anger was a smothering force in the room, something Cillian flinched and shrank back from even though he knew it wasn’t really directed at him.
…was it?
Could Brendan see, too, that…that…
“Brendan,” Mr. Anderson said, quiet but firm. “Tone it down a little, will you? He just got the shit scared out of him.”
“I’m fine,” Cillian said quickly. “It…it was a near-miss, I just…I just keep thinking about what could have happened, that’s…that’s all.”
“It won’t happen again,” Mr. Anderson promised, then glanced at Brendan. “Should we loop the studio in on this before filing a police report? The studio heads will probably want to know, not that they’ve done anything from the rumors I’ve heard about how they’ve dealt with shit like this in the past, you know all the execs care about is whether or not that fucker makes them any money—”
Cillian’s eyes widened, his heart skipping as he realized…oh, shit. “No!” he blurted before he could stop himself, starting to reach a hand toward Mr. Anderson, then restraining himself, curling his hand back against his pounding chest. “You…you can’t tell anyone.”
It would end up a tabloid mess, get back to his family, and even if it didn’t…
“I…p-please,” he stammered, while the two of them just stared at him, Mr. Anderson incredulous, Brendan impossibly unreadable. “This…this could make or break my career. And if you say anything…I’ll…I’ll lose this chance. The whole production will fall apart. All these people will lose their jobs, all the cast and everyone on crew. All because of me.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected.
Only that he was burning up inside with abject humiliation, with guilt, with fear, with…too much, too much to unpack, everything happening too fast, too many things one after the other while he was just struggling to keep up.
But whatever he expected, it wasn’t the long, strange look that passed between Mr. Anderson and Brendan Lau.
Before Brendan pushed away from the door and crossed the room toward Cillian on slow, stalking steps. The aura he carried around him traveled with him, as if he were a moon with its own atmosphere, this radiant body exuding formidable power—both in the controlled, tight strength in every movement, and in the sheer force of his personality. That deep brown stare was a battering ram, presence so overwhelming that even before Brendan stopped before Cillian, Cillian thought he just might say yes to anything Brendan demanded just so the man would let him breathe.
He couldn’t, right now. His entire chest seized up and stayed that way like his lungs had contracted a muscle cramp as he stared, incredulous, while Brendan Lau—the Brendan Lau, star of over thirty award-winning romantic films, the actor who had first made Cillian want to reach from high school stage plays into Hollywood at all, the man who had charmed millions…
Knelt in front of him.
Brendan Lau sank down until they were on eye level—no, below Cillian’s eye level, and Cillian made a spluttering sound as he stared down into eyes that wouldn’t let him go; the moment he’d locked onto Brendan’s gaze he’d frozen, a tremor going through him. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even remember what he’d wanted to say, when Brendan Lau looked right into him as if he could peel apart the most intimate places of Cillian and touch the secrets he never wanted anyone to know, stroke his coarse fingers over them, make them quiver and shake the same way Cillian’s gut quivered and shook right now.