Page 63 of Blood Stone

Chapter Thirteen

Thumping on the trailer door woke her, making her jump. Kate rediscovered she was sitting at her desk, with her head pillowed on her arms. She straightened up, feeling her neck and the small of her back scream in protest. “Coming!” she yelled, but it emerged as a croak.

Too much tequila. Now she remembered. She glared at the nearly empty bottle on the desk where her elbow had rested. She had cracked the seal about five minutes after arriving back at the trailer last night and that had been about fifteen minutes after Garrett’s kiss. Three of those minutes had been spent convincing Adrian she had work to do at her desk, so don’t bother trying to coax her to bed tonight. Another five of them had been spent acquiring the tequila.

Then she had tried to get shit-faced and wipe Garrett from her mind. It hadn’t worked so well, for while her body had cooperated and shut down on her nicely, her brain had continued to fire on all cylinders, circling around the kiss endlessly, playing it out from all camera view points and perspectives.

The kiss…and Garrett’s fucked-up reaction afterwards.

No matter how she pulled it apart and tried to refit it, no matter what motives she applied to Garrett, she couldn’t get the pieces to fit.

It just didn’t make sense.

Kate pushed the trailer door open, rather than suffer another pummelling on the metal. She threw her arm up to protect her eyes as a shaft of early morning sunlight pierced her eyes. The sun was just lifting over the horizon.

“Jesus! What time is it, for fuck’s sake?” she demanded, wincing.

“Nearly five,” came the answer.

“Brittany?” Kate forced her eyes to focus despite the glare and saw the P.A. standing at the bottom of the steps. “What the hell?”

“Sorry to wake you,” the teenager said in her high, innocent voice. “But Mary-Ann says you’d better get over to the extras tent pronto.”

“She did? Why?” Mary-Ann was their on-site media coordinator, a sweet young thing carrying a freshly minted communications degree from Stanford. She had been another of Garrett’s perfect finds – she had graduated summa cum laude, but she came at a ridiculously cheap price. As they were parked in the middle of nowhere, the chances that she’d actually have to do anything seriously challenging until they returning to L.A., where there was a whole agency to back her up, was next to zero.

Brittany clutched her clipboard more tightly, her smile fading. “Umm…th.there’s a whole busload and another half a bus of media people at the extras tent, demanding interviews and site tours.”

“What?” Kate stared at her, absorbing it. “Abusload? Where are my extras?”

“They’re still in Frisco.”

Kate caught her breath. “The fucking press tossed my extras so they could hitch a ride out to the set?”

Brittany edged backwards in the dirt. “It looks that way. That’s why Mary-Ann wants to see you.”

Kate rubbed at her eyes.

“Kate.” Adrian’s voice.

She looked up. He was strolling toward the trailer, looking fresh and rested, and suddenly oh-so-good. Kate sighed. “Are you aware of what’s happening?”

He glanced at Brittany. She gave a small smile and backed even further away before turning and hurrying toward the big blue extras tent, a hundred yards away. Kate could just see the back end of one of the yellow ex-school buses that shipped the extras out from San Francisco each morning, peeping out from the end of the tent. The sun blasted through the windows, showing every hand print and smear.

Adrian put his foot on the bottom step. “Can I come in?” he asked.

She backed up into the trailer. Adrian followed her, shutting the door behind him.

“Mary-Ann is looking for me,” she warned him. “I have to go.”

“She can survive for five minutes,” he replied. “It’ll be good practice. It won’t be the last time this happens.”

“What happens? Last I heard, we were mentioned on theLate Show. Now all hell is breaking loose.”

“The Internet is what happened.” Adrian picked up the remains of her tequila and swirled the dregs around the bottom of the bottle. Then he tossed the bottle into the trashcan under her desk and parked his butt on the edge of the desk, facing her. “You spent a lot of time the last few weeks talking about Murad and the movie on-line, didn’t you?”

“On Twitter, sure. But those are transitory conversations. Long gone.” She moved into the bedroom to change, peeling off her day-old clothing.

Adrian kept talking behind her, lifting his voice so she could hear. “Nothing on-line is gone forever. You talked about it on Twitter and everyone else re-tweeted. They shared your links and comments on Facebook and Pinterest and MySpace, blogs, any other social network you care to name. People have already been talking about the movie for weeks, speculating about the casting and the history.”