Page 8 of Love At First Fright

Y ou’ve got this, you deserve to be here , Rosemary whispered to herself as she stepped into the Ampleforth Suite.

It was already full of people, despite the fact that she was still ten minutes early, even after hurrying back to the hotel and changing out of her wet clothes, braiding her hair back from her face since it was still a little damp from the downpour.

The suite where the production meeting was taking place was a brightly lit room looking out over the river, with more of those old-white-men portraits eyeing her suspiciously from the wood-panelled walls.

She didn’t know what to do with herself, but then she spotted what seemed to be a self-serve coffee and tea station, complete with fine bone china teacups and saucers.

Look busy, look like you know what you’re doing, she told herself.

She wished Josephine, her agent, were here.

That woman knew how to talk to a crowd, knew how to assert herself.

Rosemary was fine when it came to the book world, she knew how to act as an author, but around film people?

She suspected she was a small fry compared to the hotshot directors and producers, not even counting the Hollywood stars.

One thing she was good at, however, was masking her anxiety in group settings.

“Rosemary? Oh my goodness, hi! How are you?” a voice chirped from beside her. Rosemary smiled as she took in the person standing next to her, with their sleek black hair and dazzling smile.

“I’m Lyn, we were chatting over email, remember? It’s so amazing to finally meet you!” Lyn said, reaching out a ring-clad hand to shake Rosemary’s.

“Of course! Lyn, it’s good to put a face to the name.

” Rosemary said, relief spilling over her.

Lyn was one of the production coordinators, probably the person at the studio she’d been in touch with the most since the movie had been greenlit.

Lyn was perpetually peppy over email, and, much like Rosemary, had a tendency to add many additional exclamation marks to their emails.

“Did you like the suite? I saw how gothic it looked online, and I thought to myself, she’s a horror writer, I have to put her in the scary room.” Lyn laughed good-naturedly. “Come sit down, I’ll get your coffee for you. Or tea?”

“You don’t have to do that, Lyn, really,” Rosemary said.

“I insist.”

“Then I’ll have an Earl Grey, please. Sugar and milk. But I’m really happy to make it myself.” Rosemary didn’t like feeling like she was being presumptuous, or acting like some kind of diva.

“Please, it’s my job. Besides, I thought you might want to settle down and prepare yourself.”

“Why would I need to prepare myself?”

A frown creased Lyn’s eyebrows. “The executive producer, Jeremy, has decided he wants to sit in. He doesn’t normally come to these things and, well, he can be a little…

demanding. And I deal with Hollywood types, so when I say demanding, you know I mean it.

” Lyn winked and went off to make Rosemary her tea.

Others settled down in their seats around the table, and Rosemary noticed that no one apart from Lyn had spoken to her, but they all seemed to know one another. Well, you didn’t exactly go around introducing yourself to them either, did you?

Lyn returned with her tea, complete with a lemony shortbread biscuit, and then crouched down beside her.

“Come on, sit here.” Rosemary patted the seat beside her.

“No can do, I’m not important enough to sit at the table yet.” Lyn grinned, seemingly not minding that fact at all. “But I’ll be back there”—they nodded at a row of chairs along the wall—“making notes. Ah, don’t look, but Jeremy just walked in.”

Rosemary subtly looked. Jeremy was on the shorter side, but what he lacked in height he made up for in breadth.

The man clearly worked out, but there was something about his appearance that Rosemary found unappealing.

He was muscular, sure, and tanned, but in a tanning bed kind of way.

It was the kind of physique that Rosemary imagined men thought women liked, all bulging and veined and social-media-worthy.

Honestly, he looked dehydrated. And like he listened to podcasts about CEOs’ work-life balance.

When would men realise that women wanted someone who looked like he could throw them on the bed, play a sport, but also say hell yes to a slice of cake?

Though perhaps that was just what she was attracted to when it came to men.

Jeremy offered the room a veneered smile and slipped into a chair near the head of the table. Even this far across the room she could smell the sharp metallic tang of his cologne.

Still, no one was sitting beside her, and now Lyn had retreated to a chair in the corner of the room, where the other assistants and coordinators had congregated.

A few more men peeled in after Jeremy, chatting about golf and some party that had happened at Soho House the previous week. For a moment, Rosemary was worried the room was becoming a sausage fest, but then, thankfully, some women entered.

She was pretty certain that one of them was Marissa, the lead scare actor, who would be playing a couple of the ghosts in the haunted manor, but as Rosemary made a move to go and say hello, the voices in the room hushed, as if someone important had entered. Even Jeremy sat up a little straighter.

Rosemary turned around to face the door, a scowl narrowing her eyes.

Ellis fucking Finch. Rudest man in the City of London.

He had changed out of the cream sweater into a navy shirt, his hair still damp and brushed back from his face.

“I hope I’m not late, I got stuck in the rain,” Ellis said in his gruff British voice.

Far too deep to be the voice of Alfred. Another tally added to the con pile.

The rest of the people began to find their seats, and Rosemary realised with a mounting horror that there were only two vacant seats left.

One for Vincent, the director, and one for Ellis.

Crucially, one of those seats was right beside her.

She watched covertly as Ellis stalked over to the tea station and made himself a cup. He took sugar in his tea, which she found oddly surprising. The teacup and saucer looked comically dainty in his hands, not that Rosemary had noticed the size of his hands.

“What’s Vincent’s ETA?” Jeremy called out.

“I’m here, I’m here,” came a French-lilted voice, quickly followed by the entrance of a willowy trans man who was wrapped up so thoroughly against the autumn chill—even though it was positively balmy in this room—that he appeared to be at least seventy percent scarf.

Vincent settled himself in the empty chair on the other side of the room and, when he caught Rosemary’s gaze, offered her a quick smile.

They hadn’t spoken much, apparently the studio had assigned Vincent the project later on than usual, but during their brief Zoom call, Vincent had walked Rosemary through his vision for the project, and she had felt a lot of her concerns ebbing away.

Vincent was a powerhouse director in Hollywood, and had won his first Oscar at age twenty-five for an autobiographical movie about his process of transitioning—having him direct her movie was a real “pinch me” moment.

There was one concern that still bothered her, though, and he happened to be sliding into the final empty seat beside her.

She didn’t think he had noticed her yet; he was clearly used to big rooms with lots of people and had learnt to only pay attention to the ones in charge…which, despite this entire film existing solely as a product of her imagination, did not seem to be her.

As Vincent and Jeremy chatted through something to do with act 3 in hushed tones at their end of the table, Rosemary watched as Ellis pulled out a battered—she wouldn’t say well-loved—copy of When the Devil Takes Hold out of his bag.

He flipped through the pages, and she realised it was covered in small, scratchy pencil annotations.

He had the script open, too, and seemed to be comparing them.

As he did so, Ellis rolled up his sleeves, resting his bare forearms on the table.

At that moment, Rosemary realised three things about Ellis Finch.

First, his forearms were somehow both lean and muscular at the same time, dusted with dark hair.

Second, he smelt offensively good. Like soap and fresh cotton and something woodsy.

Cedar, maybe. And third, there was a small, infinitesimally small, part of her that wondered if she’d been wrong about Ellis.

She had made an assumption that the style of action flicks he’d been in before meant he was uninterested in acting in anything serious, any role with in-depth characterisation.

But here he was, comparing handwritten notes that he had made across both the script and the novel she’d written. Could he care?

“Oh.” The sound came out involuntarily.

A pair of serious grey eyes flicked to hers, and held, taking her all in.

“What are you doing here?” Ellis asked, low and quiet, as if he was embarrassed on her behalf. What, did he think she had followed him here like some sort of stalker? Oh, come on.

“I’m here for the meeting.”

His brows knitted together.

“Alright, everyone, thanks for joining us. We can keep this meeting quick, there’s just a couple of things to run through while I have you all in the same room,” Vincent began, sipping from a large coffee cup in between words.

Rosemary suspected that the majority of his PA’s job would be taken up by making sure that coffee cup stayed full.

“Do we have everyone then, we’re good to go?” Jeremy asked.

“Where’s the author, Rosemary Shaw? She was on the roster for today,” someone said from the other side of the table, though Rosemary didn’t notice who. She felt anxiety jolt through her.

“Present,” she said, hoping it would sound tongue-in-cheek, when in reality her voice was shaking a little so she sounded like the new girl on the first day of high school. All eyes in the room found her.

“ You’re Rosemary Shaw,” Ellis said from beside her. He didn’t seem all that pleased by the revelation.

“Last time I checked,” she bit back.

“You’re not who I was expecting.”

How dare he?

“Well, neither are you.” She used her softest, most menacing drawl to let him know exactly what she thought of him.

Rosemary was gratified to see Ellis’s serious mouth flattening to a line.

She turned back to the table and nodded as Vincent continued the meeting, throwing around words that seemed incongruous with the subject matter, like “full fat schedule” and “day out of days.” Rosemary was out of her depth, and tried her best to keep up.

She sent up a secret thanks that Lyn was in the corner taking notes.

Ellis didn’t speak to her again, but every so often she felt his eyes on her, assessing.