“Ah, that’s more like it. My favorite,” he said, squinting at it as if inspecting it for flaws.
I swallowed, wondering if he’d ever looked at me that way.
As soon as that thought bubbled up to the forefront of my mind, Reese’s steely gray eyes were on me.
I stiffened, petrified.
“Am I getting fired?” I asked, the question escaping my mouth before I could stop it.
Reese filled the hall with booming laughter then stopped abruptly, fixing me with that gray gaze again.
I couldn’t read him. The knot in my stomach tightened.
“No, Charlie. I’m not firing you,” he said, his British accent sharp in the air.
My shoulders sagged as relief flooded through me. A few seconds passed and then I met his gaze again. “Then… what did you want to talk about?”
He cleared his throat and tossed the apple into the air, catching it with ease. “I wanted to ask if you’d be open to being filmed.”
My mouth popped open. “What?!” I asked.
Reese pinched his violet tie between two of his fingers and ran them down the length of the silky fabric.
It only lasted a second, but it made me wonder how it would feel if he ran his fingers down my inner thigh like that.
My crotch pulsed and heat rose into my cheeks.
“Nothing complicated, of course,” Reese said, staring at the apple as if he was asking it instead of me, “just a small part.”
“What kind of part?” I asked, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice. Was this normal for directors to ask people on set to be actors? “I don’t have much experience with acting,” I admitted, hoping he was kidding.
“That’s fine; the part I’m thinking of putting you in wouldn’t require much.”
Suspicion and curiosity began to weave their way into my mind.
He continued, and I was thankful that it was him that broke the silence. “I woke up this morning from a dream,” he started, pushing the apple across the table from one hand to the other. “And in that dream, I was stricken by a creative thought. As soon as I woke up, I knew I had to execute on this vision. It’ll make The Black Castle even better than it would have been if we stayed on script.”
“Y-you’re going off-script?” I asked, my mouth popping open. Suddenly, I was mired in thoughts of the fans of the show making mean online comments about me, holding me accountable for “ruining” the show.
He nodded and fixed me with those steely gray eyes. There was something about his gaze that made me want to do everything he wanted— made me want to please him.
“Going off-script is sometimes necessary,” he replied, laying one of his long, delicate hands on the table. His fingernails were perfectly trimmed, as if he got regular manicures.
I tried to resist picking at my thumb cuticle, placing both of my hands on top of each other on my lap.
“You know that today, we’re filming an intimate scene between Lady Bryn and Prince Valentine,” he said.
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“We are also going to introduce Mason’s character, Chronis. So far we’ve filmed the sword fight at dawn. But a part of it feels unbalanced; the scales are tipped in Prince Valentine’s favor. He gets an entire sex scene in this episode, plus a few more engaging scenes. All Mason’s character gets is a sword fight.”
I leaned forward, resting my head on my hands.
“There needs to be yin and yang between Prince Valentine and the bastard Chronis. More balance to foreshadow the intense competition between them later in the season.”
Suddenly I knew what he was getting at, and I knew it a second before he said it.
“I want you to be in a sex scene with Chronis.”
My mouth dropped open again. Me and Mason Vayne, on a bed, filmed in front of the millions of audience members? No way.
“I— I don’t know if…” I stuttered, looking down at my hands. “Why me?”
“You have the right aesthetic,” Reese replied sharply, a smirk curling across his face. “It was always suspected in the books that Chronis was bisexual. I want to plant that seed in the audience’s minds early on. It would make for more well-rounded character development.”
“But… But why me?” I repeated, “I’m just a stylist.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Reese said. “We did a background check on you — I saw that you took some acting classes when you went to L.A., and did some auditions. We found your audition tapes from when you tried out for those plays.”
Fear formed a tight ball in my gut. I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to find those tapes. Embarrassment took over and heat rose into my cheeks as I remembered trying to fake a southern accent and saying some poorly-written lines.
“Oh, bugger up,” Reece said, flashing his movie star smile at me, “No need to be embarrassed, you’re twice as good as when I first started!”
I looked up at him and he was looking at me like that again — fixing me with his steely eyes as if he saw something in me; as if I was something more than what I was.
I straightened up as if I could measure up to his expectations.
“But I’ve never acted for real before,” I said. “I never got any of the parts I auditioned for.”
“I don’t care about that,” Reese said. “I want you in this part. You have the right aesthetic, you move with fluidity, and you have all the right angles. Behind the camera, you’ll look stunning.”
He was still looking at me with that intense gaze; there was no escaping it. It pinned me there, gluing me to my seat. I looked at the random assortment of fruits in the cornucopia so that I could have something else to look at besides his magnetic eyes.
The words repeated over and over again in my head: Why me, why me, why me?
I was nothing — a nobody. Sure, one time I tried to be an
