“Yes. Noon today,” Valerie said. “Just outside of the place I told you about. You have the address of the place, right?”
She paused for a moment, listening to the answer from the other end of the phone.
“Great. And no, trust me, the pleasure is all mine,” she said.
She ended the call and smiled to herself. She looked pretty damned pleased with herself and Callin wondered absently if she had been arranging herself a lunch date. That would certainly make life on set a lot easier. If Valerie found a guy she actually loved rather than wanting to mate with him for the power it would give her, maybe she would chill out and they could all get along. It was probably too much to ask for, but it was a nice dream.
Callin tapped on the door, stepping away from the wall of the trailer so that Valerie could see him.
“Oh good. You got my message,” Valerie said. “Come on in. Have you been out there for long?”
“No, why?” Callin asked.
He resisted the urge to grin. It had to be a date Valerie was organizing. She was afraid he had heard her talking and would tease her about it.
“No reason,” Valerie said. “I just wanted to talk to you about this first scene.”
She pointed to her script where it lay open on the table. One of her lines was highlighted.
“Here, where my character says that her father died when she was three, and then she goes on to share her favorite memory of him. I don’t think her memory would be so vivid. Not from when she was so young. I was thinking of asking the writers to change it to her being five or six instead. What do you think?” Valerie said.
She looked at Callin expectantly and he nodded his head in agreement.
“Yes, I think you’re likely right. And it doesn’t affect the plot so it’s a nice, easy fix. I can’t see the writers giving any pushback on it,” he said.
“Will you speak to them? They’ll hear it better coming from you,” Valerie said.
Yeah, Callin thought, because I wasn’t a douchebag to them for the first few days on set until someone had to step in and tell me to mind my manners. He didn’t say that, though. He figured Valerie knew it as well as he did, and he remembered some advice Lucian had given him when he was growing up: pick your battles. This was a pointless battle—one he was likely to win, but to what end? Instead, he nodded his head.
“Yeah. I’ll speak to them before we start filming,” he said.
“Thanks, Callin, you’re the best,” Valerie said with a smile.
Callin returned her smile with a half-hearted smile of his own and made his way out of the trailer, heading for make-up. It was only as he sat down in the make-up artist’s chair and took a sip of his coffee that he realized what was really going on here.
Valerie had asked to see him as soon as he arrived on set, and then she wanted him to use the few minutes he would normally have spare once he was ready to start filming and she was still getting the finishing touches done to her hair. She was filling his time with tasks to ensure he didn’t have any spare moments to catch up with Brianne, and she was doing it in a clever way. She had stumbled across something that seemed like a normal, rational request, one that he couldn’t really refuse without looking like he didn’t see the flaw, but something that ultimately wouldn’t make a huge difference to the movie either way.
Oh, she was good. He had always known Valerie was a damned good manipulator, but it was only now that he was seeing for sure just how good she was. It worried him slightly that he had never seen the lengths she would go to in order to get her own way before. It made him question again whether she was really the right alpha for the pack.
He pushed his misgivings aside. If she wasn’t the right alpha for the pack, then who would be? Certainly not him—he still didn’t want that level of responsibility for other people’s lives. He appeased himself by reminding himself that Valerie prized her role as pack alpha above everything else, and that meant maybe her manipulation wasn’t so bad. It meant that she was manipulating the pack’s enemies and therefore, strengthening the pack. It was definitely better to have a woman like Valerie on your side rather than working against you.
Callin didn’t fully believe his theory, but he let himself believe that he did, because the alternative—him challenging her for the pack—would likely end up with him dead, or at the very least, banished from the pack he had thought of as his family.
11
The morning had gone much slower than Callin had wanted it to. After getting ready for filming, he had gone to the movie’s writers like he had said he would and explained to them what Valerie had pointed out. As he had suspected, the writers agreed with the change and he had gone back to the set where Valerie was waiting for him and told her that the line had been changed to what she had suggested. Valerie had thanked him, and her smile had seemed genuine enough. It probably was.
She really was happy, just not for the reason she claimed to be. Again, she was playing him, trying to manipulate him into thinking they were a team, working together to help to strengthen the movie. He took the only pleasure he could find in the situation—that he was playing her almost as much as she was playing him by letting her think he was falling for her mind games, when really he saw straight through them and would put an end to them if anything more serious came up.
Callin had caught a glimpse or two of Brianne over the
