LOL Romantic Comedy Anthology - Volume 1 - Thirteen All-New Romance Stories by Bestselling Authors Read online

  “I mean about seeing you tomorrow. On the set.”

  “Oh.” He cast his gaze down, and I got a bad feeling he was going to say something I didn’t want to hear. “You don’t want to visit the set tomorrow. It’s always so boring at the best of times, but ballroom scenes are the worst, because of the scale. There’s nothing to do but sit around and wait.”

  I shrugged. “All the more reason for me to come. I’ll hang out and keep you company.”

  He still wasn’t looking me in the eyes. “Let’s talk about this next week.”

  I put my hands on my hips so fast, I sent up two splashes of water. “Are you kidding me? I’m your wife, but I’m not good enough to come visit you on the set? What do you want from me, besides sex? Why did you even marry me?” I looked up at the night sky, where I could see the moon, but no stars. “Oh, that’s right. You married me for good publicity.”

  “And also because I love you.”

  My jaw dropped open. Also? What the Fudgeeo cookies?!

  He quickly said, “I mean, only because I love you. Not also. That came out wrong. I told you before, I’m no good with words, unless someone writes them for me in a script.”

  “You’re plenty good with words when you’re trying to get something, Dalton Deangelo.”

  I turned away and started walking through the water to the stairs. He splashed and caught up with me, grabbing me in his strong arms. He held on. I could struggle all I wanted, but he wasn’t going to let me go unless I hurt him.

  Oh, but I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to elbow him in the stomach, or hit him in the nose with the back of my head, but I resisted the urge and went limp in his arms.

  His voice deep and thick, he growled, “You’re my wife now.”

  I sniffed. “I know. That’s why it hurts so bad.”

  “I’ll be thinking about you tomorrow. Go shopping with Vern.”

  “Sure,” I said coolly.

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not,” I lied.

  He kept hugging me from behind, and nodded his head forward to kiss my shoulder.

  His grip loosened, so I slipped free of him and swam quickly to the stairs. I stepped up, out of the pool, and wrapped myself in the robe.

  “I know you’re stressed about moving,” he said. “Even good changes are still difficult. Trust me, everything’s going to settle down soon.”

  I grabbed a handful of my wet hair and wrung out the water. Dalton stood in the shimmering blue pool, bare chested and gorgeous, looking like a page from a magazine.

  Part of me wanted to forget all about him teasing me on the plane and now this. I could let it all go and join him in the pool, on this beautiful summer night.

  But another part of me still wanted to run. Now I had an enormous diamond weighing down my ring finger, but I was still the same girl who left Dalton in a hotel room and ran home in the dark.

  “Trust me,” Dalton said again. “Everything will look better in the morning.”

  “Is it okay if I sleep in one of the guest rooms tonight? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since before the wedding.”

  Disappointment flickered across his face. “Of course it’s okay,” he said. “This is a big house, with plenty of space.”

  I turned around and looked up at the glass wall. It certainly was a big house, all right. Between the house and the huge city of L.A., I felt very small.

  I went inside, gathered my laptop and a few things from the master bedroom, and got myself set up in a spare room at the opposite end of the house.

  After about an hour, Dalton came by to say goodnight. We talked about schedules and wake-up times, but we didn’t talk about what had been said in the pool.

  He stood in the doorway, glancing over at the bed a few times. I knew he was waiting for an invitation, but I didn’t give him one. If we were going to make love for the first time in our new home, I didn’t want it to be like this.

  He went off to bed, and I phoned my best friend and cousin, Shayla, to tell her everything.

  When she heard about me not getting invited to the set, she got even more angry than I had.

  I sure do love Shayla.

  She was the one who suggested I call my new L.A. friend Mitchell, and get him to help me sneak onto the set of One Vamp to Love.

  I had a few more glasses of wine, thanks to a bottle I liberated from the wine cellar, and then I phoned Mitchell.

  4

  When I got out of bed Monday morning, Dalton was already gone for work. He’d gotten up before five o’clock so he could be on the set by six.

  Mitchell arrived at the house at nine, wheeling a suitcase full of wigs he’d borrowed from his drag queen roommate.

  “This house is almost exactly what I imagined,” Mitchell said as he looked around the living room, with its polished concrete floor and fifteen-foot-high ceilings. Mitchell isn’t a very tall guy, and he looked even smaller in the big room, like a fresh-faced, muscular kid with curly blond hair. “Needs more art.”

  “And a few area rugs, right?” We both looked around at the bare, modern interior for a moment, then Mitchell took a seat on a white leather chair.

  I ran to the kitchen for my mocha and his latte, then returned.

  “Yes, you need area rugs,” he said as he checked his phone. “I may still get called in to work, but I’m probably yours for the whole day. Are you still serious about crashing the Vamp set, or should we do the sensible, boring thing and go shopping instead?”

  “What do you think? I don’t know anymore. It felt like a good idea last night, but now it just seems ridiculous. And dangerous. They could arrest me for being a stalker.”

  “Tell them you’re his wife.”

  “That’s what all the stalkers say.”

  “Good point, but you really are his wife.” Mitchell suddenly glanced wildly around the room, his blond curls bouncing. “Wait, you are married to him, right? Don’t tell me you broke into his house and this whole thing is an elaborate con!”

  I laughed. “Mitchell, you were at the wedding.”

  He grinned. “Exactly. Which proves my point. You really are Dalton’s wife, so you’re not a stalker, and nothing bad is going to happen to us.”

  I sipped my mocha for a minute, not quite willing to say yes. Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked what kind of wigs he’d brought over, courtesy of his roommate’s alter-ego, Luscious Hilda Mae Sparkles.

  Mitchell opened the suitcase and pulled out an assortment of top-quality wigs in brunette, black, and red. Our plan was to sneak in as personal assistants, and Mitchell knew just what to say, because he’d worked at a number of studios. The key was to talk fast and act annoyed.

  I could have just shown up as myself and made a fuss until they let me in, but that would have reflected poorly on Dalton, and given me even more of a diva reputation. The press had already been calling me Super Soaker, because I had a tendency to dump water on people I didn’t like. (And on people I do like, but that’s a different story.)

  We relocated to the bathroom with the biggest mirror, and we tried all of the wigs. I liked the brunette one, because it was closest to matching my eyebrows.

  Mitchell said, “No, you need to wear the black wig, because you look fierce, like Cleopatra.” He settled the black-haired wig onto my head, then stepped back to admire. He gasped, “Oh my god, I’m straight now.”

  “They’ll know it’s a wig. My eyebrows look like furry blond caterpillars next to this.”

  Mitchell rolled his eyes. “Fools and children shouldn’t see things half finished.” He pulled out a makeup kit and went crazy on my face, darkening my eyelashes and eyebrows.

  When I looked in the mirror, I was surprised by how sexy I was. Now, I feel pretty good about my appearance most of the time, but I’ve never wanted to make out with myself, you know?

  In that sexy Cleopatra wig, I kinda wanted to get Dalton and have a kinky threesome, with me, him, and the hot chick in the mirror.

  “Dalton won’t know it’s you,” Mitchell said. “Your own mother wouldn’t know it’s you.”

  “She would if I opened my mouth.”

  Mitchell got a cheeky grin. “Not if you’re Ursula. How’s your cleaning-lady accent?”

  I cleared my throat, then tried my Ursula identity. “I am cleaning lady. I clean real good.” I put on a blank expression. “I clean shower real good. I get right in and scrub, scrub, scrub. Dirty bachelor. Tsk tsk.”

  “Very good, Ursula, but you’re a personal assistant now, not a cleaner.”

  “Yes, yes. I help actor. He no good actor, but he work hard. He stand in back and pretend to talk. I ask what he say, and he say it’s nothing. He say he make background noise. Peas-and-carrots-peas-and-carrots.”

  “And what work do you do for our boss, Ursula?”

  “I make the food in the blender. I make the laundry. And sometimes when he sad, I put the hand in the pants and pull and pull until we make more laundry.”

  Mitchell frowned. “We don’t talk about that last part.”

  I pretended to zip my lips.

  We finished getting me dressed, ate a quick brunch with some waffles the housekeeper had stocked in the fridge, and got ready to leave.

  Dalton’s butler/pilot/personal assistant met us at the door.

  “Where shall I take you shopping?” Vern asked politely.

  “Take the day off. Mitchell’s driving today.”

  Vern stared at my black wig with suspicion. “I’ll drive both of you, and you’ll save time not having to worry about parking.”

  “It’s no trouble,” Mitchell said.

  Vern kept staring at me. “Ms. Deangelo, that certainly is an excellent disguise. I barely recognized you. It does seem like an awful lot of effort just to avoid some paparazzi.”

  “Maybe I’m robbing a bank,” I said.

  Vern moved to block the door.

  I picked up a pillow from the sofa and chucked it at him. The pillow struck his chest and dropped to the floor. I picked up another pillow and aimed it at his head.

  Vern’s face got puckered, like he’d just swallowed a bug.

  Mitchell joined me in grabbing pillows from the sofa and aiming them at Vern.

  “I see this is a standoff,” Vern said politely.

  “And you’re unarmed,” Mitchell said.

  We stared each other down for at least a minute.

  Then Vern reached for the door handle, opened the front door, and stepped aside.

  “Have a lovely day shopping,” Vern said.

  5

  We pulled up to the studios, and Mitchell drove around looking for somewhere to park. The lot was huge, but didn’t look like much from the outside. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the windowless buildings were just storage.

  I hadn’t been to the set before, but I knew that they film most of the scenes inside those buildings on sound stages. For graveyard scenes, it’s cheaper for them to shoot on the sound stages and do CGI with green screens.

  They do shoot outdoors sometimes, which was why Dalton had been on a crane, high above a forest, on the day before our wedding. The curious thing about that was how they were shooting during the daytime. Drake and Connor aren’t sparkly sunshine vampires who go traipsing around in the daylight typically. Dalton had let it slip that Connor gave his character a potion.

  I had been telling Mitchell all about this plot twist on the drive over, and he was fascinated.

  “I’m dying here. Peaches, you need to get us some scripts.” Mitchell jiggled with excitement as he looked around for parking. “What’s the point in being married to Drake Cheshire if you don’t get to know what’s happening in the next season, or… uh… never mind. I just thought of your other benefits.” He turned and gave me an eyebrow waggle.

  “Dirty boy. Get your own vampire.”

  He bobbed his head from side to side. “Maybe I will.”

  In front of us, a car pulled out of a parking spot, so Mitchell quickly whipped into the space.

  I stepped out of the car, smoothed down my plain black dress, and then patted my wig hair.

  “You look great,” Mitchell said.

  “Thank you. I am Ursula, personal assistant to B-level actor. I no talk about hand-in-pants, make-happy time.”

  Mitchell, who was still inside the car, opened the glove box and handed me an ID tag on a lanyard. I set my purse on the car seat and pulled the lanyard on over my head.

  “These are from your photographer’s studio,” I said.

  “Flip it over to the back side. Trust me, people don’t usually check. And if they do, just say you’re lost.”

  “But we’re miles away. Your workplace is nowhere near here.”

  “Exactly. We’re really lost.”

  “And crazy,” I added.

  He got out of the car and winked at me. “We may be crazy, but at least we’re fun. Come on. They’re on lunch, so it’s a good time to sneak in with the catering rush.” He locked the car, started off toward an entrance, and I trotted right after him.

  We walked right through an open doorway, past two male security guards who nodded us through. Inside, there was another security guard, a tough-looking woman with rippling forearm muscles. She looked seriously scary, like a secret service agent, with her mirrored sunglasses and her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, but something about her caught my attention. She looked very familiar, even with her eyes hidden behind the mirrored sunglasses.

  I hadn’t met more than a handful of people in L.A., so I turned my face down and kept walking. Then I realized that avoiding her would make me look more guilty, so I lifted my chin and looked right at her.

  The female security guard frowned, and suddenly my insides didn’t feel so good. I knew why she looked so familiar.

  She and I had tangled before. On my previous visit to L.A., she caught me and Mitchell napping poolside at a mansion where we didn’t belong. In our defense, our sexy male model friends had lied and said they knew the owner of the mansion, so we hadn’t snuck in and trespassed knowingly.

  We had been innocent then, unlike now.

  I kept walking, hoping my black wig was enough of a disguise to fool her. She let us pass through and didn’t move a muscle, except to frown harder.

  Once we were well inside the building and out of range of the woman’s hearing, Mitchell said, “Sweet heavenly mercy, that was the psycho woman from the pool, wasn’t it? The one who handcuffed us with those plastic ties?”

  I could hardly breathe, between the terror and relief. “We can’t go back that way again. She totally knew something was up.”

  “Bless the sparkles of Luscious Hilda Mae, but that could have been a real disaster.”

  He nodded for me to follow him down a hallway, so I did, hoping he knew the direction to go. There were people all around, pushing rolling carts of costumes, lugging pieces of furniture, and barking into headsets while looking irritated.

  We walked past an actress I recognized as the woman who played the mother of one of the teen love interests on Vamp. We were definitely in the right place.

  We kept walking, and nobody did much more than glance at us. Mitchell got bold and stopped a woman with a headset to ask where the principals were filming. “Hotel ballroom,” was her reply.

  After the woman left, we jumped up and down excitedly. In unison, we both said, “I love the hotel ballroom.”

  We had to stop someone else and ask them exactly where the set for the hotel ballroom was, and this guy actually pulled out a scrap sheet of paper and drew us a map.

  “This is too easy,” Mitchell said once we were alone and moving down another hallway that connected to a different building.

  “I know. I’m actually getting worried about my husband’s safety. He could have all sorts of stalkers getting in here and throwing themselves at him.”

  “Like a sexy, voluptuous Cleopatra,” Mitchell said. “Meow. You are making me so straight today, you bad girl.”

  We got to a closed door. The sign said HOTEL BALLROOM - FILMING IN SESSION.

  “This is it,” Mitchell said. “Try not to look like a stalker when you see him.”

  “That’ll be tough, because he’s so adorable. I’ll probably start drooling, even though I’m mad at him.”

  Mitchell grinned. “I wonder if he has his shirt off.” He reached for the door, then stopped. “Wait a minute. Are you actually mad at him? You’re not going to go in there and cause a big stink, are you?”

  “Me? Why does everyone think I’m the person who starts up drama?”

  “Because you throw water on the paparazzi, Super Soaker.”

  “Just open the door. I’m not doing this to cause drama. We’ll go in, watch them filming for a few minutes, then we’ll zip right back out again before anyone notices, and then we’ll go shopping.”

  Mitchell looked skeptical.

  “We’ll buy area rugs,” I said. “I just want to see what they’re doing. Ten minutes, that’s all I want.”

  He made a face with wide eyes, acting like this was all my idea and he hadn’t masterminded the whole thing and talked me into it. He opened the door.

  We stepped through, and right onto the set. We were in the fancy ballroom, on the dance floor. Someone barked at us to get out of the shot. The set was enormous, and there must have been a hundred people in there, all working.

  I saw my husband, Dalton Deangelo, less than twenty feet away. I froze on the spot. He was leaning forward so that a short makeup artist woman could powder his forehead with more of the pale makeup they use to make him look like a two-hundred-year-old immortal vampire.

  He turned his face toward mine, our eyes met, and my blood ran cold. His green eyes were dark like coal, even under the bright studio lighting.

  He looked away from me quickly, but in that instant, I knew he’d seen right through my disguise.

  And I was absolutely sure he was livid.

  My heart sunk, and a wave of nausea passed over me. Mitchell grabbed my arm and yanked me off the dance floor, out of the bright lighting.

  We retreated to a dark corner like two cockroaches.

  I stood there quietly, trying not to faint or throw up or die of embarrassment right on the spot.