Just To Be With You (The Sullivans #12)(27)

Ian put her phone in his pocket and stopped at his assistant’s desk. “I need to head out for a while.”

“Is everything okay? Where is Tatiana?”

Clearly, she was now as concerned as he was about the beautiful actress they’d both spent so many hours with in the past couple of days. “That’s what I’m going to go find out.” Bethany’s eyebrows went up in surprise. In the ten years she’d worked for him, he’d never missed a single planning meeting, even that week he’d had a 104-degree fever and could barely walk a straight line. “If she does happen to call or come by while I’m gone, tell her to call her cell phone, would you?” He walked past the full conference room without breaking his stride.

The ride in his town car from the office to her condo should have taken fifteen minutes, tops, but traffic really was bad today. Normally, he answered email on his phone to make up for the lost travel time, but he couldn’t stop thinking—and worrying—about Tatiana long enough to type in a coherent reply to so much as one.

She’d fallen asleep during that meeting yesterday, and he suddenly worried that she hadn’t come to the office because she wasn’t feeling well. If she was sick, would she know that she could call him or his parents or any of his brothers or sister for help?

Telling himself that he would have done the same for any of his siblings who were supposed to meet him over an hour ago, Ian told his driver to keep heading to Tatiana’s place, then got out to cover the rest of the distance on foot.

* * *

When Tatiana’s doorbell rang for her meeting with a model who was transitioning into acting and the young woman’s mother, she put aside her script and got up to answer it. She’d never made so many notes in the margins of a script...or gotten so little out of any of them.

Every line of dialogue she’d played out in her head this morning had sounded wrong, worse now than they had before she’d started to shadow Ian. It would be easiest to blame the screenwriter, but her problems with the part weren’t his fault. They were hers, and hers alone.

She knew she was overthinking it, and yet the more she tried to relax and trust that she’d figure out her character before filming began, the tenser she became. By this point, she’d been gripping and crumpling the pages so hard that they looked as if a teething infant had been gnawing on them.

Plus, even though she’d vowed the night before not to keep feeling weird about what she’d said to Ian in his office yesterday afternoon, she couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d shut her out. And how much it had hurt.

On the way to the door, Tatiana picked up a stray hairband from the kitchen counter and, with a big yawn, shoved her hair into a messy ponytail. She’d always been a good sleeper, which had helped her out a great deal over the years when she’d needed to catch catnaps between scenes. But all the things she’d said to Ian—about falling for him and how could he have paid off his ex and that she wasn’t going to forget her feelings for him—had played on repeat in her head all night long, along with the way he’d carefully scrubbed his expression clean of emotion by the time he’d left for his meeting.

She didn’t much feel like smiling at the moment, but she made sure one was on her lips as she opened her door. “Serena, hello. It’s so nice to see you again.” She gave the positively gorgeous model a hug. “Hello, you must be Serena’s mother. It’s lovely to meet you, Genevieve. Please come inside. Sorry, I know it’s a little messy, but I thought it would be easiest for all of us if we met here rather than on a set or in an office.”

Serena’s mother looked positively gleeful as she said, “I’m so thrilled Smith suggested we meet with you to discuss this role. Serena is absolutely beside herself at the chance to prove herself on the big screen, aren’t you, sweetie?”

Serena nodded and smiled, but evidently Tatiana wasn’t doing as good a job of covering up her gray mood as she thought, because she said, “I hope you weren’t in the middle of something. We could come back later if we’ve interrupted you.”

Catching the horrified expression Serena’s mother gave her daughter, Tatiana replied, “No, this is perfect.”

Smith had asked if she could do him a favor by running through a couple of scenes with Serena and then giving him her opinion about the budding actress. It was a pretty important role in one of his upcoming movies, and because Serena was untried, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to regret his casting choice.

Tatiana had worked with models before and apart from the occasional exception, they were never all that great. They looked beautiful, of course, but looking pretty and expressing honest emotion weren’t always synonymous. She’d met Serena at a couple of industry events this year, and each time, she’d been struck not only by just how pure the model’s beauty was, but by how different she seemed. Quiet, and not overly interested in playing the game, the two of them had had a normal, un-Hollywood discussion about a book they’d both recently read.

“Can I get either of you a cup of coffee?”

When both women nodded, she went to fill three mugs. Tatiana had already had one cup too many this morning, but figuring one more couldn’t make her feel any more off-kilter than she already did, she topped off her own cup.

“Is this Smith Sullivan’s family?”