Hollywood Dirt (Hollywood Dirt, #1)(39)

“I just got a baby rooster,” Cole started.

“I can see that,” the man drawled. He leaned forward, his chair creaking, and peered through the thick plastic. “Why’d you bring it with you?”

“I don’t know. I thought it might need to be checked out, or you might have questions, or it might not be able to be left alone…” Cole’s voice trailed off, and he realized exactly how stupid he sounded.

“It’s. A. Chicken.” The toothpick in the man’s mouth fell out as he spat out the words. “It’s not a pet. You don’t name the thing and give it a bedazzled collar.”

“What does it eat?” Cole snarled, taking Cocky’s tub down off the counter and setting it on the floor, his boot pushing it to a safer location, a little to the side.

“Corn.”

Cole waited for more. And waited.

“Just corn? Nothing else?”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Its. A. Chicken. There ain’t no Chef Boyardee prepackaged meals in nine different flavors. You want to get fancy, buy the FRM brand. It’s twice as much and doesn’t make squat shit bit of difference.”

“Where’s that?”

“Two rows left, at the end. It comes in fifty-pound bags. Think you can lift that?” Cole swallowed, his eyes on the man’s, and wondered what his publicist’s reaction would be if he cold-cocked this hick.

“I can lift it,” he said evenly. “Anything else I’d need for it? Medicine or vitamins or shots?”

“It’s. A.—”

“Chicken,” Cole finished. “Got it. How much for the bag of feed?”

“Eighteen bucks.”

He pulled out his wallet and tugged out a twenty. “Here. Keep the change.”

He slapped down the bill and crouched, lifting Cocky’s tub carefully and taking it out to the truck. He set it down on the passenger seat, buckling it in, then returned to the store, throwing the feed bag over his shoulder with ease while the man behind the counter looked away and spit into a red Solo cup.





CHAPTER 45


BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN:

CODIA IS OFFICIALLY DEAD

The divorce between Cole Masten and Nadia Smith has moved into high gear, with each side lawyering up and court documents flying furiously back and forth between the pair. Nadia, who recently won her first Academy Award for Heartbroken, is allegedly going after an equity stake in The Fortune Bottle, Cole Masten’s latest film, which begins filming in just two weeks.

I was engaged once. Three years ago. I thought I was in love. But love shouldn’t hurt, shouldn’t dig through your chest, carve out your heart, and serve it like a meal. Or maybe it only hurts when it’s real. Maybe when breakups didn’t hurt—that was when you knew the love was false.

I wondered if Cole and Nadia’s love was real. I wondered how much he was hurting. I wondered how much of his * behavior was pain, and how much was just him.

I hadn’t spoken to him since I dropped off the baby chick. Word around town was that he had a new truck and bought a mess of chicken feed. So I guessed he kept the chick; I guessed he was settling in. Ben met with him twice about locations, and brought me over a script. I shrugged when he delivered it, tossing it onto the table, and scurried about finishing the batch of chicken salad I was working on. But as soon as he left, I devoured it. Settled into the recliner and ran my fingers reverently over the top page. It wasn’t bound, it wasn’t protected, it was just a fat stack of pages, held together with one giant clip. I flipped over the top page and started reading.

Three hours later I took a break, standing up and stretching. I stood at the sink and filled up a glass, looking out the window, across the field, at the Kirklands’. I’d been doing that lately. Staring at the house. I had known before Brandi Cone had called, her voice all high-pitched and excited, that Cole had a new truck. I had watched it being delivered, had seen a barely-visible Cole jogging down the side steps and over to the trailer. I wouldn’t have guessed him to be a truck guy. He seemed more the flashy convertible type.

Then I went back to the script. Read every line slowly, sometimes aloud. The role was manageable. Ida was an independent thinker, a secretary with a nest egg to invest. She often stood up to Cole’s character, keeping him on his toes, and they had a respect/hate relationship that morphed into friendship by the end of the movie. The fights—and the script was full of them—would be easy. The respect, the eventual friendship… that would be more difficult. But not impossible. No, for a half a million dollars, I’d charm the spots off a frog.

Filming started in just two weeks. Before, I’d have been busy helping Ben get any final details in place. Now, as an actress, I had a different set of things to handle. Just one teensy problem: I didn’t know what they were.

“I feel like I should be doing something,” I spoke into the phone, the long cord twisted into a knot of epic proportions, my fingers busy in its coils, trying to make sense of it.

“The other actors are meeting with voice coaches, working on their dialect. You don’t have to do any of that,” Ben said, his voice scratchy, the sound of drilling loud and annoying in the background. He was at the Pit. Cole wanted it finished yesterday, and the crew was still working out some electrical kinks. Next Monday, starting early, our construction workers would move out, the crew would move in, and our sleepy little town would be taken over by Californians. I was terrified and excited, all in the same breath. Each day felt a hundred hours long and still passed too quickly.