“Okay, forget it then,” Michael said with a shrug. “I just thought it would be fun to hang out with twenty good-looking women for a few weeks.”
No one said anything for a long moment. For a bunch of guys who didn’t have the sort of job that afforded them the opportunity to hang out with women that often, it proved to be an argument none of them could resist—they signed up for the film.
Michael’s only regret was that he had earned the lead on the Costa Rica trip and had missed the first week of boot camp. That was one week of being surrounded by women he’d never get back, and if there was one thing Michael Raney loved, it was to be surrounded by women.
There was no time like the present, and as soon as he got through this studio budget meeting Jack had asked him to attend, Michael was ready to go play.
He started across the parking lot, making eye contact with as many women as he could, who in turn gave him a smile, a smile, a smile . . . oh, ouch. No smile there. That was a definite glare from ah . . . Linda. Yeah, Linda, that was her name. Linda . . . the production assistant, right, right. Or was it Lindsey? He couldn’t really recall much about her, other than that he’d been involved with her for a very short time once. She didn’t have the looks most guys wanted, but Michael had liked her a lot in the beginning—she had a wry wit. Unfortunately, it turned out that she was funnier in a weird way than a ha-ha way, and he hadn’t pursued it.
And as she was still staring daggers at him, Michael looked in the opposite direction.
Well, shit.
He knew that one, too. Jill, perky Jill with the brand-new, perky breasts. Nice perky breasts. Nice perky breasts attached to someone with stalker-like tendencies.
Okay, so there might be a couple of rough spots in this dream gig, but nothing to worry about. There were still more than a dozen women he hadn’t been involved with, and one with golden hair was walking toward him that minute. Michael smiled, slowed his step. “Excuse me, can you point me toward the office?”
The golden-haired woman smiled brightly and offered to take him there herself.
Was America a great country, or what?
THE women gathered on the basketball court to play dodge ball, or as one of the stunt coordinators put it, “practice teamwork.”
“I don’t know how in the hell we are going to learn teamwork playing dodgeball, but whatever,” Trudy said on an impatient sigh as she studied her hand through giant black sunglasses she had yet to remove. Trudy was a single mom with a useless boyfriend and an unusual fetish for showy sunglasses. She had more pairs than Leah could count.
At that moment, she was wiggling her fingers at Leah. “So what do you think of this color? I got it from my daughter Aralia.”
Leah looked at the fingernails Trudy was wiggling at her. The color was a little too bubblegum pink for her tastes, but looked like something a fifth-grader like Aralia would like. “Fabulous,” she lied.
“Don’t look now, but here comes the Stud Strut,” Jamie said. Jamie and Michele had migrated toward Trudy and Leah early on, and now the four of them were inseparable. Jamie nodded her dark red head in the direction of the door to the basketball court. “Hey, you know what T.A. stands for, don’t you?” she asked as they watched two of the three stunt trainer-slash-coordinator hunks, Cooper and Eli, stroll in.
“What?” Leah asked.
“Tits and Ass,” Jamie said, and then guffawed. “Get it? They have a thing for tits and ass!” She laughed. Leah, Trudy, and Michele rolled their eyes.
“Ladies, if we could have your attention!” Eli, the one with the sandy blond hair was speaking. He was a quiet guy who Leah thought looked pretty damn good in faded jeans. Hell, they all looked good for that matter, from Cooper’s dark locks, to Jack and his thick brown hair, and then of course they were all tall and built like a brick shit house.
“We finished up our first phase of intensive gym work,” Eli said. “You did good, ladies. Real good.”
Several of them cooed like a flock of doves.
“This week, we’re gonna focus on team-building exercises. And then next week, we’re going to work hard to block those two big battle scenes with the team skills you’ve learned. We won’t lie to you—this is going to be a lot of hard, physical work. But if you do like we ask, and we get those battle scenes down, we’ve got a little surprise for you.”
“I hope the surprise has the name Gucci in it somewhere,” Leah muttered.