“Wait, wait!” Kit got jerkily to her feet. “There is no romance, not between me and Noah. You know that.”
“Of course I know that,” Thea muttered. “But for the next month, or at least until they finish casting Redemption, there has to be—the money people have to see that you can hold the public’s attention in a positive way. If the media’s lapping you up, it makes you the next hot thing, and that equals free promotion for the movie.”
Pacing from one end of the room to the other, Kit shoved a trembling hand through her hair. “But Esra Dali doesn’t care about promotion,” she said, naming the difficult but brilliant director. “He chooses who he chooses.”
“Esra is one of the sharpest operators in the business,” Thea retorted. “He’s an artist, no doubt about it, and he won’t choose a vacuous ‘it’ girl for his movie, but if it’s a contest between two equally talented, equally charismatic actors, he’ll inevitably choose the one with the stronger media profile.”
A small pause as Thea sipped from what was probably her third coffee of the morning. “He knows he’ll lose his backers if he can’t make them money—and without those backers and their financing he can’t tell the sweeping stories he likes to tell, because those stories require serious budgets.”
Shaking all over, Kit put a hand over her mouth and tried to think. “You know Noah, Thea,” she said at last, her stomach a lump of ice. “He isn’t a one-woman guy.” It hurt her to say that, hurt her to remember all the women he’d slept with. Broken glass thrust directly into her veins couldn’t have hurt that much.
“Then you have to convince him to behave for a few weeks,” Thea ordered. “Because while this publicity could make you, it could also tank you. If he’s caught with a groupie, you go from being one half of Hollywood’s hottest couple to the woman scorned.”
The brutally pragmatic words sent Kit to her knees, but Thea wasn’t finished. “You’ll get pity while he’ll come out the stud. Because the world’s not fair, and a woman who ‘can’t keep her man’—as I promise you the story will be spun by the tabloids—is not someone people want to emulate or to follow. You’ll become toxic until I can clean up your image, and that’ll take time.”
Kit’s head felt stuffy, her eyes hot. She wanted to argue with Thea, but she knew the other woman was right: the world wasn’t fair. Everyone wanted their silver screen idols to be winners in real life too. Even her superhero movie might tank if people began to pity her. Kickass superheroes didn’t get dumped.
And still… “No, Thea,” she whispered, her throat raw. “I won’t use Noah that way.” It wasn’t his fault this had spun out of control.
“He’s your friend—”
“No,” Kit said again, conscious Thea was operating with a handicap. She didn’t know Kit and Noah’s history, didn’t know that not only would Kit not force Noah into an untenable position, she wasn’t sure her heart could take the charade. She was too afraid it’d start to believe the illusion was real.
“Kit, this is serious.”
“I know. I’ll take my chances.” She’d started out in the movies in a low-budget film—she’d do that again. No matter how much damage this did to her image, she was still an Oscar-nominated actress. Someone would hire her, and even if her career trajectory took a dip, it wouldn’t be forever. She’d make it back out.
Strong thoughts, but as she hung up, her mind raced like a rabbit, her skin hot. She’d worked so hard for her career, and it was all about to go up in smoke. Heat suddenly turned to ice. The cosmetics contract she was relying on to get her out of a huge financial hole wasn’t yet final… and there was every likelihood Noah would pick up a woman again tonight.