The Prince's Devious Proposal - Holly Rayner Page 0,64

for the entire first act. Her hair hung loose down her back instead of being arranged in the elaborate updo Charlotte had worked out with the hair design team.

Charlotte grabbed her by the elbow. “Are you serious?” she said. “It’s twenty minutes to curtain! You’re nowhere near ready.”

“Stop worrying, Charlotte,” Emery said. “We have a lot of time. Have you seen the size of the audience?”

“I’ve seen it.”

She had been waffling about it, her opinion changing every five minutes. The last time she had looked, it had seemed like an overwhelming amount of people. A frightening amount. The time before that, she’d felt ashamed of how few had turned up.

I wonder if every playwright is this much of a mess on opening nights.

“Just get back to hair and makeup,” Charlotte said, giving Emery a gentle push in that direction. “Don’t let me see you again until you’re ready for the stage.”

Emery affected a fake pout. “So bossy,” she said, but she took off in the direction Charlotte had indicated she should go.

It was like herding cats. Already, Charlotte had caught two members of her cast sneaking out for cigarettes, even though she had expressly forbidden smoking on performance days. The last thing she needed was raspy-voiced actors choking their way through their lines.

This wasn’t her first production, and yet she felt more nervous about this play than she had about any of her past ones. She wondered why that was.

Maybe it was just the fact that she’d been working on this script for so much longer than anything else she had ever produced. It really had been her life’s work so far. Seeing it on stage during the final dress rehearsal last night had been surreal.

And now she was going to show it to the rest of the world.

God, she hoped people would like it. It would be painful in such a personal way if they didn’t.

She took one last look around backstage and then made her way out to the front of the house. There was nothing else for her to do here, and she was making herself far too nervous lurking in the wings. The cast knew what they needed to do. The crew had been well trained. The best thing Charlotte could do now was to get out of their way and let them do their jobs.

That was easier said than done, though. As soon as she took her seat, she began to feel fidgety, thinking of things she hadn’t checked.

Were all the props in place? She hadn’t looked. Her prop master was a pro, but there had been that one rehearsal in which the bicycle had been a complete no-show. You could laugh something like that off in rehearsals, but if it happened tonight…she didn’t even want to think about it.

And what about the costumes? She always liked to do final checks with the actors on opening nights, just to make sure they looked the way she wanted them to, and Emery had been so far from ready—

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. No. She was just going to have to relax and let go of her worries. Either this would go well, or it wouldn’t. She had done all she could in rehearsals and her work with the crew. They were ready. She trusted them.

As the curtain lifted, Charlotte’s anxiety reached its peak. For a moment she felt almost blinded by nerves.

But then Emery walked out onto the stage and spoke her first lines. She was perfectly in character, just as she always was, and Charlotte could feel the audience around her becoming swept up in the story.

The play was a reminiscence on Charlotte’s own years in graduate school, and it was there, in fact, that she had begun writing it. She had done her best to represent the way the pressured environment of an institute of higher learning could create unbreakable bonds between people.

Emery’s character, Anna St. Clair, was not directly based on Charlotte herself or on anyone she had known in school, but she was an amalgam comprised of many different people. Charlotte felt deeply and personally connected to the character, more so than she did to any other she had ever written.

She had cast Emery after a single audition, thrilled with the spark the young actress had brought to the role. She hadn’t expected to find someone who so completely was Anna St. Clair, but watching Emery made Charlotte feel as if the character she had spent so many