Taming Hollywood's Baddest Boy - Max Monroe Page 0,8

underground.

“How quickly can you get in touch with him?”

Abort! Abort! Abort!

“I’m not sure,” I say with a shrug. When all eyes narrow in on me suspiciously, I say the first thing that comes to my panic-fueled mouth. “But probably pretty quick.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“Who’s his agent?” Olivia asks the room, hoping someone knows the answer.

“Adele,” I offer up because, evidently, I’m in the middle of a nervous breakdown. My mouth has gone Terminator-style rogue, but in this apocalyptic world, there’s no reassuring Arnold robot voice saying, “I’ll be back.”

“Oh, that’s right. Adele Lang.”

Oh yeah, Adele Lang. I nod. This isn’t the first time you’re actually hearing her last name or anything. No, not at all.

“I can’t believe that woman is still working in Hollywood,” Callie says with a grin. “She has to be pushing eighty at this point.”

“She’s old-school. Fucking hard-core,” Olivia adds on a laugh.

Serena walks over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out toward the city and stands there for a long moment.

Callie and Olivia chat animatedly about Adele Lang.

Charles stares daggers into my skull.

And, me? Well, I stay rooted in my seat, trying not to fucking piss myself.

Holy shit. What have I done?

I’ve just promised my boss a man I can in no way deliver.

Billie

Pretty sure the only thing I’m missing right now is Eminem’s mom’s spaghetti. Palms sweaty, heart racing, I hear “Lose Yourself” in my head, and let me tell you, the working motion picture to go along with it is dismal.

My whole body shakes and my throat feels tight as I finally escape the conference room and head straight toward the elevator. No detours, no pit stops, no fucking bathroom breaks; I need fresh air, and I need it right the f-bomb now.

Being competitive is one thing, but being so competitive that you lie about knowing a celebrity who has been MIA for eight years is batshit crazy.

Nausea roils violently in my gut as the elevator dings its arrival, and I step inside.

What in the hell were you thinking? You just promised a celebrity you’ve never met in your whole fucking life for a movie, with no actual way of contacting him!

Is this what anti-money, pro-happiness people would call living beyond your means? Promising your boss a man you can’t deliver because you refuse to let your archnemesis win?

Because I have a pretty big feeling this is going to bankrupt my happiness in a big way.

Off the elevator and through the lobby doors, I find a quiet spot on the side of the building where no one can witness my shit fit. The last thing I need is an anonymous do-gooder calling the police and asking them to do a welfare check on me.

I’ll end up in Cedars-Sinai with no access to cutlery.

I scrub a hand down my face and type in the name Luca Weaver into the search bar on my phone.

In mere seconds, what feels like a million search results populate on the screen.

I have no idea what I think I’m going to find here—it’s not like Google is going to magically give me his freaking GPS coordinates—but I am a desperate woman who will snatch at any straw. Even the plastic ones, and those fuckers are banned.

I tap the first result on the page, his Wikipedia profile.

Luca Weaver is an American actor. He rose to prominence at the age of ten playing Sam Winston on Home Sweet Home.

I scan through the entire bio.

His career successes. His current age—thirty-four. His family—highlighting that his younger sister, Raquel Weaver, is also in Hollywood.

It’s all the shit I already know.

I tap out of the Wiki page and go back to the search results, but I’m too damn stressed out to do any more useless research on Luca Weaver.

So, I call Birdie instead.

Surely, she can give me some advice…

We love to give each other shit, but we also care about each other. She’ll know what to do to help me.

I chew at my lips as I wait for her to answer, which she finally does on the fourth and final ring. My lips probably look like those of a hiker who’s been lost in the desert with no access to water for a couple weeks after that much time tearing them apart, but I don’t care. I’ll bite these fuckers off completely and live a lip-less life if Birdie can come up with something to get me out of this cluster.

“Hey hey,” she greets, her voice altogether too cheery for my current state. “How is your