Touching the Billionaire - Holly Jaymes Page 0,71

continue to torture yourself, and live your whole life wondering what if.”

“What if what?” I asked.

“What if you had been able to talk to her and work it out and ultimately live happily ever after.”

Initially, I laughed at that idea. Happily ever after wasn’t a reality. At least not for someone like me. But then his words settled into my brain and down into my heart. I didn’t know if there would be a happily ever after with Madeline but it was possible we could have lived happily for a time.

The next day I set out to figure out where she might be so I could talk to her. I’d been told she’d been in California, but when I accessed my network of people, I heard that she had left. I was disappointed for her to find out that she hadn’t gotten the role she’d been auditioning for. A part of me wanted to reach out to that director and advocate on her behalf, but I also knew that that was exactly the sort of thing that she didn’t want. She wanted to make it in the business on her own merit. So I didn’t call.

Next, I accessed the gossip mill in the condo building to see if anyone knew if Nadine’s sister was still staying with her. The gossip I got back was that Nadine’s new roommate was her boyfriend, who I guessed was the guy I ran into the day I went down there. Nadine’s neighbor wasn’t sure but she thought maybe she had heard that her sister was up in Woodstock with their grandparents. That made total sense.

I was halfway to the garage to get my car and drive up to see her when I remembered I was supposed to be on a talk show that evening. I had already done a couple but I was finding the more I did, the more difficult it was to be upbeat. The funk that started when Madeline walked away just seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into my soul. But I had to do what I had to do.

Although most of the talk shows were on TV during late-night, they were generally filmed early in the evening. I was in the green room of The Joey Kasen Show, waiting to be introduced. The show was the most popular of all the late-night shows, often called simply Joey Late Night. Because it was a big deal, I had to be at my best.

I watched from the TV screen in the green room as he did his opening monologue and a short chat with the leader of his band. When he got ready to introduce me, I stood up, smoothing out my tie and straightening my jacket. I gathered all my strength so that I could be charming and witty and everything the public expected of Theo Wolfe. Joey introduced me and I walked out through the curtains to a round of applause, and hoots and hollers. I waved at the crowd as I made my way over to Joey. I shook his hand and then took a seat next to him.

“I suppose you have that kind of reaction everywhere you go,” Joey said. A few more hoots and hollers, and whatever the female equivalent of the catcall was, sounded through the room.

I gave my sheepish smile. “Sometimes.”

Usually, the opening of an interview involved small talk, but since I really hadn’t done anything like take a trip to the Caribbean or do volunteer work at some charity, we didn’t have a lot to chat about. So we went straight into talking about Earthshot, the movie that would be coming out shortly. In it, I played an astronaut in a future world in which humans had colonized other planets, and Earth was essentially abandoned and forgotten. My character ended up having spaceship trouble, and Earth was where he crash-landed.

After discussing the movie, the audience was shown a clip of it and then we went to a commercial break. In the beginning of my career, that would’ve been it for the interview, but now that I was a bigger celebrity, I usually got a longer segment, which was the case in this situation. So when we came back from commercial break, I still had a few more minutes to fill with Joey.

“Now, is it true that you have started your own production company and just finished filming a movie in which you’ve cast former child star, Maddie Fox?” Joey asked when we