Take Two

By Suzanne Enoch

Eleanor Ross has it all: fame, fortune—and Brian MacCafferty, the perfect combo of bodyguard and assistant who makes every day a breeze. MacCafferty anticipates her needs, puts out her fires, and—once upon a time—nearly put a ring on her finger.

And when a scandal erupts that could ruin El, it’s Brian who rushes to the rescue and joins her in hiding. Will El discover there’s no hiding from true love? And is she finally ready to take a second chance for her own, real life Happily Ever After?

*previously published in the I LOVED YOU FIRST anthology*

• Language: English
• Publisher: NYLA
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641971843

Suzanne Enoch

A native and current resident of Southern California, Suzanne Enoch loves movies almost as much as she loves books. When she is not busily working on her next novel, Suzanne likes to contemplate interesting phenomena, like how the three guppies in her aquarium became 161 guppies in five months.

Book preview

1

Cafferty, when’s the Charlotte Maybury interview? Eleanor Ross yelled, tapping her finger on the edge of her phone. Please let it be Thursday, she repeated to herself, eyeing her calendar’s open skies at the beginning of the week. Three days without a make-up appointment, without a fitting or a reading or a camera test or a schmooze dinner with a producer.

Tuesday, Cafferty returned, his voice echoing up from the office.

Shit. Can we—

I think we can shift it to Thursday, he interrupted. That would give you a three-day break before you dive in again.

Yes, please. Brian Cafferty, the magnificent beast, always anticipated her every need, even if it was only for a bit of breathing room. No wonder she’d nearly married him. And no wonder she’d changed her mind about that; what woman wanted to be married to a man who could read her like an open book?

Instead, they’d found the perfect niche for Cafferty. He could keep her schedule, book her appearances, and give her pep talks, and she could tell him to back the fuck up when she needed some space and a moment or two when her life wasn’t scheduled to the millisecond. Hell, she’d fired him six times over the past four years since they’d become un-engaged, which she couldn’t have done if they’d been married. And she’d hired him seven times, so he liked something about the arrangement too.

Eleanor tapped in next Thursday’s date for the e-news interview, leaving the time blank for the moment. That left her with a FaceTime chat in an hour with Enrique Vance so he could tell her—how had he phrased it—the window he wanted to open into Teresa Woodward’s soul. All directors were like that, with their own favorite method of communicating their vision to the pesky actors who had to pantomime it, but for crying out loud, some of them were pretentious little shits. She liked what she’d seen of Enrique and the fact that he wanted to make a superhero movie with soul, but that didn’t stop her from sending up a quick prayer every morning since she’d signed onto the project that she’d made the right choice.

El, came from the open doorway of her upstairs sitting room, and she jumped.

Cafferty leaned there, a sculptor’s wet dream of manliness hidden beneath a Star Wars T-shirt and faded jeans. Yeah, it hadn’t been just his gift for anticipation that she’d fallen for. That was past tense now—though she did still like to look. She wasn’t dead, for crying out loud. Eleanor shook herself. Did the new pages show up?

He straightened, bringing an envelope around from behind his back. Yep. Figured you’d want to take a look before Vance’s call.

Thanks. She pulled out the two dozen pages, flipping through them. Huh. Teresa Woodward’s drinking problem is now a shopping addiction. Dolce and Gabbana. Can you say product tie-in?

You’re so cynical. Brian leaned over her shoulder. It’s difficult being a high-powered lawyer with a mutation that lets her detect lies. A new purse helps dull the pain. He reached down to flip over a page of the script. She is still a lawyer, right?

Eleanor snorted. Yes. And I’ve always wanted to play a superhero. Don’t make fun.

Uh-huh. Speaking of fun, Rod the Bod called twice while you were on the phone with the summer camp people. Something about dinner.

You shouldn’t call him that.

Sorry. Mr. Bannon, then.

Since Roderick Bannon’s last movie had very nearly gone straight to the Walmart five-dollar DVD bin, Rod had been spending extra time at the gym, with Chris Hemsworth’s ex-trainer. Personally, she thought the movie had floundered because Rod, with his sun-bleached blond hair, eight-pack abdomen, and trademark piercing blue eyes, hadn’t made for a very convincing blind, reclusive professor of literature. Then again, she happened to have inside information that Rod detested reading, so that might have prejudiced her a little on the believability scale.

She liked Rod. He told a good joke, they shared friends, and he happened to be very pleasant to gaze upon—though in her line of work, she knew a lot of guys who fell into that very same category. Still,

they’d been dating for three months, and she hadn’t fallen out of the starry-eyed, mushy stage yet. Maybe this time she wouldn’t. It could happen; it nearly had four years ago when she’d met Brian Cafferty. The three other men in between those two kept trying to prove her wrong, but hell, if an actress couldn’t imagine a different life, she was in the wrong business.

Am I giving him an excuse, then? Cafferty prompted. An early wake-up call? A production meeting first thing in the morning?

She shook herself out of her whimsy. That was something that didn’t belong in her line of work. Whimsy led to heavy-assed costume dramas just so you could play a princess, even if the script was a bloody train wreck. Or a carriage wreck, rather. Anticipating my every need again? she quipped, a little too sharply.

"Not your every need."

Now she wanted to dive into that damned whimsy again. Boundaries, she muttered, stacking the script pages in her lap again. Too many people clawed at her, wanted bits of her. It felt…safe, being able to tell one of them off.

Sorry. What do you want me to do with Bannon?

Ask him when he wants to come by or if we’re meeting somewhere. She stretched. A night out will be nice.

"And then three days of catching up on Secrets of the Zoo and finally seeing the third season of Stranger Things?"

God, yes. I need to know what happens to Hopper and Joyce before I fly off to Brussels for four months. Why can’t Chicago be in Chicago anymore?

Because it’s cheaper to make Brussels look like Chicago than it is to film in actual Chicago, he pointed out.

Yes, I know. Just let me complain a little. I can’t do it in front of anybody else; they think spending four months away from my house while wearing spandex and hanging by my waist from a piano wire is glamorous.

So Teresa Woodward can fly, now? he asked, lifting both eyebrows this time.

"Not yet. By