Falling for Real

By Kadee McDonald

She was too honest and lost a plum role because of it. Now she needs a fake relationship to get her back into Hollywood's good graces.

 

After taking a break for college, actress Hayley Niven is trying to get her career back on track. But when she tells a magazine she doesn't believe in true love, the producer of her next movie—a rom-com, no less—drops her.

 

Her agent's solution to the dilemma? A fake relationship with another one of her clients, an intelligent and adorable young British actor named Jameson Rand, who also needs to raise his Hollywood Q score. Hayley agrees because it's all for publicity, right?

 

But when Hayley and Jameson meet, will they begin falling for real?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kadee McDonald
• Release date: Jan 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224929009

Book preview

Chapter One

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THEY’RE pulling the contract? Hayley Niven paced across her talent agent’s office before dropping into a black leather Paulo Bent lounge chair and raking her rhinestone-studded fingernails through her blond hair. I went through three long, difficult auditions to get that part. They can’t just take it back.

Unfortunately, dear, they can. And they have. Hayley’s agent, Mitzi Ames, eyed her young client from across an expansive teakwood desk. Mitzi worked hard for her clients, and she’d been a godsend for Hayley, now that she’d finished college and was trying to relaunch her acting career. "We’ll get paid for the cancellation, of course, but they said they’ve changed their minds after reading your interview in Young Celebrity magazine."

It was hardly an ‘interview,’ Hayley corrected. They just asked twenty-five actresses who are twenty-five or younger if we believe that one day we’ll find one true love. I mean, how lame is that?

Exactly. Mitzi tapped her pen on the desk. Three said they’d already found it, while twenty-one of them said they were sure they would one day. And then they asked you, and what did you say?

I told the truth. Hayley shrugged. I always try to tell the truth. You know that.

Hayley, you said you didn’t believe in true love. That it’s a fantasy fueled by hormones and sappy greeting cards. Not exactly what the producer who’d just cast you in his next big-budget rom-com wanted to hear.

Actors aren’t their characters. He should know that.

"I’m sure he does, but the audience is another matter. He believes, if they’ve seen or heard about that interview—and, seriously, it’s been reported everywhere, Hayley—they won’t be able to separate you from the character and it’ll tank the film. He can’t take that chance with a multi-million-dollar budget. No producer would."

So, what are you saying, Mitzi? That I’ll never work again?

No. I think there’s a way we can fix this, and I have a plan.

Hayley sat back. Okay. She didn’t usually like it when her agent ‘had a plan’ because it often required a good bit of effort on Hayley’s part. I’m listening.

I have another client, a young British actor named Jameson Rand. He’s absolutely adorable.

I’ve heard of him...I think.

"Of course you have. He was hugely popular in the U.K. a decade ago, when he was a teenager. Then, like you, he took a break to go