“Are you serious?” I demanded, jumping off the porch and standing before him, my hands on my hips. “Bennington…” I searched for his last name.

“Payne,” he supplied.

“Bennington Payne, are you yanking my leg?”

“I’m not.” He tilted back his beer and took a long pull of it, a line of condensation running down its stem. “He does. Wants you to take Minka Price’s place. Thinks you’re perfect. Authentic.” The word ‘perfect’ was enhanced by a gesture of the jazz hands variety.

I had to sit down, could feel the growing crescendo of the crickets closing in on me, the evening heat suddenly too much. I’d been hoping, three days earlier, for a job delivering donuts on set, brewing coffee, running copies. Now… Minka Price’s role? Mrs. Holden would be crushed. She had made plans to come back during filming, her heart set on meeting the actress in the grocery store, or the gas station, or on an evening walk, her pen and notepad conveniently nearby for an autograph and Oh, do you mind a photo? I sat on the closest step and tried to process this.

“It’s a no-brainer, Summer,” Ben said quietly. “No one gets an opportunity like this. Girls in Los Angeles screw, kidnap, and kill for something like this.”

I smiled at the image, a hundred big-breasted bottle blondes in different compromising positions, hands outstretched for a role that seemed undeservingly before me. I couldn’t act, had never tried. Hadn’t taken drama in high school or participated in church plays. And now… to take Minka Price’s place? Town would have a field day, whispers flying at a furious pace, the gossip mill twisting my good fortune into something ridiculous, that much was certain. I’d be famous. Not Price famous but still. I hung my head between my knees and took in a deep breath. I didn’t want to be famous.

“It’d be a ticket to the show…” Ben said soft and teasingly. A ticket to the show. Yes, being in the movie would put me in the middle of the action, would show me everything that I’d been worried about missing and then some. It would be very exciting. I’d seen the budgets, seen the amount of money—Cole Masten’s money—being poured into a production that would trump any event in Quincy’s history. A sudden thought hit, the first one that should have come to mind earlier. “How much does it pay?”

Ben shrugged. “No idea. But you could ask Cole.”

Cole. Oh yes. The man I had banished from my home. I twisted my mouth. “Where is he?”

“In the car. I made him wait there.”

I laughed. “Oh really. You made him wait?”

He smiled ruefully. “He might have offered.”

“How kind of him,” I muttered. A lead role, it had to pay a lot. Enough to set up Mama and properly escape Quincy. More than enough. I glanced back at the field and wondered what I was still thinking about.

“Okay,” I turned back to Ben. “Let’s ask Cole.”

CHAPTER 32

Cole had never had a mother. The official industry story, printed a hundred different times, in different ways, was that a drunk driver killed his mother when he was young. It’s amazing that, after eighteen years in the spotlight, the truth never came out.

The truth was, his mother had been the drunk. She’d always been a drunk. Not a stumbling around, unwashed hair drunk who got kicked out of bars in the middle of the afternoon. No, she was more of a dignified, mimosas at breakfast, cocktails at lunch, wine with cheese as a snack, fall asleep before dinner drunk. He had very few memories of her. She was always in bed by the time he got home from school and was never up before he left. He’d been twelve when it had happened. It was a Sunday, when the maids were off, when the house was quiet. He’d been playing in the front yard, a baseball in the air, tossed up by his own hand, the other posed to catch it, when her car had pulled down the drive. He hadn’t caught the ball. Instead he had stared, her white convertible zipping down the drive, the red top of it up, the glare on the windshield making it impossible to see inside. When the gate at the end of their drive opened, there was a squeal of tires, and then her white car was gone.

He hadn’t known, staring after the car, that it had been her driving. He had only known, reaching down to pick up the missed ball, that something felt wrong.

His mother had never slowed when approaching the stop sign. If she saw the minivan approaching, she didn’t react. The minivan’s driver—a forty-two year old divorcee with two children strapped into backseat car seats—saw her, her foot jamming on the brakes, the vehicle skidding to a stop a second too late, clipping the back end of his mother’s Jaguar V12. The bump sent the convertible into a spin that was stopped by the brick corner of a Starbucks. One couple at an outside table dove out of the way and survived with only abrasions. The minivan divorcee and her two children had whiplash and temper tantrums. His mother had a cerebral fracture. She might have survived that except for the spark that hit the broken fuel line, causing an explosion heard three blocks away. An explosion. Lucky for her. Lucky for his father. No autopsy. No blood tests. The Masten name and reputation stayed intact.

Had his mother lived, she would have been nothing like the sunny burst of nurturing that knocked politely on his window.

Cole jumped at the noise, scowling as he looked away from his phone and up through the car’s window. A woman stood there, mid-fifties, her mouth stretched into a smile, her fingers wiggling in a wave. He tried not to grimace and rolled down the window.

“You must be Cole Masten.” The woman smiled, a relaxed, natural gesture that was nothing like the forced politeness of her daughter. And that was who this no doubt was. Summer Jenkins’s mother. Their similarities lay in the lines of their features, the light hazel of their eyes, the golden brown of their hair. This woman’s was cut shorter and curled. Cole liked it better long, better for twisting up in his hand and pulling. Better for… he shifted in his seat and reached for the handle. Opened the door and stood, feeling better as he looked down at her instead of up.

“How’d you know?” He smiled politely, feigning humility. Fans liked that—the aw shucks I’m nobody shtick.

She held up a cell phone, a flip one, one with actual buttons instead of a touch screen. “My daughter left me a voicemail.” She tilted her blonde coiffed head as if it helped her to remember. “She said, ‘Don’t come home. Cole Masten is here.’” She opened her purse and dropped in the phone. “Nothing to make a mother come home quicker than to tell her to stay away.”

There was a moment of silence, and he shifted into a new position against the side of the car. So, she lived with her mother. That was something you didn’t see in LA.

The woman eyed him, her gaze shifting over his clothes, and he wondered if any evidence from last night was present. “How do you know Summer?” the question was a polite one, voiced in light tones, but there was a trap in the words, a danger in the vowels.

He spoke cautiously. “I just met her today.” The woman said nothing, and his mouth moved in a search to fill the silence. “A few hours ago. I came here to meet Ben.”

“Do you work on the movies also?” Her hand wrapped around the strap of her purse, and she pulled it higher up on her shoulder.

He studied her. Tried to see a joke in her question. “Yes. I’m an actor.” An Academy Award winning actor. An actor Time Magazine just put on their cover. She smiled as if it was a cute little job. “That’s nice. I’m Francis Jenkins. Summer’s mother.” She let go of the purse’s strap and stuck out her hand.