Starstruck by Lauren Conrad Page A

softening, she picked it up and slipped it into her purse. She had no idea how Charlie planned to make it right, and in a way, she doubted that he could. But just seeing his handwritten promise made her feel a little less alone.

10
ON-SCREEN AND OFF
    The silhouette of a man, high atop the stone wall, looked small against the blue sky. A woman’s voice cried out, “No! Noooo!” as the man, teetering on the wall’s edge, lost his balance and plunged down to the ground.
    Smack . Carmen winced at the impact, and then watched as the man got up from the inflatable mat that had broken his fall and brushed his light brown hair back from his face.
    “Oh for God’s sake,” Colum McEntire said. “That blasted pigeon got into the shot. It flew right in front of him. Can someone handle that? Or is that too much to ask?”
    Carmen and Luke exchanged a nervous glance. Colum McEntire had a legendary temper—he’d once fired Rio Lockhart, his starring, A-list actress in Far from Her , midway through production for some tiny infraction that neither would discuss. (That had required some serious script rewriting!) Some days were worse than others, and today was looking like one of the bad ones. He’d already brought three different PAs to tears. And, as Luke had noted, “two of them were dudes.”
    Carmen watched as Luke’s stunt double drank from a bottle of Gatorade and had his nose powdered by the makeup lady. He did not look particularly like Luke. But they shared that tanned, Hollywood handsomeness—which, if Carmen was honest, was just a little bit generic. It seemed like everyone looked like a Hemsworth these days. Was there some sort of farm that grew guys like this? Maybe somewhere down in Australia, a mad scientist was breeding a new crop of leading men.
    Luke scooted his chair closer to Carmen’s. “Do you know my double did all the stunts in Deadman’s Driveby ? He broke his leg in one of the crash scenes and cracked a rib in another.”
    “Impressive. If only there were two of you in real life,” Carmen mused, “then maybe Kate wouldn’t be mad at me, because there would be enough yous to go around.”
    “Let’s not talk about that,” he said.
    “Does the heart heal so quickly?” she asked, smiling. It was one of her lines from the movie.
    “Actually, no,” Luke said. “That’s the problem—I think about her a lot. And I start missing her. But then I stop myself, because I know I need to be focused on this role.” He gestured to the set before them, a futuristic-looking fortress pockmarked with holes and craters from the explosives that had supposedly struck it. There was a puddle of fake blood near a fake dead tree. (It seemed like only the roses under Julia’s window were real.)
    “My Romeo, on-screen and off-,” Carmen said lightly.
    “Romeo is traditionally unlucky in love,” Luke noted. “I don’t know if you’ve read the whole script, but … it doesn’t end well.”
    Carmen clasped her hands to her heart. “‘Love is never easy—love destroys things. It breaks hearts. It tears apart families. But it is the one thing that makes everything better. Love itself is perfect—it’s just that those of us who feel it aren’t.’”
    Luke laughed and put his arm around her. “If you don’t stop quoting your lines at me, I’m going to poison you.”
    “Like Roman poisons himself! How perfectly in character of you,” Carmen said, laughing, too.
    It wasn’t so hard to pretend to love Luke.
    But Laurel, meanwhile, was contemplating candidates for Carmen’s next fake love interest—one who’d let himself be filmed for The Fame Game . She wanted to set Carmen up with Cayden Taylor, lead singer of The Silver Moons. Carmen had never met him, but he’d been in Laurel’s class at Palisades Charter High. He’d recently broken up with his model girlfriend and was—for the moment, anyway—still on the lower rungs of the ladder to fame. “He’s hilarious. You’ll love him,” Laurel