Hollywood Hot Scoop

Solemnly Single Star Spotted on a Second Date!

If you’ve been following our updates on Derek Riley—and let’s face it, who hasn’t—you know our handsome Hollywood heartbreaker has been perpetually single since being left at the proverbial altar by past costar and girlfriend Bonnie Aiken, leaving hundreds of thousands of women around the world in despair as he continues to live life on his own. I for sure have been baffled by his singlehood when there are so many eager candidates out there, myself included.

But it seems his lonely streak may finally be over!

Who’s the lucky lady? Derek has been seen twice now with potential costar Shannon Stark, and while we chalked the first sighting off as two industry associates getting to know each other, I can with confidence say Sunday morning’s brunch was more than just a business meeting. As one of our sources put it, “Derek is smitten.” While I’m waiting for proof that our main man is officially off the market, these photos sure show us a side of Derek we haven’t seen in a while.

Check out those smiles, Scoopers! We haven’t seen Derek this happy since his last Oscar win, and it’s nice to see that someone has been able to bring out the best in him when his friends have been too wrapped up in their own lives to be the support he needs.

Unfortunately for Derek, I give this relationship two months, tops.

It looks like Derek has a type, and Shannon seems to be taking Bonnie’s place as the pretty face with limited acting skills. She won’t talk back or steal any of Derek’s well-earned spotlight, so this might be a match made in heaven for the big-time star. Then again, I won’t do those things either, so maybe Derek should keep looking for his soulmate instead of settling for an unremarkable actress no one has heard of because it clearly didn’t work out the last time.

She doesn’t deserve him.

He deserves to be happy.

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Chapter One

Derek

As far as bad dates go…I’ve never had worse. And that’s saying something. When I was in junior high, I took my crush to the Snowball Dance and someone stepped on the hem of her dress on our way in, ripping the skirt from the bodice entirely. We were luckily right next to the women’s restroom, where she hid until an assistant principal brought her some clothes from the lost and found.

Or, fairly early into my days in Hollywood, my date and I got cornered by paparazzi, who threw increasingly invasive questions our way. She answered every single one, including the ones directed at me despite knowing next to nothing about me, and eventually left with one of the reporters to hook up with him, leaving me on my own.

Those dates were bad. Terrible. But this? This was worse.

“Why do I even try?” I mutter, dropping my head against the seat in the back of my SUV and letting my breath out in a slow stream.

Hunter, my bodyguard, is clearly trying to hold back laughter as he responds from the driver’s seat. “Because you’re lonely.”

He can’t see me in the darkness of the backseat, but I glare at him anyway. “I don’t need the reminder.”

Los Angeles passes by the windows as we drive, bright even this late at night. I love this city and always have, but lately it’s had a dullness to it that is entirely a matter of my perception. In a city of almost four million people, how in the world can I not find one? One who isn’t interested in my fame? The loneliness didn’t hit as hard as it did before my friends all found their significant others, though I’ve done my best not to think about that.

The last thing I need is to resent their happiness when it’s so well deserved.

Hunter’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. “This is going to be all over the internet tomorrow,” he warns, as if this is my first rodeo.

I pinch the bridge of my nose, hoping to stave off a coming headache. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Absolutely nothing. People will say what they say, and the worst of the tabloids, Hollywood Hot Scoop, will somehow turn tonight’s disaster into praise for my charitable efforts or something equally ridiculous.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I try to guess which of my friends is calling, since my publicist knows better than to reach out first. It’s early in Candora, so I should be safe from Freya’s lectures until tomorrow, and lately Bonnie avoids the internet like the plague. Cole is too busy hovering over his very pregnant wife, Carissa, to bother paying attention to gossip. That leaves one option.

I answer the call without looking at the screen. “Liam.”

“Dude.”

Sighing, I sink a little lower in my seat, wishing I could lie down and escape the world for a minute. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“And I thought I had bad luck! You might have just won the trophy for worst public moment ever.”

If Liam already knows about my disaster of a date, I’m not sure I want to know what’s on the internet. “How bad is it?” I ask, even though I’ll get a full rundown from my publicist as soon as I call him. “How much did people see?”

“Are you telling me it’s worse than the flashing and the cheesecake temper tantrum?”

I groan. “It’s worse.”

“Tell me everything.”

I imagine him sitting in his hot tub, his wife on his lap as he waits for me to spill all the details. I like Kasey, especially with Liam, and I’m sure they’ll both get a kick out of tonight’s mess. But I’m still processing and don’t especially want to relive the evening.

“If you don’t tell us,” Liam says, confirming Kasey’s presence, “we’re just going to have to assume everything we’re reading is true.”

It probably is. Taking a deep breath, I take a moment to consider how best to relay tonight’s date. I can usually minimize the drama of things when I need to, but no one could make tonight sound less crazy than it was.

“We went to Félicie for dinner,” I say, keeping my voice even. “Everything was going great until we got dessert, and the cheesecake had a strawberry on top.” I shake my head, hating every word coming out of my mouth. “Shannon claimed she’s deathly allergic to strawberries, though she failed to mention that to anyone ahead of time.” I add that last bit in a grumble because I’m too tired to hold it back. Based on everything else she did tonight, the ‘allergy’ was a complete lie. “And she…”

“Flipped her lid,” Liam finishes for me. “Yeah, we saw a video of that part. Girl’s got an arm, I’ll give her that.”

Outraged by the alleged attempt on her life, Shannon grabbed the cheesecake with her bare hand and threw it into the waiter’s face. It was at that point that her dress, which had been putting in a valiant effort in staying on her body all night because it was clearly too big for her, slipped. And by slipped I mean fell off entirely. At least she was wearing underwear.

“And that’s when she stuck her tongue down your throat?” Liam asks.

I groan. I don’t care about decorum anymore. Flipping my phone to speaker, I twist until I’m lying on my back on the seat, my knees in the air. “No, first she licked the cheesecake off the waiter’s face. Then she kissed me.” Kiss being a loose term, of course.

Hunter chuckles in the front seat. “She was impressively bold,” he says.

“No cap,” Liam agrees.

I roll my eyes. “Whose side are you on, Wright?” I ask Hunter, though his joking is making it easier to breathe. He was never truly worried about my safety tonight, despite Shannon’s wild display, which kept it all from getting too tense. I can generally take care of myself, but it’s nice to have backup.

“Always yours, Derek,” Hunter says. “Liam, ask him about the soup.”

I tense. “Don’t ask about the—”

“Well now I have to hear about the soup,” Liam says with a laugh.

I sigh. He’ll hear about it sooner or later. “I convinced Shannon to leave once we, uh, helped her become decent again.” AKA when I wrapped my suit jacket around her after Hunter dragged her off my lap so I could breathe. She still has my jacket and will probably sell it on the internet for some quick cash. She’ll need it after tonight. “She grabbed a bowl of soup from a random table on the way out and dumped it on the head of a man sitting outside, claiming he looked sad and hungry.”

Liam whistles low, and he sounds a little more serious when he asks, “What happened to her? She wasn’t like this on your first few dates with her.”

No, she wasn’t. Shannon has actually been really nice. We met at an audition, and she was sweet and witty, with a genuine quality about her. She’s just starting out in the film industry and has a lot of potential, and it was nice to be around that kind of untarnished enthusiasm for acting. We seemed to have a connection, one I was eager to explore.

“Fran happened,” I mutter, exhausted.

Liam swears, and Kasey speaks up for the first time, asking, “Your old publicist?”

The publicist I should have fired long before I did.

“I found out tonight that she’s working for Shannon, and I’m eighty percent confident she put Shannon up to it after Hot Scoop called Shannon unremarkable.”

“Only eighty percent?” Liam asks. “That’s not very Derek Riley of you.”

Yeah, well, I’ve been faking my confidence more and more lately, and I’m tired. The exhaustion goes far beyond tonight. “I feel bad for Shannon, more than anything,” I say with a sigh. “This could ruin her.” With the way Hot Scoop has been writing about me lately, it will ruin her.

And there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s the worst part, having no power over this situation.

“She’s smart enough to know better,” Kasey says. “She made her choice when she agreed to go bat crazy.”

Kasey and Liam are my only friends who have met Shannon so far, since a movie Shannon auditioned for is one whose screenplay Kasey is helping revise. I was planning to bring Shannon to our Sunday brunch next week to introduce her to the rest of the gang, but that plan’s out the window. It’s for the best.

It’s not like I’ll ever find someone who can both handle my crazy life and keep me grounded. I can’t even do that for myself lately.

“Hey,” Liam says, his tone soothing. “At least you can bet Hot Scoop will find a way to spin the whole thing in your favor, right?”

I huff a laugh. That stupid site has never had a bad thing to say about me despite constantly tearing down my friends. Even last fall, when they uncovered a long-buried secret that my cousin Elliot is really my half-brother, they were still mostly in my corner. “I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse,” I say.

“Definitely a blessing. It’s brutal when you get on their bad side.”

Every single one of my friends has been on Hot Scoop’s bad side. Relentlessly. A gut feeling that won’t go away tells me their battles with the tabloid have somehow been my fault. I wish I knew how—why—so I can fix it, but that website has become the bane of my existence. My white whale. The sharp rocks at the bottom of a slope I’ve been slipping down for years.

“I’m sorry you had to endure the date from hell,” Liam says. “Don’t let it bug you.”

“Does anything bug Derek?” Kasey asks. It’s a joke. I think. But it almost sounds like a genuine question.

Yes, things bother me. Plenty of things. I just don’t let anyone know that they bother me.

I feel Hunter’s eyes on me in the mirror again, and I’m pretty sure he has something to say. Something only for me, or he would have said it by now. He’s never been shy about voicing his opinion, which is one of the reasons I’ve kept him around as long as I have. Honesty is hard to come by in my line of work.

Clearing my throat, I keep my tone light. “At least I’ll be out of town for a couple of weeks and can avoid the spotlight.”

“Ah right.” Liam sighs dramatically. “Your super secret research trip.”

“My trips are always a secret.”

“Because you’re a spy, I know.”

I grit my teeth. “Liam. You have to stop with that. You know I’m not a spy.”

“Do I know that? At this point, nothing would surprise me about you, Derek.”

“I’m going to hang up now. Ethan’s probably waiting for me to call.”

“Best publicist in the world,” Liam says wistfully. “Good luck with the Shannon fallout! We’re here if you need us.”

After he hangs up, I lie in silence for a moment, letting myself breathe as the night settles over me. Liam says he and Kasey are here for me, but they’ve managed to stay in the honeymoon phase for over a year with no signs of that changing and are obnoxiously obsessed with each other. Bonnie and Hank have only been married for seven months and aren’t much better. Carissa’s baby is due any day now, which means Cole is freaking out and mother-henning—not that I blame him. And with Freya happily holed up in Candora with Elliot, the two of them figuring out how to run a country as a newly married queen and king, I feel…

Drifted. Like an unmoored boat. While the sea is calm, that’s fine, but what happens if things start to churn? How soon before I crash into the rocks on shore?

“Derek?” Hunter asks.

I sit up and run my hands down my face. “What?

“Why don’t you ever tell Liam where you go?”

I wonder how long he’s wanted to ask me that. Years, and the question makes me smile despite everything. “Because he’s happier if I let him think I’m some international super spy.” Going off to learn skills for film roles doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as protecting national security, but more than anything I’ve been hiding behind the facade, as if Liam’s jokes will keep him from seeing the cracks in my armor. I shift in my seat, uncomfortable about how close I am to lying to one of my best friends. Liam deserves better, but I can’t give it to him. “That isn’t what you want to say, though.”

Hunter pulls through the gate at my driveway and doesn’t say anything until he’s parked in the garage. The car is dark, but enough light comes from the garage for me to see the worried look on his face as he looks back at me. “Aren’t you tired?”

“I’m exhausted. Shannon—”

“I’m not talking about tonight.”

I sigh, my eyes dropping to the phone in my hands and the million messages waiting for me. My agent, sending me scripts and setting up auditions. My manager, keeping my schedule packed to the brim with interviews and promos—everything I need to be successful. My assistant, who is the only reason I function lately. My friends, hoping I have solutions for their problems because I’m the one who keeps a cool head, no matter the situation. My mom…

I focus on the text that has been sitting in my notifications for three days. I don’t even know how she got my number, but I guess she got tired of trying to get to me through my staff over the last several months. And while I can’t read the whole message without letting her know that I’ve read it, the preview is enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I haven’t spoken to my mother in…ten years now? Maybe more. And now that the truth about Elliot is out there, she’s convinced she and I need to heal our relationship so our family can be complete again.

That won’t—can’t—happen. Not when she’s the one who broke us in the first place when she cheated on my dad with my uncle, leading to their divorce. To her leaving. My dad was barely a father to me after that, and now he has a whole new family, one that doesn’t remind him of his first wife. He’s happy. My mom can’t change that, no matter how much she wants to.

She left us behind and kept her second child a secret. A brother she never told me about and abandoned before he ever knew her. I’ve come to terms with what she did to me, but what she did to Elliot? He says he doesn’t care, but I do. My whole life, all I’ve ever wanted…

My fingers curl into a fist in my lap as I meet Hunter’s gaze again. He’s worked with me long enough that I can’t hide from him like I used to, and that should worry me. Freya is good at seeing through my acting mask if she tries, and Elliot is too smart for his own good and makes hiding next to impossible, but Hunter might be the only person in existence who truly knows how heavy my life is getting.

“Yeah,” I breathe, closing my eyes and dropping my head back again. “Yeah, I’m tired. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You could take a break.”

I choke out a humorless laugh. “Good one.”

“I mean it. You don’t have to do this river thing. Just use the time to go somewhere and relax.”

This river thing is the first project I’ve been excited about in a long time. Not only is the script compelling, but it’s so different from what I’ve been doing lately. It’s thought-provoking and heartfelt and will stretch me as an actor. I’ve been looking forward to this research trip for months, though Hunter clearly doesn’t share the sentiment. “Are you saying that because you want to go to a resort?” I ask.

“I always want to go to a resort. But I’m saying it because you can only be perfect for so long before it starts to break you, and you’ve been…well, you’ve been perfect for a long time.”

Sighing, I open my eyes again and look at him. “I’m not perfect, Hunter. You know that.” Hunter has seen me at my worst more than anyone and knows firsthand how flawed I really am.

“I do know that,” he agrees, “but I’m starting to think I’m the only one. You’re allowed to be imperfect, Derek.”

That’s the thing, though.

I’m not allowed, and I’m not sure I ever will be.

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