TAMING HOLLYWOOD’S BADDEST BOY Page 8

  Dear God. What did Earl put in this thing? Rocks?

  I wobble a little on my feet but grip the straps and find my balance again.

  Luca stares back at me from his spot at the entrance of the trail. Frankly, there’s no telling how long he’s been watching.

  “What?” I ask with way more bravado than I’ve earned.

  “Are you going to be able to carry that for the entire hike?”

  His question is completely valid, because honestly, I don’t know if I am. But fuck if I’ll give him the satisfaction of admitting my struggles aloud.

  Tough-girl act engaged, I roll my eyes. “Of course.”

  He moves his gaze to my boots then, before jerking his head at my pack. “Better get your real boots out then.”

  I glance down at my jean shorts and trusty UGGs and crinkle my nose up at him. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I inquire, pointing the toe of one UGG boot toward him. “They’re UGGs. Perfect for hiking. And my favorite cowgirl boots are at the bottom of the river, so…”

  “They’re crap. You’re gonna lose fucking toes.”

  Pfft. “They’re made from sheep’s wool.”

  “Do you see any fucking sheep around? No. Because they’d freeze too.”

  “It’s seventy degrees out,” I retort. “If anything, I’m too prepared.”

  “It’s not going to stay seventy degrees, princess,” he states on a sigh. “Alaskan springs aren’t like the ones in LA. The temperature will drop at night, and it’ll drop fast. Not to mention, the ground is saturated, and your fucking socks are going to be wet before we even hit the two-mile mark. I would’ve thought you’d have learned your lesson about the conditions around here last night.”

  I frown at the reminder of my brush with death before throwing my hands up in the air. “I don’t have anything else!”

  Luca grumbles something before shrugging his backpack off his shoulders, pacing irately back toward me, and dropping the pack unceremoniously onto the dock. Zippers slide out of the way as he shoves his hand inside and pulls something from one of the pockets, and before I know it, he’s leaning down before me and wrapping what look like garbage bags around my boots.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I ask and try to step back, but he keeps one hand firmly on my calf.

  “Saving your toes from frostbite.”

  In a minute flat, he’s done, and I stare down at the disaster that now sits on my feet. My pretty fur UGGs have been transformed into ugly plastic galoshes.

  “I look ridiculous.”

  He chuckles and raises both of his brows. “You’re just now figuring this out?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re wearing booty shorts and UGGs in the Alaskan wilderness. Trash bags or not, you are the picture of absurdity.”

  “Well, ex-cuse me for not knowing I’d have to trek to hell with you,” I retort with a defiant hand to my hip. “I would’ve packed accordingly had I known I was hiking with Satan.”

  His stupid grin just grows wider, consuming his damn face. “Does that mean you’re starting to realize this was a bad idea?”

  Of course I am. But I sure as hell am not giving him the satisfaction of a yes response.

  “No,” I lie.

  “God, you’re fucking stubborn.” He groans, rolls his eyes, picks up his pack, and walks away from me, off the dock and toward the trail that lies ahead.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Now is the part of the trip where we walk,” he says mockingly over his shoulder before whistling for Bailey to follow his lead. The handsome Labrador stands at the edge of the dock, looking back and forth between Luca and me.

  Luca comes to a halt when he realizes no one is following him—not even his dog.

  “Goddamn, what now?” he asks, jaw firm.

  I huff out a breath and raise both of my hands up in the air. “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

  “My friend Lou lives thirty or so miles that way,” he says and points over his shoulder. “And since I already told you this was a hiking and camping trip, those next several miles are by foot.”

  Wait…how many miles did he say?

  “Did you mean three miles?” I ask, hoping I’m suddenly hard of hearing.

  “I said thirty because I meant thirty,” he answers. “Well, thirty-six-point-two, to be exact.”

  “We hike over thirty miles? On our feet?”

  “Yeah.” His stern expression turns to amusement, and I don’t miss the smug smile that crests his perfect lips. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Yes, I do. I very much do.

  Thirty-six fucking miles?

  That’s, like, more than a marathon. Why on earth would anyone be friends with someone they had to hike a blooming marathon to get to?

  “Billie?” Luca asks, his frosty blue eyes positively sparkling. “You think maybe you’ve bitten off more than you can chew?”

  Fucking definitely. From the moment I said his motherfucking name.

  But the reality of my situation is that my whole career depends on this.

  I have to convince Luca Weaver to do this movie. I. Have. To. Or else, Charles the Kiss-Ass will be Serena’s right-hand man, and everything I’ve worked so hard for over the past four years will just be…useless.

  I’ll be starting from scratch again. Back to the beginning in a way Switchfoot doesn’t even understand—and they wrote a dang song about it.

  Ugh.

  “You need me to take you back?”

  Get it together, Billie. Get it together, and get ready to move your feet and hike like you are the world’s hike-iest hiking hiker that’s ever fucking hiked.

  “No.”

  Unconvinced, he tilts his head to the side. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because you don’t look sure at all. You look scared out of your skull.”

  I really want to tell him to fuck off. I also want to tell him to take me back to civilization.

  But the stubborn, unrelenting part of me wins out.

  “I’m sure.” I force a smile to my face and move toward him and Bailey.

  Off the dock. Onto the mushy ground. And toward the fucking forest.

  “Let’s hike, hike, hike it up!” I feign excitement, and Luca groans.

  “God help us all.”

  Yeah, for once, I think we’re on the same page here, buddy.

  Billie

  History always repeats itself. Sometimes in the ways you don’t want it to. Sometimes, especially in the ways you don’t want it to.

  When I was a kid, around seven or eight, if memory serves, my parents took my sister and me to Disney World. It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime.

  Mickey, Minnie, roller coasters, and overpriced snacks, all coming together to make the ultimate fantasy for a little girl like me.

  But two days before we were all set to fly to Orlando, Birdie broke her foot at soccer practice. The doctor put her in this hideous purple cast, gave her crutches, and instructed my parents that she’d need to stay off her foot for the next three weeks. When you’re on your way to Disney World, three weeks is a dang eternity.

  When we made it to the land of make-believe, Birdie tried to stick with her crutches, but two hours into our first visit to the Magic Kingdom, she wouldn’t stop bitching about her armpits hurting. And it would be I, my parents deemed, who would have the honor of pushing her whiny ass around in a wheelchair.

  Our week-long Disney extravaganza transformed in a poof! to the child’s equivalent of running the New York Marathon. By the time we hit the end of the week, I was wrecked.

  Tired, cranky, and unreasonably close to pushing Birdie right out of her wheelchair on purpose. So, she couldn’t walk. Pfft. Big deal. Even babies know how to crawl.

  The point, though, is that I didn’t push Birdie out onto the hard, sweltering ground like some kind of animal, no matter how much I wanted to. I restrained myself an
d used rational judgment.

  And now, while hiking through the forest with a broody lumberjack and a thousand freaking pounds strapped to my back, I’m having to tap in to that very same kind of willpower.

  I will not give up and sacrifice my body to the animals. I will not beg Luca to turn back and then kill him upon arrival to hide the evidence of my weakness. I will prevail, and I will do it without making a single comment about “outdoor types” and their “obvious mental illness.”

  Sweat beads at my forehead and beneath my bra, and I send up a silent prayer that I remembered to pack deodorant.

  Shit. Did I even put deodorant on today? I was so busy trying to sneak out of the cabin ahead of Luca that it’s all a jumble in my mind. I know I put on underwear because my vagina isn’t currently chafing, but gosh almighty, when it comes to the BO juice, I’m drawing a complete blank.

  I’d attempt a sniff check, but my nose and lungs refuse to assist in anything other than inhaling and exhaling and panting like a dog right now. I have no idea how far we’ve hiked, but I swear to God, we’re going to finish all thirty-six miles by tonight. There’s no way we’re not.

  I look ahead and stare daggers into Luca’s back, the slave driver.

  His strides are downright nonchalant, and his arms relaxed, as he and Bailey head toward another rocky incline that has a strong possibility of being the actual death of me. My chest is already pretty tight, and I’m not sure how many more beats per minute the ticker can take. There’s no family history of heart attacks in the Harris clan, but you never know how an organ is going to react in extraordinary circumstances.

  “You okay back there?” he asks over his shoulder, but thankfully, doesn’t glance back to take in my current state. Sweat slicks small pieces of hair to my forehead, and I’m fairly certain my tongue is lolled out of my mouth like a stick figure corpse.

  “Never better!” I exclaim like I’m not one wheeze away from landing a part in a commercial about emphysema.

  Good God, how are you going to convince him to do Espionage if you can barely talk? It’s way too complicated of a conversation to have via miming.

  Whatever. I can worry about that later.

  For now, I need to focus on following Luca and Bailey up and over the rocks without making some kind of a mess. It could be blood, it could be shitting myself—anything and everything is a possibility when Fear Factor: Alaska Edition is involved.

  Grunts and groans escape my lungs without invitation—which I would totally laugh about if I could breathe—and when I get to the top of the formation and crest the peak, I find my travel companions standing down below, watching me in amusement. One of them at least—Bailey—doesn’t look like a totally smug bastard.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Luca asks again, immense amusement at my misery making his lips curve up into a smirk.

  I swallow back the urge to tell him to fuck off and force a smile to my lips. “I’m great! Having the time of my life!”

  “You look like you need a break.”

  I wave him off with one weak arm, cupping my hand into a pose of royal recognition, just to give it a little something extra. “No way. I’m good.”

  Carefully, I turn and scale down the rocks toward the two of them on shaky arms and legs.

  “You’re good?” he asks from behind me, his voice somehow mischievous. “So, you’ll be able to manage another ten miles before we call it a night?”

  “What?” I ask, whipping around so hard I almost lose my footing and fall to a treacherous fate. Resecured in my position after a mighty scramble, I try to calm my voice and ask my next question without turning around. “How many more miles today?”

  “Just ten.”

  Just. Ten.

  JUST TEN MORE MILES!

  Oh, for fuck’s sake!

  My heart starts to speed up, fueled by my anxiety, and then, suddenly, seems to start slowing down. And I can’t be sure, but I don’t think it’s doing it on purpose. Screw you, my heart says. I’m throwing in the towel.

  And hey, I get it. It’s one thing to be a hero, but it’s another thing to let your bravado take you places you can’t possibly survive. They call it Darwinism.

  “Uh…”

  Other than my loud pants as I finish climbing down from the rocky mountain, silence stretches between us. It’s only when I make it to the bottom and turn around that Luca breaks it.

  With laughter and leg-slapping and belly-grabbing, he gives an award-worthy performance imitating one of the fucking hyenas from The Lion King, and all I can do is stand there and watch him lose his shit while I try to catch my breath. I don’t have nearly enough energy to inflict the level of violence on him that’s playing out in my head.

  “I’m just screwing with you,” he finally says through wheezing gasps when enough blood has drained from my face that half the embalmer’s work is already done. “But hell, it was worth it to see that look on your face.”

  I growl.

  “We’re not doing another ten miles,” he says with a cheeky grin. “This is where we’re stopping for the night.”

  “Here? As in, right here?” I ask, looking around to find absolutely nothing but trees and forest.

  “What did you expect? A fucking Holiday Inn?”

  Expect? No. But it would have been a nice surprise.

  I make a big show of rolling my eyes, skirt around him to “survey the ground,” and lie. “I just want to make sure this is the right spot for us to…uh…pitch our tents. You know. We don’t want the ground to be too soft…or too hard…that sort of thing.” I pinch some dirt between my index and middle finger. “Yeah…okay… This should be all right, I guess.”

  Luca sighs and shakes his head as he shrugs off his backpack and begins to unpack his tent from the front pocket. Bailey busies himself with marking his territory, and I take the blessed opportunity to do absolutely nothing. My legs aren’t above staging a rebellion, and I’d rather not leave this earth being the first half-body coup as my legacy.

  “How many miles did we walk today?” I ask as Luca works, lounging back on my pack with little to no grace. My legs are open, my belly visible from the bottom of my now gross shirt, and my undetermined use of deodorant has finally given way to a rather large amount of perspiration which forms obvious circles of discoloration around the armpits of my top. Luca glances at me over his shoulder, takes in the sexiest woman he’s ever witnessed, obviously, and smirks.

  “Nine.”

  Nine…teen…right?

  “Did you say nineteen?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “Nine.”

  Just nine.

  We’ve only hiked nine fucking miles today.

  Only twenty-seven to go…

  Oh, hell’s bells, his broody ass better end up doing this movie, or else I might be tempted to kill him.

  Of course, his stupid tent is up before I even find the strength to open my bag. It’s like he went straight from being Hollywood’s Baddest Boy to Alaska’s Number One Boy Scout Recluse without even stuttering.

  I watch him discreetly as he gives Bailey some food, and I ponder how that’s possible.

  After listening to his reasons last night, I understand why he had to leave LA. But being locked away from the whole world and living off the land seems a little extreme to me. Wasn’t there some other place he could go? Like, I don’t know…Duluth? I can’t imagine people would go looking for him there, but at least there’d be a diner or something.

  But hey, what do I know? The loner lumberjack persona seems to suit him incredibly well.

  Bailey dives into his kibble, and I turn my attention to my backpack.

  It sits beside me on the dirt, and as much as I want it to, I don’t think it’s going to come to life like the furnishings in Beauty and the Beast and unpack itself.

  Ugh.

  With a huff and a grunt, I get up on my knees, unzip the main compartment, and rummage through the inside. One by one, I pull out various items and set them on
the ground in front of me. There’s plenty of it. Some of my items, but mostly it consists of all the shit Earl stuffed in there. Frankly, it’s probably all the camping gear a woman would need. But it may as well be essentials for a fucking astronaut to head into space for all I know about it.

  Besides the flashlight, batteries, a few bottles of water, food, my magazines, cell phone charger, the golden screenplay, and extra clothes, pretty much everything is unfamiliar.

  I grip a package with three tube-shaped objects in my hand and examine it.

  LifeStraw is written on the side, and the words personal water filter are scrawled across the top. What does that even mean? I know our bodies are, like, sixty percent water content, but I usually get all of my water from coffee. Could I use this to purify it?

  I grab the instruction booklet from just inside the packaging and flip through the illustrations. When I realize they’re painting a picture of a person dipping this tube thing into a lake and wrapping their lips around the top, it hits me—I’m supposed to use this thing to drink water from lakes. Or creeks. Or freaking ponds!

  I drop it to the ground like it might catch fire, and Bailey strides over and picks it up in his mouth.

  “Bailey, no,” Luca says, but the doggo can tear that package to shreds for all I care. I’m willing to do a lot of things, but drinking water from a creek that animals piss and shit in is a hard limit. Maybe when I get to the mental place where lost hikers have been willing to gnaw off their own arm, I’ll feel differently. But for now, I’ll abstain.

  Luca is determined, though, pulling it out of Bailey’s mouth and handing it back to me.

  “Uh…thanks.” I take it as politely as I can manage.

  I choose dehydration over piss water, but I have absolutely nothing to choose over putting together my tent anymore. Time’s a tickin’.

  I pull it from the back of my pack and smile. It’s cute and pink and the only damn thing I actually got to pick out. Earl was insistent about directing me on the rest of it.

  With the instructions in one hand and the pink material and support poles in the other, I seek out the best spot to begin—enough feet away from Bailey’s new favorite pissing post and the surly lumberjack’s perfectly set-up tent, but not so many that I’m the first choice for some wild animal’s dinner.