Free Cut to the Chase by Lisa Girolami

it was just the two of them. “I do.”
    “Then don’t overthink this. Maybe she just wanted to make a new friend. Maybe she likes you more than that. Either way, just chill or you’ll make yourself crazy.”
    She was right. Avalon’s star status clouded Paige’s judgment and made her hypervigilant. Whatever it was or wasn’t, she still had a job to do. And she’d done this before. Hollywood movies and celebrities weren’t new to her. This was her third book, and she was becoming a Hollywood regular herself. She couldn’t say she was in the industry exactly, but she made her money from the entertainment world and knew her way around a movie set as well as anyone.
    She wasn’t a groupie and didn’t care to make herself available because of the lure of the luminary. She just needed to remain professional and do her job. If they shared a laugh or two in the meantime, fine. Thank goodness she’d caught herself so quickly. She wouldn’t make a fool of herself by thinking she was in Avalon’s romantic sights.

Chapter Six
     
    Paige left her house at six thirty in the morning. Skipping breakfast and even coffee, she didn’t want to be late for her meeting with Bubba Densman on the set of his cowboy movie. She drove through the high desert to Lancaster, about an hour north of Los Angeles at the edge of the Antelope Valley.
    Though the town had begun as a railroad water stop in the 1800s, it now boasted a population of almost half a million people. Still, many outlying areas in the vicinity afforded film crews a dusty desert landscape on which to build a Western set with a backdrop of an uninhabited and seemingly forsaken desert.
    She spent the first couple of hours photographing Bubba and an hour with him as they sat in director’s chairs and talked about his experience in action films. He was a big clod of a guy with broad shoulders and gargantuan hands. She realized right away that he wasn’t as graceful as previous film editors had portrayed him to be. All morning, he’d bumbled about, trying to hit his camera mark and clumsily throwing his weight around as if he were fighting a colossal sack of angry turkeys. But he was gentlemanly, which Paige appreciated.
    She got a lot of great pictures of him in a saloon brawl and captured moments when he was discussing a scene with the director as well as sitting alone on a bale of hay, ostensibly contemplating the next scene.
    After she thanked him for his time and asked him if she could return to do more shooting, they parted ways. She began to head for her car but turned around to take one last look at the set. The crew was still busy preparing the next shot. Off set, she saw the back of a hulking figure heading for the craft service table. It had to be Bubba.
    Her gut told her to go back, so she got out her camera and caught up with him just as he bent over to examine a table of fairly elaborate hors d’oeuvres. Her timing was flawless as she snapped a number of completely paradoxical photos, focusing on his huge, dusty sausage-like fingers delicately picking up a petite crostini, his pinkie pointing daintily up.
    “Perfect,” she said with extreme satisfaction, then headed to her car.
     
    *
     
    Paige found parking on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Seward Street, close to where Avalon said they were shooting. Her cell phone rang as she locked her car. “Paige.”
    “Marlene.” She shook her head in annoyance. “What?”
    “I need to come get my flat screen. The one in the bedroom.”
    “That’s not your flat screen.”
    “I wanted the TV, you didn’t.”
    Marlene’s sense of entitlement was unbelievable. “I bought the TV, remember?”
    “If I hadn’t wanted it, you’d never have gotten it,” she said as her voice rose quickly. “If you hadn’t been so fucking boring in bed, and out, may I say, the TV wouldn’t be there at all.”
    “I’m hanging up now.”
    “You don’t need the TV, Paige.”
    She pressed the End button and tried to