Say It Sexy by Virna Depaul Read Free Book Online

her balls-to-the-wall attitude we were getting glimpses of, she hid a lot.
    She folded her hands on the table, the wooden surface holding up against the burden of her strained smile. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”
    “This is Tyler Tapia,” Lyle introduced with a wide swipe of his arm. “Our resident prodigy.”
    “Yep,” Tyler acknowledged. “That’s me.”
    Gwen, looking like she had swallowed her tongue, volleyed her attention between the director and Tyler’s bored face. “Didn’t you win an Academy Award when you were twelve?”
    “Yep.” Tyler still sat there, not looking up from his phone.
    “Wait,” Gwen said, picking up a pencil and tapping it on the table. “If Tyler has an award under his belt, why does Garrick get top billing?”
    I straightened in my chair. Her question indicated that despite trying so hard to ignore me, she was still thinking about me. Maybe she’d never stopped. Sure, it could just be annoyance that I caught her talking shit about me, but I was hoping it was more than that.
    I immediately frowned at my thoughts.
    I’d known Gwen for less than an hour. She was my co-star. Yes, I screwed around a lot, but I never screwed around with someone I was filming with, ever. There were too many hot, willing girls to shit where I worked. So why the hell should it matter whether Gwen was attracted to me or hated my damn guts?
    “I do mostly indie films,” Tyler answered in a flat-lined tone before Lyle could scrounge up an explanation. “Greater depth, deeper meaning.”
    Swallowing her envy in light of his potent indifference, Gwen sighed. “Well, Tyler, care to turn your phone off and join us in some greater, deeper team bonding? Today is the first day of work.”
    Five points for Gwen. As much as I liked Tyler in spite of his aloofness, the phone thing was getting to me. Even I made sure to turn mine to vibrate before we started.
    Tyler didn’t miss a beat, the inflections in his voice and expressions almost undetectable. “The average human brain can handle only three to four tasks at once on top of maintaining all bodily functions.”
    I rubbed the back of my neck. “Oh, boy, here we go.”
    “I can easily process twice that much. So not only can I walk, talk, and chew gum, Gwendolyn, I can also write blogs, read articles, and solve three Sudoku puzzles in the time it takes you to do your makeup.”
    “It only takes me fifteen minutes to do my makeup,” Gwen said.
    “Well, then, I rest my case, don’t I?” Raising his eyes, he leveled Gwen with a stare that could have stopped an oncoming train. “The phone stays on.” With that, he resumed his mad thumbing across the screen.
    “I don’t know about you all, but I’m impressed.” Shane glanced around, suppressing a chuckle.
    I turned to Gwen, wanting to get her to relax. To stop worrying so much and just enjoy getting to know her co-stars. “Tyler gets cranky when he’s bored,” I said. “You’ll learn to love him.”
    “That seems unlikely,” she said flatly, turning to Lyle to bring some sense of order to this melee. Tyler looked at me briefly and rolled his eyes. I could tell he thought Gwen was an uptight bitch. I’d tend to agree with him if it wasn’t for the way her face had paled and the near-desperate look that had come over her since the meeting had begun. In truth, she looked a little like she wanted to hurl, and she was biting her lip punishingly, the way girls sometimes did when they wanted to stop themselves from speaking…or crying.
    Interesting.
    Lyle offered Gwen an ignorant smile. “This is going splendid, don’t you think?”
    I suppressed a smile when Gwen tapped the pencil a little harder to drive her point home, unable to help admiring her tenacity. “So we have an action hero, a know-it-all brainiac with a phone for a limb, and a third unestablished person, no offense Shane, who has absolutely no experience whatsoever…”
    “No acting experience,” Shane cleared up for