The Doctor's Damsel (Men of the Capital Book 3) by Cara Nelson Read Free Book Online

and Becca was excellent at waiting tables. It was a call for extras on a cable show. She was up for the role of a cocktail waitress at a strip club who would serve the main character and his cronies during a salacious scene between the requisite shootouts.
    It wasn’t her favorite kind of role—she tried to avoid the scantily clad roles because she wanted to be a serious actress. It was a shitty, misogynistic show designed as wish-fulfillment for egotistical assholes who paid for premium cable, but it was an exceedingly popular and award-winning shitty misogynistic show, the It guilty pleasure of the year. She unfastened one button on her dress to show the black lace edging of her bra and squared her shoulders.
    She was in the lobby of the studio sipping tea with lemon for about three minutes before a woman with a clipboard approached her.
    “You can go,” she told Becca.
    “I haven’t read yet,” Becca explained. “They have two or three more girls to see before it’s my turn.”
    “You can leave. You don’t fit the profile.”
    “Sure I do. I have it right here on my phone. Caucasian, blonde, five-foot-six or taller.”
    “Your measurements don’t fit the specifications,” the woman said, looking pointedly at Becca’s chest with derision. Upon quick survey of the other actresses, Becca realized they all had implants. Big ones. Like, Hooters would consider them to be vulgar. With a sigh, she threw away her tea and left.
    As she fed laundry into the machine and slipped in a couple of dollars, she thought about her depressing morning. She was going to have to look at roles for thirtysomething actresses soon, and that was not an inspiring thought. She was officially too old to be a promising starlet. As her clothes spun their way to cleanliness, Becca focused on the fun she planned to have—good, clean fun—with Abe later. She’d promised to take him bowling, and she could bet he’d never been cosmic bowling before. There was nothing like cold beer and a blacklight to make a man cut loose, so she couldn’t wait. She couldn’t decide if she should wear a flirty sundress or her leather shorts. The leather shorts chafed a little, but they never failed to reel in even the most commitment-phobic date.
    When she’d folded the last of her clothes and toted them out to the car, she blasted some Tom Petty and sang along. She’d always secretly thought that she was the good girl at the opening of Free Fallin’, even though she was too young and had obviously never met any member of the Wallflowers.
    She was starting to wonder if she should get out of acting, take a course in restaurant management and get a real job, find a regular guy and start having the two-point-five kids, give up the struggle to be different. The very thought of it made her want to throw up, so she went to the gym instead. After a good two hours of cardio and circuit training, she showered and headed home.
    She had a couple of hours to kill, so she pulled out the script for her upcoming movie audition and decided to run the lines. Unfortunately, the record function on her phone had quit working last week, so she’d have to do her best practicing with only the bathroom mirror. Unless—her sister did have a recording studio. She could surely figure out how to record herself running five minutes of script and then play it back to listen for rhythm and tone. She wanted to get the accent just right. Excitedly, she bounded into the studio and stood on the mattress, picking the simplest-looking microphone. She looked up sound boards online and found a diagram that helped her—it wasn’t exactly like the model Hannah had, but the basic functions had to be the same.
    Soon, she’d figured out how to record her voice and then stop the recording and play it back. After a few takes, she thought she had the opening just right and listened to it three times in a row, satisfied that she’d nailed it. This was pretty fun, having sophisticated equipment