Rules of Seduction Read online

  RULES OF SEDUCTION

  Text © 2015 Jenna Mullins

  Cover photograph © Urban Dreams Photography 2015

  Author photo © Kyle Quigley

  Cover design © 2015 Michelle Taorminalle

  Interior design by McLin Publishing

  eBook files by Vook

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the permission of the publisher. To do so constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for brief passages for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]

  Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Paper Lantern Lit, LLC

  The Studio

  Brooklyn, New York

  www.paperlanternlit.com

  First e-book edition: April 2015

  ISBN 978-1-508-007647

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Present Day

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Read a Special Excerpt of ETERNAL NIGHT

  Praise for ETERNAL NIGHT

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  About the Author

  Check out all The Studio eBooks

  For Mom, my perfect fan

  Present Day

  If I lean back in my chair far enough and fall to the floor, I could knock myself out and have to go to the hospital. At the moment, this sounds like a good idea.

  But then, I run the risk of suffering amnesia and forgetting how to use my video editing software, which would—

  “Dani?”

  I immediately straighten up in my chair and look up to see a slender Asian man enter the room wearing what I can only describe as a fanny pack on steroids—an arsenal of little brushes, tubes, and small jars peek through the see-through plastic.

  “Hi, I’m Nathaniel,” he says with a smile that shows off rows of teeth so white and straight they almost look cartoonish. “I’m here to make you look beautiful.”

  Forget the blinding teeth. If this man is here to make me look less like I’ve been averaging 3.5 hours of sleep a night, I will stare at those pearly whites until my eyes burn.

  “You’re here to make me look beautiful? Good, because I’m pretty sure I look like a monster. A sleep-deprived monster.” I reach up and rub my eyes because I know I have smudged eyeliner from last night that I didn’t bother to remove before falling asleep. I drag my index finger under my eyelids to try and remove it, and I can feel how puffy the skin is under my eyes. Yikes.

  Nathaniel just giggles at my comment, and it is adorable. It’s impossible not to smile at him, even though it means showing my average teeth in front of his perfect ones.

  “Oh, you are anything but a monster,” he insists while guiding me over to a small vanity in the corner. I hop into the cushioned chair, lean back and close my eyes as Nathaniel comes at me with a contraption I believe is for my eyelashes.

  It looks like something I’ve seen in my gynecologist’s office, so I sincerely hope it’s for my eyelashes.

  “Are you ready to begin?” a new voice breaks in. I crack one eye open and see a woman with a mess of blonde curls pinned to the top of her head and a bit of red lipstick on one of her incisors. She looks very much like how my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Limon, looked right after I stood on my desk chair in the middle of math class and sang the song for the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on a dare. I got the scolding of a lifetime, and this woman has the same furrowed brow and pursed lips as good ol’ Miss Limon.

  “A few more minutes,” Nathaniel says as he attacks my face with a brush. The heat from the bulbs surrounding the vanity starts to make the air feel sticky.

  Miss Limon’s clone sighs heavily and sits on a couch near us. “I suppose you can still listen while he makes you look . . . better,” she says. She begins to drone on and on about our expectations of each other, and beads of sweat start to form over my upper lip. Every few minutes, Nathaniel has to blot my face with tissue paper. He’s about to go on his fifth blot attack, but then his phone rings and he excuses himself from the room, leaving me with a pool of perspiration.

  I reach for the bottled water on the counter in front of me and clutch the plastic container. The bottle makes a loud crinkle, and Miss Limon gives me a Look. To cut what can only be described as severe awkwardness, I quickly take a sip of the cool water, and mercifully, Miss Limon begins rifling through the papers in her lap. On those pages is everything about me that she needs to know, plus (I’m sure) some extra information that she has no business knowing.

  “Dani, you seem nervous,” she tells me without looking up from the page she’s scribbling on. I swallow my water hard so I can answer her quickly. Ouch.

  “Well, yeah. Yes. I am nervous. It’s just . . . I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m not even sure I need to do this,” I stammer.

  “This will only help you, I promise,” Miss Limon says.

  I give her a small smile as if I’m reassured, but I’m certain that my eyes, widening in terror, are screaming a different story entirely. I’m a former film student—I can light a scene seven different ways, but I’m less confident about posing under them. I don’t belong here. My eyes dart around the sparsely decorated room and focus on a suspicious stain on the maroon carpet. I try to focus on it, and not the task at hand.

  “You’re used to staying behind the camera,” she says, apparently reading my mind. “Listen, let’s practice. You went to Columbia College in Chicago, right? Majored in Television and Film Production?”

  Of course, Miss Limon knows all about me going to film school at Columbia in Chicago, where I studied directing. She probably also knows I graduated a semester early at the age of 21.

  What’s probably not in those papers is how all through high school and college, I studied way too hard and took myself way too seriously, which all felt justified when I scored a job with my dream film studio, Greener Pastures Productions, right after graduation.

  “That’s where it started,” I blurt out, but Miss Limon doesn’t seem to hear me as she begins to rummage through her bag that’s positively bursting at the seams with papers and file folders.

  Great, how am I going to do this if I can’t even hold a normal conversation with one person? I tug at the ends of my long, brown hair. I resist the urge to tuck my out-of-control waves under the worn baseball cap I carry with me everywhere.

  “Hmm? What was that, Dani?” Miss Limon finally says,
straightening and holding a pen and blank piece of paper. “Danika is your full name, correct? Do you prefer Danika or Dani?”

  “Dani, please.”

  “Okay Dani. I do want to talk about the reason you’re here—”

  “A-year-ago-I-moved-to-Los-Angeles-so-I-could-do-what-I-spent-half-my-life-working-toward,” I say in one breath, accidently interrupting her. Miss Limon puts up a hand, wincing at my rapid-fire delivery.

  “Let’s slow down,” she says, taken aback as if I just asked her to move in with me. Which I would never, by the way, because she is definitely the type of person to implement a chore wheel. I almost laugh at my own joke, as if he were here to listen to me joke about her under my breath.

  But he’s not.

  So I just clasp my hands together and start again. “Six months ago, I moved to LA and I got a job with Greener Pastures Productions, a very small production company,” I say, only slightly faster-than-normal. “Ever heard of it?”

  “No, can’t say that I have.”

  “Not surprising. They specialized in independent films—you know, full of metaphors, weird lighting, and a lot of depressing-sounding French words.” I wave my hands around, trying to express the “artsy-fartsy-ness” of Greener Pastures’s films. Miss Limon pushes her eyebrows together—I can’t tell if she’s confused, feigning interest, or both. “Anyway, I loved them.”

  “So a dream job in the City of Angels. What could possibly go wrong?” Miss Limon says wearily, like she’s heard it a million times. She starts typing something on one of her two Blackberry phones. I sense that I’m about to lose her, but for the first time that day, I feel myself start to smile.

  I’m a storyteller—I know how to do this.

  What I’m about to tell her will be unlike anything she’s ever heard before. And I am the unlikely hero. Or the unlikely villain, depending on how you look at it.

  “All it took was an hour,” I say bitterly.

  “An hour?” she says, peering up from her phones. “For what?”

  “For everything to turn to shit and fall apart.”

  Rules of Travel

  Invest in a neck pillow. Yes, you may look ridiculous wearing it, but it will be the most valuable thing on a long flight. Let people judge you; you’re comfortable!

  Dress casually enough so that you are comfortable, but not so much that you look like a homeless person who has wandered aboard off the streets. No holes in the crotch.

  Be aware of the volume of your music. If people can hear your Taylor Swift playlist over the noise of the plane, it’s too loud.

  Do not be the kind of person who stinks up the back half of the plane because you had to bring the gyros on the trip with you. Be courteous and leave strong-smelling food at the airport.

  Watch reality cooking shows and/or sitcoms. They make the time go by faster.

  For the love of God, do not watch a movie where an animal dies. You will cry and everyone will stare at you.

  Your bladder is small. Sit in an aisle seat.

  Books over magazines. Always. You’ll never pack enough magazines, but three books are more than enough.

  If you don’t want anyone to talk to you (and you never do), keep headphones in and your face in a book as soon as you sit down. Eye contact is an open invitation for other people to talk to you. Shut that down.

  Try not to scream at the people who stop to readjust bags or text on their phones the very second they get off the plane. Yes, they are holding up the plane, and yes, you want to pull their hair out strand by strand because they are being so stupid, but take a deep breath. You don’t need to get arrested.

  One year earlier . . .

  Chapter One

  I resist the urge to take a photo as my plane descends on Los Angeles International Airport. I want to capture this moment, but I also don’t want to look like a noob, so I just settle back in my seat.

  “LAX,” I whisper to myself, trying out the abbreviation I’ve heard so many times in TV shows and films. It sounds good coming out of my mouth. I wiggle in my seat, trying to get rid of my nervous energy before I embarrass myself by singing “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus, but I can’t help it—in less than twenty-four hours I will be interning for my dream director, Morris Kensington.

  Morris Kensington, a director whose films made you think. And feel. Some might call them art-house, or hipster, but I just call them intellectual and deep. His movies focus on real-life stories about real-life people. Like a girl traveling by plane to Los Angeles, clutching a copy of the first completed draft of her script, Tower, in her lap because she doesn’t trust her old laptop, which uses most of its power just to boot up. And she sure as hell isn’t checking her treasured script and risk losing it in the bowels of an airport, never to be seen again. The pieces of paper represent everything she’s been working toward since she first realized how movies could make her feel.

  Morris Kensington makes the kind of movies that I hope Tower will one day become. The ones that remind you that even though real life isn’t always as exciting as a fairy tale, at least it’s honest.

  But right now, I feel like the star of a fairy tale as the pilot announces our imminent arrival. Or at least a cheesy Lifetime movie. I can’t help it—I lean over my seatmate (ignoring his dirty look) and peek out the window.

  I smile as I peer at the smoggy expanse of Los Angeles spread out before me. This is as far away from home as I’ve ever been, as my boring Illinois childhood meant the farthest we ever traveled was to Indianapolis to visit my cousins. And that was by car. Now, not only was I all the way across the country, but the ticket that brought me on this plane is a one-way.

  I grew up in a suburb, but when the skies were clear enough, I could see the Windy City’s skyline from the window of my high school science class on the fourth floor. It was a nice, middle-class suburb where nothing exciting happened and vanilla upbringings were the norm. Pleasant, but uneventful. Until one day, when I was ten, my dad took me to a back-to-back-to-back feature of all three Indiana Jones movies. We ate Milk Duds and greasy, buttery movie popcorn for seven hours straight. We had upset stomachs and oily fingers that just never felt clean the entire next day, but I didn’t care. Going on an adventure, having an escape, feeling like I can go anywhere and be anything happens in the darkness of a movie theater, putting trust in the hands of someone else to entertain me for an entire day . . . that’s the day I fell in love with making movies.

  And now my life feels like a movie—a fairy tale down the yellow brick road to becoming a Hollywood director . . . if I can ever get off this plane. I think my leg fell asleep and will never wake up again.

  The plane finally touches down with a slight bump. After waiting an eternity on the tarmac, and another eternity at baggage claim (thank God my bags didn’t bust open mid-flight), I finally step foot in LA.

  I’m immediately introduced to LA winter: seventy-six degrees, sunny with a cool breeze. Perfect. I grab my phone and swipe to check Chicago’s mid-January weather and laugh triumphantly. Thirty-four degrees with a high chance of sleet. I look up at the sky and say a silent “thank you” to the weather overlords.

  With my bags and one squeaking wheel in tow, I make my way to the taxi line, which is about fifteen beautiful people deep. I slip on my cheap aviators that look the same as those expensive designer shades everyone hides behind (I want to blend in on a budget) and slowly make my way to the front of the line. I pass the time by people watching; they all wear the SoCal casual (so SoCasual?) uniform: either worn jeans and soft-looking T-shirts, or gauzy, flowing skirts with crop tops. In fact, they all look like it’s a Saturday and they’re running to Whole Foods. Some girl even has feather earrings tangled up in her hair. That can’t be comfortable.

  I’m only two people behind the front of the line when a tall blonde girl with giant sunglasses that cover half her face strolls right in front of me. She’s got a Starbucks cup that’s bigger than her sunglasses (and that’s saying something) in one hand
and her phone in the other. She throws her long hair over her shoulder and giggles. “Nooo!” she squeals into her phone. “He so did not say that!” The sun that catches her phone’s hot pink rhinestones nearly blinds me.

  And she has officially cut in front of me.

  “’Scuse me,” I say to her with a gentle tap on her shoulder. She whips around and I jump back, fearful that the lid of the steaming cup of coffee will pop off. She looks down at me, but continues her conversation on the phone. “Well . . . maybe I could see Jordan saying something like that . . . “

  “Um, there’s a line for the cabs,” I tell her, waving backward toward the group of people behind me. She looks over my shoulder and back at me, as if she needs time to process this simple idea of a line.

  “Whoops,” she says airily. “Sorry. I’m just soooo late so I’m just going to pop in the front real quick.” She still hasn’t taken the phone away from her ear.

  “What?” I say, genuinely confused. “You can’t do that.”

  “I’m doing it right now,” she shoots back, finally putting her phone against her chest to talk to me.

  The cab pulls up; a Prius. It’s so Los Angeles that I would have laughed if things hadn’t just turned Hunger Games on me. The Chicago Dani would have backed down and waited, but I’m now in LA. It’s time to be assertive.

  The blonde looks at me. I look at her. We look at the door.

  I sprint.

  Since I don’t have an Extremo-Ginormoussimo-Grande Starbucks latte, I have the advantage. I grab the handle and hurl myself into the backseat. The driver blinks at me in surprise, then gets out and puts my behemoth suitcases in the trunk. I hear him tell the girl that she needs to go to the back of the line.

  He’ll get a nice tip.

  “Where you goin’?” the cab driver asks.

  I glance down at my phone for the address to Greener Pastures—Morris Kensington’s production studio—even though I know it by heart by now.

  “Fifty-seven hundred Wilshire Boulevard, please,” I say, making sure to pronounce “Wilshire” correctly. I had practiced saying “Wil-SURE” not “WillSHIRE” for about two weeks before leaving Chicago. I researched and rehearsed the correct pronunciation of most popular street and landmark names. The last thing I want to do is sound like some hick tourist.