EXCERPT REVEAL! Rising Star by Susannah Nix
Starstruck Book 1
Release Date: November 8, 2018
Contemporary romance lovers will for sure want to get their hands on RISING STAR by Susannah Nix, available November 8th! Be sure to check out an excerpt below!
Alice Carlisle has problems.
Her sociology Ph.D. dissertation is going nowhere, she’s about to lose the TV extra job that’s been paying her bills, and her roommate is kicking her out. She needs to find a new place to live ASAP, so she can focus on finally finishing her doctorate.
Enter Griffin, one of Hollywood’s rising stars, who offers to let her move into his guest room if she’ll dog sit for him. Four months rent free in a nice house with an adorable dog is an offer Alice can’t turn down—even if she has major qualms about her movie star roommate.
Griffin Beach has it all.
He’s gorgeous, newly jacked, and poised to make the leap from TV show regular to box office superstar. Until his dog sitter bails, leaving him desperate to find somebody he trusts to look after his precious fur baby.
Enter Alice, the extra who’s never seemed to like him but loves his dog. Griffin has his doubts about the arrangement, but living with Alice opens his eyes to how empty his workaholic lifestyle has become. The more time they spend together, the more he realizes she might be exactly what he needs in his life.
Can Alice let her guard down and learn to trust again? Can Griffin stop trying to please everyone else long enough to show her how he feels? Will they get their Hollywood happy ending? Or will their love story bomb at the box office?
His hip bumped against
Alice’s, and she shuffled aside to give him more room. They were working in
tight quarters, and part of her job was to stay out of everyone else’s way. But
as she reached for a scalpel on the tray of instruments beside her, she
misjudged how close it was and knocked the whole thing over, sending hemostats,
forceps, and scalpels flying with a deafening clatter.
“Ow!” the man dying on
the gurney cried out as he flinched away from the flying medical equipment.
“Shit. Sorry,” Alice
muttered. Good thing their scalpels weren’t actually sharp.
“Cut!”
The director ripped
off his headset and approached with a thunderous expression on his face. It was
Dean Harwell’s first time in the director’s chair on Las Vegas General, and the technical challenges of filming the
show’s complicated trauma scenes had been giving him fits all week. Dean was
moonlighting from his regular job as star of Las Vegas General’s
better-rated lead-in, and had only ever directed two episodes of his own show
before this. The producers had done him a favor letting him direct, but at this
point it was clear to everyone that they’d made a grievous mistake. The guy was
in way over his head, and had been taking it out on anyone and everyone with
the misfortune to attract his attention.
Alice’s feet weren’t
the only ones that shifted nervously as Dean stormed toward them. The other two
nurses in the scene—a background actor named Diane and a minor recurring cast
member named Abby—shrank back and hung their heads. Even Griffin Beach—who was
in his seventh season as series regular Ethan Convey and had recently blown up
the box office in the fourth installment of the blockbuster Troublemakers franchise—visibly winced. Only Alfie Crosby, a forty-year veteran of
stage and screen sitting comfortably at the top of the call sheet seemed
unfazed by the oncoming tantrum.
“Why is the dead guy
talking?” Dean demanded, red-faced under his backward Yankees cap. “And moving?”
Once upon a time,
Alice had actually thought Dean was hot, but that was before she’d had the
pleasure of working with him. Funny how much less attractive some people became
once you got to know them.
“He’s not dead yet,”
Alfie said, looking more amused than anything. “There’s another page of
dialogue before he codes.” According to The
Hollywood Reporter, Alfie was
being paid a cool half million per episode, so he could afford to be amused.
“She threw a tray of
sharp instruments at my face,” the not-dead-yet actor mumbled in his own
defense.
“Sorry,” Alice said
again. In an entire season working background, this was the first time she’d
ever ruined a take—but of course Dean didn’t know that.
“Background are supposed to be seen and not
fucking heard!” he shouted. “It’s
right there in the goddamn name: background!”
All the extras on his
own show despised him. Alice had talked to some of them in the commissary last
week, and they’d offered their condolences over Dean’s guest directing stint on
LV Gen. Now she knew why.
Dean started to take a
menacing step toward Alice, but Griffin Beach inserted himself between them.
“It was my fault,” he said, facing down Dean with a level stare. “I bumped into
her and made her knock the tray over. If you’re gonna be pissed at someone, be
pissed at me.”
Alice could have
hugged him for taking the bullet for her. Not that she ever would. There was a
strict caste system in place on set. Extras who got too familiar with the
talent would quickly find themselves out of a job and unlikely to be assigned a
new one by the casting agency.
She hid gratefully
behind Griffin’s broad shoulders and kept her mouth shut while Dean railed
about professionalism and the fact that it was only eleven a.m. on Wednesday
and they were already four hours and ten pages behind schedule. Someone might
have pointed out that they were only behind because of Dean’s inexperience and
repeated tantrums—this was his second outburst of the day and they were still
hours away from lunch—but no one did, because it would only antagonize him and
lengthen the duration of his tirade.
It was a full five
minutes before he lost steam and stalked back to the monitors.
“Thank you,” Alice
whispered to Griffin as soon as Dean was out of earshot.
Griffin gave her a
wink so devastatingly sexy she felt her knees go wobbly. So much for not paying
attention to how attractive he was.
“Don’t worry about
that apple-faced goon,” he whispered back, covering the mic tucked under his
shirt as he leaned toward her. “He’s not even qualified to be the assistant
manager at PetSmart.”
Alice swallowed,
momentarily paralyzed by the perfect storm of Griffin’s kindness and sexy
proximity, combined with her own overwhelming gratitude and embarrassment.
“Boy, what a
dickhead,” Alfie announced loudly, not caring who heard him. “Who told that
moron he could direct?”
Griffin snorted and
wandered back to his mark, leaving Alice to pull herself together and reapply
her veneer of detached professionalism.
Props came through and
reset the scene, Dean called action, and they started again from the top.
This time, Alice
managed not to throw a tray of scalpels at anyone.
Susannah Nix is the author of quirky contemporary romances about smart women and swoony men, including the Chemistry Lessons series of romcoms featuring STEM heroines and the Starstruck series of movie star romances. She lives in Texas with her husband, two ornery cats, and a flatulent pit bull.
When she’s not writing, Susannah enjoys reading, cooking, knitting, watching too much television, and getting distracted by Tumblr. She is also a powerlifter who can deadlift as much as Captain America weighs.
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