RELEASE BLITZ! Rising Star by Susannah Nix
Release Date: November 8, 2018
Hey contemporary romance lovers! RISING STAR by Susannah Nix releases is available NOW - make sure to pick this one up today!
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✦Amazon https://amzn.to/2OsMLFL
✦Apple Books https://apple.co/2OHEIWz
✦B&N http://bit.ly/2D6Lq5H
✦Google Play http://bit.ly/2D4jzU1
✦Kobo http://bit.ly/2D7Mp5N
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?
~ EXCERPT ~
The hot doctor beside Alice—better known to television
audiences as the adorably charming Dr. Ethan Convey—bent over to check the
patient’s chest drainage unit. “Chest tube output is twelve-hundred cc’s. Prep
for thoracotomy.”
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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