Excerpt
Because they spent most of
the day at the studios, it meant they had to spend the next few days digging
in. And to Cassidy's amazement it was going pretty darn well, all things
considered.
Will's guided tour had indeed
given her an extra dimension of insight to the logistics of each scene they came
up with, and even though she knew he hadn't intended it – it had also got her
creative juices flowing. When they started getting words down on paper she felt
like she was getting a part of herself back again. It was exhilarating, boosted
her self-confidence no end. Heck, she was even starting to have fun.
It was the reason she would
cite later for not having seen the danger coming her way before it arrived.
Because if she'd been paying more attention...
When they couldn't agree on
what happened at the end of an action scene Will came up with the idea they read
the lines aloud. Nothing unusual about that she had thought at the time. It
wasn't anything new after all. When they had worked on the first of Nick
Fortune's adventures they often acted out a scene before they'd even put words
down and sometimes they became so absorbed in the roles they were playing that
it added a dimension to the fictional characters they might never have thought
of otherwise. But back then they'd had a very different relationship. It never
occurred to Cassidy to take that into consideration when they got to their feet
with their matching sheets of script in hand, hot from the printer.
Nick and Rachel had gotten
themselves into trouble and had been arguing about whose fault it was they were
in the mess they were. They were minutes away from being tossed off the edge of
a cliff by armed terrorists...
“I suppose you're going to kill
us now? That's what you asked them. Why didn't you just offer to shoot us
too?” Said Will as Nick.
“Oooohhh,” Laughed Cassidy as
Rachel, “Believe me if I had a gun right now I'd be more than happy to shoot
you!”
She grinned when Will changed
his voice to read one of the terrorists’ lines, “Would you two shut the hell up?
You’ve got about five minutes to make your peace.”
He threw her an all too brief
smile before jerking his chin at her to indicate it was her line. So Cassidy
lifted her sheet and tried to find where they were, “Just make sure he
goes first. He's the one that got us into this mess.”
“Me?! I'm not the one
who screamed and gave away our position!”
“That spider was the size of
Moby Dick!” Cassidy couldn't help but laugh again at the line. She loved
that line. It was her line; she'd thought of it. She was back! What had
made her think she couldn't do this again?
Will became Will again, “Which
brings us to the part under debate...”
The original idea had been to
have Nick and Rachel fight their way out of the situation by distracting the
terrorists with increased arguing. Cassidy had wanted it to be Rachel's idea;
funnily enough Will wanted it to be Nick's. Will suggested Nick winked at Rachel
to let her know what he was doing. Cassidy said Rachel was too mad at him to
play along with anything he came up with.
Suddenly Will looked at her
with a gaze that made her heart jump out of rhythm.
“What?” She asked a little
breathlessly.
“I have an idea.” He stepped
closer, “Play along.”
Cassidy turned her head and
eyed him with suspicion, “What are you doing?”
“They get to the edge of the
cliff. They're still arguing. Guns to their backs.”
“Uh-huh.... and then...?”
Something dangerous shimmered
across Will's eyes as he closed the gap between them, his deep voice lowering to
a husky edged rumble; “Then just before they're pushed over the edge... Nick
asks for the last request of a dying man...”
“And that request would be...?”
Will smiled that smile
and knocked her on her ear again, “He asks to kiss Rachel.”
Cassidy's eyes widened, “He
what?”
“Just for the record; her face
looks exactly like yours does right now...”
It wasn't the fact somewhere in
the foggy haze of her completely distracted brain Cassidy didn't think it would
ramp up the scene to a new level that made her heart thunder loudly in her ears
and her body temperature rise. Hell no. It was the fact that Will was staring
down at her with a darkening gaze.
He wasn’t seriously going to -?
Thick dark lashes lowered
slowly as he took the last step to bring his body within inches of hers, and as
she swayed a little on her feet, he angled his head; his gaze lowering to focus
on her mouth. Oh God. He was. But why? He couldn't -
Cassidy's lips reached for his
of their own volition when he was less than an inch away; like a flower lifting
towards the sun. His mouth was full and firm and hotter than she remembered from
the hundreds of times she'd kissed him before but no less familiar. When his
large hands framed her face, she took a deep breath through her nose. When he
leaned into her she exhaled against his lips, her heavy eyelids closing…
If anyone had told her a month
ago that sometime in the very near future Will Ryan would be kissing her again
and she would be feeling it in every cell in her body, she’d have laughed out
loud at the ridiculousness of the notion. But he was and she did.
It was surreal. And at the same
time, it was like coming home.
Long fingers slid down her
cheeks, around her neck and into her hair; the taste of him on her lips and the
heady scent of clean laundry and pure Will surrounding her. Cassidy forgot about
the script, about the fact they were playing the part of Nick and Rachel, about
the danger in what they were doing. She forgot all those things.
Instead she dropped her sheet
of paper and reached for handfuls of the shirt above his lean waist while he
slipped a hand up to cradle the back of her head, fingers threading into her
hair as Cassidy drowned in the sensations flooding her body.
She'd missed kissing him.
Lord how she'd missed it. It was as if her body had been asleep like Snow
White’s and only now, with the right man, was she being kissed back into life.
But then no-one had ever kissed her like Will kissed her. He could make the
world tilt on it’s axis beneath her feet. Always. From the very first
time he’d kissed her. When he’d caught her similarly off-guard as they’d walked
over the O’Connell Street Bridge in Dublin after taking photographs of possible
locations for a short film they were working on for class. With no warning he
had taken her hand, tugged her to him and kissed her. ‘Because he had to’
he had told her afterwards. As if it was as vital to him as breathing or
drinking water or any of the other things a person had to do to survive…
When he slowly drew his lips
from hers, her mouth followed him back for the inch she'd closed, her eyes
opening wide and searching his with a combination of wonder and fear. But after
a brief moment of studying her with a dark unreadable gaze, Will rested his
cheek against hers; whispering into her ear in a husky voice,
“Then Nick says 'you take
the one on the left'."
Cassidy's heart plummeted to
the soles of her feet.
Then Will released her and
stepped back, turning abruptly and informing her in a flat, business-like voice,
“That works better. So we'll add that in and jump straight to the fight and the
chase scene...”
“Right,” Cassidy nodded dumbly
while she tried to get her breathing under control. The script. Nick and Rachel.
Not Will and Cassidy. That's what the kiss was about. He hadn't kissed her
because he'd wanted to. He'd just forgotten they didn't have the same
relationship they'd had when they would have played out similar Nick and Rachel
scenes before – apparently.
Bending down to retrieve the
sheets of paper on the floor she took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks as
she exhaled. She could only pray he wasn't planning on acting out the love scene
they had planned for Act Three...
Because she didn’t think she
could survive Will Ryan breaking her heart twice in one lifetime. Hell, she
wasn’t entirely sure she’ got over it the first time.
Back to books
Text Copyright © 2011 by
Trish Wylie Cover Art Copyright © 2011
by Harlequin Enterprises LimitedPermission to reproduce text granted by Harlequin Books S.A. Cover art used
by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. ® and ™
are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated
companies, used under license.
Behind The Scenes
His L.A. Cinderella
is a result of my
travels in the summer of 2008. With the RWA's National Conference held in
San Francisco, it was the ideal opportunity for me to explore some of the west coast of
America. And eventually that brought me to Los Angeles, home of Hollywood and
movie studios; the place where magic is made onscreen. Put this visit together
with the seedling of an idea I had for a story, my love of movies and all the reading I'd been
doing about script-writing and this one was pretty much inevitable!
Initial idea? A pair of
screen-writers. (From all the reading up I'd been doing on how screen-writing
overlaps with book writing this was kind of a given). Then it became a pair of screen-writer's working on a
script that was part three of a trilogy they'd
been
contracted to do. (From my love of movies like Indiana Jones, National Treasure
and Fool's Gold we had an adventurer type movie). And then began the 'What If?' process...
What if these two used to be a
couple? What if they had shared the dream of making it big? What if their big
break went sour when the second movie flopped? What if one of them left to
continue working towards the dream while the other one stayed behind? Now what if, years later, the film that flopped proved a long term
hit and the studio wanted the third script? What if being locked in a room together working on the script
was twice as hard for my hero and heroine because the fictional characters in their films
were reflections of themselves and the relations
hip
they had?
With the answers to all those questions I had a story I named
He Said, She Said.
And honestly? There's probably
more of my sense of humour in this book than I've ever let loose before. Well,
not on the printed page anyway. Yes, there's a little Hollywood fantasy in there
but I learned and saw a lot when I was in Los Angeles; despite the most rotten of
rotten colds I picked up between San Diego, San Francisco and L.A. - so Cass, my
heroine, has a lot of my personal experiences. She just happens to have them
with the lovely Will thrown in. Lucky girl!
Location, Location,
Location
Welcome
to Hollywood!
Like millions of people on the planet I've always
been fascinated by the city where dreams are made. I love movies - have done
since I had my very first cinematic experience in a tiny little movie theatre in
the West of Ireland. I'll never, ever forget it. It was one of those theatres
that hadn't changed much since movies first arrived. It had plush red velvet
seats and double seats in the back rows, that as
a child I didn't understand... I was eight or nine... and we saw
Lady And The Tramp. My first ever 'romance'. And I was transfixed. Even now - x number of years
later - one of my greatest weaknesses is the purchase
of DVD's. I have a massive collection! And I always buy limited edition versions
and double discs so I can see all the behind the scenes info and storyboards and
interviews with writers and directors and...
Well, I was very excited about going to Los Angeles
for the first time!
I wish I could tell you it was all I expected. Parts
of it were. Other parts? Not so much. All grist to the writer's mill, isn't it? A
great many of my experiences became my heroine's as a result - I just wish I
could have had the experiences she had with Malibu and a red carpet film
premiere, to say nothing of the romance!
Anyhoo, one of the highlights of my trip, and the reason
for the dedication inside this book, was when a very good friend back home hooked
my up with a friend
of hers who works at Warner Brothers Studios. I'm so very, very glad she did,
because it was one of the absolute best days of my trip. My name was left at the
gates, I was picked up in one of those little electric cart thingies by one of
the nicest girls I've ever met and she promptly put me on a VIP tour behind the
scenes. My friends, it was amazing! And I would highly
recommend it to anyone who goes to L.A. Hence
why we get a behind the scenes at the studios scene in the book with Cass and
Will...
Now, since I'm all for a little fantasizing
in my books too, I went
to town and gave
my hero a house on the beach in Malibu. One look at pictures of the
sunsets, the crashing waves, the decks that seem to float above the water and I
was sold! I've always had a thing about the sea. And since my trip was my very
first glimpse of the Pacific, it seemed only fair it make it into the story. I
gave my hero Will the house I'd have if I was him, and naturally because Cass
had so much of my personal experiences, I let her fall in love with it the same
way I would have.
But then that's the beauty of being a writer, isn't
it? I took the parts of my trip I loved most, some of my fantasies about
Hollywood, threw in a few of my own emotions and experiences and then I got to
wrap it all up in a happily ever after. The experiences that led to this book
weren't all easy ones, the writing process wasn't easy either because I was
experiencing a really bad case of writer's block in the latter part of 2008, but
in the end I LOVE this book. I just hope readers will feel the same way...
Background Music
For
His LA Cinderella I had another 'soundtrack' I put
together on my laptop with
songs that evoked a sense of the emotions and 'place' of this book. So there was
more than one song and yes, some of them were beach-type songs that mentioned
the word California a lot... But
if I had to choose one then the song I ended up playing on repeat the most this
time was from my heroine Cassidy's point of view. And was from the Carrie
Underwood album Some Hearts.
'I Just Can't Live A Lie' is a song that really captures how Cass feels
about Will - the guy she's never fallen out of love with. You've only to look at the lyrics to see what I mean:
"Oh,
I know I could say we're through. And tell myself I'm over you. But even if I
made a vow. A promise not to miss you now. And try to hide the truth inside. I'd
fail cause I, I just can't live a lie...
Could I forget the look that tells me that you want me? And all the reasons that
make loving you so easy. The kiss that always makes it hard to breathe. The way
you know just what I mean. No I can't live without..."
You can order a copy of the album
here
*All Photographs are used to
give a visible representation of the Authors 'view' and are in no way
representative of the people or places in real life beyond the realms of the
Authors imagination.
Reviews
HIS L.A. CINDERELLA (4.5)
by Trish Wylie: Former screenwriting partners -- and lovers -- Will Ryan and
Cassidy Malone are reunited when the studio exercises an option on a prior
contract. Working together again is a challenge, because the spark between them
remains. But so does pain from their breakup. Cassidy can't forget that Will
left, and he can't quite forgive her for not leaving Ireland for the States with
him. They vow to keep things strictly business -- but adhering to that bargain
isn't easy at all! A unique premise, lots of sizzle and a generous helping of
wit keep you turning pages, but what's truly memorable about Wylie's novel are
the characters and their complex emotions.
Catherine Witmer -
Romantic Times
