Page 39 of He's The Reason Why

She got the feeling he’d been about to say something else. What was he hiding?

“I’m sure if you told Tamar that you damaged your vocal cords they could get someone else to sing for you. I’ll tell her for you, if that makes it easier.”

“I don’t need you to make things easier and I’m not letting someone else sing for me.” He glared up at her. “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me. I’m singing that damn song.”

“No, you’re not. That’s what I keep trying to tell you. That thing you’re doing? It’s not singing. It’s shouting, it’s talking, it’s messing around, but it’s not singing.” She threw up her hands, exasperated. “Which you’d know if you were a professional singer, which you obviously aren’t. So what, I’m just supposed to accept you doing a bad job? Why are you so determined to pretend to sing?”

“I might not be up to your standards, Princess, but that’s just tough.”

“You could back out. It’s not a big deal. Just tell Tamar and Paul that you have more important things to do. Hell, the guy before you called it quits because his dog died.”

“I’m not backing out.” He glanced to the left as if something in the distance caught his attention. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He slurped on the throat lozenge. “Because I made a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“You want to know? Fine. I’ll show you.”

He walked down the hallway to a set of double doors and flung them open.

She stepped inside what could loosely be described as an office. An arched picture window opposite the door was blocked by a classroom-sized corkboard, a round conference table took up most of the middle of the room, and a slab of wood he must use as a desk stretched across the back wall.

Two armchairs sat in the corners on the right, a large rolling whiteboard hid the left wall, and a corkboard with sections taped off labeled Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 blocked part of the window. Color-coded cards were pinned in each section with descriptions of scenes from a movie scrawled on them.

She’d seen a storyboard like that at Day Dreams Studios. They were constantly updating it to show changes or to request feedback on a new idea, but those had a sense of organization to them. She could easily see how one thing led to another, and how different scenes related to each other.

The whiteboard was covered with a riot of colored sticky notes, doodles, and arrows pointing from a headshot of one person to a picture of a bar or house or pond. It looked like a murder board in a detective show, except as far as she could see, there was no dead body. The word “Conned” had been scrawled in red at the top.

Standing in the middle of this room felt like being in the middle of a hurricane. Absolutely everything in the room was covered with papers, notes, or books.

Piper took a closer look at one of the cards on the whiteboard.Marshalland Blake recruit the team.

“Conned?” She stared at Blake, the one steady thing in a room that threatened to overwhelm her with clutter. “That’s the next movie?”

“Yep.” Blake pulled a sticky note that said Location Scout - Vegas off the whiteboard and stuck it under the name Marshall. “We start shooting in late January, which means we’re already behind.”

She shook her head as she turned a slow circle. “I don’t get it. If you had something else going on and it’s this”—she gestured at the room—“unhinged, why did you say yes toScorched?”

He leaned against the desk and looked very much like an overlord surveying his kingdom. “The studio and I made a deal. I play Jesse, they backConned.”

“So you’re being held hostage.” So much of his behavior was starting to make sense. “Scorchedreally is a speed bump for you. You don’t get what you really want until you’re done dealing with overzealous pop stars, is that it?”

He flinched. “It’s not like that.”

She gave him a hard stare until he relented.

“Not exactly like that. I wouldn’t have agreed to it if I wasn’t willing to give a hundred percent. I’m committed, okay?”

“Committed to what? Because all I’ve seen so far is someone hiding behind a good voice and attitude. You really should have told me you didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked you to use your diaphragm. I would have explained it better. I would have shown you how to get more volume without hurting yourself. I would have…dammit. This is my fault. I should have realized why you kept hamming it up like that.”

His apologetic smile somehow made him look almost shy. “You figured it out eventually.”

“After we wasted a week.” She shook her head. “And here I thought you were in a hurry.”

He snorted. “It feels like the treadmill is running so fast I can’t keep up, but that’s no excuse. You’re right. I should have said something. To be honest, I was hoping everyone would be so busy hearing you that they wouldn’t notice I wasn’t exactly keeping up. Or, if they did, they’d chalk it up to character interpretation rather than my weak singing ability.”

---