Page 13 of Secret Daddies

By the time I turned back to him, I noticed that he had moved the chair away from the mirror—like he didn’t want to see his reflection. I frowned as I stood with a brush in my hand, wondering what was going on.

“I don’t like to watch myself when I’m getting worked on,” he explained, clocking my confusion at once.

“Oh, sure,” I replied as I moved toward him. “Whatever works. Here, could you close your eyes?”

He did as he was told, and I slipped into my usual routine—starting with the parts of his face that needed color correction, and then working to conceal and set everything from there. The goal was to make him look as natural as possible on camera, but without showing much of the actual human flaws of his face.

Well, what they thought of as flaws, anyway. As I worked on Taylor, I couldn’t help but admire the details that I knew would soon be covered—the wrinkles around his eyes, his smile lines, the texture to his skin. I actually thought he was really handsome as he was, but I supposed that wasn’t what the superhero genrecalled for—they wanted perfection, in any way they could get it, and it was my job to deliver it on a platter.

I stepped back to grab another product from my kit, and he opened his eyes for a moment, stretching his jaw and cracking his neck.

“Long night?” I asked. I knew they had been shooting last night, doing some action scene that started off with a chase under cover of night—they had to cordon off a couple streets to make it happen, and it was cheaper to do that in the evening when fewer people would be driving around anyway.

“Longer than I’d like,” he replied, before falling silent again. He wasn’t rude, exactly, just—to the point. It was a stark change from how flirty Lee had been yesterday, and how much Devon had to say when we first ran into each other, but I was grateful for a break—if Taylor had turned out to be some charming sweet-talker too, I didn’t know what I would do.

“How did it go?” I asked him, carefully blending the powder down to his jawline. I couldn’t help but notice how defined it was, how sharp—the way that a few veins stood out on his neck just below the spot I was working on.

“Well, I hope,” he replied.

I grinned. “You don’t like the late shoots?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Better things to do with your evenings, huh?”

“Something like that.”

He managed a small smile in my direction. I could tell this small-talk thing didn’t come easy to him, which was fine by me—it wasprobably safer for me to keep my distance, given the mess I had managed to get myself into with Devon and Lee as it was already. I wondered if they talked amongst themselves, if Taylor had any idea what had been happening, or if he was oblivious to the fact that I had already messed around with two of his castmates.

I got the feeling he would judge the hell out of me if he knew. When I had been looking for stuff about Lee online, a few articles had popped up about Taylor too—or, what little there was about him out there. It seemed as though he kept his personal life as private as he could, maybe protecting someone he was in a relationship with. He’d started out as a stuntman, and he was likely used to the anonymity that came with all of that, not wanting to expose his partner to anything that they wouldn’t have had to deal with before he became one of the biggest deals in Hollywood.

I pinched my tongue between my teeth, narrowing my eyes as I came in a little closer to finish up work on a slight bruise on the corner of his jaw. He winced as I touched it with my brush, and I pulled back at once.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “Is that too painful? I can leave it and come back to it later, if you want…”

He shook his head.

“It’s fine,” he assured me. “I’ve dealt with far worse over the years, trust me.”

“That’s not exactly what I was hoping to hear,” I replied, managing a smile, but I went back in to finish what I had started. This time, he sat there stoic, not letting a single flinch show as I worked on the rest of his face.

“You must be used to getting bruises from when you were a stuntman, huh?” I remarked, and he glanced up at me, clearly a little surprised that I knew so much about him.

“How do you know about that?”

“I try to keep up with what’s going on around here,” I explained with a shrug. “Especially when it comes to who I’m going to be working on.”

His lips curled up into a smile for a moment, and he nodded.

“Yeah. I used to be a stuntman. I would do my own stunts now, but the studio gets worried about me getting hurt and having to slow down production to let me heal.”

“Hey, you can’t blame them,” I remarked. “It’s all about sticking to the schedule, right?”

“So I hear.”

He fell silent again as I finished blending his makeup, taking a step back and looking him over.

“There. I think that’s?—”

---