Page 71 of Behind the Scenes

She was an actress, so she needed to act like she knew what the hell to do as she pointed the gun at Paul.

But it wasn’t her manager who spoke first. Hunter looked at her with fear in his eyes and shook his head. “Alexis, what are you doing? Don’t do that. He’s not going to shoot me. Put the gun down, honey.”

“Lexi, watch yourself. You don’t know what you’re doing,” Paul said in that patronizing way he always did when talked to her.

Tears welled in her eyes as she screamed, “My name is Alexis! Don’t call me Lexi! I’m not a child. I’m a grown woman you were supposed to care about. I trusted you, and you tortured me with those letters! You made me afraid to even leave my house. How could you do that to me? How could you do that, Paul?”

“It wasn’t real, Lexi. It was all an act, and you performed beautifully, just like I knew you would.”

He smiled as he said that, like manipulating her was okay. She wanted to kill him for that, but her hands shook so much she couldn’t aim.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hunter move and turned to see him rush Paul. The two men crashed through an end table and fell to the ground. Alexis kept the gun pointed at her mark, but now she might shoot Hunter if she pulled the trigger. Frozen in fear, she didn’t know what to do.

And then the sound of a gunshot exploded all around her, and she watched in horror as both the man she loved and the man who had betrayed her lay in a motionless heap in front of her.

“Hunter! Hunter!” she screamed so loud her throat burned.

She dropped the gun to the floor and backed away from it in horror. Had she shot it? She didn’t know. It had all happened so fast that she couldn’t tell.

And who had been shot?

Both men lay still, so she couldn’t tell who had been hurt, or worse, who lay there dead. The door burst open, and two of Hunter’s friends rushed in to see what had happened. They didn’t say a word to her, but she wouldn’t have been able to answer if they had. She didn’t know what to say. All she knew was a feeling of sadness she’d never experienced before began to settle into her chest as the reality that at least one person she cared about may very well be dead just a few feet away from her.

And she may have been the one to blame for their death.

“Hunter, man, are you okay? Talk to me,” one of the men said frantically as the other one moved him off Paul.

And then she saw the blood and knew the truth. A large red stain on the front of Paul’s shirt told her he’d been the one shot.

Finally, she heard Hunter’s voice as he spoke for the first time. “I’m okay. Where’s Alexis?”

Unable to hold back the tears of happiness and sadness, she began to sob. Hunter ran over and took her into his arms, holding her tightly to him as she cried.

“It’s okay. You’re going to be okay, Alexis.”

“I thought you were dead. You weren’t moving.”

He tilted her head back and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “I’m okay. The gun went off when we hit the ground and I tried to get it away from him. I’m sorry, honey. He’s gone.”

Alexis looked over toward where the two men stood near the body and sobbed harder. “I thought I killed one of you, Hunter. I thought I was the one who shot the gun.”

He pulled her to him again and held her close. “No, it was an accident. You didn’t hurt anyone. You couldn’t.”

“Why did he do all of this? Why would he torment me like that for months and then come here with a gun to hurt us?”

One of the men turned toward her and Hunter as the other man walked out the front door. “I can help with those answers. Your manager was up to his neck in debt, even worse than your assistant Carla, who was helping him. I’m guessing he needed to be able to say he had the biggest star in the world so he could milk that claim for all sorts of projects.”

Hunter looked over at the man and asked, “I never gave you Paul’s name, though. What made you check into him, Gideon?”

“If you ever paid attention to anything, you’d know that her manager announced at the end of last year that he was creating his own production company. No way you can run that kind of company with just one star, so he’d need more than just Alexis. I remembered hearing about it on some TV show once, so when you gave me the list of names, I added his to it. Turns out, he was behind this whole thing, but I didn’t get the proof I wanted until I ran the prints.”

“I thought I figured it out this morning. That’s why I wanted to get Alexis away from New York for a while to see if I was right.” Hunter looked down at Alexis and frowned. “I wish I wasn’t right about him.”

“What’s going to happen now?” she asked, afraid for Hunter for the first time.

He kissed her on the forehead and hugged her to him. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“I’m sorry Xavier and I didn’t get here in time to stop this, Alexis. When Persephone came back to the house, she ordered us to get those prints ASAP, and as soon as we found out what we had, we started coming here. She didn’t know he had a gun. She thought he was a good guy.”

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