“I see this is a standoff,” Vern said politely.
“And you’re unarmed,” Mitchell said.
We stared each other down for at least a minute.
Then Vern reached for the door handle, opened the front door, and stepped aside.
“Have a lovely day shopping,” Vern said.
5
We pulled up to the studios, and Mitchell drove around looking for somewhere to park. The lot was huge, but didn’t look like much from the outside. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the windowless buildings were just storage.
I hadn’t been to the set before, but I knew that they film most of the scenes inside those buildings on sound stages. For graveyard scenes, it’s cheaper for them to shoot on the sound stages and do CGI with green screens.
They do shoot outdoors sometimes, which was why Dalton had been on a crane, high above a forest, on the day before our wedding. The curious thing about that was how they were shooting during the daytime. Drake and Connor aren’t sparkly sunshine vampires who go traipsing around in the daylight typically. Dalton had let it slip that Connor gave his character a potion.
I had been telling Mitchell all about this plot twist on the drive over, and he was fascinated.
“I’m dying here. Peaches, you need to get us some scripts.” Mitchell jiggled with excitement as he looked around for parking. “What’s the point in being married to Drake Cheshire if you don’t get to know what’s happening in the next season, or… uh… never mind. I just thought of your other benefits.” He turned and gave me an eyebrow waggle.
“Dirty boy. Get your own vampire.”
He bobbed his head from side to side. “Maybe I will.”
In front of us, a car pulled out of a parking spot, so Mitchell quickly whipped into the space.
I stepped out of the car, smoothed down my plain black dress, and then patted my wig hair.
“You look great,” Mitchell said.
“Thank you. I am Ursula, personal assistant to B-level actor. I no talk about hand-in-pants, make-happy time.”
Mitchell, who was still inside the car, opened the glove box and handed me an ID tag on a lanyard. I set my purse on the car seat and pulled the lanyard on over my head.
“These are from your photographer’s studio,” I said.
“Flip it over to the back side. Trust me, people don’t usually check. And if they do, just say you’re lost.”
“But we’re miles away. Your workplace is nowhere near here.”
“Exactly. We’re really lost.”
“And crazy,” I added.
He got out of the car and winked at me. “We may be crazy, but at least we’re fun. Come on. They’re on lunch, so it’s a good time to sneak in with the catering rush.” He locked the car, started off toward an entrance, and I trotted right after him.
We walked right through an open doorway, past two male security guards who nodded us through. Inside, there was another security guard, a tough-looking woman with rippling forearm muscles. She looked seriously scary, like a secret service agent, with her mirrored sunglasses and her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, but something about her caught my attention. She looked very familiar, even with her eyes hidden behind the mirrored sunglasses.
I hadn’t met more than a handful of people in L.A., so I turned my face down and kept walking. Then I realized that avoiding her would make me look more guilty, so I lifted my chin and looked right at her.
The female security guard frowned, and suddenly my insides didn’t feel so good. I knew why she looked so familiar.
She and I had tangled before. On my previous visit to L.A., she caught me and Mitchell napping poolside at a mansion where we didn’t belong. In our defense, our sexy male model friends had lied and said they knew the owner of the mansion, so we hadn’t snuck in and trespassed knowingly.
We had been innocent then, unlike now.
I kept walking, hoping my black wig was enough of a disguise to fool her. She let us pass through and didn’t move a muscle, except to frown harder.
Once we were well inside the building and out of range of the woman’s hearing, Mitchell said, “Sweet heavenly mercy, that was the psycho woman from the pool, wasn’t it? The one who handcuffed us with those plastic ties?”
I could hardly breathe, between the terror and relief. “We can’t go back that way again. She totally knew something was up.”
“Bless the sparkles of Luscious Hilda Mae, but that could have been a real disaster.”
He nodded for me to follow him down a hallway, so I did, hoping he knew the direction to go. There were people all around, pushing rolling carts of costumes, lugging pieces of furniture, and barking into headsets while looking irritated.
We walked past an actress I recognized as the woman who played the mother of one of the teen love interests on Vamp. We were definitely in the right place.
We kept walking, and nobody did much more than glance at us. Mitchell got bold and stopped a woman with a headset to ask where the principals were filming. “Hotel ballroom,” was her reply.
After the woman left, we jumped up and down excitedly. In unison, we both said, “I love the hotel ballroom.”
We had to stop someone else and ask them exactly where the set for the hotel ballroom was, and this guy actually pulled out a scrap sheet of paper and drew us a map.
“This is too easy,” Mitchell said once we were alone and moving down another hallway that connected to a different building.
“I know. I’m actually getting worried about my husband’s safety. He could have all sorts of stalkers getting in here and throwing themselves at him.”
“Like a sexy, voluptuous Cleopatra,” Mitchell said. “Meow. You are making me so straight today, you bad girl.”
We got to a closed door. The sign said HOTEL BALLROOM - FILMING IN SESSION.
“This is it,” Mitchell said. “Try not to look like a stalker when you see him.”
“That’ll be tough, because he’s so adorable. I’ll probably start drooling, even though I’m mad at him.”
Mitchell grinned. “I wonder if he has his shirt off.” He reached for the door, then stopped. “Wait a minute. Are you actually mad at him? You’re not going to go in there and cause a big stink, are you?”
“Me? Why does everyone think I’m the person who starts up drama?”
“Because you throw water on the paparazzi, Super Soaker.”
“Just open the door. I’m not doing this to cause drama. We’ll go in, watch them filming for a few minutes, then we’ll zip right back out again before anyone notices, and then we’ll go shopping.”