The
stakes are high in LOVEGAME, when a movie star with a shattered past meets a
man who can either break her or make her whole. USA Today and New York Times
bestselling author, Tracy Wolff, returns with a novel full of seduction and
desire. Fans of Tiffany Reisz’ The Siren or Lauren Dane’s Laid Bare will fall
in love with Ian and Veronica, a true crime novelist and movie star, who steam
up the pages in LOVEGAME.
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True Crime novelist Ian Sharpe has spent his career writing about serial
killers for very personal reasons. For his latest exposé, he is taking on the
sadistic madman known as the Red Ribbon Strangler, and when his research leads
him to Hollywood’s most private and provocative actress, he will break every
rule to uncover her truth.
The daughter of one of Hollywood’s golden couples, chased by paparazzi
and treated as a commodity her entire life, Veronica Romero wields her sex
appeal like a weapon. She expects Ian to be as easy to control as every other
man she’s ever known. But from the beginning, he refuses to fall into line.
Mysterious and cool, challenging and just a little bit dangerous, Ian somehow
makes her feel safe—even as he digs into the deepest secrets of her life and pushes
her to the breaking point.
As raw ecstasy gives way to agonized truths, their dark obsession
exposes secrets that have been buried for far too long. Ian wants to tear down
her walls and heal the sensual woman underneath. But if Veronica’s learned
anything, it’s that the line between pleasure and pain is a narrow one—and when
caught between them the only thing that matters is how you play the game.
I take picture after picture, with a
vintage champagne glass in my hand or my face buried in a huge bouquet of
dahlias. Toward the end, Marc has the stylist and his assistant wrap me up in a
long string of artificial belladonna since the real stuff can cause problems if
it touches the skin. Then they heap my gloved hands with a mountain of the poisonous
black berries and Marc has me hold my hands out to the camera in a deadly
macabre offering.
Again and again Marc shoots me like
that, taking pictures from every possible angle. On his knees in front of me,
looking up. From a ladder above me, looking down. Beside me. Behind me. Across
the room. Up close. Again and again he points and clicks. Again and again, I
smile and pout and make every other expression he asks for. I even take his
suggestion to tilt my head back with my mouth open wide and hold one of the
berries between my thumb and index finger as I pretend to be about to drop it
in. As I do, I close my eyes and pretend not to be totally icked out.
When I open them two minutes and twenty
shots later, the first person I see is Ian. He’s leaning back against one of
the mirrored walls and for once his omnipresent notebook is nowhere to be seen.
Instead he’s staring straight at me, a half-snarl on his normally calm face and
his eyes burning with a mixture of contempt and desire.
It’s the first time I’ve seen anything
but pleasant or puzzled interest from him and it has the tiny hairs on the back
of my neck standing up. Has ice skating down my spine and a desert taking up
residence in my mouth. Because, in that moment, as our eyes lock and his turn impossibly
darker, impossibly blacker, I don’t know who he sees. Can’t tell who he wants.
Me or her?
Actress or murderer?
Sentient being or a character he helped
create?
It’s just more fuel to add to the fire
of my earlier doubts and in that one tense and electric moment, it comes to me.
What the cover shot should be.
What I need it to be.
Marc backs off a little, has his
assistant come forward with a trash bag for me to throw away the last of the
berries and the gloves I’ve been wearing. As she pauses to tie up the bag in
front of me, I ask her for a couple wipes.
She quickly returns with a box of baby
wipes and I smile my thanks even as Marc instructs me back against the mirror
for what he calls “the last series of shots.”
I do as he instructs, but as he’s fiddling
with the lighting, I turn toward the mirror and swipe the wipe over the right
half of my face.
“What are you doing?” my makeup artist
squawks as he comes racing across the room at me.
“Trust me, Dalton,” I tell him as I
continue to scrub.
“Stop doing that!” he orders as he
grabs on to the end of the wipe and actually tries to wrestle it away from me.
“Just wait,” I instruct, refusing to
let go no matter how hard he tugs.
“But—”
“What are you up to, Veronica?” Marc
asks. He sounds more intrigued than annoyed.
“I’ll show you,” I tell him, pushing
gently at Dalton’s hand until he finally lets go with a whimper.
And then, with the whole room—including
Ian—watching me intently, I wipe the entire half side of my face clean of any
and all makeup. I do it carefully, making sure that the line that runs down the
center of my face is exact so that both sides are completely symmetrical.
When I’m done, I reach up and take off
my right earring and hand it to Dalton who still looks slightly shell-shocked.
Then I step back and stare at this new reflection of myself in the mirror.
Half me at my most natural, half her at
her most armored, it’s a devastating look. Made even more so by the elaborate
fifties makeup Dalton has me in—all red lips and thick black liner and long,
long lashes.
There is a difference, I tell myself
fiercely as I study myself. I am not her. I will never be her, no matter what
it felt like four months ago.
In the background I’m aware of Marc
cursing softly, of him snapping picture after picture. I don’t turn around,
instead continuing to give him my back so that he gets both me and my
reflection in each shot.
“Turn around,” he breathes after he’s
taken at least three dozen pictures.
Reluctantly, I do as he requests, then
follow his impatient gesture for me to move away from the mirror. I step
forward and then the camera starts again, clicking away to get the shot from
this angle as well.
At that moment, Ian moves and I make
the mistake of glancing his way. Our gazes lock and heat slams through me at
the look he’s giving me, has my eyes widening and my lips parting on a gasp as
I struggle to draw air into lungs that have abruptly forgotten how to work.
“Fuck,” Marc breathes from where he’s
narrowing in on my face. “That’s it. That’s the money shot.”
I drag my eyes away from Ian, but it’s
too late. For the first time in a very, very long time, I feel vulnerable. And
I hate every second of it.
New
York Times and USA Today Bestselling author Tracy Wolff collects books, English
degrees and lipsticks and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she
is when immersed in a great novel. At six she wrote her first short
story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven she forayed into the
wonderful world of girls lit with her first Judy Blume novel. By ten she’d read
everything in the young adult and classics sections of her local bookstore, so
in desperation her mom started her on romance novels. And from the first page
of the first book, Tracy knew she’d found her life-long love. Now an English
professor at her local community college, she writes romances that run the
gamut from sweet contemporary to erotica, from paranormal to Urban Fantasy and
from young adult to new adult.
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