Page 33 of Let’s Make a Scene

“I understand,” I say instead, and I mean it. Because I can feel my heart beating harder, because I hear the truth in what she said. She really believes that I can do this, and after being so ruthlessly pummeled by self-doubt for the last few weeks, it’s a lifeline, a hand reaching down and offering to help me to my feet.

I know, somewhere deep inside me, that she’s right, that not only can I do this job, but that I can do it brilliantly. If she’d been kind and gentle and told me I only needed to do my best, it would have flattened me, but this—this demand that I reach my potential—has me practically levitating off the ground. Maybe it’s madness, maybe it’s ego, maybe it’s just what a person has to have to be able to make something like this happen at all—but my outrageous self-belief is what has got me this far, and I feel it settle around me now.

“Good.” Jasmine nods. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions or to make suggestions.” For a moment the stern facade drops away, for just a second her mouth curves, and I see a glimmer in her eye that makes her look like Logan. “Let them underestimate us. We’ll have the last laugh.”

“You’ve got it, boss,” I agree. I think I would lie down in traffic for her if she asked.

She only nods once more, the cool expression falling back into place as she lets herself out the door, passing Hannah on her way.

“There you are,” Hannah says, bouncing up the steps into the trailer. “Are you ready to get into costume?”

I stand, grin at her. For the first time I’m not faking it when I pull my shoulders back, lift my chin and say, “Absolutely.”

BY THE TIME I AM laced into my corset and buttoned into a gown of creamy silk trimmed with green ribbon and delicately embroidered with trailing green vines, I feel ready. Of course there are still nerves there, but they simmer, a low, gentle heat underneath the roiling thrill of excitement. I look in the mirror and all I see is Emilia.

Hannah must sense my mood because she doesn’t try to talk to me as we pick our way over toward the cameras.

“Okay!” Logan says, clapping his hands together when he sees us approaching. “Here we go!” His smile is wide, but there’s a tightness around his eyes. His sister might believe in me, but Logan’s definitely not sure I can do this.

Jasmine lurks behind him, swathed in black and looking grimly like she’s about to attend a funeral. It is strangely reassuring.

The gray clouds have drifted away, and the sky is mostly clear now, though Marion is staring up at it, deep in conversation with Mark, the head of cinematography. Logan’s sheep have been dotted artistically around in the background, and between them and the rolling green landscape intersected by low dry-stone walls, the scene is bucolic.

Waiting up at the top of the gentle slope, under a handsome oak tree, is Jack. Dressed in breeches, dark riding boots, and a navy jacket that appears to have been molded to the muscular lines of his upper body, he looks every inch the romantic Regency fantasy. As I walk toward him, I notice he has his eyes closed, just as he did that first day at the read-through, and when he opens them, they catch on me and flash, full of an electric blue heat.

In that moment I’m not sure if the zing I experience is between Cynthie and Jack or Emilia and Edward, but I know that it will help with the scene, and instead of tamping the feeling down, I let heat unfurl inside me. I allow my mouth to curve: a smile and an invitation, and Jack’s whole body goes utterly still, wariness creeping into his gaze.

“Last looks,” Logan yells, and Liam rushes forward from behind the huddle of the cameras, pulling brushes from his belt as he dabs first at Jack’s face and then at mine.

The people around us fall back. Logan and Jasmine are positioned behind their monitor. The camera operators close in, a boom mic hovers in my peripheral vision, and I take a breath, narrowing my focus so that I don’t see them, don’t hear them. All I see is Jack, and I’m so focused on him, I’m convinced that I can hear his heartbeat, thrumming in time with my own.

“First positions,” Marion calls, and I move to the agreed-upon spot.

“Roll sound,” Logan’s voice comes, and then there is the quick patter that I know signals the start of filming.

“Sound speed!”

“Roll camera.”

“Camera rolling.”

A young woman steps forward with a slate. “Scene seventeen, take one.” She claps the slate shut, and I feel the thrill you get when the roller coaster is climbing, climbing, climbing.

“Set,” one of the camera operators says.

The moment teeters on a knife’s edge—the split second before free fall. My eyes close.

“Action,” Logan shouts, and if I were Cynthie, I might wonder why Jasmine hasn’t said anything at all yet, but I’m not Cynthie anymore. My eyes snap open, and I say my first line.

“It has been quite the social season.”

“And you and my brother have made a stir.”

I tilt my head, considering the man beside me. He holds himself stiffly, emotions in check.

“Do you think so?” I ask, lightly. “I wonder how such information reached you, when it seems you’ve been avoiding society altogether.”

Edward’s jaw tightens, and my heart leaps. He thinks he’s hiding his feelings, but they’re easy enough to find if you choose to look for them.