Page 25 of My Sexy Rival (Stars In Their Eyes 2)
His trainer has this goatee, she’d said.
Fine, a lot of guys had goatees. But a lot of guys also didn’t have goatees. Opening another browser window, I searched for shots of Nick Ballast with his trainer. They showed up immediately, and lo and fucking behold.
Nick Ballast and Jenner Davies had the same personal trainer.
A spark of excitement raced through me.
There it was. The first act. The pieces were coming together.
But then, I told myself to settle down. This didn’t prove anything. Lots of trainers had more than one celebrity client. The only way to know if there was anything more to this than mere coincidence was to go to the source.
Since Jess had mentioned the names of some of the most popular gyms in Los Angeles, I looked them up, scrolled through the photos and bios of all the personal trainers, and found him quickly.
His name was Pelly Howland.
I plugged him into Google so I could learn everything about him.
His website popped up. Not an over-the-top one, but it advertised his credentials both as a trainer and in entertainment law. He wasn’t a lawyer, but evidently he thought it important to mention in his bio that he’d earned his associate’s degree in entertainment law, and was studying now for his bachelor’s in the same subject.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
Those details told me a lot about him.
As did the fact that his cell phone number was on his page, along with his email. This guy was hungry. He wanted business. Hunger for work was something I knew well. Now I needed to know more about what made Pelly tick, so I turned to Facebook where I discovered that he was quite fond of posting photos of himself while wearing a crisp shirt and tie and sharing status updates from Hollywood Breakdown, rather than dispensing tips about drinking protein shakes after a workout.
I nodded as the picture of Pelly Howland crystallized. He was a trainer who wanted to be a player. That’s how I would hook him.
Grabbing my phone, I dialed his mobile, but it went straight to voicemail. “Hi, this is William Oliver,” I began, opting to use my first and middle name rather than last. “Heard great things about you from some of the guys at WAM,” I said, tossing out the name of the biggest talent agency. I didn’t say I worked there. I simply said I’d heard of him from there, and hoped that would be enough of a lure that Pelly would feel as if he’d made inroads in the big beast of Hollywood. “Would love to book a session.”
Then I left my number. Next, I tried the gym he worked at and requested a session with him today.
“He’s fully booked. How about next Friday at 9:30?”
“No, thanks,” I said, and hung up.
I heaved a frustrated sigh, but remained undeterred. There had to be something to the Pelly-Jenner-Nick connection, and I needed to figure it out. I’d already discovered that Pelly was social, and active on Facebook. Maybe he was a Twitter fiend, too. Quickly, I tracked him down on Twitter, scouring his feed for any clues. His first update of the day boasted about working out on the trails. His next claimed he was booked with sessions all day and so pumped for them. Fine, that was the gist of what I’d learned from the gym. Then he linked to an article about the potential casting of We’ll Always Have Paris. One more click of the mouse down his feed, and there it was—an update from twenty minutes ago saying his two p.m. session cancelled but he’d make the most of his free hour with some treadmill time.
Or with me, I reasoned, and hoped Pelly checked his messages in between sessions.
After James’s runaround this morning, I refused to let this piece of intel elude me. Determined to snag some face time with the man, I was going to have to try to find him at his gym. I pulled on workout shorts and a T-shirt and hunted around for a Bluetooth headset that had come with my phone but I never wore, seeing as I didn’t want to ever look like a douche who wore a Bluetooth except for now when I needed to harness that look. As I opened the door, my phone rang.
“William Oliver,” I said.
“Hey! Pelly Howland. I just had a cancellation. You still up for a session? Because I would love to fit you in. I’m all about client service,” he said.
“How fortuitous. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I made my way to Pelly’s gym, stopping only at a magazine stand along the way.
I parked a block away from the gym, tucked the headset over my ear, slipped the Hollywood Breakdown under my arm, and walked inside, looking the part of a young and hungry Hollywood player, too.
