They gazed at each other, electricity sparking in the air. Sam leaned in, lowered his head intimately, to softly say, “I expect you’ll be surprised just how much greatness we have between us,” he said, and then he pulled back before he did something crazy and kissed her in public. Surely doing so would get him a great big smack in the face. “I’ll see you at seven.” He turned and sauntered back toward the building, feeling her eyes on him.
“Sam,” she called. “Make that seven-fifteen.”
He laughed and waved in agreement. She was letting him know nothing with her would come easily. She remained a challenge—but then anything worth having was a challenge. And Meagan was one of the most interesting, impossible-to-resist challenges he’d ever encountered.
He headed back to the offices, only to find Sabrina walking toward him, her purse and her keys in hand.
“I’ve debated telling you something,” she said, “and I don’t want it to get out.”
“I’m listening.”
“When the higher-ups green-lit Meagan’s show, they insisted on attaching a few people to it. One of them was Kiki Reynolds. You might want to keep an eye on her.”
“Could she be a real problem?”
“Could be.”
Sam nodded, grateful for the tip, and he and Sabrina parted ways.
It seemed Meagan was going to be fighting a whole lot more than her attraction to him in the next few months and Sam vowed he’d be by her side every step of the way.
4
SAM KELLAR WAS MEAGAN’S nemesis, proven once again by the fact that she was thinking about him rather than the on-camera contestant interviews she was supervising. She pressed her hands into her temples. She still wore her skirt, though she’d managed to trade her heels for flats, she hadn’t made time to change, but she seemed to have plenty of time to think about things she shouldn’t be thinking about. Sam and his too-blue eyes and his hard, tempting body.
She didn’t want to work with him, and she absolutely didn’t want to live with him for the duration of the show. That was too close for comfort. She knew darn good and well that if she had even a moment of weakness, Sam would take over her bed, and her life would follow.
She focused on the lounge area of the show’s private hotel floor, now newly converted into their interview set. The studio wanted drama, so she was working on giving them drama. She was the producer and mastermind of the show, and should have had a say in Sam’s involvement in the show. Still, they weren’t cancelled. Her dream of this program’s success, and these dancers’ dreams of exciting careers, were still alive. That was what counted.
Derek Rogers, the show’s young, hot host, was busy interviewing one of the last female dancers. They were finally about to wrap for the night, which meant Meagan would soon meet Sam for dinner.
Maybe she’d get the male dancers on set for interviews, instead of tomorrow as planned, and just skip dinner. And she really did need to squeeze in some footage of Ginger and DJ talking about the events of the night before. They were, after all, not only choreographing the contestants’ routines, but helping to supervise the contestants.
“What were you thinking when the fire alarm went off?” Derek asked Tabitha Ready, who at twenty-eight, was the oldest female dancer competing. Many of the other contestants looked up to her. She was a pretty brunette with loads of talent. She was also an absolute drama queen who was so paranoid about, well, everything, that she seemed better suited as a cast member of Scream than of a dance show. And she was making some of the girls act the same way.
In response to the question, Tabitha seemed to sink deeper in the leather chair she occupied, crossing her arms in front of her pink sweat jacket. “I just knew we were all going to die. We keep having these things happen on the set and I... Just thank God, Jensen was there.” Jensen being the male dancer who clearly had a crush on Tabitha. The public was going to eat this up.
Derek, looking every bit the handsome model even in his jeans and Stepping Up T-shirt, cast a discreet glance at Meagan that said he, too, believed, this footage was a ratings grabber.
“Jensen carried you out of the house, I understand,” Derek prodded, urging her to continue on this path of conversation.
“Oh yes!” she said. “It was horrible. We didn’t see fire, but we could smell smoke. We knew any second everything would just blow up.” She lowered her voice. “You know. We have a curse on the set.”
Meagan cringed every time the word curse came up, despite the studio’s explicit instructions to play it up. She’d planned for drama to unfold in the house with the dancers—in fact, that concept had been pitched with the show—so one would think a curse would excite Meagan as much as it did the studio, but it didn’t. A curse was something that would mess with the dancers’ heads and their performances. And ultimately, the dancing had to win the public’s hearts. But “the curse” had been given new life and new breath by the house fire, exciting the executives with the promise of ratings. Sure enough, every single dancer had brought it up in their interview. Tabitha, however, seemed determined to own the curse.
“We’re afraid of what will happen next,” she said. “None of us are going to sleep tonight. I don’t know how we’ll dance under such circumstances.”
The cameraman zoomed in on Derek’s deadpan look before he said, “Then you know what you should do?”
Meagan exchanged a “here it comes” look with Shayla White, the director, who was fast becoming a close friend. Hiring Derek, an ex-pro quarterback and sportscaster, for a dance show had been a risk, especially considering he’d lived up to his reputation for saying whatever came to mind. If Stepping Up was to succeed where other dance shows had failed, it meant they needed originality, and Derek was nothing if not that.
Derek continued, “Get a lucky charm like us athletes do. In my case, I’d get a pair of lucky briefs.”
“Briefs?” Tabitha asked, skeptically. “Eww.”
Derek grinned and held up his hands. “Hey, don’t tell me you haven’t got a pair of lucky underwear.”
It took a second but finally Tabitha, and everyone else on set burst into laughter. “Well, maybe I do,” she said, clearly giving it some serious thought.
Derek assured her, “At least five guys on my NFL team had ‘game day’ lucky boxers. They swore they’d screw up on the field without them. They believed those transformed them into men of steel, and so they did.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s all in your head. It’s what you believe.”