Genesis’s voice broke into my train of thought. “She totally blocked me! She took over this longstanding role and started misspelling her character’s nickname on purpose, and I corrected her to help her out because it was making people upset on this message board I belong to, and she publicly called me out and said something about people changing and reinventing themselves as they grew and having the freedom to be whoever they wanted, and then she blocked me. Then a bunch of her other followers started ganging up on me. It was not fun.”
She said it in one quick breath, and I narrowed my eyes at the actress. Genesis seemed like such a sweetheart that I couldn’t imagine anyone being mean to her for any reason.
Although sometimes I was too quick to judge. Maybe the actress got a lot of flak on Twitter and used her block button liberally. She might be really nice. I should give her the benefit of the doubt. Especially if it would help my little fledgling company to succeed.
She walked over to us, and Genesis fell silent.
“Hello. I’m Abigail Morris-Mansey.” She had a smooth, posh, upper-class British accent. She held her hand out limply, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to grab it. So I shook her fingers.
“I’m Lemon, and this is Genesis. Nice to meet you.”
“Beg your pardon? What did you say?”
Confused, I glanced over at Genesis. She looked like she wished she could just shrivel up and disappear. “I said, I’m Lemon, this is Genesis.”
“Very sorry, but I simply can’t understand a word you’re saying. You have an extremely thick accent. Excuse me.”
My accent was not that thick and I knew she’d understood me just fine. I’d lived with women long enough to know that she was playing a mind game and trying to intimidate me. Too bad for her—I didn’t intimidate easily. Abigail walked outside toward the pool, carrying a drink in one hand and smoothing down her hair with the other. A cameraman followed after her while she looked out at the horizon, as if thinking deep thoughts.
So much for her ever becoming a client.
“That’s her! That’s the girl who told production I had an eating disorder!” I heard a woman screech. I turned back to the window to see somebody in a hideous tangerine getup pointing a finger at the window, and I craned my neck to see who was coming in. The new girl had just stepped into the room when the tangerine woman stalked over to the new girl and slapped her.
I gasped, and then ran over to try and separate them. Tangerine Girl was screaming, “You were trying to get me kicked off the show, weren’t you?”
At the same time, the other woman was yelling, “You’re crazy! What is wrong with you! Get off of me!”
None of the crew stepped in to help. They stood there and filmed, saying nothing. So I yanked the tangerine girl off of the other one and pushed her back. She fell onto her butt, still yelling and screaming.
I put my fingers into my mouth and whistled loudly. The screaming finally stopped. I channeled Grandma Lemon the best I could. “Y’all need to calm down. This is not how ladies behave.”
Some more choice words were exchanged, but the other girls managed to separate the fighters into opposite corners of the room. I worried that I might have to spend the rest of the night playing referee.
And that things would only get worse once Dante joined us.
Chapter 4
I never realized how much I like surprises until I met you.
I already had a pounding headache, and it didn’t seem like it was going away anytime soon. I had spent a long time talking with Genesis, the only other halfway normal person here, and we both enjoyed the show put on by the drunken women who had gone into a tizzy when Dante entered the room.
“He sure is handsome,” Genesis sighed.
And in other news, water was wet.
I encouraged her to try to meet him, although I didn’t like her odds given the man-eating savages currently monopolizing his attention. He looked over their heads at me and gave me a “sorry” expression and I just waved. That’s what we were here for. He wasn’t there to spend time with me.
“I’m relieved he only has a bit of an accent,” Abigail said to some women off to my right. Dante and Rafe had been allowed to attend Columbia and MIT, respectively, unlike their older brother, who had only been allowed to go to university in England since he was the crown prince and all. Even then they’d only let Nico go because England’s crown prince was attending the same school, which would double the amount of security. Dante had once joked that as “the spares,” no one cared if he and Rafe came to the United States. Which meant that they had only the barest trace of an Italian accent when they spoke English.