Chapter 1

David
Tim, Wolf, and David were sixteen hours into their seventeen-hour flight from New Zealand to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the University of Oklahoma. That was where they planned to go to school and play football.

“Could you imagine if we’d tried to do this via a commercial flight?” Tim asked.

“My luck, I would’ve had some little kid behind me, either screaming or kicking my seat the whole way,” Wolf replied.

Their original flight to New Zealand had been a nightmare. Tim and Wolf had flown out in June, nearly three months before David arrived, to help set up and start filming the last two films in the Star Academy trilogy. David had been in Europe shooting the latest James Bond offering. Without David along, they’d had to fly commercial. For the flight home, the studio had sprung for a private jet.

“I don’t think they allow rug-rats in first class,” David said with a bit of a smirk.

“Whatever,” Wolf said, not taking the bait.

David had gotten his two best friends jobs with the Star Academy production crew. The financial windfall was enough for both Tim and Wolf to decide to gray-shirt and enroll for the spring semester instead of the fall. They’d had a lot more free time than David and had been able to enjoy traveling all over Australia and New Zealand.

The copilot emerged from the cockpit.

“The tower in Norman wanted to let you know that Coach Michaels will be there to meet you. I let them know we’re still on schedule.”

“What time is it here?” Tim asked.

The copilot looked at his watch.

“It’s nineteen hours behind Auckland ... that would make it two-thirty, local time,” he said and then went back up front.

“We didn’t rate the head coach when we came for our recruiting trip. Why do you think he’s meeting us today?” Wolf asked.

David had caught that, too. One possibility was that their Heisman-winning quarterback, Hayden Walsh, had announced plans to go pro. The coach might be greeting them to jumpstart David on his quest to lead the Sooners as next year’s quarterback. David had been rated the number one recruit his senior year and had decided on Oklahoma specifically to win national championships.

But in the back of his mind, he didn’t think the head coach would be there when one of his staff could have done the job. Oh, well, he would find out soon enough.

“Before we left, I got confirmation we got a triple in Headington Hall,” Tim said.

“I got that too. Did you get yours?” Wolf asked David.

David shrugged.

“I’m not sure. Lexi handled that stuff.”

“Not that I’m complaining, but why did she go home a week early?” Tim asked.

Lexi was David’s PA and acted as his gatekeeper, sometimes to his detriment. She’d pissed off his friends more than once when she’d stopped them from ‘bothering’ him. Tim and Wolf had admitted to each other, though, that with the compressed filming schedule, David had been run ragged. He’d been lucky if he got five hours of sleep on any given evening.

It wasn’t that David was afraid to work hard. He’d put in more hours than anyone he knew of during high school to become an elite quarterback and baseball player. He was almost invariably up at the crack of dawn, hitting the pavement running when most everyone else was snug in their bed.

But the past half year had been nonstop. If Lexi hadn’t been taking care of him, David didn’t know how he would have survived. She’d made sure he was where he needed to be when he needed to be there, and she’d been tasked by David and others, including the director, with keeping all distractions away from him. That sometimes meant that his friends and family were blocked in their efforts to get ahold of him.

David grinned as he reminisced about the time when Lexi had learned that her gatekeeper duties didn’t apply to his mom. All his friends loved his mom but knew that you never crossed her. In David’s junior year, she’d actually dragged his former best friend, Alan, out of the stands by his ear when he’d defied her.

It hadn’t taken long for everyone to figure out that if they really had to talk to David, they should have his mom call. Lexi had even interrupted filming one day when she’d called. That Lexi was more afraid of David’s mom than of Chubby Feldman, the legendary action director who’d filmed the James Bond movie, said a lot about David’s mom. When Chubby had started to object, Lexi simply told him it was David’s mom. They’d been lucky Chubby found it amusing.

“We were almost done, and she’d done such a good job that I decided to reward her and let her go home early,” David explained.

Tim and Wolf looked at each other.

“I call bullshit,” Wolf said.

“He’s right. It was more than that, because you were lost without her to boss you around,” Tim agreed.

“She said she loved me,” David confessed.

They both looked as confused as he’d felt for the last week. If he’d known that might happen, he would never have gone along with Lexi’s scheme to hook up. She had made a convincing argument. Instead of him romantically linking up with another actor on set in stereotypical Hollywood fashion, she would fulfill his sexual needs.

Lexi had sold it as a way to prevent any friction on the set if things went south. She’d reminded David of what happened in the romantic comedy he’d been in, Love Letters. The two leads, Halle James and Ben Cowley, had gotten interested in each other. Halle was one of David’s best friends, and he’d warned her that Ben was also dating Isabel Alexandra, the smoking-hot actress of Baywatch fame. It turned out that he was right and that Ben had never intended to leave Isabel. The results were not good when Halle had finally realized Ben wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.

There were many other instances where such relationships had caused problems, so David had relented. It didn’t hurt that Lexi was his type: athletic with model-quality looks. He also knew that sex with her was more than satisfactory, and that was selling it short. Between the sheets, they clicked.

The final reason David had accepted was that Lexi and he had a history. When they’d first met, he’d been convinced she was the typical ‘mean girl.’ David had had numerous people who’d met her warn him to be careful. Even when David first hired Lexi, he’d been cautious.

Then she’d made it her mission to prove him wrong. They’d had a few rough patches, but all in all, she’d done an excellent job as his PA. David had come to think of Lexi as an integral part of his team. Sort of his Girl Friday, who just happened to be there for him in more ways than was probably appropriate.

When Lexi said she loved him after the last time they’d made love ... David had panicked. He was of two minds. David once had a girlfriend explain to him that if you said you loved someone within 24 hours of sex, it didn’t count. A good orgasm wasn’t much of a foundation for love, so it was possible she didn’t mean it.

There was another possibility, though, which was why he’d sent Lexi home: she really might have meant it. The honest-to-God truth was he’d never made the cognitive leap to even entertain the possibility. He’d instantly realized that if two people worked together as closely as they had, day in and day out, for seven months, feelings could develop.