She stopped abruptly when he shouted and turned around. He gestured questioningly to the door.

“Aren’t you coming, too?”

Taylor stared at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? There must be a hundred cameras out there. I’ll leave later, when everyone’s gone.”

Jason’s jaw almost hit the floor. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You don’t want to be seen with me?”

He then looked at Taylor with such disbelief she couldn’t help but smile. He was quite cute when utterly clueless.

“I have a trial in one week,” she told him. “I can’t risk being accused of trying to bias the jury pool by being seen in the media with a celebrity. The judge could throw me off the case for that.”

Then she looked at Jason pointedly. “Besides, my client is trying to beat sexual harassment charges. They need to look as morally upright as possible. It would border on malpractice for me to link them to you.”

Jason blinked and almost laughed. No offense taken.

And it was in that moment, at her refreshing disinterest in the publicity that constantly surrounded his life, that Jason felt the strangest sensation—a slightly panicky, breathless feeling, like riding on a roller coaster.

It was an odd feeling for him—something he couldn’t quite identify—but he knew one thing.

He didn’t want her to leave.

“But what about the film?” he blurted out, trying to think of something, anything, to keep her from walking away. “You said it yourself, there are problems with the script.” He looked at her pointedly as his words tumbled out in a rush. “And how about me? We didn’t cover all of my courtroom scenes—I need to be sure I look like I know what I’m doing.”

Taylor turned all the way around to face him. She took him in for a moment, then smiled.

“You will make a great attorney. Jason.”

It was the first time she said his name.

Then, just like that, she turned and sprinted off to the elevator bank. And before Jason could say anything further, she was gone.

He stood alone in the lobby, staring after her. Oblivious to the fact that the paparazzi were on the move, that they had caught sight of him and were beginning to descend with their cameras. They lined the windows and surrounded him, moving in as a pack. But Jason didn’t notice the bright, burning flashes that exploded all around him, because he had only one thought on his mind.

There was no way this was over.

JEREMY WAS ABSOLUTELY correct in calling Jason’s publicist the busiest man in show business. Marty Shepherd, cofounder of the Shepherd/Grillstein Company—the top publicity firm in Los Angeles—could not recall the last time he had slept more than four hours in a row.

Being the eyes, ears, and voice of most of the film industry’s top acting talent was no easy feat. Not that he had any problem representing directors or writers, but no one ever cared what they did. Ron Howard or M. Night Shyamalan could snort cocaine off the ass of the script girl in the middle of an on-set orgy, and that still would be less gossip-worthy than whether Jennifer Lopez wore her wedding band while eating lunch at the Polo Lounge.

For a de minimis 5 percent of all gross earnings, Marty’s responsibilities could be boiled down to one pithy mantra that every associate in his firm was expected to eat, sleep, and die by: make sure your client is someone whose fuckups are newsworthy, and fuck anyone that makes up news about your client.

It was the second half of Marty’s mantra that kept him in the office so late on this particular Friday evening. Rebecca, an associate whose only assignment was to assist Marty in the various issues that arose with one particularly challenging client, had just stopped by his office.

“We’ve gotten calls from Us Weekly, In Touch, and Star. They want to know what Jason Andrews was doing in an office building downtown,” Rebecca reported. “They claim he was with a woman, although she apparently slipped off before anyone snapped her picture.”

For a brief moment, Marty wondered how the woman—who he assumed was this Taylor Donovan person Jason insisted on working with—managed to get out of the building without being photographed. Not an easy feat when traveling with Jason Andrews.

“Tell them he was getting cash from the ATM”—Marty almost laughed at the idea himself—“and that the woman was a building employee who stopped him for an autograph.” With those instructions, Rebecca nodded and left.

And then for the next half hour, Marty sat alone in his office and contemplated just how big of a problem Taylor Donovan was going to be.

It went without saying that Jason Andrews was his top client. In fact, Jason Andrews was the top, period. The biggest name in Hollywood—a status he had held for a long, long time.

Which was precisely what worried Marty, who got paid to worry when no one else did.

God knows it wasn’t easy to get to the top. But staying there was even tougher. Jason had that rare kind of star quality that came around only once a generation: women loved him, and men wanted to be him. Rolling Stone magazine had hit the proverbial nail on the head: his quick wit and easy charm did indeed call to mind Cary Grant or Clark Gable. But there was something about Jason that was just that little bit more down to earth than the icons of the classic films. Marty had never been able to figure out exactly what that “something” was, although he secretly suspected it had something to do with the fact that Jason was from Missouri.

Unfortunately, Hollywood—like many of its inhabitants—had a wandering eye. There was nothing the town liked more than the “new face,” or discovering the next person who everyone would hail as “up-and-coming.”

And after sixteen years in the business, being an undisclosed “thirtysomething” years old, Jason Andrews was neither of those things.

Luckily, the end was nowhere in sight. Jason’s next movie, Inferno, would be released in just a few weeks and had been predicted to be the blockbuster of the summer. He would follow that tent-pole pic with the legal thriller he was about to begin filming for Paramount, a film for which Marty had high hopes of a third Oscar nomination.

In Marty’s mind, therefore, the only thing Jason needed to do was to keep doing everything exactly as he had for the past sixteen years. Which—from a publicity standpoint—meant wining and dining only the most famous of actresses, supermodels, pop stars, and the occasional billionaire heiress.

Taylor Donovan, however, was none of those things. As far as Marty was concerned, in terms of media exposure, the only thing worse than dating nobody was dating a nobody.

With Inferno about to be released, the public was ready for another full-fledged Jason Andrews romance. And Marty Shepherd—publicist to the stars and eighth most powerful person in Hollywood (once talent and studio heads were excluded)—was determined to give them one.

With these thoughts in mind, Marty picked up the copy of People magazine that Rebecca had handed him earlier that week. He flipped through “The Women of Jason Andrews!” article until he came to the last picture of Jason and the actress who’d been cast as the female lead in the legal thriller—Naomi Cross.

Marty smiled, thinking how nice Naomi looked standing next to Jason. She was an ingénue and a media darling. Even better, she was British, which meant double the UK and European exposure.

Yes, Marty mused to himself, Naomi Cross was just the answer he’d been looking for.

WAY ACROSS TOWN, in a recently purchased five-bedroom home nestled in the heart of the Hollywood Hills, someone else was looking at that very same picture of Jason Andrews and Naomi Cross.