A Taste of Ice Read Online Free PDF

was still a nobody. With his help, that would soon change. And
then
she’d be worthy.
    Out on Waterleaf, he flipped up the collar of his cashmere coat and tugged on his stiff, leather gloves. His gaze skated over the papered windows and the chalkboard sign with Cat’s name scrawled on it. He shivered, but it had nothing to do with the cold.
    Cat’s opening was going to fucking
kill
.
    Suggesting to Helen to schedule the gallery event in the middle of the festival, at the peak of the Hollywood presence and the greatest saturation of money and power, was brilliant on his part. Aside from the fact that he’d contracted with Helen to take a finder’s fee from sales, really what he was selling was Cat.
    The L.A. elite spent their lives grasping for whatever was “the latest.” They worshipped new faces. They obsessed over beauty. They loved whatever someone else told them to love, whatever someone better than them deemed important or rare or special. Michael was a prime example of this, and he knew it.
Thank you, Raymond Ebrecht, for passing on the torch
.
    Michael was merely doing his duty by telling the rest of the elite to love Cat’s art. He was nothing, if not a trendsetter.
    He was nothing, if not a man obsessed with the one womanwho didn’t give a shit about his money or his job. The one woman who wasn’t
quite
good enough for him.
    His phone rang. With a grunt he pulled off a glove with his teeth. No wonder the industry was based in L.A. If everyone had to jump through these goddamn hoops all the time to get to their phones, the number of tantrums would increase exponentially.
    “Yeah.”
    “Tell me you’re on your way.” Grant, his office assistant.
    “I’m on my way.”
    Grant’s voice lowered. “I have Tom Bridger in my eyesight and he’s talking to some random. Get over here and you’ll catch him before the main title.”
    Bridger seeing Michael at the theater
before
the screening went a hell of a lot further than Michael approaching the director right after. That meant Michael was about to actually sit through the film and hadn’t just popped in during the denouement. Bridger needed to know Michael’s pursuit of him was deadly serious.
    The project for which Michael wanted the young, up-and-coming director was going to be a game changer. But Michael had to slow play him. Bridger was one of those annoying types who were into film for the “art” and publicly decried anything to do with Big Hollywood. So far, Bridger had barely acknowledged the calls from Michael’s production company. Michael’s number-one business goal while in White Clover Creek? Change Bridger’s mind. And he was exactly the kind of guy who’d love Cat, with her aw-shucks likability and raw talent. He’d introduce them as soon as possible and let Cat’s good vibes rub off on Bridger. Everything was coming together so nicely. With Bridger in the director’s chair, the thing would sweep the Oscars.
    The world assumed that winning more Oscars than the record-setting Raymond Ebrecht was every Hollywood producer’s dream. Not for Michael. His goal was much more personal.
    “You there?” Grant’s tinny voice came through the phone.
    “Be there in five.”
    At the bottom of the Waterleaf hill, a respectable crowd gathered outside the Gold Rush for Bridger’s opus oneighteenth-century French prostitutes, shot with one camera and a max on Bridger’s credit cards. A light snow started to fall and Michael had to slow his steps so his loafers wouldn’t send his ass rolling down the sidewalk to the red carpet below.
    His phone buzzed. A text this time.
    “Jesus, Grant,” he mumbled, “I’m almost there.”
    But it wasn’t from Grant. It was Sean, his
other
assistant.
    Need you up at the house. Now.
    Problem? Michael texted back.
    A surprise from Lea. Get up here.
    Oh, God. She’d brought him another one.
    Michael snapped his phone shut, adrenaline hurtling through his body. Growing up he’d never had the joyful