Stripped Read Online Free PDF Page B

facilities, pushing himself through a grueling distance routine, followed by an hour on the weights.
    Europe was far more accepting of slender men on the silver screen than the States, he’d discovered. If he wanted to make it in American cinema—and he sure as hell did—Declan needed to keep his muscles pumped and primed. Work after work , he mused wryly, and pushed himself into mile eight.
    It didn’t leave much time for sightseeing, but what he had seen, he’d loved. Los Angeles was sunny and warm, busy and bright, and a far cry from his perpetually overcast hometown of Dublin. But he’d only experienced sunlight on his face during brief breaks in filming during the day, when he would step the outside the gigantic, airport-apropos warehouse hangar that was Vendetta ’s soundstage and turn his face to the sky. The late-April air always felt like paradise against his made-up skin.
    When he wasn’t on set, he pored over the script for Vendetta in his hotel room, memorizing and practicing until it felt as though his eyelids were made of sandpaper. He could barely appreciate the accommodations, which, in addition to a large bed, offered living area near the windows. His head was too lost in learning the nuances—and lines—of his character, Count Vargas, to truly take in the lushness that surrounded him.  
    That said, the richness of it all was undeniable. Hollywood was a different beast than any entertainment environment he’d known, and Declan knew his fair share. His first gig had been a toothpaste advert at age seventeen, and in the twelve years that followed, he had seen most of what Europe had to offer an actor. A couple of indie flicks, a long-running television drama, and, most recently, a BBC miniseries entitled Arthur’s War had placed Declan in film festivals, press tours, and fan conferences. He’d even done a stage play in New York once.
    None of it had prepared him for L.A.  
    Everywhere he looked, he saw shiny and sparkly and metallic and new, not to mention bleached and plastic and couture and caffeinated. L.A. swirled around him, leaving him spinning in place as he tried to find a foothold in this bright, exuberant, desperate city—a foothold he needed if he wanted his career trajectory to be onward and upward.
    Oddly enough, Fiona O’Brien felt like that foothold.  
    His alarm was set to wake him at five-thirty each morning, a brutal adjustment to the difference in time zones but necessary if he wanted not to be tardy to his hair-and-makeup calls on the studio lot. Declan did not want to be late. God only knew what sort of mood his tardiness would put her in, now that she seemed to have decided they couldn’t be friends.
    And their stupid, fantastic almost-kiss was why she had decided that, but he wouldn’t take it back. Absolutely not. Glaring at the flat-screen television mounted in front of him on the gym wall, the images nothing but colorful, flighty blurs, he increased the treadmill’s speed again.  
    That almost-kiss had been eye-opening for Declan. Here was this woman who was not beautiful, but compelling , with honey-kissed skin and wide gray eyes she insisted on hiding under men’s button shirts and behind Ray-Ban glasses with navy plastic frames. This woman with her angular face and unsmiling mouth…except for when she laughed. That once, he had magically figured out the combination to unlock her lips and make her laugh.
    He barely knew her, nine days in, and he suspected she wanted it that way. The almost-kiss had shaken her, regardless of the heat he’d seen blazing in her eyes.
    Except it hadn’t been heat, not exactly. More like…a craving.
    The warmth that no longer extended to him, not since their time alone in the hair-and-makeup trailer that first day, reached out and enveloped the other members of Vendetta ’s cast and crew. There were those whom she’d obviously known for years—like Marta, the dresser—and those whom she was just meeting for the first