A shirtless man suddenly appeared in the driver’s window. He sat up suddenly, indicating the seat had been fully reclined. Half a second later, next to him, a naked woman—well, naked from the waist up, anyway—appeared. Wendy’s sideways glance lasted long enough to see the woman’s wide eyes and open, stunned mouth. The naked woman dropped back, out of view, immediately.

“Oh my God,” Wendy said.

Her mother, frantic, said, “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

The shirtless man did not, however, drop back. He continued to glare.

“Shit,” Wendy said, turning her eyes forward.

“Shit!”

There was a car coming straight at her.

Wendy did the calculations in her head in a millisecond. There wasn’t time to accelerate and get in front of the self-driving car. So she hit the brakes, let the other vehicle pull ahead, then swerved back into her lane. The blasting horn of the oncoming car Dopplered past her.

Her chest pounding, Wendy aimed the car for the shoulder and slowed the car to a dead stop as the self-driving vehicle’s taillights vanished into the distance.

“Wendy? Wendy!”

Wendy took a moment to catch her breath, and then she began to laugh.

“Asshole,” Frank Silvio said, sliding back down onto the reclined seat once the other car had dropped back. He shifted onto his side so he could reach out and trace his finger along the jawline of the woman stretched out next to him. But she shivered at his touch and pulled back.

“What?” he asked.

Things had been going so well up to now. God knows he’d been as careful as he could about his behavior. If you were a movie producer in this day and age, and fucked an up-and-coming—no pun intended—starlet, you had to make the ground rules very clear. No more whipping it out. No more secret buttons under the desk to lock the office door. Christ, you had to be careful. So, when he’d met . . . hang on, what was her name again? Right, when he met Cheryl Garland, he told her right from the get-go, he was not considering casting her in anything. There was no quid pro quo, sleep-with-me-and-I’ll-make-you-a-star bullshit. Just told her, hey, I like you, you want to hang out, come see my beach house, maybe go to a party and meet Ryan Gosling?

And she’d said yeah, sure, let’s hang out.

So, none of that power dynamic bullshit, right? He wasn’t dangling an acting opportunity in front of her, and just as well, because he’d seen her in one of those NCIS things—who the fuck knew which one—and her theatrical skills weren’t worthy of a grade school Christmas pageant. She’d had, like, three lines playing a seaside restaurant waitress, parading around in a bikini, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out how she got the part.