Sleepless Beauty (Someone Else's Fairytale Book 6)

Screaming Archaeologists

"You don't owe me anything, you know that, right? Gideon?" says a feminine voice.

"I needed to come back. I need to make amends," answers a masculine voice.

The scene fades in to show the back of two people: Maria Balbaz, a woman in a cop uniform with her black hair pinned up in a bun, and Gideon Babcock, a man in a suit. Before them is an area marked off with yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze and a barren desert carpeted with clumps of dead grass and scrub beyond.

The two turn to face each other.

"Hey!" shouts a voice offscreen. "Did one of you come over here?"

"Cut!"

"We told you to stay off our dig!"

"Listen, when we say 'Quiet on the set, it needs to be quiet.'"

"Did. One. Of. You. Come. Over. Here?"

"Let's stay calm, now."

"You can't just wander wherever you want!"

*

It was just past 8 AM when Jason called. "Chloe," he said, "we've got archaeologists screaming at us. They've interrupted three takes."

"Okay," I replied.

He cracked up. "Okay? That's it? You're not surprised?"

"Um... no." I was standing in our bedroom, beside our king-size bed with an overnight bag at my feet and three outfits spread out atop the comforter. They were all t-shirts and yoga pants, not the kind of thing that warranted agonizing over, but this was how I killed time.

Besides, if I didn't consume myself with outfit choices, I'd slip into agonizing about having a live baby inside me, due to become a live baby outside of me in the next two weeks. I couldn't afford to waste stomach lining wondering whether I was ready for it. It was healthier to accept that I wasn't, and yet that was where my life was going.

As if to punctuate that thought, Baby gave me a good solid punch at the base of my ribs.

I patted my belly to calm her down. "Do you want me to come to set?" I asked, praying I didn't sound too hopeful.

Jason was working long hours as a producer and star of his own television show. I wanted to be there, near him, but was being careful about intruding. He could not afford distractions, not this week.

Last month his show had a guaranteed time slot on a major network and was slated to go into production next month. Then his costar had almost died from an aneurysm. She'd had to withdraw from the project, leaving the casting director scrambling to fill her role, and the new actress they'd found was good, but wasn't a household name. The network balked at that and hit the brakes and no other network had agreed to pick them up without first seeing a pilot. That left Jason and the other producers in a bind. They'd managed to book a crew and locations to shoot the first episode, using the original draft of the script, not the planned rewrite the writers would have done if they'd had the chance to interview me and all my former coworkers in the Albuquerque Police Department. Jason said the process felt like laying track while the train was in motion.

And he was not the kind of person who could pass along blame, even though there was no way he could have prevented an aneurysm. If anyone near him suffered, he blamed himself. He had enough projects to get by on if this one fell apart, but not everyone in the cast and crew could say the same.

Besides, he'd been so excited to have a job in Albuquerque, where he could sleep in his own bed every night and eat green chile and sopaipillas on a whim.