Unscripted Seduction - Chapter 1
The villa sprawled across the hillside like it had something to prove.
Ama Osei sat in the back of the hired SUV at the base of its sweeping stone steps and stared up at the sun-washed facade, at the broad terraces and sheets of glass and expensive, deliberate quiet, and wondered for the fiftieth time in the last twelve hours what had possessed her to say yes.
Palm shadows slid over the bonnet. Heat shimmered above pale gravel and somewhere beyond the walls, the Atlantic breathed against the shoreline with the lazy arrogance of something eternal.
She should’ve been in New York. At her mother’s side, fielding emails from a safe distance, not halfway across the world about to knock on the door of a man Ashon Biney, Hollywood director and movie producer extraordinaire—and her mother’s boss—had described, with a glint in his eye that had been almost offensively amused, as brilliant, difficult and one inconvenience away from
arson.
But two nights ago her mother had been pale with pain, her left arm immobilised from wrist to shoulder, fury crackling off her hospital bed in little electric bursts as she tried to turn injury into a scheduling inconvenience.
‘I can still manage from here.’
Ama, standing beside the bed with her own fear locked down under cool practicality, had lifted a brow. ‘With what? Telepathy?’
Renee had glared at her. ‘Don’t get smart.’
‘Then don’t ask me to pretend you haven’t been doing three people’s jobs on one spine and pure spite.’
Her mother had gone still then, her sharp gaze narrowing with a complexity Ama had no time to unpack. ‘Don’t be insolent.’
‘Great, I’ll stop as soon as you agree to be reasonable? Even Wonder Woman rests between bouts of saving the world. Let me take a turn.’
Her eyes only got narrower. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
She’d folded her arms. ‘About getting you to rest? What do you think? I work for the company. A crisis has landed and you can’t get on a plane. So yes, I’m serious.’
A beat. Another.
Then, softly enough to be more unsettling than anger, Renee had said, ‘This won’t be shadowing any more, Ama.’
She knew that well enough.
She’d spent too many years being a nepo baby, Renee Osei’s daughter, instead of a woman with good instincts, sharp enough to carry a crisis on her own name. Ashon had offered to fly in himself. His wife and co-producer Cilla too. Ama had shut that down before either could finish the sentence. If this went right, she wanted no one calling it borrowed authority.
Sure, it would be stepping way out of her comfort zone. A zone she’d carved for herself with skill, precision and determination as a Creative Development Executive.
Now here she was, in Ghana, with sweat cooling between her shoulder blades beneath a cream linen blouse that had looked immaculate an hour ago and felt like armour now.
Her phone was already in her hand.
Here goes nothing.