Unscripted Seduction - Chapter 5
Damian had spent the last three months telling himself solitude was discipline.
That the silence in this house was necessary, the endless procession of unreturned calls, emails and increasingly hostile messages from production an irritant rather than a warning. That if he shut out enough noise, the script would eventually yield the one thing that had so far eluded him.
Truth.
Instead, it’d given him a headache, a spreading contempt for everyone attached to the project, and now this woman standing in the centre of his living room as if she had every right to occupy the air in it.
Ama Osei wasn’t what he’d expected.
That was irritating in itself.
When he saw the message that production was sending her over, he’d expected someone older, for a start. Someone practised in the tedious art of smoothing egos and packaging panic in polite language. Not this woman with the cool gaze and the sharp mouth and the body he had no business noticing in cream linen and tailored lines that made his house suddenly feel less like a fortress and more like a trap of his own making.
She was beautiful in a way he deeply distrusted. Beautiful the way intelligence was beautiful when sharpened into a weapon.
And the worst of it was that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this aware of a woman. Couldn’t remember the last time desire had arrived so abruptly, so unwelcome, after days that had become weeks, then into months of working, stalling, rewriting, sleeping badly and forgetting that anything beyond this script still existed.
Then she’d looked him in the face and asked what he was afraid of.
And the truly intolerable part was that she’d landed too close to the truth.
Writer’s block.
He almost wished it were that simple.
The problem with the script wasn’t craft or structure or even the usual tedious notes from executives who thought emotional truth could be engineered with market research and a mood board.
The problem was that every time he pushed the story deeper, it stopped feeling like fiction and started feeling like excavation.
Of his self.
He resented the script for it.
Resented the project. Resented Theo for recommending him to his cousin Ashon, Ashon for betting on him, himself for saying yes in the first place, and this beautiful corporate lackey most of all for walking in here and looking at him as though she could already see the fracture lines.
‘You’ve mistaken boldness for insight,’ he said coldly.
Her neat little chin lifted, her folded arms lifting other parts that made hunger bite the corners of his jaw, then tunnel deep towards his groin. ‘And you’ve mistaken avoidance for artistry.’
Lightning flashed beyond the glass at the far end of the room, whitening the sea for a second before plunging it back into bruised blue. A beat later thunder rolled over the house, lower now, closer.
Neither of them looked away.
‘I’m not here to psychoanalyse you,’ she went on. ‘I’m here because Obibini has a production schedule, investors, department heads and a crew who need to know whether they’re working with a functioning script or an expensive fantasy.’