Page 52 of Mr. Fixer Upper
He slapped at his phone on the nightstand and then flopped back down on the pillow, his arm anchoring her against him again.
“Uh-uh,” Paige yawned. “You’ve gotta get out of here before someone busts in here and jumps to the wrong conclusions.”
He yawned mightily, stretching his body until she could feel his tensile strength against her. “It’d be a lot more fun if they were the right conclusions, but someone had to go and get the shit beat out of her.”
“Har. Har. Now get out of here.”
To antagonize her, he dropped a peck on her shoulder. “See you on set, princess.”
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Day five of shooting dawned bright and warm enough that Paige went with shorts instead of the jeans she’d been wearing to cover the bruises and cuts on her legs. It was going to be too hot to be vain, and she’d be able to stay on set longer if she were comfortable.
The house was transforming quickly. Slate blue siding had replaced the dingy white and a crew of masons worked to finish the brick on the expanded front porch. New dormers broke up the expanse of new roof that had been re-shingled.
The yard, on the other hand, had been destroyed by production tents and an army of people tromping over grass and plants and bore none of the signs of early summer that the neighboring lots did.
Paige called up the contractor’s schedule on her iPad and checked the landscaping timeline. They were definitely going to need an extra day for construction and filming, and she was glad she’d squeezed two in. Everyone had been staying on set much later than usual, busting their asses to help Brunelli’s crew and lending hands wherever they were needed.
There was usually a family or two that the crew really connected with, and for this season, that family was the Dufours. The handful of hours they’d all spent with Carina and Malia had cemented everyone’s resolve to do the best job possible.
Satisfied that the schedule was intact, Paige opened Facebook to check the show’s page. Cat’s blog posts were shared there as well as behind-the-scenes footage and pictures of jobs in progress.
Meeghan Traxx’s name jumped off the screen at her. She didn’t want to tap on the link, Paige told herself, but that damn index finger betrayed her and opened the article.
The article led with a splashy picture of the busty blonde in a skin-tight red dress wearing safety glasses and wielding a sledgehammer. Her bloody-murder red lipstick matched her glossy, talon-like fingernails.
Meeghan Traxx doesn’t let rumors about her boyfriend bother her. “Things with Gannon and I?” she laughs. “What’s better than perfect? He’s the kind of guy who holds my purse while I try clothes on because he doesn’t want to be too far away from me.”
Paige felt twin urges to vomit and smash the iPad over Gannon’s head. But since he would be wearing a damn hardhat to help with drywall, it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying. Compelled by righteous anger and a sick sense of masochism, she couldn’t stop herself from reading on.
Recently Traxx’s relationship with rising star Gannon King hit a public rough patch when rumors linked him to his show’s production assistant Paige St. James.
“I’m a field producer, not a production assistant,” Paige muttered to herself.
Traxx laughs off the idea that King’s eyes would wander. “Believe me. There’s nothing some star-struck coffee fetcher could do to tempt Gannon away from me. He’s incredibly loyal to me…”
Paige dumped the tablet on a work table rather than giving in to the urge to toss it over the fence into the neighbor’s koi pond. Cognizant of the microphone that suddenly seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, she kept her string of four-letter words to herself and buried herself in work.
Paige kept her head down and slogged through the morning, avoiding eye contact with Gannon and focusing on the job at hand. Drywall was a pain in the ass without filming, but throw in a camera crew, and things got even more hectic. Thankfully no viewer wanted to watch drywall be sanded so that stage of the operation usually afforded her crew a little time off.
Unfortunately, in order to get tothatstep, they needed to have the plumbing and electrical inspected, which is why an entire reality TV crew was waiting around with nothing to do while a middle-aged, bespectacled Tim Conway lookalike poked his way through two floors of chaos.
Paige paced through the Dufour’s now open living space and tried not to look at Gannon who was deep in discussion with Tim Conway Jr. Andy caught her eye and jerked his head toward the door. She followed him outside, and he handed her his phone. “They just sent me the teaser for this season,” he told her.
“The way you’re looking at me makes me think I’m not going to be happy,” Paige guessed.
Andy scratched behind his ear and moved the claw hammer someone had left on the railing out of her reach.
Oh boy.
She hit play and kept her face expressionless as clips rolled to the show’s theme song. There was Gannon looking sexy and broody, Cat mugging for the camera, then the action picked up with Cat throwing a volunteer’s axe through drywall and Flynn, Gannon’s foreman, chucking a toilet through a plate glass window. Both toilet and glass rained down in slow motion into a Dumpster.
The announcer’s voice, a favorite talent for the network, came on.
“You never know what disasters you’ll find in a renovation…”
Clips of termite damage and plumbing leaks escalated into a heated argument between Gannon and Paige. The next shot showed stone-faced Paige storming away from Gannon while he watched appreciatively. They wrapped with footage Rico had captured of the storm and Tony running toward the house with the little girl under his arm, the tent collapsing behind him. The shot went dark, and Gannon’s voice shouted her name.
