Making Up Read online

  Making Up

  By Lucy Parker

  Author of Act Like It and Pretty Face Lucy Parker returns readers to the West End, where it’s fireworks onstage and off in a sexy enemies-to-lovers showdown.

  Once upon a time, circus artist Trix Lane was the best around. Her spark vanished with her confidence, though, and reclaiming either has proved...difficult. So when the star of The Festival of Masks is nixed and Trix is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight, it’s exactly the push she needs. But the joy over her sudden elevation in status is cut short by a new hire on the makeup team.

  Leo Magasiva: disgraced wizard of special effects. He of the beautiful voice and impressive beard. Complete dickhead and—in an unexpected twist—an enragingly good kisser.

  To Leo, something about Trix is...different. Lovely. Beautiful, even though the pint-size, pink-haired former bane of his existence still spends most of her waking hours working to annoy him. They’ve barely been able to spend two minutes together for years, and now he can’t get enough of her. On stage. At home. In his bed.

  When it comes to commitment, Trix has been there, done that, never wants to do it again. Leo’s this close to the job of a lifetime, which would take him away from London—and from Trix. Their past is a constant barrier between them.

  It seems hopeless.

  Utterly impossible.

  And yet...

  This book is approximately 82,000 words

  One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!

  Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Deborah Nemeth

  Dedication

  For my nieces, Riley and Charli, with love.

  May you always find happiness and unexpected moments of magic.

  And don’t read past this page until you’re older.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Pretty Face by Lucy Parker

  Author Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Lucy Parker

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  When one of the most talented aerial performers in the West End suddenly slammed into the side of a fire-breathing dragon, crushing his metallic wing and snapping her own forearm like a matchstick, quite a few people cheered.

  Trix Lane was about six feet away from her castmate when the collision occurred, hanging upside down from a hoop, and for a moment she had the dizzying sensation that she was the one falling.

  The audience continued to applaud as Paige’s hands jerked free of her aerial straps and she tumbled the rest of the short distance to the stage.

  Trix watched, helpless, as the straps sailed upwards almost in slow motion, leaving a ghostly, repeated pattern in the strobe lighting, like a time-lapse photograph. The black crystals on Paige’s costume caught the swirling beams of light in an obscenely pretty way.

  And as she lay dazed on the floor, the chorus continued to dance around her, high-kicking and jazz-handing their way through a wink-wink-nudge-nudge number about the therapeutic benefits of love and sex.

  Trix really hoped that the extremely badly timed ripple of laughter was directed at the trio of oblivious Masked Fools, who continued their cheeky banter with the crowd.

  The Festival of Masks was loud and chaotic from the opening sequin-wiggle to the last romantic clinch. It was the show with an identity crisis, according to one long-ago critic, unsure whether it was a carnival, a rock concert, a very dark fairy tale, or just a slightly smutty night out. The orchestra was now building to a crescendo, and laser beams of colour dissected the darkness around the theatre, dipping and weaving. In the early days, Trix had sat in the stalls during rehearsal a few times, and the view from there was like being caught in a kaleidoscope of fractal art.

  With as many as thirty performers onstage and a dozen in the air during the finale, navigating around swooping mythological creatures and eye-tricking illusions, it probably wasn’t surprising that most of the audience were either looking elsewhere when the accident happened or thought it was part of the act.

  And it all happened so bloody quickly.

  Trix swung through the last moves of her own routine out of sheer habit, pulling the momentum from Jono Watanabe’s firm grasp as he swung her outward in a strong arc. Her appalled gaze met his in the instant before he released her. She drew her legs in for a double rotation. When she caught the bar of her hoop again with the small of her back and rolled up to sit, she hit every transition right on the beat with the ease of constant practice.

  Below, the perfectly choreographed pattern of the dancers faltered just a little as the cast realised, one at a time, what had happened. Trix looked over at Jono, who had his left arm and leg hooked around the bar of his glittering trapeze. He was always so graceful that the position would look effortless from the ground. Up here, in the heat and strange sense of isolation, Trix could see the bunched muscles quivering down his side. He stared back at her, sweat beading on his shaved head, apparently at an equal loss as to what to do now.

  The golden rule of theatre, always, was to keep going. Ad-lib through a forgotten line, chin up after a dodgy note, dance past a stumble.

  Obviously, nobody onstage was sure if it was appropriate to keep booty-shaking around the unmoving body of their castmate.

  In the air, the dragon hung off-centre, one wing slanted at a lopsided angle.

  The atmosphere resonated with a feeling of unreality as things came to a close, highlighted by the cliché of the band playing cheerfully on.

  Marco Ross, their current stage manager, was so hardnosed that if it had happened mid-performance, Trix wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d just lassoed poor Paige’s ankle, dragged her into the wings, and thrown her understudy into the spotlight before the news could reach the orchestra pit.

  Fortunately, it happened with only a few seconds left to run, although for the first time in three years, an even-toned voice came over the speaker system to explain that there would be no curtain call for tonight’s performance.

  Trix, Jono, and several of the other aerial performers had to wait above while the partitions descended around the circular stage. Under the stark glare of the houselights, voices blended into a headache-inducing racket.

  When her feet were back on solid ground, the relief of hearing Paige’s voice through the clamour made Trix’s hands shake as she unhooked her wires. She’d been playing Pierrette for so long now that it was as routine as scrambling an egg or brushing her teeth. A grim-looking rigger checked her equipment as he took it from her.

  The crew was so stringent about safety practices that the chances of a collision midair ought to be infinitesimal to nonexistent.

  As usual, the universe spotted complacency and delivered a swift kick up the arse.

  Or, in this case, a crashing blow into a giant robotic dragon. Paige had managed to take the main impact on her arm instead of her skull, thank God, but several things were no longer pointing in the right direction. Since her castmate was having a bad enough night without Trix doing a full-body shu
dder and then stress-vomiting everywhere, she swallowed hard on rising acid in her throat and crouched down at Paige’s side. Her fingers hovered above the other woman’s knee, afraid to touch her and risk hurting her more.

  The house medic was trying to examine her while they waited for the ambulance. Apparently he had a death wish.

  “Am I in pain?” Paige repeated. Her jaw was clenched tight, and she had to force enough space between her gritted teeth to speak. Sweat dripped from beneath her crystal headdress and pooled in the hollows of her shoulders. “How about I take the bone sticking out of my arm and skewer your tiny little balls with it, and we’ll compare notes? How about that? How are your pain levels after the testicle kebab, you pissbiscuit? Zero to ten?”

  When she wasn’t dealing with compound fractures, Paige “Pissbiscuit” Lawson was the sort of person who put a fiver in a swear jar if she said “bugger” in public.

  She was going to be mortified when these moments of her life were posted online under the guise of fly-on-the-wall realism.

  At Trix’s side, Jono also looked at the West End Story film crew, everybody’s constant shadow for the past month. They were hovering with their cameras and drooling into their ring lights at the thought of the views on this episode.

  Without a word, Trix and Jono moved together and stood where they could block as much of Paige from view as possible. When a camera shifted position, so did they, ignoring the irritated noises behind them.

  For a reason he chose not to share, Marco had signed off on this so-called web documentary about the backstage reality behind West End “glamour.” The online series had been pitched to the cast and crew as an impartial account of sweat and sacrifice. So far, surprising exactly nobody, the result was sex, scandal, and spats, cunningly edited to look a lot more interesting than it was.

  Trix suspected that Marco fancied himself as the next silver fox to go viral on social media, which would explain why he regularly walked into the shot with his pecs out, even though he hadn’t personally performed onstage for about two decades and had no need to be semi-nude at training. He could just as easily stare in withering silence and bark out his blatant insults with his shirt on. His job description seemed to centre around raising his voice every time he had something demoralising to say, making last-minute and usually inconvenient changes to training schedules, and failing to see the humour in any joke in the history of funnies, even the ones scripted into their own show.

  Nobody could be that obnoxious every second of his existence. Even fate would lose patience and start dropping pianos in the vicinity of his head. Perhaps Marco was a surprising ray of sunshine outside the theatre.

  He came to stand over Paige and the medic, his lips compressed, his admittedly attractive silver hair sticking up in agitated spikes. There were probably invisible birds circling his head right now, tweeting lawsuit, lawsuit, almost killed one of your principals, lawsuit.

  This would still be the moment to set aside the implications for the show and offer some human empathy to the member of the team suffering horrific pain.

  “I don’t care whether you’re playing the lead role or that kid who juggles with fire balls,” Marco said flatly. “When you’re on the stage, your mind is engaged. What the hell happened out there? Do you know what a bloody hassle this is going to be?”

  And maybe Marco never brought the sunshine. Maybe Marco was just a perennial wanker.

  “I’m probably going to spend the next month fielding calls from parents about their traumatised wee kiddies,” Marco muttered, and Trix inhaled sharply.

  Nobody knew the extent of Paige’s injuries. Nobody knew whether her career had just ended permanently. Nobody should really be bringing “wee kiddies” to see a show with a strong burlesque element and highly sexual plotlines; they might have magic tricks, but they weren’t a pantomime. There were several brutally frank things she wanted to say to Marco at that moment.

  Generally she found it easy to get along with people, even working in an industry full of big personalities and even bigger egos. Marco was one of only three people who had ever annoyed her on such a fundamental level that it made her skin itch.

  The paramedics arrived after a few minutes, and Trix got out of their way. “We’ll meet you at the hospital, Paige.”

  Paige was heading swiftly into a state of morphine-induced marshmallow, by the look of it. “I think Jono’s going to puke,” she said indistinctly, and Trix spun around.

  Jono’s face was still shiny with sweat, and he did look very definitely green under the strong lights. “No, I’m not,” he retorted with complete indignation, and then threw up all over himself, the floor, and Trix.

  This was one of the times when it would be nice to be taller than five foot, and not presenting the top of her head as a target.

  Naturally the doco crew caught the entire thing on camera.

  Tonight had blown all other performances out of the water for the title of Worst Ever, an honour previously held by the popping button incident, which had exposed her left nipple to a packed house. Although quite a lot of people had missed the action that time, too, since her breasts were essentially microorganisms: too small to be seen by the human eye. On the plus side, she’d never been hit in the face by her own tits while doing a straddle mount on the hoop.

  Everyone had at least stopped gawping at Paige’s departing stretcher now. And Marco looked disgusted and left them to it, so that was something.

  Poor Jono was so mortified that Trix should probably stop giggling, but at this point things were so horrifying it had flipped her inappropriate-laughter switch. Exam rooms, bad news, projectile vomiting: all cues for her face and vocal cords to act independently of her brain.

  Her costume would have to be put through a carwash before the drycleaners would touch it, and it was possible she’d end up as bald as Jono if she didn’t see some shampoo soon and things had time to congeal. Since neither of them could look much worse, however, she delayed a bolt for the showers long enough to give him a quick hug. The feathers of his costume were soft and silky against her fingers.

  “Some people will do anything for internet fame,” she teased, and he groaned low in his chest.

  “Stop. I can’t look at them. I can’t look at anyone.” He dropped his head the considerable distance to her shoulder. “I’m going to need you to stand in front of me for a while. Until my hands stop shaking. Then I can dig a pit and subside into it.”

  “I come up to approximately your knee. My services as a human shield are useful only to toddlers.” Trix gave his back a consoling little pat. “And I know I have a decent butt, but I would really prefer it if my friends didn’t stand behind me while I’m in the shower.”

  Jono straightened to his full height. His eyes were still shadowed. “Holy shit. When she fell...”

  “I know.” Trix’s knees felt like she’d spent intermission doing tequila shots.

  That instant of time, with the thick straps seeming to float and Paige’s eyes wide and panicked, was fixed in her memory like a still from a horror film.

  “I guess we’re in for a major cast shake-up.” Despite the dodgy stomach, Jono was a more rational thinker than Trix, whose brain was currently stuck on hand-wringing and nervous bouncing. He gulped. “Bones outside of body. I don’t think she’ll be back on Wednesday.”

  Trix forced herself to stop jiggling about like a manic wind-up toy. “She might not be back at all.” It was a sobering realisation. They put everything they had into a career that could end in a split second, but it was always one of those “it won’t happen to me” prospects, easily pushed aside in the sweat and adrenaline under the lights. “Cassie will have to take over as Doralina.”

  Which was unfortunate. Paige’s understudy was a pill. If Cassie bollocksed up a cue, she had a habit of looking from the nearest performer to the audience and pulling an exaggerated face, inviting
the assumption that the other person was at fault. If she ran someone over with her car, she’d blame them for denting her bumper.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Jono scrubbed his hand over his mouth. “Cassie’s trying to wriggle out of her contract.”

  Trix was attempting to pull the sticky scraps of her costume away from her skin without giving Jono an eyeful. It took a moment for the implication to sink in. Her head snapped up so quickly that she felt a tendon pull taut in her neck. “What?”

  “Apparently Cassie’s trying to leave. They’ll probably have to reaudition the role, in that case, and the second understudy will get a massive promotion in the meantime.” Belatedly, Jono’s own brain caught up. “Shite. Is that still—”

  “Me.” For an instant, Trix thought her own stomach was going to follow Jono’s projectile example. “It’s me. I’m second understudy for Doralina.”

  The Night Wraith, the most technically difficult and physically demanding role in the entire production. She had agreed to learn the cues and the basics of the routines this year, solely because it meant a few extra quid a week. It was another never-going-to-happen scenario that had funded her weekly Sunday roast at her local pub. She was supposed to be the Prince Harry of the situation, well down the line of succession.

  She had to force her speech out of a chest that felt as if steel hands were gripping her lungs and electrocuting her heart. “Is that definite? About Cassie?”

  “No.” Jono was completely oblivious to her building panic. He knocked his fist gently against her shoulder. “But I heard it from Allie, so...”

  Her friend in the wardrobe department was the oracle of company gossip, and could usually predict hook-ups, engagements, and promotions at least a week before the news went official. If Allie said it was so, there was a bloody good chance that Cassie was on her way out.

  In Trix’s current frame of mind, Jono’s genuinely delighted, supportive grin looked like the Grinch’s malevolent leer. He sketched an ironic bow. “Check you out! Leading lady. Hell, yeah!”

  She couldn’t move her own lips into anything resembling a smile. In the past, she’d have been split right down the middle between horrified concern for Paige and guilty excitement. Now...terror. Nothing but terror.