Are you ready for
a different kind of love story?
Meet Michael &
Laine in this Hollywood themed second chance romance by CD Reiss!
NOW
AVAILABLE!
ShutterGirl Book Trailer:
Blurb
ONE movie star on the cusp
of greatness
ONE broken girl who touched
him
TEN years to forget her
A MILLION stories in
Hollywood
I
am not hurt.
I don’t need a second chance with him, or a life I thought I had.
While he was out forgetting me to become a movie star, I was building a career out of nothing. A career as a paparazzi, but a career. For a foster kid who bounced around every home in Los Angeles, that wasn’t easy.
This camera is all I have.
He’s nothing to me. Every time I take his picture and sell it, I remind myself that I did it all without him or his approval, his cinnamon smell or his clear green eyes. He lights up the screen like a celestial body, but he’s nothing but a paycheck to me.
He can throw my camera off a balcony, and nothing has to change. We can stay king and queen of the same city, and different worlds.
Except this is Hollywood, and here, anything can happen.
I don’t need a second chance with him, or a life I thought I had.
While he was out forgetting me to become a movie star, I was building a career out of nothing. A career as a paparazzi, but a career. For a foster kid who bounced around every home in Los Angeles, that wasn’t easy.
This camera is all I have.
He’s nothing to me. Every time I take his picture and sell it, I remind myself that I did it all without him or his approval, his cinnamon smell or his clear green eyes. He lights up the screen like a celestial body, but he’s nothing but a paycheck to me.
He can throw my camera off a balcony, and nothing has to change. We can stay king and queen of the same city, and different worlds.
Except this is Hollywood, and here, anything can happen.
So I came across this book and I was sucked in. The synopsis intrigued me. I mean we all watch TMZ, ok maybe not all, but I do and now I’ll look at the paparazzi in a different manner!
This was my first time reading a book from this author and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I loved her writing style.
I’d shot him a hundred times over the past years, yet I had always been convinced he didn’t know who I was there. Did he recognize me?
Meet Laine Carthwright, paparazzi extraordinaire. When the sun goes down and the stars come out she knows exactly where and when to be there. Capturing their mistakes of the night; where she snaps her pictures and sells them to the highest bidder.
She has struggled all her life -going in and out of foster care. At sixteen she finally found a good home. While attending her new high school she catches the eye of Michael Greydon, son of a famous actress and actor.
While she buried her nose in a book on the bleachers he couldn’t stop looking and seeking her out. It was forbidden. It was the right boy with the wrong girl. It was never meant to be.
I was fascinated. The gutter? What was it like in the gutter? What kind of person did it make you? And how could something so beautiful, even from twenty feet below, come from the gutter? Who was she?
Nine years. Nine years is a long time but it isn’t long enough to forget the one who stayed right there in the back of your mind.
In nine years he followed in his parents’ footsteps and she became his worse nightmare.
“So,” he said, “you became a photographer.”
“I became your worst nightmare.”
“You used to be my friend.”
“Things change.”
There it is the; moment that my heart gets sucked into this story. I’m are sitting here snickering because I’m wondering how he is going to talk her out of taking his picture.
Michael has found Laine again. The girl that he couldn’t forget. The girl that he couldn’t believe that fate would bring back into his life. Could this time be for real? Could this time be their time?
"Laine. Right in front of me. She had gone from a beautiful and sullen teen to a stunning and witty woman. I’d felt explosive, like a test tube of nitrous, ready to detonate at the slightest agitation, as soon as she was within reach."
One night together, one picture of the two of them and all hell would break out. Now he is dating the enemy and all her contacts are drying up since she is dating the enemy. This relationship was doomed from their first kiss.
"I didn’t usually look at the media’s reaction to me and what I was doing. It had always been bland and boring. Just me walking or drinking coffee. There had never been any bad behavior to get distracted by, so it had been easy to follow a simple rule…don’t look.
The rule was easy until Laine, in that dress, her hair unpinned, her fingers gripping my elbow as I kissed her. I felt alive. And that was a cliché, of course."
But what happens when the shuttergirl is now in front of the lens and not in back of it? What happens when the ghost of the past comes back wanting what you have now?
This part of the story broke my heart. My heart was beating faster than I thought possible. My breath hitching at each and every turn and in the end all I wanted was for them to succeed.
I wanted this boy and girl to have their happily every after; the girl who was once broken and put herself back together, the boy who had nothing but fame and a shell of a life.
Do second chances exist for them?
"Except this is Hollywood, and here, anything can happen."
Excerpt #1
I stroked his hair, waist deep in peace, all worry gone for
the moment, and floating in no more than an ocean of gratitude. I must have
been more vulnerable than I realized, or he’d reopened some wound with his
kindness, because though my sweet reverie stayed, as the minutes passed, a
layer of need fitted itself on top of it.
I needed to tell him, if not the details, the outlines of
who I was.
“I want you to know,” I whispered, starting somewhere small,
then everything I didn’t want to say spilled out. “I have stuff. I’ve never
been to jail, but you know, it’s stuff, and it’s ugly, and it scares me.
Because, I mean, you’re so perfect, and I’m… I’m just a mess. I’m not whole.
I’m a bunch of pieces of a person I cobbled together.” My eyes got wet when I
thought of the comparisons between us and that picture in my silverware drawer.
“So if you have to move on when you realize that, I’ll understand. You have an
image, and if anyone understands protecting a career, it’s me. I mean, I’ll be
mad, don’t get that wrong, but also.” I swallowed and blinked, shifting my head
so he wouldn’t feel the tear on his forehead. “I won’t blame you.”
I waited for an answer. Anything. A change in position or a
word on any subject. The weather. Sports. Something. But all he did was breathe.
I smiled so wide, tears fell into my mouth. He was sleeping.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CD Reiss
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