“How about, ‘Leading Ladies only end up on magazine covers with good reason’?” Ava suggested.
“That’s not exactly catchy,” Jasmine muttered, but she wrote it down with the tiny pen attached to the notepad.
“What was your second point?” Michelle asked.
Jasmine’s cheek’s warmed as she mumbled, “Two: Leading Ladies don’t need a man to be happy.”
Her cousins exchanged another look. It was the one they always shared when the subject of Jasmine’s love life came up.
“What about, ‘Leading Ladies are whole and happy on their own’?” Ava said, her tone gentle.
Jasmine doubted that, but since this plan was also supposed to keep her from getting derailed by romance, she wrote it down.
“What’s the third one?” Ava asked.
Shit. Why had she mentioned this stupid plan in the first place? Jasmine thought fast. “Um, Leading Ladies take their careers seriously.”
Michelle rolled her eyes. “You just pulled that out of your ass.”
“Fine.” Jasmine tossed the pen onto the table. “Three: Leading Ladies don’t sit home crying over their exes.”
Ava rubbed Jasmine’s shoulder while Michelle took the pen and wrote something down. When she was done, she slid the paper over to Jasmine.
Leading Ladies are badass queens making jefa moves.
“I almost wrote boss queens but with jefa in there, it would have been redundant,” Michelle explained.
Jasmine gave a small smile and spoke around the lump in her throat. “Thanks.”
They were all silent for a moment, sipping their coffees, and then Ava set her mug down and folded her hands on her lap. In a quiet voice, she asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
It was the closest she would come to asking outright about McIntyre. Subtlety and patience were Ava’s tools of choice, which made her a great teacher. Michelle, a high-level corporate marketing consultant turned freelance graphic designer, was less likely to beat around the bush, but she’d follow Ava’s lead when it made sense to her.
“You’ve seen the tabloids, so you know the gist of it.” Jasmine heaved a deep sigh. “Obviously, I’m not dating McIntyre anymore.”
“We know that’s not the full story,” Ava said at the same time that Michelle said, “He was a tool anyway,” but then Jasmine’s phone rang. Saved by the bell. The last thing she wanted to do right now was rehash the painful and embarrassing experience of being publicly cheated on by a rock star.
“It’s my agent,” Jasmine murmured, answering the call. “Hi, Riley.”
“Hey, Jasmine.” Riley’s chipper tones filled her ear. Riley Chen was young and friendly, but when it came to making deals, she was a pit bull, latching on to negotiations with a ferocity that had made her a rising star in the agency. “Did you get into New York okay?”
“I did. Dropped my luggage off at the hotel and now I’m visiting my family.”
“I won’t keep you, then. But I wanted to call because I figured you hadn’t seen your email yet, and I know you don’t like surprises.”
A shimmer of dread threaded through Jasmine’s gut. Now what? Aware that her cousins were watching with undisguised interest, Jasmine kept her expression bland. “No, I haven’t checked my email.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Riley said quickly, as if reading the apprehension in Jasmine’s voice. “Just a casting change for the love interest.”
“Oh?” That kind of was a big deal. She’d already done chemistry reads in LA with the guy she thought she’d be kissing on-screen.
Riley continued. “The actor who was supposed to play him broke his leg in Aspen.”
“Oh, damn. Was it a skiing accident? It’s June.” And since they’d already signed their contracts, he shouldn’t have been doing something dangerous, like skiing. Not when they were due to start production in a few days.
“Well . . . not exactly.” Riley lowered her voice. “Apparently, he was meeting someone there, and he tripped getting out of his car. It looked like he was trying to be stealthy.”
Jasmine’s brows creased. “How do you know all this?”
“Someone caught the whole thing on their phone and sold the video to Buzz Weekly.”
Jasmine groaned. Buzz Weekly was the tabloid news source that had taken the McIntyre story and run with it, thus making Jasmine a household name. But not for a good reason, she thought, recalling the first point on her new Leading Lady Plan.
“I know,” Riley said. “We hate Buzz Weekly. But I watched the video, and the guy did a pirouette thing before toppling down a few steps. Only, like, three of them, but they were brick. He broke his leg and scraped up his face too.”
“Yikes. That sounds pretty bad.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for him. A girl in a bikini came running out to get him, and it turns out she’s only nineteen, whereas he’s almost forty.”
Jasmine pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. There was always some scandal in Hollywood. And while it would be nice to think this one would take the place of her own, she doubted it. McIntyre was just too famous.
And now, by extension, so was she.
Riley wasn’t done, though. “All that to say, he’s off the show. You’ll have a new costar for Carmen in Charge.”
This was a big change. “Do you know if we’ll be doing chemistry reads, or is this a done deal?”
“Done deal,” Riley said, sounding sympathetic. “The producers don’t want to delay production, and he’s finishing up a pilot, so there’s no time for a chemistry read.”
“Who is it?”
The phone connection broke for a second. “—shton Suarez.”
Jasmine blinked. “Wait, did you say Ashton Suarez?”
On either side of her, Ava’s and Michelle’s eyes widened.
“Yes,” Riley said. “Have you heard of him?”
“Um . . . yes.” Holy shit. Of course she had. Ashton Suarez was her grandmother’s favorite telenovela star. Esperanza had watched every show he’d been on for almost a decade. She was going to flip when she found out.
“Oh, good, that’ll make intros easier. You’ll meet him at the table read. Anyway, I’ll let you go now. Have fun with your family!”
Jasmine murmured a farewell to Riley and slowly lowered her phone to the table. It had been completely stupid to say his name out loud in front of her cousins. Cue overreaction in three . . . two . . .
Michelle grabbed Jasmine’s wrist in a tight grip, her brown eyes wide. “Ashton. Suarez,” she repeated. “Ashton Fucking Suarez . . .”
“He’s el león dorado!” Ava squealed.
Michelle flung her head back and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, adopting a dramatic tone. “And el matador!”
“El hombre seductor!”
“El duque de amor!”
“I know, I know,” Jasmine cut in. The guy had been on something like twenty different Spanish soap operas, and they’d be here all day if her cousins continued to spout his various character names.
“I think the one where he played the Golden Lion was my favorite,” Ava mused. “It was like The Godfather meets Indiana Jones.”
“I liked the one where he was an old-timey sheriff.” Michelle fanned herself. “He cut quite the dashing figure in that uniform.”
“Okay, that’s e—” Jasmine began, but Ava cut her off.
“He played a villain recently, and I liked his beard. But I thought they killed him off too soon.”
“Ava!” Michelle’s jaw dropped, aghast. “Spoilers!”
Ava shrugged, entirely unapologetic. “If you spent more time with Abuela, you’d be caught up.”
While they went back and forth about Ashton’s best roles, Jasmine mulled over this latest news. Ashton Suarez was a solid fixture in telenovelas, and even though Jasmine’s Spanish wasn’t good enough for her to follow them fully, she’d seen him on Esperanza’s TV plenty of times over the years. He was a good-looking man, even if he had a tendency to overact sometimes.
Not that Jasmine was one to talk. Her role on The Glamour Squad, a newer soap centered around a modeling agency, had required a level of melodramatics even her telenovela-loving abuela found a little ridiculous. Still, Jasmine’s back-from-the-dead trophy wife character, Cordelia, had stolen the show. Fans had loved Cordelia’s forbidden romance with Keane, the fashion photographer with a gambling addiction. For Jasmine, Cordelia would always hold a special place in her heart—the character had earned her a Daytime Emmy nom and won her the role of Carmen.
Never mind that she didn’t speak Spanish. Jasmine’s accent was perfect, even if her conversation skills left something to be desired. The last time she’d tried to gossip with her grandmother in Spanish, Esperanza had complained Jasmine was hurting her ears.
Her younger brother, Jeremy, had teased her when he found out she had to speak Spanish for the role, but he shut up real quick when Jasmine pointed out he knew even less of the language than she did. While Spanish had been Jasmine’s father’s first language, her mother, who was Puerto Rican and Filipina, knew very little Spanish or Tagalog, so English had been the main language in their home. Working on this show was going to be like a crash course in language immersion, and Jasmine sincerely hoped she was up to the challenge.