He sat down on the arm of the chair and took her hand in his. “What happened?”
“Since you saw Beauty Tames the Beast , you understand the concept. It wasn’t like The Bachelor franchise, where the end result is a proposal, but if some romances came out of the season, ratings went up, so they were always encouraged. Which is why every contestant had to sign a contract that he or she wasn’t in a relationship.”
“Okay. That sounds reasonable.”
“The only problem was, one of the Beauties had broken up with her boyfriend and auditioned for the program as a way to get past the breakup. Which probably wasn’t the best idea, but hey, it wasn’t my job to judge. Just to be a producer, which was essentially wrangling the contestants—”
“Sounds like herding cats.”
“You’re close.” She liked that he got it. Maybe there was a chance for them, after all. “Anyway, a few weeks in, she realized she was pregnant. Which I’d already suspected, and when I asked her straight out, she told me the truth. But we were getting close to the end, and she was definitely an audience favorite. So both the senior producer, who, I suppose I should mention, I was sort of romantically involved with for a short time, and the owner of the show insisted I just let things play out. Which might have worked out.
“But the contestants themselves were living in a sort of Beverly Hills prison. They had their phones taken away, they didn’t get to watch any TV but movie DVDs, and they were totally cut off from the real world.”
“Which doesn’t exactly define ‘reality.’”
“Believe me, there’s very little reality about the concept. While, on our show, the drama wasn’t planned, it’s not that difficult, after everyone’s been forced together into such an environment, to play on various distrusts and paranoia. This particular woman was getting more and more stressed out because not only was she dealing with a first trimester of pregnancy, with all the morning sickness and hormone swings that entails, she couldn’t even tell her former boyfriend, he was going to be a father.
“She told me privately that she wanted to give their relationship a second try. But contractually, she couldn’t leave without the risk of the show suing her. My job was to keep her as steady as possible and get her to the end.”
“Which didn’t happen,” he guessed.
“Wow. You really didn’t watch much TV. Or YouTube.”
“I was a bit busy tracking down a serial killer,” he reminded her. “That didn’t leave much time for entertainment.”
“Touché,” Lani said with a long sigh. “Anyway, I thought we were going to make it. Then she miscarried.”
“Hell.”
“That’s putting it mildly. I argued that now we had to let her go home to her family. And maybe the baby’s father. But the producer—”
“Who you had the sort-of thing with,” he said.
“Yes. And I could add that it was nothing like our thing, but it’s a moot point. So, moving on, that’s when the show’s attorneys stated that since she’d lied on her contract about how long she’d been out of any relationship, she wasn’t owed anything. Her medical bills weren’t even going to be paid. That was bad enough, but when I went to the hospital to try to break the news to her, I walked in the room and found a camera crew.”
“Jesus.”
“Different team,” she corrected with a shake of her head. “That’s when I lost it and blew up, and all my pent-up frustration and anger came boiling out. Unfortunately, the camera was still rolling, which risked ruining her life and any chance she might have had of reconciling with her boyfriend, who wasn’t at all happy that she’d been keeping that secret to stay on a TV show, never mind that she was contractually obligated. Also, she’d told me that she’d gone on partly because she needed the money after the breakup since she’d been living in a house that her boyfriend had bought, and was suddenly in a financial bind.”
“That’s tough.”
“Isn’t it? Although the video of my tantrum was edited from the program, someone sold the outtake to one of those horrid Hollywood gossip blogging sites, and I became a viral sensation. I was even a popular Internet meme and Twitter GIF. Then fortunately, for me, at least, two weeks later, a paparazzi cameraman caught a big-name pop star naked on a beach with one of his bandmate’s wives, and I became yesterday’s gossip news.”
“Do you know what happened to her? The contestant?”
“I do, actually. She emailed me. She married the boyfriend, and they have a nine-month-old daughter they did not name Beauty.”
“So, all’s well that ends well. Do you ever think that you could be happy doing something else, like working in a library, back on the mainland?”
Lani shook her head. “I belong here on Orchid Island.”
“You’re hiding from reality here,” he insisted.