Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 14 of 32
Chapter 14: Hold, Please
"What's holding it?" I said.
"The rope lock and my two hands," the flyman said. "I've got it. Call it, Cleo."
On the deck, the girl from Baltimore was singing the first line of the ballad.
Eighteen hundred pounds of steel hung over her head on a lock with nothing through it.
I didn't think. I'd been trained not to.
"Hold, please," I said into the headset. "Everybody, hold. Deck, level it and freeze. Rain off. Sound, kill the track."
The deck stopped pitching halfway through a roll and settled flat.
The rain machines coughed and went dry.
The girl from Baltimore stood under the bridge with her mouth open and no music.
Twelve hundred people went quiet.
I keyed the god mic for the deck.
"Company, this is Cleo," I said. My voice came out of every speaker on the stage, calm and flat. "We're holding. Everyone on the deck, walk downstage to the lip. Walk. Don't run. Don't look up."
The girl from Baltimore didn't move.
She looked stage left, at me. The way she had on the first preview.
"You too, sweetheart," I said. "Walk to me."
She walked.
She came off the deck dripping, straight into the wings, and I caught her by the shoulders.
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened," I said. "Something almost did. Go sit on the stairs and breathe."
Jude came off behind her.
He didn't stop at the lip with the others. He walked straight through the wings toward dressing room one, peeling off his wet jacket.
"Jude," I said. "Stay in the wings."
"I'm not standing under that thing."
"Nobody's under it now. Stay where I can count you."
He kept walking.
I let him. I had a bigger problem.
"Lights, house to half," I said. "Main curtain in, slow."
The red velvet came down between the deck and twelve hundred people.
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