Hollywood Playboy (Hollywood Royalty 1)

How I fell for the Hollywood Playboy

Jessica Hawthorn

If someone would have told me that going on a thirty-day press tour would be life-altering, I would have laughed at them and went on with my day. What I will say is this. I fell for a man, who, at the end of the day, is just a man regardless of his job. A private and intimate picture was stolen and distributed to every single paper and online publication out there, making our secret feel dirty. And I’m done with people trying to dissect and ruin it, so this is my comment on the picture.

I was asked . . . no, I take that back. I was ordered to go on this press tour, regardless of how I felt for Tyler. I’m not going to lie, and I have people who can confirm the two of us started off on the wrong foot. We didn’t even try to hide our animosity toward each other.

I tried to push him to the edge of the cliff, going above and beyond his limits, and he tried to get me thrown off the press tour. I guess it really was like two kids on the playground not getting along with each other. But in the end, I had a job to do, and I would stand by my commitment.

One day, I was running on the treadmill. It was maybe six forty-five, and he got on the one next to me. With just the two of us in the room, what was I to do? I looked over and said good morning. I think I got a grunt, I’m not even sure. But at least I got something, right?

I guess that was the first thing we had in common because we both got up at six every day to run on the treadmill. Every morning, we would run side by side. Sometimes we would talk, sometimes I would ignore him or vice versa, and then sometime during those early morning miles, the unthinkable happened. I stopped resenting him.

I watched him interact with others with a smile on his face the whole time. I watched him stand in line and sign autographs for hours with his fans. After I stopped resenting him, I started respecting him. It wasn’t easy to be him. The press was always there trying to catch his every moment, to catch when he stopped smiling so they could speculate as to the why, to catch the one moment they could report on, me included. He lives his life under the microscope, and I don’t know how he does it with a smile on his face.

Ten journalists were invited on this press tour, and I expected him to interact with us only when he needed to, but I was wrong. He got on the bus just like we did, and he sometimes even carried his own bag. He took the ten of us out to eat the best ramen noodles from a small little hole in the wall. The next day, he took me for a motorcycle ride. He wasn’t Tyler the actor—he was Tyler the man—and I started to look at him differently. He wasn’t the condescending a-hole I thought he was. He is thoughtful, he is kind, he is funny, he is compassionate, he is considerate, he is courteous, and he is generous. He is all that and more, and more importantly, I get to call him mine.

I won’t go into detail of how we started this because that is for him and me, and those moments are all ours. WE get to keep that.

The only thing I will admit to is that I fell in love with a man, and lucky for me, he feels the same way I do. So there you have it, folks. How I fell in love with Hollywood’s Playboy. I won’t hide it anymore, and I won’t deny it. Tyler Beckett owns my heart. Cheesy, right? But hey, you do cheesy things when you fall in love.

Sincerely,

Jessica

The next day, the letter is still trending, and I spend the day unpacking my stuff. Tyler sits on the bed dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap on his head while he flips through the channels on the television. “When is Australia?” I ask him, sticking my head out of the closet. I’m wearing white shorts today with a gray sweater.

“In five days,” he says, looking over at me. He tried to get out of it, but then he turned the tables around and forced his hand. He would only go if I went with him. So I glared at him, then agreed to because he deserves to go out with a bang. “The flight is fifteen hours from LA, so I was thinking we could fly into LA in the morning and take off at eleven p.m. We can sleep on the plane, and we’ll arrive there at seven a.m. two days later.”