Three Girls And A Leading Man Part 1

Three Girls and a Leading Man.

Rachel Schurig.

For Andrea.

Twenty-plus years and still going strong. Thank you for everything!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Special thanks to Andrea, Angie, Mary, and Mich.e.l.le for your help and advice.

Thank you to my family and friends who have been so supportive of this series.

Thank you to Nicolas J. Ambrose for editing services.

Book cover design by Scarlett Rugers Design 2011.

www.scarlettrugers.com.

Chapter One.

*Are you feeling lonely? Depressed? Hopeless? As the years go by are you finding that more and more of your friends are getting married and leaving you behind? Are you tired of being the only single girl? Don't despair-there's hope for you yet! You've taken an important first step in buying this book. Together, we'll discover what's holding you back from the happiness you deserve.'-The Single Girl's Guide to Finding True Love "She has got to be kidding me," I muttered, staring down at the book in my hands in disgust.

"What's up?" Jen asked, peering over the top of her laptop.

"My mother," I said, sighing. "She's sent me a gift."

"What is it?"

"Seriously, Jen, you don't even want to know."

I threw the book, along with the rest of the mail I had just brought in, down on the dining room table and walked into the kitchen to pour myself a drink.

"Wow, Annie," Jen called from the living room. "If you need a drink before you've even taken your shoes off or set your purse down, that must have been one heck of a present."

After a moment's search, I found a half-empty bottle of chardonnay in the fridge. "Thank G.o.d," I muttered, turning to the cabinet to find a wine gla.s.s. Empty. Of course. I pulled open the dishwasher, where I had loaded several gla.s.ses the night before, to find it full-but still unwashed.

"d.a.m.n it, Tina," I muttered, slamming the washer closed. My irritation was growing by the minute now, and my roommate Tina's inability to do the simplest thing was so not helping. It was Friday night, I'd had a long week at work, and I just wanted a gla.s.s of wine. Was that too much to ask?

"Hey, pour me some," Jen called.

A minute later I joined my best friend in the living room.

"Cla.s.sy," she said, raising her eyebrows as I handed her a coffee mug full of chardonnay.

"It was the only thing that was clean," I told her, sitting next to her on the couch. "Tina didn't run the dishwasher after her little gathering last night."

Jen groaned. "That girl is on my last nerve."

Tina was our third roommate. She'd been living with us for the last six months. To say we weren't crazy about her would be an understatement.

"She had those people here until two a.m. last night," Jen continued. "Chanting and doing G.o.d knows what with those crystals."

"Let's just kick her out," I said, plopping my feet up on the coffee table.

Jen laughed. "If we could afford the rent, I would in a second. I'd be happy to be rid of the incense and the mess and the constant references to my aura." Jen pushed her dark hair out of her eyes. "Do you know that last week she told me my prana was murky? What does that even mean?"

I rolled my eyes and took a long pull of my wine.

"How was your day?" Jen asked. I closed my eyes. My day had been long. "That good, huh?"

"Same old c.r.a.p," I said. "Stuck in the office doing busy work while Grayson got to do all the creative stuff. Just what I always dreamed I'd be doing when I went to work in theater."

Jen winced. "I'm sorry, hon," she said. "Want to talk about it?"

"What's there to say? My job is lame and pays me next to nothing."

We were distracted from this depressing topic by the sound of someone at the front door. Whoever it was, they seemed to be having a difficult time getting the door open.

"A little help?" called a familiar voice from the porch.

I jumped up and ran to the door, throwing it open to reveal our other best friend, Ginny, standing on the porch with her arms full and a small child by her legs tugging on her sweater.

"Gin!" I said happily. "I didn't know you were coming over!"

"Grab the baby, would you?" she asked, shifting the load in her hands.

I scooped Danny up, kissing him. "Hey, buddy!"

"Annie, Annie!" he squealed, and I felt my heart soar.

Besides Ginny and Jen, whom I had been best friends with forever, Danny was the most important person in my life. It had been a shock, sure, when Ginny told us she was pregnant at the age of twenty-three. And, yes, it had been super scary dealing with the birth and having a newborn baby around. But I wouldn't change any of it for anything. Because now we had Danny.

I stepped aside to make room for Ginny to come inside, bringing Danny over to the couch and swinging him around and down into Jen's arms. He laughed and reached for her and I saw her face light up, too. G.o.d, the kid had us wrapped around his little finger.

"I'm glad you're both home," Ginny said, dropping Danny's diaper bag and folded up pack-and-play on the floor. "I was hoping to hide out here tonight."

I smiled, glad that Ginny didn't feel the need to ask for our permission. This used to be her house, too. The three of us had found it after graduating from college and rented it together. Ginny had found out about the baby right there in our kitchen, and this had been Danny's first home.

"Yay!" Jen said, tickling Danny's belly. "Sleepover!"

"What are you hiding out from?" I asked.

Ginny rolled her eyes. "Josh is having a fantasy football draft at our house. Can you believe that? Ten grown men pretending that they have actual football teams. Drinking beer and smoking cigars like they think they're so cool. It's just too lame for words. I had to get out."

I laughed, rather nastily, and Jen shot me a warning look. I had a bit of a history of disliking Ginny's husband, Josh, but I was over it now. Mostly.

"Well, I'm glad you're here," I told her. "Jen and I were just having some wine."

"Ooh, that reminds me," Gin said, bending down and rummaging through Danny's diaper bag. "I brought us some pinot!"

Jen and I both laughed. It was so Ginny to carry wine around in her baby's diaper bag.

"How *bout I make us some dinner?" Jen said, getting to her feet. "What do you guys feel like? I think I have some pesto; we could do a chicken and pasta thing."

Ginny moaned. Jen was a fabulous cook.

Looking around the room, I felt my spirits rise. I might be totally frustrated in my job, live with a psycho like Tina, and have a mother that drove me crazy, but tonight, it didn't matter. My two best friends were here. What else did I need?

Chapter Two.

An hour and a half later, the three of us sat down at the dining room table. While Jen had cooked, Ginny and I had fed Danny, given him his bath, and set him up in my bedroom in his pack-and-play for the night.

"Freedom," Ginny said, raising her wine gla.s.s (I had begrudgingly run the dishwasher). "No baby, no men, no jobs. It's the weekend, girls."

"Thank G.o.d," I said, downing my pinot quickly. "This week was h.e.l.la lame."

"Annie is having a s.h.i.tty time at work," Jen explained to Ginny.

Gin made a face at me. "Sorry, hon. What's up?"

"I'm just...bored. I never wanted to work in an office and it feels like that's all I do."

On paper, my job was perfect. I worked at Springwells Theater Company, an awesome small, non-profit theater in Detroit, about twenty minutes away from our house in Ferndale. We ran a lot of programs for teens and kids-play writing, acting, dance, things like that. I loved that part of my job-but more and more I was being shunted off into the office to do busywork. Administrative c.r.a.p was really not my thing.

"I went into theater so I could be creative," I said, pouring myself more wine. "But it feels like I sit at a desk all day dealing with soul-crushing, administrative bulls.h.i.t."

"Well," Jen said, dishing me out some pesto pasta. "Are there any auditions on the horizon?"

I had to roll my eyes a little. Just like Jen to bring it back to the positive, no matter how grouchy I was acting.

"Actually, there is. A really cool new show has open calls next week." I paused for effect. "It's being produced by Jenner Collins."

"Oooh," Ginny said. "Big time!"

Jenner Collins was a native Detroiter who had made it big in Hollywood. He'd even been nominated for a Golden Globe a few years ago. When he wasn't hanging out in L.A. being a big-time movie star, he spent part of his time back in Detroit, producing new plays with local talent. Getting into one of his shows would be a dream come true.

I'd wanted to be an actress for as long as I could remember. There was nothing I loved more than getting up on stage and completely losing myself in a character. My friends have always said I have a flair for the dramatic; I guess it makes sense that I chose drama as my career.

A lot of old friends from college question why I still live around here. Detroit isn't necessarily the place to be if you want to be a star. When I told my mother I was majoring in drama, she burst into tears, a.s.suming it meant I would be moving out to L.A. to try to break into movies. "You'll end up living in a slum and taking your top off for money!" she had sobbed.

What most people didn't seem to understand is that I had no interest in the fame thing. Sure, I would love to act on stage on Broadway, or something, but I wasn't going to uproot my life over it. I was happy in Detroit-it was an awesome city with a great arts scene. People were putting up cool, edgy shows all over the place. I would be happy if I could make a living working around here, even if it meant I never made it to Broadway. Besides, the girls lived here.

What I had never realized is that it's every bit as hard to find your big break in Detroit as it is a big city like New York.

"Well, I think you should go for it," Ginny said, reaching over to move a pile of mail a bit farther from her plate. "Let me know if you need help running lines."

"Thanks," I said. This is what I loved about my friends-they always took my pa.s.sion seriously. Never once had they told me I should move on and find a real job.

"Hey, what's this?" Gin asked, pulling a book off the pile of mail she had just moved. "The Single Girl's Guide to Finding True Love?"

I groaned. "My mother sent it."

Ginny started laughing as she flipped through the book. "Oh, my. This is ridiculously sad."

"Tell me about it," I grumbled, helping myself to more of Jen's pasta concoction. "That woman just has no clue."

"Aw, she means well," Jen said. "She just wants you to be happy."

"And apparently, being happy requires you to follow these *Ten simple steps to making the right impression on your first date'," Ginny said, pointing to a random page in the book. "Oh, no. I'm starting to see where you're going wrong, sweetie. According to this you should always let the man lead the conversation and should only talk about yourself in response to his specific questions."

Jen snorted. "That sounds just like you, Ann."

"You also should never, ever ask a man out and should only kiss someone after three dates."

"If that's what it takes to land a guy, you're screwed," Jen said with a smirk.

"I doubt I would have much interest in any guy that would care about s.h.i.t like that," I replied. "When was that book written, anyhow? 1950?"

Ginny flipped to the front cover.

"Nope. It's a new release, though I can't believe a publisher would still accept something like this."

"So you don't stock it in your store?" I asked. Ginny was the manager of a bookstore up in Rochester, a town about twenty minutes away from our house. As a lifelong bookworm, it was the perfect job for her.

Ginny snorted. "h.e.l.l no."

"Well, I think maybe you should keep an open mind," Jen said, a glint in her eye. "You never know, you might learn something useful from that book."

I knew she was half kidding, but I glared at her all the same. "Ha ha. Besides, it's not like I'm exactly hurting for dates. So they don't stick around very long, who cares?"