Chapter 97: Making an Impression

"Cousin... look, that’s Tom Harker, he’s gorgeous." Saint noticed quickly that Chloe moved through the set with real ease, nobody shooed her off, and plenty of the crew greeted her by name as they passed.

Not entirely surprising, really. People tend to warm to a cheerful, easy-going girl wherever she goes, and Chloe clearly had that effect on everyone around her.

More than that, though, she was consistently polite, properly considerate with everyone she dealt with. Saint hadn’t spent much time with her as an adult, but it didn’t take long to see that Linda had genuinely raised her well.

’The kind of daughter other parents hold up as the example,’ Saint thought, watching her work the set.

"He is handsome," Saint admitted, watching the male lead run through his blocking. Saint had never been the type to feel threatened by another man’s looks, he was comfortable enough in his own skin, and genuinely believed there was more than one way to carry yourself well.

"CUT! good take, that’s a wrap for the morning, let’s break for lunch." The director’s call ended the morning’s filming.

"Come on, cousin, let me introduce you to a few proper stunners," Chloe said, already heading off with another basket of food balanced on her hip.

Background actors, crew, and the principal cast all got different catering, and Chloe’s deliveries that day covered the leads and the director specifically.

"Eve, lunch!" Hearing Chloe call out the actress’s actual first name rather than her character’s confirmed, plainly enough, exactly how close the two had actually become.

"What’s on the menu today?" Eve glanced Saint’s way for a fraction of a second as she took her food, then promptly forgot he existed.

Fair enough, really, Saint was decent-looking by most standards, but the entertainment world has no shortage of decent-looking people passing through. Eve, five years younger than him, already had two series behind her and a genuine lead credit to her name.

"Didn’t you say you weren’t working today?" Eve asked, taking her container.

"Ha! Wasn’t planning to, but my cousin’s never seen a proper film set before, so I dragged him along," Chloe said, already pulling Saint into the small crowd forming around the catering trolley.

Celebrities, underneath it all, are still just people, hungry people, at that, and nobody waited politely for an assistant to collect their food when it was right there in front of them.

Standing there in the middle of it, Saint had the distinct, almost comic sense of a man utterly out of his depth, not one person on that set had the faintest idea how thoroughly he’d been chased by cameras of his own, back across the Channel.

Not that it was anyone’s fault, really. Saint himself had never gone out of his way to publicise any of it domestically, and the handful of requests that had come through from the local press back home had all gone politely unanswered.

He’d turned down every single interview request the previous season, too consumed with the job to bother, and the moment the season ended, he’d gone straight from England to Europe and back again without a proper stop. Nobody tracking celebrity gossip in this corner of the country had any particular reason to connect the dots.

"Chloe, who’s the handsome delivery boy today, then?" Two more faces joined the group, Rachel Osei, playing one of the supporting leads, and the youngest of the main cast, a girl named Poppy Linden.

"Hee hee, handsome, is he?" Chloe practically glowed at the compliment, as if it had been paid to her directly.

"Oi, what’s that look for?" Poppy, the sharpest-tongued of the three, wasn’t about to let that slide.

"Don’t start, that’s my cousin, before anyone gets any ideas," Chloe said quickly, heading off the teasing before it went further.

"Your cousin? Since when do you have a cousin? You’ve never mentioned him once," Eve said, of the three, she and Chloe had clearly grown closest.

"He’s been living abroad for years, only just back for a visit," Chloe explained.

"Chloe, that dress?" Rachel’s attention had already shifted elsewhere, eyes catching on what Chloe was wearing.

"Lovely, isn’t it, my cousin brought it back for me, present from his trip," Chloe said, still visibly pleased with herself.

"It’s gorgeous, obviously, but this isn’t even out here yet, is it?" Something close to envy flickered across Rachel’s face. She’d clocked the dress the instant Chloe walked in, and the one disappointment was that it clearly wasn’t available locally yet.

"Really?" Chloe, evidently, had no particular sense of what counted as high fashion.

"Course it’s true, this hasn’t even landed in the major cities yet, let alone out here. I’d have bought it myself ages ago if it had." Rachel had her own income from acting, on top of a genuinely well-off family besides.

"Is it expensive, then?" Chloe’s background was fairly ordinary by comparison with the rest of the cast.

"At current prices, probably somewhere around a thousand pounds." Rachel herself had half-wondered, quietly, whether the dress might be a knockoff, not everyone in this industry was above faking it for appearances, but a careful touch of the fabric had settled that question; whatever it was, it was genuine.

"A thousand pounds?" Chloe looked faintly horrified.

The Pryce household did well enough, but their usual clothes budget ran closer to twenty or thirty pounds a piece. A thousand pounds for one dress sat somewhere beyond comprehension.

Vanity is a natural enough thing in anyone, girls included, but for someone as unpretentious as Chloe, the idea of wearing something this expensive while carrying lunch trays around a working film set was genuinely uncomfortable, not flattering. One stray splash of sauce and the whole thing would be ruined.

"Cousin, why didn’t you say this dress cost that much?" Right on cue, Saint reappeared with another empty basket, having finished his own delivery round.

"Expensive? Who told you it was expensive?" Saint, if he was honest, had genuinely no idea what the dress had cost. He’d stopped tracking his own clothing budget somewhere around the time Jasper first started dressing him for nights out.

Since Grace, most of what he wore had been picked out by her entirely, he simply never thought to ask the price of anything she handed him.

"Rachel reckons it’s over a thousand pounds," Chloe said.

"Oh... right, no idea myself, honestly. Had a friend pick it out for me." Given Saint’s current salary, a thousand pounds genuinely wasn’t much to think twice about.

"No, I’m telling Mum and Dad about this," Chloe said, clearly rattled, watching Saint’s total indifference to the number.

"Don’t be daft, if I can afford it without blinking, then it’s not expensive, not to me. Don’t turn a gift into something to stress over." Saint talked her down immediately.

If Linda actually found out the real figure, there’d be a proper lecture coming, and worse, Chloe would probably never wear the thing again out of guilt.

"Anyway, weren’t you going to introduce me to some stunners?" Saint steered the conversation elsewhere before Chloe could dwell on it further.

"Right... Rachel, Eve, Poppy, this is my cousin, Saint." Whatever looks Saint carried, it was never really his face that held people’s attention for long, it was the steadiness underneath it, the particular calm confidence that seemed entirely out of step with how young he actually looked.

As for anyone else on set clocking who he actually was, nobody much cared, truthfully. As far as this crew was concerned, he was just the delivery boy’s cousin, and nothing more.