Elaborate Lives / Elaborate Lives (ePub)

In life, as in film, fight for the role you want.

An aspiring film director with anger management issues is sent to therapy or lose his job. Instead of doing the hard work of improving himself, he invites his troubled celebrity therapist to stage a fake romance with him so they can manipulate the Hollywood PR machine to fix their reputations.

Larisa de France-Kahn is the daughter of a model and a famous film producer born to host formal dinners an adorn the arm of a powerful man, but she's determined to thwart her fate by graduating from her psychiatry residency and practice emergency medicine as an anonymous citizen if only her mother will stop sending her on blind dates with billionaires who would like to make Larisa their trophy wife. The separation between Larisa's celebrity and professional lives is threatened when a producer friend of her father sends one of his directors to Larisa for counseling.

Quinn VanderVeer might be the greatest filmmaker of his generation, but he's so insecure he's turned everyone against him. He comes to Larisa in the middle of a nasty breakup, questions about his sexuality, and mounting pressure on the set of his first big budget production. She could help him if only he would see her as an ally instead of the woman who could reveal him as the imposter he feels he is.

As Larisa works to tear down Quinn's walls, she also must work against walls of her own, holding them up against her belief that her education has made her unlovable, and her psychiatry skills make her intimidating to men who want to be in control. Together they might become an industry power couple, but first they'll have to trust each other with their deepest fears and secret desires.

Book One in the Elaborate Lives Series