Joelle reached for a towel. “Luxury rustic footwear abundance?”
I looked down at the cream sliding over my toes and the perfect matching pedicure I’d paid actual money to have painted the color of emergency vehicles.
“Cut,” Caprice said cheerfully. “Beautiful chaos. We’ll use it.”
“We are not using my foot cream as campaign content.”
Caprice strode toward me, five-foot-nothing in utility shorts, a sleeveless black top, gold hoops, and big white sunglasses pushed into her honey-blond hair. “Sunny, sweetheart, your foot cream has relatability.”
“My foot cream has a lawyer.”
“They also love your face when you’re pretending not to be furious.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“Exactly.” Caprice turned to Ed. “Did you get her threatening to sue dessert?”
“I got the whole dairy deposition,” Ed said. “Audio’s weird, though. Wind’s kicking up.”
I glanced toward the edge of the meadow. Dry grass leaned in one long shiver, bending away from the pines. The cooking station sat in the cleared area we’d been told to use, framed by two folding prep tables, a heat-safe mat, a portable grate, buckets of water, a fire blanket, an extinguisher, and enough stainless-steel bowls to make us look prepared rather than deliciously doomed. Behind us, my retro camper gleamed cream and cherry-red under the sun, wrapped with the S’more Than Ready logo in big playful letters.
It was cute. It was professional. It was mine.
And every time someone said cute like it meant lesser, I wanted to hit them with a cast-iron skillet.
Joelle crouched at my feet with a towel, dabbing lemon cream off my shoe with hostage-negotiator calm.
“We have twelve clean cones left for close-ups,” she said. “Four backup jars of mascarpone, two berry trays, one basil bunch that still looks perky, and Ed’s left battery is at forty-three percent.”
“Marry me,” I said.
“I’m holding out for someone with less dairy on her foot.”
“Understandable.”
Caprice checked her phone, then looked at the setup, the meadow, the cookfire, and the portable reflector. “We need the hero shot with more flame.”
Joelle looked up. “We have flame.”
“We have polite flame. I need wow flame.”
“Caprice.”
“Not bonfire. Just a little more visual.”
“This is a dessert segment, not a dragon birth.”
Caprice pointed toward the camera. “The sponsor bought campfire fantasy, and the heat source is currently giving modest tea candle.”
“That modest tea candle is under my legal and emotional supervision.”
Ed shifted the camera on his shoulder. “For the record, I enjoy modest. Modest doesn’t melt microphones.”
A ribbon of gray smoke curled up from the cookfire and drifted toward the pines. The fire itself was small, built in the portable raised pit the production contact had approved. Everything about our setup had been signed off. Paperwork. Emails. Map pin. Production notes. Caprice had a whole folder on her phone labeled PERMITS / PLEASE DON’T RUIN MY LIFE.
We weren’t idiots.
We were women with clipboards.
