Michael shifted uncomfortably and shoved his hands into the pockets of his loose board shorts. “None of it’s a big deal. That’s just life.”
Her face softened. “You really believe that.”
He shifted again. There was nothing to believe or not believe. Jennings was family. Peterson was too—and both of them mattered a hell of a lot more than anyone who shared his blood. Besides, he knew they’d turn around and do the same for him, no questions asked. It was the way it worked. “Well, what about you?”
“What about me?”
As they transferred the focus to Rachel, Michael felt himself grow more relaxed. “You forget I’ve seen you perform, Red. Even though I might not be as smart as Dominic, it’s obvious you’re more than just a pretty face. You’re a damn talented actress—so why are you wasting your time on slutty Shakespeare in this nowhere city?”
She flushed, color rising from the neck of her blouse and working its way up her face until it reached her ears, pink and hot and angry. He could see the anger coming, see her defenses building up. The next step would be an insult or a scream or a kick to his knee. He’d hit a nerve—she only reacted like this when he was right.
He loved being right.
“But you know what?” he asked, stepping forward, savoring the moment and the tic of anger along her temple. “I think you might be on to something here.”
That got her. “I am? What?”
“That whole ‘Michael not doing enough for himself’.” He got closer, so much so that he could smell the clean tang of soap and various girly sprays, feel the heat that rose from the surface of her skin. “I think it’s about damn time I do exactly what I want.”
Her eyes grew wide, but she didn’t move. Lips parted softly, and he could see the question forming. What does he want?
With a growl, he sprang forward, one arm wrapping around her waist, the other wrapping up behind her head, tilting her up to meet him. The last time they’d kissed, it had been an exploration, an examination of the power and control that existed between them. This time, it was going to be a clear demonstration of where that control and power rested. Michael smiled against her lips, taking full advantage of that moment of suspended animation when mouths weren’t yet fused into one.
And pulled away.
Rachel’s squeal of protest was enough to feed his manhood and his pride in one rising swell, and he used her momentary confusion and pliancy to pull her toward the back of the barn. They dodged a stack of chairs with the seats broken out, ducked underneath a lamppost that had been turned onto its side, not stopping until they reached the deepest, darkest corner of the barn.
“What are you doing?” Rachel yelled. “Is this another one of your games, Michael? Because I’m not amused, and I don’t like confined spaces.”
“Ta-da!”
“What is this?”
“It’s my arcade game,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He gave the big black box in front of him a loving caress. “You wanted to know my innermost desires. Behold. Frogger.”
Rachel sank to an ancient papasan chair set up next to the arcade game, her eyes snapping. The poor light back there made it hard to tell if it was anger or amusement. “This is the culmination of all your hopes and dreams? A video game?”
He reached down and hit the power switch, the blinking light of the screen signifying that his heavily jury-rigged electrical system in the barn, which fed from about twenty extension cords, was still up and running. “It’s not just a video game. Have you ever played Frogger?”
“My mother raised me and my sister in a series of New York dressing rooms, had us watching her from the wings by the time we were able to stand. Do you really think I played video games growing up?”
Although her voice dripped with sarcasm, he didn’t miss the reference to her mom. It was the first time she broached the subject willingly and openly—and he felt the impact of it. Rachel wasn’t the type of woman to share things about herself unless they were yanked out when she was otherwise occupied, and even then she did her best to hold on to them for dear life.
Her voluntary confession meant only one thing. He was growing on her.
Oh, yeah.
He rubbed his hands gleefully and got the game started, the menu screen an inviting series of blinking green and yellow lights. “Come on. You’ll love it.”
Her face was wary, but she stood, peering over his shoulder as he navigated the pixelated frog through the city streets of equally pixelated cars.
“I wasn’t much of a gamer, either,” Michael confessed, trying hard to keep his attention on the screen and not Rachel’s proximity, which seemed to fill the air with charged tension. It was the kind of charge Michael normally plugged himself right into.
Huh. How had he never noticed before just how good the prolonged buildup felt?
“Jennings bought this for me when I turned thirteen, a few weeks after my parents decided they were done playing Mom and Dad.”
“They got rid of you?”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong—living with Jennings was a hell of a lot better than trying to tiptoe around my dad all the time. Still. It hurt, you know? They didn’t even ask me what I wanted. I’m not even sure they said good-bye.”
“That’s awful.”
He shrugged and slammed on the joystick. “Like I said—I got advantages out here. Jennings had this game delivered on the morning of my birthday in about ten different pieces. It was a real piece of shit, a broken motherboard and wires poking out everywhere. Jennings took one look at my face and told me to put it back together my damn self.” Michael laughed, remembering how close he’d been to tears at the time. “It was the best thing he could have done. It took me almost six months to finish, and I used to have to hang out at the arcade in town every day so I could follow the repairman around and bum parts.”
“You’re saying you built this thing?” Rachel ran her fingers along the surface of the side panel. She might as well have been rubbing his balls for all the movement set his parts on fire. “By yourself?”
“Yeah—Jennings is a lot smarter than most people give him credit for. Those whole six months, I didn’t once miss my parents. I was too busy being pissed off at Jennings for giving me a broken birthday present and at myself for not being able to figure out how to make it work right away.”
His frog died. Michael stepped back, finally allowing his gaze to meet Rachel’s.
“He did it on purpose,” she said.
“He’s tricky, that old bastard. But he’s good people. So’s Nick. So’s Eric. Now—do you or do you not want to try?”
She seemed to appreciate him changing the subject, nudging him out of the way with her hip, placing her hands over his just briefly as they switched places.
“This doesn’t look so hard,” she muttered.
“Then do me proud, Red.” Michael took her spot in the chair, leaning back with his hands behind his head, content to watch her for as long as she was willing to stand there.
Of course, Rachel played the video game like a girl, putting her whole body into every movement. Each time her face got a little bit closer to the screen, her ass stuck out a little bit more, swaying to and fro as she jumped the frog around the screen.
This was a side of video games he’d never explored before. He could get used to it.
“What in the Sam Hill is going on back here?” Jennings hollered, coming into the little alcove on silent, sneaky feet. “How many minutes are you going to make an old man stand around waiting?”
Michael laughed. Rachel jumped back as if caught making porn—or at least viewing it. Jennings took note of the video game and swore again.
“I thought I threw that damn thing away when we tore down the house.”
“You did. I rescued it,” Michael said. He peeked at the screen. “Not bad. But you’ll have to come back and practice if you want to beat any of my high scores. You’ll want to put a little more ass into it next time, th
ough. That’s where the real points are.”
She caught his meaning, flushing heavily and flailing an arm in the general direction of his head. He ducked.
Jennings missed none of it, but for once in his life, kept his croaky old mouth shut. “I’m ready if you are, young lady. And you,” he added, turning to Michael. “Something tells me you need to get down to the field where your protégé is working. From the sound of it, he’s using the post-hole digger to murder those goats.”
“Well, that’ll put hair on a man’s chest,” Michael said, not the least bit worried.
“Somehow I get the feeling that’s your biggest accomplishment in life,” Rachel muttered, stalking out into the main area of the barn. More gently, she took Jennings’s arm and led him through the doorway.
“What? Growing hair in manly places?” Michael called back after her, hefting a second post-hole digger over his shoulder to head down and give poor Nick a hand.
She turned and glared.
“I’d be happy to show you someday, Red. You just say the word.”
With that, he brushed past her out the barn door, taking care to land a hearty smack on her ass as he went by. But he didn’t stick around long enough to hear more than her sputtered cry of outrage.
He had goats and a young man to wrangle.
Chapter Fifteen
Cry Havoc
The tension level in the week leading up to the opening night was always palpable, swirling around them in waves of alternating excitement and anticipation. Everyone was on pins and needles, and tempers flared from the most benign sources.
Not so with Rachel.
As everyone else mumbled last-minute lines under their breath like continual prayers and made frantic calls to the costume department to get alterations made, she walked among them as calm and cool as could be. It rarely endeared her to the other cast members, but that was hardly the point. She fed off other people’s heightened emotions, using their distress to find her own kind of inner balance.
“That makes you an emotional vampire, you know,” Molly said once. “It’s kind of creepy.”
Rachel begged to differ. There was something to be said for being the calm in the midst of the storm, the power in the middle of so much downward spiraling self-control.
“You’re in an awfully good mood,” Mary said warily, coming at Rachel with a mouth full of pins. “Who’s in trouble?”
Rachel laughed and let the seamstress make a few adjustments on a piece of draped gauze. “No trouble. I’m just excited for opening night.”
She was. It wasn’t like the opening of her college shows, when success had always seemed just one good review away, when seeing Dominic—Professor Taylor, as she’d called him in public—had been enough to fill her with excitement that lasted the whole week. Since then, she’d learned the hard way that success as a stage actress didn’t happen with a bang. It was a long, slow, painful journey that required her to continually look out for her own success.
Which was what she’d done, constantly and without fail. Just yesterday her inbox had contained a precious email from the lead critic at the infamous The Shakespeare Review. If she could procure Peter Bloom a pair of tickets to the opening of their next show, he’d fly in from New York to be there. The Peter Bloom, whose articles on the modern variations of Shakespeare were standard textbook reading for every theater student on the planet. Word of their little show was getting around—he’d used the terms “intriguing” and “potentially explosive”.
Having that letter printed out and tucked into her purse gave her strength and hope. Excitement, for the first time in what felt like forever.
And her good mood had nothing to do with the likelihood of running into Michael today. Nothing at all.
“Rachel, could you please step into my office?”
She was glad to see that the same frazzled aura had gotten to Dominic too. He looked as though he’d gratefully step off the edge of the stage into an abyss. His hair shot up in every direction, and he had a pair of women’s glasses, complete with rhinestones, tipped on the edge of his nose. If she examined under his pants, she was sure she’d find mismatched socks and underwear that hadn’t been changed in a week.
Good thing she didn’t care what went on under his pants. Now that she really examined him, his legs were too narrow and too spindly, his backside a flat landscape with nothing to hold on to. She much preferred a man with some meat there, whose legs and ass were rounded with muscle and might and—
She chomped down on the inside of her cheek. Best not to finish that thought.
“You look like crap,” she said instead. Dominic plopped into his expensive leather office chair, sending layers of paper fluttering into the air.
“Do you need me to run point on this? I could stay late tonight, get all the cues solidified, choreograph the backstage movements…”
Dominic pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m fully capable of running my own show, Rachel.”
She might have pointed to any number of errors he’d made today alone but kept her mouth shut. Dominic had a tendency to break down when criticized. He took everything she said so damn personally.
She waited quietly while he finished pushing and prodding at various parts of his face, releasing tension and looking rather like a madman.
“It’s Marvin,” he finally said. “It seems there’s been a…situation, and he’s going to have to pull out of the show. For the duration of this run.”
“What do you mean, a situation?” She was instantly wary.
“He’s in the hospital—”
“Oh, that’s awful!” Marvin, their lead actor, had never been her favorite person in the world—he had a tendency to drone on about Texas Hold’em strategies at the worst possible times. He was an amateur player and almost always wore dark glasses and a visor to emphasize his goals of playing in the World Series of Poker. But he was a good actor. A deep baritone voice and the ability to school his face into any number of emotions made him an ideal lead. Most days, she just tolerated him, but she certainly didn’t wish him bodily harm.
“What happened?”
“Oh, not what you’re thinking. He got an invite to some freeroll tournament aboard a boat, Wild West style.”
“Did he cheat? Did they break his kneecaps?”
Dominic sighed. “For a highly literate woman, you watch an awful lot of television. No—the tournament is in two weeks. Apparently, he gets seasick to the point where he can’t walk straight. He’s having inner ear surgery to try to correct the problem before the tournament begins.”
Rachel was having inner ear issues of her own. “So let me get this straight. He voluntarily gave up his lead role and walked away from this production…to play poker?”
Dominic pushed back from his desk and wheeled to the opposite end of the room, busying himself with something behind an ancient metal filing cabinet.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, it’s just—” He cleared his throat heavily and at length. “If Marvin is out, that means Michael is in.”
Rachel’s first impulse was, for the first time in her life, not to throw something across the room and into Dominic’s head. For one, he was still hiding. For another, heavy projectiles seemed wholly inadequate for the depth of her current emotions.
“No.”
Dominic poked his head out and blinked. “No?”
“You wouldn’t dare.” She was sure of it. Never mind the sudden burst of activity near the region of her heart, at odds with the sudden lack of sensation in all her limbs. It was too ludicrous to imagine.
He scooted out a little more. “It’s not a matter of daring or not. Marvin is out. Michael is the understudy. You know how it works.”
“Nope. You’re testing me. This is some kind of prank.” She firmed her lips. “You know as well as I do there’s no way he could handle it. Has he even cracked the script since he’s been here? Are we even sure he can read all the words? Every time I turn around, he
’s off flirting with the set designers or preening in front of a mirror.”
Never mind that she found herself thinking about Michael at odd moments of the day, wishing she could call and share something funny, her breath catching at the sight of any man with unruly blond hair—this was work.
This was her work.
She recalled all too well the circumstances under which Michael landed the role, her mother’s public disgrace and his oddly heroic moment. Giving him the understudy role had been Dominic’s way to appease the situation, get everything smooth and back up and running without causing any of them to lose face. It had never been in the plan to actually give him a chance. They were already so far removed from the real theater—to what depths would they descend next? Flash mobs? Interpretive dance?
Dominic pressed a button on his phone and spoke in low tones. Rachel heard him ask for Michael to be sent in. She steeled herself for what she knew was coming—the man’s grin, his hand firmly on the back of her head as he shoved her face in this.
His laughter, full and hearty and completely unchecked.
“I fail to see what’s so funny about this,” Rachel muttered as Michael fulfilled her prophecy almost to perfection. “This isn’t a game.”
Michael held up a hand while he continued his guttural noises. He was almost doubled over and beginning to wheeze. Please just let him pass out already.
“Okay,” he said, ending his tirade as quickly as it began. He looked back and forth between them. “That was fun. Are we done? Can I go now?”
Dominic shook his head soberly. “I’m afraid not.”
“Wait—are you saying you don’t want to do it?” Rachel was perplexed. Relieved but perplexed. She’d been sure he would jump on this chance to complicate her life—it was rapidly becoming a hobby of his. “You’re stepping down?”
The World is a Stage Page 16