Bad Attitude

by Tiffany White

  Somehow she didn’t think imagining Mitch Marlow naked was going to be the right approach to take.

  2

  MITCH MARLOW SPRAWLED in the canvas director chair, a bad hand of poker barely holding his attention.

  “You in, Mitch?” the key grip asked, after raising the pot. The makeshift poker table was set up in the clearing outside Meramec Caverns, the old James gang hideout fifty miles west of Saint Louis.

  “Yeah, I’m in,” he answered, tossing in a few coins and shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

  The movie they were making was titled Jesse, and he had the lead role, playing the famous outlaw. A lot of movies had been made about the James gang, but this was the first rock Western.

  The critics were hedging their bets. Had it not been for the fact that every vehicle starring Mitch Marlow had grossed big-time profits, they’d be predicting a disaster. And if Mitch Marlow could really sing, then the sky was the limit. The sound track would sell millions and feed the publicity for the movie. Mitch Marlow knew his name made the outcome of this crapshoot only a little more predictable, but in the movie business anything could happen.

  Since the movie was a Western, the costume department had pulled out all the stops; leather vest and chaps, cowboy boots and hat, silver spurs, and a pearl-handled revolver in the holster tied low on his thigh with a thin, rawhide strip. All the gear was aimed at setting the female audience’s hearts aflutter, but at the moment it was driving Mitch nuts. He was sunburned to a crisp.

  Why he had let that socialite brat talk him into flying into Midland, then driving to Big Bend National Park for naked cliff diving, he hadn’t the faintest idea. Peter was going to have a cow when he saw the pictures. The tabloid photographer must have been hanging from a tree to get the cover shot. How apt, he thought with a wry chuckle.

  Oh, well, Peter would get over it. He’d rant and rave for a while, but that was all, Mitch decided. He threw in another bad hand, then shrugged when the prop technician let out a loud whoop and raked in the sizable pot.

  Maybe he should call Peter and warn him, get the lecture over and done with. Mitch considered the idea while the key grip dealt a new hand. Nah … He wasn’t in the mood to deal with one of Peter’s sermons.

  The arrival of a taxi pulled his attention away from the first decent hand of cards he’d had all afternoon. The cabbie got out and went around to open the door for his passenger.

  “Who in their right mind would come out here in the middle of nowhere if they didn’t have to?” one of the crewmen wondered as he anted up his share of the pot.

  Mitch knew who it wasn’t. It wasn’t one of those bloodsuckers from the International Intruder; they were too sneaky to arrive by taxi. If he ever got his hands on one of them … A sick feeling hit him in the stomach. Maybe it was Peter, come to quote him chapter and verse, as he’d been doing for months over the phone.

  A long, low wolf whistle from the key grip drew Mitch’s gaze from a pair of aces back to the taxi—and to the woman who’d just alighted. His blue eyes collided with a mass of red curls and a dangerous abundance of curves.

  She didn’t look away when he gave her a blatantly frank perusal. Acting as rotten as he felt, he called out, “Hey, Red, if you’re the local welcoming committee, you’re late.” But the pretty woman pointedly ignored him as she paid the driver and collected her baggage.

  “Oh, goodie, she’s staying,” Mitch mumbled, tossing down one card.

  The crew members smirked and hooted; Mitch knew that the macho fraternity found him quite entertaining when he chose to be—when he wasn’t being a general pain in the rear.

  The woman with the luscious legs, wearing a short, stretchy, peg skirt, walked toward them. “Mitch Marlow?” she inquired, stopping beside him.

  He didn’t bother to look up from the fresh card he’d been dealt. “That’s me…. Want my autograph, do you now, darlin’?”

  “Only if you sign it in blood,” she answered with a pained sigh, removing her sunglasses and hanging them on her funky necklace.

  “Blood … ?” Mitch tried not to smirk but not very hard as he inquired, “PMS … right?”

  Her pose was one of unforced confidence. His question did not alter it one iota. “Is there someplace we can go and talk—alone?” she asked.

  “Hey, fellas, did you hear that? She wants to talk to me … alone.”

  There was laughter all around—more male bonding. “Yeah, her and twenty million other babes,” the prop technician said with unmasked envy; he tossed in his cards and folded.

  “Mr. Marlow … ” she said, impatience lacing the formal address.

  Mitch tilted back his cowboy hat with one knuckle, casually revealing his famous, sun-streaked locks. “Seems you have me at a bit of a disadvantage, you knowing my name when I don’t know yours. Have we met somewhere before?”

  “I’m Molly Hill,” she said, offering her hand.

  Mitch shook it. Not releasing it, he cocked his head at an angle and studied her, squinting into the glare of the sun.

  “Molly Hill … Now that’s a name one would remember. You an actress or something?”

  She pulled her hand free, making Mitch smile. “No. I’m not an actress, and we haven’t met before. I’m here representing the Ketteridge Agency. Peter Ketteridge sent me.”

  “Why?”

  “Could we go someplace and discuss it?” she reiterated, holding her ground.

  “Sure. Excuse us, will you, fellas? Come on, follow me, Red.”

  “It’s Molly.”

  “Whatever,” he said, taking her arm and marching her to his trailer.

  “How come you aren’t shooting, instead of sitting around playing poker, if the movie’s over deadline?” she asked, running to keep up with him in her high heels on the uneven ground.

  “We’re doing an outdoor scene and we have to match the time of day with the footage we shot yesterday,” Mitch answered, She had to be pretty new at her job if she didn’t know that. “Have you been with Peter’s agency for very long?”

  “Two years,” she answered when they reached the trailer. Once inside the invitingly cool trailer, he took her briefcase.

  “What’s in here, anyway? You’ve been holding it like it contains the loot from a bank job. Did Peter send you all the way out here to get me to sign some papers or something for him? Wait … I’ll bet it’s about that underwater picture, isn’t it? I told him I’m not doing it, no matter how much money they’re offering.” He stopped and gave her a once-over. “No matter how luscious the babe he sends out here to induce me to do it.”

  “I’m not a lus … a babe,” Molly said, swallowing dryly. ‘It’s work I brought along with me, if you don’t mind.” She grabbed the briefcase from him. “I thought perhaps I’d be able to do it while I’m baby-sitting you.”

  “While you’re what?”

  “Baby-sitting you,” she repeated. “That’s why the agency sent me. Hasn’t Mr. Ketteridge called you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps you should call him.”

  “Don’t worry. I intend to right now,” Mitch said, moving in on her, enjoying the look on her face as the distance between them grew whisper thin. Smiling wickedly, he reached around her for the telephone.

  “If you’re some tabloid reporter, now would be a good time to scream,” he warned, covering the mouthpiece of the phone while waiting for someone to answer.

  She didn’t move.

  “Oh, hi. Yeah… is Peter in? Tell him it’s Marlow. That’s right, and I’m not a happy camper at the moment, so he’d best get his butt on the line, pronto.”

  “Get me a cold beer from the fridge, would you, Red?” Mitch said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

  Molly carefully inched past him to the refrigerator, watching as Mitch cradled the phone against his shoulder; the modern instrument looked incongruous with his cowboy gear. She pitched him a beer from where she stood, and h
e caught it one handed, just as the phone crackled back to life.

  “Listen, Peter, your ah … practical joke … has arrived. Ha–ha. Real funny, Peter. I owe you one.” He winked at Molly.

  He opened the beer in his hand while listening to Peter; a scowl slowly replaced the look of amusement on his face.

  “It’s not a joke? Then what the hell is it?”

  A little later he slammed down the receiver and stood thoughtful for a moment, then turned his attention back to her.

  She didn’t blink under his unswerving gaze.

  “What’s the verdict?” she asked finally.

  “Verdict?”

  She nodded. “Am I leaving or staying?”

  “Oh, you’re staying, all right,” he answered, draining the last of his beer.

  Molly cleared her throat nervously. “And it’s all right with you … that I’m to baby-sit you until this film is wrapped?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave her a look that was blatantly seductive. “Just how good are you at tucking in?”

  Molly crossed her arms in front of her. “Forget it. I’m not your type.”

  “Says who?”

  “Your history.” She counted on her fingertips. “Blond-haired, blue-eyed, nymphet, IQ struggling to surpass two digits.”

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  “One assumes.’”

  “No, not the blond, blue-eyed, et cetera—the two-digit IQ.”

  “Fragile ego?” she inquired solicitously.

  He shook his head. “Nope. High IQ’s usually come with biting rejoinders I can live without.”

  “Fragile ego,” she repeated, smiling smugly.

  MITCH LOOKED as if he wanted to hit someone. Anger radiated off him in waves. A moment later he swung and the fight began.

  “I don’t think he’s doing much acting, do you?” Heather Sims, the petite, blond actress who played the love interest in the film commented as she sat beside Molly in a canvas chair and tanned herself. “Whew! All that pent-up hostility makes me hot. What Mitch Marlow needs is a real woman to relieve the pain he’s in. If you ask me he’s past ready to feel alive again.”

  The lust in the rising star’s voice spelled trouble to Molly. Heather was married to an insanely jealous superstar wrestler. Sonny and Heather Simms’s legendary marital spats during their three-year marriage had snagged even more tabloid covers than Mitch. Molly knew Heather’s wandering eye could spell disaster.

  “I thought you were married to Sonny Simms,” Molly reminded her.

  “I’m married, but I’m not dead,” Heather said, while they both enjoyed the view of Mitch dusting off the seat of his outlaw’s britches after the fight scene. He adjusted the low-slung gun belt on his hip, causing Heather to sigh. “And some temptations are just too hard to resist, you know.”

  The character actor playing opposite Mitch was rigged out in cowboy gear, too, only it didn’t look dangerously sexy on him, merely serviceable. The character actor was beefier and taller, with the right menacing look, but Mitch’s grace when he moved took away the other actor’s advantage of height and weight. Mitch was pure poetry in motion, with a natural athlete’s perfect coordination.

  There was nothing pure about the thoughts Mitch interrupted, however, when he turned to Molly and called, “Hey, Red, mind getting me another pair of leather gloves? I just busted this pair.”

  Stripping off the gloves, he tossed them to her. It took a great deal of effort on her part to resist the temptation to bring them to her nose.

  Setting aside the paperwork she’d been pretending to do, she realized she’d been right about his appeal in the flesh. While his talent awed her, his charisma made her want to follow in his wake. He was intense and full of life; hiding his pain most of the time by playing pranks, catching his fellow actors off guard. It took every ounce of self-control she owned not to stammer, gawk or faint in his presence. She was in over her head without a lifeline in sight. How could one man’s sheer, physical beauty make her so addle-brained? She had to get a grip on her feelings before she made a fool of herself and lost this opportunity. She had to remember this was the fantasy world of movie making.

  Rising to carry out Mitch’s request, she realized she’d been waiting for an excuse to take a closer look at his trailer. Last night she’d merely glimpsed it before he’d introduced her around and taken her baggage to the trailer she shared with the “best boy,” who was, in this instance, a woman. Her name was Angie, and her job was to assist the key grip with setting up the physical operations of the film, making sure everything that was supposed to happen did so.

  Inside the trailer, Molly gave her curiosity a few minutes’ free rein before beginning a search for the gloves.

  While she didn’t actually snoop into the closets or closed drawers, she did take a visual inventory of what lay in the open. A pair of expensive sunglasses that he never seemed to wear, a worn deck of poker cards, a pair of Day-Glo shorts wadded next to a stack of paperback Westerns, a skateboard … A skateboard? And … uh … a shiny packet of foil-wrapped condoms.

  She stared at them; perhaps he wasn’t suicidal, after all.

  “Take anything you need, darlin’,” Mitch said, startling her as he came up behind her, close enough for her to feel the whisper of his warm breath on her neck. She’d been so lost in her examination that she hadn’t heard him enter the trailer at all.

  “I … I was looking … ah … for your gloves,” she said, sure her face was beet red.

  “You’re in the wrong trailer.”

  “What?”

  “Extras are in the costume trailer,” he explained. “I realized you didn’t know that, after I saw you begin heading this way.”

  “Oh.”

  He nodded to the shiny foil packet, then reached around her. Opening a drawer, he tossed in the packet of condoms to join several dozen others. Grinning like a wicked highwayman about to take a lady’s virtue, he said, “It gets pretty boring making movies, with all the waiting around between scenes. One has to find ways of entertaining oneself.”

  “Is your trailer the equivalent of the costume trailer when it comes to safe sex for the whole crew, or is your ego that outsize?”

  He laughed, a rich, seductive laugh that crawled up her spine, trailing sweet suggestion. “Water balloons. I use them for water balloon fights, you goose.” There was a cool stare on his face when she turned and he added, “Mostly.”

  “Oh.” Molly was furious to find herself continually tongue-tied in his presence. Normally a glib comeback tripped off her tongue, but then, normally she didn’t find herself mere inches from the country’s leading heartthrob, who also just happened to star in her own private fantasies.

  “Listen, since you’re here and everything, would you mind doing me one more favor?” Mitch asked, pulling off his leather vest and beginning to unbutton his dusty chambray shirt.

  “I … ah … ”

  When he pulled the shirt from his pants and shrugged completely free of it, she closed her eyes and stood rooted to the spot, feeling for all the world like some nineteenth-century spinster.

  She took a quick breath of surprise when she felt him reach around her again for something in the drawer, but her eyes flew wide open at his next words. “Here, this lubricant might help.”

  Molly looked down, to see his long, slender fingers wrapped around a bottle of green herbal lotion. “My back,” he indicated, turning it to her, “feels like something out of a packet of Crispy Critters. Would you mind rubbing some of this on it for me?”

  “Oh … okay,” she stammered, taking the bottle from him.

  “I’ll just sit down on the edge of the bed, so it will be easier for you to reach,” he offered. The bed groaned under his weight, echoing her own discomfort at being confronted by the wide expanse of naked, sinewy flesh.

  Yeah, sitting down was good, she thought, fearing she might go completely weak-kneed, once she began touchin
g his bare skin.

  Opening the bottle, she squeezed some of the globby contents onto her palm and tentatively raised her hand to his bare back. Taking a deep breath, she touched his feverish skin, her fingers trembling slightly.

  “Ahh … ” Mitch sighed as she began massaging the green goo into his back until it turned clear and disappeared.

  “It smells like lime Jell-O,” she noted, letting her hands follow the contours of his back; it had a very masculine, triangular shape.

  “Feel free to lick anytime.”

  She didn’t reply, but continued to stroke the ointment onto his back, just for the feel of his skin beneath her touch. It was impossible to touch, to press skin to skin and remain remote, as she’d promised herself she would. Finally realizing what she was doing, she stopped.

  “All done?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Yes.” All done in was more like it, she thought, putting the lid back on the bottle.

  “Let me give you some advice, Red. Never go cliff diving naked, without protection.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You get burned everywhere.”

  “Including the press,” Molly commented dryly.

  “Touché,” Mitch said, tossing the lotion back into the still open drawer. “I guess ol’ Peter was plenty steamed when he saw the pictures that landed me on the cover of the supermarket tabloid, huh?”

  “Like a lobster.”

  “Oh, well, at least there was some benefit to it, as things turned out.”

  “There was?”

  “Sure. I got me a baby-sitter. Gosh, I haven’t had one of those since I was—oh, say eleven or so. Her name was Monica and she taught me how to—”

  “I don’t think I want to know,” Molly said, rolling her eyes heavenward.

  He told her, anyway. “Skateboard.” He nodded to the one leaning in the corner of the trailer. “What did you think she taught me, goose?”