In the beginning, in addition to being quite attractive in a polished sort of way, Elizabeth had been bright and funny and he’d enjoyed listening to her biting wit. But, if he were being honest with himself, he never felt a hundred percent comfortable in Elizabeth’s company. A part of him sensed the woman was constantly scrutinizing him, evaluating him. It was a little like being a student in a prep school, knowing he didn’t dare allow himself to slouch.
He’d never put on any airs to try to impress anyone. If anything, he was guilty of the sins of omission, of not saying what he knew might lead to a less than amicable conversation. He let her talk and at times let her believe that he agreed with her on some trivial matters close to her heart when he really didn’t agree at all.
And, most important of all, even slightly more important than never feeling that he could really just be entirely himself, was the fact that Elizabeth didn’t fill that emptiness within him.
That had been the whole original point for his giving in to Jeremy and going out with the woman to begin with, to try to fill that hole that Eva’s passing had opened up in his gut.
“If you’d like to place a call...” the metallic, female voice was saying into his ear, accompanied by the annoying throbbing noise of a phone left too long off the hook.
Stone sighed. “No, I wouldn’t,” he muttered under his breath just before he returned the landline receiver back to its cradle.
* * *
As if guarding a major secret, Ginny stepped into the family room. She grinned from ear to ear and hugged herself gleefully.
Virginia looked up from her book.
“What’s up, munchkin?” she asked, curious as to why her niece seemed to be embracing herself while that wide grin of hers all but split her face in two. “Daddy and Elizabeth just had a fight,” she announced happily.
The book about someone else’s romance instantly ceased to be of interest to her, not when real life was unfolding something far more interesting before her. Virginia tossed the paperback on the coffee table.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I heard him on the phone,” Ginny told her, then, bobbing her head, she added, “I heard her, too.”
“He had it on speaker phone?” Virginia asked, wondering why Stone would do that. Her brother was very big on privacy.
But how else could Ginny have overheard what Elizabeth was saying?
Ginny shook her head. “She was using a big voice. I could hear it coming out of Daddy’s other ear.”
Virginia paused, taking in a breath. Doing her best not to laugh. She supposed that was probably the most colorful, succinct explanation of why Ginny could hear what that snob was saying to her brother.
Virginia knew that she shouldn’t be encouraging Ginny to eavesdrop, that she should tell her it’s wrong. But they could have that heart-to-heart talk some other time. Right now, her curiosity was getting the better of her and she needed answers.
“So you know what they were arguing about?”
Ginny bobbed her head up and down like a dashboard bobble-head on a road trip. “Daddy told Elizabeth he couldn’t see her on Saturday because he had to do something for his work. He said he’d make it up to her, but she yelled, ‘Don’t bother.’” Ginny cocked her head, her small eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “What’s ‘making it up to her’ mean?” she asked.
“Doing something nice later on because you can’t do something you promised right now” was the best way Virginia knew how to explain the phrase to her niece.
It seemed to do the trick because the little girl’s eyes began to sparkle as her grin bloomed again. “You know what I think, Aunt Virginia? I think Elizabeth’s going to go away.” Ginny was practically beside herself with excitement.
Virginia nodded her head. Certainly sounded like that to her. “Looks promising,” she agreed.
“What looks promising?” Stone asked as he entered the family room. After his less than cheerful phone conversation with Elizabeth, he needed a dose of sunshine and that meant being with his daughter.
“The weather on Saturday,” Virginia said quickly before Ginny had a chance to blurt out the truth. Ginny was sharp enough, even at four, to play along.
“The weather here’s always promising,” he said, wondering why his sister would even think to say that. “You have plans?” he asked.
“Nothing special,” Virginia answered with a vague shrug. She remembered that she was supposed to be watching Ginny because Stone had told her he was seeing Elizabeth on Saturday so she used that scenario to build on. “Just taking Ginny to the park for a while maybe. I haven’t really decided yet.”
“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions,” he told her. “You’re getting the day off.” He saw the quizzical look on Virginia’s face and explained, “Ginny and I are going to pick out tile.” Realizing that this was coming as a surprise to Ginny, Stone looked at his daughter. “I know it’s boring, kiddo, but—”
He got no further as Ginny clapped her hands together as if she’d just been told she was going to live in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
“I love tile, Daddy!” she declared with gusto, fairly jumping up and down.
Stone could only stare at her. He knew she liked Danni, but he hadn’t even told her that part yet. Had she just assumed they were shopping with Danni? Otherwise, this made no sense. “Since when?”
“Since I was a little girl, Daddy. A long time ago,” she answered with a toss of her head.
Stone pressed his lips together, doing his damnedest not to laugh. “My mistake. I forgot,” he solemnly “apologized.” “By the way, Danni’s coming with us. It’s her tile we’re going to be picking out.”
Virginia rose from the sofa, more pleased than she could possibly put into words. “Looks like things are going well for you and Danni.”
“The renovations are coming along, yeah,” Stone agreed, deliberately avoiding assigning any other meaning to his sister’s words. There was no and between Danni and him. They weren’t a couple, a unit. They weren’t anything.
You sure about that? She’d been on your mind a lot for someone who wasn’t “anything,” a small, annoying voice in his head insisted on pointing out.
Because she knew that no one could talk Stone into anything or force him to do anything, Virginia let his answer ride for the time being. There was time enough to work on it—and him—later. Right now, all that mattered was that he was seeing Danni on Saturday and he wasn’t seeing Elizabeth on that day.
“I’d better go see about dinner,” she told him, then paused in the doorway, waiting for instructions. “Chinese or Italian?” she posed.
“Italian,” he responded without thinking.
“Pizza it is,” Virginia said as she went to place the order to the near-by restaurant that was on their speed dial.
Stone could have sworn he heard his sister singing, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” under her breath and wondered what had come over her.
He also knew that there would be no finding out, no questions properly answered. Virginia could be very elusive when she wanted to be.
The older he got, he decided, the more mysterious women—all women—became. He resigned himself to the fact that trying to understand them was a losing battle and always would be.
* * *
“But, Barry,” Danni lamented, “it’s Saturday.”
“I know it’s Saturday, babe. I’ve got this handy-dandy thing on my desk called a calendar so I can tell people like you I know what day of the week it is.” And then her producer’s voice grew serious. “You think I’m happy about this? Saturday’s the only day of the week I get to sleep in. Sally drags my butt to early mass every single Sunday. Like seeing me there, nodding off in the pew is going to change any plan He’s got in store for me,” he commented. “But the powers that be need this one segment of the show retaped,” he stressed. “You gotta come in.”
Barry reverted to his standard coaxing tone, the one he used de
aling with studio heads and actors alike.
“Look, sweetheart, it’ll only take an hour. Ninety minutes, tops. Then you can go do whatever it is you were going to do. At least you’re only putting a little of your day on hold. I can’t just go home and pretend nothing happened so I can get back to sleeping in once we’re done,” the man complained. He assumed that he’d convinced her and asked, “How soon can you get here?”
Danni heard her doorbell ringing.
They were here.
What was she going to tell them? she wondered, disappointment washing over her. She was looking forward to this on so many levels, not the least of which was finally picking out some of the things to keep the renovations moving along.
“Soon,” she promised.
“Okay. Oh and don’t forget to wear what you were wearing yesterday so there’s continuity. Your viewers won’t understand why you did a sudden costume change in the middle of making those cake pops.”
“Fine. Same clothes,” she parroted. “See you then,” Danni said, quickly terminating the call just as she opened the door to Stone and his daughter.
The second she did, Ginny erupted like a happy firecracker.
“Hi!” she exclaimed with exuberance as she bounced into the house. “Daddy said you need help picking out tile.”
“Hi, yourself,” Danni said, greeting the little girl. The grin on Ginny’s face was infectious. Danni could feel it spreading to her lips even as she turned toward Stone to make her apologies and explanations.
But then she got an idea.
“There’s been a slight change in plans,” she started to explain, nodding at the phone in her hand. “My producer just called.”
“You have to go in,” Stone guessed.
She nodded her head, but before she could say anything, he was absolving her of any guilt she might be feeling. What he was feeling, oddly enough, was a sense of disappointment. He tried to pinpoint exactly why that was, even as he deliberately nixed that it could be because of Danni.
“Hey, I understand,” he told her. “We can do this some other time.”
“No,” Ginny cried.
Danni took one look at the disappointed expression on Ginny’s face and did a quick recalculation, going with the idea that had just popped into her head.
“No,” she said, echoing Ginny’s protest and accompanying it with a firm nod of her head.
Now he was really confused. “No?” Stone asked, looking for enlightenment.
“No, we don’t have to do this some other time,” she told him. “We really need to get started today.” She was really tired of looking at naked, stripped-down walls when she came home at night.
He wasn’t the one who had just said she had to go into the studio this morning. She had. “But you just said—”
Danni stopped him right there. They were wasting precious time. Every moment they stood here, talking was another moment that freeway traffic to the studio wound up doubling. They had to get going now if they wanted to have a prayer of getting to the studio at a relatively decent time.
She stopped to find her purse. “I know what I said and I do have to go to the studio, but how would you like to come with me?” She was addressing her words to Ginny. “You can sit in the studio audience—you can be my studio audience,” she told her. “And once we get this one scene redone, we can go look at tile. Unless you’d rather not go to the studio,” she said as that possibility occurred to her. Driving to Burbank and back might just be too much trouble to put Stone through.
Stone never got a chance to answer. Ginny beat him to it.
“I want to go to the studio,” Ginny assured her. “Please, Daddy, can we? Can we?” she asked twice, just in case he’d missed hearing her beg the first time. Ginny grabbed his hand, all but jumping up and down, pulling on it, as if that would help persuade her father to agree.
There were very few times Stone said no when it came to his daughter. This was not one of them. Instead, he turned toward Danni.
“You don’t mind?” he asked.
“Mind?” she repeated, mystified. “Why should I mind? In case you missed it, I’m the one who just suggested it. I’ve got people in the studio audience watching what I do every day. It might as well be people I like,” she told him, then glanced down at Ginny. “The studio audience gets to sample what I make when I finish.”
There, that should seal the deal for Ginny, she thought, just in case the little girl was thinking of changing her mind.
Changing her mind was the furthest thing from Ginny’s mind right now. If anything, Ginny’s eyes were shining. “Really?”
Danni’s grin almost matched the little girl’s. “Really.”
Ginny swung around to make her final appeal to her father.
“Say yes, Daddy, say yes,” she pleaded.
Stone responded with a deep, rumbling laugh. “As if I’ve ever said no to you.”
“But you did say no to me, Daddy,” Ginny reminded him very seriously. “I asked for a pony for Christmas and you said no. Don’t you remember?”
He remembered very well. Remembered, too, feeling badly about denying the little girl anything. Even something as outlandish as her very own pony. There were times when he felt, if he looked up the term pushover in the dictionary, there would be a picture of his face in the reference area.
“That was different. I was thinking of the pony,” he teased now. “And your aunt Virginia who’d be stuck cleaning up after the pony.”
Ginny’s small face scrunched up as if she were untangling what her father had just said.
But the bottom line was that she was really interested in one thing. “Then we can go with Danni?”
Stone nodded. “We can go.”
He wasn’t sure just which felt better, being on the receiving end of Ginny’s hug or Danni’s smile. He decided that it was a tie.
Chapter Eleven
Ginny, her hand wrapped tightly around Danni’s as they walked onto the sound stage, appeared to be trying to take everything in at once.
“If your head spins any faster, it’s going to fall off,” Stone warned his daughter, amused as he watched her looking around.
“Is this where you work, Danni?” Ginny asked, no doubt overcome by the hugeness of it all.
“This is where I work.” Danni had led the father and daughter duo in via the rear stage entrance, which brought them right to the actual set.
The set, with its gleaming new appliances, was the epitome of a state-of-the-art kitchen. It was, in a nutshell, her dream kitchen. Sometimes, after the show was done for the day, Danni would stay late to make something to take home with her or to give to one of the crew members as a gift if they happened to be celebrating some special occasion.
The crew all loved her.
Rather than behave like a diva, something that some celebrities did when they became caught up in their own press releases and started believing them, Danni never put on airs. She made it a point to know the entire staff and crew by their first names.
She also made it a point to find out about their families. Her accessibility as well as her likeability made the atmosphere on the set a great deal warmer and more laid-back than most sets.
The sound of her voice as she spoke to Ginny drew out both the producer who’d initially called her this morning and the director.
The latter looked more than anxious to get this retaping over with and get back to his far-too-often-interrupted life.
“You came,” Barry said needlessly as he came out onto the set to join her. That was when he saw Stone and Ginny for the first time. “And I see you brought reinforcements with you,” he commented, looking the newcomers over rather intently.
Like most of the people on the set, he was protective of Danni.
“This is Stone Scarborough and his daughter, Ginny,” Danni said, introducing them. “This is my producer, Barry McIntyre, and my director, Ryan Talbert.” Each man nodded in turn. Barry gave her a questioning look and she knew
that if she didn’t want to walk onto a set full of speculation on Monday morning, she needed to set the record straight right now. “Stone and his daughter had just arrived at the house to take me tile hunting when you called this morning. Since you said it was only going to take up an hour—”
“Or so,” Barry pointed out. “I said an hour or so.”
“Actually, you said, ‘Ninety minutes, tops,’” Danni quoted. “I’m planning on holding you to that because I don’t think it’s right to restrict Ginny for any longer than that.”
Barry appeared a bit daunted as he glanced uncertainly over to his director.
Ryan sighed and nodded. All he could do was give it his best shot. “Let’s get going then. We’re reshooting the cake pops segment. For some reason, the tape on that didn’t come out right.”
She heard one of the cameramen chuckling. When she turned to look in the direction of the amused sound, she cocked her head as if to silently ask him why he was laughing.
The man wasn’t shy about sharing. “My guess is that Wally probably ate that part of the tape—he’s hoping you’ll have to bake another batch of cake pops. I think the guy must have eaten about twenty of them. What he didn’t eat, he took with him.” The cameraman grinned. “Said it was for his kid but I’ve got a hunch his kid is never going to see them.”
The gaffer they were talking about was the newest addition to their staff. He’d been there for a couple of months and was exceedingly friendly and talkative, but there was no denying that he really liked to eat. The man weighed about three hundred pounds and was already being referred to as a human vacuum cleaner—not always behind his back.
The term didn’t appear to offend the man. At least, he just seemed to be able to laugh it off.
“Hey, where is the human vacuum cleaner?” another cameraman asked, looking around.
“Grady, don’t call him that,” Danni said.
“Ah, he doesn’t care, Danni,” Grady protested, waving away her protest.
“The man has feelings. Trust me, he cares,” she stressed. Danni absolutely hated seeing any living thing picked on and teased, whether the act was blatant or covert.
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