“Ahh. And a director who improvises has no problem with method actors?”
“We all have to make compromises in this business,” Sarina said. “Sometimes you even agree to work with people you detest because the part is right. And in this case, for Jay, it was worth compromising to get an actor of Garth’s caliber.”
When she smiled adoringly at her husband, Carly smiled, too. But she already had a sinking feeling that hanging around while Garth “developed his character” would prove nothing but a waste of time.
CARLY EVENTUALLY ESCAPED from Garth Richards’s questioning and got back to the house—hot, depressed about her failure to learn anything from the stars and dying for a shower.
But when she neared the top of the stairs she could hear the shower was occupied. The water was running, and above its gurgle Nick was singing—a cowboy song, no less. Being put in charge of the pony rides had apparently taken him back to his childhood summers on that ranch.
She stood listening to him, her mood improving slightly. Attila wasn’t the only one who responded to Nick’s deep voice. And he even sang on key.
When he stopped and turned off the water, she hurried into her own room. If she looked the way she felt, she didn’t want him seeing her. Oh, she knew she shouldn’t give a darn about how she looked to her business partner. But she couldn’t help the fact that she did.
After finding some clean underwear, shorts and a top, she waited until he’d had time to get out of the bathroom. But she didn’t wait quite long enough.
She opened her. door when he was only halfway down the hall to his room—and only half dressed.
“Holy smokes!” he said, stopping in his tracks. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on people?”
“I wasn’t sneaking up,” she protested, trying not to stare at his bare chest. But those hard muscles were impossible to ignore. And he had the sexiest dark chest hair—not too much or too little, but just right.
She made herself look down, which turned out to be a bad move. He hadn’t yet gotten around to zipping his jeans. When she forced her gaze all the way to the floor, she discovered that even his bare feet were sexy.
“You just get back from your afternoon with Royce?”
She met his gaze again, and it suddenly dawned on her that he was jealous. The realization started her blood racing. She had absolutely no romantic interest in Royce Chalmers, but Nick couldn’t know that. And if he was jealous, it meant…
Oh, rats, it was too darn hot up here to think what it meant. Except that maybe she’d better wait until later to tell him she’d confided in Royce about the sabotage.
“You were gone for hours, you know.”
“Yes, I know. But I wasn’t with Royce much of the time. I…oh, I’ve got to tell you what happened, but can it wait until after I have a shower?”
Nick grinned. “Too bad you weren’t ten minutes earlier. We could have saved on water.”
“Very funny,” she said, marching past him and doing her best to look cool. But it was awfully hard to manage when the thought of showering with him had started her insides positively steaming.
As Carly closed the bathroom door, Nick mentally kicked himself. What the hell was the matter with him? The woman wasn’t interested. At least, if she was, she was showing no intention of doing anything about it. So why the hell was he making juvenile insinuations?
He’d never acted like a lovesick adolescent around any other woman. At least, not since he’d actually been a lovesick adolescent So why was he doing it with Carly? Maybe he did find her attractive, but…
“Hell,” he muttered. “Find her attractive?” Her queen-of-understatement routine must have rubbed off on him. The truth was that, somewhere along the way, he’d developed an almost constant craving for her.
Regardless of that, he was damn well going to stop being an idiot around her. Tugging on a T-shirt, he headed downstairs—where there wouldn’t be the sound of the shower to make him imagine her naked.
“Treat!” Crackers demanded the moment he walked into the kitchen.
He got some sunflower seeds from the cupboard and put them in a bowl. Then, since either Harpo or Groucho or Chico—Zeppo was the only one he had a positive ID on—was panting a mile a minute, he put down fresh water.
By the time he got around to getting the jug of iced tea and a beer out of the fridge, Carly had appeared.
Her hair was wet and hanging loose. It would have given her that innocent look she sometimes had except for the fact she was wearing another pair of shorts that would stop traffic and a sleeveless shirt he hoped she’d button a little higher if old Royce showed up again.
That was something else that never happened to him with other women. He wasn’t the jealous type, but his blood boiled every time he saw the way Royce looked at her.
She smiled, and he erased all thoughts of the cameraman from his mind.
“I could use about a dozen ice cubes in that tea,” she said.
He dug a couple out from the freezer, then followed her onto the porch. The Marx brothers immediately found shady spots on the lawn and got busy sleeping. Dogs, he’d discovered, were big sleepers.
“So?” he said after taking a swig of beer. “Did you meet Sarina and Garth?”
“Oh, Nick, I not only met them, I spent the entire afternoon with them. But it did us no good at all.”
He listened as she proceeded to tell him the whole story.
“And after all that time,” she concluded, “I have no more idea whether they’re really our saboteurs than I did last night. It was like I got handed an opportunity on a platter and completely blew it.”
“No, you didn’t blow it. In fact, it sounds as if you did everything right. When you thought Attila might be in danger, you went straight to check on him. And when you had the chance to spend time with Garth and Sarina, you grabbed it.”
“But I didn’t learn anything.”
“Well, you could hardly expect they’d say, ‘You know, we hate Jay so much that we’re trying to ruin this movie.’”
“No, of course not. But when I asked them leading questions, I couldn’t tell whether their answers were the truth or lies.”
“Hey, they’re actors. They make their living by being convincing liars. So if it is them…”
“Yes?”
He shook his head. “It makes things a little tricky, that’s all.”
“So what do we do?”
“Wait and watch. And if there are any more incidents, we try to find out who was behind them.”
“You think there might not be any more?”
“It’s possible.” He finished off his beer, then sat watching her while she mulled that over.
She didn’t look convinced there was even a chance, which probably meant her detective instincts were pretty good. Unless their saboteur decided he was at risk of getting caught, why would he stop?
“There’s something else I have to tell you,” she said at last. “I told Royce that the ‘jinx’ was actually someone trying to sabotage the movie. And that Sarina and Garth are our prime suspects.”
“I thought we weren’t going to tell anyone,” Nick said, trying to keep his annoyance from showing. He didn’t like the fact that he was jealous of Royce, and he sure as hell didn’t want Carly to realize he was.
“Well, when I got so upset about the roast, he knew something was up. And when he asked me what, I couldn’t think of any way to avoid telling him.
“But what about your afternoon?” she added quickly. “What did you do after the boys had their pony ride?”
“Nothing. Just came back and had my shower.”
“No, I mean, they couldn’t have been riding for all that time, so…”
“Yeah, they were. They were having a ball, and I hadn’t seen you come back to the house, so I just let them keep at it. We went down to the camp, and their mothers took pictures of them on the ponies. Then I let them ride along the perimeter of the woods.”
He pa
used, noticing Carly’s worried expression. “What? I didn’t let them gallop the ponies or anything. Hell, they could hardly stay in the saddles, let alone go faster than a walk.”
“No, I knew you’d make sure the ponies were fine. But what about Kyle and Brock? How did they seem when they dismounted?”
“Oh, a little weak in the knees, but that never lasts. I could tell they’re really into the acting stuff, though. When they headed back to the camp, they were trying to outdo each other walking bowlegged.”
“Nick, if you let them stay on those ponies the entire afternoon, there wasn’t any trying involved. They’d practically never ridden before and…Oh, Lord, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Tomorrow, when Jay wants to shoot them running from Attila, they’re going to be so stiff and sore they’ll barely be able to walk.”
“Oh, come on, don’t you think you’re exaggerating? More than a little? It’s not as if Paint and Brush are big workhorses. They’re just little ponies.”
“Yes, but in case you didn’t notice, Kyle and Brock are just little boys.”
“DID YOU HEAR ALL the activity in the camp this morning?” Carly asked over breakfast. “I mean, how early people were up and around?”
“Yeah,” Nick said between bites of toast.
“They were serious about starting to set up at dawn.”
When he merely nodded, she poured herself more coffee, then topped up his mug without bothering to ask whether or not he wanted a refill. Crackers was being more talkative than Nick, and since her questions were barely getting grunts in reply, it didn’t seem worth the effort of speaking.
She looked across the table and let her eyes linger on her business partner, certain there was no risk he’d catch her watching him this time. Not when he’d been avoiding eye contact since the moment he’d walked into the kitchen.
Yesterday, she’d never dreamed he’d still be upset with her this morning, but he obviously was. And she was certain he’d slept late solely to avoid her. The man really did not take well to criticism. And it had hardly even been criticism. She’d merely pointed out that he’d made an error in judgment by letting the boys ride for so long. It wasn’t as if she’d accused him of being a deranged killer or something.
Nevertheless, it had been enough to make him decide he’d rather go for a walk than continue sitting on the porch with her. And when he’d come back to the house, it had only been to tell her that some crew member he’d been talking to had invited him to have dinner at the camp.
That was the last she’d seen of him. When he hadn’t been back by midnight, she’d simply gone to bed.
Of course, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep until she’d heard him come in. And after that, she’d still lain awake forever, unable to stop thinking about his jealousy of Royce. Finally she’d told herself that, given their situation, whatever his jealousy said about his feelings toward her was irrelevant. But even then, she’d found it hard to get to sleep.
From here on in, she was going to have to do a lot more sleeping and a lot less lying awake thinking about Nick Montgomery. If she didn’t, she’d be a zombie long before he went back to Edmonton.
He glanced at his watch, then said, “Okay, let’s get this show on the road. Otherwise, by the time we feed Attila, we’ll be late.”
“We don’t have to feed him. I asked Dylan to come a bit early this morning and give him breakfast first thing. And I’ve already packed a cooler full of treats in case we need them to make him run. So all there’s left to do is take him to the shoot site—just put him on his chain and go.”
“Ahh. And once he’s out of his field, if he wants to head in one direction and we want to go in another, who wins?”
She gave him a look that said she didn’t find the question amusing. “He’s a trained bear, remember? So he’d walk nicely even if he wasn’t on a chain. But Gus felt that when we were on a job with him we should always use one—to make the cast and crew feel safer.”
“Because nobody would ever realize that walking a six-hundred-pound bear on a chain is like walking a rottweiler on a piece of string?”
Carly pushed herself away from the table, thinking she’d rather Nick had stuck to his grunts than switched into his dry sense of humor mode. She was darned worried about whether or not Attila was going to perform well this morning, and what Nick considered witty was doing nothing to alleviate her anxiety.
“Bye-bye,” Crackers said when she took Attila’s collar and chain off the peg.
“Bye-bye, Crackers. You talk to the Marx brothers while we’re gone.”
Leaving the dogs sulking because they couldn’t come along, she and Nick headed down to Attila’s field, where Jonathan was just arriving to take over from the night-shift boy.
After chatting with them for a minute, she and Nick went into the field. When she put Attila’s collar and chain on him, Nick was positively smirking. She didn’t say a word about it, though, because at least his mood seemed to have improved. And the last thing she wanted to do was de-improve it again just before he had to work with Attila.
The road Jay’s people had cut through the woods was wide enough that she and Nick could walk side by side. And as she’d predicted, Attila ambled along behind them like a perfect lamb. It was only when they were nearing the shoot site that he started to get a little frisky.
“Do we have a problem?” Nick asked anxiously.
“No, he always gets excited when he realizes he’ll be working in front of a camera. He likes to be the center of attention.”
One of the assistant cameramen wandered out of the clearing and nodded to them. “You’re a little early. They’re still lighting the bear’s stand-in, but it shouldn’t take much longer.”
A few more steps and most of the site became visible through the trees. There were klieg lights set up all around the perimeter, portable generators to provide power, three cameras on large dollies and a small horde of crew members—most of whom were near Chef Raffaello’s snack table, drinking coffee.
“Those people all get paid for standing around doing nothing?” Nick said.
“That’s the way shoots work. It’s always hurry up and wait.”
Attila made a funny little snorting noise, stopped walking and raised up on his hind legs.
“Why’s he doing that?” Nick asked.
“He just wants a better look.”
“You’re sure he’s not thinking about misbehaving? I mean, what if he decides to take a run at someone or something?”
“Nick, he’s never done anything like that. Besides, bears don’t rear up when they’re going to attack. They lower their heads and flatten their ears back.”
“Well, even so, maybe you’d better give me the chain, just in case.”
She handed it over, congratulating herself on keeping quiet again. But Nick’s playing macho man was awfully silly. He knew as well as she did that, regardless of who was holding the chain, if Attila decided to take off, he’d be gone. Not that he ever would.
He dropped back down onto all fours, and before she realized anything was wrong he gave such a threatening snort that she jumped. Then, in a flash, he lowered his head, flattened his ears, and charged toward the clearing—yanking Nick completely off his feet and dragging him a few yards before he let go of the chain.
“Attila, stop!” she shouted, racing after him in utter horror.
By the time she reached the clearing, it was in pandemonium. Some of the crew were running for their lives, others were trying to climb trees. And Attila was attacking some sort of big furry monster at the far end of the clearing.
“Attila, off!” she shouted.
“Get him under control!” Jay was screaming. “Get him under control!”
Her heart in her throat, she slowly and cautiously crossed the clearing. Attila had totally flattened his victim, and when she realized it wasn’t anything alive—only some bearskins and pieces of lumber— she offered up a prayer of thanks.
Now that a
ll the pieces were lying motionless, Attila simply poked at the skins a few times with his snout, then turned and looked at her.
“Okay, boy,” she murmured. “It’s okay. Come.”
As gentle as a lamb again, he walked over to her. “Good boy.” She stroked his nose. “Good boy. Sit.”
“What the hell was that about?” Nick whispered, materializing beside her.
“Oh, Lord, you’re not hurt, are you?”
“No, but both Jay and Goodie look apoplectic. What the hell went wrong?”
“That was the problem.” She waved her hand toward the things on the ground. “Those bearskins. It doesn’t matter how well they’re cured. There’s always some scent of the bear left. So Attila smelled it and thought it was real.”
“And instinctively attacked it.”
She nodded. “When they were live bears, they must have been males.”
“Dammit,” Nick muttered. “All that worrying about him not running on command when what we should have been worrying about was him not stopping on command.”
He looked over to where Jay was cringing behind a tree and demanded, “What the hell was this pile of rubble?”
“Our stand-in for Attila,” the director said shakily.
“Well, why didn’t you tell us you were planning on using bearskins? He thought they were a live bear. So, look, we’re going to take him into the woods, where he can’t see what’s going on, and you have someone get those things the hell away from here.”
Nick reached down to where the end of the chain was lying and picked it up—which Carly realized would have struck her as funny under different circumstances. After all, everyone on the site had just seen how effective it was.
But as things stood, she felt a whole lot more like crying than laughing.
“You just wait a minute,” Jay said from behind the cover of his tree. “This is impossible. I’m not working with a killer bear.”
“He’s not a killer,” she protested, growing closer to tears by the second. “If you hadn’t used those stupid bearskins, he’d have been just fine.”
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