Harlequin E Contemporary Romance Box Set Volume 3: Falling from the SkyMaid to LoveWhen the Lights Go DownStart Me Up

by Sarina Bowen

  Having never really considered the handiness of rear exits, she discovered they could be tremendously convenient. She jogged down the alley and rounded the corner.

  Since she didn’t want to spend her days ducking out the back of the building, Maxie decided to take advantage of another very convenient fact.

  In the world of the theater, there was never any shortage of weird tasks. She could keep herself legitimately occupied and hard to find on a hunt for new stock. She’d heard a rumor that one of the bigger local companies was considering doing a Romeo and Juliet set in sixteenth-century Japan, during the influx of European traders and Jesuits from Portugal. Picking up that show would be another coup for her company, well worth the time she would spend on research, even if only based on a rumor. And if she landed that play, too, she could give Marcus a leg up to Stage Manager, just like she’d done for Ruben. He deserved it and she wanted it for him badly enough to underbid the competition if that’s what it took.

  But for the immediate future, as far as Nick Drake was concerned, Maxie had vanished.

  She didn’t know if he would go so far as to ring her doorbell—the warehouse district wasn’t exactly near Nick’s Gold Coast hood—but she found herself leaving out the back, heading down the alley and feeling ridiculously as if she was imitating a spy in her dodgy actions.

  Between work and time spent with her sisters, staying overnight to give the new parents a break by taking over some of the late-night feedings, she managed to duck Nick for several days running, although he never stopped calling her a couple times a day.

  Maxie wiped baby puke off her shoulder, read up on the Azuchi-Momoyama period, and told herself to suck it up and deal. No one wanted to listen to her whining, so she kept the details private, figuring she’d give herself some time to figure out the reasons for her hesitation.

  Two afternoons later, in a quiet moment at Sarah’s, she gave up.

  Baby Eliza was out cold, drooling in the middle of the big circular dog bed that Sarah had decided made the perfect bassinet. And Maxie just couldn’t take it anymore. Not talking to Nick wasn’t helping her erase his presence from her frigging brain, so she might as well bitch about him. She came out swinging, still mad about their last, and first, date.

  “I looked like a waiter. I sounded like an idiot. And he liked it!” Her shout shrank to a whisper when Sarah gave her an exasperated look. Sleeping babies were not to be woken.

  Curling her feet beneath her at the far end of the sofa, Sarah blew across the surface of her tea and contradicted her.

  “You were in Armani. I’m sure no one mistook you for the help.”

  “At least I could have laughed that off. I wanted to tear my eyes out with boredom. The only person there who didn’t fade into the background was a gold digger on an old man’s arm. At least she didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of her dress.” She flushed with guilt, remembering how she’d made fun of the woman. It had felt like sarcastic commentary upon her own companions in the moment, while she was mocking their snobbery, but in retrospect she just felt mean.

  “Did Nick ask you to play it down? Dress more conservatively?” Sarah sounded surprised.

  “Yes.” Even as she answered, a little voice in the back of her head was pointing out that that wasn’t actually true. “Well, not exactly.”

  He had poked a little fun at her inclination to play dress-up, but he hadn’t said a word about what she should wear. Do you have anything in that costume closet you call a wardrobe that’ll suit a cocktail party at Cité? If she’d decided that dressing like a toreador suited a cocktail party at Cité, Nick might have shaken his head, but she had no evidence that he would have refused to take her.

  He might have gritted his teeth, tossed her bullfighting cape over one arm and offered her the other.

  “So, you decided to dress and act like a Lincoln Park Trixie. Blame yourself if you didn’t enjoy it.”

  Maxie flopped down on the opposite end of the sofa with a wail.

  “But I could tell how much he liked it!” She hugged a pillow to her chest. This was the part that hurt. “I wasn’t planning on acting like that. It was just a costume, like anything else I’d wear. I thought it might be fun to dress up to fit in and then say absolutely shocking things all evening, like ‘I’m so sorry we have to leave early, but my other lover doesn’t like it when I come home too late.’ You know, fun stuff.”

  “Right. Fun stuff.” Sarah’s idea of fun involved high-stakes poker tournaments or down-and-dirty salsa dancing, but she nodded encouragingly.

  “But when he picked me up, I went down to his car—his car with a driver, for Pete’s sake!—and it was like he’d never seen me before. He just couldn’t shut up about my outfit. ‘Oh, Maxie, you look so beautiful.’ ‘You’re absolutely stunning, Maxie.’”

  “Yeah, I hate it when gorgeous men can’t stop complimenting me.”

  “It made me feel like I’ve been a disappointment every other time he’s seen me. And I’ve been naked in front of this guy. It was like he was wondering why I hadn’t been dressing like that the whole time. And he was so damn happy when I went along with it. Played the role.” She rested her chin on the edge of the cushion. Sarah had stopped teasing her, sympathy in her eyes. “He almost tripped over himself, introducing me to every other boring couple in the room.”

  “Oh, Maxie.”

  “And we were just like the rest of them. Polite, proper, lifeless.” She closed her eyes and guilt surged in her throat. Good manners made her take it back. “Everyone was very nice. I’m sure they’re lovely people.” She tucked the pillow under her knees and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “We were the zombies. The pod people.”

  “Night of the Living Dead.”

  “Or the one with Donald Sutherland.”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  “Right.”

  “But honey—” Sarah’s voice was gentle “—you can’t be mad at Nick for being attracted to you just because you don’t like what you were wearing.”

  “Oh, he’s been attracted to me before. Attracted right on top of a concrete floor.” Her laughter was bitter and short-lived. Her eyes ached and she blinked again and again. “But this was the first time it didn’t bother him that he wanted me. I could tell.”

  Her sister reached her arm across the back of the sofa and squeezed her hand.

  “I’m sorry he made you feel bad, baby. I love you. We all do. And, maybe…just possibly, mind you…you’re projecting a bit because you felt so out of place?”

  “It wasn’t just me,” she argued. “I don’t belong in that crowd. Not even a little.” Maxie knew what came next. She’d grown used to hearing the chorus of reassurances from family members during the emotional years of her adolescence. “And I know: not everybody’s comfortable with being different, and if he can’t see how special I am, then it’s his loss, not mine,” she recited in singsong chant. “I gotta tell you, Sarah. That didn’t make me feel better even when I was crying because no one asked me to homecoming.”

  “I’m just saying, maybe Damian burned you—”

  “Fuck, no. He’s got nothing to do with this.” Any mention of the jerk who’d played her for a fool in college was getting shut down immediately.

  Sarah glared at her for a moment. “Fine. Then stop being such a punk.”

  Okay. Comfort time was apparently over.

  “Excuse me?” What she really meant was piss off, and you could hear it.

  “Stop being a punk.” Sarah tossed back the dregs of her tea, swung her legs off the couch and strode over to the open kitchen area. “You’re right. You’re not in high school anymore. So why are you acting like a pouty teenager?”

  “Thanks for your sympathy and understanding.” She jumped up, too, righteous anger vibrating in her bones. “I’m sorry if I’ve taken up too much of your time.”

  “Oh, sit down. You don’t fool me with your ‘I’m outraged’ act. And Mom brought over some of her
brownies. You won’t get one if you leave now.”

  Irritation, more at being called out than anything else, warred with desire. It wasn’t really a fair fight. She sat down. “You always did fight dirty.” Sarah knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere without that brownie.

  “Nuh-uh. Addy’s the dirty fighter. I’m the peacemaker.”

  “You broke our brother’s nose with a softball.”

  Sarah had retrieved the plate of gooey, fudgy brownies from the kitchen, but she lifted it out of her shorter sister’s reach with a scowl. Maxie swung for it like cat batting at a toy on a string. “That was my husband,” Sarah said. “I was just cheering him on. Softball is a full-contact sport.”

  “I wasn’t talking about last summer. I meant when we were kids.”

  “Oh.” Sarah flashed a grin and allowed Maxie to pluck a brownie off the plate before doing the same. “Yeah, that was me. But he was crowding the plate. So I brushed him back a little.”

  “You winged a nine-inch softball at his face.”

  “Taught him to respect the pitcher, didn’t it?” She wiggled her eyebrows and popped the brownie in her mouth before setting the plate down on the coffee table and sinking back into the couch with a little sigh. “Listen, this hiding out and avoiding his phone calls isn’t like you, Maxie. You are a full-contact sport, girl. Plus, it sounds like the man doesn’t even know that you’re having this existential crisis. So why aren’t you locking him in your office and thrashing it out with him?”

  Good question.

  As much as Sarah’s description of her made her sound like a linebacker, Maxie had to admit that she was right. She chewed slowly. Chocolate was good for thinking. If she were unhappy with a friend or a sibling or a coworker, her first instinct would be to drag it all out in the open and jump up and down on the problem until she managed to pound it into a more satisfactory form. So why the hesitation?

  “I’m not myself around him,” she admitted at last. “And I don’t like it. It’s like walking on a waterbed. I don’t ever feel like I have my feet under me.”

  “You’ve played every other role, kiddo. Why not try faking a little confidence this time around? I don’t think you’ll be pretending for long.”

  “That’s the one thing I don’t usually have to fake.”

  “I know you’re used to being the commander in chief, but the only thing you can control here is how you choose to act.”

  Small creaking whimpers—huh, she actually sounds like a puppy—rose from the dog bed. Time to play auntie. She unfolded herself from the couch and strolled over, stopping on her way to pet the ginger cat draped over the back of the oversized couch.

  Tucking the tiny bundle of grumpy, squinting whininess in the crook of her arm, she walked back and forth across the wide-open space of the loft. She whispered to her niece, “Your mom is almost always right.” Eliza spit up and drool ran down her chin. “I know. It makes me want to puke, too.”

  “Stop corrupting the child,” Sarah said with a smile. “And no, you should not stage an off-season nativity play just because you’re suddenly swimming in infants. I know the way you think. She’s not a prop.”

  “Why do they all keep telling me that?” She wiped a corner of the pursed mouth with her thumb. “I know you’re not a prop. You’re the baby Jesus. C’mon. I’ll get you a camel.”

  Eliza was starting to look interested in the possibilities when Sarah demanded the return of her child. Maxie pressed a kiss to the baby’s fuzzy scalp before handing her over, planting a second kiss to the top of her sister’s head. She snagged a second brownie and slung her bag over her shoulder. Sarah’s parting shot chased her to the door.

  “Call him, Maxie. Or I’ll tell your niece that her aunt’s a punk.”

  See. She did too fight dirty.

  “I got a rep to protect,” she muttered and then ended up humming the medley of hits from Grease for the next five hours. And she did call him, sort of.

  She chickened out the first time, hitting End Call before the first ring as she strode down the cracked sidewalk through the jailhouse shadows of the overhead El-train tracks. She’d been ducking his calls for days and wasn’t quite ready for an actual conversation. Voice mail. That’s what she needed.

  Because of Caller ID, she couldn’t call hoping to get voice mail and hang up if Nick answered instead. So she had to wait until late that night to call his company’s general contact number and work her way through an entire phone tree of options to get to corporate voice mail, which she prayed wasn’t forwarded to his cell phone after hours.

  It wasn’t. Thank god. She left him a brief message suggesting they get together soon and then got back to work. She called her intern, Clarissa, to coordinate the first full-cast roundtable read-through of Heitman’s show for the next night. She’d turned over the remaining run of Oz to Ruben, and Marcus was managing his own show from start to finish for the first time, so she reminded him one last time that she was on call for support twenty-four/seven, whatever he needed.

  Things were looking better for the Heitman show, thank god. The genius playwright had been reined in, the director had cast his people without any drama and the excitement of a powerhouse new show coming together vibrated in her bones.

  It was kind of a turn-on.

  The next night everyone gathered in the conference room Clarissa had rented at a downtown hotel for the meeting. The theater where they’d be staging the play wouldn’t be available for a month, when the show that was currently running there seven days a week shut down. After this read-through, rehearsals would take place with smaller groups, focusing on specific scenes and story arcs until the play had come more fully together. Having learned in the past that a full actor was a happy actor, she had arrived at the hotel with platters of deli sandwiches and cases of soda.

  “It’s gonna be a bumpy night, boys,” she said under her breath as she looked around the enormous table. First read-throughs were always chaotic, as actors tried to find their way into the characters whose skins they would inhabit for weeks to come.

  She sat in the corner, casting a professional eye on her people and making notes about clothing sizes, personalities, lighting or sound cues suggested by Heitman, and ideas for necessary props. Everything was going smoothly. Almost too smoothly.

  That always worried her.

  Shortly before the first scheduled break, her phone lit up with Marcus’s text.

  911.

  Ducking out into the hall, she called him immediately.

  “You’re not gonna believe this.” Marcus’s voice was tight, his words clipped off sharply.

  “What’s the damage?”

  “She’s changed her mind. Sixteenth-century Japan is out. She wants to set the show in Chicago, using gang conflicts as the background.”

  “Okay. Sort of a West Side Story rip-off, but you can handle the change.” She withheld judgment, waiting to hear what he had to say next, while consigning all her recently acquired Japanese memorabilia and costumes to the back of the warehouse. She’d find a use for them eventually.

  “Let’s ignore the fact that a white woman from California who’s done no research has no business appropriating a complicated racial/class issue to make her play ‘gritty.’” Maxie heard the air quotes, no problem. “I’m also pretty sure she hired me because I’m black.”

  “Oh, Marcus. I’m so sorry.” Damn. She’d allowed her friend and employee to become another casualty of her connection with Nick Drake. She was so excited about Smith’s play and mixed up about her feelings for Nick that she wasn’t giving Marcus the support he needed in his first big job with sole responsibility for a production.

  “Like I’m gonna be her touchstone on all issues related to blackness. Shit. Just because I’m an African-American from Chicago doesn’t mean I have insider info on the gang scene. I grew up in Hyde Park. I went to Latin.”

  “Listen, you want off the job, I’ll make it happen. Ruben can take over and you can finish Oz. I know you
wanted this show to be your baby, start to finish, but if it’s going to be a nightmare—”

  “Ah, screw it. Ruben’s Latino. God knows what she’ll say to him. Probably change the setting to an immigration detention center. Never mind that he’s from Seattle. Maybe I can minimize some of the damage. But if I need backup with this woman…”

  “In a heartbeat. I’m there.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  “Drinks on me when this one’s over?”

  “I’ll hold you to that. And no cheap grandpa beer this time.”

  She laughed. Bless the Chicago hipsters, who had made buying drinks for people a cheaper endeavor with their obsession with the love their grandfather’s generation had for cheap, shitty beers. She could usually get away with two-dollar pints when rewarding theater people. “Top shelf all the way, my friend.”

  By the fifteen-minute break at the end of the first read-through, she’d already spotted the disastrous backstage romance that would form between two of the actors, headed off an argument over the proper condiments for a Chicago hot dog, and used all her spare packs of Kleenex tissues to comfort a teary-eyed college student whose eventual confession made her send Clarissa to the nearest drugstore for a pregnancy test.

  “Good woman,” she said when her intern tracked her down in the hall outside the conference room and handed over the brown paper bag with aplomb. And a lifted eyebrow. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s not for me. It’s for Miss Weepy Pants, currently hiding in the bathroom.”

  “Great. Last thing this production needs is more hormones.”

  She punched her thumb through the tab at the end of the box and tugged out the instructions. Sounded easy enough. “Ha. I’m as cool as a fucking cucumber. Nothing caught on fire and no one broke any laws. Yet. I’m almost tempted to pull a fire alarm myself, just so we don’t jinx ourselves. How much trouble could we get in for evacuating an entire hotel, do you think?”

  Clarissa drew her eyebrows in and bit her lip, shaking her head frantically.

  “A considerable amount, I would imagine.” The smooth voice came from behind her.