Starstruck

by Anne McAllister

  “He was engaged?” Liv knew she was staring but she couldn’t help it.

  “No, but not because our father didn’t try. He had the girl all picked out. Daughter of a lawyer he knew. In the days of arranged marriages my father would have known no equal. But he met his match in Joe.” She shook her head in wry amusement, her eyes remembering. “ ‘If I want a prison sentence, I’ll commit a crime,’ Joe told him when dad announced that Joe ought to marry Patsy. There was no compromise, no middle ground. Neither gave an inch. And after he left home to be an actor—something else Dad didn’t like—Joe never came back.”

  “Never?”

  “Three times in eighteen years. And then he stayed at a motel. He took my parents out, showed them he was a material success—which was his way of telling dad he’d made it on his own—and that was that.” Ellie shrugged. “Joe is a stubborn man. Too stubborn for his own good.” She smiled slightly, and Liv’s heart quickened when she saw the resemblance to Joe in that smile. “Or he was,” Ellie amended, “until he met you.”

  “Don’t start that again,” Liv protested, but Ellie just smiled like a fairy godmother about to grant wishes that Liv wouldn’t even admit to because they were so hopeless and absurd.

  “We’ll see,” Ellie said archly. “We’ll see.” She got to her feet and picked up the towel, folding it under her arm. “The muse beckons,” she said. “I think I’ll go type for a while, see if Joe’s right about my sticking to fiction!”

  Probably he was, Liv mused as she sat in the lengthening shadows and mulled over what Ellie had said. It was insane to get her hopes up, to believe it when Ellie told her that Joe’s relationship with her seemed different than the ones he’d had with other women. But it had the effect at least of making her see him in a different light. Now, knowing about his father, she could impute another motive to his having a harem than pure undiluted hedonism. Now she could see it as a rebellious reaction to a father who had tried to control his life. She sat watching him as he dried off briskly, his body silhouetted against the flaming orange of the sky, and she was overwhelmed by the surge of affection that washed over her.

  All week the tension between them had been tautening. Emotionally as well as physically the bonds linking them grew stronger. Now even their gazes, their accidental touches, their stilted conversations were like currents of electricity. Her awareness of him, especially since the night he had kissed her in the hall, had become a physical, almost tangible thing. Shivers in her knees, goose bumps on her arms, tiny hairs that stood at attention on the nape of her neck, all presaged Joe’s entrance into a room. His gaze made her hot, his voice made her cold, and his complete domination of her mind had made her drive past the Elvehjem Art Museum four times before she remembered that that was where the recital was that she was supposed to be covering for the paper.

  She saw him sling the towel around his neck and begin walking toward her, his arm around Ben’s shoulder as they came. Like father and son, she thought, and knew in a moment of stark truthfulness that she wished it were so. She wished that Joe Harrington were the father of her children, that she could have his children, that he would be her husband and she would be his wife.

  Oh how I love him, she thought as he loomed ever closer, and her knuckles whitened as her fingers clasped her knees.

  “Your mother’s a foolish woman,” Joe was saying conversationally to Ben, his grin teasing her as he approached. “She never swims with us!”

  “I’m afraid I’ll drown,” Liv managed, her voice shaky, stunned by the realization of her love for him.

  “I’ll save you,” he promised. He pulled her to her feet and slipped his arm around her, drawing her to his side.

  “Will you?” she asked in a little more than a whisper. A night hawk circled and dived above their heads.

  “Mmmhmmm.” He was cool and damp, his hard hip pressed firmly against her own as they walked as one toward the lighted house beyond.

  And Liv thought, I hope so, because like it or not, I’m going down for the third time.

  Chapter Nine

  Joe did all his research, made all his plans, advised all his troops, anticipated all Liv’s arguments and allowed for all contingencies before he asked.

  “Will you come with me to Vienna?” he said. They were sitting in her VW bus overlooking Lake Mendota because, having gone out for supper and been mobbed by autograph seekers, having gone to the movies and been mobbed, and having stayed away from home where, if there wasn’t a mob there was the nearest thing to one, Joe had given up on trying to find the appropriate moment and had finally just driven to the end of a dead-end street, snapped off the ignition and popped the question.

  Just as he was about to open his mouth with the first of his well-reasoned and thoroughly rehearsed arguments, he heard her say, “Yes.”

  “What?” He couldn’t have heard her right.

  “I said yes.” She was looking at him steadily, without her sunglasses on for once, with just clear, gray eyes, and saying it again. “Yes.”

  “You will?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “Well, why did you ask if you didn’t want me to say yes?” she demanded, exasperation showing.

  “I do,” he said quickly. “I do want you to!” Did he ever! It was the stuff of which fantasies were made!

  “Well, then…”

  “I… I’m just surprised, that’s all.” That hardly covered it. Amazed, stunned, baffled, thrilled, delighted, ecstatic, rapturous, astonished. This list could go on and on. He felt as though he must be grinning all over his face.

  “I’ll have to arrange with Marv for some vacation, though,” she said to him, her eyes thoughtful. “And ask Tom to take the kids.”

  “I already did,” Joe said. That was part of his preparation before he’d even dared to ask her.

  “What?” Now it was Liv’s turn to be incredulous. “You asked Tom to watch the kids while I went with you to Vienna?” She started to laugh.

  “No, I asked Ellie. She agreed,” Joe said quickly. “And I asked Marv to give you the time off. He will, but he wants one travel feature on Vienna and a follow-up on my speech at the UNO to tie in with the one you did earlier on my speech here.”

  Liv stopped laughing abruptly. “You talked to Marv?” She looked horrified. “My God, what will he think?”

  Joe shifted uncomfortably in the seat of the VW, banging his knee on the steering wheel. “Nothing he wasn’t thinking already,” he said gruffly. The twinkle in the older man’s eye, which fell just short of a leer, was fresh in his mind. “Your friend Frances what’s-her-name assured him that I would take good care of you.”

  “Frances?” Liv was looking more horror-struck by the minute.

  Joe shrugged, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. Everything he said seemed to be undermining his position rather than strengthening it. “She thinks I’m just what you need,” he offered hopefully as a last resort.

  Liv rolled her eyes. “She would. Frances is a born romantic. She firmly believes that innocence can reform the worst of rakes.”

  “And you don’t?” Joe saw a faint flicker of something he wanted to believe was hope in her eyes, but it was gone almost instantly and her face was closed again.

  “Not anymore,” Liv said, matter-of-factly. “In my experience innocence implies gullibility. I found that out with Tom. I intend to learn from my mistakes.” She was looking at him with an intensity that unnerved him, and he felt as though he was missing something that ought to be as plain as day.

  “Oh,” he said, filled with a faint but growing uneasiness. He ought to be rejoicing, oughtn’t he? He’d just pulled off the coup of the century—he’d talked Liv into going to Vienna with him, hadn’t he? Had he?

  It’s just that you didn’t really have to work hard at it, he comforted himself. You put in all those hours thinking up reasons, and you didn’t even need them. Why not, he wondered as he stared blindly out over the wind-whipped orange-streaked lake. Why had she suddenly stopped fi
ghting him off?

  The answer was simple. Liv had even told him it, spelled it out—she learned from her mistakes. And the biggest thing she had learned from the failure of her marriage to Tom was that she needed to take an active part in any future relationships she wanted. It wasn’t enough to expect that things would work out if you were just nice, pleasant, helpful, faithful and a good mother. That sort of thing was fine for cocker spaniels, Liv decided, but it wasn’t much good for wives.

  She felt oddly exhilarated as she sat in the wind-rocked VW watching Joe contemplate the water, knowing that he was trying to fathom her complete reversal. It was like being dealt a good hand in bridge, like getting the inside lane at the track meet—a tiny edge, a taste of power, and for the first time in their relationship, she felt as though she wasn’t the one running away.

  On the contrary, she was advancing. Once she realized that she loved him, there was no running away from involvement with him. She had to act. And acting, to this case, she knew meant going to Vienna with him. Her mouth quirked up at the thought of it. Way to go, Liv, she reflected. If you’re going to pursue a guy, what better place to do it than a fabulously romantic city like Vienna.

  “When do we leave?” she asked him.

  “Thursday. Do you have a passport?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll get you one.”

  “I thought it took weeks,” Liv protested.

  But with Joe Harrington, passports, like everything else, appeared like magic. A drive to Chicago, a Joe Harrington smile, a shuffling of papers, and a few hours later Liv had a passport, a ticket and a new piece of lightweight luggage—a gift from Frances, who’d said, “You can’t travel with Joe Harrington carrying that eighty-pound monstrosity that Aunt Martha took west with her on the Oregon Trail.”

  Her suitcase wasn’t the only lightweight thing about her, Liv thought as the next three days passed by in a blur of activity. There was her mind as well. She must have been insane to agree to this, she thought again and again, mostly when the pace slackened and she had a half a moment to reflect on what she was doing. But then she would catch a glimpse of Joe, or hear his voice, or just have a second’s vivid memory of him—his grin, his after-shave, the taste of his skin—and her doubts would be overcome by love. She might be crazy—everyone but Frances, given knowledge of what she was about to do, thought so—but she had to try to make this relationship work. She loved him, for better or for worse, and if he wasn’t the loving kind, wasn’t the marrying kind, it would be because he chose not to be, not because she gave up without ever trying to let him know how she had grown to feel about him.

  But the doubts lingered, even though the kids were properly envious of their globe-trotting mother, and Frances spent half of Liv’s last work day gushing lots of advice and innuendo. It all washed over Liv in a wave of babble and enthusiasm. She only saw clearly Ellie’s thoughtful frown when she was telling them good-bye, Tom’s incredulous expression when she’d told him that, yes, she definitely did know what she was doing going off to Vienna with “God’s-gift-to-women-Joe-Harrington,” and lastly, Joe’s rather nervous, “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” on their way in to Chicago that morning, which made her wonder if he wished that she had.

  But the qualms all disappeared as quickly as O’Hare Airport did when the plane took off that afternoon. It was impossible to dwell on the negative, not to be excited. To a woman who had never been farther from home than Detroit in one direction and Fargo, North Dakota in the other, she could as well have been going to the moon as to Vienna. She glanced quickly at the man sitting next to her, the man who was responsible for her being here and wondered again if he regretted asking her.

  But Joe didn’t look like a man with regrets. He was smiling at her indulgently, rather like a father enjoying his child’s first view of a Christmas tree, and she felt the color rise in her cheeks as she smiled back at him.

  “Glad you came?” he asked, his voice soft in her ear and seeming the tiniest bit uncertain.

  “Oh, yes.” But the real reason, she knew, wasn’t their destination—Detroit or Fargo would have done as nicely—it was the person she was going with. Wanting to share that with him she reached out and laid her hand on his knee, then leaned across the arm rest to brush her lips across his. “Yes, I am.”

  Joe blinked as if this new, more aggressive Liv would take some time getting used to. His eyes followed the length of her arm down to where it rested on his knee. “Liv,” he growled sternly sounding more like her father than the man she had come to love.

  “Sorry.” She lifted her hand and settled it demurely in her own lap, trying to rein in feelings which had been growing stronger every day. “I’m just amazed that I’m here, that’s all,” she tried to explain. “I seem to be acting out of character lately.”

  Joe’s brows lifted above the dark frames of his glasses. “Yes,” he agreed seriously, “you do.” He looked as if he still couldn’t believe that she was coming with him. But then, the plane hadn’t quite left the ground yet, so maybe he thought she might still back out. Liv could have told him she wasn’t about to do that. From here on out there was no turning back.

  “I wonder what the movie is,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, as if her warm smile was making him nervous.

  Liv took out the in-flight magazine and searched through it, trying to appear thoughtful while she was still bursting with enough psychic energy to propel the plane all by herself. Unfortunately, when she found out what the movie was, all her thoughtful discretion dissolved in laughter. “Guess what!” she chortled.

  “What?” He regarded her warily.

  “Steve Scott.”

  “What?” Joe snatched the magazine away from her and stared down at the page she indicated. There it was in black and white: Joe Harrington as Steve Scott in Hills of Thunder. “Hell,” he moaned and sank back into his seat.

  Liv grinned. “Your alter ego lives.”

  Joe groaned. “You don’t want to see it, do you?”

  Liv had no trouble detecting a strong note of hope in his voice, but, in fact, she did want to see it. She hadn’t seen a single movie of Joe’s since she had known him. It didn’t matter which one she saw, but she knew she wanted to bring her knowledge of the man to his films and see what, if anything, she learned.

  “Why not?” she challenged him. “It was good.”

  Joe looked skeptical, rather like Steve Scott when confronted by a particularly unpleasant new plot twist, Liv thought.

  “Please,” she implored.

  Joe shrugged, his expression grim but resigned. “If you want, go ahead,” he said gruffly as the plane hurtled down the runway. “But don’t expect me to. I brought a book on the Spanish Civil War to read.”

  He didn’t read it, however. Instead he watched Liv watching Steve Scott and grew increasingly morose. She seemed enchanted, enthralled, intrigued. Was it Steve Scott she really wanted? A master of all situations? A clever, charming, intelligent, superb lover? A superman in jeans and polo shirts? Joe closed his eyes and stifled a groan. There was no way he could be all that, even if he tried! But then why had she come to Vienna with him? The question of the century, he thought as he studied her profile, watching her smile as Steve Scott saved the day once more. Good ole Steve, he had all the answers. Joe wished he had the answer to this one.

  “You were really wonderful,” Liv told him when the lights came back on again, and the flight attendants moved back down the aisles offering another round of refreshments.

  “Um,” Joe grunted. He wished he could muster up some enthusiasm himself. She sounded positively thrilled by what she had seen and that depressed him further. “How about something to drink?” he asked, hoping to divert her.

  “Not now,” Liv said, eying him curiously. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” He plucked irritably at the arm rest, then muttered, “I hate Steve Scott.” He couldn’t help himself.

  Liv didn’t hate S
teve Scott. But she wouldn’t have gone to Vienna with him, either. He was too perfect, too macho, too predictable—he was the prototype from which movie star idols were made, and undoubtedly there were bits of him in Joe. But Joe had a humanity, a vulnerability, that was lacking in Steve Scott. And it was more that part of him that Liv loved than the movie star hero. In fact she thought that Joe must find him difficult to live up to. It must be terrible to have to pattern your life on a cardboard character who only had virtues. Heaven knew her own failure to be a magazine version of Super wife and Supermom had been hard enough to take, and she was the only one expecting that of herself. Not like Joe, who had an image that legions of sex-starved women expected of him.

  “I can see where he’d be a bit of a cross,” she said, and Joe looked over at her, wary and assessing, as though he didn’t believe she had really said that, so she went on, “Hard to live up to, I mean. After all, how often does one have the opportunity to rescue fair maidens from headhunters or deadly plagues, or to defuse bombs?”

  “Not often,” Joe agreed, a faint grin twisting the corner of his mouth.

  “Still,” Liv said, taking a sip of the orange juice the flight attendant had handed her, “I think you’re better at real life.”

  “Oh?” It didn’t come out as noncommittal as he’d obviously intended it. Liv heard a sharp note of interest in his voice.

  “You rescued us from chicken pox,” she said, “which, while it may not be deadly, was certainly heroic of you in my book.”

  “Anybody would have—”

  “And if not bombs,” she continued, starting to laugh at the memory of it, “you certainly managed to defuse Tom.”

  “That bastard!” Joe straightened in his seat, his face a mixture of irritation and amusement. “That self-righteous prig! How dare he come banging on the door at two in the morning, drunk as a skunk, demanding to know my intentions toward his ex-wife?”