Starstruck

by Anne McAllister

  “Sure you do. We had dinner in Water Tower Place. And you told me I was better looking than him.” Tom was smirking as he watched the screen.

  Liv thrust the needle through the pants again, eyes still shut. Joe’s voice, warm and slightly hoarse, spoke words of love to the stunning blonde. Was he still in town? Would she find him? Oh Tom, for heaven’s sake, leave! She opened her eyes, knotted the thread and bit it off. “Finished,” she said and stood up, moving purposefully toward the television and shutting it off. “Good night,” she said.

  Tom blinked, then reluctantly hauled himself to his feet. “Good night?” he asked.

  “It’s late,” Liv explained, edging him toward the door. “I’m a working woman and I need my sleep. Besides, you’ll want to get an early start for Phoenix tomorrow.” She had thought she could wait him out, but now she knew she couldn’t. Not after seeing five minutes of that movie. If she could be jealous of a woman in a ten-year-old movie, she had to get busy right now straightening out her life.

  “Liv, couldn’t we just—”

  “No, Tom. We couldn’t. Good night,” she said firmly. “Good luck in Phoenix. The kids will call to say good-bye before you go.” And by that time she had him on the porch. She smiled and shut the door on his back.

  “Noel!” she shouted. “Noel! Baby-sit, will you? I’m going to Joe’s!”

  Noel poked his head out of the kitchen, lifting the radio earphones off his head. “Now?” he glanced at his mother, then at his watch and back at his mother again. “It’s eleven-forty-five. Now?” he repeated.

  “Now.”

  There were no lights on in Joe’s house when she drove up, but a light-colored Buick was parked in the driveway so she decided her guess was right. He was probably inside, asleep. Should she leave it till tomorrow morning? She chewed her lip indecisively, then knew with absolute clarity that she couldn’t. Even if he stared at her as though she was insane for banging on his door in the middle of the night and asking him why he was back, she had to do it. She had to know.

  But her banging roused no one, not even when she thumped so loudly that she was sure the neighbors a hundred yards away could hear her. Liv shifted uncomfortably in the cool autumn air and wondered what to do now. Maybe he had gone down to the lake to walk in the moonlight. She smiled, thinking, oh, you romantic!

  But she stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jeans and walked down to look at the lake. There was no one as far as she could see along the shore. The silvery moonlight cast fingers of light across the water, and she could pick out scruffy pine trees, several rocks and a small willow. But no Joe. It seemed so peaceful, so serene, so unlike her inner agitation. Maybe if she climbed up into the tree house she could see more. She’d never been there, but the kids had exclaimed about the view.

  She’d had no desire to see it herself. It was beastly high and seemed to be swaying now in the wind. Maybe climbing it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  She walked back to it and tested the first rung of Joe’s homemade ladder with her foot. It seemed sturdy enough. Then what was that creaking she heard? Wind? She gripped one of the rungs with her hands, feeling suddenly as though she ought to go home after all. What could she see from up there anyway? Then she heard the creaking again. Muffled thumps. A groan. Not the wind, Liv decided, her heart lurching.

  “Joe?” she called tentatively. Surely not. Who would climb up a tree in the middle of the night? “Joe?”

  Another moan. More creaking.

  She started climbing now, her hands damp on the rough wood, her torso drenched with a sweat of nervous apprehension, as much the result of climbing the tree as of confronting Joe. She poked her head up through the trap door in the floor of the tree house and looked around. “Joe?”

  “Uhhh,” he mumbled behind her. She hauled herself into the structure, scrabbling about on the floor, knees shaking. He was huddled in the far corner, knees pulled up to his chest, his dark head leaning against his knees.

  “Joe?” She stood and tripped over something large. It roiled and made a clinking sound when it hit the tree house wall. “Good Lord,” she murmured. She groped for it on her hands and knees, knowing by instinct—and smell—that it was a now-empty liquor bottle she held in her hands. “What on earth have you done?” she demanded, lifting his face in her hands.

  He didn’t seem to focus on her. “Whasit to you?” he asked roughly. “You’re not s’posed to be here,” he added when he saw who it was. He put his hands to his head as if to hold it on. “This isn’t the way it was s’posed to be at all,” he said plaintively like a small boy.

  “Huh?”

  “How can I tell you you love me and, and… no, I— you… and marry… hell,” he muttered. “I’m too drunk.” His head slipped down again and he was asleep.

  “Joe!” She shook him. “Joe!”

  “Lemme sleep,” he pleaded.

  “We’ve got to get you down!” Marry? Did he say, marry? Love? I love him? Or he loves me? Stop it, she admonished herself. He’s drunk out of his mind. He won’t remember a bit of it in the morning. “Come on, Joe,” she begged, trying to put her arms around him and drag him to the ladder. “We’ve got to get down.”

  “No,” he mumbled, curling further into the corner. “Can’t.”

  And she realized that he was more perceptive drunk than she was sober. In the shape he was in, he was treed for the duration. She chewed her nails in frustration. What could she do with a drunk man twenty-five feet up in a maple tree?

  The answer wasn’t all that hard to figure out. She had to go back down and call Frances, getting her to come and spend the rest of the night with the kids, gather up some blankets, and climb back up the tree and keep him warm for the rest of the night. She wasn’t going to let him freeze to death now. Not when words like love and marriage were falling from his lips!

  She thought afterward that there was a distinctly funny side to the whole scene, if only she’d been able to see it rather than participate in it. As it was, she spent the better part of half an hour inching her way back down the tree, rounding up the blankets and asking Frances to watch the kids.

  “I’m staying up with a sick friend,” she told Frances, not daring to mention whom, and Frances, Good Samaritan that she was, said she’d put on her robe and drive right over. Liv only hoped Noel had the sense not to say where she’d gone. But there was nothing she could do about that now. Now she had to head back to the tree where Joe slept like a babe.

  “I’m back,” she announced breathlessly, and was met by unconscious snores. “I should leave you to get pneumonia, you stupid pig,” she groused at him with a sort of rough affection. But she dragged him instead onto one of the blankets and lay down next to him, pulling the heavy quilt from his bed over both of them. He didn’t wake up, but the heat of her body attracted him, anyway, and he turned, burrowing into her, his cold arms going around her in a viselike grip. His champagne-scented breath, the only warm thing about him, fanned her cheek, and she shifted her body trying to get comfortable on the hard wooden floor and thought how much she loved him, how much she had needed to feel him against her like this again.

  “You insufferable wretch,” she scolded, tears running down her cheeks as she stroked the tangled softness of his hair. “How could you do this to me? What sort of man mumbles words like love and marriage and then falls asleep?” She bit him gently on the jaw, and his head turned instinctively and his lips caught hers in a long, drugging kiss.

  What have I done? she wondered. How can I have fallen in love with a man so practiced that he can make love, dead drunk, in his sleep?

  Feather-light kisses brushed her lips. She was in Vienna, waking up on Sunday morning, stretching, purring, and Joe was kissing her, murmuring in her ear, loving her. She’d had the dream before. A dozen times. More. And the ache when she opened her eyes to an empty bed was devastating. Cool, firm lips traced her jawline, nuzzled her earlobe. A cold nose caressed her hair. That was a new touch. She didn’t r
emember dreaming the nose before. She opened her eyes, expecting the nose to vanish, the lips to disappear. A pair of bewildered jade-green eyes with a dark fringe of lashes stared into her own.

  “What are you doing here?” he rasped, his voice filled with incredulity and uncertainty.

  It was a new ending, at least. But she wondered if it was any more promising than the old one. He could have looked more welcoming. She propped herself up on her elbows so that her eyes were on a level with his. “Saving you from yourself, apparently,” she told him, unsure of how much of last night she was supposed to know. “Whatever were you doing up here, drinking yourself into oblivion? On champagne, no less?”

  The green gaze wavered, fell, then slowly rose to meet hers again. “I thought you, Tom… I saw…” He couldn’t get it out. His eyelids flickered, then dropped, hooding his gaze.

  “No.”

  “No?” He looked up again, a flame flaring to life in the eyes that now bored into hers. “No?” he asked again.

  She shook her head, praying that the spark meant something. But once before, in Vienna, she had seen that spark too and, remembering, she held her breath and waited. He didn’t speak for what seemed an eternity. Then, “I-love-you-will-you-marry-me?”

  He said it so fast she wasn’t sure she heard him at all. Her heart leaped, but her brow furrowed and, wanting to be sure, she asked, “What?”

  “God,” he growled, hunching his shoulders, a tide of red creeping above the collar of his thin jacket, “You’re as bad at this as I am. You’re supposed to say, ‘yes,’ or ‘darling, of course,’ or ‘when?’ ” He shifted his weight onto one arm so that he bent over her, his mouth twisting. “Or I suppose you could say, ‘no.’ ” He looked vulnerable and uncertain. His right hand moved up to caress her hair, but then, as if fearing he had no right to do so, he dropped it quickly to the quilt. “Well,” he muttered. “Do you have an answer?”

  “I thought you’d never ask!” She sat up suddenly, launching herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck in such an outburst of joy that she knocked him flat on the treehouse floor.

  “I take it the answer is yes,” he said, grinning.

  “Yes!” She bent over him, brushing her lips teasingly across his. But the teasing didn’t last, couldn’t, and it exploded instantly into a full-blown passion that enveloped them both. This time there was none of the gentleness of their Vienna love. Joe rolled her over, tugging at her clothes with the same feverish anticipation with which she was attacking his. Buttons popped, zippers rasped, bodies clung. He murmured to her in aching, broken whispers of the love he felt that he had so long misunderstood and then tried to deny. But Liv heard almost none of it, her ears were filled only with a raging passion, a roaring desire. Explanations meant nothing now. He was here, he was hers, and gripping him tightly with arms of surprising strength, she opened to him and the two became one.

  “Oh, Liv,” he muttered, his heart beating like a tympan against her breasts. “What have you done to me?”

  “Loved you.” She smiled, her own heart just now beginning to steady and slow. Her hand went up to stroke his hair and ear, and she tilted her head sideways, pulling back from him slightly to study his profile. He was cleanshaven again, with just a day’s worth of sandpapery beard, handsome as ever, and when he grinned down at her, the tiny chicken pox scar next to his left eye crinkled into another engaging dimple. “Leave it to you,” she teased, “to turn chicken pox to an advantage.”

  “Think so?” he looked enormously pleased, and she remembered that Veronique had said he’d never be the same again.

  “What about Veronique and the Steve Scott film?” she asked suddenly.

  “It’s not on. Never has been.” He told her about Luther’s pressure tactics and his leak of the story to the gossip magazines. “You saw it?”

  “Oh yes. That’s when I thought all hope was gone.”

  “It nearly was,” he admitted. “It seemed the path of least resistance, doing Steve Scott. I was ready to, I think. Then I got Noel’s card.”

  Liv shook her head. “What card?”

  “Telling me about his game. Remember, I told him that if I couldn’t come he should send me a card with the score on it. He did. Also mentioned that you and Tom were there. I felt as if I’d been stoned. The very thought of you and Tom was all it took to crystallize my thinking. I knew then that I loved you, that I didn’t want anyone else near you. Ever. I caught the next plane back to Madison, determined not to let him have you.”

  “So what happened? I mean, you came over last night and—”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Jennifer saw you.”

  “Oh. Well, I saw her and the boys. And Tom. I thought he was really back for good then.” She saw a look of despair flash in his eyes as he remembered. “I thought I was really too late. And what was I going to do? Strap on a gun and challenge him to a duel? If he’d come to his senses sooner than I did, I figured it was nobler to leave. To try to forget you. I didn’t deserve you, anyway.”

  Liv rolled her eyes. “You are an idiot. How could you think I still loved Tom after what he did? After what I did, making love to you?” She looked at him with all the love she felt there in her eyes for him to see, and he shook his head, smiling, kissing her, his own eyes flaming with a brightness that danced like the sunlight in the leaves rustling gently above their heads. Liv rolled over onto her back so that she lay side by side with Joe under the quilt, looking up at the green turning to gold above them.

  He grinned and said, “I’ve never made love in a tree house before.” He turned his head and looked at her with warmth and gentleness in his face. “Have you?”

  “Hardly.” Liv laughed, then grew serious as she thought about all the places Joe had probably made love, even if he had missed tree houses until now. “Will I be enough for you, Joe?”

  He frowned. “You mean, will there be other women besides you?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to ask, but she had to, had to know if he’d considered it.

  “No. I tried that already.” He grimaced. “After I left you in Madison and went back to L.A., I told myself I could forget you. I was wrong. I loved no woman after you.” He kissed the tip of her nose gently. “I’ll never want to, I promise. I know now that it wasn’t love I was after with them, anyway. It was challenge, coupled with needing to forget you. But I couldn’t forget you. And now I’ve got you. Besides, just recently I discovered that you’re all the challenge I’ll ever need.”

  “I love you,” Liv whispered, stroking an errant lock of hair off his forehead and following her fingers with her lips.

  “And I love you.” He sat up, his bare back dappled with sun as he groped in the blankets for the champagne bottle. “This was supposed to be for us to celebrate our future with,” he said ruefully, tipping it upside down and letting the last drops spill out. “Shall I get dressed and go buy us another?”

  Liv shook her head. “No thanks,” she murmured, running her hands down the length of his spine till he shivered. “I think you should lie back down and prove how much you love me some more. And then when I’m convinced, we can climb down from our little love nest and drink a toast to our marriage as we mean to go on.”

  “Huh?”

  She tugged him back under the quilt and wrapped her arms around him. “I mean, why bother with champagne when right in the kitchen here we have enough grape Kool-Aid to float a ship on!”

  The seductive kiss and warm breath touched Liv’s ear just as a pair of hard arms went around her and pulled her back into her husband’s arms. She started, then relaxed, loving the feel of his lean, hard length against her, relishing the kisses that continued down the edge of her jaw until suddenly they stopped.

  “What’s that slop you’re mashing?” he demanded.

  “Banana,” she told him, turning in his arms and kissing him soundly on the lips before she stepped back to wave a forkful under his nose. “Want some?”

  “
Yuck.” Joe wrinkled his nose. “Nick eats that? I thought he was a smart baby.”

  “He is,” Liv agreed. “Takes after his mother.”

  Joe glared. “All Harrington. Spitting image of his father, everyone says.”

  “In looks, maybe,” Liv conceded. “And personality. Who else has a two-month-old Casanova for a son?”

  “Keep picking on me, and I won’t tell you what I’ve planned for tonight,” Joe mumbled into her hair.

  “Tonight?”

  “Our first anniversary. Or had you forgotten?” he teased.

  “Of course not. But I thought you might have had enough to do recently, what with finishing up the screenplay and preparing to direct it, convincing Luther to produce it and arranging locations in Spain, to spend time planning anything else.”

  “I told you, I love a challenge,” Joe grinned, kissing her nose. “That’s why I married you.”

  “That’s why, is it?” she asked tartly, turning back to the banana.

  “Of course. And because I thought it was the easiest way to give my father a half-dozen grandchildren. Besides, I love you.”

  She dropped the fork with a clatter and turned, the banana forgotten. “I love you, too. More each day if possible.”

  “Good. You can start proving it right now.” He spun her around again and untied the apron around her waist.

  “But I’ve got to feed Nick,” she protested. Aprons were a necessity with Nick. “And then I’ve got to pick up Ben at scouts and Stephen at cello, and Jennifer is—”

  Joe shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you trading Steve Scott for Gary Cooper these days?” Liv asked, but Joe didn’t answer, just took her by the shoulders and steered her into the living room of the architect’s house that was now permanently theirs. “Joe…” she began again, but then she looked up to see Arthur Harrington sitting on the couch, his youngest grandson regarding him in cross-eyed awe as he bounced up and down.