Reilly's Return

by Tami Hoag

  “Not at all,” Bryan said, pushing himself to his feet. He was every bit as tall as Reilly. Not as brawny, but equally athletic-looking, Jayne noticed. She didn’t miss the intensity in either pair of blue eyes as the men regarded each other. Bryan was the first to offer his hand. “Bryan Hennessy. You must be Pat Reilly.”

  “I am.”

  As they shook hands, Jayne watched Bryan’s face. The hint of a smile lifted one corner of his mouth.

  “Jaynie,” Reilly said, not taking his eyes off the man before him, “you’ve got a phone call from the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” Jayne mumbled, nibbling on her thumbnail as her gaze darted back and forth between the two men. It settled on Bryan, and he looked at her, giving an almost imperceptible shrug. Jayne’s eyes widened.

  What do you mean, you don’t know? You always know.

  Not this time, sweetheart.

  Reilly frowned at the pair and the silent communication obviously going on between them. His scowl only darkened when Bryan reached out and gently tapped a forefinger against the little gold key that dangled from Jayne’s wrist. Jealousy burned through him. He’d always been a tad bit territorial, but with Jayne he felt downright primitive. He was sick of having to watch other men share her affections. He’d had no say in the matter when she’d been married to Mac, but damned if he was going to let this buck move in to challenge him now.

  “Shake a leg, sheila,” he snapped at Jayne. “It’s a toll call.”

  Jayne gave him a strange look but hurried out just the same.

  The instant she was out of earshot, Reilly wrapped a fist in Bryan Hennessy’s shirt front and leaned toward him, the picture of male intimidation. “You lay a finger on her, and I’ll break it off and feed it to you for breakfast. You got that, mate?”

  Bryan had the gall to look mildly amused. He removed Reilly’s hand from his shirt with deceptive calm. “We’re clear on that, but maybe I should explain something to you. Jayne is like a sister to me. I wouldn’t hurt her any more than I would stand by and watch some outback Casanova break her heart. You got that, mate?” His voice was low and calm, but the threat was implicit.

  Reilly grinned suddenly. With the danger of a rivalry removed, he liked this Hennessy—a man who stood his ground and spoke his mind. He gave Bryan a brotherly thump on the shoulder. “We’re square then.”

  “Be careful with her,” Bryan said, his expression dead serious. “Jayne is very special.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Reilly murmured, his gaze straying out the door just as Jayne emerged from the house wearing an enormous straw hat with pink silk cabbage roses on it. She had changed into a shirtwaist with a long, flowing, flowered skirt, and she towed a recalcitrant Candi Kane behind her as she marched toward her car. The teenager was protesting loudly about going to her doctor’s appointment, but Jayne wasn’t having any of it. Reilly smiled fondly. “Don’t I know it.”

  The cast of A Taste of Starlight sat in the auditorium seats of the community theater staring past their director with their mouths hanging open. Jayne tried to ignore the feeling that she was talking to a group of zombies and pressed on with her explanation of why the sexiest man in the universe was joining their ranks.

  “Mr. Reilly is an old friend who has agreed to appear in the play as a favor,” she said. Not one of them blinked or in any way acknowledged her. They went on staring at Reilly as if mesmerized. “As I’m sure y’all realize, his participation will boost our attendance considerably, boosting our box office receipts as well, adding badly needed money to the coffers of both the community theater and the young artists’ program. I know I speak for all of us,” she said with a touch of irony, “when I say we greatly appreciate his generosity with his time.”

  They didn’t move an inch.

  “I know I can count on y’all to keep Mr. Reilly’s participation our little secret, too. It’s our duty to protect his privacy while he’s here.”

  There wasn’t so much as a flicker of awareness in response to her statement. They might have been mannequins for the amount of animation they displayed.

  Candi, who sat at Jayne’s right with her red high-top sneakers propped up on the seat in front of her, glanced up from her article on natural childbirth and gave the amateur actors a disgusted look. Having easily forgotten her own star-struck reaction to meeting Reilly three days before, she said dryly, “They’d make a terrific mime troupe.”

  Jayne gave her a silencing look, then glanced back at Reilly who stood slightly behind her. He seemed distinctly uneasy. The expression in his eyes was almost wary. He had twisted the script she’d given him into a cylinder of dog-eared pages. Now that she thought about it, he hadn’t said a dozen words on the drive to the theater.

  As she looked at him, trying to puzzle through the clues of his mood, the vague image of the conversation they’d had the morning of his arrival came back to her. He’d looked the same way while evading her questions about why he wasn’t filming Road Raider Part III. She had sensed the same kind of tension in him during that conversation. How odd.

  He couldn’t possibly be nervous about doing the play, she thought. Reilly uncertain of himself? When pigs fly. He was a veteran actor with a dozen major motion pictures under his belt. He had worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He couldn’t possibly be having qualms about appearing in a little community theater production.

  Still, that was the feeling she was getting, and Jayne had always been wise enough to trust her feelings, her clues as to how others behaved and reacted. She had built her career on trusting those highly sensitive instincts.

  She reached out automatically for Reilly’s hand, needing to offer him support more than she needed to avoid contact with him. She’d been watching him warily for three days now, studiously avoiding touching him—a tremendous feat for a woman who found touching as normal and essential as breathing. Truly, it was a tremendous feat for any woman living in the same house with Reilly.

  After the scene in his bedroom that first morning, she had braced herself for an all-out assault of her senses. But he had behaved himself admirably. With the notable exception of having taken over her kitchen, he had been a polite and courteous house guest. For that Jayne was appreciative, relieved, and depressed all at once.

  But this was not the time to mull over the contrary swing of her hormones. She drew Reilly a step closer to her so he was standing beside her and gave him a gentle, reassuring smile. “Let me introduce you to everyone before we get started.”

  Reilly listened intently as Jayne went through the row of volunteers, trying to channel his panic attack into something positive, like a good memory. The heroine of the play, a nightclub singer named Desiree Angel, was to be played by Cybill Huntley, a slightly plump CPA with a glazed look in her green eyes and silvery blond ringlets that fell to her shoulders. One of Desiree’s matchmaking aunts was to be played by Jayne’s palmist, Wanda Styles, a woman who bore a startling resemblance to Elvira of horror movie fame. She was dressed all in black and wore half a pound of eye makeup. The other aunt was to be played by Marlene Desidarian, an extra-large legal secretary in an orange tie-dyed T-shirt who wore an armful of copper bracelets. Phil Potts, the county clerk, was taking on the role of the nightclub manager. Phil was forty-five and balding with a little Hitler moustache and a pleasant smile. The club’s bouncer was to be played by Arnie Von Bluecher, a giant with a German accent who designed and made jewelry and sold it in his own shop in Anastasia’s marina area.

  These people were going to look to him for inspiration, Reilly thought. They were going to expect him to act up a storm. They were depending on him to help them pull this show off. What if he couldn’t do it? What if he let them down? His performance was no less important to these people than his participation in Deadly Intent had been to his director friend who had invested heavily in the picture and was on the brink of bankruptcy. They were counting on him the same way his cousin Mick was counting on h
im to back his charter airline business.

  Suddenly his broad shoulders seemed braced against the weight of the world. He broke out in a cold sweat. The instinct for fight or flight was urging him to turn tail and run, but he wouldn’t do that. Pride kept his booted feet rooted to the floor. Pride and a decade’s worth of old chewing gum. The theater’s floor had yet to receive the benefits of a good cleaning.

  Jayne glanced up at him with a question in her eyes. He answered it with a decisive nod. He had promised her he’d help her. Damned if he was going to let a little blind panic stop him.

  She went on with her introductions, finishing up with the stage manager in charge of curtains and props, Timothy Fieldman, a seventeen-year-old nerd with taped-together glasses and calf eyes for Candi Kane. Candi was to be their makeup artist.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Reilly asked under his breath. He took note of Candi’s bruise-blue blush as the girl turned her spikey head to bat her lashes at Timothy. “Or did I miss somethin’ here? Is this the Nightmare on Elm Street version of the play?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jayne assured him, patting his arm. “She’ll do just fine. Besides, you’ll look great with spiked hair.”

  He started to protest, then caught the twinkle in her eye and chuckled instead. He knew he was in trouble when Jayne could put one over on him. His sense of humor was in sorry shape. He blamed it on a lack of sex, something he hoped to rectify soon. He was about fed up with the getting acquainted stage of their relationship. He honestly couldn’t see why one activity had to preclude the other, but that was the way Jayne claimed she wanted it.

  To his way of thinking, they had gotten to know each other the moment Mac had introduced them. In that instant they had been as starkly aware of each other as two creatures could be. Perhaps what she meant was for them to start fresh, without the barrier of Mac between them. And so they had. But enough was enough.

  He watched the naturally seductive sway of Jayne’s hips beneath her dark paisley skirt as she walked toward the stage, and heat coursed through him like a river at flood tide. He acknowledged that he was more than ready to chuck this half-assed wait-and-see plan she’d formulated and get on to the important stuff.

  The first night of practice wasn’t going to amount to anything more than a read-through of the script, but Jayne had decided to make the occasion a special launching of their project. She’d spent much of the afternoon with her cleanup crew finishing work on the stage. They had even managed to set up some of the props for the first scene.

  Now she nodded to Timothy as a signal for him to go open the heavy old curtains—a flourish signifying the beginning of their theatrical endeavor. He didn’t budge. His gaze was on Candi.

  “Timothy?”

  “How do you get your hair to stay that way?”

  “Spray starch.” Candi smiled at him sweetly and patted a hand to her crown of unmoving spikes.

  “Wow. That’s so cool.”

  “Timothy?” Jayne asked again, more forcefully. “The curtains?”

  His head snapped around as if she’d jabbed him with a cattle prod. “Oh, gosh! Oh, gee! I’m sorry, Miss Jordan! I’m really much more diligent than this. You’ll see.”

  He scrambled up out of his seat in a tangle of gangly arms and legs and fell all over himself in an effort to appear highly efficient. When he finally made it to the stage and pulled on the rope to open the curtains, nothing happened. He pulled again. Still nothing. On the third try, he jumped off the ground and yanked on the rope with all his meager might. The curtains separated all of three feet before tearing from their hooks and collapsing to the stage in a dusty, moldy heap of age-rotted fabric.

  Timothy ran down to the front row of seats, glasses askew. Clumsily he tried to brush the thick layer of dust from Jayne’s head and shoulders. “Oh! Oh! Gee, Miss Jordan, I’m really, really sorry.” The apology spewed out of him a mile a minute in between gasps, his voice cracking on every third word. “I never meant to break anything. I was just trying to do my job the way you told me to. I only want to be efficient. I only want to help. I—”

  Jayne halted him, holding him at bay with a straight arm, her hand pressed to his bony shoulder. “Timothy, it’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.” She looked up at the stage and the sea of red brocade spilling across it, her shoulders slumping. “I guess we’ll just have to put new curtains at the head of our list for ways to spend our box office money.”

  She turned back to her troupe with a sigh. “Come on, gang. Let’s take our positions on stage and read through Act One.”

  For the first time since they’d laid eyes on their illustrious co-star, the group moved. The spell was broken. Chatting among themselves, they left their seats and moved down the aisle, with only Cybill still staring at Reilly as if he were an alien being. They all clambered onto the stage, stepping over and around the fallen drapery, eager to examine the set.

  The first scene took place in Desiree’s one-room apartment, where the only significant piece of furniture was an ornate brass bed.

  “Nice choice of props, boss,” Reilly said, his low voice washing over Jayne in an intimate wave of warm sensation. He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “What say we try it out later?”

  Jayne felt her cheeks grow hot. Excitement jumped to life inside her and collided with a heavy wall of apprehension. Three days had hardly been long enough to discern what Reilly’s intentions were. How long would be long enough, she wondered. She’d had no luck trying to read his mind, and she was getting no help from her usual source of premonitions. She was flying blind and she didn’t like it any more than she liked Reilly’s sudden change in tactics.

  Darn the man. She had never been able to maintain her equilibrium around him. That blasted animal magnetism of his made her personal field of life energy go haywire. If he had any idea how badly he rattled her she would be lost. Perversely, a part of her thrilled at the prospect of being lost—lost in Reilly’s arms. She shivered.

  A stream of patented Pat Reilly curses snapped her out of her trance. Jayne looked up to see Reilly backed against a wall, being confronted by a determined-looking Marlene, who probably outweighed him by twenty pounds. While Wanda and Phil looked on with interest, Marlene made a great show of fluttering her eyelashes and moaning as she began running her hands all around Reilly’s head and shoulders, almost but not quite touching him.

  Jayne burst out laughing as Pat looked to her with an expression caught somewhere between shock and desperation.

  “You’ve got one hell of an aura, studmuffin,” Marlene said in a gravelly voice as she stepped back from him, her dimpled hands falling to her sides, bracelets rattling. “I’ll bet you’re a Leo with Pisces rising.”

  Reilly wore an expression of outrage. “It’s none of your bloody business what’s risin’.”

  Marlene ignored his outburst and turned toward Jayne with a shrewd expression. “You’ve got your hands full, honey.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Jayne grumbled.

  “I’d love to read your palm sometime,” Wanda said in a husky voice, reaching out toward Reilly’s hand. She had inch-long blood-red nails and a ring shaped like a spider.

  Wide-eyed, Reilly squeezed away from the wall and dodged Wanda and Marlene. He grabbed Jayne by the arm and dragged her a few feet away, all the while keeping a wary eye on his attackers. Marlene looked like an upright freezer with a fading blond braid. He’d seen less formidable foes in tag-team wrestling matches. And Wanda was enough to give Vincent Price the shivers.

  “Reilly, I like having two arms,” Jayne protested, squirming in his grasp.

  He loosened his hold, but didn’t let go. His eyes blazed like sapphires. His square jaw jutted forward aggressively, showing off the cleft in his chin. “Everyone in this bloody town is cracked. That’s it, ain’t it? Psychics and palmists. Everythin’ here is turned around back to front and upside down. It’s just like in that movie where all them wives turned ou
t to be witches, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, calm down,” Jayne said. She smoothed her hands down the arms of his jacket, subtly aware of the hard muscled strength beneath the battered leather. “Marlene didn’t hurt you. She was just reading your aura. I told you it was a very sensual experience.”

  “Superstitious rot,” he grumbled. “Scared the bloody bejeepers out of me, she did.”

  He straightened his broad shoulders, tugging down the waistband of his jacket as if resettling the cloak of his dignity. Indignant, he gave Jayne a sideways look. “She touched my aura. Here I was, savin’ myself for you. Now I feel cheap and tawdry.”

  He was putting her on. The realization struck Jayne with a burst of good humor and a touch of uneasiness. He’d shifted gears so smoothly, she hadn’t even noticed.

  She gave him a look and called out, “Places, everyone! We’re going to walk through the first act. That’s called blocking. I want you to follow your scripts, read your lines on cue, and move where I tell you to move. Don’t worry about doing it perfectly.” She smiled beguilingly at her amateur actors. “Remember the main reason we’re here—to have fun!”

  Cybill, who had the lead role, not only forgot to have fun, she forgot how to speak. The woman opened her mouth for her first line and nothing came out but a mouselike squeak. After the third try, she turned to Jayne, purple with embarrassment, tears pooling in her eyes, and murmured, “I guess I’m a little nervous.”

  “Honey, there’s nothing to be nervous about,” Jayne assured her, patting her arm. She didn’t miss Cybill’s furtive glances at Reilly, who was lounging offstage since his first appearance in the story didn’t happen until midway through the first act. A pang of sympathy ran through her. She certainly knew what it was to lose all sense in Reilly’s presence. Poor Cybill had been literally struck dumb by the mere sight of the superstar.

  Reilly seemed to understand it as well. He pushed himself out of his chair, crossed the stage, took Cybill by the arm, and led her a couple of steps toward stage left. Jayne thought the woman looked ready to faint dead away, but Reilly appeared unconcerned.