Reilly's Return

by Tami Hoag

  “Everybody gets nerves from time to time, luv,” he said gently, smiling down indulgently into her adoring gaze. “All you have to do is remember how simple this is. You get cast for a part, you read the lines, do what the director says. It’s simple.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink and nodded toward Jayne. “Mind you, don’t let the boss know how simple it is. She’s liable to replace us with trained monkeys.”

  Cybill’s frigid fear dissolved into nervous giggles.

  Jayne felt her heart melt into a gooey puddle in her chest. How sweet of Reilly to set Cybill’s self-conscious fears aside. Most of the actors she’d known were too wrapped up in their own insecurities to worry about anyone else’s.

  She thanked him with a private little look as he sauntered by on his way back to the wings. He slowed his stride just enough to murmur, “Thank me later,” in a black satin whisper. Fanning herself with her script, Jayne turned back to the actors onstage.

  This time when Cybill opened her mouth, her line came out. It was wavy and warbly, but the next one was better, and the one after that was pretty good. The first scene proceeded without a hitch. Midway through the second scene Reilly made his first appearance.

  It was worse than an E. F. Hutton commercial, Jayne thought. The only sound was the distant clank of the building’s ancient heating system. Every eye in the place was glued to Reilly—Reilly, who suddenly looked a little pale beneath his tan. She watched him closely herself, but for very different reasons from those of the rest of the cast and crew.

  Something was wrong. She could feel it. She could sense it in the way he moved. His fluid, athletic grace had fled. A muscle twitched in his jaw. He plowed through his first nine lines with all the finesse of a bear dancing in high heels.

  No one else seemed to notice his lack of grace and style, probably because their own performances were devoid of either quality. But they were amateurs in their first play. Jayne didn’t expect them to be anything other than awkward. Reilly, on the other hand, was a world-class talent, and she was a world-class critic.

  “Let’s take a coffee break, everybody,” she said as Reilly ended the act on a note that, to Jayne, was as flat as an anvil. She almost winced when he delivered it. “There’s coffee and cookies backstage.”

  As the others gravitated toward the coffee maker, Jayne pulled Reilly aside. “Is something wrong?”

  Nerves gelled into a lump in his stomach. She’d seen it. She’d found him out. He should have known this would happen. If anyone could spot him for a no-talent phony, Jayne could. He must have been temporarily insane to volunteer to be in a play she was directing.

  “What?” he asked defensively, suddenly angry with her for her oft-stated opinion of his meager talent. He felt an instinctive need to lash out, and Jayne was destined to get the brunt of it. She was the root of all his problems—the object of his desire had been his best friend’s wife, a woman now bent on keeping a distance between them, a woman now directing this bloody play. “What? I didn’t dazzle you? As if I ever could.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t expect anything more here than you see on the screen, Jayne.”

  Jayne felt as if she’d just walked in on the middle of a foreign film; nothing he was saying made any sense to her. “I just thought you seemed a little tense, that’s all.”

  A gross understatement if ever there was one, she thought. Reilly looked like a human time bomb about to go off. He loomed over her, the tension vibrating in the air around him.

  He spoke from between clenched teeth. “Lack of sex. Care to do anything about that, sheila?”

  Jayne scowled at him, crossing her arms over the front of her plum-colored sweater. Her booted toe tapped impatiently against the worn wooden floor of the stage. “You blame everything on a lack of sex. I swear, if you went bald overnight, you’d blame it on a lack of sex.”

  “Yeah, and it’d be true. I would’a torn it all out by the roots.”

  “Well, maybe you should channel some of that pent-up energy into your acting, because what you’re giving me here is flat,” she said, hoping to goad him into performing.

  Her strategy worked a little too well. Reilly hooked an arm around the small of her back and hauled her up against his body. Her eyes widened at the feel of him as her hips pressed against his.

  “Luv,” he said on a growl, his mouth just inches from hers, “believe me, what I want to give you is definitely not flat.”

  “You are an absolute vulgarian.” Her words were as stiff as her body in his arms as she fought the urge to melt against him.

  “I’m a man, Jaynie. A man has needs … just like a woman does. Tell me you don’t need it, Jaynie,” he demanded softly, his tone of voice a lesson in seduction. Of its own volition his free hand came up to comb her wild hair back from the delicate line of her cheek. “Tell me you haven’t lain in bed every night for the past year aching for it the way I have.”

  He could tell by the flare of desire in her eyes she had. Her body betrayed her if her words didn’t. The longing was there in those obsidian depths, just beneath surprise. “Yeah, I’ve waited that long, Jaynie,” he admitted. “I’ll warn you—I’m not inclined to wait much longer.”

  The fine trembling that coursed through her was an intoxicating mix of fear and anticipation. Jayne stared up at him with doe eyes, the coward in her wishing she could be anywhere else in the universe. But along with the fear and the anticipation was a dark sense of inevitability. She couldn’t be anywhere else in the universe because what had begun between her and Pat Reilly while she’d been MacGregor’s wife was far from over.

  The noisy return of the cast broke the spell that had wound around them. Reilly released her and strode away. Without a word to anyone he headed for the coffeepot with his hands in his pockets, hoping to disguise his state of burgeoning arousal.

  The plan to woo Jayne slowly was shot to hell now, but then he’d never been much for plans anyhow. His impulsiveness just now had gotten more of a reaction out of Jayne than three days of playing the gentleman had. They were never going to find out anything about what could be between them if they went about this Jayne’s way, he reflected as he poured himself a cup of coffee and added gagging doses of sugar and cream.

  She was trying to protect herself, he thought as he absently chose a cookie and nibbled on it. He could understand that. He could understand it, but he damn well wasn’t going to allow her to do it.

  Jayne resumed her role of director, congratulating herself on a stellar performance. Inwardly, she was a jumble of raw emotions and painful doubts. Outwardly, she appeared to be confident and cheerful, if a little subdued. Ignoring Reilly’s uninspired performance, she took her amateur thespians through Act Two with quiet competence. All went well enough until they reached the pivotal scene between the heroine, Desiree Angel, and her hero, Wilson Mycroft.

  It was the first really emotional scene between the two lead characters, the first scene where they actually touched each other. They took their places, standing beside the brass bed. Reilly put his arm around Cybill’s shoulders, keeping a discreet distance between them. Knowing what was in store, Cybill took one look up into Reilly’s famous blue eyes and went mute again. Jayne frowned and nibbled on her thumbnail, at a loss as to how to handle the situation.

  “She’s not exactly Meryl Streep, is she?” Candi murmured. She stood beside Jayne, one hand braced against her aching back, one rubbing her protruding belly. “I’d volunteer to take the part, but I don’t think I could get close enough to him.”

  Jayne gave her a wry look. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t be very believable as a virginal ingenue.”

  “No,” Candi said with a snort. “But at least I can talk.”

  “Jayne, I can’t do this,” Cybill whispered, her voice trembling with desperation. She had abandoned Reilly and now grabbed onto Jayne’s arm with a death grip. “That’s Pat Reilly. The script says I’m supposed to kiss Pat Reilly!”

  J
ayne heaved a sigh. “Cybill, honey, he’s just a man.”

  Cybill was astonished. “Jayne, are you out of your mind? Rodney Povich at the hardware store is just a man. My husband is just a man.” She jerked her thumb in Reilly’s direction. “That’s Pat Reilly.”

  Jayne’s shoulders drooped in defeat. Candi gave her an I-told-you-so look.

  “Why don’t you walk through it with me, Jaynie,” Reilly suggested, his tone thick with dangerous undercurrents. “Show Cybill what a snap it is.”

  Jayne glared at him. He was being obnoxious in the extreme. She was beginning to regret her dream come true of directing him. He’d been subtly difficult ever since his first scene. He wasn’t giving her even a small sampling of the talent she knew he possessed, the talent she had been so determined to bring out. If anything, he seemed to be fighting it—fighting her—and she was darn near ready to give him a swift kick in the seat of his well-worn, indecently snug jeans.

  “All right,” she said tightly, picking up her script as if it were a gauntlet he’d thrown down.

  She took her place before him, standing beside the fancy brass bed. He pulled her much too close and looked down at her, his eyes blazing with challenge and belligerence and barely leashed passion. A strange recklessness tilted her chin up, and her mahogany-fire hair spilled down her slender back and over Reilly’s arm.

  “Put a little something into it this time,” she suggested beneath her breath.

  “Oh, I’d be glad to, luv,” he muttered, his eyes flashing at her unintentional double entendre.

  “Wilson,” Jayne began, thankful she had memorized most of the play, since she couldn’t pull her eyes away from Reilly long enough to read her lines, “how am I supposed to quit this life? I need the money. If I leave Lucky Louie’s now, Aunt Mabel and Aunt Catonia will lose their home. They’ll be thrown out in the street.”

  “I’ll help you, Desiree,” Reilly said stiffly.

  “How can you help? You dress up in a chicken suit and pass out handbills on the sidewalk. Don’t tell me—that’s just a hobby. You’re really the third-wealthiest man in America.”

  “No, I’m not. But I’d be the richest man in the world if only I could have your love, Desiree.”

  As directed in the script, Reilly gazed down into Jayne’s eyes and the earth shifted suddenly beneath his feet. His anger vaporized, slipped through his grasp like smoke. The tension that had had him in its grip since his first line of the evening melted. Awareness of his surroundings dimmed. His focus was wholly on Jayne, on the feel of her in his arms, on the way the light turned her hair to a nimbus of dark garnet around her head.

  This was what he wanted. This was what he had craved for so long—to hold her in his arms like this. When she was this close, his heart pounded in a rhythm he didn’t recognize, and his head filled with cotton wool. She was so pretty, so feminine with the wide ivory lace collar of her sweater framing her slender shoulders. And there wasn’t a reason in the world she couldn’t be his.

  “I’d have everything a man could want if I had your love,” he murmured, his words sweet with longing and wishing. “I’d be everything I’d ever hoped to be with you by my side.”

  Dazed and dazzled, Jayne stared up at him, barely aware that they were on stage. Breathlessly she recited her next line, her heart skipping erratically in her breast. “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” he said hoarsely. The script dropped from his free hand and fell to the floor unheeded. He speared his fingers into Jayne’s hair, his big hands framing her face, and lowered his mouth to hers.

  Jayne sighed and leaned into him. It was a sweet kiss, full of hunger and hesitancy, and she drank it in as if she hadn’t been kissed in years.

  The cast broke into wild applause, cheering and whistling.

  Reilly lifted his head, his eyes cloudy with confusion. Jayne reacted more quickly, bolting out of his arms, scrubbing at her flaming cheeks.

  “That was wonderful!” Cybill exclaimed, her eyes brimming with tears as she came forward to congratulate Jayne on her performance. “But I’ll tell you something, Jayne. If he kisses me that way, I promise you I’ll have an aneurysm and die.”

  That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea, Jayne thought. She was trembling all over as if she had severe malaria. Fever and chills chased each other over her skin. She felt as if her bones had all dissolved. One kiss and her sense of self had shattered like a supernova.

  And for Reilly it had all been an act.

  SIX

  HE’D PUSHED TOO hard.

  Jayne, who usually rambled on nonstop, her conversation flowing from one topic to the next, had been virtually silent on the drive home from play practice. Candi had filled the awkward quiet with her wry observations about the cast, about the way rehearsal had gone, about Timothy Fieldman, who she thought was kind of cute in a nerdish sort of way.

  Reilly hadn’t had much to say. He’d been too caught up in memories of the way Jayne had felt in his arms during the scene they had played together, of the way the whole world had disappeared and every ounce of his energy had been concentrated on Jayne. More than once during the past year he had wondered if what he’d felt that day at Mac’s graveside had been a figment of his imagination. It hadn’t been. He’d felt it again tonight.

  They were on the verge of something special, he and Jaynie. He could feel it in his gut. He only hoped he hadn’t blown it by taking the bit in his teeth earlier in the evening. Yes, Jayne had responded to his bullying. She had also sought the refuge of her bedroom the instant they walked into the house.

  Reilly didn’t waste time wishing he’d been born with the capacity for self-restraint. Nor did he waste time regretting what he’d done. He did waste a considerable amount of time sitting on the sofa in Jayne’s den, staring at her closed bedroom door.

  Not that he had anything better to do. It was two-ten in the morning. Everyone and everything on the farm was asleep, including Rowdy and the llamas. Even the tarantula was dead to the world. But Pat Reilly was wide awake, suffering through yet another bout of the insomnia that had plagued him for months now. He hadn’t even bothered going to bed. He knew he’d be lucky to get two or three hours of sleep, and those wouldn’t come for a while yet.

  The turmoil of self-doubt that lay beneath his veneer of macho self-confidence always seemed to simmer a little hotter during the night when there was no escaping it. The idea of distracting himself in a woman’s arms had crossed his mind more than once, but the one and only woman he wanted hadn’t been available to him. Tonight she was within his reach, but a wall stood between them—an emotional wall that could prove to be much trickier to get around than the wooden one that surrounded her bedroom door.

  Needing to move and stretch the muscles that coiled with tension, Reilly hauled himself to his feet and began to prowl the den.

  It was a comfortable, rustic place with rough planking covering the north and east walls. The room had been divided from the guest quarters by elevating it, giving it a loft effect. A large, soft, white U-shaped sectional sofa invited a person to sprawl out to listen to music or perhaps to watch a movie on the big-screen television. Most of the east wall was taken up with shelving and a cluttered desk area. As with the first level, the south wall was one enormous window.

  The view tonight was nothing but a weird combination of moonlight and fog. It made Jayne’s big barn house seem cozy and warm, the only solid, safe place to be in a world that had mysteriously evaporated into mist. Once again Reilly had the sensation of being at home. His family’s station wasn’t often enveloped in a bank of fog, but there was ever the feeling of being in a pocket of security surrounded by wilderness. It was a good feeling, a safe feeling, one he eagerly embraced now, during the long night when there was no one he needed to impress with his sensible self-reliance.

  Not wanting to think another thought about this horrible weakness that was afflicting him, he climbed the four steps leading up to Jayne’s office area and began
to poke around, searching for things of interest. He inspected the desk that was littered with notes, mail, old copies of Variety. It never occurred to him to feel guilty about snooping. He wanted to know more about Jayne, so he looked.

  There was a half-finished review in the typewriter, waiting for the final touches before she would submit it for her column. He read it over, wincing at the concise manner in which she had cut the film to shreds. It seemed a paradox to him that Jayne, who was one of the most compassionate people he’d ever known, could be so brutal in her critique of someone else’s work. Knowing her personality, one might have expected her to be kind and sympathetic toward a bad performance or an unfortunate choice of scripts. Instead, she was painfully honest in her opinions, padding nothing with kind words that could have been misconstrued as praise when she felt none was due.

  What Jayne did for a living bothered Reilly much more than her penchant for palmists and paranormal phenomena. The people in the film industry worked long, hard hours to put a movie together. They put heart and soul into their work. It just didn’t seem right to him that a critic should be able to sit in supreme judgment like some kind of Grand Inquisitor, able to make or break a picture according to her whim. It just didn’t seem democratic. He wondered how big a fight he’d have on his hands if he tried to talk her into quitting.

  Mac had been able to live with Jayne’s profession, Reilly reminded himself as his gaze fell on a photograph of his old friend. The picture in its ornate, silver filigree frame stood on the shelf above the typewriter. Mac stared out at him with wise dark eyes and a crooked smile, looking enough like Sean Connery to make feminine hearts flutter despite his age.

  They had been best friends, he and Mac, but they had been very different from each other. Mac had been calm and pragmatic. Those words were noticeably absent in descriptions of Reilly. It stood to reason his relationship with Jayne would be very different from her relationship with Mac. He wondered now if that idea frightened her. Jayne liked security. She tended to back away from anything that threatened to overwhelm her.