Sandra's Classics - The Bad Boys of Romance - Boxed Set

by Sandra Marton

  Shannon swallowed drily. ‘I didn’t mean you. I was expecting Mario. The, uh, the delivery boy from… Did you want to see me?’

  Cade nodded. ‘I hope you don’t mind my dropping in. I was in the neighborhood...’

  One dark eyebrow arched upward. ‘You’re the second person who’s used that line today, and I didn’t believe it then, either.’

  ‘Look, I was out walking...’

  ‘Walking? Here? Nobody walks here after dark unless they have a Rottweiler with them.’ She peered past him and her eyebrow arched upward again. ‘And I don’t see any four-footed friend by your side.’

  ‘OK, I confess,’ he said, putting his hand to his chest. ‘I was just sitting around my hotel room, bored to tears, and I decided it was time for some exercise, so I said to myself, Morgan, 1 said, where in this city can you work up your pulse rate just by outrunning the muggers? And then tone up your muscles by jogging a dozen flights of stairs.’

  ‘It’s only five.’

  ‘And end up standing in a doorway, verging on cardiac collapse, desperate for a drink of the wine you’ve brought—a vintage year, madame, not that you care, apparently—while a beautiful woman wearing Mickey Mouse on her feet tells you she’d rather you were a de­livery boy named Marco.’

  A smile pulled at the corners of Shannon’s mouth. ‘Mario,’ she said. ‘His name is Mario. And you’re not verging on anything. You’re not even breathing hard.’

  Cade’s eyes flickered over her and he grinned. ‘I can’t imagine why not,’ he said. ‘That sexy outfit you’re wearing is enough to drive a man insane with lust.’

  She chuckled softly. ‘Mario likes it,’ she said, and then she opened the door and stepped back. ‘OK, you can come in for a minute. How can I turn away a man with such discriminating taste? I just hope none of my neighbors saw you. They’ll beat my door down.’

  Cade shook his head as the door closed behind him. ‘Nobody saw me, except for the group of kids sitting on the stoop downstairs. They were so busy looking at my bike that they didn’t pay much attention to me.’

  ‘Your bike? But they’ll...’

  ‘They’ll guard it with their lives,’ he laughed, un­zipping his jacket. ‘I paid them fifty bucks to watch over it and I promised them another fifty if it’s still in one piece later.’ There was a moment’s silence and then Cade’s eyes swept over her again, lingering on the curve of her hip and the swell of her breast, clearly outlined beneath the somewhat damp robe. ‘Did I get you out of the bath or something?’

  ‘No, no, I...’ She swallowed hard, suddenly aware of the fact that she was naked under the robe. ‘I was just going to get dressed,’ she lied, backing towards the bedroom. ‘Why don’t you open that wine while I... ’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, turning away from her. ‘That’s a good idea. Do you have a corkscrew anywhere?’

  ‘There should be one on the kitchen counter,’ she called from behind the bedroom door.

  Her heart was tripping into overdrive. Well, anybody’s would, she told herself, stripping off her robe with trembling hands. After all, the man had taken her by surprise.

  She pulled open the closet door and stared at the clothing in it, but her mind was blank. Jeans, she thought finally, and a sweatshirt and my sneakers. At least, that didn’t take any planning. OK, she thought, OK, that’s it...

  Not quite.

  Her hair was a disaster. She yanked out the clips that held it back and it tumbled around her shoulders. Quickly, she combed through the tangles and fluffed the dark curls around her face. The ends were damp, but it would do.

  Do for what? she thought, but the question was more than she wanted to deal with just then.

  Cade was standing at the window, gazing down at the street. He turned towards her and smiled.

  ‘I should have asked you to keep the slippers on,’ he said, holding a glass out to her. ‘Mickey is one of my favorite people.’

  Cade Morgan, famous musician, she thought, drinking what is probably a very expensive wine out of my very best jelly glass. She bit back a nervous laugh and smiled at him.

  ‘I’d offer you some cheese and crackers, but I’m afraid the cupboard is bare.’

  ‘No problem…’ He took a breath. ‘You must be wondering what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Well, yes, you could say that.’

  He flashed her a quick, boyish grin. ‘I don’t suppose I could convince you that you’d forgotten you invited me for supper... No, I didn’t think so,’ he said. ‘But it was worth a shot. Would you believe me if I said I’m not exactly sure, myself? I really was just out for a ride— well, worrying and riding. I was going over that damned scene we rehearsed today and...’

  ‘The scene we didn’t rehearse, you mean,’ she said, sinking down ito an ancient upholstered armchair. ‘Look, I’m really sorry about that. I told Jerry I’d get it right tomorrow.’

  ‘What a hell of a day it was,’ he said, sitting down on the couch opposite her.. ‘The rehearsals, the taping, the make-up, the cos­tumes ... Is it always like that?’

  Shannon smiled. ‘Sometimes it’s worse. It’s not easy to do a one-hour show, five days a week, and juggle so many storylines and characters.’ She tucked her legs up beneath her. ‘But daytime drama must be easier than doing concerts. At least we stay in one place.’

  Cade sighed. ‘That’s the truth. I haven’t done that since I was at school.’

  Shannon sipped her wine and then rested the glass on her leg. ‘Princeton, right?’ He looked at her in surprise and she blushed. ‘Well, your life story isn’t exactly a secret,’ she said. ‘Every magazine on the stands has done something about you at one time or another.’

  ‘And hardly any of it the truth,’ he said.

  ‘Is Princeton the truth?’

  ‘Yeah, Hard believe, right? Me, a music major at a place like that...’

  ‘Easy to believe, after seeing you play with the Ma­rauders last week.* She blushed again and he smiled.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That blush. I didn’t think women did that anymore.’

  To her horror, she felt the color in her cheeks height­ening.

  ‘An inherited trait,’ she said lightly. ‘All the women in my family blush. My mother, my aunts, my cousins...’

  Cade laughed. ‘And where are these hordes of blushing females? How come they haven’t taken America by storm?’

  Shannon rose and padded across the room. ‘They’re back home in Kansas,’ she said, refilling her glass.

  ‘Waiting for you to win an Emmy or a Tony or an Oscar?’

  Waiting for me to give all this up as a bad idea and come home,’ she laughed. ‘I think they’ve heard too many stories about starving in the name of art. Would you like more wine?’

  Cade nodded and held his glass out to her. ‘It’s true, though. For every musician making a living, there must be fifty who aren’t.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t stay with classical guitar?’

  ‘The money?’ he asked and she nodded. ‘No, it wasn’t that. Well, it was, at the beginning... Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  ‘If you want to tell me.’

  He sighed and sat back against the couch cushion.

  ‘I was a scholarship student, which meant I was broke most of the time. I started playing at clubs near school on weekends—my own stuff, mostly—and after a while I realized that I’d always love classical guitar but, I don’t know, there’s a reality to other music...’ He drank some wine. ‘How’s that sound? Pompous? Pretentious? Trite?’

  ‘Honest,’ Shannon answered, smiling at him. ‘I just wish there were as much reality in the soaps. But then, who would watch them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cade said with a sigh, ‘I noticed. My char­acter—Johnny Wolff—seems awfully one-dimensional. Nobody can be that evil.’

  ‘Alana Dunbar can,’ Shannon said. ‘My girl’s a cold, calculating shark. In fact, the first time she rea
lly thaws is... is when she meets Johnny.’

  ‘Ah yes, back to today’s horror show. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that scene right. I told Jerry...’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Cade. I never even gave you a chance to say your lines, but tomorrow, I...’

  ‘Does the entire population of Manhattan always stand around watching a rehearsal? I’m not sure I want a chance to get to my lines tomorrow if it means every adult this side of the Continental Divide will be leering at us. I kept expecting someone to sell popcorn.’

  Shannon let her breath out and slumped down on the couch beside him. ‘So much for paranoia,’ she muttered.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I told Claire—my agent—virtually the same thing and she said I was crazy. But I knew I wasn’t. I’ve never seen an audience like that at a rehearsal.’

  ‘Well, that’s because it wasn’t an audience. It was a bunch of gawking idiots, waiting to see me make an ass of myself.’

  ‘What? No. That wasn’t it at all. Those people...’

  He sprang to his feet and stalked across the room. ‘Come on, Shannon, we both know that those people think of me as an intruder.’

  ‘An intruder?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know what I mean. All those actors and technicians, watching me, knowing I got a chance some of them would give their right arms for.’ He took a deep breath and swung around to face her. ‘I don’t blame them for wanting to see me mess up.’. Shannon rose from the couch and walked towards him.

  ‘Cade,’ she said gently, ‘you don’t understand. Those people weren’t there to see you fail. They heard about... about what happened the day we met, you see, and about all the things people said about it, and...and...’ She took a deep breath. ‘They want to see us together,’ she said finally. ‘They want to see if what they’ve heard is true.’

  He looked at her blankly. ‘What they’ve heard?’

  Her eyes narrowed. If he’s playing games with me, she thought, if he’s putting me on... But Cade was looking at her as if she were speaking another language. My God, she thought, is he so ter­rified of failing that he thinks the whole world is watching him?

  ‘Sparks, remember?’ she said with false brightness. ‘They want to see if the room lights up when we play our love scenes.’

  ‘If the room...’ His eyes widened. ‘Really? Is that what they’re waiting for?’ She nodded her head and a smile lit his face. ‘Damn it, that’s terrific!’

  ‘There’s nothing terrific about it. I don’t want to burst your bubble, Cade, but those people are going to be very disappointed.’

  ‘That’s it,* he said, flashing her a quick, uncertain smile. ‘Give me a vote of confidence and then snatch it back. I thought you said they weren’t waiting to see me fall on my face.’

  ‘My, what an ego we have, Mr. Morgan. Didn’t you hear me? Those people are watching us, not just you. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the pro.’ She laughed shakily. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that no matter how well we play that scene, it’s not going to be good enough?’

  ‘I wish to hell I’d known all this before,’ he said softly. ‘I’d have told you there isn’t a thing to worry about.’

  ‘Of course there is. It’s as if everybody’s forgotten we’re acting. They’re bound to be disappointed.’

  Cade took the empty glass from her hand. She watched as he set it on the table.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ he said, twining his fingers through hers.

  ‘Show me what?’ Her voice was wary, but she let him draw her toward him. ’

  ‘Nobody’s going to be disappointed,’ he said. ‘Not Jerry, not that crowd of gawkers...’

  Her heart thumped erratically. ‘No, don’t...’

  ‘Not anybody, Shannon. I guarantee it.’

  His eyes were narrow slits of blue darkness and his fingers steel clamps around hers. She shook her head, her body tensing instinctively as the space between them lessened until finally they were only a breath apart.

  ‘Cade, please...’

  His hand tangled in the cascade of her hair as he bent his head to hers and her whispered plea was lost against his mouth.

  For an instant she struggled against him, and then her blood grew thick in her veins. She made a sound that was half moan, half sigh and she leaned into him, burrowing into the hardness of his chest, stretching herself against the hard length of him, as if her legs might col­lapse under her.

  His lips teased at hers, urging her to open her mouth to him, urging her to taste and be tasted, and she made soft, inarticulate sounds as she did as he demanded.

  He tasted just as he had the first time he’d kissed her, she thought, only now there was the added tang of the wine on his tongue, blending with the taste she re­membered as his and his alone. She freed her hand from his and spread it on his chest; the other moved to the nape of his neck. She wanted to feel the heat from his body burning through her palm, through her fingers...

  A horn blasted in the street below, shattering the stillness that had settled around them. Cade growled at the interruption, but Shannon grasped it as she would a lifeline, pulling free of his. embrace and backing away from him. Only his eyes followed her, dark indigo stones set in his face. She could feel the heat of his probing stare spreading over her skin. .

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she whispered.

  He had a thousand answers; he had no answers. In the end, all he could do was make a half-hearted attempt at lightening the tension that had suddenly filled the room.

  ‘Nobody’s going to be disappointed,’ he said huskily, reaching out and running his finger across her lips. ‘Now you can relax.’.

  His voice was as warm as his breath. For a fragment of eternity, her eyes closed and she swayed towards him— and then his throaty whisper sorted itself into words she could understand.

  Of course, she thought, the love scene! The scene won’t be good enough, she’d said, and he’d taken her in his arms to prove her wrong.

  But he’d proved more than that, she thought in sudden panic. He’d proved that he could turn her world upside down each time he touched her. And he knew it—he knew it...

  The realization was frightening.

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang.

  ‘My groceries, at last,’ she said, snatching her shoulder-bag from the table. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’ She opened the door and smiled at Mario. ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she whispered, taking the groceries from him. His teen-aged face puckered in surprise as she pushed a ten dollar bill at him. ‘For you,’ she said. ‘And here’s the money for the groceries.’ The boy was still staring at her as she closed the door and turned back to Cade. ‘Dinner,’ she said brightly.

  His eyes met hers.

  ‘Shannon. We need to talk.’

  ‘I need to put away this stuff. You need to go home.’

  ‘Shannon…’

  Her phony smile faded.

  ‘Go home, Cade.’ Her voice trembled. ‘Please.’

  He looked at her for a long minute.

  His hand cupped her cheek. Her lashes fluttered down; she felt the sweet whisper of his mouth over hers.

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The bed squeaked ominously as Shannon eased herself down on it. ‘It’s still making funny noises,’ she called into the shadowy darkness surrounding the lighted set.

  Someone chuckled in reply.

  Shannon could feel her cheeks reddening, but she kept her chin up and her eyes never wavered from the spot where she knew Jerry Crawford was standing.

  ‘I just don’t want to waste any more time,’ she added carefully. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t mention it...’

  ‘It’s OK, Shannon,’ Crawford said. ‘It won’t collapse again.’ There was another giggle and then a soft laugh. ‘Quiet,’ Jerry barked, ‘or I’ll clear the damned set. We’ve got work to do.’

  Please, Shannon thought, please, let something go right
. Maybe someday she’d be able to look back at today and laugh—from the start, things had gone like a skit from Saturday Night Live—but right now she felt closer to tears than laughter.

  At nine o’clock, the mike boom had collapsed for no apparent reason. They’d no sooner fixed it than Rima the Prima had gasped and dropped to her knees. For a few panicked seconds, everybody had thought she’d had a heart attack. But it turned out that Rima had lost a contact lens, and the cast and crew had spent twenty minutes crawling around on the floor, looking for the darned thing, which, of course, they never found.

  What they did find was that the famous Rima the Prima’s emerald eyes weren’t emerald at all. Without the artificial color added by the contacts, they were a pale, near-sighted brown.

  And then it had been time to rehearse The Scene, which was how Shannon thought of it, and as the time had grown near for the first run-through, she’d felt the cold touch of panic. Who would be on that bed with Cade Morgan? Shannon Padgett or the character she was playing?

  Cade’s assurance that the scene would sizzle was suddenly not comforting at all.

  Why hadn’t it oc­curred to her that knowing he could draw such a pas­sionate response from her was dangerous? If she wasn’t going to be an actress playing Alana Dunbar, who would she be? Crawford had hated the way she’d played this scene with Tony. No passion, he’d said, but that had been safer than losing control of herself in Cade’s arms...

  At least they hadn’t been in costume for the first re­hearsal.

  If Jerry had told her to change into the flesh- colored bodysuit, she’d never have been able to walk to that awful bed, much less sit down on it. As it was, she’d moved towards it with all the grace of a badly con­trolled marionette. She’d managed to say her lines when Cade had materialized before her, but even she knew her delivery had been wooden.

  And when he’d smiled and walked towards the bed, his eyes and voice ca­ressing her as if they were a man and a woman alone in a real bedroom in a real apartment, panic had exploded deep inside her.

  ‘You’re going to feel the planet spin when I touch you.’

  That was Cade’s first line. Would it? An actress couldn’t afford to lose control. She couldn’t afford to lose control.