“Fun couple,” Bram said as he flipped the lock on the doors behind them. “A little intense, but still a barrel of laughs.”
Georgie headed for the bathroom. “And here I am, naked under this sheet, my hair sticking out all over my head. I haven’t even brushed my teeth. Jade can get the best of me without even trying.”
“I should have been more sensitive toward your pathetic self-esteem issues,” Bram said, following her. “I’m going to punish myself by taking you back to bed and working extra hard to be the man of your sexual fantasies.”
“Or not.” She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. No wonder they were staring at her neck. She had a giant sucker bite. She touched it with the tip of her finger. “Thanks a lot.”
He slid his own finger over the slope of her shoulder. “I wanted to make sure Lance didn’t forget who you belong to.”
She grabbed her toothbrush. Women weren’t property, especially this woman. Still, it was nice of him to have thought ahead. What she didn’t find so nice was her discovery that he had one fewer vice than he’d led her to believe, something she’d have to confront him about very soon.
He handed her the toothpaste. “Last night when I went outside to get Jade, she was already walking toward the front door, talking on her cell. I can’t prove it, but I think she was discussing the quarantine with someone.”
“Before she came in?” Georgie said around a mouthful of toothpaste. “But that doesn’t make sense. If she already knew about the quarantine, why would she let herself get stuck here?”
“Maybe because she didn’t trust her husband to be holed up with his still-sexy ex-wife for two days?”
“Really?” She smiled and spit. “Cool.”
“You’ll tell me, won’t you, when you’re ready to stop obsessing over the two of them and start living your real life.”
She rinsed out her mouth. “This is L.A., so real life is an illusion.”
“Bram!” Chaz yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Bram, come quick! There’s a snake in the swimming pool. You have to get it out!”
Bram shuddered. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“You should make Lance and Jade do it.” Georgie docked her toothbrush. “It’s probably one of their relatives.”
“Bram!” Chaz called out. “Hurry!”
Georgie ended up pulling a robe around herself and following him out to the pool, where a rattlesnake had climbed up on a kickboard floating in the water. It wasn’t a big rattler, maybe two feet long, but it was still a poisonous snake and one that didn’t like the water.
Chaz’s yelling had alerted the other houseguests. As Lance and Jade appeared, Bram picked up the leaf skimmer and held it out. “Here you go, Lancelot. Impress the women.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Don’t look at me,” Jade said. “I’m phobic.”
“I hate snakes.” Chaz made a face.
Georgie extended her hand toward Bram. “Oh, give it here. I’ll do it.”
“Good girl.” Bram passed over the leaf skimmer.
As Georgie took it, Laura appeared, followed by Rory, who flipped her cell closed and dashed to the rim of the pool, the heels of her very expensive Gucci sandals clicking on the deck. “It that a rattler?”
“It sure is.” Bram glanced at Rory, then held out his hand to Georgie. “Honey, what are you doing? Give me that. No way am I letting you go after a dangerous rattlesnake.”
She suppressed a smile and handed back the swimmer. Bram gritted his teeth and gingerly extended it across the pool. Meg and Paul appeared and watched the process, with Meg occasionally throwing out advice. The snake hissed and coiled but Bram eventually managed to knock it off the kickboard into the skimmer. A patch of flop sweat had formed between his shoulder blades as he carted the extended skimmer to the very back of his property and flipped the snake over the stone wall.
“Great,” Rory said. “Now it can crawl back into my yard as soon as it’s full grown.”
“You let me know if it does,” Bram said. “I’ll come right over and take care of it for you.”
“You should have killed it,” Lance said.
“Why?” Meg retorted. “Because it acted like a snake?”
Georgie realized she needed to clarify something, and with Rory standing there, she might as well do it now, however awkward it might be. “You know, Rory…Those drinks Bram’s always carrying around. It’s iced tea.”
Bram looked at her as though she’d lost her mind, as did the others. “Just so everyone understands you’re not a drunk anymore,” she said lamely. “You stopped smoking cigarettes five years ago, and the oregano in the kitchen is really oregano. As for drugs…I’ve found some Flintstone vitamins and Tylenol, but—”
“I don’t take Flintstone vitamins!”
“One A Day. Whatever. If people know you’re not such a badass anymore, they might stop treating me like I was crazy for marrying you.” And, she thought, Rory might be more willing to get behind Tree House. Her newly calculating brain ticked away.
Bram finally climbed on board. “You were crazy to marry me, but I’m glad.”
They did a little marital cuddle, although she could tell from the tight furrow between his brows that he wasn’t happy with her. “My hero.” She patted his chest.
“You’re too good to me, sweetheart.”
Laura asked Lance and Jade the question that should have been at the forefront of all their minds. “How are you two? Any symptoms?”
“Jet-lagged, but otherwise healthy,” Jade said.
Rory flicked open her cell. “Give me a list of whatever any of you need. One of my assistants will get it all together and put it by the back gate.”
Lance clapped Paul on the shoulder. “It’s great to see you again. We finally have a chance to catch up.”
Georgie didn’t have the stomach for this reunion, and she began to move away, only to be stopped by her father’s reply. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to say to you these days, Lance.”
Lance didn’t seem to know how to respond. “Paul…This has been hard on everyone, but…”
“Has it?” her father said. “The way I see it, it’s mainly been hard on Georgie. You seem to be doing just fine.”
Lance looked stricken, and Jade’s forehead crinkled. Georgie was touched. “Go ahead, Dad. I don’t mind.”
“I mind,” he said and walked away.
The corner of Bram’s mouth curled. “I don’t understand it. Dad was in such a good mood last night when the two of us made plans to go fishing.”
Georgie studied him. Since when had Bram Shepard become a person she could count on? As for her father…Had he snubbed Lance out of respect for her or only to salve his own pride?
She took extra time with her hair and makeup, but dressed in jeans and a plain white T-shirt so she didn’t look as though she were trying too hard. When she came downstairs, she found her houseguests on their cells nibbling an assortment of cereals and muffins. Chaz stood at the stove, making eggs by request, and Lance mouthed that he’d like two scrambled egg whites. Next to him, Jade interrupted her phone conversation to order up hot water for herbal tea. A helicopter buzzed overhead. Georgie saw Paul through the French doors talking to someone on his cell. Laura sat in the dining room with a notepad, her phone to her ear. At the kitchen table, Rory furiously scribbled a note to herself in the margin of the Los Angeles Times front page, while Meg, perched on a counter stool, was doing her best to reassure her mother that she was all right.
Bram carried a case of bottled water in from the garage. He looked up at the ceiling as the sound of a second helicopter joined the first and began to circle. “There’s no business like show business.”
Word had leaked out even more quickly than she’d expected. Georgie imagined a photographer hanging off the skids, his telephoto lens pointed at their house, willing to risk his life to get that first picture of her with Lance and Jade. What would a photo like that bring?
Six figures for sure.
She filled a coffee mug and slipped outside into the shelter of the veranda. The whirl of helicopter blades was louder here. Her father, leaning against one of the twisted columns, saw her approach and ended his phone conversation. They studied each other. His eyes looked tired behind his rimless glasses. Maybe things had been easier between them when she was little, but she didn’t remember it that way. Still, he’d been a twenty-five-year-old widower left to raise a daughter alone. She cradled her coffee mug. “Are you still signing autographs for Richard Gere?”
“I signed one just yesterday.”
He’d started getting requests when his hair had gone silver. At first, he’d tried to explain that he wasn’t Gere, but people hadn’t always believed him, and some had even made comments about stuck-up movie stars. Paul eventually decided he wasn’t doing Gere any favors by pissing off his fans, so he’d started signing. “I’ll bet it was a woman,” Georgie said, “and I’ll bet she loved you in An Officer and a Gentleman. People need to get over that. It wasn’t your best film.”
“True. They conveniently forget about Unfaithful and The Hoax.”
“What about Chicago?”
“Or Primal Fear.”
“Nope. Ed Norton stole that one from you.”
He smiled, and they both fell silent, neutral territory exhausted. She set her coffee on one of the tile tables and made herself act like a grown-up. “I appreciate what you said to Lance earlier, but the two of you had your own relationship. It wouldn’t be right for me to spoil that.”
“Do you really think I’m going to pal around with him after what he did to you?”
Of course not. Her father cared too much about her image to be seen with Lance Marks.
A jagged ray of sunlight cut a silver blaze across his hair. “You delivered a moving defense of Bram earlier,” he said, “but I doubt anyone believed it. What are you doing with him, Georgie? Explain it to me so I can understand. Explain how you could instantly fall in love with a man you detested. A man who’s—”
“He’s my husband. I don’t want to hear any more.”
But the gloves were off, and he came closer. “I hoped by now you’d have finally figured out the kind of man you belong with.”
“What do you mean, ‘finally.’ I already figured it out, remember? And that marriage wasn’t exactly a rousing success.”
“Lance was never the right man for you.”
It was the helicopters. They were making so much noise they’d distorted his words. “Excuse me?”
He turned away from her. “I supported you with Lance, even though I knew he’d never make you happy, but I’m not doing it again. I’ll say the right things in public, but privately I’m going to speak my mind. I don’t have the stomach to start up the pretend game with you again.”
“Wait a minute! What are you talking about? You introduced me to Lance. You loved him.”
“Not as your husband. But you wouldn’t hear a word of criticism.”
“You never said you didn’t like him, just that he didn’t have as many dimensions as I did, once again implying that I need to be more focused.”
“That’s not what I meant at all. Georgie, Lance is a decent actor—he’s found his niche, and he’s smart enough to stick to it. But he’s never had a personal identity of his own. He relies on the people around him to define who he is. Until he met you, he’d hardly read at all. You’re the one who got him interested in music, dance, art—even current events. The way he absorbs other people’s personalities helps make him a good actor, but it doesn’t make him a good husband.”
This was virtually the same thing Bram had said.
“I could never stomach the way you acted around him,” he went on, “as though you were grateful he’d chosen you when it should have been the other way around. He fed off that. He fed off you—your sense of humor, your curiosity, how easy you are with people. Those things don’t come naturally to him.”
“I can’t believe…Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me how you felt about him?”
“Because every time I tried, your back went up. You worshipped him, and nothing I said was going to change that. We had enough tension over your career. What would criticizing him have accomplished except to make you resent me even more?”
“You should have been honest. I always believed you cared more about him than you did about me.”
“You like to think the worst of me.”
“You blamed me for the divorce!”
“I never blamed you. But I do blame you for marrying Bramwell Shepard. Of all the stupid—”
“Stop. Don’t say any more.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. She felt upended. Was her father telling her the truth, or was he trying to rewrite history so he could preserve the illusion of his own omnipotence?
Phones were ringing inside, and she could hear the gate intercom buzzing. A third helicopter dropped down, lower than the other two. “This is crazy.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “We can…talk about it later.”
Laura waited until Georgie disappeared to emerge from the back of the veranda. Paul looked as vulnerable as an invincible man of steel could look. He was such a mystery to her. So tightly controlled. She couldn’t imagine him laughing at a great dirty joke, let alone being caught up in a colossal orgasm. She couldn’t imagine him doing anything to excess.
He lived modestly by Hollywood standards. He drove a Lexus instead of a Bentley and owned a three-bedroom town house instead of a mansion. He had no personal staff, and he dated women his own age. What other fifty-two-year-old Hollywood male did that?
Over the years, she’d spent so much energy resenting him that she’d stopped thinking of him as anything more than a symbol of her ineffectiveness, but she’d just witnessed his Achilles’ heel, and something inside her shifted. “Georgie’s a terrific person, Paul.”
“You think I don’t know that?” He quickly reverted to his starchy self. “Is this how you’ve built your career? By eavesdropping?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” she said. “I came out here to see if I could get better cell reception, and I heard the two of you talking. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Or go back inside and leave us alone?”
“I got sucked in by your cluelessness. It temporarily paralyzed me.” She caught her breath, unable to believe those words had come from her mouth. She wanted to chalk up her unguarded tongue to a sleepless night, but what if it was something more dangerous? What if all these years of self-disgust had finally eaten away at the last threads of her restraint?
He wasn’t used to anything but her obsequiousness, and his eyebrows lifted. Her entire career depended on representing Georgie York, and she had to apologize quickly. “I just meant…You always seem so together. You’re sure of your opinions, and you don’t second-guess yourself.” She took in his navy slacks and expensive polo shirt, and her apology began to go awry. “Just look at you. Those are the same clothes you had on last night, but you don’t muss. You don’t wrinkle. You’re very intimidating.”
If only he hadn’t reared back on his heels and looked down his nose at her sadly wrinkled kimono top and wilted ivory slacks, she might have been able to stop herself. Instead, she said, much too loudly, “That was your daughter you were talking to. Your only child.”
His fingers curled around the coffee cup Georgie had left behind. “I know who she is.”
“I always thought my father was screwed up. He was lousy with money, and he couldn’t hold a job, but a day never went by that he didn’t give all us kids a hug and say how much he loved us.”
“If you’re suggesting I don’t love my daughter, you’re wrong. You’re not a parent. You can’t understand what it’s like.”
She had four wonderful nieces, so she had a fairly good idea what parental love involved, but she had to stop herself right now. Except her tongue seemed to have disconnected from her brain. “I don’t get how you can b
e so distant with her. Can’t you just act like a father?”
“Apparently you weren’t eavesdropping hard enough or you’d know that’s exactly what I was doing.”
“By lecturing and criticizing? You don’t approve of what she wants to do with her career. You don’t like her taste in men. Exactly what do you like about her? Other than her earning power.”
His face flushed with fury. She didn’t know which of them was more shocked. She was ruining everything she’d taken so many years to build. She had to beg his forgiveness, but she was too sick of herself to find the right words.
“You just stepped way over the line,” he said.
“I know. I’m—I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You’re damned right you shouldn’t have.”
But instead of rushing away from him before she could do any more damage, her feet remained stubbornly in place. “I’ve never understood why you seem so disapproving of her. She’s a terrific woman. She might not have the best taste in men, although I have to say Bram has been a pleasant surprise, but…She’s warm and generous. How many actors do you know who try to make life easier for the people around them? She’s smart as a whip, and interested in everything. If she were my daughter, I’d want to enjoy her instead of always behaving as though she needs to be made over.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But she could see he understood exactly what she meant.
“Why don’t you just have fun with her sometimes? Goof off. Do something that doesn’t involve business. Play a card game, splash around in the pool.”
“How about a trip to Disneyland?” he said caustically.
“How about it?” she tossed back.
“Georgie’s thirty-one, not five.”
“Did you do those things with her when she was five?”
“Her mother had just died, so I was a little preoccupied,” he snapped.
“That must have been horrible.”
“I was the best father I knew how to be.”
She saw real pain in his eyes, but it didn’t stir her compassion. “Here’s what bothers me, Paul…If I don’t understand how much you love her, how’s she supposed to?”
What I Did for Love Page 25