by Linda Cajio
She nodded, then looked away. “The love scene …”
“No big deal,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll gag my way through it.”
Pen closed her eyes against the sick feeling inside her. She didn’t want to go. She couldn’t go.
“Are you jealous?”
Pen opened her eyes to find Richard turned back around and grinning at her. She cleared her throat. “Well … uh, no. I just wondered if it would be a … a nude one.”
“I love it,” he said, pulling her into his embrace. “No, it won’t be a nude one. But you don’t have to go the studio if you don’t want. Just come with me to the hotel. It’ll be private and we’ll have some free time together.”
“I told you I couldn’t handle it,” she muttered, disgusted with giving so much of her emotions away.
“Then you better come to the hotel and make sure I’m a good boy,” he murmured, nuzzling her ear. He ran his tongue around it, sending shivers of sensuality down her spine. Then he teased her lobe with his teeth.
Pen moaned and arched herself against him.
She couldn’t not go, she thought dimly. She couldn’t not go.
The suite was luxurious and private and sensual. Everything he’d thought it would be.
Pen stood by the sitting room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over Central Park.
“This beats the hell out of my trailer, doesn’t it?” he asked, coming up next to her to admire the view.
She raised her eyebrows. “Won’t all this opulence ruin your frame of mind for your character?”
“Ezekiel can handle himself for a while. This is for me. For us.” He pulled her against his side, liking the sound of “us.”
Pen clearly liked it, too, for she put her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest. He hadn’t realized just how much she’d come to mean to him. He opened his mouth to say so, when some inner voice cautioned him. They were still fragile together, and he didn’t want to rush her.
“Let’s get unpacked,” he said, “And order dinner in. I want this to be only for us.”
Later that night, when she emerged from the bathroom in a lavender negligee, Richard decided he’d stumbled onto a wealth of great ideas.
The air froze in his lungs as he lay on the four-poster bed and surveyed the sheer lace bodice and panel that ran down the front of the gown. His script slipped down his side as he stared. Every intimate detail of her, from her rosy nipples to the soft down at the junction of her thighs, was veiled and completely exposed at the same time. Amazing what the contrary stimuli did to a man’s pulse, he thought. His heart thumped painfully in his chest. And what it did to the rest of him was downright sinful. He was so tight, he was straining against his silk boxers.
She came toward him without a word, watching his expression with a slight smile of recognition. She knew exactly what she was doing to him. She took the script the rest of the way out of his lifeless hands and set it on the night table. But she didn’t click off the lamp. Instead, she leaned across the bed, her hair falling forward against her breast, and brushed her lips against his. She didn’t touch him anywhere else, just her lips rubbing and sucking at his own, coaxing his mouth open to a bolder kiss. Her tongue ran along his bottom lip, then inside to swirl along his own.
He drew in a deep, shuddering breath and reached for her. But she pushed his arms down, insistent on only their mouths touching in a slow, erotic kiss that exploded through the senses. Again and again, when he would have pulled her to him, she held him back, teaching him the finer points of slow, deep kisses that drove men insane. Richard realized he was perfectly willing to learn. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace.
Finally her mouth eased from his … but only to trail a light string of sensual fire along his jaw and down his chest. Her tongue ringed his nipple, nearly sending him shooting off the bed. Her fingers raked through the mat of hair on his chest, her nails gently stinging down the muscles of his stomach. He groaned and clenched his fist in the spread, wrapping the quilting around his hands in a Herculean effort not to touch her. She’d made it more than clear she was seducing him, and he’d be a fool to stop her in her quest. Of course, there was a definite possibility she’d kill him in the process.
Her fingers hooked around the waistband of the shorts and slowly slid them down his hips. The feel of the tight silk against the most intimate part of his body was sheer torture. His blood felt as if it had been heated in a furnace beyond the boiling point.
He wanted to say something, tell her what she was doing to him, but he couldn’t seem to find his voice. With each touch of her mouth against his skin, she knew.
And then she straddled him, taking him inside of her. She smiled knowingly. “Now you’re properly covered.”
She moved against him. He gritted his teeth at the sensation of her caressing him tightly in her moist heat, the silken gown puddled around his stomach and thighs. She rose above him almost leisurely, stroking him again and again, her eyes closed, her head thrown back. He gripped her thighs, trying to anchor himself to her. Her movement quickened. Her hands curled against the hair arrowing his stomach, tiny little pinpoints of pleasure-pain.
Richard could stand it no longer. He cried out as his body exploded into a thousand blinding pieces. Pen moaned, arching impossibly against him, taking in all of him, everything he had. Everything he was.
She collapsed against his chest, quivering at the sensual shock waves rolling through them. He wrapped her in his embrace, touching her at last, in the aftermath of a cocooning velvet darkness.
She leaned up, gathering strength from a place he couldn’t begin to fathom, and kissed him. “That was a real love scene, and don’t you forget it.”
He managed a chuckle. “Lady, it’s burned in my memory forever.”
“It better be.” She caressed his chest, her fingertips trailing across his skin like a cool wildfire.
Richard rubbed his hand lightly along her shoulder, delighting in the feel of her silken flesh that far surpassed the most expensive silk for evoking tactile sensations. She had given him more than she would ever know, for her to seduce him like that. She had been sexually bold before—they both had with each other—but never like this. He wanted it to go on forever.
He wanted forever to begin now.
She should have stayed away.
Pen swallowed back the queasy feeling in her gut as she watched the lighting crew put the finishing touches on the equipment hanging above a three-sided set that looked exactly like a diorama on settler life in a history museum. The life-size set itself was dwarfed by the enormous soundstage they were in. A man and woman, both remarkably the same heights and builds as the principal stars, stood in place for the crew’s benefit.
Pen wished they were doing the damn scene and not Richard. She’d managed to blend into a darkened corner, out of everybody’s way, but it wasn’t enough to avoid seeing the upcoming scene.
She had told herself last night before she and Richard had made love, after she and Richard had made love, first thing this morning, and all through getting dressed that she wouldn’t attend the day’s filming. She’d tour New York. She’d sleep in. She’d sit in the hotel lobby. She’d go get mugged in Central Park. Anything was preferable to watching this.
And yet she couldn’t stay away. Now it was too late.
Pen rubbed her fingers across her forehead, trying to dispel the pounding behind her eyes. She’d have a migraine, she was sure, even though she’d never had one in her life before. There was always a first time, and this was certainly the event that would do it.
People were gathered around the small buffet table, digging into the pastries and coffees, but the conversations were low and somber. Richard and Mary Jane were both at the double-back makeup mirror, being done up. They didn’t speak, but that didn’t reassure her. Mary Jane’s artfully tousled hair and small pert body were an allure few men could ignore. Pen felt too tall, too Alfred E. Neuman in coloring, and too gauche. The woman’
s presence made a mockery out of Pen’s silly attempt at seduction the night before. She groaned in shame. Richard might have enjoyed it, but he had to be secretly amused by the whole thing.
“There you are,” Libby said, peering at her as she walked over. “What are you doing over here?”
“Staying out of the way.” Pen forced herself to smile.
Libby wasn’t fooled. “Will you relax! This is no big deal. Oh, it’ll look erotic as hell on the screen. But that’s because of camera angles and all.”
“Then why is the set closed?” Pen asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Because I don’t need any nonsense distractions around. Besides, it’s not closed. It’s just not open. We have a bunch of damn reporters outside again. How the hell they found us, I don’t know.”
“Here you are,” Richard said, coming up behind Libby.
“So much for this being an out-of-the-way corner,” Pen muttered. “Judge Crater would have been found ages ago if you two had been on the trail.”
Richard frowned. “What’s wrong?”
He was in full colonial regalia, the scene being that his character would come looking for Robertson and instead would find the wife alone. They would consummate their forbidden love just one time. The damn scene had all the potential for gut-wrenching sexuality, Pen thought, having peeked at the script when Richard had been in the shower that morning.
“She’s got a case of observer nerves,” Libby replied for her cousin. She patted Pen’s hand, then added. “Five minutes, Richard.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” Pen said, sighing, after Libby left them alone.
“Yes, you should.” Richard turned around and called out. “Set up my chair for Ms. Marsh.”
“Richard, please!” Pen exclaimed in horror. “I don’t want to be over there by the set.”
“But how will I see you for inspiration?” he asked reasonably as he drew her out of her haven of dark safety.
“I doubt I’ll be inspiring,” she muttered, disgusted with her weaknesses. If only she’d stayed at the hotel … if only she’d stayed home altogether. Now she was forced to watch the man she loved make love to another woman. Once had been more than enough, and that had been “scenus interruptus” by a war party of Chickasaw Indians. That wouldn’t happen this time.
She died inside as Richard placed the chair where he felt he’d have full view, then helped her into it, his gestures solicitous.
“Places, everyone,” the assistant director called out.
Richard didn’t move. Instead, he stared at her as he took her hands. Her heart began to beat faster, her senses suddenly attuned to his. But the vague anticipation did not prepare her for what came next.
“I love you, Pen. God, how I love you,” he said, then kissed her lingeringly, his lips emphasizing his words.
When he finally released her, she stared at him in astonishment. Richard, the shy, private man, had exposed his emotions for all to see, for her to know and to make no mistake that whatever was required of the movie was only acting, a far, far cry from what he felt for her.
She wanted to say words, but her brain and her voice seemed to have been lifted straight out of her body. He grinned crookedly at her, kissed her again, then released her hands and strode onto the set, taking up his mark with Mary Jane. Dimly, somewhere in the recesses of her head, she was aware of the stares of the crew.
“And … action!” Libby called out, into the stunning silence.
Pen watched the scene begin, watched take after take for choreographing, watched the actors play their parts to the hilt. But mostly she watched Richard, watched each time he immediately turned to her at each disruption, watched him gaze at her in those moments, watched him smile intimately at her, only for her, and knew that he did love her, with every unspoken caress more powerful than what the camera would ever see.
And she said back to him with every look, every gesture, every smile, “I love you.” The barriers were down and stripped away forever, leaving her heart bared to him. To everyone. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered, except Richard and how much she loved him.
At the first full break, she rose up to meet Richard as he crossed the soundstage to her. His shirt was hanging open from the last bit of staging, and she grabbed up a handful, pulling him against her.
“You certainly know how to sweep a girl off her feet and leave her speechless,” she murmured.
He grinned. “You taught one helluva lesson last night.”
“And you taught one this morning. I love you, Richard.”
“Damn straight you do.” He kissed her soundly.
People chuckled at them, but Pen didn’t care. The crew was loose and relaxed now, a far cry from the tenseness of the morning. When he finally let her go, Libby applauded, bringing more laughter from everybody. Pen found herself grinning at her cousin, who didn’t look at all annoyed at her star’s declaration. In fact, she looked damned pleased.
“Let’s go get some lunch,” Richard said, putting his arm around her. “I’m starved. But since we can’t satisfy that, then let’s eat.”
Pen smiled at him. “You wait until tonight.”
“Does that mean I’m going to get seduced again? I hope, I hope.”
“If you’re a very good boy,” Pen promised.
The cameraman called Richard over at that moment, and Pen decided to move on outside, wanting to be alone with her thoughts. Her brain still reeled from his revelation.
As soon as she opened the stage door, however, she found herself standing behind a Mary Jane gleefully holding court with a mob of tabloid reporters. Belatedly she remembered Libby’s words about the media showing up at the soundstage.
She grappled with the door latch, but Mary Jane yanked her forward, saying, “Here she is! Here’s the real woman in Richard Creighton’s life. Her cousin’s been a hoax. Richard just told her in front of everyone that he loved her. Her! Not Libby Marsh. Her! The schoolteacher! They haven’t been honest with your readers. And Richard certainly hasn’t been honest with his fans.”
As Pen gaped at the microphones suddenly shoved in her face, she also belatedly remembered how subdued Mary Jane had been during the filming. If she’d thought anything at all, it was that Libby had firm control finally. Certainly not that Mary Jane was furious and hatching plots. Her stomach clenched as questions were thrown at her.
“Is it true?”
“What about you two? How long have you been seeing each other?”
“Will you get married?”
“You and Richard have been dishonest with his fans. How do you answer that?”
“And how did you feel witnessing his love scene with Mary Jane?”
Mary Jane smiled at the questions prying beyond any definition of good sense and common courtesy, triumphant over the havoc she’d just wreaked.
Pen took a deep breath and raised her hands for quiet, staring each one of them in the eye while raising her eyebrows and simply waiting for quiet. The reporters obeyed remarkably fast, she decided, as the shouting died down. She knew she had to be very careful about what she said, because it could reflect poorly on Richard.
“Thank you.” She smiled at them. “It’s lovely to meet each of you today. Regarding the last question, I would like to say that today I have just been privileged to witness the greatest job of acting by anyone.” Mary Jane gasped. Reporters twittered. Pen kept her face straight and continued innocently, “I’m so proud of Richard, of his entire performance in this movie. This is a beautiful love story and a terrific action adventure that certainly won’t disappoint his fans, of which, I admit, I am one of his biggest.” A second ripple of amusement spread through the group. “Richard and I have known each other for a long time, since we were children.” She could feel Mary Jane start as well as see the reporters’ surprise. Pen sensed no one would interrupt if they thought she’d give them information voluntarily. “It was never anyone’s intent to be deceitful, only discreet. I have been very concerned for t
he children I work with. Their welfare and my school’s reputation is very important to me. I’m sorry you all mistakenly got the wrong end of the story with my cousin, but I can’t say I was displeased.” More laughter. She grinned. “And I’m sure you understand. Thank you for listening, but you’ll have to excuse me now. I’m late for lunch.”
“Wait! Wait!”
Pen only waved to them as she ducked back into the building again, leaving Mary Jane to fend for herself. Richard was right at the door. And he was grinning.
“I thought I was going to have to rescue you,” he said, hugging her. “But you had them hopping through hoops.”
“Thanks.” Pen gripped his shirtfront and buried her face in his chest, feeling weak and drained from the experience.
She’d managed to hold her own today, but she’d never survive the attention his career drew all the time.
Never.
ELEVEN
“I’d like a word with you.”
Pen stood in front of Mary Jane, blocking her from returning to the set after the lunch break. She’d sent Richard off to makeup and waited for his costar to come back into the building, having put two and two together and come up with a firm four. It was time to become the schoolteacher again. Besides, she couldn’t be hurt any worse than Mary Jane had already managed, and she had had enough.
Mary Jane stared at her defiantly. “I don’t want a word with you—”
“You’ll have one,” Pen broke in. “In my profession I’m well trained to recognize children who deliberately create negative attention for themselves and manipulate others. You’re a classic case, Mary Jane. Textbook classic. It’s obvious you’ve been the one who’s been feeding the press erroneous information, hurtful information. It stops today.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mary Jane said in regal tones.
“Yes, you do. I’m not playing games with you. I’m telling you to stop now. Libby’s treated you well. And so has Richard. The rest of the cast and crew have endured your antics with patience. But you look foolish, Mary Jane. And obvious.” A good teacher always gave her students an out so that they could regain their self-respect. It was time to give Mary Jane hers. Her tone softened. “You are a wonderful actress, Mary Jane. You can meet Richard as a respected colleague and give a performance he’ll find tough to beat. Throwing someone off balance outside the arena of acting to undermine them only demeans you. You are far better than that. And in Richard’s case it’s not effective. As a child, he had to handle a lot worse abuse than you or anyone can deal out now. Be as secure as he is, Mary Jane. Take pride in yourself and your abilities. You have a right to it.”