Blood Stone

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “He called in the loan?”

  “If it had been that simple, I could have rallied around a few interested backers and paid it off.” She scowled. “He put a lien on it. Now the building is in escrow and under legal dispute. I can’t use the damn property to conduct business until the dispute is settled.” She dropped into her chair and scowled even harder at her coffee. “The son of a bitch.”

  “And the second thing?” Roman prompted her.

  She blew on her coffee. “You’ll notice I’m not exactly swimming in staff.” Her mouth turned down.

  “Just Britney and the security guard.”

  “John is working as a personnel favour to me,” Kate said. “Britney is a new hire and I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep her.”

  “Labour issues?”

  “Employment and Immigration. And Labour. Enough of my employees were illegal or underage and the rest of them had records or histories or shaky ID papers that they didn’t want looked at too closely for reasons of their own...this is Hollywood. Everyone’s got secrets. Immigration carted off two illegal aliens and suddenly, I didn’t have a workforce. Everyone else melted away like butter at noon.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Enough of them to make it not worth while bringing the rest in to work. I told them to take a holiday, the five or so I had left.”

  “Garrett has a long arm,” Roman observed.

  “It was Garrett Industries that won the government contracts for the barrier renewal project in Texas and California. Worth billions. I heard Garrett was millions cheaper than the nearest bid, and he’s bringing the contract in on time and under budget. The federal government would do anything to ensure he’s kept happy. If he picked up the phone and called his pals at Immigration and said ‘Pay Kate Lindenstream a call for me,’ they’d spill coffee on their crotches in their scramble to get it done.”

  Roman nodded. Kate wasn’t stupid. Likely, Garrett had done something pretty much exactly like that. Although the phone call would have been a bit more subtle than she thought.

  “And the third thing?” he asked.

  Kate looked at him. Her eyes got bigger. And damn it if her chin didn’t move in the merest hint of a quiver.

  Roman’s gut clenched. Fuck, what had Garrett done to her?

  Kate pushed a stapled bunch of legal-sized sheets across the desk, turning them with her hand so by the time they were in front of him they were the right way up for him to read.

  Roman skipped all the legal phrasing and got to the meat of it, flipping the top page to read the relevant details. “Theft of intellectual property?” He put the paper down. “Well, he’s not fooling around.” He looked up at Kate.

  Her scowl hadn’t moved.

  “Does this halt the picture?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. Her tone was even. Neutral. “Everything is built on the shooting script, and the shooting script is built on the reading script, so...”

  Roman touched the legal papers again. “I’m assuming this is a nuisance suit. You wrote the script. You did the research. I remember the publicity about the time you spent in Turkey doing it. You’ve always written your own scripts. This...” He looked down at the paper. “This Roy Cummings that claims you stole his script and re-wrote it, I presume is a lot of bullshit designed to stop production until you give Garrett whatever it is he really wants.”

  “It’s as obvious to you, too?” Her knuckles were white around the coffee cup.

  “Not obvious, no. But I had a couple of major clues. I passed MacDonald on the way here. And I saw that thing between you and Garrett go down in the basement at The Standard last week.” He tapped the legal suit. “And you said this was number three, so MacDonald must have dropped this off just now. He would have delivered in person just to make sure you knew Garrett was behind this. Along with insults number one and two, it does start to stand out in neon.”

  Kate flexed her fingers, then wrapped them about the cup once more. “I want his balls, Adrian. I want him on a butcher’s block and a cleaver in my hand.”

  “There’s better ways to get even,” Roman pointed out mildly. “I’m sure you’ve thought of some of them already.”

  “Yeah, over the last few days I dreamed up some doozies. But he’s fucking with my movie now.” She stood up abruptly. “He’s interfered with my project.”

  There was a look on her face, a line to her jaw that spoke of a deep-held fury and capacity for explosive action. Roman felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickle with painful alertness. The predator in him stirred. His incisors shifted.

  He held his reaction at bay with sheer willpower, and was suddenly glad he was not Garrett right now.

  “Kate,” he said, speaking with the soft tone one used with high-fettled animals, to keep them soothed and calm.

  She focused on him.

  “What, exactly, does Garrett want so badly to go to all this trouble?”

  “What trouble? He’s surrounded by lackeys. He would have said ‘make her life miserable’ and it was done.”

  “You don’t know that. From what I hear, he’s a hands-on CEO.” Roman cleared his throat as Kate sent him a withering look. “Anyway, what does he want?”

  “He wants in on my movie.”

  “He wants a role?” Roman asked, frankly stunned.

  Kate shook her head. “He says he can get me Patrick Sauvage for five million, and he’ll cover Sauvage’s daycare fees. But, he wants to be on the set for filming, in exchange.”

  “And you said no?” Roman was flummoxed. “Why on earth would you turn down a deal like that? Sauvage is asking forty million a movie now.”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Forty,” Roman said firmly. “He just signed for the Superman remake at forty.”

  Kate closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Garrett is a movie junkie. He’s just trying to deal himself in on la-la land.”

  Roman leaned forward. “So, let me be clear. You turned down a chance at Patrick Sauvage for five million on a principal?”

  Kate opened her eyes. Her gaze riveted him to the spot. “You’re saying I should have taken his money?” Her tone was reasonable. Light.

  Deceptive.

  Roman wasn’t fooled. He’d seen warmer eyes over duelling pistols. But despite seeing through her mellow tone, he could feel his heart start up all by itself...something that hadn’t happened in a good long while. Duelling mentally with Kate was stimulating him in ways he’d almost forgotten.

  “Come on, Kate,” he chided her gently. “You really think I’m the sort that would suggest lying down with the dogs like that? If I was, I wouldn’t have come here to check if you were okay when you didn’t show today. I would have fucked off and figured you had better things to do, and found something more interesting to do myself.”

  Her eyes didn’t release him. “It sounded a lot like you were suggesting I should have grabbed the deal.”

  “I was clarifying. I wanted to be sure you really do have the backbone I thought you had.” Roman grinned. “I have to say, I admire your guts. There’s not too many people I know with courage enough to take on Calum Garrett.”

  Kate leaned forward. “Truth? I didn’t know I was taking him on. I just turned him down, Adrian. I figured that was it.”

  “Even after the basement thing? I told you that sort of guy doesn’t take no for an answer.” He leaned forward, too. “Would knowing you were taking him on have changed your answer?”

  She considered for a good long five seconds, her full lips pursed. “No,” she said at last. Then she smiled at him. “Damn it, you always manage to do that somehow, don’t you?”

  “Do what?” he asked, honestly curious.

  “Make me see the whole picture more clearly.”

  “Is that what I do?” He was honestly surprised. “It’s not intentional.”

  “But you do it anyway. It’s the way you think. You see things just differently enough. From twenty thousand fe
et up, or further out, or something. So you always end up asking the question that makes me step back and see it all from the top of the chessboard.” She swayed forward through the few inches of space that remained between them and touched her lips to his.

  As kisses went, it barely counted. There was four feet of cherry wood desk between them, just to start. Kate looked like she had been short on sleep for the five days since Roman had last seen her, and no woman, no matter how wonderfully endowed her natural beauty, could come up looking fabulous after being on her feet for a week of high stress and too much coffee.

  But the touch of her lips was delightful anyway. They were soft and pressed against his own. Heated moist flesh. Human flesh. And if Roman had a weakness, it was for the warmth of a human’s touch.

  His hand rose to cup the corner of her jaw all on its own. He slid his thumb underneath, to touch the soft flesh beneath her chin, and feel the echo of her pulse.

  Then she was pulling away, leaning back into her chair. She pushed her hand through her messy, tangled curls and cleared her throat, her eyes on her coffee mug.

  Roman read her awkwardness far too easily. She had stepped over her own go-slow barrier. He could smell her arousal.

  He spared her any more discomfort. “Do you want to take Garrett on at his own game and win, Kate?”

  She lifted her head. “God, yes. Who wouldn’t? But I don’t have the sort of resources he does. He has hot and cold running lawyers and connections around the globe—”

  “That’s not the game you want to play, though.”

  She frowned.

  Roman sat back. “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’?”

  Kate’s frown stayed in place, but Roman could see she was thinking it through. He stayed silent, letting her puzzle it out. She looked at him. “How is that any different from letting him win?”

  “You keep control. Including the end play.”

  Her eyes lost their focus as her mind went into overdrive. Roman could see her working it out. Her lips parted, as the ideas came faster and faster. Her pulse was leaping at the base of her throat as her excitement rose.

  She refocused on Roman and her smile, this time, was sparkling with wickedness. “Adrian, you’re a fucking genius.” She moved around the desk, still thinking, refining it. Excitement was making her movements hurried. Adrenaline had woken her from the five day slump.

  She reached over her desk and picked up the cellphone lying there. “One moment,” she said, and rapidly thumbed out a text message. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile that had all sorts of devil mixed up in it.

  Roman wondered what mischief she was suddenly brewing.

  She tossed the phone back onto her desk, then pushed at his shoulder so the chair swivelled to face her. Then she nudged his surprise a cog further. She sat in his lap.

  “Your idea is perfect, Adrian.” Her voice was the low, husky contralto that always seemed to vibrate at the bottom of his spine. “Or it will be, if you come with me.”

  Chapter Six

  Garrett fished his phone out of his pocket and turned it on. He was intrigued to see it was a direct message on Twitter that had buzzed against his chest, and tapped it to open and read it.

  @DoveAngel I surrender. Name terms. The Standard main bar. Tomorrow. High Noon.

  “Pull over,” he called to the driver, working the menus to set up a direct response back.

  MacDonald looked up from his briefcase full of paperwork as the limousine swerved with smooth competence across lanes of traffic over to the stall lane and slowed to a halt. “Problem?”

  Garrett carefully slid his finger across the screen, composing his reply. “The reverse. A problem just resolved itself.”

  “The woman?”

  Garrett frowned, hearing Sebastian’s voice in his mind. “Kate,” he said. “Her name is Kate.”

  “That one,” MacDonald agreed.

  Garrett looked at the finished Tweet. @Lind’stream The Standard, High Noon it is. Your lunch date can be your second.

  He hesitated, annoyed with himself. Why was he deliberately dragging Roman into this? Then, with an impatient clench of his jaw, he hit ‘send’ before he could change his mind or dither any longer.

  Then he switched over to normal phone output and pressed Nial’s speed-dial button.

  “Kate has buckled,” he said, when Nial answered.

  There was a minute pause. “She lasted four days and one move longer than I thought she would,” Nial replied. “Tough lady.”

  “I warned you she had balls.” Garrett grimaced. “I knew she would cave with this round, though.”

  “Because it threatened her movie?” Nial replied. “Why not use that straight out of the gate, then?”

  Garrett stared out the window at the stream of cars, trucks and holiday vans whizzing by at seventy five miles an hour, all outnumbered by big long-haul rigs and their loads, sometimes three or four of them nose to tail.

  “Why use a bazooka when a handgun might do?” And he kept his face away from MacDonald in case the prevarication showed, because that wasn’t the whole truth. The truth was, he had been reluctant to hit Kate Lindenstream with the overwhelming leverage he knew he could pull by yanking her movie out from under her. It felt like hitting a man when he was down and he was supposed to be on the same side as Kate, although she had no idea there was such a thing as sides, or factions. Her only enemy was him, as her reference to High Noon clearly indicated. She wanted her showdown and her pound of flesh.

  Kate Lindenstream would find a way to make him pay for what he had done to her these last ten days.

  But for right now, he had her over a financial barrel and she knew it. That was why she was surrendering and willing to talk terms.

  She was a realist.

  “Well, it took a bazooka, after all,” Nial told him. “More and more, I like her. I think you’ve found us a winner, Garrett.”

  “I’m glad you think so. I have to face her over lunch tomorrow.”

  Nial chuckled. “We all have to take one for the team here and there. Cheer up. Imagine Roman’s face when he realizes you’ve attached yourself to his girlfriend’s picture, after all.”

  Garrett couldn’t help it. The laugh squeezed out of him, dry and hard.

  * * * * *

  Kate caught her breath as she accustomed herself to the feel of sitting on Adrian’s lap. His well-muscled thighs were firm under her ass. Her shoulder brushed against his.

  He settled his hands around her waist. She was wearing the industry uniform, jeans. She barely remembered throwing them on this morning. Her mind had been so engrossed in the overwhelming concerns Garrett had been heaping on her head for the last few days, it had been hard enough to find sleep. Dragging herself out of bed a bare handful of hours later to discover what new disaster may have occurred had taken all her energy. Dressing had become purely automatic.

  She had kept up appearances in front of everyone else, though. She had smiled and joked. No one outside a tight circle of trusted people knew what was happening. If anyone caught a whiff of disaster, it would spread like wildfire.

  Kate shuddered to think what would happen if the media got hold of this. The tabloids would scream she was broke and on the street in one hundred point font, and scrounge up the worst photos they could find of her, where she looked the most pathetic.

  No one with a brain would believe it, but too many people would think she had troubles and wonder if she was handling the movie business as well as she might. The next time she wanted to raise money for a movie, they would remember and they would hesitate to give it to her.

  It was that fear that had kept her going for these last few days and allowed her to pretend to everyone that everything was just fine, thanks.

  Now she was abruptly aware of her clothing and her general appearance. The tee-shirt was a surplice tee-shirt that crossed over at the front. It dipped down low and gave a hint of cleavage
, and she was suddenly glad she had reached for this one rather than a standard tee-shirt this morning.

  For Adrian’s thumbs were stroking her midriff, as if he were trying to reach higher, as he watched her with his steady gaze. Then his fingers stilled as if he realized what he was doing.

  Kate linked her arms around the back of his neck. “I stocked up on hundred dollar bills,” she told him.

  He didn’t show any reaction, except for a slowly in-drawn breath that filled his chest and made his shoulders lift.

  Then her phone vibrated on her desk, low and demanding.

  His gaze slid toward it.

  “It’s him. It can wait,” she assured him.

  “Finish it off,” he told her, his voice low. “I want your undivided attention for a moment.”

  His tone and the implication in his words made her clit throb. Kate stayed where she was, reluctant to move. But, too, concern prickled through her. “Adrian...”

  His hands around her waist tightened. He lifted her off his lap, picking her up like she weighed ninety pounds, which she didn’t. She wore size eight, even at her height, but she kept that size because of working out with weights and disciplined cardio routines. She’d swapped body fat for muscle years ago, and muscle outweighed body fat by three to one. But Adrian picked her up and put her on her feet like she was a toddler.

  “Deal with Garrett first,” he said. His voice was the same low, implacable rumble. But his eyes were flickering with a hot promise that made her reach for the cellphone, more than willing to get rid of Garrett as swiftly as possible.

  She read the message. @Lind’stream The Standard, High Noon it is. Your lunch date can be your second.

  “Fuck,” she muttered, annoyed.

  “What’s he done now?” Adrian asked.

  “He wants you there.” She passed the phone to him. “I guess he wants a witness to my humiliation.”

  Adrian read the message. “He wants a witness for your signature that isn’t one of his people. He’s probably got papers already drawn up. You could always take someone else.”

  “No, I’d rather it was you. That is...do you mind? Can you spare the time tomorrow?” She grimaced. “It’s short notice, I know.”