3inter glanced out the heavily smoked windows of the limousine. “Your hotel in about three minutes,” she judged, and looked down at the tablet once more. “I’ll have certified copies of the contract made and distributed to all the stakeholders, and Patrick Sauvage’s contract, too.”
MacDonald lifted his head. “You’ve already signed a contract with Sauvage?”
“You were busy with Kate Lindenstream stuff. I handled it,” Garrett told him dismissively.
MacDonald frowned. “Who did you get to draft it?” he asked. “These Hollywood types love to squelch. If you don’t have an absolutely waterproof deal—”
“It’s fine, Tom,” Garrett told him shortly. “Forget it.”
MacDonald tapped the edge of his screen with the wide ring on his wasted finger, considering. “Alright,” he agreed, and went back to work.
Garrett let out a sigh and let his mind turn back again to Kate’s parting words. You fucked me over good and proper.
Even though he had been braced for her fury, the bitterness pouring from her had still left him feeling uncomfortable. The expression in her eyes had been bleak, and her pointed chin had been held stiff and unresponsive. He had wanted to send her a message afterwards, to try to erase some of the negativity. None of this was supposed to impact so badly upon her, but trying to explain that was out of the question.
For now, anyway.
“Garrett,” Winter prompted.
He looked at her.
“I’ll sort all this out and I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow, yes?”
The car was pulling up under the hotel portico. He had been lost in thought.
He stirred and reached for the door handle, but the hotel valet beat him to it. The door opened, pulling in heat and light. Garrett winced. “Seven thirty,” he agreed.
“She’ll be fine, Garrett,” Winter added.
He glanced back at Winter. She sat in the corner with her legs crossed, looking effortlessly efficient, composed and calm.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“Kate Lindenstream. You’re worried about her. But there’s no need.”
Garrett pulled out his sunglasses and pushed them on. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told her and shut the door on her.
That was another reason he’d never used personal assistants until Nial had foisted his wife upon him as a means to insert his own people onto the set. Personal assistants ended up becoming too personal.
* * * * *
Winter had the limousine drop MacDonald off first, then she could be dropped at her hotel without complications. She breathed a sigh of relief when MacDonald was gone. The long, thin man made her feel uncomfortable although she had no idea why.
As the limousine drew closer to the hotel, she was aware of a building tension in her. She could have reached inside and smoothed it away, but that would have meant dealing with the subject matter that was causing it, and for right now she was afraid to touch the subject.
So she sat on the bench, her tension winding slowly tighter the closer she got to her temporary home.
By the time she walked through the lobby, carefully not catching anyone’s eye, and slumping to make herself look thick around the waist and as unattractive as possible, she was trembling with the effort to hold it all inside her.
The elevator ride seemed endless, even though no one stepped on or off the elevator and she miraculously got the car all to herself. It was mid-afternoon and quiet.
Sebastian was working on his computer when she stepped into the suite, and Nial was on the phone. Nial was always on the phone these days.
Sebastian rose to his feet as soon as he saw her. “What happened?” he demanded sharply.
Winter held up her hand, telling him silently to halt as he headed in her direction. Her hand was shaking, she saw. It was all going to come out of her. It was rising like noxious yeast.
Nial turned at Sebastian’s tone, looked at her, and said into his phone “I’ll call you back,” and switched it off. He threw the phone onto the seat of the big armchair. He didn’t come closer to her, but his gaze ran the length of her, assessing carefully. “You’re not hurt and you haven’t been since you left this morning.”
She swallowed. “They hauled Finka Zupan’s body out of a drainage culvert yesterday. I saw it on TV.”
Neither man reacted. They just stared at her.
“You were going to talk to her,” Winter accused them. “Just talk!”
Sebastian glanced at Nial.
The glance did it. The glance was too much confirmation for her. Winter clapped her hand over her mouth as genuine nausea enveloped her and rushed for the bathroom. There was no time to adjust her body chemistry and she knew she deserved this at the very least.
She staggered to the toilet, crumpled in front of it and was violently, massively sick. It wrenched at her body and muscles long after her stomach was empty, and it was worse for the fact that in her life Winter had only ever been genuinely sick once. She normally adjusted her physiology to avoid this horrible experience. Now she was paying twice over for that privilege because being sick and vomiting was such a new experience.
Cool hands soothed her back as the spasms eased. Something cold and damp pressed against her neck.
Winter turned her head into the shoulder she knew would be there waiting for her and let the tears take her. They were few, but each one felt as hard as a bullet and hurt as it rolled down her cheek.
She was picked up and carried into one of the bedrooms and laid on the bed. Her wig was carefully lifted away and her hair loosened, along with her clothes. She was cradled against one body and another, warmer one fitted itself against her back. That was Sebastian.
Winter let herself be soothed. If she refused Nial and Sebastian’s comfort, who else was there to offer such warmth to her? She was weak and pathetic, but she wanted to be held and reassured right now, even if the men doing it were the ones who had caused her misery in the first place.
The hypocrisy prickled softly, until she could no longer ignore it. She sat up.
“I suppose I should give you the benefit of doubt.” She wiped her cheeks dry with her hand. “Did you do it?”
Nial lifted himself up with one of his powerful, cat-like movements, so he was resting against the bedhead. “Does it matter?”
Sebastian folded his long legs so he was sitting cross-legged, and rested his hands loosely on top of them where they crossed over. He wasn’t contributing just yet, but she could see he was with Nial on this one by the expression in his green eyes.
Winter pressed her hands together. “Of course it matters. To me.”
“Why?” Sebastian asked, his tone reasonable.
She tried to find a few words to encompass an entire conversation her answer would take if she was thorough, and sighed. “If you have to ask, Sebastian, it’s not worth me answering.”
“You value Finka’s life above your own?” Nial asked.
“Yes!” Winter replied.
“Really?” he pressed. “I have a gun at Finka’s head, and you would say ‘shoot me, not her,’?”
She bit her lip. “You can’t go around just...killing for convenience’s sake.”
“We didn’t,” Sebastian replied.
Relief touched her, until Winter realized she had handed Sebastian a way to lie to her and tell her what she needed to hear at the same time. Her relief congealed. “Then if not for convenience, why did you kill her?” she asked.
“We didn’t kill Finka.” Nial tugged at her arm, bringing her toward him. She let herself be pulled into his arms. “She was already dead when we reached her.”
“Someone else killed her?” Winter asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We didn’t want to bother you with it. You’re busy,” Sebastian replied.
“Too busy to know something as important as the fact that someone else wanted to kill Finka?”
“It was a simple mugging gone wrong. She was a stranger here,” Nial said. “Her motel was in
an area where I wouldn’t want to travel alone at night. We found her outside the back of her room. Someone had taken all her possessions and ID. It was only your description that told us it was Finka. We left the body where it was. Someone moved it afterwards.”
Winter let her aching head rest against his shoulder. “You would lie to stop me worrying about this, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would. You are worth more to me than a dozen Finkas. Alive or dead.”
His pragmatic answer was no answer at all.
She sighed. “So I will never know what happened, then.”
Nial lifted her chin so she was looking him in the eye. “It has happened. You cannot change it. Regret Finka’s passing, yes, but now it is time to move on, Winter.” His eyes were very blue in the dim light filtering through the heavy curtains over the window. He gave her a small smile as he carefully hoisted himself off the bed with minimal disturbance to her. “And now, I will make you some coffee, for we are all in for a long night.” He paused. “Make that a long week. I saw your portfolio was thick with papers. She signed the contract?”
Winter nodded. “She didn’t like it, but she signed. Watching those two bargain was...interesting.”
“Then Kate will not hold up production on the movie, if she has both money and Sauvage in the bag. One week, and we must have everything completed here in Los Angeles and be ready to move onto location.”
“That’s most of what I have to do tonight. Prep work,” Winter agreed.
Nial gave a dry smile. “Garrett may not have liked having you added to his entourage, but he has no compunction about using your labour.”
“That was my idea,” Winter told him. “If I am to pose as his assistant, I should really be of assistance, or people will notice. That MacDonald is far too observant, for one. He listens, even while he’s working on his own stuff.”
Nial held up a finger. “Coffee first. Then business. There is a proper order to these things.” He strode from the room.
“He just likes to lick the spoon,” Sebastian observed. “The glutton.”
“He makes better coffee than you do,” Winter replied, stretching and rolling over to look at him.
Sebastian picked up her hand. “If Nial had been lying, he would have simply told you we found the body in the culvert, where the police did. You know how to lie as well as we do, Winter. The simple lie is the most foolproof. Why would he embellish a lie, to you of all people, with details about the motel room and muggers?”
“Maybe, because if the story had been that simple, I would have suspected it was a lie because of its sheer simplicity?”
Sebastian shook his head. “You really want to think badly of us, don’t you?”
She sat up. “No! Of course I don’t, Bastian. But the timing...”
“The timing is unfortunate, yes,” Sebastian agreed. “Coincidences have hanged innocent men before now.” He grimaced. “Would we kill to protect you? Of course. In a heartbeat – if killing was needed. Did we kill Finka? No.” He turned her hand over, lifted it and kissed the palm. “But the thought crossed my mind,” he added, his lips tickling her flesh.
Chapter Ten
Things were going well, which made Kate nervous.
She clutched her Solo cup, which was half-full of watery beer, and looked around the barn-like room her cast and crew had taken over for the night. It was one of those mysterious pockets of silence and solitude that sometimes happened, when no one was tugging at her sleeve either mentally or physically and she had five minutes alone with her thoughts.
After a week of being on set, she had already forgotten how good being alone was.
The barn was called The Ranch and was one of Los Imperalis’ two bars along the main – and only – street. There was a single set of traffic lights in the town and this was the only town for thirty miles. The set, currently, was ten miles away in the desert, while they were shooting the battle scenes and easing Sauvage into the role with some good old fashioned blood, guts and sword wielding. It gave him time to get his lines down for the rest of the script.
Los Imperalis was base camp for the shoot, which would last another four weeks here before heading back to her studio for indoor scenes. The indoor sets were being built at the studio while they were away, and part of her evenings was spent pouring over high resolution photos of progress to date.
But not tonight. They had logged one week of filming and tonight was celebrating the milestone, along with a party to thank the sponsors.
It galled her that Garrett got to be one of the good guys standing on the stage being hailed for his generosity. It riled her even more that his applause was discernably louder than anyone else’s as they were announced. Garrett was a celebrity in his own right. And after a week of being on set with everyone, he had made friends and influenced people enough that the applause actually seemed genuine.
“Asshole,” she whispered into her cup, as he waved off the applause and gave a little bow.
He was wearing jeans, just like everyone else on the set who wasn’t in costume. That had shocked her, right there, the first time she had spotted him moving amongst the organized hysteria of first day set up. If she had stopped to think about it beforehand, she would have assumed even Garrett would give up his thousand dollar suits for the California desert and the inelegant camping conditions everyone put up with.
But she hadn’t spared Garrett a thought that didn’t involve four letter words and body parts under extreme pressure. Even those had been rare, because the last eight days before driving down here had been frantic with preparations.
It didn’t help that Garrett had delivered on his side of the contract and more. Patrick Sauvage had turned up in her studio the very next day, along with Garrett and a tall man with black hair turning prematurely grey...or perhaps it was highlighted. It was sometimes hard to tell, these days. But the man had been wearing a variation of the universal uniform of security guards in the entertainment world: Black jeans, and a black tee-shirt with a V-neck. Black sneakers. The shirt was snug around his biceps, proving they were well developed, but not steroid-induced large. And he had heavy shoulders, too.
His eyes were arresting. Blue so blue it looked like it had been touched up by the best digital remix artist in the world. Except that Kate was looking right at him, and they were real enough. They made her think of Roman`s eyes, except the blue of this man`s eyes was even more pure than Roman`s. They were astonishing.
“This is...what was your name, sorry?” Garrett asked the man.
“David.” The man nodded at Kate. “Just pretend I’m not here.”
Sauvage scowled.
She put it together. This, then, was Sauvage’s nursemaid. The man stepped back, deliberately removing himself from the conversation.
Sauvage took a deep breath. “Right,” he said, giving her a smile that showed some effort. “What’s first?”
She had picked up the clipboard with the list of things they had to take care of as quickly as possible – costume fittings, hair and make-up, prosthetics, weaponry and more – and had slid into business, able to dismiss Garrett from her mind because matters had been so pressing.
But at the end of the meeting, Garrett had pushed the sleeve of his jacket aside to check his watch, then glanced at her. “Los Imperalis and the locations around it aren’t likely to have much in the way of Wi-Fi out there.” He pointed to her laptop sitting on the desk. “How will that hamstring you?”
“I haven’t looked into it yet,” she said. “My computer specialist who takes care of that stuff was one of the ones you had run out of the country.”
Garrett lifted a brow. “I’d apologize, but you used illegal labour in the first place. It gave me leverage. You might remember that in future.” He held up his hand as she opened her mouth to reply. “I have a man – he’s very good. He could make sure that, wherever you are, there’s a Wi-Fi hotspot working. One big enough and strong enough to support the entire cast and crew’s on-line needs
.”
“He could do that in the middle of the desert?” Kate asked, trying not to be impressed.
“He could,” Garrett confirmed.
“That would be...useful,” she replied, struggling to avoid sounding too pathetically grateful. In fact, until Garrett had pointed it out, she had forgotten this essential but minor detail. It was administrative trivia on her radar, but one that could give her giant morale headaches on the set a few weeks in when everyone had been isolated for too long. Jose Avelar had simply taken care of that stuff for her.
Garrett had filled in quite a few holes in her preparations, she realized. True, they were holes he had helped create. But she wouldn’t have been location-ready in time if he hadn’t offered the people and resources he had ended up providing. Every time she had accepted his help or taken on another one of the people he “just happened to know,” her jaw had clenched tighter and her gut had twisted harder.
Her thoughts about Garrett, therefore, had not been at all kindly, when she spared him thought at all.
Adrian had seemed to be able to pluck the thoughts from her mind. Adrian...she had many spare moment thoughts about Adrian. If it hadn’t been for him, she suspected she would have gone into total nuclear meltdown by day three on the set.
He had seemed to know exactly when Garrett himself, or Garrett’s latest activity had pushed one too many of her buttons. He would pluck her pen, her computer or her cellphone – sometimes two or all of them at once – from her hands, and drag her somewhere moderately private, and drive her crazy with lust as he did things with her body she hadn’t been aware were possible. Sixty seconds in his arms or with his mouth on her flesh, and all thoughts about Garrett and the movie disappeared, drowned and washed away in the rising tide of need.
She hadn’t realized that Adrian would take his role as sex toy quite so seriously, but she had found out right after Garrett and Sauvage had left the first day after she had signed the deal.
Adrian had kneaded her shoulders as they watched Garrett leave the trailer. “Relax,” he murmured. “Deep breath. You’re way too wound up.”
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