Hollywood Wedding

by Sandra Marton

  Kissing Eve had started as a game, an object lesson to show her that he knew what she was and wasn’t impressed, but it had changed into something he didn’t like to think about, a dark hunger to possess her that had almost driven him past the point of no return.

  Scowling, he dropped his feet to the floor and brought his chair up straight. How many poor saps had she worked her black magic on? He’d spent the past week poring through Triad’s files, and it was all there, the talent she had for conning men into letting her get away with dollars-and-cents murder.

  There was his father. And the bank’s Ed Brubeck. Even the caterer who delivered meals to the set seemed to have been on the list. The guy still brought the food, but with Eve gone, the fare had gone from roast beef to hot dogs.

  “You don’t pay me enough for roast beef,” he’d said when Zach passed along the crew’s complaints.

  And what about the guy who owned the Wonder Horse? Horace had returned, minus a shoe but in good health, but his owner was protesting. Eve had convinced him, he said, to let the horse work for far less than his usual fee.

  “Eve made me promises,” he said, “and now she’s gone.”

  Promises, Zach thought. Oh, yeah, he’d just bet she’d made promises!

  What she hadn’t done was run Triad. It was already in debt, and about to go even deeper. Eve had made commitments toward a new film, commitments Zach had just discovered.

  Hell, by the time he figured a way to pull Triad out of deep water, it would be next Christmas!

  He shoved back his chair, got to his feet and shrugged on his jacket. Emma looked up in surprise as he pulled open the door to his office and strode past her desk.

  “Are you going out, Mr. Landon?”

  “Yes,” Zach snapped, “I am.”

  “But you have an appointment.”

  “Cancel it.”

  Zach slammed the door shut behind him, trotted down the cracked steps and headed for the Porsche.

  Eve had taken a sick company and made it worse. Now Triad was in its death throes but it was dying on his watch, dammit. He’d figured on being out here a few days, maybe five, but it had been a week already and there was no end in sight. He had a life and a business back East, and he was damned if he was going to spend any more of it cleaning up a mess his father and Eve had made.

  “I’ve had it,” he growled as he stabbed the key into the Porsche’s ignition.

  And it was time Eve knew it.

  * * *

  Eve sat curled on the sofa in her living room. She was wearing her tattiest robe and sipping a cup of tea as she watched the rain come down. The miserable weather was a perfect match for her mood.

  She had come home almost an hour ago, after a fruitless morning and afternoon of interviews, feeling as low as she could ever recall feeling. A long, hot bath had done nothing to improve her spirits, and neither had twenty minutes of staring blindly at Oprah on TV.

  She sighed and told herself not to sit around feeling sorry for herself, but maybe that was better than the rage that had driven her the past week.

  God, how she hated Zach Landon and men like him!

  When you were blond, and blue-eyed, and halfway attractive, you learned early on that even if you wore sackcloth and ashes, some men figured you’d been put on this earth for only one purpose.

  It was funny, really. She hadn’t expected that from Charles’s son. Charles had not judged her by her looks; why would his offspring? Her big worry had been that Zachary Landon would be a human cipher, too wrapped up in bottom lines and balance sheets to understand Triad’s unique problems.

  Eve’s mouth turned down. Instead, he’d turned out to be the kind of man who’d taken a look at her, decided what she was and set out to punish her for it.

  And he’d succeeded. She was out of work, and the only way to describe her prospects was to say they certainly didn’t look promising.

  Eve got to her feet. No, they weren’t promising at all, she thought as she brought her empty teacup into the kitchen. The trade journals didn’t exactly advertise openings for out-of-work heads of companies, and even if they had, no one would hire her.

  “Sorry, Eve,” all her contacts said when she called, “but you know how it is.”

  Yes, she knew. The rumor that she’d slept her way into the top job at Triad had been bad, but this was worse. She’d been fired, she was a failure. And who would hire a failure?

  She wasn’t even anybody’s choice for typist or word processor, she thought as she rinsed her cup and put it into the dish drainer. Nobody wanted to hire a typist or a word processor whose last job had been head of a production company.

  “We don’t really have anything you’d be interested in,” the interviewers kept saying, and Eve kept smiling like a fool because otherwise she was afraid she’d blurt out the truth, that she was interested in anything that would pay the rent.

  At the beginning, when Charles had first offered her the job at Triad, he’d talked about working out a severance package. But all that had gone by the wayside when he’d become ill.

  Eve switched off the kitchen light and made her way into the living room. She needed a job. Any job, and never mind its status.

  It was an old Hollywood tradition, she thought with a bitter smile, taking that breathless plunge from the heights to the depths. Veronica Lake, the forties screen siren, had ended up as a manicurist. Betty Hutton had gone from burning up the screen to burning pots in the kitchen of a parish mission. She could certainly go from…

  The doorbell rang. Eve frowned. Who could it be at this hour of the afternoon?

  She put her eye to the spy hole. “Yes?” she said. “What do you…?”

  The words caught in her throat. It was Zachary Landon.

  “Open the door, Eve.”

  She stared through the spy hole, taking in the expensive dark blue suit, the handsome face with its cold mouth and hostile eyes, and the rage came rushing back, so all-consuming it threatened to cut off her breath.

  “Go away!”

  A door creaked open across the courtyard. Zach shot a look over his shoulder before turning back to Eve.

  “I don’t intend to stand out here all day, Eve. Let me in.”

  Eve laughed. The man was incredible!

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Landon. Certainly, Mr. Landon. Your wish is my command, Mr. Landon.”

  She didn’t move a muscle. Zach leaned closer.

  “Open it,” he said through his teeth, “or so help me, I’ll break it down!”

  “Mrs. Harmon will love that.” Eve smiled and raised her voice just a little. The door opposite hers was fairly trembling with anticipation. “Won’t you, Mrs. Harmon? It will give you an excuse to call the police, just the way they do in all those crime shows.”

  “What a good idea,” Zach said coldly. “Perhaps we’ll be lucky enough to have a reporter come along for the ride. Having your picture splashed across the papers tomorrow ought to make your life even more interesting.”

  Eve’s smile faded. She jerked off the chain and wrenched the door open.

  “Well?” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk.” Zach brushed past her. “But without an audience.”

  She frowned, but he was right. She didn’t need an audience, either, she thought as she swung the door shut.

  “Five minutes,” she said, turning to Zach. “After that, you’re out of here.”

  His teeth showed in a phony smile

  “Such hostility, Evie. Anyone would think you don’t like me.”

  “You said you came to talk, and I said you had five minutes. Now you’re down to four. Believe me, I’ve better things to do than waste my time with you.”

  His gaze swept over her, taking in the long flannel robe and loosely braided hair.

  “Oh, I can see that,” he said tonelessly. “Lounging around the house is exhausting work.”

  Lounging, Eve thought, remembering the endless, and unproductive, round of interviews, loung
ing…

  “Yes,” she said with a cool smile, “that’s right. It’s the rain. It always makes me lazy.”

  Zach looked at her again. She looked anything but lazy. There was an energy to her that was almost palpable. Her creamy skin was flushed, her eyes bright, and unless he missed his guess, there was nothing under that robe but woman.

  The thought made his body tighten, and he turned on his heel and walked around the small living room while Eve tapped her foot.

  “When you’ve seen enough,” she said, “be sure and let me know.”

  He had seen enough—enough to be puzzled. He had expected…what? Velvet chaise longues and dim light? High-heeled gold mules tucked beneath a gilded chair? He wasn’t really certain. But he hadn’t expected this somewhat shabby assortment of furniture, the kind that looked as if it had been rescued from secondhand shops.

  Then again, he thought as he turned to Eve, he hadn’t expected her to look like this, either. She didn’t look like a femme fatale, she looked soft and vulnerable and almost painfully beautiful, she looked like a woman a man wanted to scoop into his arms and carry off to bed…

  He frowned. “I had a call from Bob Kaplan today.”

  “The loan officer at State Affiliated?”

  He nodded. “I’d asked him to give Triad some extra time on that final loan payment, but——”

  “But he wouldn’t.”

  “Exactly. He said——”

  “I’m not interested.”

  It wasn’t true. She was desperately interested, but she’d sooner have choked than let Zach know that.

  “You’re not interested,” Zach repeated in a flat voice.

  Eve shook her head. “No.”

  “I’ll bet that would make the poor sap who granted you that loan in the first place feel pretty stupid.”

  “Ed Brubeck?”

  “Yeah. Thanks to you, he’s been sent to the boomes. He got dumped out of the L.A. branch and into the backwoods because he was foolish enough to…” Zach glared at her. “What’s so funny?”

  “You,” Eve gasped, “you’re funny! Just listen to you!”

  “Hearing me describe a man’s demotion is amusing?”

  “Demotion!” Eve threw back her head and laughed some more, but her laughter stopped when Zach grabbed her, hard, by the shoulders.

  “How can you laugh at another man’s misfortune, dammit? Have you no heart?”

  Eve wrenched free of him. “Are you stupid, or are you blind? Of course, Kaplan wouldn’t extend the loan deadline. Kaplan knows zilch about making movies. Besides, he’s only a bank officer.”

  “Only a…”

  “Brubeck’s a vice president. And he’s just been made one of the directors. That’s why he’s been transferred to Arden. To the main office in Arden, I might add. And, just in case you’re going to sit around waiting for the ax to fall on his head because he lent me that money, don’t. His promotion came through after he’d approved the Triad loan.”

  It was gratifying to see the sudden wash of crimson that swept into Zach’s cheeks, but the pleasure didn’t last long.

  “So, you managed to climb past Kaplan,” he said. “But then, that wouldn’t have been so difficult for a woman of your talents. Look at how you worked my old man.”

  “I did not work Charles,” Eve said sharply.

  “No?”

  “No. He heard me express some ideas and he liked them.”

  “I’ll just bet he liked your ideas,” Zach said with a taut smile. “What man wouldn’t?”

  Eve opened her mouth, then shut it. She’d be damned if she was going to let Zach Landon force her onto the defensive. You only lost ground, arguing with the Zach Landons of this world.

  “Instead of making speeches about my morality,” she said, her tone icy, “you might try phoning the State Affiliated office in Arden and talking with Ed Brubeck. Tell him the film’s almost completed—Horace did turn up, didn’t he?”

  Zach nodded. “Yes,” he said wryly, “the star returneth.”

  “Good. Then you can assure Brubeck that the movie will hit the video stores within the month, and——”

  “The video stores?” Zach stared at her in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. Triad’s gone into debt to make a movie that won’t play in the theaters?”

  “Right.”

  “Dammit, woman, how could you be such a fool? What’s the logic in making a movie that won’t earn any money?”

  “Do yourself a favor, Zach. Get your hands on some books about making movies in the nineties and read them. Maybe, with luck, you’ll learn something.”

  The flush rose in his cheeks again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Lots of films go straight into video stores They’d never recover a dime otherwise.”

  “Dogs, you mean.”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “If this movie’s so bad, why are you making it?”

  Eve sighed as she walked into the kitchen.

  “I inherited it,” she said as she filled the kettle with water. “From the former head of the company. Any other clever questions?”

  He hesitated. Everything had seemed so obvious a little while ago. But now—now, he wasn’t so sure

  “Well?” She put the kettle on the burner, turned on the flame and swung toward him. “Last chance, Zach. If you’ve other things to ask me, ask them now.”

  “Horace’s owner is complaining,” he said brusquely, his eyes on her face. “He says he let you have the horse at a ridiculous rate.”

  Eve snorted, yanked open a cupboard door and began banging cups and saucers onto the counter

  “Did he bother telling you that this Horace isn’t the real one? Horace went to horse heaven the week before we started filming. According to Triad’s contract, I could have walked away.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because,” she said patiently, “we’d already laid out big bucks for everything else. And Horace’s owner offered a solution. He had another horse. It looks like Horace, but it’s not as smart.”

  “Yeah,” Zach said with a little laugh, “tell me about it.”

  “Do you take milk or sugar?”

  “What?”

  “With your tea. Milk? Or sugar?”

  He didn’t take tea at all, not since he was ten years old and sick with the flu and Stella had fed him endless pots of the stuff. But there was something about this tenuous peace, about standing in the warm, cramped kitchen with Eve in her flannel robe…

  “Sugar,” he said, frowning. “Sugar’s fine.”

  “So? What else do you need to ask me?”

  He looked at her. Her expression was bland but he knew she was enjoying this. It wasn’t just that she was getting a kick out of his needing her help, although he wasn’t kidding himself; she was definitely lapping it up

  But there was more to it. She was knowledgeable about moviemaking, he had to admit that, more than he’d expected and surely more knowledgeable than he. It made sense that she would be. She’d been on the fringes of the business for a long time, and once the old man had handed Triad to her, she’d probably done some fast and furious homework so that she could make herself seem indispensable. The last thing she’d have wanted would have been for Charles to have taken away her toy.

  She was, after all, not just beautiful but bright.

  “No more questions?”

  Zach looked at her. “The caterer,” he said. “The crew’s not happy with his meals lately. They want roast beef. He wants more money.” He paused deliberately. “Or is it just that he misses you, Eve?”

  Color swept into her cheeks but her eyes never left his.

  “The caterer’s planning on branching into residential work,” she said stiffly. “I told him that if he fed the crew well, I’d put in a word with a friend who writes an influential food column. Any other questions, Mr. Landon?”

  Zach took a long drink of his tea, then put the cup down. What the hell, he thought, an
d he took a deep breath.

  “Perhaps I was hasty in firing you,” he said.

  Eve grasped the edge of the counter for support. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me the first time.” He smiled. It was not a particularly pleasant smile, she thought giddily, but it was a smile, nonetheless. “Don’t push your luck by making me repeat it.”

  Her hand began to shake; she set her cup down carefully on its saucer and drew a deep breath.

  “Well,” she said, “well.”

  “You do know something about the film business.”

  “Yes. I do. I tried to tell you that.”

  “Not nearly enough to rate the top spot, of course…”

  The smile that was hovering on Eve’s lips disappeared. “Your father disagreed.”

  “My father was influenced by your other assets.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Are we back to that?”

  “We never left it. You played my old man like a champ.”

  “This is my house,” she said sharply, “not the Triad office. I’ve no intention of listening while you insult me.”

  “Listen while I make you an offer, then.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “My brothers and I intend to sell Landon Enterprises.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Only that we can’t do it until Triad gets out of that sea of red ink it’s floating in.”

  Eve smiled coolly. “My heart bleeds for you.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Zach said brusquely. “I’ll let you run Triad but you’ll have to answer to me on a daily basis.”

  Her heart leaped, but she folded her arms over her breasts and eyed him cautiously.

  “Why? Why would you ask me to come back to work?”

  “I just told you. Because I have to put Triad into the black. That next movie you’re planning…What’s it called?”

  “Hollywood Wedding. But how did you…?”

  “Did you think I’ve spent the week sitting in your office doing nothing? I know all your plans for Triad, Eve, even that you’ve already promised to spend money you don’t yet have.”

  “Only because I’m convinced Hollywood Wedding will save the company.”

  Zach nodded. “How much do you need?”