After a couple of fruitless hours, she threw her pen down. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was that simple. She might as well admit it to herself, because it wasn’t going away. And while she was at it, she might as well add that she wanted his hands on her body again more than she wanted chocolate, ice cream or coffee, her three favorite food groups.
“This is crazy,” she told her empty condo, bouncing up from the couch agitatedly.
What was wrong with her? How could she want someone who had been so cruel to her? Was this some twisted statement on her psyche? Was she actively seeking out a man to hurt her in some way?
Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the antique mirror above her fireplace, Sadie stopped and stared. Her hair stuck out in all directions, and her eyes were wide and confused.
“You’re a mess,” she told her reflection.
And she needed to get out of her own head for a while. Scooping up the phone, she hit the speed dial for Grace. Guilt and discomfort gnawed at her as she consciously acknowledged something she’d been doing all week—she was avoiding Claudia. So far, she’d ducked two lunch invites and a movie suggestion from her friend. She felt like a prize cow. But she also knew she couldn’t spend time with Claudia and not give up her secrets. And it wasn’t fair to dump her mess in her friend’s lap. More correctly, it wasn’t fair for her to dump her mess in the producer’s lap. Which pretty much defined the problem in a nutshell. She needed her friend, but she couldn’t in all conscience ask Claudia to choose between their friendship and her responsibilities. Sadie should not have slept with Dylan. She knew it, he knew it, and Claudia would feel incredibly let down if she knew what Sadie had done. Hell, Claudia had only been in the job seven weeks, and Sadie had banged their prize new story editor in the office within days of laying eyes on him. Just the thought of Claudia’s reaction to this bit of news made Sadie’s stomach churn with anxiety.
The sound of Grace’s voice in her ear pulled her back from her tortured thoughts.
“Hey, Gracie, it’s me. You feel like shopping, or lunch or something?” Sadie asked a little desperately.
Grace made an apologetic sound. “I’m so sorry, Sadie, but I’ve already told Hope we’d hang out today. I’ve been working all week, and she’s been stuck at home on her own…” Grace explained.
Sadie was confused. “I thought you said yesterday that she was going home today?”
“She was. But she’s changed her mind. She’s a real mess, Sade. I’m going to talk her into staying with me for a while. There’s plenty of work for her out here, and I don’t want her anywhere near that creep. He’s called her a couple of times, but I made her block him from her cell phone, and he doesn’t have my number.”
“Okay. Well, maybe we could do something tomorrow?” Sadie asked.
“Sorry. Hope has booked us in for facials tomorrow.” Grace sounded guilty, and Sadie rushed to assure her.
“That’s great. You deserve a break. I’ll see you on Monday, okay?”
“Are you all right?” Grace asked, concern lacing her voice.
“Just confused, as usual. But this, too, shall pass, right?” Sadie said brightly.
They talked for a few more minutes, then Sadie returned the phone to its cradle.
Arms flopped between her legs, she stared straight ahead listlessly. How was she going to get through the weekend with her sanity intact? Beside her, the phone rang as if in direct response to her silent plea. She leaped on the receiver with pathetic eagerness.
“Sadie, it’s Claudia. We have a problem.”
A shiver of apprehension raced down her spine and she took a deep breath. Claudia knew about the sex-on-the-desk thing. A rush of heat washed up her chest and into her face. How was she going to explain what had happened to her friend when she didn’t even understand it herself? Claudia was so professional, so committed to doing a good job. And Sadie had let her down.
“Sadie, are you there?” Claudia asked as the silence stretched.
“I’m so sorry. I want you to know that up front,” Sadie said.
“Well, that’s really sweet, Sade, but I think you’re going to feel more pissed off than sorry when I tell you you’ve lost your weekend,” Claudia said.
Sadie pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it a moment. Slowly it dawned on her that Claudia didn’t know about her and Dylan, and that there was some other crisis to deal with.
“Sure, that’s okay. What’s up?” she asked.
“Mac Harrison has chicken pox,” Claudia said, referring to the actor who played the part of Kirk on the show. “Can you believe it? He visited his niece, who was infected but not showing. Bingo, he’s covered in spots. We have to pull him for two weeks.”
Claudia sounded thoroughly pissed.
“I’ll be at the office in half an hour,” Sadie said reassuringly.
“Chicken pox. My first test in the hot seat, and it’s chicken pox. I can’t believe I have to dip into the emergency funds to work around a stupid kid’s rash.”
“It can be quite, um, uncomfortable,” Sadie said, trying to repress a giggle at Claudia’s utter disgust.
“This is going to look so great in the soapie mags and TV guides,” Claudia said morosely. “Our hottest star down with the pox.”
Sadie burst out laughing. After a moment’s silence, Claudia joined in.
“Okay, I’m overreacting a little,” Claudia admitted after a moment.
“It’s cool. You’re allowed. It is a stupid thing to catch.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve already had words with Mac,” Claudia said. “I’ve warned him that next time it had better be something headline-worthy like flesh-eating virus or botulism.”
“I’ll see you in twenty,” Sadie assured her friend through her laughter.
She didn’t bother changing out of her old denim cutoffs, flip-flops and tank top. She didn’t even bother putting a bra on beneath her tank top—at the best of times, a bra was pretty much a token gesture anyway, given the size of her bust. Claudia had seen her in worse, and if she was going to work like a dog all weekend, she might as well be comfortable.
She regretted her decision the moment she walked into the office and saw Dylan talking with Claudia in the kitchen area. She stopped in her tracks, suddenly acutely sensitive to the fact that she had far too little clothing on. Dylan broke off what he was saying when he saw her, his dark gaze raking her from head to toe. Sadie stuck her hands into her front pockets and willed an extra couple of inches onto the bottom of her cutoffs. They were her car-washing shorts, and while they weren’t exactly Daisy Duke hot pants, they ended a good distance above her knees. She could feel the heat in Dylan’s gaze as it ran up her bare legs. Goose bumps broke out over her body, and she suppressed a shiver. Why wasn’t she wearing a bra? And how could a simple look have so much power? Especially a look from a man she didn’t like?
“Thanks, Sade. I owe you one,” Claudia said, oblivious to the crackle of awareness surging back and forth between her two key story people. “I figure between the three of us we can at least pinpoint the size of the problem today. If I have to, I can reschedule next week’s shoot to give you more time to rewrite the replacement scenes.”
“Sure. Not a problem,” Sadie said automatically.
She was deliberately not looking at Dylan. She could see him in her peripheral vision, but she could not risk looking at him directly. She was already too aware of the fact that he was wearing a pair of low-slung jeans, the denim faded and soft enough to outline every muscular bulge in his legs. And she didn’t need to look more than once to have an image burned onto her retina of the way his ratty, slightly shrunken T-shirt moulded the hard planes of his chest. It sported the Lakers’ logo in faded lettering, and didn’t quite meet the waistband of his jeans on one side. His feet were bare, an innocuous circumstance that for some reason made her palms feel hot and sweaty. God help her, even his feet were sexy.
“Where do you want to work? The story room? One
of the offices?” Claudia asked.
She instinctively turned toward Dylan’s office, since it was the closest, and Sadie and Dylan both spoke at once.
“No!”
Claudia’s eyebrows shot up. “O-kay. Story room it is, then,” she said, shooting Sadie a what-the-hell-was-that look as they moved toward the larger meeting room.
Sadie smiled weakly and shrugged a shoulder, regretting the gesture the moment she felt her breast jiggle. A bra, a bra, her condo for a bra. Never had underwire, lace and various bits of tiny hardware seemed so appealing.
Sadie waited until Dylan chose a seat before pulling out a chair as far from him as possible. Claudia sat between the two of them and started handing out the scripts in question. There were ten one-hour scripts in all, two weeks’ worth. A substantial tower of paper.
“Okay, how do we want to handle this?” Claudia asked, throwing the floor open to her experts.
To Sadie’s surprise, Dylan deferred to her with a quick look in her direction.
“Right. Um, sure.” Why was she surprised that he hadn’t tried to take the lead? She was the boss, right? Somehow, she always expected him to try to bully her or beat her down, but she was beginning to understand that Dylan didn’t ever do what was expected of him.
“Let’s break these up, find out what we’re up against. I’ll handle the first four scripts, since I’m probably the most familiar with the material, and you two take three scripts each.”
Sadie leaned forward to grab a handful of tiny Post-It notes, forgetting her sans bra condition until the front of her tank top gaped. She didn’t need to look up to know Dylan was looking at her. She could feel his eyes on her like a caress.
Swallowing self-consciously, she slid a pile of Post-it notes toward both Claudia and Dylan.
“Tag anything with Kirk in it, or any mention of him. Once we ascertain what we have to pull him out of, we can come up with a reason for his absence and a replacement story to slot in,” Sadie instructed.
Claudia and Dylan nodded their understanding, and for the next few hours there was nothing but the rustle of paper and the scratch of pens as the three of them ploughed through the scripts. Slowly, Sadie’s monumental awareness of Dylan faded to manageable proportions. As long as Claudia was there, they had the ultimate buffer for the insane physical attraction that seemed to exist between them. Even if Sadie wanted to take advantage of it, she couldn’t with Claudia on hand. Not that she wanted to, of course. Dylan was everything she disliked in a man. And they had a deal—a very sensible, rational deal not to let anything happen between them again.
By 4:00 they had a blueprint of what needed pulling out and replacing. Across the ten episodes, Kirk was in nearly forty scenes spread over six sets and one location shoot.
By 7:00, they were all jangling with coffee nerves, but had formulated a solution to their problems. Once Mac was clear of his quarantine period, they would shoot a scene explaining that his character was heading off to help his brother with a business crisis across country, and paste it in during the tape edit. Story wise, Loni would be angry that he was leaving at a time when she was still grieving the loss of their unborn child. Since the shooting scripts were ten weeks ahead of the stories Dylan and his team were plotting at present, Kirk’s abandonment of Loni at this difficult emotional time only added weight to their decision to divorce in subsequent weeks.
When they’d finished mapping out the arcs they would be slotting in to take the place of Kirk and Loni’s scenes, Claudia breathed out a sigh of relief and pushed a hand through her hair.
“Wow. That’s great, guys. I can’t believe we got through all that so quickly.”
Sadie was faintly surprised, too. But once they knew what they were up against, she and Dylan had worked together like a well-oiled machine. There was a special form of shorthand that developed between simpatico story people on television drama that allowed them to finish each other’s sentences and outline moments without going into every tiny detail. Sadie had experienced it with a couple of colleagues in her time, but she had never expected to be so in tune with Dylan that they would understand what the other was going to say before it was said.
But that was the way it had been. He suggested an idea, she fleshed it out, they both spoke up with the pay-off scene at the same time. Her excitement about a moment fed his energy, and ideas flew across the table. Claudia sat between them, her brow furrowed with concentration as she tried to keep up.
“You know, it’s like you guys are speaking another language when you get going like that,” Claudia said as she went over her notes. “I don’t even know what half of this stuff I wrote down means!”
Sadie laughed self-consciously. “It’s a story-table thing. It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s solid gold. I was feeling incredibly guilty about this stupid dinner I have to go to, but you guys have got this whipped. Once you’ve fleshed out those replacement scenes in story line form, I’ll farm them out to a couple of freelancers to write up the dialogue and we’ll be ready to rock and roll.”
Sadie barely heard anything that her friend said. She was too busy registering the fact that Claudia was standing and collecting her bag and car keys.
“You’re going?” Sadie asked stupidly.
“Like I said—I’ve got a dinner with the organizing committee for the People’s Vote Television Awards,” Claudia said.
Sadie shot a panicked look toward Dylan, then immediately regretted it. What was she expecting him to do, second her plea for Claudia to remain as chaperone between them? His dark gaze was unreadable, and Sadie dropped her eyes back down to her notes.
“I’ll check in again later, okay? If you need me, I can swing back around after the dinner,” Claudia said on her way out the door.
And then they were alone again.
6
DYLAN SCRIBBLED a pointless note in the margin of his scratch pad. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sadie’s blond halo of hair, the silky mass even more tousled than usual after an afternoon of plot wrangling.
If he shifted his head a little more to the side, he would also be able to see the sweet swell of her breasts in the bright aqua tank top she was wearing. He didn’t need X-ray vision to know she wasn’t wearing a bra—that fact had been apparent the moment she’d walked in the door. All afternoon he’d been resisting the urge to feast on the soft outline of her nipples through the stretch fabric of her top. But he was only human, after all. He was bound to slip up sometime. Like…now, for instance, with Claudia gone and the coast clear.
He shot a glance toward the end of the room. Sadie was resting her head on her hand, her elbow propped on the table. Her full lips were pursed around the end of her pen, her eyes fixed on the page in front of her. His eyes dropped to caress her breasts. Their curves pressed full and proud against her tank top, two pert, perfect handfuls. He shifted a little in his seat, remembering the weight of her in his hands, the way she’d moaned with need as he’d taken one of her nipples into his mouth. His fingers curled into his thighs, wanting to touch, as well as look. His groin tightened, and even though he knew it was an exercise in self-torture, he couldn’t pull his eyes away. Her nipples were very sensitive, he remembered, but she’d liked it when he bit her there, his tongue rough against the pebbled silk of her skin. He moved his tongue against his teeth, remembering how she’d tasted. As if they were responding to his lust-laden thoughts, Sadie’s nipples hardened into two erect nubbins, poking proudly through the thin layer of cotton that was all that separated her from his roving gaze.
“Stop it!”
Dylan’s gaze shot from her chest to her face and he saw she was staring at him, her brown eyes frustrated.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” he said, aware that he sounded more than a little caught out.
“Yeah, you were. You were staring. We had an agreement,” she said.
“Then you should have worn a bra,” he fired back.
“You
’re the one with bare feet,” she said belligerently.
He made an exasperated noise. “Not quite the same thing, I’m sure you’d agree?”
She blushed, and avoided his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t like it.”
“Parts of you do,” he said before he could help himself.
She pierced him with her gaze. “You don’t even like me. Remember?”
“You’re the one with the erect nipples, baby.”
“Right. So you don’t have a hard-on right now?” she demanded.
“That’s right, I don’t,” he fibbed.
“Liar.”
She stood abruptly and moved around the table toward him. Dylan fought the urge to cover his incriminating crotch with his notepad. This conversation was juvenile enough as it was.
“Ha!” she said as she spotted the thick ridge his erection made in his jeans.
“Okay, you got me—I have a hard-on. Big deal. It’s a well-known fact that penises are indiscriminate. I, however, am not.”
“Ditto for my nipples,” Sadie asserted defiantly. “I have no control over their bad taste.”
“Fine. We’ve got that covered. How about we do some work so we can get out of here before Monday?” Dylan suggested tightly.
“Great idea. Let’s do that,” she agreed.
For the next two hours, they plotted the specifics of the replacement scenes. Dylan’s hand began to cramp from his intensive note taking, and his growling, empty stomach became louder with each passing moment.
When a particularly loud, demanding hunger rumble shattered the silence of the room, Sadie rolled her eyes.
“I take it you’re hungry?” she asked, as though that were an incredibly unreasonable thing.
“Us humans need to recharge every now and then. We can’t just find a handy power socket like you robots,” he said.
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