“She does this,” Ben confessed. “She just…does.”
“But I need to work.” Jo stepped closer to plead with him. “I’m having a hard enough time getting anything done without distraction, and this book—”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Yvonne interrupted, finishing her perusal of the front hall. “I’ve got everything taken care of.”
Jo managed a tight smile, though she had a feeling it smacked of desperation. “It’s only that I’ve got a deadline. And a sort of routine that I stick to. And I’m not used to having people over.”
“Really?” Yvonne gave her a look that was almost offended. “With a house like this, you don’t have people over?”
“Not everyone likes the social scene,” Ben argued for Jo. “I’m not exactly fond of it myself at the moment.” The hint of vulnerability behind his wry words sent a jolt of compassion straight to Jo’s heart. The kind that would rope her into doing anything for him. Like hosting a party of famous people.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Yvonne strode up to Ben, patting his cheek, then walking past him toward the hall and the rest of the house. “These are your true friends. They’ve heard all about the scandal, and they don’t really care. Charles wants to talk to you about a few things, though.”
Ben swallowed, then turned and followed Yvonne down the hall as she helped herself to a tour.
“Who’s Charles?” Jo asked, trailing behind. There didn’t seem to be any point in protesting the inevitable. She mentally ran through the cast of Second Chances.
“Charles Rigley,” Yvonne answered. “He’s one of the show’s executive producers.”
“Is he coming here to fire me?” Ben asked, voice loud and harsh enough to make Jo squint.
“No, honey,” Yvonne assured him with a wave of her hand, “But he wants to talk to you about the Times article.”
“Him and probably a dozen other people who I’ve ignored these last couple of days,” Ben grumbled as if talking to himself. “I never should have let you convince me to stay here. Now is not the time for a vacation, even if—” His eyes flickered to Jo, and he was silent.
Yvonne glanced over her shoulder as she swept into the open space of the living room, a sly grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. A moment later, she faced forward and gasped. “Would you look at this?” She slowed her steps as she walked further into the room.
Ben held back until he was at Jo’s side. “I can get rid of her if you want,” he murmured. “Everyone else too, for that matter.”
“It’s okay,” Jo sighed, half laughing, still not adjusted to the surreal situation. And here she thought she was a steady, normal writer whose closest friends were all online. So much for that theory. “I like her.”
“You like her?” Ben balked. “She barged into your house and invited a bunch of people you don’t know over.”
“Yeah. Famous people I don’t know. There’s that much, at least.” She rubbed her forehead between her eyes nonetheless. Be nice, be social, make Mom proud.
Ben’s sober look of frustration melted to a fatalistic smile. He shook his head, taking her hand and squeezing it. Jo’s heart caught in her throat. It may have been going down in flames around him, but Ben’s world certainly was interesting. It was like something she might have written about. Maybe if she called this surprise supper “research,” she could justify ignoring work.
Yes, there it was. She forced her shoulders to relax, shook her hands out. This was work. This wasn’t shirking her duty or falling behind. There was a story here, if she could find it.
“Did you see this fireplace, Ben?” Yvonne asked, studying one of the photographs on the mantel.
“I’ve been warming myself by it for the past day and a half,” he said. With a covert motion, he slipped his hand to the small of Jo’s back and nudged her over to join Yvonne. One simple gesture, and it had Jo feeling like this was their house, not her house.
Of course, if it was their house, they could probably afford to pay all the bills and keep it around for a while. It couldn’t have been as expensive as Ben’s Manhattan penthouse.
“And the ceiling,” Yvonne went on, spinning as she looked up. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“May I show you the view?” Ben dropped his arm from Jo’s back so that he could gesture to the windows, like a docent in a museum.
Yvonne gasped and held a hand to her chest as she completed her turn and stopped to stare out the picture windows. Jo got the distinct impression that few things impressed the woman, but her house had. Forget everything else, that was something to grin over.
“This house,” Yvonne said at length. She blinked at the view one more time before turning back to Jo and Ben. “This house.”
“Yes, I know,” Ben drawled.
“It’s been in the family for four generations.” Jo shifted into her own tour guide mode. She gestured for Yvonne to follow her down the hall. It wasn’t the first time she had shown the house off as if it was an historic building. “My great-grandfather built it in the late nineteenth century with the profits from his glass ventures. He was a huge fan of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was part of the same movement that inspired the Pre-Raphaelites.”
“You don’t say,” Yvonne hummed as they walked down the hall toward the library. She glanced on to Ben. Something in her look had the flash and shine of an award being handed out.
“We’ve done our best to maintain it. I live here full-time, and my brother, Nick, is here off and on. It’s pretty expensive to maintain, though.”
She ushered Yvonne into the library, then stole a glance at Ben. Whatever Yvonne had communicated to him with that last look, he was mulling it over now. Jo had the feeling of being left out of an inside joke. Well, if not a joke, then at least a secret handshake.
When Ben caught her curious stare, he shook his head and stepped closer to reassure her. That in itself said something. For years, Jo had lived and worked behind the walls of this house, pouring everything back into it. Now she had the eerie feeling that her whole life was about to change.
Yvonne’s idea of ‘a few people’ was half the cast of Second Chances and a few of the crew members. Yvonne’s idea of ‘catering’ was a high-end feast, delivered from one of the finest restaurants in Portland. Who knew what other ideas Yvonne had up her sleeve?
At least Yvonne had been right about one crucially important thing.
“I never did understand Broadway,” Simon commented as he, Ben, and Spence helped themselves to drinks from the bar to one side of the dining room. Drinks being soda this time. Ben had had enough for a few weeks, after the debacle that landed him in Maine in the first place. Simon didn’t drink since rehab. Spence abstained for his friends’ sakes, because that’s the kind of guy Spencer Ellis was. “The stage has always seemed like much ado about nothing to me.”
“Shakespeare jokes, cute,” Ben drawled.
“Leave it to the only Brit in the room to bring up Shakespeare when talk turns to theater,” Spence added. “What about O’Neil? What about Miller?”
“What about forgetting theater altogether to concentrate on more important things?” Simon bandied back. He leaned against the bar and grinned like the fool he was at Jenny and their son, Daniel.
“It’s a prestige thing. That’s the appeal of Broadway,” Ben answered on behalf of his baby, the stage. But a niggling part of him under all that greasepaint and limelight whispered that Simon might have had a point. “Too many things can be faked or glossed over on film or tape. On the stage, you have to not only know your shit, but have complete and utter command of it.”
Simon hummed, lost in watching the animated way Jenny talked to Jo. Come to think of it, Jo had a certain glow about her too. She took to Yvonne like peanut butter to jelly, and Tasha and Jenny had drawn her into their circle instantly. Ben furrowed his brow for the half second it took for him to consider whether Jo had any friends of her own. Surely she would have mentioned them by now.
T
hen again, he wasn’t exactly the bedrock of her life.
He stood straighter, rubbing absently at the phantom spot above his heart where those sorts of thoughts stung every time he had them. Don’t be a fool, Benjamin.
“It seems to me like right now, the problem is that everyone on Broadway thinks that you do know your shit,” Spencer said, looping the conversation around to where they’d started. “Theirs too.”
Ben swallowed the acid taste that came to his mouth. It was a pitiful thing to realize how hard of a blow it would be to lose the friendship of these two men if the Pollard twins’ little power trip destroyed everything.
“I had nothing to do with any of it,” he growled, swigging his soda and half wishing it were scotch. “But I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it, and since they’re after me for something else….”
Spence and Simon both stared at him, one on either side. “What do they want?” Simon asked.
Ben hesitated. It hadn’t dawned on him that he could talk about this with anyone. He wasn’t the talking about it sort. “Something I’m not willing to give them,” he answered, taking a long drink as soon as the words were out.
Spence and Simon exchanged a look. Ben waited, muscles aching, for them to push for more, to dig in claws that would rip his flesh from the bones and expose every rotten thing he’d ever done.
“Did you hear that this joker knocked Jenny up again?” Spence hooked a thumb at Simon.
Ben started, not because a friend was pregnant, but because two friends apparently had no further interest in the end of his life as he knew it. Conversation over. Of all things, that bolstered his confidence. “Really?” He saluted Simon with his glass.
Simon nodded in deference, raising a hand. “We’re not telling people yet. Wouldn’t want the press to get hold of it. You’ve seen how they are with Spence and Tasha’s little tyke.”
“Hazel is beautiful.” Ben smiled across to where Tasha had just handed the infant girl over to Jo’s eager arms. The sight did something to his insides that he wasn’t sure he was ready to face yet. What was wrong with him? A few days in Maine, and he’d lost complete track of who he was.
As if catching on to something, Simon asked, “So who exactly is your friend, Jo? How come we’ve never heard of her before when she lives so close to Twin Pines?”
She’s just a friend. We met by chance, it’s nothing serious. I haven’t mentioned her before? None of the lies felt right.
“It’s a long story,” he said instead, then cleared his throat.
It might not have been coincidence that at that moment, Nick glanced up at him from the center of the long dining room table, where he was chatting up Adelaide. Jo’s brother had come home from his job to find a house crowded with people. He reacted like any good parent would, blaming Ben for pushing Jo into something he believed she never would have endorsed on her own. The only thing that had saved everyone from being kicked out on the snowy curb was Ben’s quick thinking in introducing Nick to Adelaide Townsend. Unfair though it was, nothing trumped filial protectiveness like introducing a red-blooded man to a gorgeous blond movie star. Even now, Nick looked like he wasn’t sure whether to growl at Ben or smack a big wet kiss on him.
“Hey, Charles.”
Spence’s greeting snapped Ben out of his thoughts. He stood taller and turned his attention to gray-haired Charles Rigley as he came over to join them. Even at an informal gathering, Charles wore a tailored suit. At least he’d set the jacket aside when the food arrived.
“Ben. How are you holding out?” Charles picked up an open bottle of wine from the bar behind them and poured himself a glass.
“As well as could be expected,” Ben answered with a tight grin.
Charles nodded. The business nod. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
This was it. The moment the second shoe dropped, the moment he lost television on top of Broadway. Ben glanced across the table to Jo. She seemed so happy with tiny Hazel in her arms. It was a blessing that she didn’t look up at him. He wanted her to be happy, even if he was about to walk the plank.
“I don’t think Jo would mind if we talked in the library.”
“Good.” Charles nodded, then gestured with his free hand for Ben to come with him.
Ben glanced to Spence and Simon with a look that said it was nice knowing them. Spence thumped his back as he left.
Walking down the hall to the library was oddly reminiscent of the trip to the principal’s office when Ben was a boy. When Charles closed the library door, giving them privacy, he experienced the same sense of doom.
“All I want to know is if you’re responsible for the rumors I’m hearing in New York.” Charles cut straight to the chase the second the door tapped shut.
Ben flinched. “‘Responsible’ is an all-encompassing word.”
Charles smiled. It wasn’t reassuring. “You’re not a bullshitter, Ben. Don’t act like one because you’re trying to hide something.”
“I’m not.” Ben grew as serious as a monument.
“Then tell me what’s really going on, because the last thing I want is for my show to be dragged into disrepute because of a team member.”
Every nerve in Ben’s body rebelled at Charles’s tone of voice. This was why he’d fought his way to the top. He wasn’t some underling who could be pushed around by the big boys. He’d won awards, gained accolades, and been celebrated all over the entertainment industry. The way Charles spoke to him now was everything he had to lose and then some.
He wasn’t going to bend over and take it.
“I have not and never will sell anyone out, Charles.” He squared his shoulders and crossed his arms, meeting the man’s eyes and holding them. He was a power-player too, dammit. “Yes, I have had a lot of people tell me a lot of things over the years, sometimes in intimate situations. None of that has found its way into public knowledge because of me.” That half of his disgrace was true, at least.
“Then who?”
Ben hesitated. His gut reaction was to throw Jett and Ashton into the fire and watch them burn. But there was a saying about burning things, particularly bridges. He could hate it all he wanted, but the Pollard twins still had the money and pull that he needed if he wanted his life back.
Damn the both of them to hell.
“I know who is behind it, but until they tip their hand, I want to try to handle things myself.”
He held his breath, waiting to see how Charles would take the answer. The man was as cold as stone when he didn’t want anyone to see what he was thinking. Try as he did, Ben didn’t have a clue which way this would turn out.
When Charles raised a hand and thumped his shoulder, his hard expression softening, Ben nearly buckled with relief. “I’ve known you for more than two years now, Ben. Yvonne trusts you. Spence vouches for you. Simon says you’re all right. If you tell me you can handle this, then I believe you.”
“Thanks.” He’d never managed to sound more certain when, in fact, he was certain of nothing in his life.
Except Jo. He was certain that she would stick by him when everything else crumbled.
“Second Chances means a lot to me,” he added. “I’m not going to lie. Right now it’s all I have going for me. No matter what happens in New York, I know where my loyalties lie.”
He could have cringed hearing those words coming out of his mouth. Forget rumors of infidelity or financial collapse, if the Broadway purists heard him say his loyalty was with the small screen instead of the stage, they’d laugh him out of town.
Only, he was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that he wasn’t lying or making things up. The people out in Jo’s dining room, Jo herself, were the ones who had been loyal to him. And Ben didn’t take loyalty lightly.
“Let’s get back in there.” Charles headed for the door. “I still haven’t been properly introduced to your new girlfriend.”
Ben stumbled. “She’s not really my girlfriend.”
“No? Why not?”
>
A thousand answers to the question weighed on Ben’s shoulders. Because he didn’t want to wreck her life. Because she deserved much better than him. Because he would much rather have her be something far closer than a mere girlfriend.
“The question hasn’t come up,” he fumbled, following Charles into the hall.
“What a shame.” Charles grinned. “I hear she’s a pretty good writer. Plus this house is fantastic.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ben sighed, rubbing his face as Charles walked on.
Chapter Eleven
Five hours ago, if someone had snuck up to Jo and told her that they were going to pack her house full of people she didn’t know, blowing any chance of getting work done out of the water, and leaving her washing half the dishes in the house the old fashioned way, she would not only not have believed them, she would have freaked out.
But there she stood, up to her forearms in sudsy water at the kitchen sink, a high-powered talent agent drying beside her, and she was smiling from ear to ear. Because the evening had turned out to be all sorts of fun.
“Your brother, Nick, is quite a hunk.” Yvonne tossed her a sideways look as she stacked another plate in the cupboard. “I like boys with long hair.”
Jo burst into giggles, her face flushing beet red. “He’s my brother. I’ll admit that he’s handsome, but he’s not my type.”
“I should hope not,” Yvonne drawled. “We all have our limits.”
“Besides.” Jo fished around in the bottom of the sink for stray pieces of silverware. “I like my men clean-cut and well-groomed.”
Yvonne answered with a hum. She refrained from saying more as Ben walked back into the room, his arms full of soda and wine bottles…his short hair perfectly coifed.
“Where do you want these?” he asked.
“In the pantry,” Jo answered, at the same time as Yvonne said, “Put them on the table.”
Jo and Yvonne exchanged surprised looks, before Yvonne’s expression softened. “Your house, your rules.”
“I’ll put them in the pantry.” Ben flashed Jo a knowing look, the smile lines around his eyes back in full force, then crossed behind them to the pantry.
Catch a Falling Star (Second Chances Book 3) Page 14