Chasing Dreams

by Susan Lewis

  He looked away for a moment as he tasted the wine, then signalled for the waiter to pour. ‘So why don’t we turn this around and talk about you coming to work for me?’ he suggested.

  Ellen’s eyes flew open.

  Michael watched her, looking very much as though he was about to laugh.

  Then, realizing what was happening, Ellen’s lovely brown eyes started to shine.

  ‘That’s your answer?’ she asked. ‘That’s what you want me to tell Forgon? That instead of accepting our offer, you’re making one of your own?’

  Michael nodded. ‘My only concern,’ he said, ‘is that losing one of his best agents to the other side might give him another coronary.’

  Ellen’s expression was caught between suspicion and laughter as she tried to work out if he was serious. ‘It probably would if I accepted,’ she said. ‘Not because he’d be sorry to lose me, but because you’d outsmarted him again.’

  Michael’s eyebrows rose. ‘He’s sure to have good medical cover,’ he said.

  Ellen choked back a laugh. Then, deciding she was enjoying this line of patter, she pursued it by saying, ‘I guess it would mean me moving over here to London?’

  ‘I guess it would,’ he confirmed.

  Her humour began to retreat as the possibility that he might mean it started to root. ‘Are you serious?’ she said after a while. ‘I mean I’m still having problems with British irony, so you’re going to have to help me out here …’

  ‘I’m serious,’ he told her.

  Her heart was suddenly unsteady. ‘But why?’ she said.

  ‘Because I hear you’re good and I’d hate to think of you losing your job because I won’t play ball with Forgon.’

  As his eyes remained on hers, Ellen was aware of a slow heat spreading through the more sensitive areas of her body, but was trying to ignore it. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there isn’t a danger of me losing my job. I got that sorted before I left. In fact, if you did accept I’d be twenty thousand dollars richer and minus a very big problem.’

  Michael’s head went to one side and the smile on his lips reflected darkly in his eyes. ‘Well, at least I won’t have your employment on my conscience,’ he said. ‘But my offer still stands.’

  She smiled deep into his eyes and felt a warmth pull through her heart as he smiled back. ‘I can’t accept, of course,’ she said, ‘but I’ll enjoy telling Ted Forgon you offered.’

  Michael laughed. ‘I wish I could be there,’ he told her, leaning back as their food was set down on the table. When the waiter had gone he picked up his wine and touched his glass to hers. ‘Let’s drink to us agreeing on something before the evening’s over,’ he said.

  Feeling herself respond to the possibilities that offered she said, ‘I haven’t given up hope of persuading you to come to LA.’

  Michael put down his glass and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Is that good?’ he said as she took a mouthful of lobster.

  ‘Mmm, delicious,’ she replied. ‘How’s yours?’

  ‘Better than that,’ he answered. ‘Do you want to try?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Monkfish.’

  Ellen leaned over with her fork, but he had already selected her a portion, so opening her mouth she allowed him to feed her. ‘Mmm, you’re right,’ she told him, trying not to be so mindful of the intimacy, ‘it’s good.’

  Seeing him watch her as she ate and feeling suddenly very self-conscious, she lowered her eyes to her plate. He was getting to her in a way she would rather not think about, especially after all the business with Clay. In fact, considering the horrors of the past few weeks and the terrible shame she felt whenever she thought about it, she was amazed at the way she was responding to this man when she hardly even knew him. But even if she wanted to, and she had to confess she did, there was simply no way she was going to fall into bed with him at the end of the evening, for it just wasn’t something she did, sleep with a man on the first night. She looked at him again and wondered if that was what he was expecting. It was impossible to tell, for despite the lingering scrutiny of his eyes the thoughts behind them were as unreachable as the answers to why she was feeling this way.

  ‘Would it be rude to ask what the problem is?’ he asked, watching her put down her wine.

  Ellen looked at him in surprise.

  ‘You mentioned earlier that if I came to LA you’d be twenty thousand dollars richer and minus a very big problem,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ellen responded with a mirthless laugh. ‘Actually, it’s nothing worth talking about. Do you go to LA much?’

  He nodded and took another mouthful of food. ‘From time to time,’ he answered. ‘The other agents go more frequently. Most of my business is here in Europe. What about you, do you travel?’

  ‘Back and forth to New York now and again,’ she said, aware of how she was barely connecting with what she was saying. This was crazy, for all she seemed able to think about now was what it would be like to make love with him. Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to get away from him for a while, as she was in grave danger of forgetting why she was there. ‘Will you excuse me?’ she said, getting to her feet.

  On reaching the ladies’ she walked to the mirror and stared at her reflection. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes too bright and her mouth was cherry red and moist. She couldn’t help wondering if she was having a similar effect on him, as without even looking she knew her nipples were hard and the attraction she was feeling was leading her thoughts in quite another direction from the one she should be pursuing. She wanted to laugh, but found she couldn’t. It was incredible to be this drawn to a man whose only act of intimacy was to look deep into her eyes and feed her a single morsel of fish. She wished Matty were there to help her to see the funny side, for that was the only way she was going to be able to deal with the rest of the evening, she was sure of it. Except that was nonsense. She was a grown woman and perfectly in control of her senses.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, getting up as she returned to the table a few minutes later.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she smiled. Her quick escape seemed to have helped as she felt much more in control now. ‘I’m sorry, what were we saying?’

  ‘What are you doing at the weekend?’ he asked.

  Ellen’s heart immediately contracted and once again she was in turmoil. ‘Um, uh, I’m busy this weekend,’ she answered, totally forgetting he was the sole reason she was in London, thinking only that she didn’t want to appear too keen.

  He seemed surprised, but said nothing.

  ‘Why?’ she ventured, sounding suitably casual.

  ‘Victor Warren has invited about twenty people to his place in Scotland for the weekend,’ he told her. ‘I thought you might like to come too.’

  Ellen’s eyes were round. ‘You mean Victor Warren the American director?’ she said, actually more impressed by Scotland and the castle she knew Warren owned.

  Michael nodded. ‘There’ll be hunting and shooting and fishing, all the normal things that go with a weekend in Scotland. I think he’s holding some kind of ball too, I can’t remember. But if you’re not free …’

  Though Ellen looked crestfallen, she actually felt much closer to bereft. But there was no way she could go, not with him, for there was no doubt where it would end up and she just couldn’t let that happen. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It sounds like fun and I’d love to see Scotland.’ Forgon was going to hang her out to dry for this, but she couldn’t run the risk of Michael thinking she was one of the perks in the package.

  He shrugged. ‘Another time maybe.’

  They ate on in silence for a while, until Ellen finally managed to wrench herself from the disappointment of not going to Scotland and the fact that he hadn’t tried to persuade her either and returned to the real reason she was here. ‘When I was reading about you,’ she said, ‘I noticed that you once went into producing, but you didn’t follow it up.’

  His easy humour and attentive blue eyes
were suddenly masked by caution, telling her she was on very delicate ground now.

  ‘Have you ever considered resurrecting the movie?’ she said. ‘Or maybe producing something else?’

  He looked at her closely, as though deciding whether or not he wanted to go any further. ‘I think about it from time to time,’ he said in the end, ‘but the right project’s never come along.’

  ‘If it did, would you?’

  ‘I might.’

  Bracing herself and wishing desperately she didn’t have to bring his name back into the conversation she said, ‘Ted Forgon’s willing to back you, give you as many contacts as you need to get your own production company started after a five-year period at ATI.’

  Michael’s eyebrows were in the air and his smile already growing before she’d even finished. ‘Does Forgon seriously think I couldn’t do that for myself?’ he said.

  ‘Here you probably could, in LA it might prove more difficult and Forgon holds a lot of sway with a lot of …’

  ‘Ellen,’ he interrupted gently, ‘the answer’s no.’

  Ellen’s eyes remained on his as she felt the consequences of her failure begin to fill her heart, with so many emotions she could find no voice through the chaos. But once past the personal loss she felt at his refusal, all she could see was the harsh reality of what it was going to mean – stuffed racks of cheap, smutty journals cluttering every supermarket check-out from Washington State to Florida Keys, all of them glorying in the full frontal nudity of one of Hollywood’s shyest and most respectable agents. Everyone she knew, when they went to get their groceries, was going to see her exposed in a way that would shock them as much as it would excite them with its potential for new gossip. Just like Clay’s Baywatch Babe, a headline would be stamped over her nipples and pubic hair, but everyone would know she was naked and because the photographer had been Clay, other papers would pick up on it fast and some eager early bird would probably go straight to Nebraska to try talking to her folks. The TV would follow up with their own spin on the story and then, after the entire nation had been fed a full diet of titillating shots of Clay Ingall’s secret love, and all her friends and colleagues had finished sniggering behind their hands and seeing straight through her clothes whenever she walked into a room, the heavyweights like Playboy and Penthouse would probably publish the whole damned lot, which left nothing, no single part of her, to the imagination. She tried to console herself with Forgon’s assurance that she had the only set of polaroids, but it was no good, she knew Ted Forgon and there was just no way he would hand back ammunition like that when he might still make use of it.

  Realizing Michael was watching her, she quickly forced a smile and, without really thinking about what she was saying, said, ‘It’s my ambition to become a producer. At least it was.’

  ‘Was?’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Still is, I guess, but …’ She broke off, but before he could speak again she said, ‘I’ve been looking at some of your tabloid papers while I’ve been here, they’re much more explicit than anything we have in the States.’

  Clay was so famous that there was simply no way the British press would pass up on the story, so Michael would get to see the whole god-damned carnival and for some reason knowing that seemed to make it all so much worse. The irony of it was that he was the only one who could rescue her, but she would never tell him that, because there was just no way he was going to sell up his life to save her reputation and her parents’ shame. And why should he? He barely even knew her, and probably to him the idea of a few nude shots in tens of millions of newspapers and magazines wasn’t a particularly big deal, at least certainly not big enough to persuade him to hand himself over to Forgon and Hollywood.

  Wanting now only to get her mind off the horrors that lay ahead, she asked the question almost before it had chance to form in her mind. ‘Why did Michelle really leave?’

  Michael blinked in surprise and though his good humour seemed still to be there she could tell that he didn’t want to answer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, putting down her fork.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first to ask.’

  She looked at him, wondering if he was going to enlarge, but he just let the silence lie between them.

  ‘I read about the charity work,’ she said, wishing she hadn’t got on to the subject, but seeming unable to get off it.

  His eyebrows flickered. ‘Then you know the reason for her going,’ he said, finishing his meal too.

  ‘That was all?’ she said incredulously. ‘I mean, she walked out on you, the movie, her life here and everything to go and work with the women and children of Sarajevo?’

  He smiled. ‘A worthy cause,’ he reminded her, ‘but I’m flattered you find it so hard to believe.’

  ‘Frankly I do,’ she told him.

  ‘Well, it’s why she went. It was something she felt she had to do and I wasn’t going to try standing in her way.’

  ‘But you loved her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn’t you at least try to talk her out of it?’

  ‘Of course. But she needed to go. It was a passion with her.’

  As Ellen looked at him her disbelief was growing, for she simply couldn’t imagine leaving a man she loved so much so easily. Except it probably hadn’t been easy, it had probably been one of the most difficult and painful things Michelle Rowe had ever done in her life, but that kind of detail rarely found its way through to the press.

  ‘Do you still love her?’ she asked.

  Michael smiled. ‘After all this time? No, I don’t think so,’ he answered.

  Ellen remembered thinking, when she’d first read about their break-up, that there must surely be something more sinister behind Michelle’s reasons for going, but sitting here now with Michael she found that hard to believe, for he just didn’t seem the kind of man to cause such devastation in someone’s life that they would go to such extremes to get away. But then she had only to recall how wrong she had been about Clay to recognize what a poor judge she was of men.

  Michael changed the subject and started asking her more about her life in LA, how she had come to be an agent, why she had chosen it as a profession and listened sympathetically when she told him about her father and how he couldn’t forgive her for leaving. They discussed movies and theatre, books and music, politics and history; then he told her about his family, making her laugh as he recounted tales of Clodagh’s eccentricities and efforts to marry him off. Their dessert arrived and the effortless move from one subject to another continued to surprise and intrigue Ellen until finally she began to wonder how she could ever have imagined she loved Clay when they had never known anything like this kind of rapport the entire time they were together.

  Coffee came and though Ellen desperately didn’t want to leave she knew she had to, for she had drunk too much wine and the way he had made her laugh and had drawn her so deeply into the disconcerting aura of his charm was making her feel much more vulnerable than she could deal with.

  She wondered now, as she sipped her coffee and watched him unwrap a chocolate for her to eat, if he had any idea how very much she wanted him to make love to her. It was as though her entire body was coming alive to the mere suggestion of his touch and she had only to think of the way his eyes would close when he kissed her and how he would become hard as her fingers found him, to know how very close she was to going home with him. In fact, if he asked she knew she would, for just the sensation of his fingers on her lips as he fed her the chocolate, and the look in his eyes as he watched her take it, pushed her desire to a point where she no longer had the will to resist.

  His eyes held hers as their hands touched on the table and a shock of desire surged between them with a force so strong it edged her lust with pain. Her lips were parted, her chest rose and fell with each breath as she watched his eyes darken and almost felt his mouth on hers. The pressure of his fingers increased and her eyelids fluttered as her need intensi
fied to a point she could barely endure.

  ‘Look at me,’ he whispered.

  Obediently she returned her eyes to his.

  ‘There’s nothing I want more than to make love to you right now,’ he told her, ‘but I can’t …’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she cut in quickly, snatching her hand away, ‘you don’t have to make excuses. In fact, I really should be going. I mean, that wasn’t meant to be rude, but it’s getting late and … Thank you for a lovely evening. I hope …’ She was fumbling for her bag and finding it she got abruptly to her feet, having forgotten what she was saying.

  ‘Ellen, listen to me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she responded, knowing she was behaving stupidly but unable to stop, ‘I really must be going. Thank you again,’ and before he could say any more she was almost running across the restaurant on her way to the door.

  It was only when she reached the foyer that she remembered she had intended to pick up the check. She groaned out loud, as she’d already made a big enough fool of herself without having to go back for more. So she left it and rushed on out into the night.

  She’d known even as she was doing it that she was overreacting, but she had been so mortified when he’d started making an excuse not to sleep with her that she hadn’t given herself time to think. Besides, he’d done her a favour, as she would have slept with him, there was no question about that, and she didn’t even want to think about how that would have made her feel in the morning.

  A wave of despair washed over her as she looked around at the bleak, windy night. She had never known a desire so intense as the one she’d experienced this evening and it was scaring her. After what she had been through with Clay, surely she should be experiencing a curb on her sexual needs, not an uncontrollable surge. So maybe there was something wrong with her, maybe she got off on being exposed and humiliated, which is what it would have meant had she allowed herself to do what both Forgon and McCann, in their own different ways, no doubt wanted her to.