by Janet Dailey
It was another ten minutes before the floor director told the performers to take their positions on stage for the opening number. When Dane informed the crew that the tape was rolling, Claude asked for quiet and began the countdown: "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …" He stopped there and continued it with his fingers, so his voice wouldn't be picked up on tape.
All that was mainly for the performers' benefit. Dane was issuing his own instructions prior to that. "Do you remember the sequence of the opening number, Wallis? A close-up frame of Ruby. Open it when I tell you and the way I tell you or I'll strangle you with my bare hands," he warned, and began counting. "Ten, nine, eight …" It was his countdown that the floor director repeated.
So it began. If Pet thought he had been demanding the day before, it was mild compared to the relentless way he drove the crew today. The slightest flaw or imperfection in a shot drew sharp and immediate criticism. Although everyone felt the razor edge of his tongue at some point, the majority of his censure seemed to go to Pet.
Take after take, number after number, Dane pushed them. Even when the fault belonged to the star, Ruby Gale, for missing her spot on stage or going beyond it out of camera range, it was the crew he blamed over the loudspeaker system. A couple of times Ruby flubbed the song lyrics.
Over the PA speaker Dane's voice was benevolent and forgiving as it filled the theater. "Don't worry about it, Ruby. After all the mistakes we've made, you're entitled to blow one now and then. You're perfect. You're doing great."
Silently Pet seethed at this preferential treatment for the star. Nothing remotely resembling a critical word was ever directed at Ruby Gale. Why couldn't Dane snap at her the way he did everyone else, she thought angrily. In his eyes Ruby Gale could do no wrong, while Pet couldn't seem to do anything right. She felt raw, suffering from a thousand needling remarks, over sensitized by a barrage of pinpricks.
She had the closing shot on another production number. "Hold that frame, camera two," Dane's voice advised sternly in her ear. "Hold it. Hold it!" Impatience inched into his tone and scraped at her nerves. "Okay, stop tape."
At the statement, Pet immediately closed her eyes and lowered her chin in wary relief. Her long blond ponytail swung forward to brush the top of her left shoulder. Releasing her grip on the control handles of the camera, she wiped her sweaty palms on the legs of her faded denims. She straightened to glance across the rows of seats to Andy's camera position and he gave her a crooked smile and a thumbs-up signal.
"We made it through that one," his voice murmured through her earphones.
Before she could reply, Dane's voice came over the public-address system. "Good job, gang, I think we've earned a twenty-minute break."
The richly resonant pitch of his voice vibrated over Pet. "Ah, a voice from above," Charlie joked, and lifted his hands in mock awe.
"Regardless of what he thinks, he isn't related to God Almighty," Pet muttered, assuming that Dane had already removed his headset after announcing the break.
Her mistake was quickly pointed out to her by Dane himself. "If I was related to him, Wallis, I would use my influence with him to do something about you," he said curtly. "And the next time I tell you to hold a shot, that doesn't mean you should move."
She wanted to scream at him to stop criticizing everything she did and to tell him that she had read between the lines and knew he wasn't romantically interested in her. Some perverse streak made her do just the opposite.
"Darling, it isn't any good," she cooed over the headset mike. "Everyone has guessed that you're madly in love with me. Trying to hide it by yelling at me all the time isn't fooling anybody. We can't keep it a secret anymore."
There was an incredulous laugh from someone, but it wasn't Dane. Pet knew she had invited his wrath upon her and grimly tugged off her headset. With her mouth clamped tightly shut, she hopped off the platform into the aisle.
Charlie called to her, still wearing his headset. "Hey, Pet! Dane wants to talk to you!"
Holding her head at a proudly defiant angle, she didn't slow her strides as she yelled back, "Tell him that's tough! I'm on my break!"
At the refreshment table set up for the crew, Pet skipped the insulated container of iced tea in favor of the coffee urn. It was left over from the morning break, which made it strong and inky black. Pet felt in need of its strength.
"What got into you, Pet?" Charlie came up to stand beside her. The smile on his face seemed to be there in spite of his better judgment. It was as if he admired her for talking back while he thought she was crazy for doing so.
Lon was there, shaking his head. "You really believe in flying in the face of danger, don't you?"
"I just want him off my back," she grumbled, and swore under her breath when she tried to take a drink of the scalding black coffee and burned her tongue.
The explosion of a door being forcefully slammed shut thundered through the cavernous theater and echoed in shock waves. A quick glance over her shoulder saw Dane striding toward them. Squaring around, Pet kept her back to him and hooked a thumb through the belt loop of her jeans, trying to adopt an attitude of nonchalance while studying the black liquid in her cup.
"I'm afraid you're in for it, Pet," Andy murmured, glancing at her over the rim of his drink.
With an exaggerated blink of her eyes, she pretended she didn't care. The skin along the back of her neck prickled a warning. Out of her side vision she saw Dane stop on her right, but she wouldn't look at him.
"You didn't really think you were going to get by with that, did you?" Dane sounded remarkably calm as he made the low challenge.
There wasn't an adequate reply she could make to that, so she didn't try. To cover her silence, she started to raise the cup of coffee to her mouth, but Dane reached out to take it from her.
"Hey! That's my coffee." When she tried to hold onto it, the hot coffee sloshed over the side and burned her hand, forcing her to let go. "Ouch!"
"Hold this." Dane handed the cup to Andy, then turned back to her. She was wary of the glint in his eye and the hint of a smile on his mouth. "How wonderful that everyone knows and I don't have to hide it," he taunted softly.
In the next second his hand had clamped itself on her arm to pull her toward him. Her protesting outcry was choked off by shock at the form his retaliation was taking. She tried to ward off his chest with her hands, but she was no match for his sheer brute force. His palm cupped the back of her head to hold it still, his fingers tangling in the length of her hair, while his mouth made an unerring descent onto hers.
The encircling steel band of his arm held her fast, arching her waist to bring her more fully against him. Pet had expected his kiss to be a bruising and punishing assault. There was driving force, but no brutality. He dominated her lips, moving over them as if satisfying a burning need to consume their softness. Her senses were filled with the sensation of his hard length bent protectively over hers, the thrust of his hips, and the solid muscles of his torso flattening her small breasts.
Aware of the interested spectators watching the embrace, Pet pushed at him, but the only surface available to her hands was the sides of his waist. It was an ineffectual attempt that gained nothing at all. Not that she really minded; the things his kiss was doing to her rivaled her imagination. The wild singing in her veins was hotly sweet, searing her with a buoyancy that convinced her she was floating on a cloud. She stopped resisting and began kissing him back, her hunger matching his appetite.
Before her hands could begin their final, submissive curve around his middle, Dane was drawing away. There was a disturbed roughness to his breathing and the smoldering darkness of passion in his eyes. Yet the clearest impression Pet had was the scattered cheers and applause of those around them.
The crew regarded the kiss as a huge joke, thinking that Dane had deftly turned the tables on her. And it was true. The heat of embarrassment rushed into her face, staining her cheeks scarlet. Pet couldn't remember ever blushing in her life, but she had never
made such a fool of herself. For a few seconds she had forgotten all that had gone before the kiss.
She lowered her gaze to the tanned hollow of his throat, his arms still containing her within their circle.
"Why did you do that?" she asked huskily. Had she really deserved this kind of humiliation?
Dane crooked a finger under her chin and forced her to look at him before he would answer her question. "It seemed the most effective way of shutting up a smart mouth." The lazy glint in his dark eyes seemed to hold only amusement at her discomfort. "And if you do it again, the next time I'll bite off your nasty tongue." He tipped his head back and to one side, as if to get a better angle of her face. "Truce?"
Before she could answer, someone called to him from the stage. "Miss Gale would like to see you in her dressing room, Dane."
With a sigh he loosened his hold and let Pet stand free. "I'll be right there," he replied. Reaching around, he took the cup of coffee from Andy and gave it back to Pet. As he walked past the refreshment table on his way backstage, he stopped to take two sugar cubes out of their box' and tossed them to her. "Put some sugar in your coffee — it might sweeten your disposition."
Sheer reflex enabled her to catch them. "I haven't been the one snapping at everybody all day." She tossed them back, surprised she could move or speak.
"Women!" Dane turned away with a wry shake of his head.
Pet had the feeling she had just been lumped into a category labeled "Impossible." Warily, her gaze flashed around the semicircle of men, almost daring them to make a comment.
Joe Wiles was the only brave one. "If you're going to dish it out, Pet, you'd better learn to take it," he advised.
"I can take it," she insisted, and gulped down a swallow of tepid coffee.
But the crew was careful not to tease her about the kiss. Ten minutes later Claude was summoning them back to work.
THE NEXT DAY was Friday. Ruby Gale's concert was scheduled for that evening at nine o'clock. Since they were taping it before the live audience, the production crew had the morning and the bulk of the afternoon off.
Dressing for the taping that evening, Pet chose the dressier biscuit-colored slacks and a peach crepe-de-chine blouse and wrapped a brown braided rope belt around her waist. Her everyday work garb was too casual to wear in front of the public, and a dress or skirt was out of the question since she still had to climb off and on the platform.
The audience began arriving at the Garden State Arts Center half an hour before the performance was scheduled to begin. Perched on her platform in the center aisle, Pet became the cynosure of many eyes that had nothing better to do than look around while waiting for the show to start. It was amusing to listen to some of the comments.
A young brunette about her own age pointed Pet out to her date. "Look, there's a woman operating that camera."
Her date had a typical chauvinistic reply. "She's probably only a helper."
A few stopped to ask questions, most of them concerned about when the show would be seen on television. "I don't know the air date," was Pet's stock answer. "Probably in the fall or winter."
Sometimes they asked where she had learned to operate the camera. "I went to college and took courses in it."
In a way, the most difficult question to answer was why she wanted to be a cameraman. "It's what I always wanted to do," rarely satisfied them.
As the time drew closer to nine o'clock, Dane's voice came over her headset. She had barely seen him at all since yesterday's episode. The few times she had, he had been in conversation with someone else and she didn't receive any more than a preoccupied glance. In the interim, Pet thought she had got things back in their proper perspective — until she heard his voice and her pulse went skittering all over the place.
His initial comments were instructions to the crew in general, then he was directing a remark solely to her. "What about you, camera two? Do you think you have the sequence of the opening number down pat?" There was a certain drollness to his tone that implied inoffensive mockery.
"If I don't, I'm sure you'll tell me about it," she replied with surprising ease.
"You can bet on it," he chuckled softly.
"I would, but nobody will give me odds," Pet returned, joking with him.
"Watch your mouth, girl, unless you want another lesson in keeping it shut." It was a mock threat, issued with a smile in his voice that made fight of yesterday's incident as if it had been all in good fun.
"Promises, promises," she faked a sigh. "That's all you men ever do — promise and forget to follow through."
"I'll remember that," he warned. Then it was back to business. "Claude, how are things moving backstage?"
"We'll be on time," the floor director promised.
"Baxter, I want you to get me plenty of audience shots," Dane instructed Lon, who had the hand-held camera. "You shouldn't have any trouble when the houselights are up. The rest of the time there should be enough fight falling back on the first two or three rows to give me reaction shots, not just applause."
"Gotcha, boss."
Precisely at nine the curtain went up. Right from the opening number the first half of the show went without a hitch. The mistakes by both crew and performers were so few and minor they were practically nonexistent. It seemed that all the rehearsing, the countless takes, the endless criticisms had all paid off to achieve near perfection.
Ruby Gale's performance had been electric, charged by the applauding audience. She was sexy, stunning, scintillating, alive as Pet had never seen her before. Everything flowed with such magic that when intermission arrived Pet couldn't help wondering what would happen when the clock struck twelve and the coach became a pumpkin again. Would the spell wear off?
"Excuse me, miss." An elderly man was standing beside her platform. Pet had noticed him before since he was sitting in one of the aisle seats near her position.
She shifted the mike wand of her headset away from her lips. "Yes?" She thought he probably wanted direction to the men's room. She supposed she could always ask Andy or Charlie.
"I've been watching you and I just wanted to say that you're a very beautiful woman," he said, smiling quite benignly. "You belong in front of the camera instead of behind it."
"Thank you." Her smile was wide and wholly natural.
"I know you're busy, but I just wanted to tell you that." He nodded in a gesture of apology and turned to go back to his seat.
"What did that man want?" Charlie asked, having seen the man stop to talk to her from his camera position. "Did he want you to go out with him?"
"He was very sweet," she insisted. "He told me I was beautiful and belonged in front of the camera."
Dane joined the conversation to state unequivocally, "Well, you don't. You belong behind the camera."
"That's a pleasant switch," she drawled.
"Why?" he demanded.
"Most men think women belong in a kitchen either in front of a stove or behind a sink full of dirty dishes," Pet explained in wry amusement.
"Better you than me," Dane returned in a mocking underbreath, then crisply, "Okay, gang, we have five minutes. Five minutes!"
As Pet had feared, the second half of the show didn't run as smoothly as the first. Midway through the second number, camera three went out. They had to do some fast improvisations of camera angles to cover the shots assigned to Charlie. When the problem defied immediate rectifying, the spare camera was hurriedly carted in and mounted.
In all, camera three was out for three songs, an amazingly short period. Yet that frantic race for time had thrown everyone off tempo and they were never able to regain that effortless coordination that had made the first half of the show so flawless.
It was a relief when the Concert was over and the tape stopped rolling. While the audience filed out, the crew began shutting down the equipment. It was twenty minutes after the last curtain call before Pet had finished.
"Are you driving back to the hotel with me?" Charlie called to her
from across the seats.
"Yeah! But I left my bag in the van," she explained. "I'll run out and get it now. Wait for me!"
The seventy-foot-long semi trailer had seemed the safest place to leave her bag during the taping. She couldn't have kept it with her on the platform since it could have been stolen too easily. Nor had it seemed wise to leave it backstage with so many people coming and going all the time.
As she walked in front of the stage, a woman stepped out from behind the curtains. Pet had seen her before. She was usually a part of Ruby Gale's personal entourage. Pet suspected she was a secretary or something.
"Excuse me," the woman requested Pet's attention with an uplifted finger. "Could you tell me where I could find Mr. Kingston?"
"I —" Pet glanced around the theater "— haven't seen him. He might still be in the trailer outside. I'm on my way out there. Shall I send him in?"
The woman considered that, then said, "Could you give him a message?"
"Sure," Pet nodded.
"Miss Gale is leaving now for her hotel. She wanted to remind him about the party she's having in her suite tonight. Would you mention it to him? Miss Gale is most anxious that he should come," the woman added.
"I'll remind him," Pet promised.
"Hurry up, Pet!" Charlie shouted.
With a quick wave to acknowledge that she had heard him, she hurried out through a side exit to where the van was parked. Its, long white-painted sides gleamed in the moonlight, emblazoned with the Kingston crest and the letters spelling out Kingston Productions. A bare light bulb illuminated the metal steps leading to the side door.
As Pet reached for the railing to climb them, the door opened and Dane stepped out. He frowned in surprise when he saw her, his gaze narrowing at her haste.
"Is something wrong?" He was down the steps and grabbing her shoulders almost before she could catch her breath. "Has something happened?"
"No, I …" She was momentarily flustered by his touch. "I left my handbag in the van and Charlie's waiting to give me a lift to the hotel."
