“Don’t you ever wear a decent shirt?” Michelle tried to restraighten the collar he’d mussed in under thirty seconds.
He looked down at it. “Never. T-shirts in the summer and turtlenecks in the winter. That’s it.”
Isobel rested a palm on his bare chest to calm him down. She needed him to do this. Though it was hard to ignore the temptation to shoo Michelle out of the bathroom and take Devlin up on that shared shower idea. Imagining him in a form-fitting turtleneck as black as his hair was a very attractive idea. Still being together for the change of seasons? That she was less sure about.
“Maybe his dragon would be comfortable in a decent shirt. Can’t we cast it instead of this useless louse?” Michelle just couldn’t leave it alone.
“Red!” Devlin growled out.
“There!” Isobel knew it when she saw it. “That’s the baseline for your character. Not just your normal salty self, but think of having to deal with Michelle instead of me.”
“Nightmare,” he grunted out, but grinned at Michelle.
“Utter and total,” Michelle agreed with a matching smile. “Okay. What if… Wait a sec.” And she rushed into the bedroom. She came back with an armful of the clothes that Devlin had brought over from his place to save time.
“No…No…No…” She began tossing bits and pieces of his clothing aside onto the floor.
Devlin just sighed in exasperation.
She held up one to his chest, looked at his face, then tossed it aside as well. She held up another and let out a lascivious wolf whistle. “Put this on.”
Isobel looked and decided that, as ever, Michelle knew her clothes.
Devlin pulled on an ocean-blue t-shirt that made his blue eyes shine. Across the front was a pictogram of the evolution of man: chimp, ape, early man with a sharpened stone, upright man with a spear…and a sailboat.
“Sexy, competent, gives the character some depth, especially if we never mention the sailing in the script. And he’s stopped squirming like a three-year-old in a suit.”
“Go to hell, Red.”
“You’d look damn good in a suit, jerk. Nothing too modern, probably a Brooks Brothers. In gray I think. Or a—”
“No chance.”
Isobel slid up to him and rested a palm on his chest. It was all too easy to picture him in a suit. Leave his hair long, and definitely keep that couple-day beard that made him look rugged even as it accented his features.
“This is a good look on you, Devlin. And you’re comfortable in it, so we’ll go with that. Though go with the slim leg black jeans that Michelle picked out.”
Sucker!
It was all Devlin could think as he sat waiting at the same Merchants Cafe table where he’d had lunch with Isobel before all of this got so real.
Michelle and Katie were tucked back in the shadows with their cameras.
But the Isobel who strode in wasn’t the lovely actress in the sundress. Her hair was wet and bedraggled as if she hadn’t bothered to do a thing with it after a shower. She wore battered jeans, faded white in places, and a loose camo jacket that revealed her form under a tight, plain-white tank top in bare glimpses. Battered Army boots completed the image.
Rosamarie Cruz dropped into the seat across from him before speaking.
“You Roscoe?” Her voice said she cared about as much as shit on her shoe if he was or wasn’t.
“You gotta be kidding me. You’re Cruz?” He didn’t need to feign his surprise. It was almost impossible to recognize Isobel, though she wasn’t hidden from view.
Her shrug of “Whatever.” She was that disillusioned, out-of-work ex-soldier.
And his head was in the script. He knew the damn thing cold. All of the setups and planning sessions, frame-by-frame storyboard reviews with Gibson’s people, holding Jennie’s hand when she needed it—they’d all burned the thing into his brain.
“Beer?” It was just eight a.m. script time.
Again that shrug. How could she express so much emotion with so simple a movement?
He signaled Tammy at the bar with two fingers.
The two of them studied each other in silence while they waited and the cameras waited with them.
Devlin had to remind himself that this wasn’t some military burnout. This was a woman putting herself in harm’s way to find someone who wanted her dead. She had a core of strength that both showed—yet didn’t in the character before him.
Sure, Rosamarie Cruz had the experience, but she didn’t have the confidence to go with it. Like Isobel in some ways. He wasn’t sure he’d ever met a woman more skilled in more ways. She’d had to be. Actress, team leader, dealing with her friends’ and her own gifts, and a society that would freak if they knew about them. Yet she was totally convinced that she was screwing up on every front.
Tammy thunked the beers down on the table, no coasters though they were on her tray.
“My tab,” he grunted at her.
Tammy just rapped her knuckles on the table and waited.
“Shit!” He dug out his wallet and handed her a twenty.
“That covers the interest, you still owe me for the beers. This ain’t your office, Roscoe.” She stuffed the bill into the back pocket of her tight jeans and strode back off screen. Yeah, easy bet he wouldn’t be getting that double sawbuck back, ever.
“Big spender,” Rosamarie grunted out, then slugged back half the beer with the ease of a drunk. It was easy to forget this sloppy woman was Isobel.
He drank enough of his own beer to match her. At least Tammy had given them a good draft, a Freemont Golden Pilsner.
Rosamarie jammed her hands back in her jacket pockets and slouched.
“You got any skills?”
She pulled a fist out of her jacket. He heard a sharp metallic snap as she flicked her wrist. Faster than he could blink, she had done the necessary release-flip-twist-and grab to unfold a Bali-Song butterfly knife. She held it for half a second directly in their shared line of sight—long enough for him to recognize the Benchmade 85 Billet Ti. Six hundred and fifty dollars of knife. To any aficionados, it would make a statement on screen that the character carried that class of a weapon.
And it made a hell of a statement about Isobel. First, that she’d practiced its tricky handling enough to make it look natural. Second, that he was lucky to have survived walking into her bedroom uninvited.
Then, with an effortless flick, she sent it whistling past his ear to thwap into a wooden post close behind him.
He turned and inspected its perfectly perpendicular placement before pulling it free and flipping it closed once more, without nicking himself. He still had the moves—a street thug never forgets. Then he tossed it back to her. She caught it midair and it disappeared back into her pocket.
Her smug smile at surprising him, with the knife and the skill to use it, fit both Isobel and Rosamarie.
Remembering his role, he lifted his beer and finished it. Then he shoved to his feet. There were a couple more lines, but he realized they didn’t need them.
“Interview’s over.”
Isobel/Rosamarie didn’t move. He liked the surprise and confusion on her face.
“You coming?” Devlin/Roscoe called as he headed out of the bar.
The pause, then fast scrape of her chair on the old wood floor was all the answer he needed. When he heard the sound of a quickly emptied beer glass being slammed back down on the table, he decided maybe he was in love.
Not really, but that tiny detail of not wasting half a beer was such a perfect touch of finesse for a down-on-her-luck character.
Once out of sight of the cameras and around the corner to the stairs, he turned to wait for Isobel’s reaction to his attempts at the role.
She hustled out of the bar, and when she saw him standing and waiting, she walked straight into his arms.
“Little early in the script for Roscoe and Rosamarie to get it on,” he managed. “Was that okay?”
“This,” she squeezed her arms around him, p
ressing their bodies tightly together, “is all about Isobel and Devlin. Roscoe was perfect, by the way!”
“You’ll need to reshoot all of this, you know? When you get a real actor.”
“Not a chance!” She dragged him down and kissed him hard.
Maybe this movie gig wasn’t so bad.
Chapter 23
The tension kept climbing with each day and Isobel didn’t know how much more she could take. Today had been their longest day yet. As the movie’s “time of day” had shifted later, the shooting times had moved with it so that the light would be right. But everything around it hadn’t shifted.
The morning reviews of finished film and preparations for the day’s shooting were getting more complex as the movie was becoming more complex. Despite returning later and later from each day’s shoots, there were still the dailies to review, the editing plan to make, and storyboards to update for the next day.
The shoot was going better than she could ever have imagined. When they botched a single take, they just kept filming as they reset and continued. The flow was close enough to seamless. She’d planned a twenty-day shoot across the city and by today, Day Eight, they were well ahead of schedule. The final sequence at the Opera House had been scheduled for four days, but it might well take only one or two at the rate they were moving.
Of course, filming more scenes faster than planned only added to all of the schedule pressures. More film meant longer review-and-edit sessions, more storyboards had to be checked for the next day, and all the rest of it.
That was aside from the acting.
Devlin was a natural for this role, he was Roscoe in so many ways. Gruff, untrusting, far too used to being on his own. His growing dependence on Rosamarie’s highly trained awareness was as unrealized as his own growing attachment to her.
There was no longer any way to tell what was real between them and what was their characters. The line between their real lives and their roles blurred more and more.
Rosamarie needed Roscoe to pull her back from the cliff edge of despair. And both Rosamarie and Isobel needed Devlin like she’d never needed a man before in her life.
Did he need her? Or was he just doing the film and being her White Knight before he drifted off to his boat and cars to wait for whatever came next?
And on top of all that, they were making absolutely no progress on finding Vermette.
Twice she’d caught “whiffs” of him. Both times she’d been in the car between the filming location and the houseboat—thankfully nearer the former than the latter. If she lost the sanctuary of the houseboat, she just might pull the plug on everything and run.
But as soon as the feeling of the hard-burning whiteness was in range, it had been gone again. Just passing by at a distance.
And Isobel couldn’t stay open all of the time. She’d go crazy trying to scan and feel all of the thousands of Seattleites around her.
She also wouldn’t be able to act her way out of a B movie with such distractions inside her head.
They’d filmed following a lead down into the Seattle Underground.
A meetup on a cross-Sound ferry, except it was a “corpse” not an “informant” who had awaited them.
They’d followed clues and done the race through the steam tunnels. They’d found the dead—carefully bloodied warriors from Gibson’s people—but never quite catching up with the unseen assailant.
This afternoon they’d finished with shooting in Seattle’s Old Town. Tomorrow would be the car chase back up the northbound tunnel as Rosamarie was slowly forced to return toward her point of origin that very morning at the apartment atop Queen Anne. She had to arrive there a changed woman.
What was surprising was that Isobel could feel herself changing.
Jennie’s original script hadn’t contemplated any relationship forming between Roscoe and Rosamarie, especially not in a single day. But they were two wounded souls: him trusting no one, and her convinced that she needed no one because she could never find anyone to trust. And the synergy between them hummed on the dailies every time they reviewed them.
But how much of that synergy was Roscoe and Rosamarie and how much was Devlin and Isobel, she could no longer tell.
“I’ve got something,” Devlin slid an arm around her waist. “Are you up to keep going?”
She leaned into his embrace for a long moment and just closed her eyes and let herself feel.
Isobel still couldn’t feel him.
But she could feel herself.
Could feel the whirlwind of conflicting emotions that had been churning inside her all day were suddenly quiet. Could feel that it was Devlin’s influence.
Could feel the question inside herself that she’d felt Hannah, Michelle, and Katie each in turn ask themselves.
Could she love this man?
“You ready?” Devlin asked softly.
“Yes.” And she felt no surprise at her answer.
She turned enough in his arms to kiss him. Very ready.
Devlin led Isobel and the others to where he’d heard some of his old friends had moved, up underneath the I-5 overpass along 6th Avenue.
“I used to hang with these guys,” he kept Isobel close by his side. “At least some of them. Soldiers who fought for their country but can’t seem to do more than survive on the streets.” He could see that other homeless lived there, but they avoided the loose enclave of the vets.
“So much pain!” Isobel had jolted against him. The impact of their emotions so strong he was almost afraid she’d scream. That wouldn’t go well at all here.
But she wrestled down the urge. By the easing of her breathing, he knew she’d shut off that inner sense again.
It took a bit of jogging some memories, but Devlin was soon welcomed back into their circle, as much as an outsider ever could be. He even managed to get their permission to film them.
Michelle and Katie did a great job of blending in with their cameras.
He couldn’t see the circle of protection that he hoped Gibson had pulled around them. But he could see the vets tense up, then relax. Like recognizing like perhaps. It told him that the security perimeter was in place.
It took only the slightest suggestion to Isobel for her to stay in her Rosamarie role.
She didn’t turn on the charm, which would have shut them down. Instead she was just a slightly earthier version of herself. It was more to her credit than his own that they relaxed into telling their tales. Some were chilling, some were just retelling of times gone by.
But Isobel had taught him enough to be able to sift through the dialog and see the scene.
Roscoe and Rosamarie squatting in the darkness, lit by distant streetlights and the background flash of headlights on the massive concrete columns around them.
Bit and pieces, tales and hints, perhaps cut together as a chaotic montage. He fed them a few lines, so that their tales became a hotbed of clues about the man Roscoe and Rosamarie were tracking across Seattle.
But as he listened, he realized that he was getting more than he’d asked for.
There actually was a shadow moving through Seattle that the vets weren’t willing to talk about directly. Claude Vermette had left an impression behind him that was uncomfortable to even the toughest warriors.
This was film he’d have to study very carefully.
Afterward, Isobel had tried to pay them with no success. It was her only mistake in the whole evening. They’d brushed aside the offer. Rosamarie had been accepted into their circle and you didn’t take money from a sister or brother inside that circle.
But the caterer had known what to do.
While they’d been having their talk, Emily had set up her food truck and cooked a meal for them. Bowls of pasta with mushroom-pepper sauce, burgers of top sirloin, and a big spread of homemade apple and berry pies. It was some of the best food Devlin had ever eaten on a shoot, squatting under the roaring concrete overpass.
The guys had been more respectful of Emily than even
the best mission volunteers.
It was only as she was packing up and he was thanking her that he saw her trying to rub the red out of her eyes.
“Are you okay?”
The lovely blonde had shaken her head no. “Two of them used to be in my command. Not my flight crew, but good people. It breaks my heart.” She climbed into the catering truck and was gone before he could think what to say.
“In her command?” Devlin whispered to Isobel close beside him.
She nodded and looked infinitely sad. “How do we really thank them?”
Devlin smiled at that. “That one’s easy.” He called out, asking who ran the best soup kitchen around.
Typical homeless, they couldn’t just say. It was part of how they passed the time. It was also an important question to them, where was the best place for a free meal. Even though the answer was clear from the beginning, it took a pleasant half-hour’s debate before they settled on their answer.
Rosamarie had simply nodded.
Even though it was now nearly midnight after an exhausting day that had started at dawn, Isobel had insisted they go past the place.
She gave them a check for fifty thousand dollars and her card. “If you ever can’t feed everyone who comes here, you call me.”
Now it was Devlin’s turn to try to rub the red out of his eyes.
Chapter 24
Hiding.
So hard.
It hurt to hide inside. But it had worked.
“No gain without pain,” his commander had always said. “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
He’d squelched himself, though it was near agony.
Don’t think. Don’t feel. Close down so that nothing remained except the searing pain where they’d ripped him away from himself.
It was worth it.
It had worked and he’d found them.
Found her.
Eaten their food.
Heard their plans for tomorrow.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
At the Clearest Sensation Page 12
