Her Red-Carpet Romance

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Don’t you like mysteries?” Lukkas asked, playing this out a little longer.

  “Just to read, not when I’m in them,” she told him honestly. “I like knowing. Everything,” Yohanna elaborated.

  “Does that mean you don’t like surprises?” he asked.

  Thinking of the way the so-called “layoff” had been sprung on her, there was only one way for her to answer that question. “Only for other people.”

  “A life without surprises.” He rolled the idea over in his head as he squeaked through a yellow light that was already beginning to turn red. “Where’s the fun in that?” Lukkas spared her a quick glance. “You do like to have fun, don’t you, Hanna?” he asked.

  Finding herself being interviewed for a job by Lukkas Spader had been one giant surprise, but if she said so, he might mistakenly think she was flirting with him. There was no way she was going to allow her attraction to the man get in the way of her working for him.

  “Lots of fun to be gotten without resorting to surprises,” she pointed out.

  On the freeway for all of four minutes, he took the off-ramp that promised to lead him to the airfield he needed.

  “If you say so,” he replied. “You like Arizona?”

  Another question out of the blue. And then she remembered. He’d said something about his new project, a Western, being on location in Arizona. Was that where they were going?

  Her stomach began to tighten up.

  “I really can’t say,” she answered truthfully.

  “And why is that?”

  “I’ve never been to Arizona,” she told him. He probably thought she was some sort of semirecluse. She hadn’t been anywhere outside of a rather small area while he, she knew, was an international traveler, going wherever the movie took him.

  “Well, Hanna, we are about to remedy that,” Lukkas proclaimed.

  Her eyes widened just a shade. “We’re going to Arizona?” she asked, doing her best to hide her nervousness.

  “That would be the natural assumption to make from what I’d just said, yes.”

  Traffic had gotten a little thicker. He was forced to go just at the speed limit rather than above it.

  He hadn’t mentioned anything about going on location to her yesterday. When had this happened?

  “Why are we going to Arizona?”

  “Because that’s where the movie’s going to be shot,” he said, referring to his new “baby,” a movie he had helped write, one based on his own story idea. “At least most of it. Whatever we can do indoors, we’ll take care of at the studio. But there’s no way, in this day and age, to be able to fake that kind of background—especially not Monument Valley,” he added. He slanted a long look in her direction. “Ever hear of Monument Valley?” he asked.

  So far, she seemed like efficiency personified, but that might be because she had him on the rebound from his previous relationship with Janice. He’d leaned on her completely. When she’d told him she was leaving, he’d felt as if his entire foundation was about to crack and dissolve into pieces under his feet.

  Hanna had appeared just in time to be his superglue.

  “Several of John Wayne’s movies were shot there,” she told him without pausing to think.

  He smiled, impressed she knew that. Impressed with her. Something that was beginning to occur on a daily basis.

  “You knew that,” he said, somewhat marveled.

  “I knew that,” she reaffirmed. “So you’re going to be shooting this film somewhere around—or in—Monument Valley?”

  “No,” he answered breezily.

  Okay, now she was confused, Yohanna thought. “I don’t understand. If you’re not shooting there, why did you just ask me if I knew what Monument Valley was?”

  “I thought I’d spring a pop quiz on you,” he told her. And then he grinned again. “And maybe Monument Valley will sneak in a time or two when we’re shooting background shots for the movie. But right now we’re going to be flying to Sugar Springs, Arizona. It’s near Tombstone.”

  On what seemed like a winding road, they were approaching the small private airport that was his immediate destination. It housed approximately half a dozen private single-engine plans. Including his.

  The area was a revelation to Yohanna. “I didn’t know there was an airport there.”

  “There isn’t,” he told her, driving over to the hangar that housed his plane. “It’s more like a landing strip than an airport. But the plane isn’t very big, either, so it works out.”

  She looked at him, a queasiness beginning to work its way into the center of her stomach. “You can fly a plane, too?”

  “I’ve got a few hours of piloting under my belt,” he told her.

  She immediately seized on what she hadn’t heard. “But no pilot’s license?”

  “Not yet.” He saw grave concern etching itself into her features. “Don’t worry, I’m not the one who’s going to be in the cockpit,” he assured her. “I’ve got a pilot on call.”

  Lukkas was on the private airstrip now. He drove straight toward where his plane was waiting. Arrangements had been made with the pilot the night before. He’d wanted to make sure the plane would be gassed up, inspected and ready to fly by the time he arrived this morning.

  “Your color’s coming back,” he informed her, amusement highlighting his tanned face.

  She looked at him, bewildered. “Excuse me?”

  “Just now, when you thought I was flying the plane, the color drained completely out of your face. It’s back now,” he noted.

  “Must be the lighting in here,” she said, grasping at any excuse. She didn’t want him to feel undermined by what had to seem like a lack of faith in him. From what she’d learned, most of the producers had egos the size of Texas and wouldn’t stand for any attempts at taking them down a peg or three.

  Lukkas didn’t appear to have an ego, but it was still too early in the game to tell.

  “Maybe,” he intoned, appearing to consider her comment about the lighting being responsible for her ghostly pallor a few minutes ago. “Contrary to what you might think, I don’t have a death wish, and the only risk I take is when I cast certain performers thought to be washed up in the business by everybody and his brother. What they don’t seem to understand,” he continued, “is that if you show some faith in that person, they tend to try to live up to that image.”

  Parked now, he opened his door. “Let’s go,” he urged, getting out of his car. “Right now we’re burning daylight.”

  He was already walking toward the airplane before she could say a word.

  Yohanna wasn’t exactly sure why he wanted her to accompany him on this flight. She’d effectively begun to organize his vastly overwhelming schedule so that he could actually have a prayer of staying on top of his agenda. Educating herself as best she could about the man she was taking all this on for, she’d begun to prioritize what absolutely needed to be done and what could wait for another day to come.

  She had a feeling the reason Spader was so disorganized was that his mind raced around, taking everything he had to do into consideration, going first down one trail, then another and another. It seemed as though the man’s day was filled with a great many starts and no conclusions. Without someone to take charge of the details and put them into a workable order, the producer was headed for a complete meltdown, which would in turn lead to utter chaos in his professional and his private life.

  And she could do all that right from his office in Bedford. Which was why she didn’t quite understand why he was taking her with him to Arizona. Especially when it all seemed rather spur-of-the-moment. At least, he hadn’t mentioned anything to her about it yesterday.

  “And why are we going there?” she asked.

  “Let’s call it a final run-through,” he told her. �
��Among other things, I want to look around the town we’re renting, make sure nothing modern’s lying around to mess up a shot when we’re filming. I don’t want to be in postproduction and suddenly looking at an iPod left on the bar or something equally as jarring.”

  Well, that part at least made sense. “And what am I going to be doing?” she asked.

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say you can be the person taking notes to make sure that I can keep track of everything that occurs to me while I’m doing that run-through.” Then he summed it up for her. “You’ll do what every organizer does. You’ll organize,” Lukkas informed her.

  Hurrying up the short portable stairs that had been positioned beside the sleek plane, Lukkas greeted the pilot as he entered the plane.

  “Jacob, this is Hanna Something-or-other. She’ll be taking Janice’s place,” he told the pilot. “Hanna, this is Jacob Winter, the very best pilot around.”

  The pilot flashed a modest smile. “He’s just saying that because I didn’t crash the plane.”

  Obviously there was more to the story than just that, Yohanna thought, looking from one man to the other. But if there was, it would be a story for another day, she could tell.

  Inclining his head ever so slightly for a moment, the pilot told Lukkas, “We’ll be taking off as soon as you strap in.”

  Lukkas looked at her as if they were equal partners in this, not boss and employee. “Then, let’s get strapped in.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later Yohanna was gripping the armrests of her seat and holding her startled breath as she felt the single-engine plane begin its takeoff.

  This was the easy part, she told herself, but she remained stubbornly unconvinced of this.

  “I take it that you don’t fly very much, do you?” Lukkas asked, looking at the way her very white knuckles seemed to protrude as Yohanna continued gripping the armrests.

  “No,” Yohanna answered without looking in his direction.

  He thought he heard a slight quiver in her voice. That didn’t seem like the young woman he was getting to know. “How often have you flown?” he asked.

  This time she tried to turn her head to glance in his direction. But something seemed to almost hold her entire body in place. She recognized it as fear and started to mount a defense.

  “Counting this time?” she finally responded, answering his question with a question.

  “Yes.”

  She took in a shaky breath. “Once.”

  That would explain the white knuckles and the death grip she had on the armrests, Lukkas thought. “Then, why didn’t you say something to me before we got on the plane?”

  She forced herself to breathe normally. It was far from easy.

  “Like what? Would you mind driving to this town I’ve never heard of in Arizona instead of flying? You’re the boss,” she pointed out. “That means that I’m supposed to accommodate you as best I can, not the other way around.”

  She kept impressing him when he least expected it. That went a long way in her favor. He’d begun to think that he could no longer be impressed by anything life had to offer. It was nice to know that he was wrong.

  “I do like your work ethic, Hanna. This little arrangement just might work out after all.” Glancing down at her hands, which were still wrapped around the armrests, gripping them for all she was worth, he told her, “I won’t even charge you for having to replace the armrests.”

  She was acting like a child, not a grown woman, Yohanna upbraided herself. Though it took almost superhuman effort, she forced her hands to let go of the armrests, although it took her a while to get all ten fingers off at the same time.

  “Sorry,” she murmured.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Lukkas countered. “Lots of people have flying issues.”

  “You probably think I’m being childish. I mean, I know that the odds against the plane going down are really tremendously low and that, comparably, a lot more people die in car crashes than plane crashes, but what my brain knows and the rest of me knows hasn’t become fully reconciled yet.”

  Yohanna took another long, steadying breath and then let it out slowly, growing just a shade more in control of herself as she did so.

  That was when she noticed Lukkas’s encouraging, amused smile had completely faded from his lips. It was replaced with a solemnity she hadn’t witnessed on the man before.

  Obviously something had suddenly changed.

  Every single instinct she possessed told her that something was wrong, but as to what, she hadn’t a sliver of a clue.

  Since she had been the only one talking when this transformation had occurred for Lukkas, it had to be either something she’d said, or a thought that had unexpectedly crossed the man’s mind.

  If it was the latter, then she was at a total loss how to remedy that. She had no way of discovering what had occurred to him to make him turn one hundred and eighty degrees.

  However, if it was something that she had inadvertently said, then the advantage was hers.

  But what had she said that could have affected him this way? She’d just cited statistics between plane crashes and car crashes.

  Replaying the past few minutes in her head, she decided that it couldn’t have been anything to do with plane crashes because Lukkas had still been grinning after she’d mentioned them.

  That left car crashes.

  Someone he had known must have died in a car crash. The more she went over that abbreviated section of time in her head, the more certain she became that she was right in her estimation.

  But there was no way she could just ask Lukkas about that outright. If nothing else, in the long run that would be like pouring salt into a freshly reopened wound just to satisfying her curiosity.

  There had to be another way to find out if she was right.

  She thought of Cecilia’s friend, Mrs. Manetti, who had initially set up her interview with the producer. Mrs. Manetti might know.

  And then, she thought as the silence between Lukkas and her continued, there might even be a faster way to find out if she hadn’t stuck her fashionably shod high-heeled foot into her unsuspecting mouth.

  Her hooded eyes watched Lukkas for any sign that he was about to turn to her or to say something. He seemed very preoccupied with whatever was in the black folder he kept within easy reach, at least from what she’d discerned so far. She quietly turned on her smartphone.

  Still watching Lukkas, she pulled up a search engine and typed in the words car accident and then his name.

  The signal reception was reduced to only two bars, rendering the search engine exceedingly sluggish. She watched the little circle that indicated the site was being loaded go around and around for so long, she felt it was stuck in this mode.

  She was about to give up for now and close her phone when she saw the tiny screen in her hand struggle to stabilize both two photographs and the words written directly beneath them.

  She’d assumed that the words would become clear first, but it was the photographs—a beautiful young woman in one and a car that looked as if it had been turned into an accordion in the other—that materialized several minutes before the words.

  After an eternity the circle stopped swirling and disappeared, leaving in its wake the headline from a newspaper article: Producer’s Pregnant Wife Killed in Car Crash.

  The article identified the dead woman’s husband as Lukkas Spader.

  Chapter Five

  Stunned and appalled, Yohanna could only numbly stare at the heart-wrenching headline, unaware that her mouth had literally dropped open.

  The next moment her brain kicked in and she quickly pressed the home button at the bottom of her smartphone. An array of apps sprang up, very effectively replacing the article as if it had never been there to begin with
. Under different circumstances, she would have gone on to read the article, but this was definitely not the time for her to fill in the gaps.

  The idea of Lukkas looking over and accidentally seeing what she was reading was just unthinkable to her. It was bad enough that she’d carelessly said what she’d said just now, comparing the crash rate of planes to cars. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t known Lukkas’s wife had lost her life in an event that she had so cavalierly tossed out. Her not knowing hadn’t lessened the pain Lukkas undoubtedly felt at the unintentional reminder of his loss.

  More than anything, she would have loved to apologize to him, to tell him that she hadn’t known he’d lost his wife this way. Until just now, she hadn’t thought that he was ever married.

  She’d done her homework on him but only partially so. To do her job well, she had been trying to educate herself about Lukkas Spader the producer, not the private man. The one article that had touched on both his professional and his private life had referred to him as being one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. That, to her, had translated to his not being married.

  Had the article been written by a more accurate writer, it would have made some sort of a reference to his being a widower. At least that would have given her some sort of a heads-up.

  Yohanna slanted a look in his direction. How did she go about making this right? She didn’t have a clue, so for now, all she could do was leave the matter alone.

  “We’re about to land,” Lukkas told her, his deep voice cutting through the fog still swirling around her head. “You might want to secure that.” He nodded at the smartphone still in her hand.

  “Yes, of course.” Feeling like someone who was just now coming to, Yohanna quickly slipped the device back into her pocket.

  After a beat, as they began their slow descent, Lukkas quietly said, “They said that she didn’t feel any pain.”

  Yohanna’s head jerked up as she looked at him. Had Lukkas glimpsed the article she had pulled up on her phone? She fervently hoped not.

  But then, how did she explain the remark he had just made?