Tender Deception

by Heather Graham

  When he finally came offstage, she sipped her coffee and studied her script without looking up. He wasn’t bothered in the least. His attention went convivially to a few of the others—Terry, among them—who were all too happy to include him in their discourse. Covertly, and with a stab of jealousy she despised, Vickie saw that Terry was still anxious to make her play for Brant, rumors or no. The tall brunette was unabashedly draped over him as she whispered a question intently, and damn Brant if he didn’t turn to give her a dazzling smile.

  “Hold it just a minute,” Monte told them all, leaping to the stage. “I think I’ve got one of those impossible to refuse offers—in the form of an apology! I know I was horrible today. I’m tired. So you must be tired too. Soooooo—we’re dark Sunday and Monday. I’m giving you Tuesday daytime off. No rehearsal. Just report for showtime. For those of you who wish to make it, I’m also extending an open invitation. I’ve rented a place up in the panhandle for the weekend. The beach, sun, and sailboats. If you can’t make it, relax somehow! That’s it. See you all tonight.”

  “Dynamite!” Bobby murmured beside Vickie, giving her a pleased grin. “Two fun-filled days on old Monte! You gonna go, Vick?”

  “I’m not sure,” she hedged. “I have Mark to think about—”

  “Now, that’s pure bunk,” Monte proclaimed, interrupting them, wryly astounding Vickie with his ability to hear what he wanted to hear. “I happen to know for a fact that you can easily leave Mark. You told me yourself just last week that your parents and your brother have been hounding you about having Mark spend some time with them. And you, Victoria, have been almost as grouchy as I. If anyone needs a vacation, it’s you.”

  She needed a vacation all right, but away from the theater and its newest star. And she was sure beyond a doubt that Brant would be going.

  “Maybe,” she hedged again, determined to make no commitments. “It’s just that I see so little of Mark myself.”

  “We’re talking about two days, not two weeks,” Monte reminded her.

  Vickie gave both Monte and Bobby a cheerful smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Maybe,” she repeated cheerily. “Probably, even!” Let them both think she was going. The less time they had to chisel at her defenses, the better.

  Glancing over Monte’s graying head, she saw that Brant was leisurely approaching their party. Her smile became deceptively dazzling as she hopped quickly to her feet. “I’ve got to run. See you all later.”

  Spinning around, she made a graceful if hasty exit from the theater. Knowing Brant, he would find a way to trick her into agreement to the weekend. Or would he? Would he really care whether she went or not? He hadn’t appeared too unhappy to have Terry draped over him and Terry had made it bluntly clear that she enjoyed draping herself.

  Later that afternoon, sitting on the divan, she found it hard to concentrate on her lines, easy as they should have been to learn. Her mind kept wandering back to Brant’s words. I plan to marry you. How absurd. He probably hadn’t really given her a thought in the years preceding his reappearance. His words were merely Hollywood and New York, she thought scornfully. In those sophisticated cities, talk was cheap, at least in the theatrical community. Light affairs were easy. They were easy anywhere, she told herself dryly, except that it was true. You could read about many a famous actor’s marriage one week, and his divorce the next, which didn’t matter. All she could ever have with Brant would be an affair. She couldn’t marry him even if he were serious. Marriage meant licenses, and if they applied for a license, Brant would discover that she was not a widow.

  “No!” she voiced aloud to herself. “Damn you, Brant Wicker. Not again!”

  “Brant!” Mark, who had been quietly playing with a set of Bristle Blocks, looked up at the name and repeated it with a smile. “Brant coming?”

  “No, no, darling,” Vickie said quickly. “Mommy was just thinking aloud.”

  Just thinking aloud. Ridiculous. There was no future in dreaming. Better to subdue immediately the dreams that could never be. Not with the obstacles that faced them—the main one of which Brant would never dream.

  She never intended to ask anyone to watch Mark for Monte’s two-day holiday because she didn’t intend to go. As it happened, though, Edward called her a few minutes before she was due to leave for the evening’s performance. Inadvertently she mentioned Monte’s plans, explaining that she had a few days off if Edward thought they might be able to get together.

  “No!” Edward told her emphatically over the wire. “We are not going to get together. You’re going to go with your group and have a good time. I’ll take Mark. Listen, young lady,” he added firmly before she could protest, “you are one of the best mothers I know. But you have to have a life of your own too. A one-dimensional parent is not good! Besides, Mark needs a little male companionship, and who better than his doting uncle?”

  Vickie had to chuckle at her brother’s tone, and agree. Edward had shown a poignant devotion to Mark since his birth. He had stood beside her from the beginning, a shoulder to lean on when the going had been rough. Karen, Edward’s new wife, was also crazy about her little dark-headed nephew.

  As Edward went on to give her a host of reasons why she should go and Mark should stay with him, Vickie felt her resolve melting.

  She was going to be with Brant for the summer; to deny herself the little vacation to avoid him was ludicrous.

  “Okay, okay!” she finally agreed laughingly. “Thanks, Ed. I could use the days at Monte’s expense! When do you want to pick up Mark?”

  Her brother told her he would pick up Mark on Saturday morning, and after a few more minutes of idle chatter about their parents and their jobs, they hung up.

  Vickie had barely seated herself on her stool in the dressing room that night before a sharp knock sounded on the door. The women looked at one another. “Probably Monte,” Terry said dryly, rising to answer the door. “Hope he’s still in his good mood.”

  It wasn’t Monte. Brant’s towering form stood in the doorway, rigid with ill-concealed anger. “Welcome, big boy—” Terry began, but he cut her off shortly with a curt nod.

  “Vickie, I’d like to talk to you before you go on,” he said tonelessly, only his stance and searing eyes betraying his emotions. Spinning on his heel and stiffly striding away, he was gone before she could open her mouth to protest or assent, taking her agreement imperiously for granted.

  “My, my,” Connie murmured, her huge brown eyes wide and full of alarm. “What on earth did you do to him?”

  “Nothing,” Vickie replied shortly, stunned, but determined to show no reaction to Brant’s high-handedness. Inside she was seething with fury and indignation, but with three pairs of eyes staring at her with curiosity, she had to pretend total indifference. Picking up her sponge, she calmly began to apply base to her cheeks. Eventually the other women lowered their eyes. Only Terry stared straight ahead at her own mirror, a secret smile curved into her lips.

  “How dare you barge into the dressing room and speak to me like that?” Vickie demanded after she had sought Brant out and found him in the scene shop laboriously pounding nails. “Just who do you think you are?”

  The hammer paused in mid-air and Brant swiveled slowly toward her, his eyes still burning darkly. For a terrified instant he reminded Vickie of a lord from the Renaissance—an all-powerful master who might easily bludgeon an erring female. But then the hammer fell innocently to his side. His voice was his weapon, lashing out with the strength of a whip.

  “Who do I think I am?” he thundered in a rasp. “Nothing much. A fellow human being, currently a fellow member of this ensemble.” Dropping the hammer with a clanging thud to the cold cement floor, he strode angrily to a rough-hewn workbench to pick up a pile of several newspapers. Stamping furiously back to Vickie, he thrust them into her hands. “These are what I want to talk to you about.”

  Vickie still had no conception of what he could be ranting about. “Those are newspapers,” she drawled sar
castically, stating the obvious and infuriating him further.

  “Read the circled articles,” Brant commanded.

  Brant had maintained his grip on the papers even as he had thrust them into Vickie’s unwilling hands. Now she looked at him heatedly and jerked them from his grasp, her gray eyes as stormy and as cold as his blue ones. Finally allowing her vision to take in the newspapers, Vickie saw immediately that the publications were major ones from across the country. And the circled articles were about Brant, told to the reporters by a nameless but well-known “leading lady of the Central Florida troupe.”

  Vickie’s heart sank slowly as she briefly scanned the articles. They were damaging, to say the least. Still, she was certain that Brant’s anger didn’t stem from the temperamental portrayal given of him, but from the fact that his private life—one he had always kept from the media—had been ripped wide open. Every personal piece of information imaginable had been given, down to his present address. And to make matters worse, it was even hinted that a romantic entanglement “destined to end at the altar” was going on between the star and the leading lady who had been so helpful to the papers.

  Vickie was horrified as she met Brant’s accusing stare, and equally filled with wrath.

  “I don’t care what this looks like!” she sputtered in a vengeful hiss. “I didn’t give this interview!”

  “I didn’t accuse you yet.”

  “No?” Vickie countered. “Then why am I standing here?”

  “I’m asking you,” Brant said more calmly. “If you didn’t give the interview, it was certainly intended to look as if you did. You do have all this information.”

  “All right, I do!” Vickie fumed as she tried to remain steadfastly cool and in control. “But I didn’t have anything to do with this. And I’m not going to stand here giving you excuses. Look for your culprit elsewhere.” Belying her words, she remained planted before him, hands defiantly on her hips, gray eyes blazing into indigo for a sign that he believed her.

  But signs were sometimes impossible to read from Brant. He stood as still as she, white-knuckled fists clenched in his pockets. With the angle of his arms emphasizing broad shoulders that trimmed to slender hips encased in jeans that hugged and visibly displayed the muscles in his legs beneath the fabric, he again reminded her of some fearsome warlord of another century. A Viking, a savage chieftain. Othello the Moor, about to commit murder over an imagined wrong.

  “You don’t have to give me excuses,” he said grimly. “I was merely asking. If you say you know nothing about it, I believe you.”

  Stunned by his words, Vickie stood still in disbelief. “You have one hell of a way of just asking!”

  “I’m annoyed.”

  “Annoyed?”

  “Okay. I’m rather irate. I can’t imagine anyone doing something like this to me.”

  “Terrific. So you turn to me.”

  “I’m sorry. I also intend to turn elsewhere. Got any ideas?”

  Vickie hardened her jaw as she clenched her teeth. She had an idea—a damned good one. But she didn’t intend to voice it, certainly not when she didn’t trust his look. He said that he believed her, but did he really?

  “Brant, these are newspaper articles. Anyone can talk. There are at least twenty people around here who could have come up with any of this.”

  The stark anger left his eyes for a moment of puzzlement. “But why would anyone want to hurt me?” he mused.

  “I don’t think anyone did intend to hurt you,” Vickie said quietly.

  “What are you talking about? I’ll be besieged at home if I don’t move now! Whoever did this even gave out my parents’ address in Tampa! They are not young people. They don’t need the harassment they’re going to get—”

  “The pain of notoriety!” Vickie interrupted dryly. “You’re a star. Surely you’ve been maligned before.”

  “Not by supposed friends.”

  “Oh, it was a friend, all right,” Vickie muttered beneath her breath.

  “What?” Brant demanded sharply.

  “Nothing. Nothing I can’t handle myself,” she murmured. “Excuse me, that is if the third degree is over. I do have a show tonight.” Majestically spinning on him, she sailed out of the shop and down the hall to the wings, not sure whom she’d rather give a sound slap to first—Brant, for believing her capable of being so petty, or Terry, who she was convinced had given the interview and purposely set it up to appear that Vickie had.

  Vickie reached the wing just in the nick of time to hear Jim bellow his “places” command. And as the show proceeded, she decided that acting was a wonderful thing. Her head was in a turmoil as vicious as any raging storm, but her lines came out ringing sincerity. Only in the wings during the act breaks was she unusually subdued, wondering what to do.

  If she really wanted to get rid of Brant, this was her chance. But she knew damn well that Terry, determined to get Brant, had given the interview. She couldn’t sit by and have Brant, who had professed to believe her, harbor suspicions in the back of his mind. Pride, she told herself, goeth before the fall…In any event she wasn’t letting Terry get away with it and sit idly by.

  As she broodingly mused, Terry sauntered over to her. “Anything wrong?” she asked solicitously. “Macho-man get your dander up?”

  “No, Terry,” Vickie drawled calmly, watching the pretty brunette. “But you might say that I am a little irritated.”

  “Oh? I did hear that you and Brant were shacking up. If you’ve had a little lovers’ quarrel, perhaps I can help,” Terry offered.

  “Brant and I are not shacking up,” Vickie explained, the terminology bothering her more than Terry’s attitude. “And I’m not irritated with Brant. Quite frankly, Terry, I’m irritated with you.”

  “Me!” The brunette feigned a pained innocence.

  “Come on, Terry,” Vickie retorted. “I’m not one of your drooling dates. Haven’t you read the papers? Your interviews were well received.”

  For an instant Terry’s sultry eyes flashed something like a fearful defiance. Then they clouded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We all give interviews all of the time.”

  “Oh, but these are especially good,” Vickie told her caustically.

  “Perhaps someone twisted what I said—”

  “Places!” Tim’s command broke off further conversation.

  Whispering quickly as she moved to her assigned space, Vickie warned Terry, “Perhaps you’d better tell Brant that your words were twisted…”

  Terry did tell Brant with an acting ability Vickie had as yet to see on a stage. She watched only a few minutes of the little scenario. Terry caught Brant offstage right after the curtain fell at the end of Godspell. There had never been such an abject display of feminine remorse. And Terry came off as the maligned one, her innocent words misused and abused. As she spoke to Brant, her long, lacquered fingernails resting lightly on his shoulder with her emphatic sincerity, Vickie turned away. She was in the clear herself, but she didn’t want to see Brant’s understanding forgiveness of Terry. It wasn’t fair. She had taken the brunt of his temper. Terry had merely to wind herself around him and—men! Surely Brant couldn’t be that idiotic! So much for his being “a little bit in love” with her.

  Suddenly Vickie was tired. The tension she had been living with was draining her. Rushing into the dressing room, she scrubbed her face and changed, in a hurry to leave, not interested in another encounter with either Brant or Terry.

  But if she had hoped to avoid Brant, she was sadly disappointed. As she hastened to the parking lot, she found him waiting for her, leaning against her Volvo.

  “What now?” she flashed angrily. “Did someone break your board? Put nails in your tires? Throw salt in your coffee?”

  “None of the above!” he laughed, languidly straightening himself. “I want to apologize.”

  “Terrific, you’ve apologized,” she said coolly, inserting her key into the lock. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”


  “It won’t start.” He moved around the car to grin into her window.

  “What?” she demanded, annoyed, punching the key into the ignition.

  “I said it won’t start, but if you don’t want to take my word for it, try it!” He continued to grin at her, leaning confidently on the frame. Vickie gave him a nasty glare and turned the key. Nothing. Spewing forth a barrage of venomous words, she pushed his elbow away from the car, opened the door, and sprang from the vehicle to further emphasize her wrath. “And you had the nerve to accuse me of that interview! Brant Wicker, you are a—”

  “Hell of a nice guy, really,” he finished, halting her vengeful fury by slipping one arm securely around her back and using the other to bring his hand to her mouth and clamp it shut, laughing until her futile struggles ceased. Without releasing his hold, he calmly informed her, “There’s nothing really wrong with your car. A loose wire. I found it when I fixed it for you the other night. Come to think of it, you never did say thanks, but that’s all right, don’t mention it. I loosened the same wire. I was afraid you’d try to run off instead of listening to me. What’s that?” he asked as she made a muffled comment into his hand. “Sounds like ‘let me go.’ Not yet. I want to make sure you’ve calmed down a bit! Oh, brother! Here comes Harry Blackwell. Let’s not have him see us arguing.” His hand slipped from her mouth, but even as she gulped for air, his mouth replaced it, searing into hers hungrily, passionately. One hand now held her to him securely around her lower back, the other reinforced his conquering command by pinning her to him by her nape. Stiffening, she strained against him, unable to fight, unable even to lift an arm. Suddenly she didn’t want to. The scent of his light, musky cologne mingled in her nostrils with an aura that was all him, all masculine, all seductive. The pounding of his heart was as clear to her ears as her own, as his lips possessed her and his tongue parted her quivering mouth—searching, probing, demanding. Sensing her surrender, he eased his deathlike grip and his hands began to wander, caressing the small of her back, teasing her ribs, moving along the smooth, alabaster skin of her neck, down to her collarbone, down briefly to cradle the curves of her breasts before they locked again behind her back to allow his lips to follow the same course.