River Road

by JoAnn Ross

  Fury drew her face into harsh, ugly lines. "You're an ungrateful bastard."

  Kendall's face was just as hard. "You swore on your dear old granny's memory that you didn't have any ulterior motive in going to bed with me. I took you at your word. If you were lying, sweetheart, it's your problem, not mine."

  Margot flung the bound pages across the room, shot Julia a white-hot look of hatred, then stormed out as dramatically as one might expect from a former daytime diva.

  "Just another day in paradise," Julia murmured. "If you had any sense at all, Callahan, you'd escape now. While you still can."

  Chapter 12

  That was a nice thing to do," Julia said thirty minutes later after the story meeting ended.

  Finn stepped back, allowing her to enter the elevator first. "What?"

  "Standing up for that woman Warren left the party with last night."

  "She's a friend," he said simply. He stuck the keycard in the slot that made the elevator bypass the lower floors. The doors closed.

  "And that's important to you."

  It didn't sound like a question, but Finn answered it anyway. "Yeah."

  "That's nice."

  "Is that a compliment?"

  "Merely a statement."

  They rode up in silence, side by side, both watching the numbers above the door light up.

  "I lied," Julia said as they entered the suite.

  "About what?" He wondered if she was going to confess she'd staged the threat.

  "It was a compliment."

  "Okay."

  "Okay? That's it?" She folded her arms. "Perhaps spending all your time with police types and criminals may have left you a bit socially challenged, but it's customary, when one receives a compliment, to respond in kind."

  "You want a compliment?"

  "I didn't say that." Her answer was a bit too quick. It had sure sounded that way to Finn. "I merely pointed out that your answer was a bit curt."

  "Just give me a minute to think of one."

  Finn wondered if there were any words of praise this woman hadn't heard, and for some insane reason wanted to try to come up with something original. Which was one of the lamest ideas he'd ever had. Pretty words had always come trippingly off Nate's tongue and he figured Jack must do pretty well in that department, since the middle Callahan brother earned his living as a writer these days, but Finn had never been one to wax poetic.

  "Forget it." She shook her head in disgust, stomped into the adjoining bedroom, and shut the door between them. It wasn't quite a slam, but it was damn close.

  Finn shook his own head. Sighed heavily as he took his notebook from a suit jacket pocket.

  No matter what else was going on in his life, he'd never had any trouble concentrating on a case. He'd developed the ability to shut out everything and everyone around him back when he'd been cramming for tests in a college dorm that made Animal House look tame by comparison.

  But as he reviewed the details of the conversations he'd had downstairs last night, the words on the lined pages seemed to blur, replaced with an unbidden mental image of him and Julia Summers rolling around on the moss-stuffed mattress at the camp.

  * * *

  The moment Julia saw Beau Soleil, she was enthralled. "It's stunning."

  "It looks just like Tara," Felissa said.

  "I'll bet it's being eaten by termites," Margot said. Faced with being fired, she'd shown up for work this morning but it was obvious to everyone that she wasn't at all happy with her situation.

  "It used to be," Nate, who'd come along to open the house for them, said. "But my brother thinks he's managed to run them off. He's been restoring the house for months, and though it's probably a lifetime project, if you'd seen the place when Jack started, you'd be amazed it looks this good."

  Julia put the names together. "Your brother's Jack Callahan? The Jack Callahan? Who wrote The Death Dealer?"

  "Yeah. That's him."

  "I absolutely love his books. I cried when his DEA hero's wife was blown up in a car bombing meant for him, and I keep hoping he'll find a nice woman to fall in love with. Is it true the stories are autobiographical?"

  "I honestly don't know. Jack doesn't talk all that much about his days in the DEA. You'd have to ask him."

  "Is he going to be living in the house while we're here?"

  "He's on a belated honeymoon. His wife's family owned Beau Soleil for generations before Jack bought it. Our maman was the housekeeper here when we were kids."

  "Sounds as if there's a story there." A fairy tale, she suspected.

  "One with a happy ending." Nate's smile was quick and warm. Julia was a little unnerved that it didn't affect her nearly as much as a mere quirk of his older brother's harshly cut lips.

  She wasn't sure what she was going to do about Finn Callahan, but since things between them had been silent and uncomfortable since she'd walked out on him yesterday morning, she didn't think she could stand to spend the next two weeks in a state of undeclared war.

  She looked up at Finn. "You didn't tell me your brother was Jack Callahan."

  "You didn't ask. And it's not germane to our situation."

  Deciding that it was impossible to have a normal social conversation with this man, Julia gave up on any idea of a truce and turned back to Nate. "I love the double front stairs."

  "Aren't they cool? The practical reason for the design is that because the women's hoop skirts were so wide, there wasn't room for two people to walk up them side by side. They also served to keep social order, since if a man saw a woman's ankles back in those days, he was duty bound to marry her. Having men go up one side and women the other prevented an escort from seeing a lady's legs when she lifted her hoop skirts to climb the steps."

  "Hoop skirts." Felissa sighed happily, obviously pleased with the idea of wearing antebellum-era costumes.

  Margot, on the other hand, seemed determined not to find anything positive about the experience. "Corsets," she muttered.

  Julia sighed with resignation. The last time Margot had been in a snit, she'd disrupted not only the mood among the cast and crew, but the shooting schedule for over a week, as well. If this season-ending project ran late, she'd never make it to Kathmandu in time.

  Things fell into a pattern over the next three days. Finn and Julia drove in silence to Beau Soleil each morning to meet the rest of the cast, who arrived by van from town. By the end of the first day, Finn had come to realize that acting involved a lot more than smiling pretty for the camera and shedding your clothes.

  He sat nearby as Damien, the magenta-haired makeup man, chattered like a magpie while transforming Julia into River Road's siren. Next her hair was brushed, teased, and sprayed into a sexy tangle of curls. Finally, while Finn waited outside her trailer, Audrey, the motherly wardrobe mistress, would dress her in period costumes that looked as if they weighed a ton and were probably even more uncomfortable than Damien's crotch binding leather pants, which had to feel like a sauna in this heat.

  Then she'd spend hours waiting while people blocked scenes, arranged lighting, and myriad other things just to shoot a scene that maybe would last five or ten minutes. If things went well.

  He began to recognize the transformation into Amanda. It wasn't that she turned from some ordinary person into Wonder Woman. Julia Summers was a naturally stunning creature, albeit with surprisingly uneven features—there was that feline slant to her eyes, her nose was a bit too pug, her lips too large, the chin too stubborn. But somehow they all fit together perfectly.

  It was, he decided, watching Fancy flirt with her mother's husband, as if an already bright light inside her flared even hotter when the camera turned on her. Even on those occasions when she'd have to repeat the same lines again and again, she somehow managed to make them sound fresh each time.

  At the end of each scene, Damien would leap to action with his brushes, powders and potions; the hairdresser would struggle to tame her curls, which were made even more wild by the unrelenting humi
dity; and the waiting would begin again.

  And all the time, while Margot bitched about anything and everything, and Felissa fussed about the heat, Julia didn't utter a word of complaint.

  That she was universally liked by the crew was obvious. It wasn't that surprising, since she appeared to take a genuine interest in them. Finn watched her ask a cameraman about his new son and ooh and aah over the snapshots the man proudly whipped out of his shirt pocket, commiserate with the script girl about her husband's infidelity, and encourage an electrician to adopt a puppy for his daughter's birthday from a Golden Retriever rescue group she'd made a fund-raising appearance for.

  She was even gracious to the townspeople who'd been hired as extras, obligingly posing for pictures and signing autographs for the locals, who were openly enthralled. Finn recognized several of them and couldn't help noticing that not only did Lorelei show up in more than a few scenes, she also disappeared with the writer during the lunch break.

  After they returned to the inn at the end of the day, Julia would order a light supper from room service and disappear into the bedroom, where he could hear her rehearsing her next day's lines aloud. Then, mere hours later, the process would begin again.

  The third day of shooting dragged on, the final scene shot late at night in the plantation cemetery. Finn stood in the shadow of a broken-winged angel, watching her. Silvery moondust streamed over the bayou graveyard, illuminating tombs that stood like mute white ghosts in the ethereal glow. Julia/Fancy was wearing a clinging moss green dress which, though not entirely true to the period, could have been created from the mist that curled in clinging tendrils around her bare arms. She'd left her fiery hair loose, allowing it to curl over pearlescent shoulders.

  "So you've come," a deep male voice echoed out of the thickening fog.

  "I hadn't realized I had a choice." She tossed her head, and there was an adversarial edge to her honeyed Southern drawl. "Since you've put Belle Terre under Yankee occupation."

  "Of course you have a choice." Captain James Farragut emerged from behind one of the tombs, wearing a uniform of Yankee blue. With his well-trimmed blond hair and beard, shiny brass buttons, and boots polished to a brilliant sheen, he could have stepped off a Union recruiting poster. Fancy O'Halloran had hated him on sight.

  Thunder rumbled like Northern cannon fire in the distance. "During my stay here, you can meet me wherever I say, whenever I say, and I won't order my men to burn your beloved plantation house to the ground when we leave," he said matter-of-factly. "Or you can refuse, and I'll turn you and your sister over to my men, many of whom are rough farm boys who don't have any idea of how to treat a lady."

  "And you do?" Her tone suggested that she found it unlikely any man from New York City would have the faintest idea how to treat a genteel Southern woman.

  His boots crunched on the crushed oyster shell gravel as he approached. "Absolutely."

  They were standing face-to-face now, her skirt pressing against his thighs as he backed her up against a crypt, pinning her between the damp stone and his body.

  Lightning flashed, brightening the scene to a daylight brilliance for a fleeting heartbeat of a second. Watching her closely as he was, Finn saw her faint shudder when the captain's fingers skimmed over her bare shoulders. With anticipation or fear, he couldn't tell.

  "Of course," Farragut mused as his touch trailed lower, tracing the rounded curve of her upper breast, "one could argue that any woman who'd meet a man all alone in a deserted cemetery at midnight isn't really much of a lady."

  The sky opened up. Rain fell in a torrent, as if being poured out of a bucket. Fancy cried out as he roughly tore the last of her pretty, prewar dresses down to her waist, but when he dragged her to the ground and began unfastening his wool trousers, she reached beneath her filmy skirt—exposing a mouthwatering length of stocking—and retrieved the derringer she'd stuck in a lacy garter.

  "If you lay a hand on me again," she said, pointing the weapon directly at his groin, "or so much as touch a hair on the head of my sister or any other woman on this plantation, I swear, you'll be carrying your manhood back to New York in a basket."

  If he hadn't known that this soap opera vixen had grown up on one of the last surviving flower child communes in northern California, Finn might have believed that Julia Summers was a true Steel Magnolia of the South.

  They glared at each other for a long, tension-filled moment. The Union captain's eyes glittered with dangerous male intent. The rain had turned her dress nearly invisible; the thin wet material clung to her curves.

  An instinctive male response to the provocative sight uncoiled in his loins; Finn ruthlessly reined it in.

  "Rebel slut," Shane Langley, playing Captain Farragut, spat the words, then lunged at her again.

  As the thunder boomed around them and the rain fell, Fancy pulled the trigger.

  "Cut!" Randy's voice broke the night.

  "Cut," echoed the assistant director.

  The artificially generated storm-abruptly ceased.

  "Stone the bloody dingoes." The hard-driving Australian director

  bestowed the first compliment Finn had heard him hand out in three days of filming, "You pulled that scene off in one take."

  "It was either that or let you rain on me for the rest of the night." Julia took hold of Shane's hand as he pulled her back onto her feet.

  "I'll see you all back on the set at nine A.M. sharp. Julia, luv, you're due in makeup at seven."

  "Dammit, Randy. That's only six hours from now. How do you expect me to get my beauty sleep?"

  "I'd suggest you sleep quickly," the director responded.

  "Don't worry, darlin'," her co-star said, his own natural Mississippi drawl more suited to a Confederate uniform than Union blue. "You're already drop-dead gorgeous."

  "Flatterer," she muttered, slipping her arms into the robe Audrey held out to her-

  "It's the God's own truth." He lifted his right hand.

  "Isn't that sweet." She patted his cheek, her smile luminous. "But I'm still not sleeping with you."

  He shrugged good-naturedly. "Can't blame a guy for trying."

  No, Finn agreed silently. With the image of those long, firm legs replaying in his mind, he doubted there were many men who wouldn't attempt to parlay that scene into the real thing.

  Julia didn't so much as spare him a glance as he followed her to her trailer; didn't say a word when he walked in right behind her as if he had every right to be there. Though he was grateful for her apparent change in attitude, Finn didn't trust her seeming acquiescence.

  "God, I feel as if I've gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson," she complained. "In a mud pit. And I'm going to have bruises all over my butt tomorrow from that damn gravel."

  Since he'd discovered that she had a habit of talking to herself, most often when she was preparing for a scene, Finn didn't respond.

  She turned her back on him and shrugged off the robe, letting it slide down her body onto the floor. The wet, muddy dress that revealed more than it concealed followed, leaving her in a muddied corset and lacy silk pantaloons that might have come from a nineteenth-century Victoria's Secret store. "If you're going to insist on hovering over me like some oversize bullmastiff guard dog, you may as well make yourself useful and get me out of this damn strait-jacket so I can breathe again."

  The corset was white floral satin, heavily boned and laced up the back. It looked uncomfortable as hell, but winnowed her waist down to an unbelievably narrow size he figured he could span with his fingers. Fingers that were practically itching to touch her.

  "Why don't I call Audrey?" he suggested.

  "Because she's had a long day since Randy got it into his head to change costumes every two hours, and she still has tomorrow's wardrobe to get ready."

  She flashed him a deliberately provocative look over her bare shoulder. "Which leaves you to undress me."

  The pink ribbons tied at the back of her wasp-slender waist were wet and muddy. Deliberately
testing his self-control, Finn drew them through the loops slowly, allowing his fingers to brush against perfumed flesh that felt like cool satin to the touch.

  Neither spoke. But the higher he got, the more he sensed the tension that had been stretched nearly to the breaking point between them these past days begin to ease. When his knuckles brushed against her spine, not by accident, but design, he heard a slow languid sigh escape from between her lips.

  "What did you think?" she murmured.

  "About what? Lift up your hair so I can unlace these top ones."

  She did as instructed, revealing a slender neck he found unreasonably erotic. "About the scene."

  "I think it was getting pretty hot." He slipped the ribbon through the final loop. "Until you shot the guy's balls off."

  "Did that make you wince? Want to grab your own?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good." There was a rasp of smooth silk against harsh denim as she leaned her nearly naked body back against him in a way that sent the last of the blood rushing straight from his head to his boxer shorts.

  Finn knew the move was calculated when she looked up at him, her sexy come-and-kiss-me lips tilted up in the same smile he'd watched her use two days ago when her character had seduced her sister's Confederate Army fiance" before sending him off to fight for a losing cause.

  "My gracious," she said in Fancy's slow magnolia drawl. "Is that your gun, Special Agent Callahan? Or are you just glad to see me?"

  "What the hell do you think?" Because he suspected it was what she wanted, Finn refused to be embarrassed by his body's response and move away.

  Buns of steel earned from daily yoga workouts wiggled against him in a way meant to test his resolve. Oh, she was good, Finn decided as he ground his teeth and forced his sex-crazed mind to run through the entire 1978 Yankees lineup. He was trying to remember who'd replaced the injured Willie Randolph at second base late in the season, when Julia gave him another smile, more wickedly seductive than the first.