You’re late. Rehearsal 9-1-1.
He swore.
For the past week, he’d done nothing but stand on the stage for the light guys or move some pieces of wood around for the set guys or go pick up coffee for the entire crew. It wasn’t exactly what he’d signed on for, but Peterson swore things were only going to get better.
At least he got to mess with Rachel on a daily basis—that was something to look forward to. Give that woman a fat-free muffin with a wink and a vow to look after her figure for her and the entertainment lasted for hours.
“They probably need some lunch,” he muttered, tucking the phone away. Michael O’Leary. Former Athletic God. Current Bringer of Sandwiches.
But the smile must go on.
His guess wasn’t that far off. As Michael walked into the backstage area, Dominic rounded the corner, his face pinched so tight it could have been shoved into a bottle and stored for later. “What are you doing?”
“That’s a good question. What seems to be the emergency around here? Someone’s corset hook get stuck? Lock themselves out of their car?”
If it was possible, Dominic’s face shrank even more. “It’s not my fault! I swear if I could go back in time and remind myself why hiring Rachel Hewitt was a bad idea, I’d do it. That woman is a—”
Michael stopped him before he got any further. “That’s what you’d waste time travel on? Hell, no. Not me. I’ve always wanted to be a knight. Armor, jousting, wenches—the whole bit. Don’t tell me you’re not even a little bit curious about the wenches.”
Dominic shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time. Will you please just go get a latte? Double tall, skim milk, no more than ten percent foam. Got it?”
Michael gave a mock salute and did his bidding, errand boy and general theater bitch. The girls at the coffee stand next door were getting pretty familiar with his face these days. He was going to have to have a serious talk with Peterson. There were limits to man’s endurance—even one of Michael’s reputation for longevity.
The coffee acquired, Michael hand-delivered it to the director, even going so far as to throw in a mock bow.
“Not for me, Michael. Go give it to Rachel. She won’t work on the next scene.”
“And you’re bribing her with coffee?” Michael asked doubtfully.
“Do you have a better idea?”
He did, actually. Pressing the coffee cup firmly in Dominic’s hand, Michael stomped up the stairs toward the dressing rooms so hard the curtains threatened to come tumbling down. He pulled open the door and caught sight of Rachel scowling into the script.
She didn’t even look up as she shouted, “I’m not coming down there until he puts the armor scene back in. I don’t care if we are wearing nothing but our underwear and doing the cancan on stage—Dominic is not God, and he doesn’t get to rewrite Shakespeare. I have some artistic integrity left.”
“You’re wanted below.”
She turned her scowl on him. “You’re not wanted anywhere. And this has nothing to do with you, thank you very much.”
He took a few steps forward. She didn’t exactly shrink back, but her hackles definitely went up. The clutch of tension in her jaw and the tic at the side of her mouth were unmistakable. He only wished his knee was a little stronger so he could swoop in and carry her down like he wanted to. But Dr. Monroe had been very strict with her warning. Nothing above forty pounds. Period.
“And you’re very welcome,” Michael said with a grin. “But the sad truth is I’ve been tasked with your retrieval.”
She shot to her feet. “You are not retrieving anything!”
“Will you come willingly?” He spread his arms wide and came toward her. She immediately put the chair between them, as if that would stop a man intent on his goal—especially when the goal was her. “Or am I going to have to force you?”
“You wouldn’t dare. If you lay a finger on me, I’ll have you arrested for assault.”
“I haven’t assaulted anything yet. Believe me, if I wanted to put my hands on you, I would. And you’d love it. Now—are you going to head down there and do the work you’ve been hired to do, or are you going to sit up here and pout like a spoiled little brat? Peterson’s kids have better manners than you.”
He couldn’t tell which part of his speech enraged her more, but by the time he’d finished speaking, she looked so mad that only a woman with her monumental pride would still be standing there, refusing to move.
“I’m not going out there until Dominic puts the scene back.” She tossed her hair. “And he can stand out there bumbling and rotting—without me—until he does.”
“Why?” Michael asked.
The hinge of her jaw loosened just enough to leave an enticing part to her lips. He cocked his head to admire the view, imagining no fewer than three ways to capture that mouth before she realized what he was doing and snapped herself back to attention.
“Why what?” she asked suspiciously, keeping her mouth firmly closed this time.
“What’s the big deal about the scene?” He nodded sympathetically. “Does it have a ton of your lines? Are you feeling left out?”
A scoffing noise escaped her lips as they fell open again. “Of course not.” She paused. “I mean, I do have lines, but that’s not the point.”
“So what is the point?” he persisted.
“You really want to know?”
He spread his arms wide. “Teach me, O Cleopatra.”
Disbelief darkened her brow, and she spoke with hesitancy. “It’s when Antony is getting ready to go to war. Cleo wants to help him into his armor, but she can’t get it quite right. She struggles. It’s one of the only times she has a tangible human weakness.”
When he didn’t speak right away, she continued, firmer this time. “I know Dominic is working with limited stage time, but when you have a strong female character like that, it’s important to make sure she’s portrayed sympathetically, you know? She’s not the villain in this story. She’s a person—and she makes mistakes.”
Michael waited a beat too long to speak. One second sooner and he could have capitalized on the softness in her voice and the slump in her shoulders. But he wanted to get his words right, and he missed his window. The moment was gone, and Rachel’s own armor slid back into place.
“You can get out of my dressing room now,” she said, a sneer curling her lip. The hostility didn’t reach her eyes, though, and there was a heavy sorrow to them that made him want to wrap his arms around her and never let go.
He didn’t, of course. He wasn’t stupid.
Michael knew he had two choices in that moment: retreat or push ahead. He had the feeling that retreat would be permanent, and the ground he’d gained, once lost, would be gone to him forever.
So he pushed. He was good at that.
Michael heaved a hefty sigh and shook his head. “I was afraid you were going to make this difficult.”
She jumped back. “What are you going to do?”
He sat on the chair she hid behind, straddling it and resting his arms across the top. She was so close he could have flicked his fingers out and grazed her breasts, but he refrained from doing anything that might give her justifiable rage.
“There once was a lass from Nantucket,” Michael began, his voice singsong and light.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Whose cunt was so small none could fuck it.”
“This is not happening.”
“Then a man came along, with a tiny-ass schlong.”
“Quit it. Quit it right now.”
“But, alas, he knew not where to tuck it.”
Rachel threw her hands up in the air. “What are you, twelve?”
Michael cracked his knuckles and took another deep breath. Five minutes. Five minutes of this and she was done. He’d bet his collection of naked lady mud flaps on it.
“There once was a girl from Mayotte,” he began again. Rachel immediately clapped her hands over her
ears and started humming a tune he didn’t recognize, but that didn’t faze him. He had a powerful set of lungs hidden underneath his barrel of a chest. He could out-volume this woman any day of the week.
“Who suffered from nasty crotch rot.”
An outraged mewl escaped Rachel’s throat. Good. She was listening. He was just getting warmed up.
“She moved to the beach, to showcase her peach.”
Rachel’s lips tightened. He finished the limerick with a mighty roar. “Where men loved the smell of her twat.”
The door to the dressing room fell open a sliver.
“Is, ah, everything okay in here?” came Larson’s quiet voice. He’d obviously been sent against his will, if the sharp whisper at his back was anything to go by. Someone seriously needed to take this boy in hand and teach him to man up a little.
“Come in, come in,” Michael called warmly. “We’re just getting started in here. You guys have me surrounded with Shakespeare all the time, so I thought I’d try my hand. It’s not so hard, this poetry thing. I don’t see what all the ruckus is about. Do you want to hear some of my work?”
Larson’s eyes grew wide, but he slipped in through the doorway just the same. Michael couldn’t have staged it better if he tried. If there was one thing better than being deliberately offensive to an obstinate woman, it was being deliberately offensive to an obstinate woman in front of an audience.
“How about this one? Stop me if you’ve heard it. There once was a man with angina—”
“Out!” Rachel yelled. Despite all her cries of assault, she was the first to make a move, both her hands pressed against his chest as she tried to physically move him out the door. Michael got up from the chair and let her push, taking a few small steps so she thought she was making progress. As soon as they were close enough to the door, he let his hand run up her, caressing from forearm to shoulder, which was bare in her filmy sleeveless top.
In the distance, Larson gulped.
“Unhand me,” Rachel said through gritted teeth, but there were goose bumps all along her arm, her skin’s natural reaction to the rough surface of his hand.
“You assaulted me first,” Michael replied, his voice low. “I have a witness.”
Her lips parted, half temptation, half outrage. It was a temptation he wouldn’t yield to, an outrage he would use to his advantage. Drawing closer, he let his other hand fall along the soft curve of her back, not quite touching, but disturbing so much of the air around them that they both felt the shift.
Just as she leaned in, probably unaware of her own body’s betrayal, Michael reached behind him and yanked on the door. The wash of cold air was a shock, and Rachel’s mouth fell the rest of the way open.
“There’s coffee down there for you if you want. Dominic ordered it. Double tall. Skim milk. Nothing frothy or sweet about it.” He very purposefully raked his gaze over the length of her. It was a sight he could never tire of, even if he had to do it with mockery shielding his real thoughts. “Huh. Kind of like you, now that I think about it.”
With a cry of outrage, Rachel stormed through the door. Larson and Michael watched, side by side, as she grabbed the coffee out of Dominic’s hand and threw it in the nearest garbage can.
“I don’t want a stupid latte, Dom. I want you to behave like a professional for once. Do you think you can manage that?”
He cast a bewildered look around before finally landing his gaze on Michael. Michael gave him a thumbs-up and then grabbed liberally at his balls. He elbowed Larson and hissed, “You too, buddy. If you ask me, all the men around here could use a little carpe scrotum.”
“Yes,” Dominic asserted, trying for a stern look. It was better than nothing. “But we do it my way. It’s my show, and I make the editorial decisions.”
Rachel stared at the director for an icy-cold minute in which it seemed the entire room might implode. Michael shrugged his shoulders and splayed his hands, hoping Dominic would get the message.
She’s right. Don’t let her walk all over you, but at least fucking listen to what she has to say.
Rachel wasn’t an easy woman by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to Michael she knew her shit when it came to this Shakespeare character. He didn’t understand how the people in her life could be so catastrophically intent at pushing all her wrong buttons.
“No,” Rachel declared. She very deliberately avoided looking anywhere within a few hundred feet of where Michael stood. “This scene is too important to Cleopatra’s character development. You know that as well as I do.” Michael cracked his knuckles and settled onto a coil of ropes, his makeshift couch for the past few days, and listened as she repeated much of what she’d said to him in the dressing room. He even bit back a cheer a few times when she made a particularly good argument, Dominic’s face pinching a little tighter each time.
She won, of course. There might have even been scattered applause when Dominic finally conceded.
And for the rest of the day, Michael proceeded to watch the rehearsals, the armor scene firmly in place, waiting for the next argument to erupt.
God help him, even faced with a bum knee and the full force of her wrath, he was actually looking forward to it.
Chapter Eight
In Fair Palouse
“I’m not saying another line until he is out of here.”
Rachel strove to keep her voice down, but it seemed every single person in the building had come over to hear her exchange with Dominic. All you had to do was say “private word,” and every ear in the place perked up.
“I appreciate your position, Rachel, but you also have to appreciate mine. I can’t throw someone out of the company because you don’t like him.”
Dominic was talking down to her, and she could see he thought she was being difficult—they all thought that.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew what people said about her, heard the rumors floating around about why Dominic would be willing to keep her on staff after one of their conflicts. A woman wasn’t allowed to have an opinion about the way a business was run unless she was sleeping with the boss. Dominic wouldn’t respect her professional opinion unless she was bumping and grinding offstage, as well as on.
What garbage. Rachel knew what her strengths and weaknesses were—and so did the people she stood up to. And she especially knew when she was right. If getting other people to agree with her meant the occasional public quarrel, then so be it.
Starting right now.
“Did you see her eye, Dominic? He hit her. That asshole hit her, and you’re letting him waltz around here like it doesn’t matter.”
“What does your sister say?”
Rachel gripped the back of a chair so tight she lost all feeling in her fingertips. She didn’t dare let go. The ground was going to collapse beneath her any minute now—she was sure of it.
“Of course she’s denying it. That’s what she does.”
“And Eric?”
“For crying out loud, Dominic. Like he’s going to admit it to me.”
She should have known better. After the barbeque, she’d actually thought things between her sister and Eric were cooling off. Molly had spent almost every evening at home recently. One of those nights, they’d even made dinner with their mother, who’d been surprisingly sober for six o’clock in the evening.
“No date night with Father of the Year?” Rachel had asked, cutting up tomatoes for their caprese salad.
“Is this new boyfriend of yours an older man? How divine. I always loved a sugar daddy.” Indira was never one to labor over a hot stove, and she’d watched her daughters work from the comfort of the kitchen island, grimacing at her cup of iced tea—which Rachel had poured herself.
“No, Mom. He has two young kids Rachel doesn’t approve of. And it’s not like me being home is that big of a deal—Eric has just been really busy with work lately, especially since he’s been spending so much time at the theater. He’s a bouncer, you know, when he’s not doing the Highland Games.
”
“How very upstanding and paternal of him,” Rachel had murmured. But something in her sister’s voice seemed to suggest there was more than work getting in the way.
Good. Let it happen before her sister fell any more in love with this man than she already was.
Unfortunately, the reprieve hadn’t lasted. Last night, her sister answered a late-night text that any self-respecting woman would recognize as a booty call. She’d come home sometime in the middle of the night after the rest of them had gone to bed. If only Rachel had waited up for her. If only she could find a way to convince Molly that she was so much better than the bright-blue-and-purple bruise around the outer rim of her left eye.
“Oh, I didn’t jump out of the way in time when Sammy was playing Wii baseball,” Molly had said with a smile. It had looked forced. “She’s going to throw a wicked curveball someday.”
“Rachel, there’s nothing I can do.” Dominic ran his hand through his short, spiky hair and sighed. “I understand you’re upset, but if your sister says there’s nothing wrong, I have no choice but to believe her. Eric and I have been talking about putting him in charge of security and the box office—a real position, not just his volunteer work. I can’t cut him loose because of your suspicions. In fact, you’re going to have to go out there and apologize, or it’s you who will be getting sent home.”
No. Absolutely not. “I know you think I took it too far, but I respectfully disagree.”
“You kicked him in the groin, Rachel. That’s assault.”
Rachel’s jaw tightened “If he ever touches my sister again, it’s going to be a hell of a lot worse than that.”
Dominic sighed. “You need to work this out with him, and that’s the last thing I have to say on the subject. Between this and your mom—”
She cut him off. “Noted.”
Eight years. She’d spent eight years going through college and working in fundraising and doing underpaid community theater work and now this. None of her jobs were very prestigious, and they certainly weren’t what she’d set out to do, but not once in all of those years had she been anything but professional. Distanced. Untouchable.
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