Crossed Hearts (Matchmaker Trilogy)

by Barbara Delinsky

  “You hated the new Ludlum book that I loved.”

  “But we both agreed that Le Carré’s was great.”

  “You hated the curried chicken we had the other night.”

  “Because I added too much curry. And don’t say you didn’t find it hot, because I saw you gulping down water.”

  “You hated the roadrunner I folded for you.”

  “I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t know what it was.” He closed his fingers on a handful of her bottom and gritted his teeth in a pretense of anger. “Leah, I want to listen to music. Will you unplug the headset and let me hear?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Inwardly pleased, she removed the plug to the earphones. As the gentle sounds of guitar and vocalist filled the room, she sat back and watched Garrick’s face.

  He was smiling softly. “Cat Stevens. This is an old one.”

  “Seventy-four.”

  Sinking lower in the sofa, he stretched out his legs before him and listened quietly. He wore an increasingly pensive look, one that seemed to fade in and out, to travel great distances, return, then leave again. Leah knew the songs brought back memories, and when the tape was done, she would have been more than happy to put the machine away.

  But he asked her to put on another tape. Again he recognized the song and its artists. “Simon and Garfunkel,” he murmured shortly after the first bars had been sung.

  “Do you like it?”

  He listened a while longer before answering. “I like it. I’ve never paid much heed to the words before. I always associated songs like this with background music in restaurants.”

  “Where?” she asked, surprised at how easily the question came out.

  “L.A.,” he answered, surprised at the ease of his answer. It was time, he realized.

  “Were you working there?”

  “Yes.”

  “For long?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  Leah said nothing more, but watched him steadily. When he swiveled his head to look at her, her heart began to thud. His eyes were dark, simultaneously sad, challenging and beseechful.

  “I was an actor.”

  She was sure she’d heard him wrong. “Excuse me?”

  “I was an actor.”

  She swallowed hard. “An actor.”

  “Yes.” His eyes never left hers.

  “Movies?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Television.”

  “I … your name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I used a stage name.”

  An actor? Garrick, the man she loved for his private lifestyle, an actor? Surely just occasionally. Perhaps as an extra. “Were you on often?”

  “Every week for nine years. Less often before and after.”

  She swallowed again and twined her arms around her middle as though to catch her plummeting heart. “You had a major part.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “You know it. It’s the one I was christened with.”

  “Your stage name.”

  “Greg Reynolds.”

  Leah paled. There wasn’t a sound in the cabin; she felt more than heard her bubble of happiness pop. She’d never been a television fan, but she did have eyes. Even had she not had an excellent memory, she’d have been hard-pressed not to recall the name. It had often been splashed across the headlines of tabloids and magazines, glaring up from the stand at the grocery store checkout counter, impossible to miss even in passing.

  “It can’t be,” she said, shaking her head.

  “It is.”

  “I don’t recognize you.”

  “You said you didn’t watch television.”

  “I saw headlines. There must have been pictures.”

  “I look different now.”

  She tried to analyze his features, but they seemed to waver. There was the Garrick she knew and … and then the other man. A stranger. Known to the rest of the world, not to her. She loved Garrick. Or was he … “You should have told me sooner.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “But … Greg Reynolds?” she cried in horror. “You’re a star!”

  “Was, Leah. Was a star.”

  She lowered her head and rubbed her forehead, trying to think, finding it difficult. “The show was …”

  “Pagen’s Law. Cops and robbers. Macho stuff—”

  “That millions of people watched every week.” She withered back into her corner of the sofa and murmured dumbly, “An actor. A successful actor.”

  Garrick was before her in an instant, prying her hands from her waist and enveloping them in his. “I was an actor, but that’s all over. Now I’m Garrick Rodenhiser—trapper, Latin student, whittler, model maker—the man you love.”

  She raised stricken eyes to his. “I can’t love an actor. I can’t survive in the limelight.”

  He tightened his hold on her hands. “Neither can I, Leah. Greg Reynolds is dead. He doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why I’m here. Me. Garrick. This is my life—what you see, what you’ve seen since you’ve been here.”

  If anything, she sank deeper into herself. She said nothing, looked blankly to the floor.

  “No!” he ordered, lifting her chin with one hand. “I won’t let you retreat back into that shell of yours. Talk to me, Leah. Tell me what you’re thinking and feeling.”

  “You were a phenomenal success,” she breathed brokenly. “A superstar.”

  “Was. It’s over!”

  “It can’t be!” she cried. “You can’t stay away from it forever. They won’t let you!”

  “They don’t want me, and even if they did, they don’t have any say. It’s my choice.”

  “But you’ll want to go back—”

  “No! It’s over, Leah! I will not go back!”

  The force of his words startled her, breaking into the momentum of her argument. Her eyes were large gray orbs of anguish behind the lenses of her glasses, but they held an inkling of uncertainty.

  “I won’t go back,” Garrick said more quietly. His hand gentled on her chin, stroking it lightly. “I blew it, Leah. I can’t go back.”

  The anguish wasn’t hers alone. She saw in his eyes the pain she’d glimpsed before. It reached out to her, as it had always done, only now she had to ask, “What happened?”

  For Garrick, this was the hard part. It was one thing telling her he’d been a success, another telling her how he’d taken success, twisted it, spoiled it, lost it. But he’d come this far. He owed it to Leah—and to himself—to tell it all.

  Backing away from her, he stood and crossed stiffly to the window. The sun was shining, but the bleakness inside him blotted out any cheer that might have offered. Tucking his hands into the back of his waistband, he began to speak.

  “I went out to the coast soon after I graduated from high school. It seemed the most obvious thing to do at the time. The one thing I wanted more than anything was to be noticed. I think you know why,” he added more softly, but refrained from going into further self-analysis. “I had the goods. I was tall and attractive. I had the smarts that some others out there didn’t have, and the determination. I just hung around for a while, getting a feel for the place, watching everything, learning who held the power and how to go about tapping it. Then I went to work. First, I talked a top agent into taking me on, then I willingly did whatever he asked me to do. Most of it was garbage—bit parts—but I did them well, and I made sure I was seen by the right people.

  “By the time I’d been there three years, I was consistently landing reasonable secondary roles. But I wanted top billing. So I worked harder. I learned pretty quick that it wasn’t only how you looked or acted that counted. Politics counted, too. Dirty politics. And I played the game better than the next guy. I kissed ass when I had to, slept around when I had to. I rationalized it all by saying that it was a means to an end, and I suppose it was.

  “Five years after I arrived, I was picked to play P
agen.” He lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Don’t ask me why the show took off the way it did. Looking back on it, I can’t see that it was spectacular. But it hit a vein with the public, and that meant money for the sponsors, the network, the producers, the directors and me. So we kept going and going, and in time I believed my own press. I convinced myself that the show was phenomenal and that it was phenomenal because of me.”

  He hung his head and took a shuddering breath. “That was my first mistake. No, I take that back. My first mistake was in ever going to Hollywood, because it wasn’t my kind of place at all. Oh, I told myself it was, and that was my second mistake. My third mistake was in believing that I’d earned and deserved the success. After that the mistakes piled up, one after another, until I was so mired I didn’t know which side was up.”

  He paused for a minute and risked a glance over his shoulder. Leah was in the corner of the sofa, her knees drawn up, her arms hugging her body. Her face seemed frozen in a stricken expression. He wanted to go down on his knees before her and beg forgiveness for who he’d been, but he knew that there was more he had to say first.

  He turned to face her fully, but he didn’t move from the window. “The show ran for nine years, and during that time I flared progressively out of control. I grew more and more arrogant, more difficult to deal with.” His tone grew derisive. “I was the star, better than any of the others. I was the hottest thing to hit Hollywood in decades. What I touched turned to gold. My name alone could make the show—any show—a success.

  “And there were other shows. After five years in the top ten with Pagen, I started making movies during the series filming break. I fought it at first. I didn’t know why at the time. Now I realize that something inside me was telling me that it was too much, that I needed a break from the rat race for a couple of months a year. That I needed to touch base for a short time with who I really was. But then I got greedy. I wanted to be more famous, and more famous. I wanted to become an indelible fixture in the entertainment world. I wanted to be a legend.”

  He sighed and bent his head, rubbing his neck with harsh fingers in an anger directed at himself. “I was running scared. That’s really what it was all about. I was terrified that if I didn’t grab it all while I had the chance, someone would come along and take it from me. But I wasn’t all that good. Oh, I was Pagen, all right. I could play that part because it didn’t take a hell of a lot of acting. Some of the other stuff—the movies—did, and I couldn’t cut the mustard. None of them were box office hits, and that made me more nervous. Only instead of being sensible, taking stock and plotting a viable future for myself, I fought it. I berated the critics in public. I announced that the taste of the average moviegoer sucked. I got worse and worse on the set.”

  He looked at her then. “I was paranoid. I became convinced that everyone was waiting for me to fail, that they were stalking me, waiting to pounce and pick the flesh from my bones. I was miserable, so I began to drink. When that didn’t help, I snorted coke, took whatever drugs I could get my hands on—anything that would blot out the unhappiness. All I succeeded in blotting out was reality, and in the entertainment world, reality means extraordinary highs and excruciating lows.”

  Taking a shuddering breath, he sighed. “Pagen’s Law was canceled after a nine-year run, mostly because I’d become so erratic. The producers couldn’t find directors willing to deal with me. They even had trouble gathering crews, because I was so impatient and demanding and critical that it just wasn’t worth it. More often than not I’d show up on the set drunk or hung over, or I’d be so high on something else that I couldn’t focus on the script. When that happened, I’d blame everyone in sight.”

  Very slowly he began to walk toward the sofa. His hands hung by his sides and his broad shoulders were slumped, but the desolation he felt was such that he simply needed to be near Leah. “It was downhill all the way from there. There were small parts after the series ended, but they came fewer and farther between. No one wanted to work with me, and I can’t blame them. New shows took over where Pagen left off. New stars. The king was dead. Long live the king.”

  Very carefully he lowered himself to the sofa. His hands fell open, palms up in defeat, perhaps supplication, on his thighs. “In the end, I had no friends, no work. I was a pariah, and I had no one to blame but myself.” He looked down at his hands and pushed his lips out. “I’d gotten so obsessed with the idea of being a star that I couldn’t see any future if I didn’t have that. So one day when I was totally stoned, I took my Ferrari and drove madly through the hills. I lost control on a turn and went over an embankment. The last thing I remember thinking was thank God it’s over.”

  Leah’s sharp intake of breath brought his gaze to hers. Her hands were pressed to her lips and her eyes were brimming with tears. He started to reach out, then drew back his hand. He needed to touch her, but he didn’t know if he had the right. He was feeling as low, as worthless, as he’d felt when he’d awoken in that hospital after the accident.

  “But it wasn’t over,” he said brokenly. “For some reason, I was spared. The doctors said that if I hadn’t been so out of it, I’d have been more seriously hurt. I was loose as a goose when I was thrown from the car and ended up with only contusions and a couple of broken bones.” His expression grew tight. “Someone had sent me a message, Leah. Someone was telling me that I hadn’t spent thirty-six years of my life preparing for suicide, that there was more to me than that. I didn’t hear it at first, because I was so wrapped up in self-pity that I couldn’t think beyond it. But I had plenty of time. Weeks lying in that hospital bed. And eventually I came to accept what that someone was saying.”

  His voice lowered and his gaze softened on hers. “As soon as I could drive, I left L.A. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I needed to get as far away from that world as possible. I kept driving, knowing that when I hit a comfortable place, I’d feel it. By the time I hit New Hampshire, I’d just about reached the end of the line.

  “Then I saw this place. Victoria’s husband had owned it—he used it for hunting parties—and Victoria kept it for a while after his death. Shortly before I came, she put it on the market through a local broker. From the first it appealed to me, so I bought it.” He looked away. “It’s odd how ignorant you can be of your own actions sometimes. Through all those years of success—of excess—the one thing I did right was to hire a financial adviser. He managed to invest the money I didn’t squander, and he invested it wisely. I can live more than comfortably on the income from those investments without ever having to touch the capital.”

  He reached the end of his story, at least as far as the past was concerned. “I’ve made a life for myself here, Leah. I’ve been clean for four years. I don’t touch alcohol or drugs, and I’ve sworn off indiscriminate sex.” He looked at his hands, rubbed one set of long fingers with the other. “That other life wasn’t me. If it had been, I wouldn’t have botched it so badly. This is the kind of life I feel comfortable with. I can’t—I won’t—go back to the other.”

  Hesitantly his eyes met hers. “You’re right. I should have told you all this sooner. But I couldn’t. I was afraid. I still am.

  Leah’s cheeks were wet with tears, and her hands remained pressed to her lips. “So am I,” she whispered against them.

  Garrick did touch her then, almost timidly cupping her head. “You don’t have to be afraid. Not of me. You know me better than any other person ever has.”

  “But that other man—”

  “Doesn’t exist. He never really did. He was a phony, an image, like everything else in Hollywood. An image with no foundation, so it was inevitable that it collapse. I don’t want that kind of life anymore. You have to believe that, Leah. The only life I want is what I have here, what we’ve had here for the past two weeks. It’s real. It’s totally fulfilling—”

  “But what about the need for public recognition? Doesn’t that get in your blood?”

  “It got in mine and
nearly killed me. It was like a disease. And the cure was almost lethal, but it worked.” He took a quick breath. “Don’t let the mistakes I’ve made in the past turn you off. I’ve learned from them. Dear God, I’ve learned.”

  Leah wanted to believe everything he said. She wanted to believe it so badly that she began to shake, and her hands shot out to clutch his shoulders. “Greg Reynolds wouldn’t be attracted to me—”

  “Garrick Rodenhiser is.”

  “I’d be nothing in Greg Reynolds’ world.”

  “You’re everything in mine.”

  “I couldn’t play games like that. I couldn’t even play them for Richard.”

  “I don’t want games. I want life. This life. And you.”

  Unable to remain apart from her a minute longer, he captured her mouth in a kiss that went beyond words in expressing his need. It was possessive and desperate and demanding, but Leah’s was no less so.

  “Don’t ever be that other man,” she begged against his mouth. “I think I’d want to die if you were.”

  “I won’t, I won’t,” he murmured, then, while his hands held her head, took her mouth again and devoured it with a passion born of the love he felt. His lips opened wide, slanted and sucked, and he was breathing hard when he released her. “Let me love you,” he whispered hoarsely, fingers working on the buttons of her shirt. “Let me give you everything I have … everything I’ve saved for you … everything that’s come alive since you came into my life.” Her shirt was open and his hands were greedily covering her breasts. “You’re so good. All I’ve ever wanted.”

  Leah gave an urgent little cry and began to tug at his sweater. This was the Garrick she knew, the one who turned her on as no man ever had, the one who thought her beautiful and smart, the one who loved her. She felt as though she’d traveled from one end of the galaxy to the other since Garrick had begun his story. On a distant planet was the actor, but on progressively nearer ones was the man who’d suffered fear, then disillusionment, then pain. Even closer was the man who’d hit rock bottom and had begun to build himself up again. And here, with her, was the one who’d made it.