She Went All the Way

by Meg Cabot

  But for some reason, out in the Alaskan wilderness, with a goose egg on her head and the wind making her color high, Lou Calabrese looked hotter than she had in a sleeveless evening gown. Maybe it was because, he realized, this was the first time he was seeing her without Barry Kimmel hanging all over her. That guy really annoyed him, and had done so long before he’d run off with Greta. Maybe it had been that bit part he’d done on “STAT,” way back before either of them had gotten famous. Barry—or Bruno, as Jack supposed he was now calling himself—had kept coming around his dressing room, asking Jack if he’d known where was a good place to score some chicks. Chicks, for God’s sake. Jack had done his best to blow the guy off.

  And now it turns out he’d had this chick here waiting for him at home the whole time. Jack really did hate his profession sometimes. Oh, he loved to act. But he really despised his fellow actors.

  “Just remember,” Lou was saying. “In the future, tinder. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Is there a movie,” Jack wanted to know, “that you haven’t seen?”

  “No,” came her reply, which was accompanied by a sweet smile that completely disarmed him for a moment, until other words came along with it. “Unlike some people,” she said, “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, so I had to entertain myself the way the common folk do.”

  “Gosh,” Jack said. “Is that a jibe at my supposedly overprivileged upbringing?”

  “There’s nothing supposedly about it,” she said. “You’re a Townsend. I think we all know what that means.” She glanced at the unconscious man beside whom she’d insisted upon building the fire. “Except possibly Sam here. I doubt he reads the society page all that much.”

  “Or maybe he does,” Jack said thoughtfully. Lou’s fire had begun to crackle merrily, but its battle against the wind and snow, which was growing ever thicker, looked as if it might be a losing one. “Maybe that’s why…you know.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “What, you think Paris Hilton is jealous?” she wanted to know. “You’re stealing all her limelight, or something? So she hired Sam here to off the competition?”

  “It’s as good a theory as any, at this point,” Jack said. “This might come as a shock to you, but there really aren’t that many people out there who’ve expressed a desire to kill me.”

  “Really,” Lou said, clearly unconvinced.

  “I’m serious. There are very few people I don’t get along with. I’m an immensely charming guy.”

  “Except to screenwriters,” she pointed out.

  “Except to some screenwriters.”

  “Hey,” she said, brightening. “Maybe the Screenwriters’ Guild got together, took up a collection, and paid Sam here to off actors like you who go around changing our lines. It’d be nice to think my dues were going towards a worthy cause.”

  He glared at her. “Look. It’s always funny until someone gets hurt is not something I feel that my character—”

  “Your character?” She hooted. “Excuse me. He’s my character. I made him up. I think I would know what he would say and what he wouldn’t say. And one thing he’d never say is I need a bigger—”

  Jack held up a hand, but not for the reason she evidently thought, to shut her up. No, he held up a hand because…

  “Do you hear something?” he asked.

  She fell silent. It was growing darker and darker on the deep hillside. The sun, which had never really put in an appearance all day, seemed to be giving up. Still, there was enough light for him to see all the bright white flakes of snow in her thick red curls. The tip of her nose was bright pink, and there were matching splotches of pink on either cheek. Her lips, which had lost any trace of makeup long ago, were cherry red, and, he couldn’t help noticing, enticingly moist.

  Too bad what kept coming out between them wasn’t half so appealing.

  “That is so like you, Townsend,” she complained. “Start an argument and then pretend like you heard something so the other person has to shut up and you automatically win—”

  “Seriously,” he said. “I thought I heard an engine.”

  Immediately, she looked up towards the sky.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she said. “What were they waiting for, an engraved invitation?”

  But as seconds passed, and the two of them strained their ears, it became apparent that whatever Jack had heard, it wasn’t a plane.

  “Are you sure R-44’s even have a tracer beacon?” she asked, after a little while.

  Still scanning the snowy sky, he shrugged. “How would I know?”

  She gave a little hiccup of outrage. It was, he thought, kind of cute. Or would have been, if it hadn’t been coming out of her.

  “You don’t know?” she practically screamed. “Didn’t you say you flew your own R-44 in Spy Time?”

  “That,” Jack said, uncomfortably, “was a bit of an exaggeration.”

  “Oh, I’ll say it was.” She snorted. “As is the idea that Spy Time ever grossed sixty-five million domestic. Puh-lease.”

  “Maybe,” Jack said, “I meant total.”

  “In Jeff Berger’s dreams,” she said. “He hasn’t had a hit since Baby Trouble, and that was ten years ago.”

  If there was one thing Jack couldn’t stand, it was exactly this. That was why he’d bought the ranch in Salinas. Still within a commutable distance of LA—well, by jet— but far enough away that he almost never had to have conversations with people about points and gross net deficits (except, occasionally, with his agent) the ranch was more of a retreat than it was merely a home. The ranch, in a way, was how he stayed sane in a world of cocktail parties, four-hundred-dollar lunches, and “Entertainment Tonight.”

  Still, this, he thought, was better than the alternative. Which was Lou using her overactive writer’s imagination to picture what was going to happen after the light faded completely and the wolves came out.

  “Not too fond of Jeff, are you?” he said, because the wind was rising and her fire was going out and the man who’d tried to kill them lay half-dead in front of them and they were trapped together in the middle of nowhere for who knew how long, and he wanted to keep her mind off what he was thinking, which was that in the morning, their bodies were going to be found, frozen together like a couple of fruit pops.

  “Why should I be fond of Jeff?” Lou wanted to know.

  There was no reason, of course, for anyone to be fond of Jeff Berger. He was a fairly typical example of a Hollywood B movie director, without scruples or tact, whose taste in jokes ran towards the execrable. Jack had only taken the part in Spy Time to pay his rent, which, in the days after he’d run away from home, and before he’d joined the cast of “STAT,” had been a source of constant worry, since he could not—would not—ask his father, who disapproved of his only child’s career choice, for a loan.

  But there were better reasons to hate Jeff Berger than his raunchy taste in jokes. He had, for instance, a set of roving hands. He could not seem to direct a film without being slapped with a sexual harassment suit afterwards.

  “He make a pass at you?” Jack asked, because he could

  see her being Jeff’s type, in that she was young and female. Oh, and attractive, of course. “Duh,” she said, scornfully. “But way worse, he rejected Hindenburg. I mean, I admit, he’d have been all wrong for it, but that he had the gall to reject it?” She shook her head. “He called it puerile. The man who directed Frat Party USA called Hindenburg puerile. And while I certainly don’t consider Hindenburg a cinematic classic, it wasn’t puerile.”

  They were not sitting closely enough together that their shoulders touched. If they had been, and she’d been crying—the way any other woman properly would have been, under the circumstances, instead of sitting there castigating him for never having seen Cast Away or The Breakfast Club—he would have put his arm around her, in the hopes of comforting her.

  And, being that she was more than passably attractive— when she wasn�
��t scowling—and that he was, well, who he was, chances were they might have found a more agreeable way to pass the hours before they were rescued than sitting there bickering like a couple of kids.

  But she wasn’t crying, and his arm wasn’t around her. Still, though they weren’t touching, he felt her tense beside him.

  And then, a second later, she was on her feet and screaming like a banshee. A pretty banshee, but a banshee all the same.

  “Over here,” she was screaming, as she ran through the snow, waving her arms wildly. “We’re over here!”

  That was when he heard it. The same sound he’d heard before, only closer this time, and more distinguishable. An engine. Not a plane engine, or even a helicopter, but an engine of some kind, and heading towards them.

  Then he saw it, a bright spot weaving through the trees towards them. A snowmobile.

  They were rescued.

  “Hey!” Jack sprang to his feet, spraying enough snow as he did so that Lou’s pitiful little fire immediately went out. But that didn’t matter, he told himself. Because they were rescued. At last, they were rescued, and soon he’d be back in his warm suite at the hotel….

  With Melanie yelling at him some more, and maybe even throwing things. And who knew? Perhaps this time she might set flame to more than just a love seat.

  It didn’t matter. Because if there was anything good that could come out of almost getting killed, it was that suddenly, one’s priorities became very, very clear. And Jack’s main priority, he realized, was to get rid of everything in his life that was remotely connected to Hollywood.

  It was irksome that this, of course, was exactly what his father had warned him about, all those years ago—that Jack would eventually get tired of playing let’s pretend all day, and end up wishing he had a “real” job. Jack had refused to listen at the time—had defied his father by dropping out of Yale and moving out to LA to prove him wrong—but now he was starting to wonder if his love for acting hadn’t stemmed so much from true love for the craft as from a desire to escape the destiny his father had planned out for him—assistant VP, then VP, then president, and then eventually CEO of Townsend Securities. Sure, he’d been successful—meteorically successful—at his chosen profession.

  But it wasn’t a challenge anymore. As far as he was concerned, the studio could wave goodbye to Jack Townsend. Jack was chucking it all in. Enough was enough, already.

  “Hey!” he called, running after Lou in the snow. Fortunately he had on his waterproof cowboy boots…not ideal for traversing wintry terrain, but hey, how was he supposed to have known he’d be slogging down a mountainside?

  The snowmobiler, coming up the steep slope towards them, did not appear to be a state employee, if his bright yellow-and-red parka was any indication. Just some random Alaskan, out for a spin. Or maybe he’d seen the smoke from the smoldering helicopter and had driven up the mountain to check it out.

  Whatever the case, he was fast approaching them. They were rescued. Soon Jack would be back at the hotel, where the first thing he’d do was check anonymously into a new room, as far away as possible from Melanie. The second thing he’d do was call the police. Because, after all, somebody had tried to kill him.

  And then? Well, he wasn’t sure. But he had a strange, nagging feeling that Lou Calabrese was going to be involved, somehow.

  Which was ridiculous, because she really, really wasn’t his type. For one thing, she, unlike almost every other woman he’d encountered since entering puberty, seemed completely immune to what he knew, without being conceited, were his exceptional good looks. Hey, a guy could not get voted one of People magazine’s Fifty Most Beautiful People ten years in a row and not come away with the knowledge that women found him appealing.

  All except Lou Calabrese, who apparently found him about as appealing as week-old string cheese.

  And while he didn’t think his work on “STAT,” or the dozen or so movies he had made, really qualified him as a swell person or anything, he was, not to put it too bluntly, one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. And there was a reason for that, and it didn’t, as Lou Calabrese clearly thought, have anything to do with how he looked: he was simply a damned good actor.

  But even though women all over America seemed to realize this, and hordes of them, like Marie back at the airport coffee shop, were prepared to swoon over his crumpled beverage containers, the fact that one seemed not in the least impressed by him—seemed, in fact, actively to dislike him—weighed more heavily on his mind than he knew it should. Especially considering the fact that he currently had way bigger problems, such as how he was going to finish this film with his co-star so assiduously hating his guts, and how he was going to get out of these woods before succumbing to hypothermia, and, oh, yeah, why someone was trying to kill him. All these things were much more important than the fact that Lou Calabrese didn’t like him.

  Although telling himself this didn’t do the least bit of good. Nor did reminding himself that Lou Calabrese was a bit weird, with her obsession for movie lore and that stupid laptop, that even now was banging against her hip as she ran. Weird or not, she still had all that gorgeous red hair, and those dark eyes that were almost hypnotically beautiful—even when they were filled with derision for him. But derision was better than what he saw in the eyes of most of the people who looked at him, which was cartoon dollar signs…

  But there really was no getting around the weird part. Especially when, as suddenly as she’d started to run, Lou jerked to a halt, freezing in her tracks like the jackrabbits back at his ranch when he happened to come across them.

  Jack barreled into her, of course. She fell forward, into the snow, with an “Oof.” He scrambled to help her back to her feet and took an undue amount of pleasure in the fact that her parka had hiked up above her hips, so that he had an unimpeded view of her backside. He was gratified to note that he’d been right about those wool pants: they hid an ass any body double back in LA would be glad to claim as her own.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack wanted to know, as Lou, trying to catch her breath, leaned forward, with her hands on her knees. “Why’d you stop?”

  “Something….” she panted, peering through the treesas the snowmobiler continued to speed towards them. “Not…right….”

  He looked. The snowmobiler was doing something strange as he came hurtling towards them…reaching behind his back, seeming to struggle with something fastened back there.

  “It’s just a walkie-talkie,” Jack said, not breathing too easily himself. Even for a guy who’d been training for a couple of hours a day to stay in shape for his nude scenes, it was no joke, running at full tilt through two feet of snow, even downhill. “He’s going to radio for—”

  But when, a second later, an explosion ripped through the quiet woods—and it wasn’t the helicopter blowing up, either—Jack realized that what the snowmobiler had been reaching for hadn’t been a walkie-talkie at all. No, what it was, he saw, in growing horror, was a—

  “Run!” Lou yelled, grabbing his arm.

  He needed no further urging. Spinning around, he began careening down the mountainside, Lou slipping and sliding along beside him. Another explosion sounded, and this time, the branches on a nearby tree flew off, sending tiny shards of wood and snow raining down upon them.

  They were being shot at. And from the looks of the damage to that tree, by a sawed-off shotgun.

  “Here!” Suddenly, Lou was pulling him down behind something, another tree, only this one seemed to have fallen some time ago. It was covered with snow. Not, Jack thought, a very good place to hide. Couldn’t a blast from a shotgun penetrate a hollow log like this one?

  But hiding did not appear to be Lou’s plan.

  “Sam’s gun,” Lou yelled. There was no chance of their voices being overheard above the whine of the snowmobile…not to mention the crack of the shotgun. She gripped the collar of his jacket. “Do you still have it?”

  Wordlessly, Jack drew out the revolver Sam had be
en waving in his face. He’d rescued it, and not the flare gun, from the burning helicopter, because he’d been certain they’d be found without the help of the flare gun, and Sam’s revolver, he’d felt, was vital evidence in the attempt that had been made on his life. Jack didn’t know all that much about guns. Except for the time he’d gone on a ride along with some LAPD beat cops, to get a feel for real-life police work for the first Copkiller, he had never even held a handgun loaded with anything but blanks.

  But Lou apparently knew a thing or two about firearms, since a second later she’d stripped off her gloves and was clutching the revolver in both hands, resting the sides of her palms on top of the log, and lining up her target with only her left eye open. Her right was squeezed shut tight, not a particularly reassuring sight.

  “A little closer,” she said. He noticed, even more disconcertingly, that both her voice and her fingers were trembling uncontrollably. “A little closer….”

  Crack! The shotgun went off, showering them with pieces of the bark. Then, even as Jack was ducking, he heard the steady pop…pop…pop of Sam’s revolver, a controlled staccato so close to his ears that when they stopped, he could hear nothing else at all.

  But he could still see. And what he saw were a pair of long black blades, coming straight at them. He grabbed Lou by the hood of her parka and pulled her down, just as the snowmobile went sailing over them, its sleek under belly bearing scuff marks, and the body of the driver slumped lifelessly over the controls, his features hidden behind snow goggles over a bright red face mask.

  And then, a few seconds later, another explosion, this one much louder than any of the shotgun blasts. Jack instinctively flung himself across Lou, shielding her from the sudden rain of debris that fell, like tiny missiles, all around them. The pieces that landed on the ground were immediately extinguished, leaving hissing, smoking craters in the snow. Other pieces bounced harmlessly off Jack’s leather coat.