by Meg Cabot
“Oh, come on, Townsend,” Lou said, not sounding so patient herself. “Nobody sends hired assassins after a perfectly innocent man. You had to have done something. Now what is it? Just tell me, so I can have some idea what we’re up against. Is it drugs?”
Jack sent her the same glare he used to give Meredith, the chief administrator at County General who’d always been urging Dr. Paul Rourke not to be so hot-headed, back on “STAT.” “I don’t do drugs, Lou,” he said laconically.
Lou chewed on her lower lip. She knew that, of course. Besides the fact that Jack had never been in any trouble over that sort of thing, the studio routinely screened their actors now as part of their contractual bargaining.
But you never knew. A small-town girl and a cop’s daughter, Lou had never experimented with illegal substances, and had been shocked upon moving to LA to discover how casually everyone else seemed to. Lou still hadn’t gotten over how many people in the business con tinued to “party,” in spite of the number of their colleagues and peers who’d gone to jail and rehab for doing so, proof that you could take the girl out of the small town, but not the small town out of the girl.
But there’d never been a whisper of Jack Townsend liking a toot now and then. So if it wasn’t a drug debt, what was it that was making so many people want him dead?
Lou glanced at him. “Gambling?”
He grimaced. “Lou. Come on.”
“Well, it has to be something,” Lou cried. “It can’t be a woman. I mean, Greta dumped you. If it were the other way around, I’d say why not? I mean, I could see Greta Woolston hiring a team of commandos to off you, but—”
Her voice trailed off as she caught a glimpse of Jack’s face, right before the flame on Sam’s lighter flickered, and went out.
“Oh…my…God,” she said, slowly. “You mean, there’s someone else?” She couldn’t say how she knew it, but there it was, all over his face. “Already?”
Jack shook his head, almost as if he were shaking off an unpleasant thought. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes, there’s someone else. Well, sort of. But she couldn’t have—”
“Aw, geez, ”Lou said, rolling her eyes in disgust. “What is with you guys, anyway? You can’t stand to be alone in your bed, even for a week? Who is she, Townsend? And I swear to God, if you say Angelina Jolie, I will freaking kill you.”
Jack glared at her. “It’s not Angelina Jolie, all right? And it’s not like that, it was just…I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have let it happen, but it did, and last night, I tried to tell her, and she went a little crazy, and—”
“Last night?” Lou stared. “Last night? You mean at the hotel? But who—” Then her eyes widened. “Melanie? You and Melanie Dupre? Aw, Jack, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Look.” Jack, in the semi-darkness, looked serious. She hadn’t seen him look this serious since—well, since the last time he’d had a gun pointed at his head, which had only been a few hours ago. “It was my fault. I admit it. It started a couple of weeks ago, and it just got out of control. Last night, when we heard the news about Greta and, um, Barry, she got…well, she started talking about how maybe we should do, you know, what they did—elope—and I told her my feelings on the subject of matrimony and she…well, she—”
Lou held up a single hand. “Don’t tell me. I already know. She lit your love seat on fire.”
“Well,” Jack said, sounding relieved that he didn’t have to explain. “It was a couch, really. But—”
“And you think Melanie Dupre,” Lou interrupted, “star of Manhattan Junior High, is the one who hired the A-team out there?” Lou shook her head. “No. I think not.”
Jack, who’d stripped off his gloves for a minute, reached up to rub his face, over which a coarse growth of razor stubble had already sprouted. “No,” he said.“I guess not. Melanie’s not really the shoot-a-guy-and-shove-him-out-of-a-helicopter type of girl. She’s more call-the-Enquirer-and-spill-all type.”
Lou was still shaking her head. “Melanie Dupre,” she said, to herself. “Melanie Dupre.”
“Hey,” Jack said, glaring at her. “You barely even know her. She’s a very warm, kind-hearted individual—”
“Oh, please,” Lou said. “Like you were really interested in her heart. What are you, a cardiologist now? Give me a break. The girl has the intellect of Hines cake frosting, and you know it.”
“Well.” Jack slipped his gloves back on. They were out of the wind, all right, but that didn’t make the temperature any more bearable. “In any case, I guess that rules her out.”
“I’ll say.” Lou had to restrain a laugh. Not that there was anything so amusing about the situation. Here she was stranded, hundreds of miles from nowhere, in the middle of a blizzard, with an actor. And not just any actor, either, but Jack Townsend, the ex of her own ex’s current flame.
But still. Melanie Dupre. Melanie Dupre, who’d been stunned the day her on-set nutritionist revealed that there was actually very little fiber in fruit roll-ups. Even Greta Woolston was sharper than Melanie.
As if he’d read her thoughts, Jack said, suddenly, “Can we possibly talk about something else?”
“Oh.” Lou flattened a hand to her chest and blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry. Have I offended you by suggesting that we discuss the reason someone might be trying to kill you? Gosh, I just can’t apologize enough for being interested in why I am currently on the run for my life!”
Jack stared down at her. In the meager light, he looked handsomer than she’d ever seen him. “Well, you handle yourself pretty well for someone who isn’t accustomed to being shot at. Where’d you learn to fire a gun like that, anyway?”
Lou glared broodily at the floor. “Oh, that,” she said. “My dad taught me.”
“Really?” Jack looked surprised. “Did he hunt?”
“No,” Lou said. “He was a cop with the New York City Police Department for forty years.”
Jack looked interested. Not like he was just being polite, either, but like he really cared. But of course, he was an actor, so it was entirely possible his interest was feigned. “Oh?”
Lou nodded. She didn’t care if he was pretending or not. She always enjoyed talking about her family, because, though the Calabreses irritated her to distraction sometimes, she was proud of every single last one of them.
“When we were little, and my mom got so sick of us hanging around the house she couldn’t stand it anymore,” she explained, “she used to send us all out with Dad to get ice cream. Only instead of ice cream, he’d take us to the shooting range and have us take turns with his service pistol.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up. Way up.
“How paternal of him,” was all he said, however.
Lou shrugged. “It was his way, I guess, of telling us he loved us.”
“Us?” Jack raised his dark eyebrows. “You have siblings?”
“Four older brothers,” Lou said. She waited to see his reaction before she added, “All of them grew up to be cops.”
He didn’t, however, look scared. Instead, he looked impressed.
“And you grew up to be a screenwriter who writes about them. Cops, I mean. When you aren’t writing about exploding blimps, anyway. Your mom and dad must be pretty proud,” he said.
“Well.” Lou was pleased that there wasn’t so much as a hitch in her voice as she replied, “My mom died ten years ago. But yeah, she was proud. Dad, too. Although, you know, we were a handful growing up.”
“I can imagine,” Jack said, mildly. “So now I know where the inspiration for Pete Logan came from.”
She glanced at him darkly. “Yes. He’s sort of a mix of all four of my brothers—”
“Which would be why you don’t appreciate it when I change his lines, huh? ”Jack definitely looked amused now.
“Well,” Lou said, unable to keep a hint of sourness from her tone, “that’s part of it, yeah.”
“Right. The rest of it is just plain artistic vanity,” Jack said.
�
�It is not,” Lou cried defensively. “I just don’t think you have the kind of grasp on the character that—”
“—that you have, I know, I know.” Jack grinned. It was that same sarcastic grin he wore practically every time he spoke, the same one he had on in all the Copkiller posters. Why was he never serious around her? She knew he was capable of seriousness, because she’d seen the art house version of Hamlet he’d done—though nothing short of rescue from this arctic hell would ever induce her to admit she’d bought a ticket to something Jack Townsend had directed and starred in. He’d made a moving Hamlet, a character Lou had always considered something of a sap.
And he hadn’t worn that grin once during the entire film.
“Well,” he said, still grinning. “Now that I know how well you handle a gun, you can be pretty much assured I won’t be ad-libbing anymore—”
She felt a shudder pass through her. She wasn’t cold anymore—at least, not as much as when that icy wind had been ripping through her. No, the shudder wasn’t because she was cold—though of course she was. It was because he’d reminded her of something she’d been trying to put out of her mind. Something she didn’t want to remember, and something she definitely didn’t want to discuss.
And that was the fact that she’d taken a man’s life.
Granted, he’d been trying to kill her. Still, it wasn’t easy, realizing that she was the first person in her family actually to end a life. And she was the only one who wasn’t a member of a law enforcement agency.
“It isn’t funny,” she said, with a sort of hiccupy sob. Where the sob had come from, she didn’t know. But she was glad for it, since it wiped the smirk right off Jack Townsend’s face.
“Hey,” he said, looking alarmed. “Look. I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, didn’t you?” Her voice caught. God, what was happening to her? As a matter of course, Lou tried never to get emotional around the people she worked with. It was hard enough to be a working writer in Hollywood, without throwing the fact that she was a female writer into the mix. The old-boy network was still alive and well in most of the studios Lou’d worked for, and she knew few female movie executives who did not complain of having hit the glass ceiling at some point during their careers. The one thing Lou most dreaded was being accused of being too emotional, too “soft,” to be taken seriously.
And now here she was, practically crying, in front of the one person she most wanted to be taken seriously by….
Her brief hope that he might not have noticed either the catch in her voice or the tears that had sprung suddenly to her eyes was extinguished when he said, in a startled voice, “Hey, Lou. I can understand why you might be upset, but—”
“No, you can’t.” Lou’s voice cracked. Oh, God, why couldn’t she just suck it up, and take it like a man? Why did she have to start crying now, in front of him?
But there was nothing she could do. There was no holding it back. It came flooding from her, like water from a dam, all her pent-up feelings over what had just occurred.
“You can’t possibly know why I’m so upset,” Lou said. She could hear her voice rising, but she didn’t care anymore. “I killed a man today, all right? And I would just like to know why. Why he was trying to kill me. You. Us. Is that so much to ask?”
And suddenly, she was melting, tears streaming from her eyes, making the man before her disappear in a soggy blur.
Great. Just great. Now she was crying—crying—in front of Jack Townsend. So much for not showing weakness in his presence. So much for trying to maintain a dignified and professional appearance. She was bawling her head off, while he just stood there looking down at her, as open-mouthed as if she’d just revealed that in her spare time she liked to watch old reruns of Battlestar Gallactica.
Well, what did she expect? Here was a man who would willingly spend time with Melanie Dupre, who had to be one of the stupidest people on the planet. He couldn’t possibly have the slightest idea how normal women behaved, because he had probably never in his life spent more than five minutes in the company of a normal woman…except maybe to sign autographs for them.
Well, screw him. She wasn’t going to stop crying just to make him feel better, or because it didn’t look very professional of her. Now that she’d got a good healthy head of steam on, she was beginning to feel a lot better. Even the snow coming down in a white sheet just outside the windows seemed less ominous, now that tears were dripping down her face with just as much velocity. The darkness that was fast encroaching what little sky she could see through those dirty panes wasn’t bothering her half so much now that she was snuffling away. She could even hear her father’s voice, in the sound of the wind as it pummeled the four walls around them. Hey, the guy was a mutt, Frank Calabrese was saying. He deserved to get popped. Don’t feel bad, kiddo. In the end, it was you or him, and what, would you rather it’d been you?
Lou was just beginning to think she’d about cried herself out when something completely unexpected happened, something that almost made her choke back her tears altogether.
And that was that Jack Townsend had slipped an arm around her.
10
Well, he’d been expecting them, hadn’t he? Tears. Lou’s tears. He’d even been a little weirded out when they hadn’t come.
He ought to have known it would take more than simply crash-landing in the Alaskan wilderness to bring tears to the eyes of Lou Calabrese. No, it had taken driving a bullet into another man’s skull to bring on the waterworks.
Well, Jack could respect that.
Now at least he knew what to do. It had been a little confusing before. He wasn’t used to women who acted—and talked—like men. Almost all of his relationships with women were flirtatious in nature. Lou Calabrese was just about the only woman he’d ever known—with the exception of his mother, of course—who had always seemed completely oblivious to his, er, charms. Not oblivious to the fact that other women found him attractive, of course. Otherwise, why would she keep writing all those scenes in which Pete Logan was required to drop trou?
But she had never given him any reason to think that she personally found him attractive. In fact, for most of the time he’d known her, she’d been quite openly hostile towards him.
Which was why he had never known quite how to act around her. Jack wasn’t used to being disliked. Oh, sure, there were people in Hollywood with whom he didn’t get along. Jeff Berger, for one, whom Jack had once given a black eye over a disagreement about a scene. And he wasn’t all that fond of Russell Crowe.
But Lou was the only woman in Hollywood with whom Jack had anything like an adversarial relationship.
Which just made the fact that he was currently sitting on a rickety cot in an abandoned forest ranger station with his arm around her all the more bizarre.
“Shhh,” he said, patting her on the shoulder as she cried, because that, he had discovered, tended to have a soothing effect on women. “It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right.”
“No, it’s not,” Lou said, in a tear-choked voice. “Just ask S-Sam.”
“I’m sure Sam’s fine,” Jack said, although he was not sure of any such thing.
“N-No, he’s not.” Lou sniffled. “He’s either still lying out there, with snow piling up on him, or—”
“Or his buddies found him, and got him medical treatment.”
“They didn’t,” Lou sobbed. “They wouldn’t. I’m sure they just left him out there to die.”
Jack was having some trouble summoning up sympathy for Sam Kowalski. He didn’t want to admit to Lou that the only reason he’d dragged the guy from the copter in the first place was so that he could get a good look through his pockets.
Instead, he said, “I bet you’re wrong. I bet Sam’s doing fine. I bet he’s warmer than we are, right now. I bet he’s snug in some hospital bed somewhere, and that they’ve got him pumped full of wonderful, mind-altering painkillers.”
Lou made a snorting sound. He realized that she was
laughing. Just a little. Still, it was a good sign.
He noticed something else, too. He couldn’t help it. And that was the fact that the shoulder he was patting was, beneath the down of the parka Lou wore, a particularly finely sculpted one. He told himself it was just the fact that they were a million miles from nowhere that her hair, softly brushing his face now and then, smelled so good. And it was just the tears that were making her dark eyes seem so large and brilliant, just as they made her lips seem so hypnotically moist and kissable….
At least until Lou, who’d abruptly stopped sobbing the minute his arm had gone around her, looked up at him with those wet, bewitching eyes, and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jack wasn’t used to women questioning him when he made friendly overtures towards them. Keeping his arm where it was, he said, not very lucidly—it was hard to be lucid with her hair giving off such a pleasant odor of orange blossoms—“Me? I’m comforting you.”
“Yeah?” She ducked out from beneath his arm and stood up. “Well, do me a favor,” she said, her voice husky with tears, though she was no longer crying. “Comfort me from a distance.”
“Lou,” he said, reasonably. Or at least he hoped he sounded reasonable. He didn’t actually feel very reasonable. Something about her body, as it had felt pressed up against his side, had unsettled him—more even than the fact that they were stranded in the middle of nowhere with armed snowmobilers chasing them had unsettled him. “Look. It’s okay to be scared. Hell, I’m—”
“I’m fine,” Lou said, in something more like her normal voice. “Okay? It’s all good over here. You just stay over there. Understand?”
He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. Clearly, Lou’s dislike for him far outweighed her fear over their current situation. This was a sobering—and infuriating—thought.
“I’m starving,” Lou announced.
Jack glanced at her. Now that she mentioned it, he realized he was kind of hungry too. Kind of hungry? He was ravenous. He’d had nothing to eat since dinner the night before. And that had only been half a steak and a few fries, since the news of Greta and Barry’s elopement had reached him midmeal, and Melanie had started right in on the theatrics….
