by Scott, Inara
Rex had been abandoned and looked fierce enough to deter most families from considering him—certainly anyone with small children. But the SPCA volunteers had assured her that he was not nearly as aggressive as he appeared. They speculated that Rex had been abandoned because he was too nice.
“You could have bitten Ryker,” she said. “That would have been fine with me.”
She was the one who deserved the bite. For a second, she had actually contemplated letting him kiss her.
Groaning, she stood and extracted her cell from the pocket of her raincoat before pulling it off. She punched a familiar number into the phone and waited.
“Alix?”
“Gunther, you bastard, what were you thinking?”
He laughed. “I was thinking that I want the Oscar this time. Ryker needs a little help, and I can’t think of anyone better for the job.”
“I hate LA. I told you I never wanted to live there again,” she said flatly.
“I know you say you don’t like LA, but be serious. Everyone likes LA. It’s simply absurd to pretend otherwise.”
Gunther Hartcourt had come to America when he was in his forties, a restless millionaire who owned three newspapers, a fashion magazine, and a designer clothing line. He also dabbled in hundreds of other small, artistic ventures, including funding a number of art galleries. He lived in New York for several years, working in theater and photography, but at the same time, he became fascinated by Hollywood and its unique mix of art, money, and politics. His uncanny sense of style, not to mention a driving ambition to bring the stories he loved to life, led him to try his hand at producing, which he found to be a perfect match for his ability to adapt his personality to his audience. Directors found him charismatic and determined. Studio executives called him shrewd and calculating. Agents and actors found him charming to a fault.
To Alix, he was simply the closest thing to a father she’d ever known.
“And I don’t want to make more movies.” She put her hand over her eyes. Lame. She already sounded lame, and they’d just begun to fight.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said. “You’ve been telling me that for years. It’s a terrible waste of an extraordinary talent, but I’ve accepted there’s nothing I can do about it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work on a little movie, does it?”
Alix heaved herself off the couch and walked to the kitchen table, where she began absently flipping through the closest stack of pictures. “I need to finish my book, Gunther. I need time, uninterrupted time to pull everything together. I’m close now. Really close. Maybe just one or two more couples and I’m there. I can’t go running off right when I’m so close to the end.”
His voice was patient, long-suffering. “Alix, let’s have a little reality check, all right? You’ve been working on that book for three years. You’ve got thousands of photographs and have done sessions with at least twenty couples. You’ve been telling me that you need one more session for almost a year now.”
Alix set down the pictures and closed her eyes as she dragged the elastic from her hair. She tried not to focus directly on his words as she shook her head and redid her loose ponytail. “But this time it’s true.”
“You’re on the verge of bankruptcy. You can’t keep taking pictures and spending money on a darkroom without bringing anything in. You’ve said you won’t accept a gift from me, let alone another loan. So this isn’t rocket science. Take the job, liebling. You need the money, and you need to get out of that house.”
Her heart sank. “Is this a pity job, Gunther? If it is, I’m not interested.”
He sighed. “Unfortunately, no. I like Ryker a lot. He’s a good man, and over the past couple of years, he’s become a friend as well. But when it comes to women, he’s a cold bastard. You saw Garden of Eden, didn’t you? Tell the truth now; I won’t let it go to his head.”
“Of course I did,” she snapped.
“And?”
“He looked like he was having sex with a stranger.”
“Exactly my point. He thinks love is a fantasy someone dreamed up to sell greeting cards. He’s a damn fine director, and most of the film is beautifully shot, but the love scenes…well, they’re terrible. None of the emotion I want to see is there. You, on the other hand, make sex look like a ballet. Women wept when they saw Through the Window. I want them to feel that way about Salva’s Revenge. I want the members of the Academy to feel that way. I want my Oscar.”
“I’ve never consulted on a movie before. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“It’s simple. You’ll give him your opinion, and he’ll take it because he’ll realize you’re right. He’s a smart man, and he wants that Oscar almost as much as I do. You may be hopeless with men, but you’ve never been a wallflower when it comes to your movies.”
“I’m not hopeless with men,” she muttered. “I just don’t like dating them.”
“Some people might argue that dating is an essential prerequisite to a relationship.”
“Some might argue that men in LA don’t do relationships, so what’s the point of dating?”
“You haven’t lived in LA for three years,” he reminded her. “And you moved from LA to a god-forsaken town with exactly two eligible bachelors, both of whom you have soundly rejected. Some might argue—”
“He told me it would only take a month,” she interrupted, to stem the fruitless argument. “I don’t want to be gone longer than a month.”
“Fine, set whatever limits you want. But come to LA. Bring your puppy with you if you must, but get out of that house. Even if you didn’t need the money, Alix, I’d tell you to come. It isn’t healthy for you to lock yourself away from people. I know you like to think you’re a tortured artist who needs her privacy, but darling, you need to get out.”
“I do get out,” she protested. “I came to visit you at Christmas.”
“Yes, and that was six months ago. You never stopped working the whole time you were here, and you only had dinner with me twice. And one of those times was Christmas Eve.”
The conversation was becoming too familiar to continue. “Gunther, I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. Let’s just drop it, okay? I’ll go to LA and help your little movie star, but then I’m coming straight home. I’m finishing the book this year. It’s going to happen.”
“And then what? What’s going to happen when you finish it?”
The question sent a zing right to the pit of her stomach. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go now,” Alix said cheerily. “I’ll give Ryker a call and let him know I’m coming.”
There was a brief pause. “Alix, the book isn’t going to change anything. You know that, don’t you?”
“Great, so I’ll talk to you later. Good-bye!” Alix ended the call and stared at the screen.
Sometimes, she hated the book.
When she’d started it, she and Gunther had both loved the idea: Alix would use her photographs to show how love transformed the act of sex. Gunther thought it would appeal to a broad audience. They could simultaneously attract women, who were looking for love, and men, who were looking for sex. But he thought the project should take only a few months. He thought Alix could interview a few couples, write some cheesy narrative to run under the pictures, and send it to press. He never really understood what she was trying to do.
The book was about real love, not infatuation or attraction. When she was making films, Alix had worked with fantastic actors, people who were professional and, in most cases, genuinely liked each other. They brought emotion and realism to her scenes that was beautiful to watch. But she didn’t want to make stories about fake love. She wanted the real thing.
That was why she was making the book. The couples she’d photographed truly loved each other, and they radiated that feeling throughout their lovemaking. At orgasm, they released themselves in a moment of complete vulnerability. It was beautiful and sensual, and Alix had captured it, over and over.
It was real. It was proof. The book was
almost finished, and when it was, she’d know she had finally done something worthwhile. The only problem was, something was missing. She’d taken hundreds of pictures, but she wasn’t finished. She just didn’t know why.
Alix picked up Ryker’s half-empty cup of iced tea and swirled the amber liquid. What would have happened if she’d let him kiss her? She stamped to the kitchen and dumped the tea into the sink. That was a stupid question. He probably hadn’t even tried to kiss her. She’d probably just imagined the whole thing. And even if he had tried, it was because he thought she was some kind of sex freak because she took pictures of naked men and women.
What a joke.
She pulled open the refrigerator and stared at the empty shelves. It had been a week since she’d been to the grocery store, and she was pining for fresh vegetables and fruit, but she simply didn’t have the money. Not if she was going to make the next payment on the darkroom and buy more film and developing solution and paper…
“All right, fine,” she said, snapping her fingers at Rex. “I’ll go to LA. I’ll make the movie and earn my easy money. But then I’m on the next plane back to Oregon. And after that?” She swallowed hard and tried to ignore the chill that settled over her shoulders. “Well…after that, I finish the book. No matter what.”
Chapter Four
Ryker dropped the paper bag that held his dinner on the coffee table in front of the large, flat-paneled screen that dominated his home office. He slid a DVD labeled Candy Fever into a player and pressed a few buttons on the wall console dotted with blinking green and red lights. Then he sank down into a dark leather couch, remote control in hand.
As the DVD loaded, he poked halfheartedly at a large salad. Realizing he was far more interested in a beer than a pile of greens, he withdrew a bottle from a small fridge beside the wall and took a healthy drink. It had been another lousy day on the set. He wasn’t getting anywhere with his actors. If anything, things were getting worse, and he was barely able to contain his frustration.
It didn’t help that he couldn’t stop thinking about Alix Z. Part of him was still furious that Gunther had demanded her presence on the set. But another part of him couldn’t help but wonder what—if anything—she might be able to offer to the film that seemed to be spiraling into chaos.
Truth be told, he also couldn’t stop wondering about the woman herself. Ever since he’d left Oregon, he kept picturing that moment in her house when the light touched her hair and he’d felt compelled to kiss her. After spending most of his adult life surrounded by gorgeous women, he’d thought himself immune to such impulses. His reaction to her was so unexpected he had taken to examining it as he might an unfamiliar bit of dialog or confusing section of a script. He considered his motivation, the underlying conflict, and that action he was trying to play. Yet after a full week of examination, he still couldn’t quite pin down the precise reason for the attraction.
She was beautiful—or at least her face was—but that couldn’t be it. He’d seen too many other beautiful women to attribute his interest solely to looks. She was refreshingly uninterested in him. That certainly had something to do with it. It had been a long time since he’d had any sort of challenge when it came to a woman, and he’d enjoyed her absolute refusal to show him even a bit of deference. Yet that alone didn’t seem sufficient.
The best excuse he could find was that she was a puzzle. Not many women made their way into directing, and fewer still achieved the level of success Alix Z reached with just a few films. Of course, they weren’t just any films. They were sexy films. Films that took age-old stories and imbued them with a living, breathing sensuality. Films that he’d been watching and rewatching all week. Films that had been made by a woman who lived in total seclusion and managed to hide her beauty behind a pair of big glasses and dreadful clothes.
Who was Alix Z? Sexless recluse or sensual Hollywood powerhouse?
He flipped through a number of scenes in the idle DVD, stopping at one that looked interesting. A woman began to crawl on hands and knees toward a man who lay, outstretched, on a silky red comforter. A lazy smile played around the corners of his mouth, but there was nothing lazy about the way he looked at her, passion oozing from him in visible waves. The camera caught the golden skin of her back and the curve of her naked bottom, lingered on the man’s face and torso, and then flashed to soft white cloths holding his arms to the posts of a four-poster bed. Every shot was perfectly cropped to expose just the right amount of skin to tantalize the viewer but not attract the attention of the rating censor.
“Is this my punishment?” the man on the screen murmured.
The woman laughed. “This is only the beginning.”
The plot of Candy Fever, Alix Z’s first film, was simple. The heroine of the film made expensive chocolates, truffles, and other sugary confections. Her treats were imbued with a sensual magic that could renew old flames or start a new love. Yet she herself lived alone, unable to find a man who could contain her sexual appetites and still satisfy her need for love. She was eventually won over by a quiet neighbor who lived a double life—nerdy software engineer by day and sexual dynamo by night.
It was a trite story, full of clichés, yet there was a powerful, heady sensuality about it, along with a blatant romanticism that pulled in thousands of viewers. The veneer of art-house chic was thin—clearly, it was a fairy tale from beginning to end—but it was a fairy tale with lots of sex. Beautiful sex. Sex shot with a creativity and imagination he’d never seen before.
“Mmmmm.” The man closed his eyes as the woman trailed one hand along his inner thigh. She crawled farther between his legs and then dropped her head in a motion obscured by her long, dark hair.
The man on the screen groaned.
Ryker’s fingers tightened around his beer.
“Do you like that, darling?”
The man nodded, his response garbled. He pulled against the cloths that bound him, but only in a halfhearted way.
Ryker hit Fast Forward. He’d watched this movie once already this week, and the scene he wanted was near the end, where the hero and heroine finally declared their love. When the DVD landed on the same woman and man on a beach, the man removing her bikini top while she reclined on a white blanket, he stopped and hit Play.
The soundtrack played something low and jazzy while the camera moved to her face, her eyes drawing closed as pleasure creased her mouth. The woman tangled her fingers in his hair, moaning softly.
Ryker searched her expression for a hint of what Gunther thought he needed to add to Salva’s Revenge. Yes, she looked aroused, but that wasn’t hard to duplicate. Gunther couldn’t say he didn’t have that. But more than aroused, she looked—he studied her face more closely, trying to determine the exact nature of the emotion he saw there—she looked ecstatic. But to his eyes, it was like watching a cartoon with human actors. It was overdone. Trite. What he was trying to do—keep the emotion real, even in the midst of sex—was far more difficult.
He thought about the critics who had complained that the sex scene in Garden of Eden came across as cold and unfeeling, just because he refused to capitulate to the Hollywood version of romance. Was that really what had kept him from winning the Oscar? If he could give them what Alix Z delivered, would he finally make it to the top?
“You’re so beautiful,” the man on the screen said, lowering his head to the woman’s naked breast. The camera caught his fingers tightening, then relaxing, and then followed as they trailed down a curved waist and across a smooth, flat navel.
Ryker took a long draught of his beer, feeling a tightening in his groin as he watched the screen. An image of the woman who made the film flashed across his mind, with her full lips and guarded green eyes. He wondered idly whether she entertained partners with the same abandon as the woman on the TV. Hard to believe, given what he’d seen, but perhaps that was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was the contradiction she seemed to embody.
“Let me love you, darling. I’ve be
en waiting so long.”
The camera cut from the man’s face, focused and intent, to the woman’s, her mouth a perfect “O” of surprise and pleasure. “Is it true, then? Do you love me?” she asked softly.
Ryker sighed. He simply didn’t understand why people had to take a perfectly good sex scene and muck it up with a lot of fake I love yous, and soulful looks. Yet this was precisely what Gunther wanted him to do—what he insisted was necessary to get into the hearts of his audience.
“Let me show you how much,” the man said, bending over her soft flesh.
An image struck him then, a pair of full lips bending over him, licking and sucking, while green eyes watched from above. He pictured the photograph he’d seen in Alix’s hand and wondered how many couples had she watched. He’d never considered himself a voyeur, but imagining her watching them created a hum of sexual tension that had accompanied him for days now, every time he pictured her, long hair catching fire in the sunlight, her lips pursed.
Watching.
Waiting.
Perhaps pleasuring herself while she watched, her long, slender fingers tangling in her own dark curls.
Ryker shifted in his seat, flicking off the movie as his pants began to grow uncomfortably tight. He couldn’t be truly attracted to her. That would be downright odd. Ryker Valentine didn’t have fantasies about awkward, reclusive filmmakers who wore their jeans too short and their glasses too big. He was frustrated and tired, turned on by a skillful director who evidently knew a thing or two about arousing her audience.
He ran his fingers through his hair and laughed ruefully. Maybe Gunther was right. Maybe he could learn something from Alix Z.
He turned back to the dog-eared script he carried everywhere he went and focused on it while he wolfed down part of his salad. Lately it seemed that Salva’s Revenge was destined for disaster. Just last week he’d realized that some of the film they shot on location had been overexposed. All of the actors’ faces looked pale and lifeless, and he’d have to rework the scene so they could do it again on a sound stage. That would take at least another day or two and who knew how many thousands of additional dollars.
