by Tami Hoag
He stopped in the wings, stage left, his booted feet spread slightly. He jammed his big hands at the waist of his well-worn jeans and shook his head as he got his first look at the woman he had come there to find.
Jayne sat atop a rickety-looking scaffolding, her legs twisted into a impossible pretzel design that probably had something to do with yoga or some equally mystical malarkey. She was just as he remembered her: pretty in a way that had nothing to do with cosmetics or fashion. Especially not fashion. Jayne’s outfits would have made any other woman look like a refugee from Goodwill. This morning she wore gray thermal underwear bottoms, a purple T-shirt, and a man’s gray plaid sport coat that swallowed up her petite frame.
Still, she looked damned appealing to Reilly, proving that hers was an inner beauty that was enhanced by delicate features and eyes like huge pools of obsidian. Her hair was spread around her shoulders in a dark auburn cloud that was nearly black in this light and so wild, Reilly would have bet she couldn’t get a comb through it to save her life. But it was soft and silky. He knew because he’d once buried his hands in it. He’d dreamed of it nearly every night since; every night for a year.
“Oooommm … oooommm …” she chanted, her face a study in concentration as Reilly moved closer.
She had a beautifully sculpted mouth. It was wide and expressive with full, ripe lips. Painted a lush shade of mulberry, those lips curved seductively around the O sound she made and closed softly on the M. Reilly’s skin warmed and his mouth went dry as he stared. He could remember exactly the texture and taste of those lips, though he’d sampled them only once, and he had certainly kissed a dozen women since. It was Jayne’s taste that lingered on his tongue, sweet and sad and frightened, full of longing and guilt and loneliness. He had craved that taste as if it had been wine. Its memory had haunted him just as the memory of her sweet Kentucky drawl had haunted him.
Memories of Jayne had haunted him more than memories of Mac had, but the thing that had haunted him most was guilt. Now that he saw her, he was all through feeling guilty.
Dang it all, Jayne grumbled inwardly, this wasn’t working at all. She was supposed to be relaxing and finding inner peace, centering her being with the cosmos, forgetting about Reilly. Ha! If anything, her premonition about him was growing even stronger. Her bracelet was like an anchor fastened around her wrist, heavy with warning. Why, it was as if he were in the same room with her! It was as if those incredible fluorescent blue eyes of his were boring into her, burning away her sense of self.
If he ever did show up, she was going to be in big trouble. She’d known from the first he was more man than she wanted to handle. Reilly radiated an aura of masculinity that was enough to make a woman swoon. It was no wonder he’d rocketed to superstardom despite the awful films he’d made. There was just something about him, an inner power, an animal magnetism so strong, it no doubt made compasses go haywire. The hairs on her arms were standing on end just thinking about it.
“Don’t think about it,” she mumbled, breaking in on one mantra with another. “Don’t think about it.”
Movement. Maybe movement was what she needed to bring her being into proper alignment. She chanted with renewed vigor and volume. She stretched her arms above her head and swung them in a circle, smacking her hand into the side of the bucket full of dirty wash water, knocking it over the edge of the platform she sat on.
The metal bucket managed to hit Reilly a glancing blow off the side of his head before much of the water had sloshed out of it. He dropped to the stage floor like a ton of bricks, his breath leaving him in an unceremonious “Ooof!”
Jayne’s eyes snapped open and rounded like saucers at the sound. She stared in horror at the man sprawled below her, face down in a puddle of water.
“Oh, my Lord!” she exclaimed. She scrambled down from her perch just as Faith and Alaina found their way to the stage from the side door.
“Jayne! What did you do to that poor man?” Faith asked, rushing forward.
“It was an accident!” Jayne wailed. She circled the prone figure warily and nibbled at her thumbnail. “What if I’ve killed him? I was struggling to achieve a sense of spiritual well-being through abstract meditation. It hardly seems right that an innocent bystander should die because of it. Unless, of course, that was his karma,” she added on a hopeful note.
Alaina Montgomery-Harrison blew up into her chestnut bangs and planted her elegantly manicured hands at the waist of her brown trousers as she stared at the body. “I hope you’re insured. This guy could sue your butt off.”
“Spoken with all the compassion of an attorney,” Jayne scolded, winding her hands into the bottom of her purple T-shirt.
“Sorry, but all my compassion went down the john this morning with my breakfast,” Alaina grumbled, slumping down to sit on an overturned crate, careful not to get her alligator wingtips in the dirty water.
Faith kneeled down beside the man on the floor and pressed two fingers to his throat. Her shoulders dropping in relief, she rocked back on the heels of her canvas sneakers and dragged a hand back through her mop of red-gold curls. “I think he’s just knocked out.”
“Thank heaven,” Jayne said, joining her friend on the floor. Her hands were shaking as she tried to push her hair back behind her ears. She hooked the fingers of her right hand beneath her bracelet and slid it around and around her wrist, hoping for a stronger sign of what this all meant, but her source had gone abruptly silent. That in itself seemed a very bad sign. “Do you think I should call an ambulance?”
The man moaned and stirred a bit, his movement rippling the surface of the dirty puddle around him.
“Looks like he’s coming around,” Alaina commented. “Now, Jayne, whatever you do, don’t apologize. It’s as good as an admission of guilt. He’ll take you for every nickel you’ve got, and then you won’t be able to afford to pay my fee for representing you.”
Jayne shot her a look of disgust. Alaina in her normal state was business-minded. Alaina in her newly pregnant state was a shark, a virago, a tigress.
“Ooohhh …,” the man moaned.
Jayne pressed her fingers to her pale cheeks and moaned along with him. “Ooohhh … I’m so sorry, mister! I didn’t mean to crack your skull with that bucket! I’m so sorry!”
Alaina rolled her eyes and muttered an expletive.
Jayne leaned down closer to get a better look at her victim. He seemed vaguely, disturbingly familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. She had the distinct feeling she might have known him if his hair had been lighter or if he hadn’t had a beard. And there was something about his nose that looked very strange, almost as if it wasn’t real.
“Cripes, Jayne, what was in that bucket, battery acid?” Alaina questioned. “This guy’s face is coming off.”
“What?!”
“She’s right,” Faith said, frowning. She pulled a packet of baby wipes out of her purse and yanked out half a dozen, which she applied gingerly to the man’s face. “I think he’s wearing makeup.”
“Pervert,” Alaina pronounced.
Jayne and Faith rolled the man onto his back, and Jayne’s eyes widened impossibly as she stared. The right side of his face had been lying in the water, and his hair on that side had turned blond, the dark color washing out of it to stain the wooden floor. His beard had slid down the side of his face, making him look distorted, like something from a cheap horror movie. Grimacing, she reached out and hesitantly plucked at the limp swatch of fake whiskers. The false beard peeled off and hung from her fingertips like a drowned muskrat.
“Eeeewwww!” she squealed, dropping the dripping mat of hair to the floor.
Alaina sat back and fanned herself with her hand. “Brother, this is getting weird.”
“It’s just like in Dawn of the Double Damned,” Jayne whispered, worried, twisting her suddenly silent bracelet. “That part where Emilio Gustave has turned into one of the pod creatures but Brigette Egbert doesn’t know it. And then she realizes it, but
it’s too late, and he fries her with his eyes and eats her.”
“Thank you for sharing that with us,” Alaina said sardonically, fanning herself harder as her flawless complexion took on a decidedly green cast.
Jayne bit her lip. “I’m sorry. It was a rotten movie.”
Faith continued working with the baby wipes, swiping off a layer of makeup and fake eyebrow. She shrieked in horror when the man’s nose suddenly came off in her hand. “Oh, my God!”
“Holy Hannah!”
“AAAAHHHHH!”
“Hey! Wait a minute!” Alaina exclaimed, hauling herself off the crate to get a closer look. “Isn’t that? It is! That’s no pervert! That’s Pat Reilly!”
Reilly moaned again and shook his head in an attempt to clear the clanging bells out of it. Then he opened his eyes and looked directly into the face of Jayne Jordan.
Jayne stared down at him for a long moment, saying nothing. She wasn’t capable of speech. She wasn’t even aware her two best friends were looking at her expectantly. Reilly’s incredible eyes glowed up at her, so blue they were almost startling, so intense she was sure she felt her heart stop just looking at them. Reilly. Her head swam at the implications. He was back, just as he’d promised.
Reilly had returned.
She took one long, hard look at him, all the old hunger and fear rushing to the surface, and fainted dead away.
TWO
“WHAT HAPPENED?” JAYNE asked as she opened her eyes and stared up into Faith’s concerned face. “Did I fall asleep? I had the strangest dream. I hope it wasn’t an omen.”
“It wasn’t an o-men, it was the man,” Alaina whispered, leaning over Jayne’s prone form. “The Hunk from Down Under, himself.”
“Pat Reilly?” Jayne barely managed to whisper the name. A dozen different emotions all rushed to her throat to choke her. There was dread and traces of a guilt she thought she had rationalized away a long time ago. And underlying that mix of negative feelings was something else altogether. It was like excitement or anticipation or something more primal that she didn’t care to give a name to.
Reilly had returned.
“Hello, luv.”
The voice was unmistakable. The husky baritone strains reached out like fingers and caressed her skin. Shivers ran up and down the length of her like ribbons rippling in the breeze. Jayne sucked in a horrified breath. This was exactly the way she had reacted to the timbre of his voice the first time she’d met him, when she’d been a very happily married woman. It was a frighteningly automatic response, one she seemed to have no control over whatsoever. It had made her feel wicked at the time. She wasn’t the kind of Hollywood wife who bed hopped. She’d been so content with Mac, she had rarely looked at other men to appreciate their male beauty, let alone to contemplate their more hidden charms. So when her husband had brought home the great friend he’d met while on a photographic shoot in Australia, Jayne had been shocked by her reaction, dismayed and disappointed in herself.
She’d loved Joseph MacGregor with her whole being—or so she’d thought. Though Mac had been nearly twenty years her senior, he’d been her soul mate, her anchor and her mentor. She had worshiped and adored him. But on meeting Pat Reilly she’d learned a quick and disheartening lesson: there was a level of attraction she’d never experienced before. To find that out with a man other than Mac had been a crushing blow. It had somehow tainted the love she had for Mac and rippled the surface of the peace she’d found with him.
Now Faith and Alaina leaned away from her, parting like double doors to admit Reilly’s countenance to her field of vision, and she was given a refresher course in that lesson. It didn’t matter that half his hair was black and half was blond. It didn’t matter that his rugged features were slightly irregular—his bold, hooked nose was a tad crooked, his cheekbones were a little too high. It didn’t matter that she’d never wanted to be attracted to him. Seeing him now sent her heart into overdrive.
“Bloody hell, I knew you’d be surprised to see me, Calamity Jayne, but I didn’t think you’d faint dead away,” he said. There was an utterly irresistible smile turning the corners of his mouth, but the bottomless depths of his blue eyes were shadowed with concern as he kneeled down beside her and tucked a finger beneath her chin. “You all right?”
What kind of darn fool question was that? Jayne frowned. Of course she wasn’t all right. Her heart was hammering like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. She was alternately hot and cold all over, and her stomach was spinning like a pinwheel in a hurricane.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, sliding back and away from Reilly’s touch. “I’m fine.”
She was still denying the attraction that pulled between them, Reilly thought. He gave a sharp sigh. She’d always been damn good at that. After her initial unguarded response to him Jayne had more or less pretended he didn’t exist except on the silver screen. She had avoided and ignored him to the point that he had begun to wonder if he was the only one who had experienced that searing flame of desire when they’d met.
Just as well, he’d told himself at the time, and he had sought to follow her lead—to ignore his feelings, to direct them elsewhere. He’d even gone so far as to try to cultivate a dislike for Jayne Jordan, dubbing her Calamity Jayne for the havoc her reviews wreaked on movies she didn’t like. He’d sent her a pet tarantula as a token of his esteem when she’d panned Deadly Weapon. The movie had been a box office smash despite her less than glowing opinion, but still her review had irritated him. And the fact that it had irritated him had irritated him even more. Jayne had been the only movie critic whose opinion had mattered to him.
The attraction had never died. The artificial dislike had never taken root. And he’d discovered after Mac’s death that the desire was still alive inside Jayne as well. She’d merely done a bang-up job of hiding it. She really should have been an actress.
“You could warn a person, you know,” Jayne said defensively. She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her clothes, avoiding a look at Reilly. “You could warn a person instead of just showing up out of the blue, disguised in some kind of weird get up.”
Reilly raised an eyebrow as his gaze swept over her from head to toe, lingering on the white socks that bagged around her ankles at the top of her low boots. “There’s the pot callin’ the kettle black. Anyhow, I did warn you.”
Jayne squared her shoulders and stuck her little chin out. “You never did.”
He stepped closer, his head bent, rooting Jayne to the spot with his beautiful, powerful eyes. She could not look away from him. Electricity charged the air as his aura invaded hers. It was a moment and a half, Jayne thought. If they’d been filming, this would have been a close up, an instant of silence so full of unspoken emotion, the viewers would have been on the edges of their seats.
“I warned you a year ago, Jaynie,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I said I’d be back and I’m a man of my word.”
“A year is long time,” she murmured. “Things change.”
“Nothin’s changed,” he whispered, leaning closer and closer still.
This wasn’t quite what he’d planned to do, Reilly thought briefly as he tangled a hand in the wild silk of Jayne’s hair. But then he seldom planned anything. He’d always acted on impulse and had never considered changing. He didn’t try to resist the force that drew his head down toward Jayne’s. And while he could see resistance in her eyes, Jayne succumbed to the force as well.
Her chin tilted upward in a combination of invitation and defiance. If she meant to voice a protest, she never had the chance. Reilly settled his mouth against hers, and Jayne found herself whirled into a vortex of passions that were frightening in their power.
The kiss they’d shared before had hinted at this, but the barrier of MacGregor’s spiritual presence between them had ended it. In the time that had passed, Mac’s presence had faded, the barrier had thinned, and now the other feelings tore through it like a raging bull through a curtain of silk.
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Reilly kissed her deeply, possessively, as if he had every right. His mouth moved on hers with an expertise that overwhelmed her senses, overpowered any resistance she might have offered. The taste of him was warm and utterly masculine and instantly addictive. She’d learned that a year ago. Kissing him now was like taking a first drink of wine after a year-long abstinence. It was intoxicating, drugging, sapping the strength from her limbs so that she sagged into his arms.
Reilly hauled her up against him with one brawny arm. His other hand remained tangled in her hair, exerting subtle pressure against her skull to alter the angle of the kiss so he would be allowed absolute possession of her mouth. She was every bit as sweet as he remembered. Her body was warm and pliant against his, petite but not without soft curves in all the right places.
If he had wondered over the course of the last year why he couldn’t get the taste of her out of his mind, his question was answered now. No other woman tasted quite the way Jayne did. No other woman expressed quite the same mix of emotions in her kiss. With Jayne there was no practiced seduction, no well thought out plot to woo him, no taste of premeditation whatsoever. There was simply pure, unadulterated emotion, and he drank it in greedily.
She reacted to him as automatically as he did to her. As his tongue slid against the warm velvet of hers he couldn’t help but wonder what it was going to be like when they finally made love. How could it be anything but explosive? Visions of tangled sheets and hot sweaty bodies wound through his brain. He groaned low in his throat and pulled her tighter against him so he could feel her small breasts flatten against his chest. They were going to be dynamite together—and the sooner the better.
“Well, I guess we’d better be going, huh, Faith?” Alaina said loudly.
