Reilly's Return

by Tami Hoag

  Mulling that thought over, Reilly examined the photo that sat next to Mac’s. It was of Jayne, two other young women, and Bryan Hennessy, all in graduation caps and gowns with a rainbow staining the sky behind them. Moving on to take a look at the stuff crammed onto her shelves, he let the subject slide from his mind. He let his gaze drift over a collection of books on theology and mythology. A copy of the Kama Sutra caught his eye, and a grin tugged at his mouth as he wondered just how closely Jayne had studied the classic Hindu text on love-making. Lord knew, he was dying to find out.

  Another shelf was stacked with books on the film industry, books on screen writing, and on directing and cinematography. He pulled out one of the texts on screenwriting and a sheaf of papers that had been tucked inside the cover dropped to the desk. Curious, he picked it up and read the cover.

  “Everlasting by Jayne Jordan,” he mumbled, his brows lifting in surprise.

  It was a script, a screenplay Jayne had written. Before he had a chance to turn back the cover, the bedroom door to his right opened, and Jayne poked her head out. She was hugging her robe around her petite frame. It looked like silk and was black with splashes of fuchsia, purple, and emerald in the form of tropical flowers. She looked sleep-rumpled and wonderfully sexy with her cheeks rosy and her wild mane of dark auburn hair mussed around her head and shoulders. A surge of desire seared Reilly’s veins as he looked at her.

  “What are you doing up?” she asked, her voice soft and smokey. It was almost like a caress to Reilly’s already-aroused nerve endings. He had to clear his throat before he could answer her.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He gave a nonchalant shrug of his massive shoulders as if to say he didn’t find it all that unusual to be prowling around someone else’s house in the dead of night.

  Jayne didn’t fall for the offhand manner. She caught the subtly mutinous set of his jaw that dared her to challenge his casual attitude. Wisely, she chose not to. Reilly would sooner have had his tongue cut out than admit to a woman that something was bothering him. Silly, macho Australian man. Oddly enough, his reluctance to confide in her just brought out her nurturing instincts all the more. She wanted to help him. She wanted to hold him and soothe away his worries, whatever they were.

  She wanted to do a darn sight more than mother him, she admitted. He looked impossibly sexy standing there beside her desk wearing gray sweatpants and an old black T-shirt that strained to span his shoulders. His golden hair fell across his forehead in a fashion that hinted strongly at numerous finger combings. The lean planes of his cheeks were already darkening with the shadow of his morning beard.

  He was every woman’s dream of a rough, maverick male who needed a woman’s gentling touch to domesticate him. That look had sold a lot of movie tickets and captured a lot of hearts. Hers was no exception, Jayne admitted with equal doses of resignation and reservation.

  When they had returned from rehearsal she had sought the solace of her bedroom, hoping to sort through the complicated maze of feelings Reilly inspired in her, but she’d come to no conclusions as to what to do about him. Now she felt like a kitten that had exhausted itself chasing its own tail—dizzy and confused, no farther ahead than when she’d started.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked quietly.

  “No. I wasn’t sleeping either.” For the first time her gaze fell on the papers in his hand and she laughed in delighted surprise. “Where did you find that?”

  “Stuck inside one of your books.”

  Smiling fondly, Jayne moved to stand beside him, her small hands lifting the script away from him. “I’d lost all track of this,” she said, her fingers brushing across the cover. “I tried to sell it when I first moved to L.A., but of course I couldn’t find anyone who would even look at it.”

  “You wanted to be a screenwriter back then?”

  She gave him an enchanting smile. “I wanted to set the film world on fire as a writer-director. But, like most people who go to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, I ended up waiting tables. When I was offered the chance to do movie reviews for a local TV station, I jumped at it.” She shrugged, her dark eyes twinkling with memories. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “You never tried selling another script?”

  “No,” she murmured, absently paging through Everlasting, not really seeing the neatly typed pages, but thinking of the rainbow she had followed to Hollywood and how it had somehow just faded away. Holding the long-forgotten script in her hands now brought back the memory of it with a bittersweet pang. “My life took a different direction. I suppose it was my karma all along.”

  “Bunk,” Reilly muttered on a snort as he moved on to examine her shelf of videocassettes. It was lined with movies, old and new, movies that ranged from Casablanca to Gone with the Wind, The Big Easy to Bull Durham.

  “You like being a critic, do you?” he asked, sneaking a hard look at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “Yes. I feel like I’m doing the public a service.”

  “Imposing your opinion on them, you mean,” he grumbled.

  Jayne frowned at him. “I help people make decisions on how to spend their free time and their entertainment money, both of which most people consider too important to waste on worthless movies.”

  He intended to turn and level a scowl at her, but a title on the shelf caught his eye, and he did a double take. “Speaking of your idea of worthless movies, what are these doing here?”

  Jayne blushed as if he’d just stumbled across a secret stash of porno flicks. She watched as he ran his index finger over the spine of each protective jacket and read aloud the titles of the films that had catapulted him to the stratosphere of superstardom.

  “You’ve got every movie I’ve ever been in,” Reilly said, his disbelief more than evident in his voice. “What the hell is this, Jayne? You hated these films.”

  “I didn’t hate Outback,” she said defensively.

  “I hardly had any lines in Outback! That was my first.”

  “I know,” Jayne mumbled. She busied her hands straightening things on her desk, keeping her head down. She was embarrassed to have Reilly discover her secret obsession with his work. It was like having him read her diary or look through her lingerie drawer or find a stack of love letters she’d written but never sent. Still, the cat was out of the bag now. “You were wonderful in it, lines or no.”

  “I was—” He stopped dead and stared at her as if he needed to translate her words in his head before he could understand them. Then his scowl darkened even more. He jammed his hands on his hips. “The hell I was.”

  “You were,” Jayne insisted. She knew the movie scene by scene. It wasn’t a classic. Nevertheless Reilly had stood out like a diamond among rough stones. His natural talent had been obvious and Jayne had been captivated. Her frustration with him had stemmed from his failure in subsequent roles to tap into that talent, a waste that broke her heart as a lover of fine acting.

  Reilly shook an accusatory finger at her. “You trashed every one of these films in your column. You hated them and you hated me in them.”

  “I did not!”

  “Oh? Ha!” His laugh was pure derision. “Tell me you liked Raider’s Revenge.”

  “I didn’t. It was dreadful. I’m amazed Jamison Roswold can direct himself out of bed in the morning. The script wasn’t fit to wrap fish in. But I never said I hated your portrayal of the Raider.”

  “Well, you did,” Reilly insisted. “You’ve never thought I could act worth a damn, and you’re probably right. But it irks the hell out of me you get to say so in a hundred and thirteen newspapers every bloody week.”

  Jayne ignored the second part of his outburst. Her attention zeroed in on the first part. There had been a certain strain in his voice, a certain flash of vulnerability in his eyes. She’d seen it before and hadn’t quite been able to interpret it. She concentrated on it now, holding herself very still. Out of habit her fingers of her right hand toyed with the bracelet she never rem
oved from her left wrist. It was silent, but Reilly’s expression told her everything she needed to know: Big, tough, cocky Pat Reilly was having a crisis of faith.

  He shifted uncomfortably under her steady stare. Jayne felt a surge of sympathy and compassion. Poor Reilly. If anyone was ill equipped to have an attack of insecurity, it was Pat Reilly. He would see it as a weakness. He would hate himself for it. He would demand more of himself and deliver less, and the circle would spiral down and down.

  Unable to stop herself, Jayne reached out and laid a hand on his rigid forearm. The need to reassure him was too strong to resist. She didn’t really want to resist it anyway. She liked Reilly. It hurt her to see him hurting.

  “I think,” she said quietly, earnestly, “that you have a wealth of talent. I think it’s a shame that talent has been wasted on second-rate stories. I think it’s a shame no director has been astute enough or shrewd enough to help you tap into it. I think you’re a very good actor, that with the right project and the right director, you could be great.”

  Reilly stared down at her warily, wanting to believe her but not quite able to. The conflict built within him until his chest was so tight he could hardly breathe.

  “You certainly wowed ’em tonight in that scene you played with me,” she said with a touch of irony.

  “There wasn’t much acting to that,” he admitted quietly. “I was too wrapped up in you to concentrate. When I’m with you, I’m no actor at all, Jayne. I’m just a man.”

  His choice of words made a tiny smile turn her lips. Her heart pounded a little harder as those words sank in. He hadn’t been acting. What he gave her was honest emotion. Another of her shields against him fell by the wayside.

  Jayne ran her hand up the steel-hard muscles of his arm, frowning prettily. “Look how tense you are. No wonder you can’t sleep. Come over here.”

  Reilly let her lead him along down the steps to the U-shaped sofa. When she ordered him to sit on the floor with his back to the couch, he raised an eyebrow but complied. Jayne settled herself cross-legged onto the soft cushion directly behind him.

  “Have you ever had a psychic massage?” she asked. “You tune yourself in to your body and your psychic energy until you achieve harmony with the life energy of the world around you.”

  “What a lot a crap, Jaynie,” he grumbled. “Skip it and get on to the massage part. I could do with some of that.”

  Jayne made a face at the back of his head. “Take your shirt off.”

  Reilly shot her a look over his shoulder that was brimming with that old Pat Reilly devilish charm. To her own credit as an actress, Jayne remained impassive. As he peeled the T-shirt off over his head and discarded it, warmth radiated through her midsection. The man had a body that could stop traffic. And she was about to lay her hands on it. Drawing in a long, thin breath, she tried to steady herself, telling herself she was doing this for Reilly’s spiritual benefit.

  What air her lungs had managed to retain vanished the instant she touched him. His shoulders were like marble, hard and smooth. His tanned skin was warm and vibrant beneath her fingertips. Touching him had nearly the same effect on her as having him touch her. A low groan tried to rise up out of her throat and she just barely managed to suppress it. She did her best to focus her attention on working the knots out of Reilly’s muscles and ignoring the knots of sexual tension coiling in her lower body and at the tips of her breasts.

  Methodically, her fingers kneaded his shoulders, working down the slope from his neck to his upper arms and back up again. Her thumbs rubbed up and down, gently coaxing the corded muscle to release its tension. Reilly groaned and sighed, unable to hold on to the stress.

  “That’s it, honey,” Jayne murmured softly. “Let all that tension go; you don’t need it. Just relax. Doesn’t that feel nice?”

  “Mmmmmm …,” he purred lazily. “I can only think of a couple of things that would feel nicer. Care to try them?”

  Jayne reserved comment and went on with the treatment. “Breathe deep and relax. You have to find your center of being. Stress throws off your cosmic balance.”

  “Jayne …”

  His warning tone told her she was going to have to take a different approach. Reilly’s beliefs were grounded in things that could be seen and touched. Cosmic life energy was too abstract a concept for him to trust.

  “You’re a good actor. You’re a wonderful actor. I’m sorry you got the impression I thought otherwise. Do you think you’re a good actor?”

  There was a telling pause before he said, “I do okay.”

  “You’re good,” she insisted. “Say it.”

  “Jayne—”

  “Say it, or I’ll stop massaging.”

  “You’re bloody cruel, sheila.”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m a good actor,” he said flatly.

  Jayne lifted her hands slightly from his shoulders. “Say it like you mean it.”

  He heaved a sigh but took her direction. “I’m a good actor.”

  “You’re a very good actor. You’ve just made lousy decisions about projects. Why did you do Road Raider?”

  “They offered me a potful of money, and my folks were heavy in debt. They were maybe gonna lose their place. I had a chance to help them out, so I took it. Then Deadly Weapon came along. The director was a pal of mine whose last two projects had gone belly-up.”

  Jayne bit her lip. Her hands slowed, the therapeutic massage drifting into slow caresses. Reilly had made his choices out of a sense of duty. She felt ashamed of herself for ever having thought that he had chosen the pictures he had as an easy way to line his own pockets. She should have known better. He’d never lived extravagantly in Hollywood. Certainly, he’d done his share of partying, but he didn’t throw cash around on sports cars or lavish mansions or any of the other customary accoutrements of stardom.

  Perhaps she had known better deep down. It had simply been easier to believe the worst of him because that had given her a weapon against the attraction she’d felt for him when she’d been married to Mac. She wondered now what other of her opinions of Reilly were misconceptions, deliberate or otherwise.

  “The movies did well enough and nobody seemed willing to offer me anythin’ better,” Reilly said, confiding in someone for the first time since he couldn’t remember when. He’d never even confided in Mac, and Mac had been his best friend. Somehow, just now, with the lights down low and Jaynie rubbing his back, with the fog bank swirling outside and the cozy den full of warmth, it didn’t seem all that hard to confide in Jayne. “Besides, I had three brothers and three sisters to put through college, and relatives comin’ out of the woodwork, all of them needin’ somethin’ or other.”

  Tears rose up in Jayne’s eyes. Her heart swelled in her breast until she thought it would burst. What a dear, sweet man he was. She lifted her hand and stroked it over the back of his head, letting the silky strands of his hair sift through her fingers.

  “You’re a good man, Pat Reilly,” she said, leaning toward him, but holding back the urge to wrap her arms around him and hug him.

  Reilly turned and looked up at her, his beautiful blue eyes glowing with intensity in the soft light. “Where I come from a man stands by his family and his mates. Bein’ good’s got nothin’ to do with it; that’s just the way things are.”

  “Stubborn man,” Jayne complained with a fond smile. “Didn’t your mama ever teach you how to take a compliment?”

  “Nope.” He turned around and kneeled before the couch, planting a hand on either side of Jayne’s hips. He grinned, showing off his famous dimple. “She was too busy chasin’ me out of the kitchen, scoldin’ me for swipin’ her biscuits before they were cool.”

  She chuckled softly, completely disarmed by his rough charm, completely aroused by the sight of his thickset bare chest. Muscles rippled with his slightest movement. A light furring of tawny hair curled across his pectorals and arrowed down in a line over the washboard muscles of his abdomen, disappearing into
the low-riding waist of his sweatpants.

  “I suspected as much,” she murmured.

  “Did you now?” He inched closer.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  He leaned toward her, and it seemed only natural for Jayne to meet him halfway. When his lips captured hers, she didn’t allow herself to ask questions, she simply enjoyed. She enjoyed the taste of him, the feel of his whiskers beneath her fingertips as she framed his face with her hands. She enjoyed the subtle textures of his mouth—firmness, silken softness, the velvety rasp of his tongue against hers. It was a gentle kiss, not angry or demanding or possessive. It was wonderful.

  A languid dizziness swirled through her head as Reilly kissed her again and again and again, slowly and gently. She felt herself floating and drifting and wasn’t entirely sure whether the sensation was a spiritual or a physical one or a combination of both. It abated only slightly when her head and shoulders were lowered to the cushion of the sofa and Reilly settled himself above her.

  Some of her doubts about him had been erased. Those remaining were being steadily pushed aside by the passion rising inside her. Jayne made no move to stop it. Nor did she make any move to stop Reilly when his hand slid to the sash of her robe.

  He looked down at her, his breath burning his lungs. She was so lovely lying there beneath him. Her dark-fire hair fanned out across the white cushion in a rich contrast of color and texture. Her dark eyes gazed steadily up at him, shining like onyx. She was delicate and feminine, and he’d never wanted anything so badly as he wanted to touch her.

  He pulled loose the sash, then ran his hand up the neckline of the robe, touching both the silk of the cloth and the silk of Jayne’s exposed skin. His fingertips dipped inside the garment, and he slowly bared her right breast to his ardent gaze. It was small but plump, as dainty and feminine as the rest of her. Even as he admired it, the dusky peach nipple at the center tightened into an inviting little bud.