“You don’t have to do that.”
“What?”
“Grab on to keep me from slipping away.”
His hand softened. “I didn’t realize—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
His mouth parted. “I’m a little raw.”
“Understandable.”
“Clingy, unhealthy …”
“Whatever.”
He pulled her tight. “I love too hard.”
“Okay.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s too … close.”
“Please don’t push me away.”
His voice rasped. “Even if I don’t, there are too many ways to lose you.”
She rested her fingers on his ropy forearm. “Is that a chance you’re willing to take?”
Curt stood outside the rehab facility. Nice place. Hot meals. Private rooms. People to help a cripple get around. An accident could happen, but wouldn’t. Not here. He needed the niece to muddy the waters. But information would be priceless.
A young woman dressed in floral scrubs came out of the joint, end-of-shift weariness across her fair, elfin features, pale, downy hair pulled into a ponytail clipped into a scatter at the back of her head. He leaned against the tree, hands in the pockets of his slacks, silk shirt open at the neck just far enough to look alluring but not crass. If Brad Pitt could pull off forty-something, Curtis Blanchard would hold his own at thirty-nine.
She glanced, glanced again. He’d known she would. He drew a slow smile, the kind that said, aha, caught you looking. She blushed, continuing down the short walk toward the parking lot. He fell into step.
“Long day?”
She nodded. “They’re all long. Twelve-hour shifts.”
“Why do I think you could use a drink?”
“I don’t know.” She kept walking, but a lot of the pink had stayed in her cheeks.
“My name’s Curt.”
“I don’t go drinking with strange men.”
He laughed. “What makes you think I’m strange?”
“I mean stranger … men.” She faltered. “Men I don’t know.”
“Then how do you get to know them?”
She reached a ’98 Mustang that had been driven hard, probably before she bought it. “Why were you standing there staring?”
“I doubt it’s the first time you’ve had that effect.”
“At the building, I mean.”
“My dad’s in there.” Oh, smooth. Hadn’t even planned that.
“Then why didn’t you go in?” She drew out her keys, complete with pepper spray and whistle.
“He’s doesn’t acknowledge me. We haven’t talked in years.” There it was, blooming in her face like a rose—sympathy. What a beautiful sight.
She hesitated. “Why not?”
“I was a wild oat he planted unexpectedly.” He shrugged. “Now he pretends I don’t exist.” Truth always rang true. So what if he’d applied it to the wrong man.
“Then why are you here?”
He looked back at the building. “That’s what I was asking myself.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Sorry I bothered you.”
“Wait.”
He turned back.
“I guess a drink’s okay.”
He eyed her up and down. “Do they feed you dinner when you work twelve hours?”
“I could get it in the cafeteria if I wanted, but why would I? You know?”
He nodded. “Why don’t I follow you to your favorite restaurant and pick up the tab?”
Her mouth formed a V-shaped smile. “Okay. Except …” She looked down. “I don’t want to go in this.”
“Go home and change. Tell me where to meet you.”
She pressed her palm to the side of her head. “You sure?”
“Sure. Beats standing outside wondering why it hurts that my old man lost his leg, when he wouldn’t care if I died in my sleep.”
Her brow pinched just enough to show she understood. “Fanny and Alexander’s on Emerson? They’ve got live music.”
He smiled. “My kind of place.” Though the music was probably the kind kids her age got off on. The thought surprised him, along with the realization that he’d rather spend the evening with Allegra. But that was the point after all. And to get what he wanted, he could baby-sit.
The new cleaning woman had just left, but Allegra crouched on hands and knees and scrubbed the shower floor. It didn’t look dirty, didn’t smell dirty, but it felt dirty. She rocked back on her knees when the phone rang, her teeth gritting with each invasive tone. She wanted to ignore it completely, but she pushed up. It could be Rob, or news of Rob.
“Hello?”
“Darling, you have to meet us at the club for cocktails.” Lorraine’s voice was shrill. “It’s simply cruel to keep us in the dark.”
Allegra winced. They wanted to hear about the mystery man who’d whisked her off to Hawaii. Was it romantic? Was he wonderful? Was she going to make an end of it with poor Rob now that he was maimed? And then she’d break down and tell them how she’d been too cowardly to face him. How she longed to be a comfort, but things had gone so wrong. Curt’s words echoed. “Let him start over with dignity.”
Sometimes she thought Curt must be reading her mind. Could he know how she’d hoped for that very thing when she remade herself? She’d left behind Allison Carter and created Allegra Delaney. Diction tapes to lose her cracker accent, deportment lessons from the movies where glittering stars walked like queens. Personal grooming from magazines, and all the rest from watching people everywhere.
Then she’d met Rob. Anyone who’d known her before would say she’d married his money. And maybe she had. But it wasn’t his money she’d fallen in love with.
“No, I’m sorry, I can’t,” she told Lorraine on the phone. “I have a date.”
“My, my, my. Well, one of these days, you have to let us meet him.”
“I’ll try, but with his being away so much on business, he guards our time jealously. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course, darling. But Bev’s claiming he’s imaginary.”
He was. Tonight at least. She hadn’t heard from Curt since she’d given him the check, and for that she was intensely grateful. Seeing him filled her with the deep self-loathing she had striven to escape. And yet underneath it all, she deserved him.
Rob greeted the nurse’s aid Nicki the next morning as always, but her response this time was resistant, almost hostile. He rose from the bed, gripping the walker and balancing precariously. At first he’d had to account for the lack of bone and muscle that his mind still thought was there. Now the missing weight was overcompensated by the prosthesis. Sooner or later he’d train his brain to recognize this as his body.
Nicki glowered as she escorted him to physical therapy. He thought he could make it down there alone, but they hadn’t declared him stable. Wise in more ways than one. So she was stuck with the job whether she liked it or not—poor girl. Maybe his stump repulsed her. She was too young to realize how temporary physical appearance was.
“Big plans for the weekend?” He glanced her way.
“Not really.”
“Weather’s going to be nice. Good for sailing.” He enjoyed watching the boats in the marina outside his window. “You like sailing?”
“Not really.”
He nodded. “Have I … offended you?”
She looked momentarily concerned. With what he paid for this facility, his complaint might cause her trouble.
“No.” She bit the side of her lip.
“Good. Well, thanks for the escort. Have a nice day.” He passed through the automatic doors she activated with a big square button on the wall, to the torture chamber where Paul, personal trainer and royal thorn, awaited him.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Phone to her ear, Gentr y drew up her knees and curled into the corner of the couch beneath the trailer window. Cameron no longer barked “Pierce” when she called. It wa
s sometimes “Hey,” sometimes “Aloha”, but usually he just started talking with “I was just thinking about you” or “I’m glad you called; I had this idea.”
This time she heard “Just a second.” Some quick keyboard typing, then he was back. “Hi.”
“Am I interrupting?”
“It can wait.”
Knowing his sharp focus, she appreciated those words every time. “I won’t keep you. I just wondered, would you like to come down for a shoot?”
“Ducks?”
“No.”
“Rabbits?”
“Definitely not.” These past three weeks, they’d made up for the silence of the first three, talking every night and more than once during the day. But she hadn’t seen him since fixing up his place—which the tabloids had trumpeted as their setting-up house.
With the ensuing barrage of calls from people willing to pay for interviews, pictures, anything he had to give them, he’d unlisted his number. One guy had perched outside for days with a camera aimed at his bedroom. “It’s sick, Gentry.” But every time she went to her trailer after a long day on the set, he’d be on her voicemail. It amazed her how much she treasured that.
“When?”
“Thursday?”
“Any love scenes?”
“No. But … everything’s got energy now, all the scenes we shoot together.” Her cinematic synergy with Alec would hopefully translate to the screen, but asking Kai to come watch was risky. If their relationship was going to progress, he’d have to deal with that element of her craft, but she was acutely aware that, after Myra’s infidelity, he might not want to.
“I could cause interference.”
She smiled. “You could.” She wasn’t at all sure she could relate to Alec with Cameron there. Maybe she needed to see that as well.
“What time?”
She gave him the details and promised him a pass at the gate if she wasn’t able to meet him there.
“Can I take you out after?”
“How do you look in a bag?”
“My best.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.”
“How’s Rob?”
“He sounded good last time we talked.” Her heart warmed. “He told me about your visit.”
“I was up that way for business. Stopped in on the way home.”
“He said he hasn’t enjoyed a conversation so much in a long time.”
“It was illuminating.”
She heard the smile in his voice. “Oh?”
“Let’s see, there was the blue-hair phase—”
“That was an accident.”
“The tomboy years, the girlie years …”
“Tell me you did not spend the whole time talking about me.”
“We covered the Giants, the 49ers, and his book. I agreed to be a resource for the technical aspects of investigation, but I have to say his character’s intriguing.”
“He let you see it?” Her uncle’s gimpy detective story might never see the light of day, but then you never knew; she was starring with Alec Warner. “How did he look? It’s killing me that I can’t get up there.”
“The graft seems to have taken. Pretty remarkable, their reconnecting the blood supply from one part to the other.”
She loved that he wasn’t squeamish about the injury—that he and Rob could talk, that he would care to. “So, Thursday?”
“Yeah. All right. I’ll be there.”
And that he never acted starstruck. She especially loved that.
Curt stalked down the sidewalk, the San Francisco night life enticing but not drawing him in. Too irascible to be charming, he’d left Nicki and her nubile friends at the last club. He hadn’t anticipated this long a recuperation, or Rob requiring a second surgery because the stump hadn’t healed properly, leaving bones and blood vessels exposed.
He shriveled inside to think of them hacking out a flap of muscle from the guy’s chest cavity and attaching it to the stump, but Nicki gave him enough details to gag a horse. She assumed he wanted to know—poor grieving son. After what they’d done to Robert Fox, he’d be putting him out of his misery.
He had tried to call Allegra so many times, reached her once, but she’d said she couldn’t talk. She hadn’t asked about the hundred grand. He hadn’t asked about Rob, but according to Nicki, Allegra hadn’t been to see him. That was good.
In case the little blond nurses’ aide could do math, he’d lied about his age, told her he was twenty-nine, not thirty-nine. He’d forbidden her to tell Rob or anyone at the center anything about him. “It’d only torque him off.”
But she’d told him plenty. How brave and kind his poor dad had seemed, always praying and reading religious stuff. “And he won’t even speak to his son? What a hypocrite.” But he was sick of spending time with her, and time in any sense was becoming his enemy.
Even with Allegra’s donation, the noose had tightened on his throat. Assuming he’d have her and the money long before this, he’d taken risks. If the wrong people found out, he was dead meat. But he wouldn’t let that happen. No way. His heart beat faster. He was stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Shooting the scene with Cameron on the set was going to be as big a challenge as she’d expected. It scared her how much it mattered what he thought, how much she cared what he felt. She had introduced him to most of the cast and crew involved in the day’s shoot and to Helen, who didn’t have call sheets for any scenes, but who’d come anyway—as she did every day—to support her friend. Gentry suspected she was also still trying to see what it was that made Gentry Fox.
She wished she could transfer the magic, blow it over her friend like fairy dust so Helen could fly too. But Helen had to find her own happy thought to make her character come alive. Not that she wasn’t trying; she tried too hard, and the scenes between them had been disjointed at best. By the third or fourth cut, she usually settled in, but by then everyone was edgy. She wished they could find the easy rapport they’d had doing improv with the troupe. She would talk to her tonight. No, not tonight with Cameron there. Her heart fluttered.
Lord, help me focus. She wanted to do her best, not just for his sake but for everyone’s. What had she been thinking? She closed her eyes and cleared her mind.
“It’s a drag, isn’t it?” Alec whispered. “Having him here.”
She answered without opening her eyes. “I asked him here.”
“You’re as crazy as Eva.”
“Eva’s not crazy. She’s right. And you’re about to find that out.” She opened her eyes as Eva Thorne.
“First team,” the assistant director called as their stand-ins exited the set, lights and camera having been positioned.
They took their places—Alec inside the tent; she, poised to stalk
in.
“Three bells!” Quiet on the set.
“Background.” The extras started milling around behind and
passed by the tent.
“Picture’s up.” Then came the call: “Roll sound. Roll camera. Mark it. And … action.”
She tossed open the flap. The whole side of the tent was open, but no one would know because that was the camera’s position.
Matt Cargill looked up from the crate that held maps and compass. “This better be good.”
“Not a word I’d apply to anything here.”
He hunkered back on his heels. “Eva—”
“Why won’t you listen? I know what’s happening.”
The camera came in tight. Her expression, then his. Their tension crackled.
“You want to break something big. Fine. I know the hunger.”
“Hunger? I’m talking real hunger, starvation.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
She crossed her arms. “Okay.” She laid out her suspicions with the steely assurance Eva took into every battle. The fact than Matt Cargill had snubbed her at the UN banquet only helped her dig her heels in.
“Wai-wai-wait.” He spread his hands. “You’re
telling me, you know this? You have proof?”
She let her steady gaze lie for her. She knew it, but without him she couldn’t get close enough to prove it. She allowed a flicker for the camera to show the audience her duplicity, another shift to show her despair over what she’d seen. They’d go with her because she cared enough to risk it all.
Would he? Could Matt Cargill get past his ego and admit he’d been wrong about her and the information that had strained their professional relationship and eroded the feelings they both worked hard to deny?
He stood slowly. “You realize where this takes us if you’re wrong.”
Her chin came up just enough to savor the victory. It wasn’t hers alone. It was every face that haunted her sleep, every child who might not see tomorrow. “I’m not wrong.”
Locked gaze, enough heat to show his decision wasn’t strictly professional, the tension of resistance and …
“Cut.” Seconds later the director called, “Print.”
Alec raised his brows with the hint of a sardonic smile. “First take.
I think you found your muse.”
Gentry shook herself. She’d forgotten Cameron was there. He belonged to Gentry’s world, or Jade’s. Eva had her own troubles. But she smiled with confidence and satisfaction. She didn’t need the director to tell her they’d nailed it. She felt it.
She and Alec were released while they set up the next scene with second team. He walked with her to where Cameron stood beside Helen, who was giving him the lowdown on cinematic lingo and protocol. Alec had been in his trailer when she’d brought Cameron onto the set, but she introduced them now.
As they shook hands and exchanged greetings, she had a sense of disassociation, of clashing with her alter ego, Eva. Helen picked up on her odd mental state and sent her a quizzical look. Then Cameron grounded her with a glance of his own, and she came fully back. “Hungry? There’s a snack cart.”
It was different seeing what Gentry did, live and in person. He tried to imagine what it would look like as a movie, but it was all in pieces; Gentry going in and out of the scene, someone taking her place while cameras and microphones were adjusted, watching her slip in and out of character.
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