“Good. I don’t like playing with the master’s words.” He smiled at her, and he had an intelligent face.
“That’s nice of you, but this works,” she said, satisfied.
“I hope he agrees with you,” he said cautiously, but there had been no problems so far. “I know you meet with him at night, so it’s a long day for you. But would you ever want to have dinner? We can do it late, if that’s better for you. I’m a bit of a night owl myself.”
“I’m usually free by eight o’clock,” she said easily. “He doesn’t take up that much of my time. He’s very considerate about it.”
“That’s good to know. Somehow, I could imagine that someone so intensely reclusive could be a bit of a tyrant.”
“He’s not a tyrant. He’s just very shy.” She covered for the employer who didn’t exist, but everyone believed in.
“We would love to welcome him here,” he said again and then turned his attention to Alex. “What kind of food do you like?”
“Anything, and casual is fine.” He suggested Mon Plaisir, which she knew from when she lived there, and liked a lot.
“That would be great.”
“How would tonight be? Or would tomorrow be better?”
“Tonight’s fine,” she said, smiling broadly. She felt pampered and spoiled.
“You’re a very important person here,” he said seriously.
“You certainly make me feel that way.”
“I’ll pick you up at eight then, in a car, not on my motorcycle.” He grinned at her.
“Thank you.” He went back to the others then, and she didn’t see him for the rest of the day.
When she got to the house after work, she emailed her approvals from “Mr. Green,” bathed and dressed, and was ready when Miles rang the doorbell at eight. She opened the door to him wearing a short denim skirt, a leather jacket, and heels, and he looked at her warmly, in black leather pants and jacket himself, and she noticed that he had shaved.
“Do you want to come in for a drink?” she offered. She could say that Mr. Green was in seclusion upstairs, without giving anything away. But he lowered his voice immediately in response.
“I don’t want to disturb him. Why don’t we just go.”
Miles led her out to his car parked in front of the house. It was a beaten-up old Jaguar, with cracked leather upholstery and tremendous charm. Miles had his own distinctive style, and he turned to her as they drove away.
“Does he mind you going out with me? I never thought about it till after I suggested dinner.” She reassured him immediately. It was the same question Malcolm had asked her in L.A.
“I’m free to do whatever I like. He doesn’t monopolize my evenings or personal time. He’s a very reasonable person. I’m not his girlfriend,” she stated clearly. “There are no nights or weekends involved.” It seemed like all he needed to know, and Miles seemed more relaxed after that. They talked easily about a variety of subjects on the way to the restaurant, and he was surprised to discover that she had lived in London for almost two years.
“So you haven’t worked for him for that long? I thought your CV said you did.” He was confused.
“I have, I was with him here.”
“I had no idea he spent time in England too. I know he has a place in the wilds of Scotland, but no one mentioned London.”
“We took a flat in Knightsbridge for two years, while he was writing here.” Everything she said to him was a half-truth, and it was exhausting lying all the time and trying to avoid dangerous slips.
The restaurant was as she remembered it from the last time she’d been there, cozy and intimate, without being so dark you couldn’t read the menu, or looking like a location for a tryst for married lovers. It was a perfect place to unwind with a friend after a long day, which was his purpose in bringing her here. She was surprised at how comfortable she was with him, and had been since they met. It was just his style, but the way he spoke to her was warm, and there was something very sexy about him with his rugged good looks.
They ordered dinner, and had a glass of wine, and he sighed as he smiled at her. “You’re too young to have been married yet, I suppose. I just finished a bad divorce, it’s a relief to focus on work. And this is such a great project.” He was so enthused about it that it thrilled Alex every time he said it. He was full of energy and great ideas for the series.
“I’m sorry about your divorce. That must be rough. Do you have children?” She knew very little about him, except that his bio for publicity said he had gone to Oxford and was forty-one years old.
“I have two kids. I married very young, right after college, so they’re fairly grown up, but not entirely yet. My daughter is seventeen, and my son is fifteen. Not easy ages, and they’ve been pulled back and forth quite a lot. Their mother wants to move to South Africa with her boyfriend, who’s from there and still lives there and has his business in Johannesburg, and I don’t want them that far away. I’m very close to my kids,” he said with a bittersweet tone to his voice.
“Are you able to stop her from moving?” He shook his head and Alex felt sorry for him. His eyes told her how painful it was for him.
“The judge ruled against me and said I can’t keep her prisoner here. We have shared custody, and the children love both of us. They don’t want to leave either of us, and the court ruled that we’ll have to send them back and forth as much as possible, which is hard on them. My daughter is in boarding school here, as most kids her age are, and she’ll be going to university next year, but my son is moving to Johannesburg with his mother. And my schedule is crazy, so I can’t always foresee how much free time I’ll have when he’s here. And he doesn’t want to go to boarding school.”
“I didn’t want to either at his age.”
“It’s not as common in the States, but almost everyone does here. He was accepted at Eton, which is a wonderful school, where I went, and he refused to go.” The school he had gone to told her he was from a good family with considerable social standing, but he had none of the snobbishness that usually went with it, and didn’t put on airs. She had met some men in England who went to the best schools and were insufferable. Miles was nothing like them. “Why would you have gone to boarding school? Were you badly behaved so they wanted to send you away?” he teased her.
“No, my father died when I was fourteen, and my mother long before that, so it was a matter of necessity. I had nowhere to live, and couldn’t stay alone in his house with just a housekeeper. It worked out really well in the end. I lived in a convent with a house full of loving nuns. I still stay there when I’m in Boston. I just moved to New York recently.” Her history touched him. She seemed like a very unusual woman and he found her warm and intriguing. He hadn’t figured her out yet, but was trying his best to. He could sense that there was a part of her she didn’t let anyone know or see. She was very guarded, like a child hiding behind a tree, thinking no one could see them, although they were partially visible. Miles was watching her closely and trying to understand her better.
“So when did you meet up with the amazing Mr. Green?” He was fascinated by that too. He was such an extraordinary writer, and he was impressed that the famous writer put so much faith in such a young woman. She was clearly as capable as she had demonstrated so far to them.
“When he wrote his first book. I was nineteen and still in college.”
“And where was that?” She seemed to have moved around a bit. He knew she had spent six months in L.A. working on Green’s movie, and now he knew they’d been in London for two years.
“He spent some time in Boston, and we met then. I’ve been working for him for six years,” she said quietly as their dinner arrived, and he continued questioning her, trying to piece the puzzle of her together. The stabilizing element appeared to be her work for Alexander Green, which was ironically true.
“That makes you twenty-five now,” Miles commented. “I must seem like an old man to you.” He laughed as he said it, and she den
ied it immediately.
“I forget about age, mine and other people’s. It’s really what’s in your head that matters, and how mature you are. Some people never get there, and others arrive early. I’ve been responsible for a long time, and I think Mr. Green recognizes it.” So did Miles. His ex-wife was exactly his age, and had been a spoiled child for all the years he knew her. There was none of that about Alex. She was a sensible woman, no matter what age she was, and he felt like he was talking to an equal as they ate their excellent dinner and explored each other’s lives.
“I bought a wonderful horse farm a number of years ago in Dorset,” he told her halfway through dinner to get off more painful personal subjects. “My children and I love it. I actually breed horses there, Thoroughbreds and Arabians, show horses. It’s a lot of work, but very rewarding and interesting. It costs a fortune to run, but we’ve had a few racehorses that have done very well. I have a new one right now. You’ll have to come and see the place sometime. It’s about three hours from London. If we get a break in the shooting schedule, when we’re further along, I’ll take you there. Sometimes the actors need a few days off, if someone crucial to a scene gets sick, or they just get worn out. It’s better to give them some time off than to keep pushing and screw everything up.” It seemed like a reasonable solution to her, and he was obviously a practical and intelligent person, full of common sense. He was very open and direct, which she liked, and wished she could be more so with him.
“I’d love to see the farm, but I don’t know anything about running a horse farm or country life. There were no horses in the convent when I was growing up.” She laughed. “Although I rode with my father when I was young. I took lessons for a while.”
“What did you and your father like to do?” he asked her gently.
“Read crime thrillers,” she answered instantly, “and every kind of detective story we could lay hands on. He had an amazing collection, some of them first editions. I kept all of them. They’ve been in storage for eleven years.”
“I guess that’s what you have in common with your employer. That must have impressed him when he hired you, your knowledge of his kind of work.” It seemed to have been a passion she and her father shared.
“Some people think that women don’t read or understand crime novels, let alone write them, which really isn’t true. Although my father believed that too. There are some wonderful thrillers and detective stories written by women, despite my father’s personal preference for male writers—he was quite adamant about it. I realize now that his view was somewhat limited and he overlooked some very good women crime writers.” It had taken her most of her life to believe it, but now she did.
“Are you an aspiring writer, Alex?” he asked her, and she shook her head. She certainly wasn’t “aspiring,” she was a full-on pro.
“Not really,” she said blithely, wishing she could be honest with him.
“My own interests lie in an entirely different direction. I love producing quality television shows and I can put a deal together like nobody’s business, but I could never write the material for a show. I can barely write a letter. I just don’t have that creative gene in me, which is why I admire Alexander Green so much. I think your skills are more like mine, organizational. We can make things happen. But don’t ever ask me to write a screenplay or a book. I know a good one when I see it, like great horseflesh. I leave the writing to geniuses like Mr. Green.” As he had been before, Miles was humble about his own talents, but he had misjudged hers. Given all the lies she and others had told him, how could he possibly know? She just seemed like a very efficient assistant to him.
“You could probably write better than you think. You just never tried it,” she said generously.
“I’ll leave that to him.” He smiled, totally satisfied with his life and what he did. The only thing he was unhappy about was the impact of the divorce on his kids. He had explained to her earlier in the meal that neither of them had done anything awful to each other. They had just married too young and run out of gas. He said his wife was a talented photographer, but had no desire to pursue it as a line of work. He said he had far less talent than she did, but had always been excited and ambitious about his career.
Alex told him not to sell himself short. She could tell that he was an ingenious, creative man. It was no small thing to create a successful television show, and put all the essential people together to make it work. She was more grateful than ever as the meal drew to a close that he had chosen her work for his next venture, and she was excited to be associated with him. She told him that her employer was ecstatic about what he was doing, and that pleased Miles too. He said they all hoped it would be a big success, and Alex said she did too.
“Your comments are bound to be the most sincere,” he said to her over a cup of espresso after dinner, “because you have no stake in it and nothing to gain. The rest of us want to make a lot of money. You’re not tainted by greed like we are,” he complimented her, and she winced.
“I have my greedy moments too,” she confessed, and it was truer than he knew.
“You seem like you have your feet on the ground,” he praised her, and she laughed.
“I was thinking the same thing about you,” she admitted.
“I’m not as sensible as I look. Breeding Thoroughbreds is an expensive venture, or raising racehorses. There is nothing reasonable about it. It’s a costly passion, but I love it,” he confessed.
“It sounds like fun, though.”
“That it is. I can’t wait for you to see my farm. The house is an old Tudor manor. It’s quite historically important, and it even has a moat and its own lake, and the land is spectacular. I’m a true Englishman, I have a strong bond to the land. My family lost their property generations ago, and I’ve always wanted land to call my own, and pass on to my children. Now I have it, it’s very important to me.” She had seen a side of him that night that she wouldn’t have known otherwise, and when she left the restaurant with him, she knew she had a friend. He put an arm around her shoulders as they walked back to the car, and there was a warm light in his eyes when he said good night to her, but he didn’t try to kiss her. And as he watched her get through the front door safely, she waved before she closed it, and felt something she had never felt before. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed very direct and simple. Yet there was one complication to it. She hated the fact that she was lying to him about who she really was.
Chapter 18
The break that Miles had been hoping for so he could take her to his horse farm came a month into the filming of the show. They’d had dinner together several times by then, and had learned a lot about each other. He knew all about the nuns, her friend Brigid, and her years in college. He knew about her father and how she had never been in love. He could see how hard she worked, and how dedicated she was. He saw her vulnerable side and her strengths, and how intelligent she was. But what he didn’t know, and couldn’t, was that she wrote the Alexander Green books. It was the only thing she had concealed from him, and she knew she had no choice. She couldn’t take him into the inner circle of her life—he didn’t belong there, and if he ever misused the knowledge, he could destroy her career, and she would let no one and nothing do that. She protected her work with every ounce of her soul, even more than her heart.
Miles had shared with her his childhood in the north of England, in Yorkshire, boarding school at Eton, a year in Ireland after college, his work for the BBC when he came back, his passion for horses, love of his children, and disappointments of his marriage. He had no desire to be married again. He had dated a few women since his separation and divorce from his wife, but no one he cared about particularly or loved, or wanted to see more of.
He said he had a weakness for actresses, which didn’t serve him well. “They’re so incredibly narcissistic,” he said, and she confessed that her nemeses were would-be writers. He asked her again if she and Alexander Green had ever been romantically involved durin
g the years they’d worked together. It seemed logical to him that it could have happened—she was a beautiful woman—but when he asked her, she said no, and he could see in her eyes that she was telling the truth, although he still had a sense at times that there were things she wasn’t telling him. He assumed they were the painful parts of her youth, like the mother who had abandoned her, and the father she had lost. It never dawned on him that it could be something else much more complicated than that.
He was incredibly drawn to Alex, but he didn’t want to create a difficult situation for either of them with their work, so he held back. And he had no idea how she felt about him. He loved their evenings together, but she was demure and very shy and in some ways very young. He guessed that she had little experience, and she had admitted to him that she had gone out with only a few men. Her entire life was devoted to her work. She was just the kind of woman he would have wanted to find, if he wanted to marry again, but he didn’t. He had vowed after his divorce never to make that mistake a second time. Alex wasn’t the kind of woman he could take lightly, and he didn’t want her to get hurt. Having a casual affair with her would have seemed like profound disrespect, even if she’d been willing, but she wasn’t that kind of woman. He felt it best to remain good friends. And their friendship was deepening day by day. They enjoyed many of the same things, and had a lot in common. It became increasingly natural to spend time together when they could. It was all very wholesome and pure, which was comfortable for them both.
The male lead in the series got a terrible flu that ended in bronchitis, the female lead caught it from him, and they had to stop shooting for a few days, and it could even turn into a week. They shot around them for as long as they were able, and then they had to stop, and Miles turned up in her office grinning broadly.
“We’ve got it!” he whispered as he approached her desk.
“Got what?” She was looking at one of the latest scripts and was distracted.
The Right Time Page 24
