Love Me

by Love Me (ARC) (epub)

  But one drink turned into three, and eventually she gave up altogether. Sometimes the green pills made Gabby want to do things that weren’t necessarily the smartest when she thought about them later on. Even if she did make it to Palm Springs in one piece, maybe it wasn’t the best idea, strategically, to just drop in on Eddie like that, unannounced. When Amanda had been staying with the Prestons, on the rare occasions she could be roused from her Harry Gordon–induced catatonia to offer the advice about boys that Gabby craved, she had mentioned that men liked it when you played hard to get.

  So Gabby was playing hard to get. She’d waited a week, until she was sure Eddie would be back, and then she managed to hold out another three days. And it was worth it. When at last she broke down and telephoned that morning, she finally—finally—got something she could use.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Sharp isn’t in. He’s recording on the Olympus lot today.”

  It was like music to Gabby’s ears—beautiful music, the kind Eddie wanted to make together.

  She hung up the phone, called the studio, and asked them to send a car for her, and an hour later, here she was strolling nonchalantly across the Olympus lot as though she’d planned to be here all along. Easy as pie. And if Eddie has been thinking about me even one-sixteenth as much as I’ve been thinking about him, Gabby told herself, he’s going to be pretty damn happy to see me.

  The recording studios at Olympus were clustered behind the grand compound housing the administrative offices of Mr. Karp—supposedly because he liked to throw open his windows to listen to the beautiful music that came from them, but in reality, this was just a story the publicity department had fed to the movie magazines, designed to make the gullible public feel as if the second-most-highly-paid man in America were a fan just like them. Every last studio was completely soundproof.

  Gabby took the shortcut around the garden of tropical flowers decorated with Greek-style statues depicting the twelve Olympian gods and goddesses in a rather more modest state of dress than was strictly classical (the prudish Mr. Karp refused to have them any other way).

  A gleaming studio limo pulled up in front of the grand building, and Gabby crouched behind an enormous magenta azalea bush to see who was getting out. It was Margo Sterling and Dane Forrest, accompanied by Larry Julius, looking so serious he could have been a prison guard walking them to the gallows. Jesus, Gabby thought. I wonder what they’re in for.

  She didn’t have much time to ponder this delightfully fascinating problem before she saw a familiar black-clad, bright-haired figure in dark glasses trudging slowly down the cobblestone road. “Yoo-hoo!” Gabby called. “Amanda.”

  “Gabby,” Amanda replied, stiffly returning her friend’s proffered embrace. “Hello.”

  “Did you get a load of those two?” Gabby asked, gesturing to the limo still idling by the curb.

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Our own Romeo and Juliet. Walking into Karp’s office like they were going to their own funeral.”

  Amanda’s lips were strangely white. She pressed them together tightly in a grim approximation of a smile. “I’m afraid I might be doing the same thing.”

  “You’ve got a meeting with Karp?”

  “No, of course not. You think I’ve ever even met Mr. Karp? They’ve got me in with some underling.”

  Gabby gulped. “It’s not about your contract, is it?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.”

  “What does your agent say?”

  Amanda gave a short bark of a laugh. “He’s either very busy or very busy pretending to be. I couldn’t get him on the phone.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Gabby said kindly. “He probably is just awfully busy. You know how they are. And you’ve still got weeks left on your contract. They’re probably just checking in. You haven’t exactly been out and about as much as you used to be. They haven’t seen you in person in a while. Maybe they’ve got a picture they want to put you on and just want to make sure you didn’t get fat or something.”

  “Maybe,” Amanda said, but she didn’t look convinced.

  “Sure. And even if it …” Gabby paused. Everyone in Hollywood was superstitious. Saying certain unthinkable things out loud seemed to invite bad luck on the speaker and listener alike. “… if it isn’t good news,” she said finally, “there are plenty of other places to go. MGM needs new faces.”

  “MGM.” Amanda snorted. “Yeah, right. Why don’t I just apply to be the Queen of England, while I’m at it?”

  “Columbia, then. Or you could sign with one of the independents. David Selznick is doing awfully swell things with those girls he keeps importing from Europe. Howard Hughes might take you on. Or Oscar Zellman, he’s always been fond of you.”

  Amanda’s gaze darted toward the neat row of stucco buildings at the end of the row, as though desperate to think about anything other than what an exclusive contract with Oscar Zellman might entail. “Are you recording today?”

  Gabby shrugged. “I’m not sure yet. Maybe.”

  “With Eddie Sharp? You sounded marvelous together the other night.”

  “Do you really think so?” Gabby’s heart leapt in her chest.

  “Oh yes. It was the best thing I’ve heard in ages.”

  “I’m so glad! I wasn’t sure you’d heard it. I didn’t see you afterward.” Gabby grinned mischievously. “Come to think of it, I didn’t see Harry afterward either.” Suddenly, she felt a painful stab of envy. Margo, living in Dane Forrest’s house, sleeping in his bed, just like they were husband and wife; Amanda, off somewhere in the dark with Harry Gordon. Everyone’s doing it but me, Gabby thought miserably. I’m just some stupid virgin singing “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”; in the meantime, everyone else knows what it feels like. “I don’t suppose you found him, did you?”

  Amanda shut her eyes. “I have to go. I’m late.”

  I said the wrong thing, Gabby thought. “Amanda, I—”

  “It’s all right. I just really have to go.”

  “Okay, okay.” Gabby gave her friend an apologetic smile. “I’ll probably be in the commissary later, if you feel like coming by. We’ll pig out on ice cream, if they’ll let us.”

  A terse nod was all Amanda could manage before she scurried away.

  Pushing back her guilt—Why, why do I always say the wrong thing?—Gabby focused her attention on the task at hand. She knew Eddie Sharp’s orchestra was in one of those studios. Nothing more than a wall of stucco (and fiberglass, and a special state-of-the-art soundproofing rubber that the studio had discreetly ordered—at great expense to Mr. Karp’s pocketbook and morality—from some scientists in Nazi Germany) separated her from Eddie. Just the thought of it was enough to make a shiver of excitement run down her spine.

  But which one was it? She couldn’t very well go barging into every studio. Interrupting the wrong recording session could cost Olympus hundreds of dollars, dollars that would be deducted from her paycheck, if the conductor was surly enough to tell someone about it. And then she could kiss any semblance of a life goodbye for the next hundred years. Maybe two.

  There was a little stone bench nestled against Mr. Karp’s trellis wall. Mostly hidden from the street, it provided a good view of the side entrances of the recording studios. I’ll just sit right there, Gabby thought, and wait. If anyone asks me what I’m doing, I’ll just say I was looking for a quiet place to learn some lyrics or something.

  The sun was hot, and the sweet, waxy smell of oranges drifting from the little grove in front of the commissary was strong and soothing. It had been days since Gabby had slept of her own accord, but suddenly, her eyelids began to droop. She saw Eddie’s face looming before her, his eyes sparkling, felt the warmth of his breath as his beautiful lips came slowly toward hers. In the distance, an odd scraping sound, faint at first, grew louder and louder.

  Funny, she th
ought, that was how it sounded when the old vaudeville guys used to do the soft shoe. But there was no vaudeville anymore. It had to be something else: the papery scratch of a nail file, Viola’s old willow broom sweeping the dust from the front porch, a scared little ghost crab scuttling across sand …

  “Gabby?”

  Groggily, she opened her eyes, blinking against the bright light. Silhouetted against the sky, blocking out half the sun like a partial eclipse, was the blurry face of Dexter Harrington, a thin stream of cigarette smoke curling from his amused mouth.

  “Dammit,” Gabby said, “why does everyone think I’m so goddamn funny?”

  Dexter laughed out loud. “Are you always so cheerful in the mornings?”

  She coughed in reply, pointing at his cigarette.

  He took another drag. “What are you doing here?”

  “Learning my lines.” She scowled at him.

  “You looked asleep to me.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of hypnosis?” she asked crossly. “It’s supposed to help with the memorization process. Ask anyone.”

  “Don’t you worry that if you sit here long enough, old Mr. Karp is going to look out that fancy window of his and wonder what he’s paying you for?”

  “Funny,” Gabby said coolly, “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Me?” Dexter dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and stubbed it out with the tip of his shoe. “I’m hard at work laying down a track.”

  “Oh?” Gabby arranged her features in a convincing look of surprise. “What are you recording?”

  “It’s supposed to be some background jazz for a movie, but things have gotten a little off track. You know Eddie.”

  I don’t, but I want to. “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.” Eddie stopped yelling at his horn section long enough to rake his eyes over Gabby. “What’s shakin’, toots?”

  In a polo shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his muscular arms and a porkpie hat pulled low over his eyes, which only served to call extra attention to his incredible mouth, Eddie looked like about the hottest guy Gabby had ever seen. Even if she hadn’t been struggling to swallow the handful of green wake-up pills she’d surreptitiously fished out of her pocket and jammed into her mouth as she followed Dexter into the building—it wouldn’t do to be sleepy in front of Eddie—Gabby would have been tongue-tied at the sight of him.

  To her relief, Dexter answered. “I found her catching forty winks on the bench outside.”

  “Lazy bum.” Eddie grinned. “What say we put you to work before you get picked up for vagrancy?”

  The pills had dissolved in the back of her throat, but still Gabby could barely speak. “What … what do you mean?”

  “I want a female vocal on this track we’re laying down. ‘Little Girl Blue.’ Rodgers and Hart. I’m trying to fill in with clarinet, but it just doesn’t work structurally without the sung melody for reference. Once through, and one pickup at the bridge. You know the song?”

  “Sure. Oh, and speaking of cats …”

  “Yeah, yeah. Later. So, we’ll do it in A-flat, over the playback. That should be fine for you, no?”

  “Wait!” Gabby cried. This was all happening so fast. Not so much as a how-do-you-do and he was already putting her to work. What should she do? More importantly, what would Amanda do? Play hard to get. Keep your head. Don’t give him something he wants until he gives you something you want. “Wait just a second. You don’t expect me to just sing for you for free, do you?”

  Eddie’s mouth twitched. “I was thinking of it more as a favor between friends.”

  Oh God, is he mad? I made him mad! Quickly, she tried to cover with a joke. “Sure, friends is great,” she said in her best impression of one of the Dead End kids, miming as though she had a cigar clenched between her teeth. “Friends ain’t gonna keep me off the streets and out of the joint, you know what I mean?”

  Eddie laughed. “All right, kid, whaddya want from me?”

  What did Gabby want? The answer flew into her head, clear as crystal. I want to be alone someplace with Eddie. “Well,” she said shyly, “remember how the other night you told me you’d take me out sometime to hear some real music? ‘Not all this treacly studio crap,’ you said. Real jazz.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  Eddie looked thoughtful. Pensive, even. It was a word she’d heard Margo use, and she liked the sound of it. “All right. It’s a date.”

  “Really?” Gabby’s squeal probably didn’t fall under the banner of hard to get, but she couldn’t help it. “Tonight?”

  “When else? Meet me in the studio commissary at eight. I’ll take you someplace that’ll knock the socks right off your feet. Now get your cute little caboose in front of that microphone and make me a happy man.”

  Beaming ear to ear, Gabby did as she was told. Who cared about leers on the faces of some of the men, or the flicker of hangdog disapproval on Dexter’s? They could whisper and stare all they wanted. It didn’t make any difference to her. She was going on a date, a real date, with Eddie Sharp! He’d said so right in front of everybody! It was too, too wonderful for words.

  But it was only when Eddie was in the booth and she had the headphones on that she realized how wonderful it was.

  “Oh, and Gabby, one more thing,” he murmured, in a low, sexy voice he knew only she could hear. “Make sure you don’t bring your mother.”

  It was then, and absolutely then, staring through the glass of the recording booth into his dark, twinkling eyes, that Gabby was surer of one thing than she’d ever been about anything in her entire life. She didn’t care what it took. She didn’t care how it happened.

  Gabby Preston was going to lose her virginity to Eddie Sharp.

  And as far as she was concerned, it couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Thirteen

  “Children!”

  Leo Karp clapped his small, square hands together in delight as Margo and Dane were ushered into his office. His palms gave off a thick, dull echo, like the sound of a baseball landing hard against the pocket of a leather mitt. “I couldn’t be happier to see you both. Dane, my boy,” he said, playfully cuffing the crook of the younger man’s arm. It was about the only part of him the famously diminutive Mr. Karp could easily reach. “I don’t think I have to tell you how proud we are of you. And, Margo, my dear.” He took her hand in both of his and raised it to his lips theatrically. “You look absolutely radiant. Keeping your weight under control, I’m glad to see. I wish more of our girls had your kind of discipline.”

  Margo blushed furiously, running her gloved hands down the skirt of her silk flowered dress. That’s Leo Karp, all right, she thought. You can’t gain or lose an ounce in this place without him hearing about it, and he wants to make sure you know it.

  “Good to see you too, Leo,” Dane said firmly, settling himself into one of the white leather chairs. Since when does he call Mr. Karp by his first name?

  If Mr. Karp was taken aback by this sudden informality, he didn’t show it. “And for you to come—both of you—to see me just like this, on such short notice, with your busy schedules, well …” He beamed. “It just warms my heart.”

  For the first time since Larry Julius had materialized on the doorstep, Margo felt a stab of real terror. Thankfully, her mandatory summonses to Leo Karp’s pristine, all-white office fortress had been seldom, but in her limited experience, the more extravagantly and lovingly the studio chief humbled himself before you, the more impossible and painful his demands were about to be. The day he’d commanded her, on pain of firing and subsequent homelessness, to give up any thought of Dane and to embark upon a completely fake public relationship with Jimmy Molloy (who frankly couldn’t have been less interested in women in general and Margo in particular), he’d pr
actically driven himself to tears begging her to think of him as her own father.

  Dane produced a cigarette from his engraved gold case and lit it with painstaking slowness. It was a well-known fact that Leo Karp hated cigarette smoking. Normally, the only person who got away with it in his presence was Larry Julius, who, sure enough, was already puffing away from his usual chair beneath the enormous white lacquer cage that housed Nelson and Cleopatra, Mr. Karp’s pair of matched white cockatoos.

  It’s a power play, Margo thought suddenly. He’s trying to show Mr. Karp that he’s not scared of him.

  “I’m sure it’s our pleasure, Leo,” Dane said with studied calmness, exhaling lavish curlicues of smoke through his mouth and nose. “Now, are you going to tell us what this is all about, or do you not want to spoil the suspense?”

  “Suspense? Who do I look like, Alfred Hitchcock? I just wanted to have a chat with my two favorite stars, that’s all. Shouldn’t a proud papa get to have a nice visit with his children?” Mr. Karp was still beaming, his tone terrifyingly light. “After all, so much has happened since I’ve last seen you. Diana Chesterfield, for instance. You must be so relieved to see she’s back safe and sound.”

  Here it comes, Margo thought, feeling the color drain from her face. He’s going to tell Dane he has to go back with Diana and we’re all through.

  She felt a sudden urge to fling her body over Dane’s, as though she were a bodyguard throwing herself in front of an oncoming bullet. Yet a glance at Dane, suddenly gone as still and inexpressive as a wax figure, told her that such a dramatic gesture would be unwelcome. Apparently, stiff upper lips were the order of the day.