Heartthrob (8 page)

“It’s Jericho Beaumont.” His voice sounded harsh, hoarse. “Mary Kate O’Laughlin tells me she faxed you a copy of a contract addendum and—”

“Jeez, I’m sorry, Jericho. I tried to negotiate it down, but the entire thing is a deal breaker. You sign it as is, or you don’t get the job.”

Jed swore softly.

“Look,” Ron said. “I know you’re probably mad as hell—I would be, too—but … think of it as dues you’ve got to pay to get back onto the A-list, buddy. Even though it’s an indy, it’s a Vic Strauss movie. And with Susie McCoy and Jamaal Hawkes ready to make the jump aboard, we’re talking high profile.”

“But, Ron …” He lowered his voice. “Damn it, have you read this thing?”

“Of course I’ve read it. It stinks. But truth is, you don’t exactly have offers piling up right now. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but
Mean Time
is having trouble finding distribution—it may never see the light of day. So come on. Suck it up, sign the deal. Do what you have to do to get back on track. And, hey, maybe your supervisor will be a blonde.”

Jericho looked over at Kate, who stood in front of an open file cabinet, at least pretending to give him some privacy.

“Call me later and let me know what you’ve decided,” Ron said. “I gotta run.”

The connection was cut, and Jed slowly hung up the phone.
Suck it up and sign the deal.
He picked up the agreement and started to read.

It was all there, exactly as Kate had sketched out—right down to the locked trailer door.

When he finished reading, he started over, and read it through again.

He wanted this part.

He wanted it, enough to do anything. Even sign his life away.

It was funny, he’d thought he’d swallowed all that was left of his pride by going to that open call audition, and then again by coming here today. But somehow, he still had some pride left, and it caught in his throat, damn near choking him as he took a pen from the surface of Kate’s desk.

He forced his anger and his shame away, and made himself feel nothing as he signed both copies of the agreement, writing the date next to his name. He sensed Kate standing behind him, and as he put the pen down, he turned to her, not bothering to hide the emptiness in his eyes. “Send the contract to my agent.”

Considering she’d just won a major victory, she didn’t look triumphant. In fact, she looked shaken as she stared down at his signature on both agreements. She looked as if she might have to run to the bathroom at any second to be violently sick.

“Oh, and congratulations,” he told her. “You’ve done what millions of women across America are dying to do.”

She looked up at him, confusion on her face.

Jed stepped closer to her, close enough to smell her expensive
perfume, close enough so that when he spoke, his breath moved the hair next to her ear.

“You fucked me good,” he said softly. And then he walked away.

“H
ey, babe!” Victor breezed into the busy Grady Falls production office. “Do me a favor, would ya?”

Kate glanced up from the shoot schedules and housing assignments that were spread across the conference table. She noticed that she wasn’t the only one in the suite of rooms who’d responded to Victor’s greeting. In the outer office, at least four young women on the production staff had also looked up from their work. Didn’t it figure? But, in this case, Kate was indeed the babe he was talking to. He came into the back room they’d labeled the conference area, and shut the door behind him.

“Welcome back,” she said. He’d been in L.A. for the better part of the week.

“Get a fax out to that writer pal of yours and see what he can do about beefing up the part of Sarah.”

Kate raised an eyebrow. “This is a joke, right?”

Victor sat across from her, stretching his legs out, elbows on the arms of the chair. He used the file folder he was carrying to push up the bill of his baseball cap. “No. I think we’ve got a chance at getting Naomi Michaelson for Sarah. But as it stands, there’s not much of a part.”

“That’s because Sarah is
dead.
”

The character only appeared in a few flashback scenes, and occasionally as a kind of ghostly memory, flitting at the edge of Virgil Laramie’s alcohol-sodden consciousness.

“She doesn’t have any dialogue, and I’m not sure Naomi’ll take the part if we can’t throw her at least a few lines. Maybe if we add more flashback scenes—”

Kate put down her pencil. “Victor. Babe. The script is too long as it is. I’m not going to ask for story rewrites and make it even longer—just so you can get into Naomi Michaelson’s pants.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Am I really that transparent?”

“You’re top quality window glass, my friend.”

“I met her at a party in L.A. last week,” he confessed. “She’s unbelievably beautiful. I only had about fifteen minutes to talk to her before she had to leave, but there was a real spark between us, you know? I told her we were still looking for the perfect Sarah. She nearly dropped her drink when she found out we had Beaumont, McCoy, and Hawkes already committed.”

Kate gazed at her ex-husband. His beat-up baseball cap was emblazoned with the name of his first feature film,
Dead of Night.
She was struck again by the fact that he’d seemed to have changed so little in the past ten years. Sure, he drove a more expensive car and had a new, pricy address, and his résumé was now filled with an impressive list of both box office and critical hits, but aside from that, he was still a fourteen-year-old when it came to romantic relationships.

And because of that, although she still felt a twinge of remorse for what might’ve been, she could look at him and feel no jealousy whatsoever when he talked about other women.

He hadn’t been the man she’d hoped he was, and she’d grown out of him very quickly. She honestly didn’t want him anymore. Not as a life partner, anyway.

Now, if only she could figure out what she
did
want.

Virgil Laramie.
She wanted Virgil Laramie. And these days, he was coming to her in a package that looked exactly like Jericho Beaumont.

Kate had been dreaming about an odd mix of both her character and the actor for weeks. In her mind they had begun to blend dangerously into one. And this wasn’t good, because although Jericho could
pretend
to be Laramie, he
wasn’t
Laramie.

She knew that. She’d been reminding herself of that every chance she got.

But when she closed her eyes, she could smell the slightly sweet, slightly spicy fragrance of Jericho’s cologne. He’d stood close enough for her to feel his body heat, close enough to feel his breath against her cheek.

She hadn’t really expected him to sign the humiliating agreement she’d drawn up. Yet he had. He’d wanted the part of Laramie badly enough to place all control over his personal life into her hands.

And after the initial shock had worn off, Kate had started to get excited about the possibilities. With 24/7 supervision, it was extremely unlikely that Jericho was going to fall back into his old habits. Even if he wanted to stray, he was going to be watched virtually all the time.

The man Kate had hired to watch Jericho was a former marine named Bobby Hollander. Hollander was a huge, hulking, unfriendly looking bear of a man with an impressive set of credentials. It hadn’t been easy to find someone she could trust completely, but Hollander’s last job had been similar. He’d been hired to supervise the nineteen-year-old son of a Fortune 500 Company CEO. The kid had been through rehab but needed a little extra help staying sober once out of the hospital. She’d spoken with the CEO, and he’d given Hollander a glowing reference.

Somehow, she got the feeling that Jericho Beaumont wasn’t going to like Hollander quite so much.

Across the room Victor was still talking about Naomi—about how she looked enough like Susie McCoy to play the part of her older sister. Her hair was the same shade of golden blonde, and her mouth and chin had a remarkably similar shape. He was almost certain they could throw some extra lines of dialogue in for her without increasing the running time of the movie by more than a few minutes.

He was smitten and ready to do just about anything to get close to this woman. There was no doubt about it. But it wasn’t necessary.

“Whatever you said to Naomi,” she told him, “it made an impression. Her agent called two days ago, and I expressed them a copy of the script. I got a fax this morning—Naomi’s our Sarah. We don’t have to add a single line of dialogue.”

Victor sat up. “Why didn’t you tell me that when I came in?”

“Because I didn’t realize it would matter so much to you,” Kate told him. “Then, when you started talking, I wanted to see how far you were willing to go to get this girl.” She smiled at him. “You didn’t disappoint me. You’re obviously willing to compromise artistic integrity for a cheap thrill.”

He grinned at her. “I’d compromise nothing. If the scenes didn’t work, they’d hit the cutting room floor, no question.”

“So it would be a very
expensive
thrill. All that extra shoot time, all that extra film …”

Victor stood up. “The point is now moot. Reserve a private trailer for Naomi for the entire month of June.”

“Like hell I will. We need her for two days of shooting—maybe three, tops.”

“Katie. Babe—”

“You’ll have three days, Victor. After that, it’s up to you to figure out a way to get her to stay on the set as your guest.”

Undaunted, Victor pushed himself up out of the chair.
“Make a note on the schedule to send me a reminder memo the day before Naomi’s due to arrive.”

“I’ve already done that,” she told him. “You’ll get memos in advance of all of the talents’ arrival and departure dates. In fact”—she shuffled through the papers on her desk—“I might as well save Annie a trip and give you this one now.”

Victor glanced at the sheet of paper she handed him. “Both Jericho and Jamaal arrive tomorrow.”

“And Susie’ll be here the day after.”

He looked up at her, all teasing gone from his eyes. “Are you ready for Jericho Beaumont?”

Kate smiled grimly. God, she hoped so. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Jed stepped inside of one of the two trailers that were to be his home for the next two and a half months.

It was … a trailer. It was neat and clean, if not particularly luxurious. There was a refrigerator and a tiny cookstove and sink, along with a small table with bench seats. The refrigerator was well stocked with bottled water, cans of soda, orange juice, and milk. There were cabinets filled with dishes and glasses, and a drawer full of silverware. Another cabinet held a wide selection of junk food. A third held dozens of drug test kits. Jed closed that door quickly.

This was the trailer he’d be spending his days in.

On the other side of the room, a couch lined one wall. There was a TV setup, with a VCR and a cheap boom box. The bathroom was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, with a shower stall about the size of a phone booth, a tiny sink, and a toilet. Farther down the hall—if it was long enough to qualify as a hall—was a bedroom in which the bed had been replaced with another couch and a table.

With the exception of the main entrance, there were no doors anywhere. The back room didn’t have one. The
bathroom
didn’t have one.

Jed had hoped that the addendum to the contract he’d signed had been merely a threat, a “here’s what we’ll do to you if …” kind of deal. Or maybe he’d just been hiding from the truth, hopefully wishing that Mary Kate O’Laughlin wouldn’t really take such extreme measures.

He should have known better.

He set his duffel bag on the couch and went to check out the other trailer—the one that had been designated for sleeping only.

It was the same size, but the cabinets in this one were empty. And instead of a couch in the main room, there was a bed. Another bed was in the back room as well. Both were unmade, their mattresses bare, with sheets and blankets neatly folded on top of them.

This trailer would remain empty to keep him from hiding his stash anywhere—nevermind the fact that he was clean and he didn’t have a stash anymore.

There were no inside doors in this trailer, either. Welcome to privacy hell.

The screen door opened with a squeak, and Jed turned to see Kate step inside. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you arrived,” she said in her deceptively breathless, helpless-little-girl voice. “Welcome to Grady Falls.”

She looked incredible. Her blond hair was feathered loosely around her face, and she was wearing a sleeveless white silk blouse and a slim-fitting khaki skirt that ended many inches above her knees. She was wearing highheeled sandals and natural-colored hose that made her legs seem to shine. She looked gracefully elegant and cool—as if she’d stepped out of a Paris fashion showroom, rather than a film production office in some backwoods, stickily humid, South Carolina swamp of a town.

Her bare arms were slim, the muscles of her shoulders and triceps very slightly defined. Her skin was smooth—and probably as soft to the touch as he’d imagined. Her
arms were nearly as sexy as her legs—and her legs were off the chart.