Love in Reality: A Contemporary Romance (The Blackjack Quartet) (17 page)

Rand explained about the night shift Control Room. “She can’t take her mike off, though. It, uh, rather cramps a guy’s style to make no noise at all,” he teased.

“Let me think about it. I may know someone who can help.” Deb straightened up. “Whatever you do, do not let Marcy know about this. She’ll have your guts for garters,” she said ominously.

“Ya think?”

“Oh, and Rand,” Deb said before she headed down the hall. “She can’t win.”

“As she’s already informed me. Seems she’d figured that out before getting here.”

“Hmm. Not as ditzy as we thought.” Deb waved at him as she walked away.

* * *

“When Chris won the Shark Fight, I figured he might put me on the hook, but then he put Arielle and Jim on,” Lissa was explaining carefully. Rand smiled at her endearing way of including all the relevant backstory when she answered his questions. She must think it made his job easier.

“…Then Jim won the Get Off The Hook competition, so I really thought I’d be in trouble, but Chris put Bryce up, which was the point, I think. Only someone in Chris’s alliance must have deviated from the plan because Arielle got fished out.”

Rand followed his script, but his mind was on their time together after her taped session. He had something new to try. The silent make-out sessions in the Journal Room were exciting—painfully, irresistibly so—but if he didn’t get his hands on more of Lissa’s skin he was going to explode from frustration. He hadn’t dared do more than kiss her in case her mike got reactivated, but he might have a way around that.

When he was done with the taped bits, Rand turned off the feed from Lissa’s mike. He opened the door and signaled her to come with him.

She hesitated. “Rand, I can’t,” she mouthed.

“It’s okay. I’ve turned off your mike.”

“People will think I’m cheating if I leave the Journal Room.”

“Oh, and coming on the show under false pretenses wasn’t cheating?”

She looked horrified, her mouth open.

He gestured to the room behind him. “Everyone thinks you’re here to win a million dollars. You and I know differently.”

She still shook her head.

“All they can do is kick you out,” he reminded her. “And I’m as committed as you are to preventing that.”

“Can’t we just stand here?” she whispered.

He tugged on her hand. “I can’t be sure the Control Room hasn’t turned your mike back on unless I’m in here to watch the light. Just—” he bent to kiss the hand he held. He could smell her hair, her skin.

She fiddled with her hair. She was nervous, but he didn’t care. “Please?” he coaxed. “I’ll show you.”

She nodded reluctantly. She said nothing as she stepped gingerly over the threshold. Rand was amused when she looked around the cluttered space he had to work in. There was a stool in front of the smoky window, with his script on a clipboard. He turned off the little book light. She took it all in—camera equipment, various switches and speakers, lights, phones, his headset.

“It’s very small,” she murmured.

He pointed to a single spot on a computer screen, dark where all the other lights were on. “That’s your mike. I’ve asked the Control Room to turn off the tape while I chat with you. After maybe twenty minutes, they’re bound to turn it back on, figuring I forgot to tell them you’d left. If they turn the tape back on, or if they start to monitor your feed, that light comes back on.”

He didn’t mention his biggest fear was Marcy walking into the Control Room, even this late in the evening. They’d have to turn Lissa’s mike on then, and if Rand didn’t see it? The results would not be pretty.

“Ah. So as long as I’m in here, you can watch for that light, which you aren’t able to see when you’re in the Journal Room.”

“Right. And frankly, me in there with you is just as illegal as you being in here with me.”

“Illegal is such a harsh word,” she said. “Let’s say it’s against the rules.”

How lawyerly. Oh, right—she came from a family of lawyers. “Okay. Well, you know—some rules are meant to be broken,” Rand coaxed.

“Only my overwhelming desire for you allows me to accept such nonsense,” she said drily. But her eyes were bright and eager. She was being won over.

“And it’s my overwhelming desire to kiss you properly that requires you to come in here,” he teased.

When she finally relaxed, he pulled her into his arms. “Now,” he said softly, “if I position you just right here, I can see the computer screen.”

He bent to kiss her, but she put a hand up. “Whoa, cowboy. I’ve got a question.”

He groaned theatrically. “What part of ‘only twenty minutes’ do you not comprehend?”

“I still don’t understand how we’re getting away with this. Do you have some leverage here such that everyone’s willing to help you uh, ‘talk’ to me?”

A fair question—and curse her for continuing to seem less ditzy than even Rand had imagined. “It’s like a game. No, not the Fishbowl. Most of us don’t care about the Fishbowl. You guys come and go every season, while we’re just trudging along trying to get a TV show on the air. But Marcy is a true believer. All that,” he pointed to the monitors showing where everyone was inside
The Fishbowl
set, “is real to her. And subverting her—her dominion, I guess—becomes our little game on this side of the glass. My chatting you up is subversion of the highest order. I was careful who I asked for help, but I have a few friends here and there.”

Lissa shook her head in bemused admiration. “I’ll bet you do, you schemer. Okay, if you say it’s safe, then it’s safe. It’s just the risks aren’t entirely balanced. If we’re caught, I’m kicked off
The Fishbowl
, which is no big loss for me. But you’ll be fired.”

“Which is why it would be silly to risk my job if all we’re going to do is chat about situational ethics,” he murmured, leaning down to cup her face in his hands. “Let’s make it worth all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, shall we?”

He kissed her. Her lips were soft and parted, her breath sweet on his tongue. He felt he was sinking into her warmth, into the heat of their skin touching, until he was on fire for her.

He slid his hands down her back, over the bulge of the mike’s transmitter and on to the hems of her shorts. Her skin was warm and firm. She cocked her leg up as she pressed hard against him. He wanted her naked, both of them naked. He ached to be inside her.

She pulled back to start to tug at the hem of his polo shirt. “Good thing you’re not wired for sound,” she laughed softly. He glanced at the board but her light was still out. When she had the shirt loose, he pulled it over his head and let it fall to the ground.

Lissa started to kiss his shoulders and the skin under his ear. Her initiative surprised him but he was too turned on to worry about who did what. He wished he could undress her, but the way she was wired made that hard to do. He ran his hands up her top and then over her breasts. Her nipples felt good—his mouth watered at the thought of kissing them, but he knew he’d lose his mind and common sense if he started down that road.

Keeping an eye on the monitor was hard. His bright idea wasn’t going to be enough of an improvement in their make-out sessions. Nudity would be nice, but even nicer would be the chance to focus on making love to Lissa properly.

“You’re thinking too much,” she murmured as she kissed one of his nipples and played with the other.

“One of us has to,” he growled, staring at the computer screen.

More kissing, more skin, more friction, more desire… then she pushed him away. “Um, I know you like me, but I don’t think I’m the only reason you’re vibrating,” she said.

Oh, God—his phone. He pulled it out and checked the text. He swore once then apologized.

“Fun’s over?” she asked.

He kissed her again, grateful that she understood—particularly when he had nearly gotten lost in what they were doing.

“Yup.” He caressed her waist as he gently moved her away. It was completely predictable, Rand knew, but he felt cheated. “I’m needed in the Control Room.”

“Right,” Lissa said. She picked up his shirt and handed it to him. He felt itchy with desire and a little confused.

“I want to stay, but I can’t,” he started to explain, but she just smiled.

“I get it. Go. It’s not like I won’t be here when you get back. Well, not here precisely,” she waved at the equipment. “I’ll be somewhere around here. Just use the PA and call me. I’ll come,” she teased.

“Funny.” He kissed her swiftly.

* * *

“You must be pleased with yourself,” Debbie said. She joined him in front of the master whiteboard in their office, the one covered with notes and comments, showing which Fish were still playing and which were gone.

“What d’you mean?” Rand asked. He sounded testy and frustrated, the result of increasingly hot make-out sessions with Lissa that ended too soon and never the way he wanted them to.

“Look at how well your quartet of brainiacs is doing,” Debbie whispered.

Rand resisted the urge to look around for the infernal interns or, worse, Marcy herself. He and Debbie weren’t slacking off. Staring at the whiteboard
was
their job.

And Debbie was right. By all accounts, his picks were controlling the game. Tommy had been fished out in Week Four when Susie won the Shark Fight, and Bryce had just gone last week when Kai was again the Shark.

“That’s not what I’m focused on,” Rand said.

“Spit it out, then. Troubles with the screenplay?”

“No. That’s going well.”

“What then? Because you’ve been acting like Marcy slammed the door on your tail. Which is doubly weird because she’s been surprisingly happy with the stories so far.”

Rand shook his head. “It’s not Marcy—for once.” He opened his mouth to say more but nothing came out.

“Okay, fine. Don’t tell me.” Debbie turned to walk away. Rand put a hand on her shoulder.

“Would a more physical Shark Fight work better this week?” he asked in a louder voice. “Y’know, give Dylan a chance to be the Shark?”

Debbie came back to stand with him in front of the whiteboard.

“What the hell is going on, then?” she hissed.

“I—you know about my time with Lissa?”

“Yeah. The first week, right?”

“Every night.”

She wheeled on him. “Are you fucking nuts?”

Rand grabbed her shoulder. “Shhh.”

Debbie wrenched her body away from his grasp. “No. No way. No
fucking
way. Tell me you’re not doing this.” Her whisper sounded like one of the three witches in
Macbeth
. She might as well have pronounced that “trouble this way comes.”

“Look, no one notices. We do the narrative clips first, really fast because she doesn’t need to have the process explained to her several times. Then I turn off her mike feed and we make out. The whole thing takes barely more time than I spent with a numb-nut like Bryce.”

“
Make out!”
She sucked in a breath that didn’t seem to calm her at all. “What are you, fifteen? My son is smoother than that.”

Yup. Fifteen and just as horny. “It’s killing me,” Rand admitted. “But it’s the best I can come up with. She’s in the bedroom with Sgt. Pepper, so our time in the Journal Room is all we have. If she won the Shark Fight people might notice she takes longer.” Plus, Dylan would start sucking up to Lissa, which would drive Rand crazier than he was already.

“What if she gets fished out?”

“Then I’ll never see her. There’s no way I could sneak into the Holding Tank,” Rand pointed out.

He and Debbie were just starting to get B-roll footage from the private house the company had rented up in the canyon. As it filled with fished-out contestants, shots of the half-dozen Fish who stuck around to decide the winner got spliced into the regular episodes. With only the Country Bumpkin and the Vixen there, the recent Holding Tank footage put even Marcy to sleep. Now that Bryce had gotten fished out, Marcy was hoping Ariella De Vil tackled him to the ground the moment he arrived at the Holding Tank.

Debbie plunked her fists on her hips and stared at Rand. Finally, she led him over to a corner of the room with a table and chairs. No one slowed down long enough to use the space for impromptu meetings. The ceiling light had burned out ages ago with no complaints. Debbie pushed him into a chair.

“When we talked about this at the beginning, I thought you were just playing with Marcy, you know, giving the kid some tips on the game.”

“I told you I wasn’t helping Lissa cheat.”

Debbie rubbed her forehead with both hands. “Yeah. I didn’t believe you.”

Rand’s eyebrows couldn’t go any higher. “Holy shit. You thought I was…”

Words failed him. He pressed his hands on the table, leaning forward. “I’ve been in agony with every competition, waiting to see if Lissa’s going to be the Shark and thus be stuck in that room, or get fished out and even less available to me. She keeps winning enough to stay in the game while losing—deliberately?—every Shark Fight. I don’t tell her to do that. I’m not sure I’d know how to make it happen.”

“So what the hell is going on?”

Rand sat back and shrugged. “Embarrassing to admit, but…I think I’m falling for her.”

“You’ll get fired.”

“That was part of the game plan, as you’ll recall.”

“Yeah, but it’s tacky to get caught fondling the Fish,” Debbie retorted. “You’ll be like that crew member on
The Bachelor
. Not cool.”

“Unless I up the stakes,” Rand said slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s what Brad would do.”

“Who’s Brad?”

“My protagonist. In the screenplay. He’d find a way to sleep with Jenna. That’s Lissa’s character.”

“Impossible. Remember? Cameras and mikes twenty-four hours a day?”

Rand scowled. “He’d find a way. He’s smarter than I am.”

“So think up a way, but don’t actually do it.”

“I just want to.”

His and Lissa’s make-out sessions, stretched as far as he dared, were the best part of his day. Rand finally understood the meaning of that story about the guy in Greek mythology, Tantalus, whose food and drink moved away from him every time he tried to grab them. That about summed it up—delights just out of reach.