Really Something (19 page)

“I don't care about the rent and all those details.” As the words left Allie, a lightness filled her chest. Another kind of freedom, a different one from the freedom she'd felt after she'd finally found her true self, invaded her spirit. “I'll find a way to make it work.”

“You're not scared at all?”

Allie laughed. “Sure I am. I'm terrified. I have a thousand what-ifs running through my mind. But I've spent years imagining my name rolling across a film screen, years with scripts sitting in a drawer that I've been too afraid to send out, and I'm not going to live that way anymore.”

Hadn't this week—and Katie's example of overcoming her own personal obstacles—taught her how foolish it was to let fear hold her back? Heck, she'd overcome her fears in all the other areas of her life. She'd lost the weight, come back to Tempest, conquered her personal demons…

Surely she could conquer the ones with her career just as easily.

“I've always been afraid to take the leap,” Allie continued, “because it was easier to stay with the nightmare I knew.” She glanced over at Jerry again, a walking, talking version of his own movies. “Literally.”

“What were you so afraid of?”

Allie turned to Vanessa, her vision blurred by the cloud of tears that suddenly washed over her eyes, and saw more than just the last few years of her career in the word that slipped past her lips. She saw the truth that had defined her life, from high school until now. Allie Dean may have come a long way in so many areas, but there were still a few that she had yet to conquer. “Rejection.”

“And that's why you haven't told Duncan Henry that you're in love with him, huh?”

“I'm not in love with Duncan.”

Vanessa reached out and put a soft hand on Allie's arm. “Hon, you really suck at lying.”

“Two things, Sugar-pie.” Jerry's voice erupted from the walkie-talkie. “A latte, stat. And a Luger. So I can blow Leath's whiny, stupid head off, have it stuffed, and mount it in my office.”

Allie picked up the walkie-talkie and depressed the talk button, all the years of Sugar-pies and latte orders suddenly boiling to the surface in one enormous burst of anger. “Jerry, shut up and quit calling me Sugar-pie. My name is Allie. A-L-L-I-E. Now keep your big boy pants on and wait because I'm busy. I will be there when I am good and ready. And I'm not bringing you a latte. I'm the location scout, not the coffee girl. So drink some goddamned Maxwell House.”

She clicked the button off and waited for the berating that was sure to come.

Nothing.

“Is he screaming?” Allie asked, afraid to look.

“I think he's in shock,” Vanessa said. “He's not even moving. He might be dead.”

“Good. Maybe he'll be quiet for a while. A man like that needs to come with hearing protection.”

Vanessa laughed, then drew Allie into a hug. “You are one kick-butt woman, Allie.”

“Thanks. I'm probably also now a fired kick-butt woman, but still, it feels good.”

“Good enough that you can quit playing it safe with your heart and tell Duncan how you feel?” Vanessa arched a brow.

“No way. Because doing that means telling him who I really am.”

Vanessa stepped back, surprised. “He hasn't guessed?”

“If you were a guy, would you see past all this and guess I used to be Allison Gray?” Allie swept a hand over her hourglass figure.

“I get your point, but still. I thought Duncan went a little deeper than that.”

“Oh, he does,” Allie replied, thinking of the conversations they'd had over the past week, the layers Duncan had revealed. How close she'd come to believing that was the real man.

Vanessa smiled. “Oh, you have it bad, girlfriend.
Really
bad.”

Allie turned and started walking toward the set again, but at a slower pace—her own pace this time. “That's the problem. If I tell Duncan who I really am, then I'll have to admit I've been lying to him and that'll go over about as well as a clown at a funeral.”

Vanessa laughed. “You don't think Duncan is above all that?”

“Come on, Vanessa, do you really think so? What do they say about history? That it always repeats itself? I'm trying to learn from the mistakes of the past.” She drew in a breath. “That's why I'm sticking to the plan. Love him, leave him, and go back to L.A.”

Before he could reject her. Like he had before.

Thinking anything else was just plain crazy. Soon as she got back to L.A., she'd put Tempest and Duncan Henry far behind her.

But the thought didn't fill her with the cheer she'd expected. Instead, disappointment weighed heavily in her gut. Crazy. She didn't want to stay here any more than a carpenter wanted to cut off his right arm.

Vanessa sighed. “Oh, Allie, I wish you'd—”

“Uh…Allie?” Jerry's voice, interrupting again, but this time sounding almost…contrite. “Could you, ah,
please
bring me a latte or a coffee? Just this one more time, please? I have a headache and I think Leath just ran away from home.”

Allie and Vanessa exchanged a glance, then both broke into a fit of giggles. Vanessa laid a hand on Allie's. “If you can change the great Jerry Wiggs, maybe miracles really can happen. Don't give up on Duncan yet.”

That afternoon, Duncan took great satisfaction in putting Jerry Wiggs in his place. As soon as they got on the set and the cameras started rolling, it took about five seconds to get the pompous director to stop inflating his own ego and instead get to the point.

“In Indiana, Mr. Wiggs,” Duncan said, “we're more about substance than flash. So why don't you give us a little meat to go with that frosting you're trying to sell?”

Jerry opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. He turned to Allie, who thus far had sat on her side of the set, quiet as a church mouse, letting Jerry do all the talking during the interview. She'd given her boss a smile, and nothing more.

Silence, Duncan had learned, was the best way to let a subject either dig his own grave or tunnel his way out. It had worked with that NBC reporter and his father—causing John Henry to lose his cool, an event flashed on national television as well as local Tempest TV, undoing years of a carefully orchestrated façade.

“Well, ah, this movie delves into the…” Jerry fidgeted in his seat, looked to Allie again, his eyes wide with “help-me” written all over his face. “Allie?”

She paused, then finally took pity on the guy. “
Sorority Slumber Party Slaughter
may look and sound like your standard teenage horror fare,” Allie said, “but underneath it all is a message.”

“Really?” Duncan said.

“
Really
?” Jerry said, definitely the more surprised of the two.

“Yes. The main character, Wanda Wolfie, turns into a werewolf and exacts revenge because she is tired of being the outsider in her sorority. Because she is going to beauty school in addition to attending college, she doesn't fit in, and every attempt she makes at being a part of the group is rebuffed. Even her professor, played by our star, Brock Dudley, tunes her out. But when she's a werewolf, she finds power and she's heard at last.” Allie let out a little laugh. “Granted, her means of handling her anger isn't the best, which is why Wanda dies at the end. It's your classic good versus evil plot. But it does have a message about exclusion and how that hurt can build up in someone and cause them to do things they might not otherwise be driven to do.”

Duncan leaned back in his chair, impressed with Allie's analysis of what he'd thought wasn't much more than one more trashy movie with an NC-17 rating. But Allie, as she had done at a hundred different turns since he had met her, had surprised him yet again. He tried not to let his growing feelings for her show on his face, but they sure as heck beat in his heart. When this was over, he intended to show her.

More than once.

And in his pocket waited a surprise for Allie—something Duncan had picked up an hour ago, a spontaneous decision, but one he couldn't have felt more right about if he'd tried. He shot her a quick smile, then brought his attention back to the interview.

Jerry was staring at Allie, openmouthed and shocked by her analysis of his film. “Wow, Allie. You really wrapped that up with a hel—” Jerry caught himself before he swore. “Er, a really nice bow.”

“I thank you for this interview, Miss Dean and Mr. Wiggs, and I think we'll all be interested to see how this little taste of Hollywood transforms our town.” Duncan turned and faced the camera. “So keep an eye out for the werewolves, Tempest. You never know what might be lurking around the corner.”

A moment later, Jim signaled that they were done. The bright production lights above them went out, one by one, and then the cameras were shut down, the studio lights brought up. “Thanks,” Duncan said as the three of them left the stage and headed back to the control room. “That'll make a great piece. I'll edit and get it on the air tonight. I'll make it my lead piece.”

“And get a jump on the city stations,” Allie said.

“Exactly. Makes my boss happy, makes your boss happy—” He indicated Jerry, who was already on his cell phone and halfway out the door, waving a good-bye with his free hand. “Everyone wins.”

“Yeah.” Allie drew in a breath and knew she should break it off with Duncan now. Tell him she was through with him. She had his signature on the rental agreement. Had the interview in the can. All her ducks were in a row.

The time had come to start taking out the enemy. The problem?

Duncan had stopped being the enemy somewhere between the kiss in the garden and the sheets at the Ramada. And she'd lost sight of the goal a long time ago.

One of the production people popped his head into the studio. “Dunk, you've got a call on line one.”

“Excuse me.” Duncan crossed the room to pick up the phone. He sat on the edge of a long table, the pose so like the one he'd taken a hundred times in those early morning tutoring sessions at Tempest High, that it sent Allie's mind rocketing back—

To the day he'd asked her to the prom.

“Hey, Grace,” he'd said, giving her that grin as he'd come into their math classroom, a half hour before the school day started. The room had been deserted, she and he meeting for what had become their usual study time. She was helping him pass the one class that was; holding him back from staying on the football team, he was making her days at Tempest High bearable.

Something to look forward to.

That day, of all days, he'd remembered something she'd said, one of those silly offhand remarks. “A present,” he said, dropping a package on her desk, then sitting back on Mr. Benoit's desk, waiting for her to open it.

She'd unwrapped the slim box—badly wrapped with Scotch tape and leftover Christmas wrap even though it was early May—and remembered laughing as she did. Laughing wasn't something Allison Gray did often in high school.

Mostly, she'd tried to sink into the floor, blend into the walls. Be as quiet as possible and make people forget she existed. With everyone but Duncan.

Inside the box, nestled in some white tissue paper was a pair of chopsticks and a gift certificate to the Chinese restaurant in downtown Tempest—a short-lived venture that had been Allie's favorite after-school haunt.

“Maybe,” Duncan had said as she'd looked at him, a question on her lips, “we could go there?”

Her world had hung in those five words, wrapped in all those hearts in the back of her notebooks, all the dreams that had filled her nights, all the hopes she'd almost not dared to have. “You want to go…with me?”

“Sure,” he said, then gave her another smile, the kind that tickled in her stomach. “To thank you for all the help you've given me this year. But, you know, if you don't want to go with me, you don't have to. That's why I gave you the gift certificate.”

Had he or had he not asked her on a date? Or was he…nervous? She couldn't tell, then decided there was no way a guy like Duncan Henry would be nervous about asking someone like her out. The numbers on the gift certificate blurred in front of her vision.

“Uh…okay. Thanks again.” Then, because she hadn't known what else to do, hadn't known whether to believe him, she'd opened her math book, flipped to the page for their homework from the night before and started in on the first problem, even though she'd already worked it out on her paper twelve hours earlier.

Duncan laid his hand over the page. “Maybe we could go together…before the prom.”

Allie remembered staring at the back of his hand, at the broad, muscled fingers that had caught a dozen winning touchdowns, the same hand that had brushed against hers, tracing over equations and grids. The same one that had held hers, for just a moment, when he'd confessed his heart's secret desires—to ditch the business track his father had planned for him and become an investigative reporter, the kind that stood up to men like his father.

“Prom?” she'd repeated, sure she hadn't heard the word. Couldn't possibly have heard him right. “But won't your date be mad?”

“Would
you
be mad?” he asked.

She hadn't dared to turn her head, to see if he was teasing. She'd clutched her pencil in her lap, her thumb pressed against the tip so hard, the lead broke off and pinged against the metal leg of the desk. Allison held her breath, heart pounding.
Date. Prom. Duncan.

Her?

“Allison,” Duncan said, and then, he reached for her other hand, turning her to face him, waiting until she finally dared to draw her gaze to meet his, “will you go to the prom with me?”

Allie shook herself out of the memory, watching the same man who had broken her heart seven years ago make his way back to her, smiling with a no-clue grin on his face.

Somewhere in some secondhand shop, there was still probably a size 2X pink ruffled dress that had never seen the inside of a ballroom. And in this studio was a heart that had never forgotten those chopsticks—

Or the way it had felt to show up at the prom and see Duncan on the arm of Lisa Connelly.

“Want to get a cup of coffee over at Margie's?” Duncan asked as he reached her. “I have a half an hour or so until I have to put together the evening broadcast. I just checked with the new nurse and everything's going fine with Katie, so let's grab a snack.”

The news report was going to air in a few hours, and undoubtedly someone else, someone as smart as Ira, would put the pieces together and figure out who she was. It didn't matter anymore now anyway. The movie was well underway, her goal had been accomplished.

The time had come to tell Duncan the truth. Vanessa was right. She couldn't keep running from her past. She needed to confront it head-on.

She already knew what his reaction was going to be. So she'd beat him to the punch, and save her heart in the process. After all, that's what she had come here to do. To give him a taste of how she'd felt that night, standing in the parking lot, watching him walk into that building with the lithe, beautiful Lisa on his arm, while she stood under a flickering streetlamp and cried.

She couldn't tell him the truth at Margie's, though. That was too public. Tonight, after dinner.

“No, I can't have coffee. I promised Jerry I'd meet him over at the diner to discuss tomorrow's shooting schedule,” she said, surprised at how normal her voice sounded. “But I'll see you at dinner tonight. Your sister already invited me, and I have something I'd like to tell you.” She forced a smile to her lips, covering all traces of the past as surely as CoverGirl had covered the acne of her youth. “It's, ah, sort of a surprise.”

“I'll look forward to it,” Duncan said, then leaned down and gave her a kiss. And still, even as she knew she shouldn't, a part of her savored that kiss. “Because I have a surprise for you, too, Allie Dean.”