The Movie (24 page)

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around her, her pussy and her stomach contracting into spasm after spasm as loxana Felix rode the longest, strongest orgasm she had ever known.

For a second he stayed inside her, holding her in position, .letting her regain her breath. Then he gently withdrew, still holding her, and scooped her up in his arms, naked and bathed with perspiration, and carried her back inside the house.

He set her down on the polished wood floor of the bathroom, carefully, as though she were made of the most delicate bone china.

‘How was that?’ he asked, grinning.

Roxana brushed past him, turning the taps on her bathtub. Showering was for people in a hurry; she preferred to soak. She reached out one toned arm and selected a small crystal bottle of lavender bath oil, especial/y blended for her by a chic Paris pafumerie.

‘What, do you want a rating out often, Sam?’ she asked coolly. ‘Eight and a half. You were very good. You get better all the time.’

She emptied the entire bottle into the bath and the heady floral scent rose up in clouds of steam, overpowering any lingering trace of sweat or sex.

Kendrick reached for a bathrobe, not wanting her to see him limp. ‘Oh, you were verygood, she says, so matter-offactly.’ loxana slipped into her bath, the perfumed oil making the water turn white. With her black hair and tanned skin she looked Egyptian. She glanced at him haughtily.

Cleopatra bathes in asses’ milk, Sam thought. She was truly exquisite. And colder than ice.

‘If you wanted hearts and flowers, Sam, you came to the wrong place. A great fuck is a great luck. End of story.’

She shrugged, sending tiny rivers of scented water trickling across the tops of her perfect breasts. ‘It’s .jus.t friction, at the end of the day.’

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‘Justfn’etion?’ Kendrick repeated, disbelievingly. ‘Is that

how you would describe what happened out there?’

This was the hottest, most sexual thing he had ever dreamed of, and loxana could dismiss it as just friction? Shit, one moment he was screwing her in mid-air, feeling her buck underneath him, beg him not to stop, and the next.., this? Wham, barn, thank you sir?

‘Yes,’ loxana said, beginning to wash herself briskly

with a sponge. ‘Would you like a shower? There’s a separate one in my bedroom.’

Kendrick stood up and laughed shortly. ‘I don’t buy it, babe.’

‘leally.’ There was nothing in her tone, not even a pretence at interest..

,

‘Yes, really. No woman thinks of making love that way.

Especially not when it’s as intense as that.’

‘I’m glad you were pleased,’ loxana said, stepping out

of the bath and reaching for a towel.

The sight of her wet, naked body, the smooth flesh shining from the water, her soft pubic hair flattened against th curve of her belly, her berry nipples erect again in the cool bathroom air, crowning slick, damp breasts that tilted youthfiflly:upwards in natural perfection, did something to Sam Kendrick. Immediate hard-on. Despite the fact that

he’d come less than five minutes ago.

Jesus, Sam thought. Is she for real?

He was forty-five yars old, and P,.oxana Felix had him

as horny as a teenager.

loxana glanced at the bathroom clock-nine-thirty a.m.

‘If you wouldn’t mind showering and dressing, Sam. I have a script meeting at Artemis at ten.’ She turned her back on him, heading for her walk-in wardrobe, dismissing him.

‘OK,’ Kendrick managed, astonished at her attitude. ‘Thanks.’ She gave him one quick, dazzling smile. ‘Oh, and Sam, one more thing - you may have been making love, but/was having sex. That’s all.’

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Open-mouthed, Sam watched his new mistress walk away.

As her limo turned into the wrought-iron gates of Artemis Studios, tkoxana Felix smiled to herself. She was wearing a Mark Eisen tailored suit in palest pink cashmere, her makeup a sweep of matching light rose tones; a breath of blusher on her perfect cheekbones, minimal highlights above her long black lashes, and her full mouth covered with the

latest glamorous wet-look lip gloss. She was as sexy as hell. And that was the idea.

A month in LA, and tkoxana had learned a few things. The most surprising was that, here, she was only a middling fish in a very large pond. Not everyone asked how high, ma’am, when she told them to jump. She didn’t get her own way’fight off. And sometimes, as with Sam Kendrick at his wife’s party, she even had to back down.

A lesser woman might have been disheartened. Might have shrugged it offand returned to modelling, where she ruled with a rod of hand-cured Italian leather. But not P,.oxana Felix. She had come to Hollywood to find true fame, to have the world fall at her feet, not the feet of her silent, frozen image. What had that artist done? Painted pictures of pipes and labelled them, Ced n’estpas unepip. This is not a pipe.

She had friends who’d never understood that. They’d stand there and laughand say, ‘If it’s not a pipe, what is it? Sure looks like a pipe to me.’

But toxana had understood right away.

It looks like a pipe, but it’s not. It’s a picture of a pipe. Big difference.

So what if the world looked at her picture and adored? Ced n’est pas Roxana. And she wanted them to adore Poxana. So See the Lights was more than important, it was vital. She’d had to fight harder than she had in years to get

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into the goddamn picture, and now, it seemed, she was going to have to fight twice as hard to stay on top of it.

It was only preproduction, and already she was running into problems Her part was way too small, and no matter how much she turned the screws on that dumpy terrified mouse writing the script, the little bitch stuck firm. Morgan’s part was just right. To increase it would be to tilt

the movie too much towards the romantic subplot

Subplot? She wasn’t sub anything.

But the trouble was that after the first disastrous screenplay meeting, Eleanor Marshall had taken control. Nobody spoke to Megan Silver without her being present in the room. That way, it was always her fault and not Megan’s - and most of the time that bearded pricl

,

Florescu, who couldn’t keep his eyes off loxana’s legs, agreed with her. And after Isabelle’s party, tLoxana had learned that she could threaten a writer, but the director and the president of the studio? No way. It was preproduction, and she could still be replaced. So she was smiling sweetly and biding her time.

But it wasn’t in tLoxana’s nature to do nothing. She planned ahead. Ever since.., ever since…

Behind the tinted windows of the lirno, a shadow of fear :and pain crossed 1Loxana Felix’s lovely face. Her lips set in straight line. No, no, not. She never thought about that,

/ele’.

Anyway, planning head. In less than a month they would be on the set, ftlming, and.at that stage she planned on throwing her weight around She was going to make enemies. So what else was new? But she’d need allies. That much was clear. So she’d been quietly observing, surveying, calculating. Who had the power? David Tauber? No .. it just looked that way. Megan Silver thought the sun shone out of his backside, and Zach Mason was happy with him, for now.., but ILoxana was her own woman. She had no loyalty to agents. Bob Alton could tell you that.

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And David was too green, too cocky. He thought he was a lion, but he didn’t realize that Eleanor and Tom and Sam were just letting him tag along. Sam had Fred, and this was Sam’s movie. They were all Sam’s movies. He really was a lion; David Tauber was just a jackal, feeding on the carcass his master had left and calling it a fresh kill. He was a good talent scout, but that was about it. And she suspected that if he ever deluded himself that he could cross swords with his

boss and win, David Tauber would find that out. Sam Kendrick, though, was truly powerful. Sam had proved that to her.

Sam could be useful. She could use him. And when she had the bastard wrapped round her finger, when she’d eked out every bit of power he had and taken it for her own advantage, she was going to break him. Sweet, deadly revenge.

So wharifhe was good in bed? So much the better, if she could enjoy herself’at the same time. It made no difference. Sam Kendrick thought he could insult P,.oxana Fe/ix, and he had to realize that there was a price. He was going to pay her with everything he had.

But Sam was already falling for her. He’d be back for more, she knew it. It wasn’t Sam she should be concentrating on this morning.

It was the man she’d decided she needed to be publicly involved with-the superstar romance that would help her with this movie, help her with its launch, help her with setting up her new career. Her next lover. Zach Mason.

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‘I have the results of your tests,’ Dr Haydn said.

Eleanor felt like yelling at her, of course you have the results of my tests - you called me into your office, didn’t you? But she said nothing. She never did. The antidipatory

fear was just too great. Her thrice-yearly check-up with the ‘ best fertility specialist in LA was something she both

needed and dreaded; needed, so that she could be reassured that it wasn’t too late for her, and dreaded, just in case this time it was, this time would prove to be the visit where Dr Hadyn would mutter something about conception being ‘unlikely’. Not to mention the fact that actually walking irlto the Haydn Clinic was difficult, dragging to the surface her deepest conflicts and bitterest fears. With every day that passed, she knew she was heading closer to the line. She would have to choose. Commit to P.aul, or leave him. Settle, or risk everything, lisk even her chance at a child. Because, right now, she knew no other man that she could be with, and her time,was running out.

Since See the Lights went into preproduction, Tom Goldman had been cutting her dead. He saw her only in the company of others. Somehow, top-management issues always got discussed over the phone. And wheneverJake Keller issued a new protest about how Eleanor was directing the rewrite process, Tom went out of his way to have it formally minuted and documented. He had suddenly become the studio chairman again, the ultimate power, sitting in judgement, as impartial as King Solomon.

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Eleanor was not surprised. He had come to his senses like she knew he would, and now he was retreating into his shell, embarrassed at whatever might have happened. She had thrown herself into her work, and there was more than enough work. She was solely responsible for this major,

big-budget movie - a ninety-five-million-dollar gamble. But privately, secretly, she was mourning. Something deep inside her had died.

‘I’m glad to say everything seems to be fine,’ Dr Haydn went on, and Eleanor felt a sharp crunch of relief in the pit ” of her stomach. She glanced around the elegant consulting rooms, a fantasy of maternal pastels in pink and eggshell blue, at the posters for breast cancer research and antenatal exercising, trying to avoid revealing her feelings. Dr Haydn already thought she was weird. If she was so worried about her fertility, why wasn’t she pregnant? She must be the only client on the specialist’s highly expensive books who still regularly used her diaphragm. Somehow, sitting in the oak-panelled waiting room with the other patients, nervous, frightened women prepared to put themselves through drags, calendars, artificial insemination and God alone knew what else, women who Eleanor knew would have given anything for the news she had just heard, her actions seemed incomprehensible, even to her. She wondered what Dr Hadyn thought of her. Selfish? Thoughtless? Immoral, even?

Eleanor clasped her hands firnaly in her lap. Who cared what the woman thought? She could test her own fertility if she felt like it and that didn’t mean sh was obliged to get pregnant. My body, my choice, she reminded herself.

‘However, your fecundity levels have dropped somewhat,’ the consultant continued. Her voice was cold and clinical. ‘A woman’s fertility naturally declines with age and that process is speeding up for you now.’

Peliefwas replaced by a clammy fear.

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‘You said I could still conceive, though?’ Eleanor pressed.

Dr Haydn looked at her over the tops of her wire rimmed glasses. ‘At the moment? Absolutely. But could conceive and will conceive are two different matters.’ Her gaze was steady. ‘Ms Marshall, you are entering the final years of your reproductive life. If you want to have a child, it is my duty to advise you that you should begin trying to get pregnant as soon as possible, and in any event, no later

than six months from now.’

Eleanor sat very still.

Liz Haydn reached across the desk with her wrinkled hand .and patted Eleanor’s smooth one. ‘It’s not too late, you know.’

She made an effort and smiled. ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

It’s not too late, Eleanor thought dizzily, but it soon will be.

Megan said, ‘I want him to drink milk. It’s deliberate. Morgan is sitting backstage and we’ve just seen her mixing a’vodka orange -light on the orange, right? She’s a bad girl, she score! drugs, she drinks. But Jason, he’s supposedly the wild one; but he’s not really. I want to highlight that by hving him reach for a carton of milk. He’s clean, she’s not. It’s the contrast.’

The heat in the meeting room was incredible, even with all the windows open,and the air-conditioning at full blast. Outside, blazing LA sun streamed onto the lot, beating down on the palm trees in the drive and the long stretch limos parked out front. Studios execs walked past with their shirtsleeves rolled up, or fanning themselves with scripts and treatments. The ice in their jugs of iced water had melted in five minutes.

Nobody wanted to work. But they had to. There were just three weeks to go before shooting started. The studio president sat quietly toone side, dressed in a

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cream suit, taking notes. P,.oxana Felix, her long hair plaited into two thick, glossy pigtails, lay on the black leather Eames sofa, propping up her head with one hand. Her exquisite face was delicately made up in soft tones of coral and apricot, and she wore a cut-off Mark Eisen T shirt in peach silk teamed with tight white satin shorts by Adrienne Vittadini. No longer pale, Poxana’s skin had tanned all over to a honey brown, no lighter, no darker, the tone controlled exactly by her choice of sunscreen. Acres of taut, slender, golden flesh appeared whenever she shifted position, and the stomach displayed by her school girl-style outfit was as flat as a board. With the pigtails she looked as though she might have been some predocious sixteen-year-old, the budding breasts and subtle makeup designed to arouse. Only her shiny wet lips with their kiss of tangerine gloss, and the two huge diamond studs that glittered ia her ears, spoiled the picture. She looked breathtaking, rawly sexual. She was direcdy opposite Zach Mason, and every time he looked at her, she moved a little, displaying herself for him.