The Movie (37 page)

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Tauber murmured, passing a hand through her newly shorn, chic platinum fringe. ‘And you’re wearing too many clothes.’

Megan pressed up against him as he unbuttoned her ,cardigan and tailored slacks, slipping the fabric slowly and smoothly away from her skin, stroking her lightly where every piece of cloth had been, then undoing her bra in a swift, practised movement, playing expertly with her breasts so that Megan was too aroused to wait for him to peel away her strawberry silk bries and ripped them off herself, leaving her naked in his arms. David shrugged off the robe and pushed her back on the bed, bending his mouth to the newly flat surface of her belly, his dry lips and ” wet tongue trailing a line of fire across her skin.

Megan gasped with desire, feeling the blood in her nipples throbbing with a new intensity as his fingers started to tweak them, then cress them, rolling them around in a firm circular motion, sometimes, leaving off so his hand could grab her whole breast and squeeze it.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ David said, his breath hot against the downy hairs of her belly. ‘Tell me how much you love it, Megan. Tell me how much you want me.’

‘Oh, God, you know I want you,’ she groaned, feeling his mouth poised right above her, and then he was doing it, his lips on hers in the most intimate caress, his tongue svcirLing around, knowing exactly what he was doing, and

298

she felt every objection, every reservation, evaporate into nothingness under the blinding heat shooting through her…

299

‘Magic,’ Fred Florescu said.

They were sitting together on the terrace of the M6ridien Hotel, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean. To the west, the sea past the Arise Polite beach was lapping gently at the shore, its heart illuminated down the

‘ centre by a red carpet of light, constantly shattering and reforming, as the waves reflected the dying rays of the sun. On the fine powdery sand that would be picture-book white at daybreak, several bonfires were burning, throwing up sparks into the twilight, whilst around them the laughter ofholidaymakers mixed with the shrieks of some Sychellois children, giggling and yelling to each other in the local Creole patois. To the east, the slopes of the mountains, covered in palm trees, wild cinnamon and thick vegetation, stretched up into the darkening sky behind them. Megan saw a flock of shadowy shapes wing up from the edge of one of the slopes and veer to the left in a ragged flurry of movement; whether they were birds or bats she had no idea.

‘I think so,’ she agreed.

‘I hope you don’t mind having a drink with me,’ the director said, reaching over to refill her glass with the local speciality of crushed ice and lime, frosted with salt. The tartness was delicious aer the sweetness of her evening meal: octopus curried in coconut milk, slices of baked breadfi’uit and a sorbet made of paw-paw and jamalac, a native pink-skinned fruit. David had insisted on .grilled

3o0

chicken and rice; as far as Megan could tell, his fitness regimen never wavered. But she had rebelled against his attempts to make her do the same; exotic travel might be commonplace to him, but Megan had never left the States

before, and she refused to pretend she was still there. ‘Of course not,’ she said.

She was delighted to be drinking with Mr Florescu. Not that she’d have had a choice about it: his word was law on the set, and an invitation to drinks with him was like a command to tea with the Queen of England. You just didn’t turn it down. But then who would want to? The guy was king of this movie now and one of the best directors in the world, and on the set everybody was clamouring for a piece of his time: Mary Holmes, Jack tLichards, 1Lobert Finn, Seth Weiss, and all the other actors; Tom Lilley, the Artemis production executive, a Jake Keller drone who slimed around the set taking notes all the time; David, whose most burning desire seemed to be to get close to him; Peter, Steven and RAck, his three assistant directors or ADs, who were glorified flunkies who slavishly worshipped their master’s every utterance; and most of all, tkoxana Felix, who had started acting like the primadonna from hell the second the first camera rolled.

David had told Megan to keep away from Fred. She was just the screenwriter, whifh put her only a few rungs above the catering staff, he said. Until and unless she was needed, she wasn’t to bother Mr Florescu.

Megan resented his tone - she wasn’t a child-but did as David said. After all, he was her agent; he knew what was best. And hanging around on the fringes of the set helped her to avoid tkoxana Felix, who took every opportunity to insult and snub her, and Zach Mason, who basically gave her the odd contemptuous glance and apart from that ignored her.

‘I wanted to get to know you better,’ Florescu said. ‘I

3oi

never seem to see you around unless it’s with David. Does

he have to chaperone you everywhere you go?’

Megan blushed. She had been thinking the exact same thing, and now she felt horribly disloyal. After all, David was the reason she was here, sipping iced lime on a tropical island instead of serving greasy chicken wings to jerks. lght?

‘He’s been very good to me,’ she said defensively. ‘He’s very good to all his clients,’ Florescu snorted. ‘You wrote a great script, plus you look great. All it would have taken was for one agent to read your script, and you would have been signed. It was his lucky break that he got to read it first,.not yours. I hope you realize that.’

Covered in confusion, Megan managed, ‘He’s my

‘ boyfriend.’

‘Sure he is,’ Fred said, sounding unconvinced, and then, seeing her flustered, added more kindly, ‘David’s a smart guy. So long as you’re happy.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course,’ Megan said.

The director nodded down the beach, towhrds the sekled-offarea where they were filming. ‘We rnight need you there tomorrow. I’m gonna want some options for the scene where Morgan confronts the drug lords, in case loxana tries any more dumb moves and I want to shoot around her.’

‘OK, no problem,’ Megan agreed immediately, her mind running througl the dialogue he was talking about. It would be tough to Change it without unbalancing other scenes in the film, but she was glad to have something to do.

‘loxana Felix,’ Florescu commented absently, ‘has one major attitude problem. She’s read too many magazines. She thinks that being a lead actress means being a major bitch and throwing tantrums all the time, and she really has no idea of the work an actor does.’

Megan sipped her drink and said nothing, listening to

3O2

the ocean crashing on the shore. She didn’t dare say what she thought of the supermodel, tkoxana was David’s client, and if David found she’d been badmouthing her to the director, he’d kill her.

‘Your David doesn’t seem to be having much effect,’ Florescu went on. ‘I asked him to talk to her a few days ago, and he said he did his best, but…’ He spread his hands in a frustrated gesture. ‘If it was anybody else I’d fire her. I guess I still may.’

Megan watched as his eyes glazed over, stating into space as though seeing something in his head. ‘Why don’t you?’ she asked. ‘Because she’s a supermodel?’

Fred laughed, and Megan found herself warming to him, liking his easy manner and his beard and his lack of pretentiousness.

‘I could get another supermodel like that.’ He snapped his fingers: ‘Or even better, a pretty actress who’d know what to do on a set already. Or Andie MacDowell - a supermodel and an actress. Don’t get caught up in thinking

loxana Felixis as special as she thinks she is, honey.’ Megan warmed to him even more.

‘It’s the way she is with Zach.’ Florescu sighed, and Megan suddenly felt a chill from the cooling evening breezes. She didn’t enjoy thinking about Zach, didn’t like remembering the offhand way he was-treating her now, either with contempt or.ignoring her. So he obviously hated her new look, so what? He was dating loxana Felix.

He was an asshole. And she had David, after all. She’d always wanted David, not Zach. Megan told herself she didn’t care.

Tve never seen a sexual chemistry like it onscreen,’ Florescu went on. ‘The tests, and the love scenes we’ve shot so far-it just blew me away. I know I could get a more professional actress, but if I can just get her to work a little nobody else would be better for this movie.’

‘You’d do anything for the movie,’ Megan said slowly,

303

understanding him. ‘Is that what you’re saying? That if 1Loxana Felix is the best Morgan, you want her, no matter what?’

‘Exactly.’ The young director leaned towards her. ‘Megan, this is my movie now. Every directorfeels that way, or they should. You wrote it and Zach’s acting in it and Joe Friedman lights it, but the way it looks on the screen, the whole package together, the movie itself that’s mine. And it has to be as close to what I saw in my

head when I read your script as I can get it.’

‘And Ikoxana will get you closest?’

Florescu nodded. ‘She and Zach. They set the screen on fire. People will walk out of the movie theatre and go home and make love. And when you combine that with

‘ the rock ‘n’ roll backdrop and your CIA plot-it’s going to blow everybody away. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about.’

He gazed out at the beach for a long moment. ‘I don’t like having to deal with loxana, but if that’s what it takes, I have to.’

‘Maybe you could call Sam,’ Megan suggested.

‘What?’

‘Sam Kendrick. When we were having script conferences, he used to come by. R.oxana dealt more with Sam than with David, mostly, even though David was her agent.’

‘P,.eally? Makes a change to have it that way around,’ Florescu said dryly. ‘OK, OK, he’s your boyfriend, I know. Don’t look like that, I was just kidding. So you think Sam might have an effect? Thanks, Megan, that’s exactly the kind of break I’ve been praying for. I’ll call him, get him out here.’

‘Don’t tell David I suggested it,’ Megan said hastily. For some reason she had a sudden premonition that her lover might be none too pleased to see his boss on the set.

‘OK. Don’t worry, I’ll keep quiet. Maybe I just wanted

to have my agent around for a change. But I’ll owe you

304

one.’ He grinned. ‘You reckon Sam might hurt the palace coup, huh? You could be right.’

‘What?’ asked Megan, shrinking back.

‘Oh, come on, don’t play it so innocent,’ Florescu said sharply, picking up a sliver of sugared papaya from the dish in front of him. Megan Silver could date whoever she wanted, but he didn’t like seeing her with a class-A shark like David Tauber. ‘David tries to crawl up my ass every day, hands out all these little hints about how he’s out on the set taking care of his clients when Sam’s back in LA sunning himself-like Sam doesn’t have an agency to ran. I should ask him why he isn’t in Texas with Colleen McCallum, but I guess McCallum’s small fry when you have Zach Mason. And he’s all over Seth and Mary and Jack and R.obert-bends over so far backwards for them he must be double-jointed.’

‘Don’t tlk about David like that,’ Megan said.

Fred stood up, smiling at her unrepentantly. ‘Hey, whatever. It’s sweet that you’re so loyal. None of my girls ever are - gotta stop screwing actresses, that’s a director’s major occupational hazard.’ He winked at her. ‘So I’ll see you on the set tomorrow, honey.’ He turned to go, then paused and added, ‘lemember what I told you about the script - anybody would have bought it. I would have. And one other thing - do your boyfriend a favour and tell him to keep away from Zach Mason.’

‘But he’s Zach’s agent,’ Megan protested.

Florescu shrugged. ‘Zach doesn’t like him. That’s all I know,’ he told her, and then wandered back into the hotel.

Megan sat still for a few minutes, sipping her chilled lime juice and watching the beach, the fires now bright gold against the night, the last streaks of sunlight having sunk down beneath the ocean. Behind the blazes and the cries of the native children she could see the black silhouettes of the mountains, looming up into the sky. In the darkness. they somehow seemed menacing; not travel-brochure

305

phygrounds of palm trees and orchids, but a real jungle,

alive, impenetrable and dangerous.

Megan arrived on the set the next morning at eight o’clock sharp, threading her way through the heavy cables of the lights, cameras and reflector shields to where Fred Florescu was sitting, .aviator shades and White Sox cap firmly in phce, talking to Zach Mason. 1Loxana Felix stood a little apart from them, in costume, but evidently not about to step into a take. She was staring at the ground, her hair blowing softly around her face in the tropical breeze, her mouth set in a mutinous line.

Megan felt her heart sink. Just another great day at the oflce.

‘Hey, Megan! Got a copy of the script? Great,’ Florescu called. ‘Come over here. We need to do something with this scene.’

‘Already?’ Meg’an asked, trying not to look at Zach. The less she had to deal with him the better. She wished that David hadn’t been so determined to get through his pushups before he followed her out here; he said he’d be right there, butshe wanted him with her now. When she had to deal with Zach and loxana.

She tried to call on the memories of David’s body moving over hers, his tongue flicking lightly across her clitoris until she’d been lost in a succession of gentle climaxes, each one bumting across her like a stream of rainbow bubbles, and then his cock ramming into her, his rhythm steady and expert, until she’d finally exploded in a hard, final spasm. Her groin was still warm from it; they’d been in bed together less than twenty minutes ago, and her quick shower hadn’t completely wiped the. feeling iway. Sex with David was always satisfying, always ended in at least one orgasm, which was more than she could say for lory, back in Frisco, or indeed any other guy she’d been with. Not that there’d been many. But - maybe she was