A Holiday Fling (3 page)

"That’s awfully generous of you, Greg, but I’m not calling to ask for money." For an actress who made her living playing the sexy, good-hearted girl next door, Jenny sounded shy. "I’m on the community center board, so I decided to stage a Christmas mummers’ play to raise money. I’ve persuaded some of my friends to lend a hand, and I think we’ll draw a good audience for the performances."

"But not good enough?"

"I’m afraid not. We’ll never make enough if we rely on ticket sales, so in six months Upper Bassett will have no community center. This may not sound very important, but community is what makes life worth living, and it can be very fragile. I don’t want to see the fabric of my native village come unraveled."

He backtracked. "What’s a mummers’ play?"

"Oh, sorry. It’s one of those British things. Medieval plays, usually a combination of religious themes grafted onto ancient fertility rites. Groups of mummers used to go around giving short performances for begging money. That’s largely died out, but the plays are still performed on occasion. It’s quite a jolly tradition."

A light dawned. "I saw a show like that in Boston once. Lots of singing and dancing and melodrama. It was a great evening."

"Ours will be, too. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that the best way to make more money from our Revels is to film the show so we can sell videos and if we’re lucky, license it to the telly."

"I think I see where you’re going with this, but there are plenty of great cameramen in England. Can’t you draft one of them?"

"Probably, but you’re my first choice. You’re known for being able to do marvelous work quickly, and your name will add value to the project." Her voice turned portentous. "The Upper Bassett Holiday Revels, filmed by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Gregory Marino."

"That’s shameless flattery." He grinned. "Keep it up."

She had the sexiest chuckle in the Northern Hemisphere. "Very well. This production will be a bit of a hodgepodge, so we’ll need your talent as well as your reputation. It won’t be easy to make my Morris dancers and children’s choir look dramatic instead of like amateur night. That’s why I thought of you."

He toyed with the handle of his mug, thinking that it sounded like a hoot—the kind of wildly improvised project that he’d loved doing in his student days. But he hadn’t been a student in almost two decades, and he was tired to the bone. "You’re talking this Christmas, aren’t you? Like, in the next week or so? I just got back from Australia yesterday and I’m in no mood to climb on another airplane and spend the holidays with strangers."

"You only just got home? Sorry—I thought you’d had more time to recover from the last job." She hesitated. "I know this is a lot to ask, but if you’re willing, you could be the making of this project. What would it take to persuade you to come over?"

"Your fair white body," he muttered under his breath as he sipped some coffee.

"That’s negotiable," she said without missing a beat.

He swallowed the wrong way and went into a coughing fit. When he could breathe again, he said, "Jeez, Jenny, you shouldn’t make jokes like that when I’m drinking my first cup of coffee of the day."

"Sorry." She sounded stricken. "That was a silly comment. I’m serious about this project, but not to the point of giving my all for queen and country."

"Sleeping with a cameraman is a sacrifice no one would ask of you," he agreed. "How long do you think this would take? I assume you want the production to be magical and exciting and intimate, not just a static record of a stage show."

"Exactly." Sensing that he was weakening, she continued, "If you’re willing, I’ll buy you a plane ticket and you can stay in my guest room. This would only take a week or so. You can be home by Christmas, though if you’d like to try the holidays English style, it would be lovely to have you. You can borrow my family if you want marvelous people who will simultaneously make you feel welcome and drive you mad."

He chuckled. "Sounds just like my family." The sprawling Marino home in Ohio would be full of kids and food and relatives who thought of him as the beloved oddball. They were proud of him, but he was a goose out of water, and a target for his mother, aunts, and sisters, all of whom wanted him to marry a nice, normal girl, not a Hollywood type, and settle down. He spent every Christmas fending off their good intentions. Mostly it was fun.

But Jenny’s job sounded like fun, too. How long had it been since he’d done any filming purely for the pleasure of it? He had been working like a lunatic for years, first taking any project he was offered to build up his credits, then, as his reputation grew, doing movies back to back to consolidate what he’d achieved.

It would be wonderfully relaxing to do a project where multimillion-dollar budgets weren’t resting on his shoulders. On the minus side, working with Jenny would be a mixed blessing. He loved being around her, and unless she had changed—and she didn’t seem to have—she didn’t have a snobbish bone in her.

Unfortunately, he liked her a little too well. Prom queens—did they have them in English schools?—didn’t pair off with oddball technogeeks like him no matter how many years had passed.

Hell, she was a friend and former lover of Kenzie Scott, superstar and possibly the handsomest man alive, while Greg was Joe Average at best. Their brief affair had been a fluke. She had made it clear that he was being offered a guest room, nothing more. If he recalled his trade gossip correctly, she was currently involved with some rich international businessman. Unavailable.

But he was good at what he did, and quite capable of working with a woman he wanted and couldn’t have. Shooting Morris dancers—what
were
Morris dancers?—and Christmas in England would be a nice change from his real life. Afterward he could fly home to Ohio. There was always leftover turkey when his mother was in charge of a kitchen. "Okay, Jenny, you’ve got a deal."

"Wonderful!" The enthusiasm in her voice was enough to banish his regrets over more jet lag. "Do you have personal video equipment you’d like to use, or shall I rent some here? And if so, what would you like?"

"I’ll bring my digital camera, but are you sure you want to use video? Film is probably better from a commercial point of view."

"True, but we can’t afford the extra time and money film would take."

"If I use 16mm instead of 35mm, the shooting time will be about the same as video. Don’t worry about renting anything—I’ll take care of getting the equipment. It’s true that postproduction will take longer with film, but you’ll have a finished product that will be easier to sell to TV, and will look good on DVD as well as video."

"I defer to your professional judgment. After all, that’s why I wanted you." Her rich voice warmed. "Thank you so much, Greg. You shan’t regret this."

He was sure she was right. To have regrets, there had to be a significant stake. This was just a little charity project. No consequences. Right?

Right.

* * *

Jenny hung up the phone. "I can’t believe he agreed," she said to her companion.

"Mrowrrrr."

"Don’t look so smug, Plato. You may be a philosopher who always knows what’s going to happen, but I’m not. It’s a miracle Greg is even available, and I thought for sure he’d turn me down. He won an Oscar, for heaven’s sake." Absently she stroked the gray cat’s short plushy fur. "You think I’m idiotic. Right again. Why else would I be talking to a cat?"

Plato gave a lofty flick of his tail that said clearly that he was in perfect harmony with himself and simply couldn’t understand human nerves.

Restlessly Jenny began to pace her living room. An actor’s life was odd and irregular by normal standards. The good parts were very, very good. The bad parts were horrid. One of the worst bits was having many friends, yet too often being alone. She had achieved a fair amount of success as a television actress, and was generally considered by the British viewing public to be quite the glamour girl. Her appearance on a man’s arm at a public event would enhance his reputation.

But being a famous man’s wrist ornament didn’t offer much for her. She stared out at the quiet West End street, where lights were beginning to shine mistily in the dusk. This near the winter solstice, days were short and nights were long. Very long, when one slept alone.

When had she begun to tire of glamour? Not during the first flush of success. She’d been giddily happy and made a fool of herself more than once. She had even believed men who said they loved her when what they really meant was that they wanted to bed her. There had been some good times, but usually she would care too much, and be left weeping.

Critically she studied her reflection in the darkened window. For an actress who was past her prime, she still looked rather well. A little rounder than her American counterparts, who tended to look like stick drawings, but few men minded that.

Though she had learned early that a pretty girl could usually get what she wanted, her no-nonsense mother made sure little Jenny didn’t let that go to her head. Her looks were a gift in the genetic lottery for which she was grateful, but couldn’t claim credit.

Talent was also a gift, source uncertain since everyone else in her family was normal. The only thing she could take personal credit for was the bloody hard work she’d put into her career, and the tenacity to keep going despite the chronic rejections that were part of a working actor’s life.

"Do you think Greg and I might end up going to bed together? That would be rather nice."

Plato closed his golden eyes, bored. A bit of routine surgery in his youth had left him uninterested in gender politics.

Jenny drew heavy curtains against the encroaching night and crossed to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. She hadn’t really been joking when she said that her "fair white body" was negotiable. Greg’s shock at her words was a little unflattering. Most men would have bantered with her, testing to see if she was serious, but Greg—Greg was different.

The American movie they’d worked on had been a disaster—her first and last foray into Hollywood. He had been a second assistant camera operator, while she was a nervous ingénue making her first feature film. The script was weak, the director was a bellowing sadist, and the leading lady hated sharing the screen with another female who was younger and prettier.

Jenny could have survived that, but she hadn’t been able to handle the loss of a boyfriend she had hoped to marry. She had thought their relationship was rock solid, until the tabloids started running pictures of him and the French actress with whom he was having a torrid affair. The swine had been too much a coward to tell Jenny that he was tired of her, so he let the journalists do it for him.

About the best thing that could be said of the experience was that her movie role called for her to cry a lot. That she had managed handily.

No, the best thing about that movie had been Greg. His sympathy and kindness had been achingly welcome at a time when she had been desperate for comfort.

Later she’d felt guilty about using him to assuage the worst of her pain, but at the time she welcomed his lack of demands. He’d given her exactly what she wanted, with no strings attached.

Just as their movie ended, she had received a heaven-sent BBC offer. Though she and Greg had planned to spend a quiet week at the beach to recover from the filming, instead he had cheerfully taken her to the airport and sent her off with a parting kiss and his best wishes.

She flew home swearing never to return to Hollywood, and she hadn’t. English show business had been much kinder to her.

The Christmas cards they exchanged always contained scrawled personal notes promising to get together when they were both in the same city and not too busy to socialize, but it never happened. Whenever she got his card—always a stunning photograph that he had taken himself—she would smile and wonder what might have happened if they had met when she wasn’t suffering a broken heart. Greg was smart and funny and nice, with a rock solid steadiness that was increasingly attractive as the years—and the unreliable men—came and went.

But maybe there would never have been a right time. Not only did they live in different countries, but both were ambitious, committed to succeeding in a brutal industry. They had done well, particularly Greg, who had hit the top of his field while not yet forty. Good directors of photography could go on for decades, and Greg would.

Actresses had a much shorter shelf life. In the last year there had been two movie roles she had really wanted, but failed to win. Nor was she likely to find another television series as successful as
Still Talking
, since that had been one of the rare conjunctions of great writing, directing, and perfect casting. Her career had peaked, and the future held mostly playing character roles and mothers.

She wouldn’t mind that, as long as she continued to work. Television offers still came in now and then, and she could do more theater work. Stage makeup and distance from the audience could preserve the illusion of youth for years. But her days as a glamorous, sexy young thing were numbered.

Even if they hadn’t been, she was tired of working so hard all the time. Eighteen-hour days, five a.m. calls, having to maintain her looks with the grim thoroughness of a pilot maintaining his airplane—sometimes she thought that digging ditches would be easier. Though certainly less satisfying.