Aspen Gold (8 page)

John wasn't sure he'd go that far, then tried to remember the last time he'd been to McDonald's as he wedged the sack in beside him on the bucket seat. They exited onto the street. Soon the little car was speeding through the traffic again.

"Who's your agent?"

"Maury Rose." She snagged a thick strand of hair the wind had whipped across her face and pushed it back.

"Maury Rose." John frowned. The name didn't mean anything to him. "What agency is he with?"

"The Maury Rose Agency." She sent him a quick, amused look.

"A one-man operation?" His eyebrows lifted.

"I think Joanna would resent that," Kit said, then explained, "She's his secretary and right arm. Maybe his left one, too."

"I know some people at William Morris and Creative Artists. I'll introduce you to them," he said as she swung the car onto one of the twisting, curving roads that wound into Hollywood Hills. "You've got a nobody for an agent.

It's time you switched to a high-powered firm that can do some good."

"Thanks, but I'll stick with Maury.

He's been my agent from the beginning."

"He hasn't gotten you very far after nine years, has he?"

"Maybe not. But he brought me to the dance.

I'll go home with him."

"In this business, it's all business, Kit," he informed her. "There's no room for sentiment."

"To borrow a famous Kennedy phrase--

"If not here, where? If not now, when?"'"

"Noble but not realistic."

"And you're a diehard realist, aren't you?" she guessed.

"Guilty." The road climbed higher, the traffic noise fading.

"How did you get started in acting?" she asked curiously.

"On a dare. I made some comment about acting being easy and a buddy of mine challenged me to try out for a play a local theater group was putting on."

"Easy, eh?" She laughed. "How many times have you eaten those words?"

"Too many."

"I believe it." She slowed the car and pulled onto the shoulder, braking to a full stop. "Here we are."

When she switched off the engine, the silence hit him. Frowning, John looked around. They were high in the Hollywood Hills, the sprawling city of Los Angeles far below, veiled by a layer of smog that turned the sun into a hazy ball of fire.

"Don't forget the sack." She climbed out of the car and slammed the door, a jarring sound in the silence.

John crawled out of the low-slung car without opening the passenger door, vaulting over it, then reaching back for the sack with the fries and coffee.

When he turned, he saw her standing a few feet away, her hands hidden in the slash pockets of her white dress, her legs braced slightly apart, the wind playing with the hem of her swinging skirt. With a twist of her shoulders, she looked back at him--the sun, the sky, and the city behind her. She suddenly seemed incredibly beautiful.

"Good. You remembered the sack." She turned and crossed the road, walking to the other side.

"I did." He took a step after her, then stopped, his focus widening to take in the row of towering letters. The Hollywood sign. He nearly laughed in amazement. He'd seen it thousands of times, so many he'd stopped noticing it.

At a distance, it looked big and white and inviolate. This close he saw the dirt and the gouges and the graffiti.

"A bit tawdry, isn't it?" Kit observed with a faintly puckish smile. "More Hollywood reality, right?"

"Right." Smiling, he followed her as she picked her way around a few rocks to the base of a fifty-foot-high L.

"Hollywood isn't a place anyway.

It's a state of mind." She took the sack from him and handed back one of the containers of coffee, then brushed away the surface dirt on the letter and sat down, stretching her legs out full length and crossing them at the ankles, the hem of her dress barely brushing the ground.

"Do you know this is the first time I've ever been up here?" John peeled off the plastic lid on his coffee.

"The road's closed a lot. Probably to keep the kids from coming up here to party." She took a sip of her coffee and announced, "The same as the commissary's--bitter and black."

She set the coffee container on a nearby rock and tore open a packet of salt for the fries. "I've actually learned to like the taste of it."

"Do you come up here a lot?"

"Whenever I get homesick for heights and I don't have the time or the gas money--or both--

to drive up to Big Bear. Some days you can see a lot from here--downtown Los Angeles, that round building down there is Capitol Records near Hollywood and Vine, Century City."

She studied the view a minute longer, then dumped the salt packet and coffee lid into the paper sack, using it for a trash bag.

"What makes you homesick for heights?"

"I'm a Colorado girl. I grew up on a ranch outside of Aspen."

"Really? I have a place there."

"Let me guess--in Starwood," Kit said, unable to picture him in one of the West End's fashionable Victorian mansions. Despite the aristocratic leanness of his features, there was nothing of the poet about him. There was too much strength in his face for that. She doubted that the frills and ornate bric-a-brac of the Victorian period would appeal to him. He needed a setting that was bold, sleek, and contemporary--like a lavishly modern house in Starwood.

"Naturally." He smiled, confirming it.

"Naturally." She grinned back. She liked it when he smiled like that, relaxed and easy, without that aloof detachment that so often tinged his expressions. But he looked relaxed and easy, she noticed, his sun-streaked hair a little rumpled from the convertible ride, the sleeves of his Armani shirt rolled back, showing the corded muscles in his tanned forearms. "Want some fries?" she offered when he reached for a cigarette.

"No thanks." He shook his head and lit the cigarette, then watched her through the raveling smoke as she took a bite of French fry and closed her eyes.

"Mmmm, ambrosia," she murmured and proceeded to chew it slowly as if savoring the taste of it. She consumed the next bite with the same slow relish. Until that moment, he hadn't guessed such sensual enjoyment could be derived from a French fry. She paused to lick the salt from her fingers and look at the view. "I like the quiet up here. The stillness. Just the sound of the wind in the brush--and sometimes the bark of a coyote. It always reminds me of home."

"When was the last time you were back?"

"Six months ago," she said, her tone changing. "For my father's funeral."

"I'm sorry." Oddly, he meant it, though he hardly knew her.

"Thanks." She sent him a small smile, then toyed with the fries in the giant cardboard pouch. "I think you would have liked my dad.

Everybody did. He had this beautiful laugh--not loud, but full of genuine warmth that filled up your heart with the joy of life. He was always finding reasons to laugh, too. Nothing ever got him down, or kept him there. He was something, my dad."

He heard the affection in her voice and glanced at his coffee. "Is your mother still alive?"

She nodded. "She's here in Los Angeles." In a hospital, in a chronic-care ward, a victim of multiple sclerosis, but Kit didn't tell him that. It was her problem and her responsibility, something personal and private. "My parents divorced when I was sixteen."

"Is that when you came out here?"

"No. I stayed with Father. I didn't come out here until after college." She lifted her shoulders as if to shrug off the subject. "So, tell me--did you ever suffer pangs of homesickness when you first came to Hollywood?"

He blew out a stream of smoke. "For which home?"

"That's right--you were a military brat," Kit remembered. "I read that in a magazine somewhere."

"My father was a career Marine. About every two years, he was assigned to a new post."

Unlike Kit, he didn't have any good memories of his boyhood or his parents. He'd hated that life--always fighting the military caste system, always fighting to be accepted in a new school, always fighting the strict discipline his father imposed and his insistence that John always had to be the best at everything.

"Are your parents still alive?" She carried another fry to her mouth.

"Yes. My father put in his thirty years with the Marines, took his military pension, and went to work for a defense contractor. He's still hauling my mother all over the country and she's still complaining."

"Still, they must be very proud of you."

"Hardly." He smiled without humor. "My father doesn't think acting is the kind of work a man should do. He wanted me to join the Marines.

Follow in his footsteps. I didn't. I guess you could say I'm the black sheep of the family."

Kit eyed the burnished light in his hair and shook her head. "You're no black sheep. A golden ram, maybe, but not a black sheep."

He laughed warmly. It was the first time she'd heard him laugh other than in films. She liked it. "I'll take that as a compliment," he said.

"It was meant as one." She munched another fry. "Are you sure you don't want some? There are only a few left."

"I wouldn't want to deprive you." His smile teased.

"I love the taste of foods," she admitted with an engaging frankness. "Any kind of food.

French fries, hot dogs at the ballpark, thick juicy steaks, caramel apples--

especially the sticky, gooey ones, caviar--

osetra's my favorite."

He raised an eyebrow. "Not beluga?"

"It's good, but I like the way the osetra eggs

"pop" when you press them against the roof of your mouth. As a rule, beluga caviar won't do that."

"Watching you finish off the last of the fries, I never would have guessed you were a connoisseur of caviar." Why? He wasn't sure. This woman had been surprising him every step of the way.

She laughed. "Another one of my many talents. Speaking of which"--she paused and stuffed the paper napkins and empty pouch into the sack, then stood up and shook any crumbs from her skirt before she finally faced him--"you said you wanted to talk to me and I'm the one who's been rambling on--as usual. I tend to do that when my nerves are all strung out."

"I noticed." He was amazed by how much he'd noticed about her, and how much more he wanted to find out.

"So?" She took a deep breath and smiled out a sigh. "What is it you wanted to talk about?"

"Your reading today." He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the rocky dirt underfoot.

Unable to stand the suspense or the silence, Kit said, "I know I did well."

Her stomach was knotting again, making her conscious of the dryness in her throat. She tried to brace herself, but she didn't know which way it was going to go.

"You did better than well. You gave an excellent reading. We want you to do a screen test. If you come off on film as well as you did today, then--all other things being equal--you've got the part."

Kit tried to take the news calmly, to be professional about it. But her joy was too boundless. She had to release it. She had to share it. Laughing, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.

His arms automatically wound around her, then stayed to keep her there when he discovered how well she fit against him, their bodies perfectly aligned, the warmth of her breath on his cheek, a carelessly sexy scent radiating from her skin.

"You don't know how much I want this part, John T.," she declared earnestly, fervently.

"It's such a wonderful part. Eden is such a challenge. There are so many layers to her, so many levels." She drew away, giving her head a dazed little shake, then throwing it back to laugh silently at the sky, her hands still linked behind his neck. "I can't believe it. I've been waiting my whole life for a chance like this."

"The part isn't yours yet," he reminded her.

"There's still the screen test."

"I know. But I'm not going to blow it. I'm just not." She lifted her shoulders in an unconcerned shrug of supreme confidence.

He saw the dance of laughter in her eyes.

Yet there was something else in them, too--a kind of inexpressible gravity that fascinated him as much as the laughter. Everything about her fascinated him.

"I believe you." His gaze shifted to her lips. The same impulses were back, the ones he'd felt at the reading. This time Chip wasn't around to call a halt to the action.

"Good. It's the truth."

When he lowered his mouth to hers, she came up to meet it. After the first brief and warm pressure, she started to pull back. He tunneled a hand under her hair, cupping the back of her head to prevent her escape. He wanted no quick kiss of gratitude. Teasing and nibbling, he rubbed away that flicker of resistance, then explored the softness, seeking the passion the scene had called for, the passion she seemed to exude so naturally.

Taken by surprise, Kit had no time to prepare for the kiss--not that it would have made any difference. His mouth was mobile and warm, and he kissed with the skill and attention of a man who both knows what he's doing and enjoys doing it. Soft then demanding, giving then taking.

She responded out of pure pleasure, while some distant part of her mind recognized that the kiss between Eden and McCord would have been hard and bruising, erupting in full-blown desire. There wouldn't have been any of this warm kind of heat, this intimacy, this sudden kick of feeling.

Greedily she wanted to run with it, but she knew better. It was too soon, too sudden, too dangerous, and she was too vulnerable.

With practiced self-denial, she pulled back, resting her hands against his chest and lowering her head, waiting a beat for the ground to feel solid beneath her feet again. Only then did she open her eyes and try to breathe normally.

"You come by your reputation honestly, don't you?"

A faintly dazed, faintly dazzled smile took any sting out of the mild accusation.

"What reputation?" His hands moved to her waist, keeping her close. He hadn't expected to feel this need. Attraction and challenge, yes, but not this need. It wasn't what he had planned. He wasn't even sure if it was what he wanted. He backed away a step, releasing her.

"Your reputation as a lover of women, of course."