Exposing Alix (4 page)

“Of course I did,” she snapped.

“And?”

“He looked like he was having sex with a stranger.”

“Exactly my point. He thinks love is a fantasy someone
dreamed up to sell greeting cards. He’s a damn fine director, and most of the
film is beautifully shot, but the love scenes…well, they’re terrible. None of
the emotion I want to see is there. You, on the other hand, make sex look like
a ballet. Women wept when they saw
Through the Window
. I want them to
feel that way about
Salva’s Revenge
. I want the members of the Academy
to feel that way. I want my Oscar.”

“I’ve never consulted on a movie before. I wouldn’t know
what to do.”

“It’s simple. You’ll give him your opinion, and he’ll take
it because he’ll realize you’re right. He’s a smart man, and he wants that
Oscar almost as much as I do. You may be hopeless with men, but you’ve never
been a wallflower when it comes to your movies.”

“I’m not hopeless with men,” she muttered. “I just don’t
like dating them.”

“Some people might argue that dating is an essential
prerequisite to a relationship.”

“Some might argue that men in LA don’t do relationships,
so what’s the point of dating?”

“You haven’t lived in LA for three years,” he reminded
her. “And you moved from LA to a god-forsaken town with exactly two eligible
bachelors, both of whom you have soundly rejected. Some might argue—”

“He told me it would only take a month,” she interrupted,
to stem the fruitless argument. “I don’t want to be gone longer than a month.”

“Fine, set whatever limits you want. But come to LA. Bring
your puppy with you if you must, but get out of that house. Even if you didn’t
need the money, Alix, I’d tell you to come. It isn’t healthy for you to lock
yourself away from people. I know you like to think you’re a tortured artist
who needs her privacy, but darling, you need to get out.”

“I do get out,” she protested. “I came to visit you at
Christmas.”

“Yes, and that was six months ago. You never stopped
working the whole time you were here, and you only had dinner with me twice.
And one of those times was Christmas Eve.”

The conversation was becoming too familiar to continue.
“Gunther, I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. Let’s just drop it, okay?
I’ll go to LA and help your little movie star, but then I’m coming straight
home. I’m finishing the book this year. It’s going to happen.”

“And then what? What’s going to happen when you finish
it?”

The question sent a zing right to the pit of her stomach.
“Okay, I guess it’s time to go now,” Alix said cheerily. “I’ll give Ryker a
call and let him know I’m coming.”

There was a brief pause. “Alix, the book isn’t going to
change anything. You know that, don’t you?”

“Great, so I’ll talk to you later. Good-bye!” Alix ended
the call and stared at the screen.

Sometimes, she hated the book.

When she’d started it, she and Gunther had both loved the
idea: Alix would use her photographs to show how love transformed the act of
sex. Gunther thought it would appeal to a broad audience. They could
simultaneously attract women, who were looking for love, and men, who were
looking for sex. But he thought the project should take only a few months. He
thought Alix could interview a few couples, write some cheesy narrative to run
under the pictures, and send it to press. He never really understood what she
was trying to do.

The book was about real love, not infatuation or
attraction. When she was making films, Alix had worked with fantastic actors,
people who were professional and, in most cases, genuinely liked each other.
They brought emotion and realism to her scenes that was beautiful to watch. But
she didn’t want to make stories about fake love. She wanted the real thing.

That was why she was making the book. The couples she’d
photographed truly loved each other, and they radiated that feeling throughout
their lovemaking. At orgasm, they released themselves in a moment of complete
vulnerability. It was beautiful and sensual, and Alix had captured it, over and
over.

It was real. It was proof. The book was almost finished,
and when it was, she’d know she had finally done something worthwhile. The only
problem was, something was missing. She’d taken hundreds of pictures, but she
wasn’t finished. She just didn’t know why.

Alix picked up Ryker’s half-empty cup of iced tea and
swirled the amber liquid. What would have happened if she’d let him kiss her?
She stamped to the kitchen and dumped the tea into the sink. That was a stupid
question. He probably hadn’t even tried to kiss her. She’d probably just
imagined the whole thing. And even if he
had
tried, it was because he thought
she was some kind of sex freak because she took pictures of naked men and
women.

What a joke.

She pulled open the refrigerator and stared at the empty
shelves. It had been a week since she’d been to the grocery store, and she was
pining for fresh vegetables and fruit, but she simply didn’t have the money.
Not if she was going to make the next payment on the darkroom and buy more film
and developing solution and paper…

“All right, fine,” she said, snapping her fingers at Rex.
“I’ll go to LA. I’ll make the movie and earn my easy money. But then I’m on the
next plane back to Oregon. And after that?” She swallowed hard and tried to
ignore the chill that settled over her shoulders. “Well…after that, I finish
the book. No matter what.”

Ryker dropped the paper bag that
held his dinner on the coffee table in front of the large, flat-paneled screen
that dominated his home office. He slid a DVD labeled
Candy Fever
into a
player and pressed a few buttons on the wall console dotted with blinking green
and red lights. Then he sank down into a dark leather couch, remote control in
hand.

As the DVD loaded, he poked halfheartedly at a large
salad. Realizing he was far more interested in a beer than a pile of greens, he
withdrew a bottle from a small fridge beside the wall and took a healthy drink.
It had been another lousy day on the set. He wasn’t getting anywhere with his
actors. If anything, things were getting worse, and he was barely able to
contain his frustration.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t stop thinking about Alix
Z. Part of him was still furious that Gunther had demanded her presence on the
set. But another part of him couldn’t help but wonder what—if
anything—she might be able to offer to the film that seemed to be spiraling
into chaos.

Truth be told, he also couldn’t stop wondering about the
woman herself. Ever since he’d left Oregon, he kept picturing that moment in
her house when the light touched her hair and he’d felt compelled to kiss her.
After spending most of his adult life surrounded by gorgeous women, he’d
thought himself immune to such impulses. His reaction to her was so unexpected
he had taken to examining it as he might an unfamiliar bit of dialog or
confusing section of a script. He considered his motivation, the underlying
conflict, and that action he was trying to play. Yet after a full week of
examination, he still couldn’t quite pin down the precise reason for the
attraction.

She was beautiful—or at least her face was—but
that couldn’t be it. He’d seen too many other beautiful women to attribute his
interest solely to looks. She was refreshingly uninterested in him. That
certainly had something to do with it. It had been a long time since he’d had
any sort of challenge when it came to a woman, and he’d enjoyed her absolute
refusal to show him even a bit of deference. Yet that alone didn’t seem
sufficient.

The best excuse he could find was that she was a puzzle.
Not many women made their way into directing, and fewer still achieved the
level of success Alix Z reached with just a few films. Of course, they weren’t
just any films. They were sexy films. Films that took age-old stories and
imbued them with a living, breathing sensuality. Films that he’d been watching
and rewatching all week. Films that had been made by a woman who lived in total
seclusion and managed to hide her beauty behind a pair of big glasses and
dreadful clothes.

Who was Alix Z? Sexless recluse or sensual Hollywood
powerhouse?

He flipped through a number of scenes in the idle DVD,
stopping at one that looked interesting. A woman began to crawl on hands and
knees toward a man who lay, outstretched, on a silky red comforter. A lazy
smile played around the corners of his mouth, but there was nothing lazy about
the way he looked at her, passion oozing from him in visible waves. The camera
caught the golden skin of her back and the curve of her naked bottom, lingered
on the man’s face and torso, and then flashed to soft white cloths holding his
arms to the posts of a four-poster bed. Every shot was perfectly cropped to
expose just the right amount of skin to tantalize the viewer but not attract
the attention of the rating censor.

“Is this my punishment?” the man on the screen murmured.

The woman laughed. “This is only the beginning.”

The plot of
Candy Fever,
Alix Z’s first film, was
simple. The heroine of the film made expensive chocolates, truffles, and other
sugary confections. Her treats were imbued with a sensual magic that could
renew old flames or start a new love. Yet she herself lived alone, unable to find
a man who could contain her sexual appetites and still satisfy her need for
love. She was eventually won over by a quiet neighbor who lived a double
life—nerdy software engineer by day and sexual dynamo by night.

It was a trite story, full of clichés, yet there was a
powerful, heady sensuality about it, along with a blatant romanticism that
pulled in thousands of viewers. The veneer of art-house chic was
thin—clearly, it was a fairy tale from beginning to end—but it was
a fairy tale with lots of sex. Beautiful sex. Sex shot with a creativity and
imagination he’d never seen before.

“Mmmmm.” The man closed his eyes as the woman trailed one
hand along his inner thigh. She crawled farther between his legs and then
dropped her head in a motion obscured by her long, dark hair.

The man on the screen groaned.

Ryker’s fingers tightened around his beer.

“Do you like that, darling?”

The man nodded, his response garbled. He pulled against
the cloths that bound him, but only in a halfhearted way.

Ryker hit Fast Forward. He’d watched this movie once
already this week, and the scene he wanted was near the end, where the hero and
heroine finally declared their love. When the DVD landed on the same woman and
man on a beach, the man removing her bikini top while she reclined on a white
blanket, he stopped and hit Play.

The soundtrack played something low and jazzy while the
camera moved to her face, her eyes drawing closed as pleasure creased her
mouth. The woman tangled her fingers in his hair, moaning softly.

Ryker searched her expression for a hint of what Gunther
thought he needed to add to
Salva’s Revenge.
Yes, she looked aroused,
but that wasn’t hard to duplicate. Gunther couldn’t say he didn’t have that.
But more than aroused, she looked—he studied her face more closely, trying
to determine the exact nature of the emotion he saw there—she looked
ecstatic. But to his eyes, it was like watching a cartoon with human actors. It
was overdone. Trite. What he was trying to do—keep the emotion real, even
in the midst of sex—was far more difficult.

He thought about the critics who had complained that the
sex scene in
Garden of Eden
came across as cold and unfeeling, just
because he refused to capitulate to the Hollywood version of romance. Was that
really what had kept him from winning the Oscar? If he could give them what
Alix Z delivered, would he finally make it to the top?

“You’re so beautiful,” the man on the screen said,
lowering his head to the woman’s naked breast. The camera caught his fingers
tightening, then relaxing, and then followed as they trailed down a curved
waist and across a smooth, flat navel.

Ryker took a long draught of his beer, feeling a
tightening in his groin as he watched the screen. An image of the woman who
made the film flashed across his mind, with her full lips and guarded green
eyes. He wondered idly whether she entertained partners with the same abandon
as the woman on the TV. Hard to believe, given what he’d seen, but perhaps that
was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was the contradiction she
seemed to embody.

“Let me love you, darling. I’ve been waiting so long.”

The camera cut from the man’s face, focused and intent, to
the woman’s, her mouth a perfect “O” of surprise and pleasure. “Is it true,
then? Do you love me?” she asked softly.

Ryker sighed. He simply didn’t understand why people had
to take a perfectly good sex scene and muck it up with a lot of fake
I love
yous
, and soulful looks. Yet this was precisely what Gunther wanted him to
do—what he insisted was necessary to get into the hearts of his audience.

“Let me show you how much,” the man said, bending over her
soft flesh.

An image struck him then, a pair of full lips bending over
him, licking and sucking, while green eyes watched from above. He pictured the
photograph he’d seen in Alix’s hand and wondered how many couples had she
watched. He’d never considered himself a voyeur, but imagining
her
watching
them
created a hum of sexual tension that had accompanied him for days
now, every time he pictured her, long hair catching fire in the sunlight, her
lips pursed.

Watching.

Waiting.

Perhaps pleasuring herself while she watched, her long,
slender fingers tangling in her own dark curls.

Ryker shifted in his seat, flicking off the movie as his
pants began to grow uncomfortably tight. He couldn’t be truly attracted to her.
That would be downright odd. Ryker Valentine didn’t have fantasies about
awkward, reclusive filmmakers who wore their jeans too short and their glasses
too big. He was frustrated and tired, turned on by a skillful director who
evidently knew a thing or two about arousing her audience.