Heartthrob (19 page)

It was taking its toll on him, too. Two days in, and he was taking cold showers at every opportunity. But as overwhelming as his attraction for her was, Jed knew that she was at least a week away from willingly climbing into his bed. And she had to be completely willing. He didn’t want to have to talk her into anything. Hell, he wanted her to beg.

“I’m sorry,” he said, giving her one of Laramie’s crooked smiles. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

She was definitely affected when he let little bits and pieces of the character he was playing slip out, Jed noted with satisfaction as she looked away from him, her cheeks turning slightly pink. Yeah, she liked Laramie. A lot.

Jed liked Laramie, too. And he liked him even more knowing that the character was going to help him get this woman into bed. But even with Laramie’s help, it was going to take time.

“How would you like it if I started asking you a bunch of personal questions?” she asked. “Details about your alleged drug habit?”

“I wouldn’t mind.” He answered quietly, with Laramie’s risen-from-the-dead matter-of-factness. “What do you want to know?”

She blinked at him for a moment. “I heard that most of the money you made on the
Kill Zone
movies went up your nose.”

He shook his head. “Not true. I’ve never even tried cocaine.” He smiled. “I have a tendency toward sinus infections, and the thought of putting something up my nose that doesn’t belong there completely freaks me out. In all honesty, I wasn’t opposed to the rush, just the method of getting it.”

“But I heard that the worst of your addictions started while you were making
Kill Zone II.
”

Kate took another bite of her sandwich, and a little bit of mustard clung to her lower lip. As Jed watched, she caught it with the tip of her tongue. And just like that, he was instantly aroused. He forced his gaze away from her mouth, and found himself staring directly at her breasts. He closed his eyes briefly, trying to remember what she had just asked him.
Kill Zone II.
Addiction. Right.

He cleared his throat. “Up to then, I was only drinking—heavily, yes, but never while I was working. But during
KZ Two
, I did some of my own stunts. They
were just easy jumps, no big deal, one of those rope-across-a-stream, Tarzan leaps, you know? But I landed wrong, and totally jammed my ankle. It wasn’t broken, but it might as well have been, considering the pain.”

She bit her sandwich again, and Jed nearly laughed aloud. It was absurd. The woman was only eating her dinner, yet it was so erotic, it was tying him into knots.

“The production was already behind schedule,” he told her. “They couldn’t afford to give me any downtime. So the doctor gave me a prescription for a painkiller. It worked. I could walk—I could even run on the damn thing, but it made me pretty sluggish. So at the director’s request, the good doctor prescribed me something else to pick me up. It only took days before I was completely dependent. A few months later, I was still taking the pills, pretending that my ankle was giving me trouble. It wasn’t, though.”

Jed laughed. “I made
Mr. O’Rourke
—a movie with an antidrug message—completely under the influence. I used to wash those pills down with Jack Daniel’s, take a hip flask with me onto the set for a hit between takes.” He paused. “It’s not a time of my life that I’m particularly proud of.”

She was watching him with a soft look in her eyes.

He wanted to reach across the table and take her hand, but he didn’t. Touching her would only make him want to kiss her, and if he kissed her, he’d be lost. And he knew the last thing he should do was rush her. No matter how badly he wanted her, no matter how badly he wanted to take off her clothes and feel all that incredibly soft skin against him, tonight was too soon.

For now, he had to settle for undressing Kate with his eyes. In his mind, he peeled her sweater back, revealing lingerie made of satin. Satin and lace. Yeah, definitely lace
in the front, allowing him tantalizing glimpses of the dark pink peaks of her nipples, and …

“Hello.” Her voice was tinged with annoyance. “I’m up here.”

He lifted his gaze to her face. God, he’d been staring at her breasts again. Her eyes were no longer soft.

“You do that all the time, you know.” Her voice shook slightly.

Damn, he’d gone and pissed her off again. And after she’d been looking at him so warmly. “I’m sorry.”

“I
hate
it when men like you do that. When you carry on entire conversations with my chest.”

She was lumping him in with the lowlifes, and indignation stirred. “I wasn’t doing that. I was just …” No matter how he put it, it sounded bad. He gave her one of Laramie’s weak smiles.

It only made her eyes narrow. “What? You were just … what?”

“Looking,” he told her. “Just enjoying the view. You’re a very attractive woman, and I happen to like looking at you.”

“At my breasts,” she qualified.

“Among other things, yeah.”

The look she was giving him implied that his answer had not pulled him out of the low-life pile. And that annoyed
him.
“It’s not as if you don’t want men to look at you. I mean, considering the way you dress.”

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It was the absolute wrong thing to say.

Her eyes flashed, and the breasts in question strained against the cotton of her sweater as she leaned forward. “That’s bullshit and you know it. Look at this sweater I’m wearing. Does it have a neckline down to my naval? No! Is it tight? No. Goddamn it, stop staring at me!”

Jed purposely let his gaze linger. “You just told me to look at your sweater.”

“Perfect.” Her voice shook so much, for one unnerving moment, Jed thought that she was crying. She wasn’t, but she was dangerously close. “I’ve just given you all the ammunition you need to completely push my buttons. I do something you don’t like, now you can stare at my breasts. That’s just perfect.”

She put her head on her arms, down on top of the table. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled. “You know, when I was in fifth grade, I had to wear a bra. I was only eleven years old, and I had this grown woman’s body. It was awful, the way the other kids teased me, but then, when I went to middle school, it got worse. Then it wasn’t just teasing. Then I was elbowed in the hall. Touched, grabbed, squeezed. Except when I turned around to see who’d done it, there was always just a crowd of boys standing there, none of ’em even looking at me. It got to the point where I felt violated every time I walked down the hall. If they weren’t touching, they were looking, and they weren’t at all subtle.” She lifted her head. “I know that you didn’t mean to insult me by looking at me that way. I can even take it as a compliment some of the time. God knows, it got to be so that I liked it—the looks, I mean, not the touching. I never liked that. But now when I walk down a street, I start to feel bad if I
don’t
get any whistles—how’s that for being really screwed up, huh?”

Jed nearly reached for her hand. “Kate, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t know why it bothers me when
you
look at me. I expect it from a lot of men, and sometimes I even play into it.” Her eyes were filled with tears, but she was fighting to keep them from escaping. “Just … don’t use it as a weapon, please? I know you’ve got plenty of reasons to be mad at me, but just … don’t get back at me that way, okay?”

“Okay.” Jed nodded. “Although I can’t promise I’ll be
able to stop, you know, looking. I mean, you’re nice to look at, and I’m a guy and …” He covered his eyes. “Oh, God, now I’m afraid to look at you.”

Kate laughed, but it sounded decidedly damp. Jed purposely didn’t watch, in case she was wiping her eyes.

“I’ve got to do these camera reports. Why don’t you go into the other room and learn your lines,” she said.

Jed stood up. “Good idea.”

The morning dawned, and Kate understood why sleep deprivation was used as torture.

It was particularly galling how easily Jericho dropped off to sleep at night. They would be in the middle of a conversation about
some
thing that was guaranteed to drive Kate’s blood pressure sky high, and then, just like that, he’d be asleep. And she’d be staring at the ceiling.

Kate peeled her face off her pillow and struggled into her bathrobe as she heard the shower shut off.

Jericho Beaumont was
not
a morning person. It was a good thing. She wasn’t, either, and she wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to stand his relentless attempts at conversation so early in the morning. For the past few mornings, he’d crawled out of the shower, thrown on some clothes, and staggered over to the Grill for coffee before he barely said a single word.

But this morning the phone rang.

Kate picked it up, sliding into the bench seat of the tiny table so that she wouldn’t have to stand. “O’Laughlin.” Her voice sounded as if she’d started smoking five packs of cigarettes a day. Or as if she hadn’t slept in three days …

“Katie.” It was Victor. “
C’est moi.
A change in the morning’s plans, babe. Naomi’s not up to speed.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Kate flipped opened her file. The entire morning’s schedule was all Jericho and Naomi—scenes of Laramie, haunted by Sarah, his dead
wife, along with a flashback scene of a younger, happier, clean and shiny Laramie, at his wedding to Sarah.

“We think it was food poisoning. We went out to dinner last night—a place that had grilled catfish. She was up all night yuking her guts out.”

Kate winced. “Poor thing.”

“Yeah, she’s literally green. FYI, she was up for sticking to the shoot schedule. I’m the one who opted to rearrange. She’s supposed to look beautiful and unearthly. She got the unearthly part down—she looks as if she’s just been exhumed.”

“So what’s the plan?” Kate asked.

“Colin and Sharlee are ready to do their scene,” Victor told her. “I’ve already spoken to both of them. We’ll just flip-flop this morning’s schedule with tomorrow morning’s. After lunch, we’ll go back to our regularly scheduled program.”

Colin Adams was the actor playing the villainous Reginald Brooks. And Sharlee Sherman was the actress playing a slave Brooks forced himself on. Jane was to stumble across the violent sexual act, watching in horror from the loft of the slave quarters. But her reaction shots would be filmed separately, on a different day. For Sharlee’s sake, since nudity was involved, the set today would be closed, with as few people as possible on hand.

Kate ran down the list of shots scheduled for the afternoon. Jericho wouldn’t be needed until late in the day. “It’s okay with me,” she said. “Are you absolutely positive it’s all right with Sharlee?”

“She said she’d be relieved to get it over with.”

“Okay, then,” Kate said. “Tell Naomi I hope she feels better.”

She hung up the phone and looked up to see Jericho standing in the doorway of his room, still wearing only a towel. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Want to go back to bed?”

It was the wrong thing to ask. Kate started to blush even before he responded.

And he didn’t hesitate, flashing her his best movie star smile—a real effort for him at that early hour. “With you? In a heartbeat.”

She put her head down on the table. “It’s 4:48 in the morning. I have absolutely no sense of humor at 4:48 in the morning. I have no patience at 4:48 in the morning. You know damn well what I meant. Naomi’s got food poisoning; we’re switching this morning’s schedule with tomorrow morning’s—which means your day is clear for the next eleven hours and change. Let’s get crazy and sleep—separately—until six-thirty at least.” She opened one eye and turned her head so that she could look up at him. “Please.”

Jericho came toward her, and gently pulled her up and out of her seat. Before she could protest, he’d unfastened her belt and peeled her bathrobe back off her shoulders. “Cute pj’s,” he added. “At least the bottoms are cute anyway, because remember, I’m no longer allowed to even glance at any shirt you might be wearing. Although if I
did
happen to look, I’d definitely approve. In a completely nonthreatening, nonsexually harrassing way, of course.”

Kate looked down at the little yellow roses that decked the cotton shorts and barely there sleeveless top of her pajamas and closed her eyes. “Oh, God. How can you make jokes at 4:48 in the morning?”

“Your problem is that you always assume I’m joking.” He tossed her robe over a chair, pulled back the bedcovers, and pushed her down onto the bed. As he pulled the covers over her, he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, right on the corner of her mouth.

“My problem,” he told her, with one of Laramie’s rueful smiles, the kind that could make her heart miss a beat, “is that you haven’t figured out I’m dead serious.”

He turned off the light and vanished back into the other room.

And Kate lay in the darkness of the early morning, suddenly wide awake.

“S
o how
did
you know you wanted to be an actor?” Kate glanced at Jericho, interested in hearing the answer to Susie McCoy’s question.