Her Red-Carpet Romance (7 page)

For a second it looked as if he was just going to laugh in her face, Yohanna thought. And then he just shook his head, dismissing the very notion.

“Being a producer's rough enough, Hanna. Why in God's name would I want to put myself through something like that? And after the hell you go through, you wind up occupying the loneliest seat in the country. No thanks. I'm happy just making movies, giving people a reason to detach from their lives for a couple of hours and just let themselves be entertained.”

“That cameraman I talked to also told me that you actually remember everyone's name.”

“Is there a question in there somewhere?” he asked.

“Do you? Remember everyone's name,” she clarified in case that had gotten lost in the shuffle.

Lukkas shrugged carelessly. “Seems like the right thing to do. Someone works for you, you should have the decency to know their name.”

“No argument here,” she told him. “But you are aware that that's pretty unique, aren't you?”

He shrugged again. “I really don't have the time to run any self-serving surveys,” he told her. “I've got a movie to bring in on time and, if possible, underbudget.”

“Well, I'm here to help with that in any way I can,” she assured him a tad breathlessly.

Admittedly, she'd gotten a little caught up in the proceedings. Being around Lukkas seemed to do that. Not only that, but she found herself sneaking side glances at the man. Here, on the set, even when he wasn't issuing orders he seemed somehow larger than life.

Great, all you need is to fall for the guy. That'll end your career before it ever gets a chance to start
, she chided herself.
Whatever you think you're feeling for this guy, you're not
, she silently emphasized, determined to get a firm grip on her overactive imagination.

“And you're sure about using Joanne Campbell?” Yohanna asked, getting back to the actress they'd discussed.

“Why?” he asked, curious as to why she would question something like this. “You don't think she's right for the part?”

“I have no idea about the part,” Yohanna confessed. “I just want to be sure that you're sure.”

He relaxed just the slightest touch. “Well, in that case, yes, I am.”

“And what would you like to do about Monica Elliott?” She prodded.

That was simple as far as he was concerned. “Let her twist a little in the wind, then send her a text message telling her I've changed my mind and she can go do her other movie. Maybe she'll be nicer to the next director she works with on her next picture.”

“You really think she can change her behavior?” Yohanna asked him skeptically.

“Hey, why not?” He was a firm believer in second chances. “I'm in the business of making fantasies, remember?”

“I remember.” She brought up another topic that was, in her view, just as important. Possibly more so. “Have you eaten yet?”

Preoccupied, Lukkas was certain he'd heard his all-around assistant incorrectly.

“What?”

“Have you eaten?” she repeated. “I've noticed that you tend to get caught up in whatever you're doing and then you just forget to eat. Not recommended,” she told him. “That catches up with you after a while—big-time.”

“Auditioning for the part of my mother?”

Yohanna couldn't tell if he was amused or annoyed. She trod lightly.

“No. I just want to keep the job I have,” she told him.

“Oh, didn't I tell you?” he asked, looking surprised at his own oversight.

Yohanna narrowed her eyebrows slightly as she looked at the producer, waiting for an explanation.

“Tell me what?” she prompted when he didn't immediately follow up on his previous question.

“That I've decided that you passed the test. You're hired on a permanent basis.”

“No three-month probation?” she asked, wanting to be perfectly clear where she stood.

“Consider it month number four,” Lukkas answered glibly.

He'd done it again. Left her stunned and falling behind, Yohanna thought. But this time, he also left her smiling to herself.

She figured she was making progress.

 

Chapter Seven

H
ours later she was back on the plane, sitting next to Lukkas and waiting to make the sixty-minute trip to Bedford.

She'd just buckled up when she glanced out the window. The view, or lack thereof, suddenly sank in.

She could never live in a place like this.

“How do they stand it?” she asked Lukkas, staring out into the night.

Making one final notation in his notepad before tucking it back into his pocket, Lukkas slanted a look in her general direction, his attention split. “Stand what?” he asked.

“All that darkness.” The fact that there was a new moon didn't help the scenario any. Yohanna suppressed a shiver that traveled along her spine. She'd never cared for the dark. As a child, she'd been afraid of it. “It's like being inside the bottom of midnight.”

“Some people actually find the dark soothing,” Lukkas told her.

“Not me,” she responded with feeling. “The dark can hide things. I like being able to see what's out there at all times.”

“At the moment, what's out there is darkness,” he said wryly.

For a second she forgot that they were boss and assistant and just responded to him as if they were friends. Friends of long standing because she really was beginning to feel rather comfortable around Lukkas.

Blowing out a breath, she pretended that his teasing ruffled her feathers. “Very funny.”

She saw the corners around his eyes crinkling as he made a guess about her childhood. “I bet you were afraid of the dark when you were a kid.”

There was a time when she would have protested the observation despite the fact that it was right on the money. But that time was gone. She was more confident now in her own abilities, her own skills. She saw no reason to pretend that he had guessed wrong when he hadn't.

“My night-light was my best friend. It was in the shape of a Saint Bernard.” A fond memory entered her mind. Her father had gotten it for her to help her get over her fear of the dark. “If it wasn't on, I couldn't sleep.”

“Let me guess. You were a city kid.”

She was and she was proud of it. “Born and bred,” she affirmed.

Still, even city kids went to the country sometimes, he thought. He remembered his own childhood, squeezed in the backseat between two siblings and what felt like fourteen pointy elbows, desperately trying to look out the window to see where they were—and if they had gotten there yet.

“No long, grueling cross-country trips when your family went on vacation? No camping out or traveling through more desolate areas on your way to somewhere else?” he asked.

She shook her head. There had been no vacations in her childhood. “My father was a workaholic. The word
vacation
wasn't in his vocabulary. But he liked to take me to the local amusement park whenever he could,” she told Lukkas in case he thought that she'd been deprived as a child. “We went on long bike rides, played ball in the field behind the high school. I didn't feel as if I was missing anything,” she said, anticipating his possible next question. “It was a good childhood as far as it went.”

The look on his face said he found that an odd way to put it. “And that was?”

“Until my dad died when I was twelve.” An ironic smile slipped over her lips. “After that, my mother went to work and I helped out around the house to try to take up the slack. There was no time for vacations,” she assured him.

Hers had been a no-nonsense kind of upbringing from that point on. Her mother had done her best, but there was no way she could have filled the void that her father had left behind.

Something in her voice had Lukkas asking, “You were close to your father?”

“I was,” she admitted freely. Her father had understood her, had allowed her to be who she was. If he were still alive today, he wouldn't be trying to set her up with the sons and nephews of some of his friends the way her mother felt she had to. “He told me I could be anything I wanted to be—as long as I was organized,” she added with a laugh.

The sound of her laugh had Lukkas envisioning sunrises over fields of flowers. He smiled. “Is that how it all started? You being so very organized?” He embellished in case she didn't realize what he was referring to.

She nodded. “Yes, that's how it started. What little girl doesn't want to please her father?” Not that it took much. A clean bedroom; her homework done before dinner. These were all things that garnered her father's praise. She missed hearing it. “After he died...for a long time after that I secretly thought if I could just be organized enough, he'd come back.” She laughed shortly, shaking her head. Had she
ever
really been that young and naive? “Drove my mother crazy. She'd put something down and before she could blink, I had it back in its place ‘where it belonged.'”

She thought back to those days. “I guess to her I was bordering on OCD,” she admitted, smiling to herself as she remembered a couple of incidents that had driven her mother particularly crazy. “Before you ask,” she continued, “I got over it—partially because I knew what my little organizational campaign was doing to my mother. I knew that she missed my father, too. I didn't want to add to her sadness by making her think there was something wrong with me.”

Yohanna understood that she had been monopolizing the conversation. And sharing much too much.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “I have a habit of babbling.” She felt herself flushing a bit. “You should have stopped me.”

The extra color in her cheeks intrigued him. “Why? You gave me some insight into what makes you tick. I thought it was interesting.”

And what makes you tick, Lukkas?
Yohanna found herself wondering.
What can I ask you without making it look like I'm being overly nosy?

“Besides,” he continued with just a tiny bit of triumph in his voice, “it distracted you.”

“Distracted me? From what?”

He gestured toward the window on her left. “We're airborne and you didn't have to squeeze your armrests until they all but fell off.”

He was right. They were flying and she hadn't even been aware of the takeoff.

Yohanna looked through her window now. Staring, she could just barely make out dots of lights scattered about in no particular pattern—she assumed they were coming from homes built along the terrain—far below her.

His question about her fears of the dark had taken her back into the past and she'd gotten so wrapped up in revisiting memories of her father, she hadn't even noticed the change in cabin pressure or the powerful surging feeling of ascent.

Still, she felt she had to at least pretend that she had conquered her feeling about takeoffs and didn't need to white-knuckle them anymore.

“Or here's a thought,” she suggested. “Maybe I've just conquered my fear of flying.”

An amused smile played along his lips. “There is that. Looks as though we'll make a real world traveler out of you yet, Hanna,” Lukkas predicted.

* * *

They landed in Bedford a little more than an hour later.

Feeling the downward shift, Lukkas opened his eyes. That was when he realized that he must have fallen asleep sometime in the past fifteen minutes or so.

The long day he and Yohanna had put in had finally caught up to him.

Stifling a yawn, he stretched as best he could in the limited amount of space he had, and then rotated his neck a little. It felt stiff. Served him right for falling asleep sitting up.

Turning his head toward Yohanna, he was surprised to see that she had fallen asleep, as well. Apparently the long day had caught up to her, too.

He was about to gently shake her by the shoulder to wake her when something had him pausing for a second.

Pulling back his hand, he just looked at Hanna for a long moment. She'd been a ball of energy today, never questioning anything he told her to take care of, just finding a way to get it done and quickly.

He knew she'd come to him without any experience in the world where he had made his mark and yet she'd adapted so well and so quickly, it was hard to believe she hadn't been part of the film industry from the very beginning.

And there was something more.

Looking at her like this, her features soft and at rest rather than animated, he could see why his director had thought she was an actress. Aside from being exceptionally attractive, there was something about this young woman...an inherent sweetness that instantly transcended any awkward period that usually existed between strangers as they slowly got to know one another.

Hanna had something, a quality that effortlessly and instantly broke down barriers. That same quality made her someone he instinctively knew he could not only count on but that she could be a confidante, a friend who wouldn't let him down. Someone who would keep his secrets and be there to lend him silent—and not so silent—support when that was what was called for.

Whoa, Lukkas-boy, you're tired and getting carried away here. She's here to take Janice's place, not Natalie's
, he reminded himself, afraid of where this was all taking him.

Shutting down any further reaction—
unwanted
reaction, he underscored—buzzing around inside him, he put his hand on Hanna's shoulder and shook it ever so slightly.

When she went on sleeping, he did it a second time, a little more forcefully this time around.

“Time to get up, Hanna—unless you want to spend the night on the plane,” he told her.

The sound of Lukkas's voice wove its way into the dream she was having and, along with the jarring motion she felt on her shoulder, abruptly made her come around.

Blinking, Yohanna opened her eyes. She was disoriented for a moment.

“You fell asleep.”

It wasn't an accusation but a statement of fact. Nevertheless, it still made her feel like an idiot who had dropped the ball. On the job a little more than two weeks and she was already falling asleep around the boss.

Not exactly a good thing to have happen when it came time to review her job performance.

“I'm sorry. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Are we still in the air?” she asked. Blinking again to clear her vision, she tried to focus as she looked out the window. An array of lights, both near and far, greeted her.

We're home, Toto
, she thought with just a touch of whimsy.

“I guess not,” she said out loud, answering her own question. And then another thought struck her. “I didn't hold you up, did I?”

“We just landed,” he told her. “You slept through that like a baby. See? I told you that you'd get used to it.”

She was never one who accepted any form of flattery as if she deserved it. “We'll see how I do when I'm awake,” Yohanna replied.

She started to get up and found that she couldn't.

“Um, you might want to unbuckle your seat belt,” Lukkas suggested, pointing toward the belt that was still quite buckled in place. “I don't think you're quite strong enough to take the plane with you.”

Chagrined, she pressed the release button on the belt—and found that although the buckle made the appropriate noises, it wouldn't separate itself from the metal tongue that had fit so easily into the slot an hour ago.

She tried pressing it again and was on the receiving end of the same result.

Lukkas was already on his feet. When he heard her murmuring in frustration under her breath, he turned around to see what was wrong. He was surprised to find that she was still seated.

“Problem?” he asked.

“I think the seat belt doesn't want me to leave,” she quipped drily.

“Let me have a look at it.” Sitting next to her again, Lukkas tried to depress the lock and found that it just wouldn't budge. “Let's try this again,” he said, seeming to address the words to the inanimate object rather than to her.

His hands on the seat belt, he applied more pressure as he tried to work the ends apart.

That had him accidentally brushing against places that he wouldn't have normally been in contact with—but he had no choice.

Yohanna shifted a little, not because she felt cramped, but because, as Lukkas was trying to free her from the uncooperative seat belt, he seemed to be unaware of the fact that his hands were brushing against her thighs, which in turn caused a heated chain reaction within her.

She was doing her very best not to notice.

She was failing.

Yohanna bit the inside of her cheek, struggling to think of other things.

Struggling to regulate the way she was breathing, as well.

Maybe if she didn't like the man as much as she did, if she actually
dis
liked him, she could easily block the warm shock waves he was unsuspectingly causing to dance all over her body.

But she
did
like him and consequently she
did
feel something spreading through her. Something she knew she shouldn't be feeling—definitely something she
couldn't
react to.

She vehemently didn't want to be one of
those
women; women who slept with their bosses as casually as they changed their clothes.

For his part, Lukkas was trying his very best not to notice that, try as he might not to, he kept brushing his hand against her, fleetingly touching her in places reserved for a lover's caress.

Tendering an apology might be too embarrassing for her, so he pretended not to be aware of it.

But he was.

Exceedingly so.

He could feel the charged electricity crackling between them all the way from the roots of his hair up to the very tips.

This reaction was purely physical and only happening because he hadn't been with a woman since his wife's death. He had never been one of those people who felt some unbridled need to sow wild oats fast and furiously anywhere and anytime he had the opportunity.