Love in Reality: A Contemporary Romance (The Blackjack Quartet) (24 page)

“And people think you’re not a smart player,” he said.

She smirked. “I’m playing a different game, that’s all.”

* * *

Rand hung out in the Control Room, chatting with the night crew, so he’d have an alibi when they heard the unmistakable sound of someone retching in the bathroom. There was no camera in the toilet area but the Fish still wore their mikes.

“Who’s that?” Barry, the AD on duty, asked.

“I don’t know,” Rand lied. “I wasn’t watching.”

Barry did a quick head count. “Susie and Chris are in the Tank with Dylan and Greg. Jim and Kai are in the garden. That must be your girl, Lissa.”

Rand felt both pride and irritation—he liked the way “your girl, Lissa” sounded but he wished they didn’t all think he was some perv. He allowed the irritation to color his voice. “Tell her to go to the Journal Room. If she’s really sick, I’ll call a doctor from there. I want to be careful—sometimes this is a ploy to get off the Fish Food.”

“You got it.”

Rand rushed to the Journal Room. By his watch, it was barely eleven. He’d already checked in at the hotel during his dinner break, so they could have five hours together. He felt his pulse galloping.

Their voices were being recorded, so he signaled to Lissa that her mike was still on. “Lissa,” he said using his producer voice. “Are you okay?”

She blew him a kiss but said in a slightly strained voice. “No, really, I’m fine. I just got a little sick.”

“I need to call a doctor if you’re unwell,” he said rather ponderously.

She rolled her eyes at his acting. “No, please. I’ll be fine now. I just need some sleep. I guess maybe the game is getting to me,” she suggested weakly.

“Let me get you some water, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed.

“Just sit here, I’ll be right back,” he said. Which was patently absurd, as there was water still on the table, but Marcy wouldn’t think of that.

He went back and grabbed the animatronic Lissa. Debbie had found the perfect place to stash her—a supply cupboard around the corner from the tech room. Debbie had finagled it so only Rand had the key.

When he came back, they put Lissa’s underwear and bathrobe on the doll along with the mike. When the doll was turned on and her “breathing” was just barely audible, Rand switched Lissa’s mike back on.

“Is that better?” he asked in his producer voice.

Lissa was standing close enough to the doll that she would be picked up on the mike. “Really, all I need is sleep,” she said softly.

He gave her the thumbs up. He called the Control Room. “Barry, I’m reasonably sure she’s not dying. I’m going to get her back into her bedroom. Tell the other Fish to stay away from that room for the night, okay?”

“You got it,” Barry replied.

Rand “walked” the doll back to Lissa’s room, which was luckily close to the Journal Room. He settled her in bed, said he hoped she would feel better, and walked out. He was careful to grimace and shrug at the camera in the hall ceiling, signaling to Barry that it looked like nothing.

He went back into the Journal Room. Lissa had on jeans and a T-shirt. She even had sandals.

“Where did those come from?” He waved his hand up and down her body.

“I hid them under my robe. I was clutching my stomach, right? Well, I was keeping these from falling out.”

Rand rolled his eyes but he was impressed.

“Let’s get going, then,” he whispered. He double-checked that everything was switched off before he phoned Barry again.

“Did you see? I think she’s a little dehydrated, is all. She’s miked, so if she’s sick again, we’ll know.”

“Damn, man, she must actually be sick. I thought for sure you’d spend a bit more time with her,” Barry joked.

“Yuck. After she’s thrown up? I’ll pass.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll tell everyone to leave her alone. Hopefully she’s down for the night.”

Rand refrained from saying anything too suggestive, just wished Barry a good night.

“You’re off, then?”

Rand faked a yawn. “I gotta get going. That way, if she’s going to be sick again, it’s your headache.”

“Gee, thanks. You’re the soul of compassion, Jennings.”

“Bye, Bare.”

When the phone went dead, Rand held out his arms. “Come here, woman. You are officially mine for the next five hours!”

She put a hand out, her palm warm on his chest. “No kissing until we’re out of here.”

“You are diabolical. Okay, then, your chariot awaits.”

“Same hotel?” she asked as they walked out to his car.

“Nope, Santa Monica this time. I took a chance on our having time to get to the ocean, so at least we could hear the waves.”

Lissa peered up at the sky. “Or even walk along the beach in the moonlight?” she asked.

He laughed. “Sure, why not? After twenty-minute time-limits, five whole hours feels like—okay, still not long enough, but longer.”

“Definitely an extended date for us,” she said.

This was happiness. Rand relaxed his hands on the wheel as Lissa closed her eyes. The consequences of their relationship were starting to mass on the horizon, but they were still too far away for him to care about. He was with a delicious woman, in a nice car, going for a midnight stroll on the beach. Didn’t get much better than this.

When Libby woke up, the car was stopped. “Oh, I must have…” She looked over at Rand, whose face was filled with amusement and affection.

“You dropped off as soon as we left the studio lot. Under the circumstances, I figured it would be better to let you get some sleep,” he told her.

“I was looking forward to talking to you,” she said.

“Well, we can take that walk on the beach now,” he teased. He tossed her the same baseball cap.

Libby looked around as she stuffed her hair under the hat. They had to be waiting for valet parking. While Rand talked to the attendant, Libby looked up at the massive tropical tree that dominated the front of the hotel. It was floodlit a lovely blue, as if the entire trunk were underwater.

“Is that a banyan tree?” she asked the valet.

“It’s the Moreton Bay Fig Tree. Over a hundred years old.”

“I’ll get you the brochure when we go through the lobby,” Rand offered before dragging her back toward the street.

The hotel was up on a bluff parallel with the ocean. Rand led them down some stairs and then across a pedestrian bridge. Libby could see people on the beach, enjoying the soft August evening. Philadelphia felt very far away.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the five-star hotel experience, but why not just take me to your place?”

They crossed a parking lot and started walking north on the path running the length of the beach. The sounds of the pier faded as they walked toward the dark.

He hesitated before answering, and Libby felt a frisson of worry. Was he married? Living with someone? A slob?

“We could have, since you devised a way to escape for several hours. It’s not a very welcoming place, though.” Rand explained this carefully, as though he was visualizing his apartment. “I’ve had dates over but usually I just made the bed. I don’t think I cared what my home said about me.”

“Which is—?”

“That I don’t bother to make it a home. Frankly, it’s not a lot more personal than a hotel room.”

Libby couldn’t picture his apartment. She and Lissa had worked to turn their generic white-walled loft into somewhere they actually wanted to be. The result, with its mix of Ikea and family hand-me-downs, wasn’t going to make the pages of a glossy home decor magazine, but it suited them and made them happy. What did it say about Rand that he’d never done that?

“Don’t you have friends or family come over?”

“My apartment? Uh, no,” he laughed. “My friends fall into three categories. Friends from work—we just go out together when there’s time, which is clearly not while the show is taping. Then there are friends from college, and those of us still in the area get together every once in a while. My college roommate is a lawyer in San Francisco, but he’s busy when I’m not and vice versa, so we mostly keep in touch online. And then there are the kids from the ’hood—that enclave of estates in Bel Air where I grew up. I went to school with some of them, and know others because our parents are friends. We don’t have a lot in common. I only see them when my mother throws a party and I’m obligated to attend.”

He sounded lonely, but he said he had friends. Maybe it sounded lonely because he didn’t have a twin. Libby knew people who hated their siblings, which also made no sense.

“Do you wish you had siblings?” she asked. She wanted to hug him. She settled for squeezing his hand.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. The families around us with the perfect 2.67 children didn’t seem any happier than my family. Those kids got shuttled from one activity to the next. I got shuttled from one activity to the next. I guess it didn’t look that different from the outside.”

“Well, that’s not what it was like for us. Oh, sure we had the after-school activities, but the fun was at night and on the weekends, when our parents were all too happy to let us play by ourselves. We giggled about school, teased each other about boys, shared clothes and makeup.” She paused. “I’m not saying this right. It really wasn’t that lame.”

“It sounds fun,” he said. “Did you ever fight?”

“Of course we did. My sister is nothing if not obstinate. And girls are mouthy. I have a friend who married right out of high school—she’s got two boys and a girl. She told me recently that boys are all legs and girls are all mouth. So, yeah, we fought.”

“But you’re still close,” he said. “What’s it like, having a twin?”

“People have been asking me that question since grade school. This summer, I think I finally know the answer.”

“Which is—?”

“I used to think it was like being one of two paintings of a single subject by a single painter. They look alike, but they might be subtly different in ways that evoke completely different reactions.”

She studied the waves, dark but edged in white lace as they broke on the sand. In the middle was a silver river of reflected moonlight. It was a peaceful image, perfect for thinking.

“Now I realize it’s not that. That’s the surface. She and I look alike. We know we’re different, even if no one else does. We picked ways to distinguish ourselves. One’s smart and bookish, the other is friendly and flirty. Never mind that our grades were nearly identical. One’s socially adept, the other seems shy. We’re both mouthy, of course,” she said with a laugh. “Too many lawyers in the family for that not to have happened. But we talk about different things in different ways.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Rand said softly.

Hadn’t she? What was it like having a twin—or, rather, what would it seem like to someone with rich parents and no sibling?

“Okay. It means I’m never alone. Even with her thousands of miles away,” she explained. “She’s always there. Before this summer I’d never had a relationship without my sister around.”

“But you’re the flirty one,” he said.

Oh, crap. Right. Still, maybe Lissa’d had the same experience living with Duke. “It’s still different. Without my twin in the picture,
I’m
different.” Finally, a true statement.

“Forty-five hours.”

“What?”

“That’s how long it’s been since I kissed you—really kissed you—without a mike strapped to your body.”

“Far too long,” Libby agreed.

Rand stopped and kissed her, softly, his hands smoothing back from her cheeks, her ears, along the edge of the hat and then down her back. His touch was gentle. She wanted to cry.

They walked on in silence. She’d been honest with him, in a crafty sort of way, but at least she’d been able to talk about herself. She wished she could get it all out, answer the questions he didn’t even know to ask. For now, though, this felt good.

“What was growing up like for you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he hesitated. “I suppose by national standards it was unusual growing up in Hollywood, but it was all I knew. What was it like growing up with a lawyer for a dad?”

He always stopped short of talking about himself. Was he bitter about his background? She let him change the subject.

“Dad?” It was a fascinating question—how did Lissa feel about Dad being a lawyer? Then she laughed, “Well, it was confusing when we were younger. One of us would go to Daddy and ask for something—like could we have money for the ice cream truck—and he’d say, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and we’d have no idea whether that meant ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ One time we asked him for something and his answer was that he’d take it under advisement. We had to ask Mom what that meant.”

Rand chuckled. “That’s like my dad. I mean, not so much the industry jargon, but the sense that he brought his work home. I’m not sure he ever relaxed enough to just be my dad.”

She waited, but he didn’t go on. Not close to his dad and possibly not close to his friends.

They headed back toward the pier.

Libby was thinking about guys’ friendships—something she had never observed firsthand, not having any brothers—when she said, “Having a twin sister kept me from making a lot of friends. I know my mother wanted both of us to have our own friends, but it never worked out that way. If only one of us was invited to a sleepover, the highlight was coming home to tell the other one all about it.”

“Do you miss Libby?”

Strange to hear him say her name. She had to remind herself to breathe again. “Uh, of course. We’re best friends. I keep wanting to tell her things about the show, about you…”

He turned to her, his grin gleaming in the moonlight. “Me?”

She nudged his shoulder. “Of course you. I didn’t tell her about meeting you last spring, so she’ll be surprised in September when I tell her that I got to know one of the producers
really
well.”

He pulled her into his arms. “I’m glad I’m worth reporting on, like a particularly good sleepover,” he teased.

“And the very best sleepovers didn’t involve much sleeping,” she whispered. She curved her hand around his neck, angling her face to kiss him. He smelled so nice, a scent she knew was just him. She remembered their night together, his hardness and the way she’d felt pressed against him in bed. She shivered at the memory and tightened her arms.