The Movie (40 page)

with Mary Holmes, because when he reviewed the rushes he wasn’t satisfied.

They were several weeks behind schedule. Already the budget was looking hopelessly optimistic.

See the Lights was in big trouble. And that meant so was Eleanor Marshall, and so was Sam Kendrick. Eleanor’s studio-saving flick was turning into a creative and commercial disaster. And Sam Kendrick’s big SKI package deal was less of a big deal every day.

Of course, that was the beauty of the thing, tkoxana thought to herself, the way all the blame would fall exactly where she had intended it to. Eleanor Marshall and Sam Kendrick would learn not to mess with her the hard way; they had both insulted her, and now they were both clutching a one-way ticket out of their precious industry, at which she, tkoxana, had apparently been such an insignifictnt novice. She smiled, her lips curving coolly. As far as she was concerned, there were certain lessons in life which you could apply anywhere. As Ms Marshall and Mr Kendrick would fred out. And at the end of it all, she, loxana Felix, would be established as a great movie star, a real powerhouse, famous for herself rather than her picture - accepted, and loved.

See the Lights would see the end of all her enemies, but the movie itself was not dead. Just a little bit sick. And when the time was right to administer the medicine, her chosen acolytes, Jake Keller and David Tauber, would be right there to play doctor, rescue the picture and put it smoothly back on track to smash success.

tkoxana breathed in deeply, drawing the fragrant tropical air into her lungs. She might head back to the hotel now, see if Sam was around to offer her a little more physicalrelease. There was something so amusing in watching him sink deeper and deeper under her spell, and after all, he did offer her body incredible pleasures. He was. good enough even to drive out the memory of her

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unaccountable failure with Zach. And surely there was no danger of her starting to feel anything for him, was there?

The supermodel checked her feelings as she strode back across the deserted reaches of sand, watching herself, observing her own emotions as though she were an unbiased, outside witness. That was the only way to survive, that had always been her way; to keep the core of your soul distant and unwatchable, so that nothing could crack it, nothing could violate it. She had suffered once before, and she would never do so again.

loxanna knew that she despised men like Keller and Tauber - they were jackals, unprincipled, greedy scav engers, with giant egos and a combination of cold ruthlessness andlow cunning that had bought each of them every gain they had. Sam, her Sam, was not like that. He had principles. He was ambitious and tough, but not ruthless. And he was strong and bold, he played with a Straight deck. You could trust him. She did not despise him. But she did dislike him, she did want revenge.., he had insulted her in public, beaten a submission from her. Well, Poxana hoped he had enjoyed his momentary thrill of domination. Because it was going to cost Sam Kendrick very, very dear.

No, she reflected, as she walked into the orchard scented gardens of the hotel. Her heart remained a fortress. Sam Kendrick would find no mercy there.

‘There’s an explanation, Tom, there has to be.’

‘Not good enough!’

Goldman’s fist pounded down on his desk, his angry face flushed red with fury. ‘You authorized those budget projections, Eleanor. You signed off on three location choices which have proved unworkable. And you had ultimate authority over casting choices which have gone badly wrong. We developed this project from scratch, and that means you took on the role as producer.’

3:6

‘Thank you for the recap,’ Eleanor Marshall replied coldly. She stood in front of her boss’s desk, poised and immaculate as ever in a navy Georges P,.ech pantsuit, a platinum wedding ring glinting on the fourth finger of her left hand.

‘See the Lights was going to be our comeback movie, and now it’s going to hell in a handbasket! Our pitch to New York to save this goddamn studio was based on the movie - ‘

‘My pitch.’

‘Oh, yeah. Your pitch, that’s right. And your movie, your casting decisions, and your mistakes!’

‘Casting ]R.oxana Felix was not my decision, Tom, if you remember.’

‘I remember that your signature is at the bottom of the memo colfirming her casting.’

Eleanor took a step backwards, her expression darkening. ‘You would deny responsibility for that, Tom? Is that what you’re saying?’

Goldman paused, took a deep breath. ‘Look, Eleanor. The board know about our problems on the set. Don’t look at me like that, I know it’s supposed to be top-level privileged. But Howard Thorn has heard about it and he’s on my back…

Eleanor felt a tendril of fear coil its way round her heart. Holy Lord Jesus, why was it Howard Thorn, out of all of them? Thorn was the one who owned stock, a fifteen per cent stake, to be precise. The director who would be most inclined to scream for blood if it all” went wrong. And whose blood? Not Tom Goldman’s, evidently. She had seen this kind of thing before. Greedy as he would have been to take the glory for a smash, Tom was pedalling away from a budgetary disaster just as fast as he could. And if that meant passing the buck on tkoxana Felix, so be it.

The moment she had dreaded had come to pass. Tom

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Goldman would be responsible for firing her or sparing

her, and his own job was probably on the line too.

Maybe all Hollywood friendships end this way, when

you get right down to it, she thought. Torn apart in the scramble to survive. Was that what their fifteen years of companionship meant to Goldman? Kill or be killed?

‘Are you saying,’ she repeated slowly, ‘that you would

lie about the part you played in casting tkoxana Felix?’

Tom Goldman stared hard at her. ‘What I’m saying,

lady, is that if you want to stay president of this studio you had better find a way to fux this mess, and you’d better do it fast.’

Eleanor turned on her heel and walked out of his office without another word.

Tom Goldman watched her go. When she had disappeared into the corridor, he slumped back in his Eames leather armchair, despair racking him. He was. being hard on Eleanor, as hard as he could.

It was the only way he stood a chance of disguising his fe.elings for her, and disguise them he must. Because she belonged to Paul Halfin. Because he had sired a child on a woman he now realized he didn’t love, maybe didn’t even like, but who would be the mother of a baby that he was responsible for.

It had taken that night in New York to show him what

true love was, what real passion was. It was difficult even to get aroused with Jordan now. He pretended it was her pregnancy, but he wasn’t sure she was buying that.., and meanwhile the studio and his great white hope of a movie were falling apart.

It was all turning to dust, his whole life, crumbling into

ashes in front of him. Made worse because for a few shining

hours he had seen it all clearly, he had had everything.

Too late, Tom. You’re just too late.

‘Fire her.’ Fred Florescu’s exasperated voice broke into

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Sam Kendrick’s self-absorption. ‘You’ve got the seniority, Sam, for God’s sake. Call Eleanor Marshall and have her do it.’

‘It would cost far too much money at this stage,’ Kendrick said, his eyes still fixed at the projection room screen. He had seen the rushes now, all of them, and he

knew this movie was salvageable just.

/fnothing else went wrong.

/fhe could persuade tkoxana to do her job.

/fthe support cast pulled themselves together.

A lot of ifs, Kendrick knew. But he just could not, would not accept the alternative. She was a drug, and he was becoming addicted.

‘Maybe we should consider firing Mary or Seth, or both,’ the agent suggested. ‘I know they’re my clients, but these are 19usy performances. What you’ve got of Poxana is actually terrific.’

‘Yeah, what we’ve got of her,’ Florescu ranted, passing his hand across his forehead. ‘But that’s not fucking enough! First I’m ready to replace the bitch, then she does a little work, and now, when we’re getting too far in for changes, she starts screwing around again.’

‘Mary and Seth are doing their best,’ Zach Mason chimed in quietly from a corner. ‘She’s putting them off deliberately. Sabotaging their performances. I see it time and again on the set.’

‘Sabotaging them? Don’t you think that’s maybe a little melodramatic, kid?’ Sam said. ‘This is a movie, not Kennedy in Dallas.’

Mason shrugged. ‘That’s what I see, Sam.’

Tll ask David to talk to her again,’ Kendrick said finally, standing up, ‘and I’ll speak to Seth and Mary and Jack. They’re all my clients, so maybe I can put the fear of God into them - do something about the personnel problem.’

But even as he rolled out the soothing words, Kendrick

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winced inwardly at the lie. The personnel problem was sleeping with him, and he knew it.

Bewitched.

The word floated through his mind, settling on the surface level of his consciousness, above the deep levels of happiness and sensual nirvana that had practically hypnotized him. Sam Kendrick lay on top of the double bed in loxana’s hotel suite, feeling sexually sated in a way he hadn’t done in years. He had started to make love to her, slowly at first, getting more and more aroused by the way she would slide that silken skin against him, trail the feathery ends of her glossy, coal-black hair over his cock,

mb her erect nipples across his dry, burning lips, cup his ‘ balls in her warm hands and massage them with the lightest,

most exquisitely teasing touch, until he was massively erect, his cock aching and throbbing with need, and then she had slid away from him onto those slender knees and taken him in her mouth, perfect red lips sliding up and down him in a heavenly rhythm, then breaking offto lick him seconds before the pleasure got too acute, flicking her tongue across the sensitive, straining tip of his penis, then all the way down the length of him to the base, her fingers trailing lightly over his balls until he thought he might go mad, and finally, seeing her pretty face curving into a secret smile, he had roared with amused frustration, grabbed the little minx by her underarms and hauled her onto her stomach across the bed, sliding in her inch by inch, delighted at finding her soaking wet for him, and had started to tease her, his cock pounding into her, his fingers slipping into the slick down between her legs, brushing over her clitoris, bringing her up to the brink and back several times, until she was weeping, kissing weakly at his forearm, begging him to do it to her, begging for release, and with an incredible sense of masculine power pumping through his veins Kendrick had agreed and slammed

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himself deeper and deeper into her velvet body, taking them both across the final barrier into an immense orgasm, one that was torn from him as though he were a boy of seventeen, one that he had felt rock his lover’s slim body as her belly convulsed in spasms beneath him. Now she was curled in his arms, naked and catlike, her small, incredibly perfect body resting against his, her head nestling in the crook of his elbow, and he was almost breathless from the adoration and protectiveness that gripped him every time he glanced at her.

‘I think Isabelle must be the luckiest woman alive,’ tkoxana murmured.

Sam laughed. ‘Isabelle and I haven’t slept together for years.’

‘Oh, come on. You’re just saying that, to please me.’ She snuggled against him.

‘I swea! You know she isn’t interested in that kind of thing. Isabelle loves giving parties, she loves the social thing.’ Kendrick shrugged. ‘It works out OK; we just never confront anything. I think a lot of good marriages survive that way.’

‘It doesn’t sound so good, Sam. It sounds lonely.’

Her words were an icy dagger plunged right into the most vulnerable places of his heart. Until he had started to see tkoxana he hadn’t cared-he hadn’t known - there was anything missing from his life. He’d been consumed with getting to the top and staying there, and there’d been exclusive whores to provide the sex which Isabelle withheld, and Isabelle to procide the social backdrop which she did not withhold. And lov?Well, he loved his kids, both in their teens and away at English boarding schools. The best, apparently, and Isabelle had insisted on it. The other kind of love, the feelings he.had once had for Isabel/e, that had died of malnutrition, and had wasted away so silendy he neither realized when it died nor missed it when it was gone.

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‘Are you ever lonely?’

The words came out before he could stop himselŁ. He didn’t want her to know how strongly he had started to feel for her, didn’t want to scare her off. How many men would a supermodel have cast off? How many lovers would this icy beauty have broken in two? Sam didn’t want to think about it. But he also didn’t want to let her go.

‘I’m lonely all the time. I’m lonely on this movie,’ P,.oxana told him, her voice a whisper. ‘It’s hard, Sam, it’s really hard. They’re all blaming me.’ Her words trailed away, filled with pain. ‘Don’t bother to deny it, I know it’s tree… Seth and Mary and Jack, they’re all acting so well, and I know my scenes probably aren’t great on tape…’

‘Your performance is fine, sweetheart.’

‘ She squeezed his arm gratefully. ‘You’re too soft with me, baby. But they make up for it. Ever’since I told Zach Mason I didn’t want a relationship with him, be’s just made it impossible, and Fred won’t cut me any slack.., but it’s mostly Megan Silver.’

‘Megan?’

“She keeps rewriting all the scenes and changing my part! I try to act it, Sam, but sometimes I just can’t… I’ve asked David to speak to her, as she’s his client, but he’s tried and I really don’t know what the hell else to do - Fred just loves her.’

‘V˘hy is she rewriting scenes now?’ Sam asked, bewildered and angry. The hurt in toxana’s voice tore at his heartstrings.