Wild Honey (17 page)

Dropping her legs down, Sasha groaned and sprawled flat. She hadn’t understood the reference at the time, but she was beginning to. Besides picking up her valuables, Leslie’s mission, so far as Sasha could figure it out, was to save another woman from making the same mistake that she had made—falling in love with Marc Renaud.

Leslie’s insistent voice broke through Sasha’s recall. “You know, of course, that he’s completely self-involved,” Leslie warned. “Booze, cigs, and his films. Those are the only things he needs.”

Sasha started on a round of scissor kicks. “I haven’t found him to be that way at all,” she said, hoping to discourage Leslie. “He’s considerate and attentive. In fact, he’s very sweet.”

“Sweet? Give him time,” Leslie prophesied gloomily. “He’ll revert. The man is incapable of giving of himself on a sustained basis. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love him dearly, but he’s unevolved.”

Sasha sprang up, jogging in place. “I have to go run now,” she announced.

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Leslie asked.

Sasha spun and headed for the door. Tired? If Leslie didn’t leave soon, she would need Bink, Arturo, and a stretcher to get from one room to the other.

Marc joined Sasha halfway through the run. She heard his rhythmic breathing and smiled as he jogged up alongside her.

“What’s bugging Leslie?” he asked.

“She thinks you’re unevolved.”

“Really? Sounds terminal.”

“I stood up for you,” Sasha said, searching his intent profile. “I told her you were...sweet.”

He glanced back, a quirk of ironic humor in his smile. “Sweet? Did she collapse laughing?”

“I don’t think she bought it.”

Their laughter lingered softly as they continued running, but the silence that eventually replaced it had a quality of uneasiness to it, as though neither knew quite what to say next, as though no subject seemed easy or safe enough to broach. Finally their deepened breathing was the only common sound. Sasha sensed that something was different between them, and it frightened her. Leslie’s return was raising a barrier, not because Marc was still in love with Leslie, or her him. It was simply that any outside interference would have burst the bubble of enchantment that had surrounded them for the last few days. It was all too fragile and new, their relationship, their feelings for each other. Everything that had happened between them felt like a dream now that reality had intruded.

“Thank you,” he said at last, “for standing up for me.”

Without thinking what she was doing or why, Sasha veered out into the water, splashing through the surf that swished around her ankles.

Marc followed her, water flying as he claimed her wrist.

Her heart was beating wildly as she turned to him. “Was I right to stand up for you?” she asked. “Was I, Marc?” The fear had become anxiety, a soft blockage in her throat.

He searched her eyes and his smile turned sad. “I guess I’m not very sweet when it comes right down to it, am I?”

She needed reassurance, and they both knew it. Leslie’s warnings were all the more threatening because Sasha half believed they might be true. “She says you’re incapable of giving, Marc.”

“Sasha, don’t—”

Still breathing heavily, Sasha avoided his eyes, but she couldn’t stop herself. Her fears tumbled out in a flood of questions. “She made it sound as if you don’t need anyone or anything, especially a relationship with someone like me. I told her she was wrong, Marc. Did I do the right thing?”

Marc went quiet as the surf crashed in around them. There was conflict in his grip on her wrist. There was the pain of a decision he didn’t want to make in his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I honestly don’t know what I need at this moment.”

Sasha could hardly breathe. He slackened his hold, and she pulled away. “That’s not good enough,” she said, her heart breaking a little with every word. “I can’t defend a man who won’t defend himself.”

“Sasha—” He turned to the horizon, his voice catching with frustration, with a glint of the turmoil he harbored. “There are so many things you don’t understand, dammit. You have this naïveté about life—”

“Then tell me, Marc, tell me about the things I don’t understand.”

He stared out at the water, his profiled face half shadowed. His eyes were pale and silvery in the light, more luminescent than she’d ever seen them. They frightened her with their capacity to turn cold and distant, to shut out all human emotion? Was that what was happening now? Or was it a trick of the light? As she stared at him, her mind formed questions, painful, escalating questions. Why was he doing this, closing her out? Where was the man who had loved her so tenderly, the man who’d brought tears to her eyes with his anguish?

“Marc?” Something inside her went crazy with despair when he didn’t answer. She broke away and began jogging back toward the beach house, her pulse shallow, her thoughts jumbling. When he made no attempt to follow her, she took it as the final rejection. It was over, all of it, the tenderness, the staggering passion—over and done with, wrapped like the movie.

As she reached the beach house, she tried to convince herself that she was overreacting, that it was the actress in her, the affinity for drama. But the feelings persisted, and finally a kind of desperation overtook her as she faced the possibility of losing the beauty that she and Marc had shared over the past few days. The thought was nearly unbearable.

By the time she reached her room and locked the door behind her, a searing spot of pain pierced her chest. It felt like an arrow through her heart. Corny, she thought, tears misting her eyes as she sank down on the bed, Lord, how unbelievably corny.

Sasha didn’t see Marc or Leslie the rest of the day. That evening, lured by the aromatic smells of Arturo’s cooking—and by a tiny, uncontrollable burgeoning of hope—she put in an appearance at dinner and found the two of them already in the dining room, drinking champagne. They were conversing quietly and seemed to have come to some kind of uneasy truce for which Sasha was grateful, although the sight of Marc with a half-empty champagne bottle in his hand made her throat tighten with sadness.

The spring lamb and mint sauce Arturo prepared were as delicious as the dinner conversation was disastrous. Sasha picked at her food as Marc gloomily finished off the champagne and Leslie discoursed on the dangers of red meat. Finally, as though he’d been cued, Arturo appeared at the door and announced that Marc had a phone call.

Daunted by Leslie’s endlessly bright patter and mystical bent, Sasha was about to excuse herself when Marc reappeared in the doorway, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He tapped one out, lit it, and took a long drag. There was something taut about him, a turbulence held in check.

“That was Paul Maxwell,” he told Sasha, exhaling a blue jet of smoke. “The studio’s found out that Leslie’s back, and they don’t want to take a chance on the press discovering that there are two of you. They want you out of here, Sasha. Tonight.”

Sasha pulled a stack of panties from the dresser drawer and tossed them into her suitcase on the bed. They landed every which way, corners unfolding, colors mixing. Absently aware that she was desecrating Arturo’s meticulous handiwork, she gave the patchouli sachet a heave next, and missed. Dunk shot needs some work, she thought.

Heartsick and confused, she glanced around her bedroom, at the moonlight glowing in the alcove, at the French provincial loveliness, and realized she couldn’t leave yet. Not this way, not with so many things left unsaid. Peering in the direction of Marc’s bedroom, she imagined him lying on his bed, chain-smoking Gauloises...and thinking about her?

She slammed shut the dresser drawer. He was thinking about her, undoubtedly, but not willing to talk to her and certainly not willing to explain himself. He’d made his excuses and left the dining room as soon as he’d passed on the studio’s message. Apparently he wasn’t even going to say good-bye.

Yanking the drawer open again, she grabbed another stack of underwear, walked to the case, and stared at it. With a tight sigh she unloaded the lingerie on the floor, adding to the heap that was already there, and turned to the wall that divided her bedroom from his. She couldn’t do it like this, not on his terms. There was too much inside her, too much unexpressed. If he didn’t want to talk, dammit, then he could listen.

He answered his door on the first knock. She didn’t allow herself to think that he’d been waiting, though it was the first notion that entered her head as she accepted his invitation to come in. Her eyes were drawn to a ceramic ashtray by his bed, overflowing with cigarette butts. Aware of him behind her, she turned, met his crystalline gaze, and felt her heart wrench. There was something beautiful and desolate in his face. Something so near to hopelessness that she was gripped with a spasm of longing, shaken with it.

In the wake of that awareness, the emotion that flooded her was stunningly impassioned.
I love him,
she thought, shocked to her soul.
I do, I love him.
Her throat rasped painfully as she tried to clear away the gravelly sensations. It couldn’t be true. She didn’t want it to be true! The awful, messy, complicated prospect of loving him appalled her. But it was true, it was. She
was
in love with him.

He broke the silence finally, his voice irresistibly husky. “To what do I owe the honor?”

She blinked at the question. It took her a moment to realize that she was also angry with him, righteously angry, just-what-the-hell-are-your-intentions-fella angry. She walked to the ashtray, picked it up with trembling fingers, and dumped it in the wastebasket beside his bed. “What happened between us, Marc?” she asked.

“I don’t know, a lot of things—”

She whirled around, eyes blazing. “Yes! Important things, passionate things, precious things. How can you discount those moments?”

“I’m not discounting anything. I know what happened between us.” He walked across to the night table, picked up a pack of cigarettes, and found it empty. “All right, it was good, Sasha, is that what you wanted to hear? It was more than good, it was magnificent.” He crushed the pack in his hand and lobbed it into the wastebasket. “And now it’s over.”

The arrow stabbed her again, piercing through Sasha’s heart, twisting in the wound. “Over?” She breathed the word. “
Over?
You can discard it all so easily?”

He stared at her, his jaw muscles drawn tight over the bones of his face, his voice achingly flat. “Better that you know it now. Leslie was right about me. I’m not capable of giving.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it, Sasha, because it gets worse. I don’t give anything away, not unless I get something back for it, value for value. You had something I needed—a face, a body that resembled my missing star’s.” He raked a hand through his hair, rage and sadness in the rigid stroke of his arm. “The picture’s done, Sasha, the party’s over. Open those beautiful eyes, for God’s sake, and read the fine print. Your services are no longer needed.”

The look in his eyes told her more than his brutal words. He despised himself for what he was doing, for hurting her, but he would do it again if he had to,
if she made him.
Yes, he would hurt her again if she stayed.

She took a step back, her legs jerky, her hand grasping air as she tried to balance herself. He was giving her no choice but to leave.

Sasha could remember very little of what happened after that. She wasn’t sure how she made it out of his room without coming apart, or into Bink’s limo, but she did somehow. She took her leave of the Malibu beach house in silence, her mind numbed, her legs trembling, her dignity intact. It wasn’t until she was halfway to Redondo Beach that she curled into a ball and sobbed.

“P
ARDON ME, AM
I interrupting your coma?”

Slumped in a captain’s chair at the juice bar, Sasha pulled out of her unfocused stare long enough to acknowledge the owner of the sardonic voice. It was T.C., and he had a handful of checks for her to sign.

“Make an X,” he ordered, dropping the pile in front of her and shoving a pen into her writing hand.

She scribbled listlessly and pushed them back at him.

Obviously exasperated, he pulled his wheelchair up close to her. “What do I have to do to get your attention these days, McCleod? Call a press conference?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re bad for business, woman. You’re depressing the customers. Hell, you’re depressing me—wandering around like a lovesick kid and staring off into thin air.”

Sasha tried to mask her misery with a smile that didn’t quite come off. “Where’s your compassion, T.C.?” she said with a sigh, “I’m suffering.” She went back to staring at the tumbler of juice du jour in front of her. She was suffering, keenly, though no one seemed to understand that. Apparently they thought the “boss lady” didn’t hurt like other people.

“Suffering won’t pay the bills, Camille,” he muttered, rolling off in a huff. Sasha didn’t even bother to glance after him. Poor T.C. She knew he was worried about her. She was worried too. She’d been back at The Fitness Factor a week, and she couldn’t bring herself to get involved in anything. None of the activities that had brought her joy pre-Marc Renaud held any appeal for her now. She had no appetite, and when she forced herself to eat, she had trouble keeping the food down. She couldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.

She was obsessed.

She was wasting away, like Camille.

Impossible as it still seemed, she was in love.

At first, T.C. had tried to lure her back to normalcy with pep talks and swaggering dares like “Feelin’ gutsy enough to take on the paper airplane king? Spot you a foot and a half.” When none of that worked, he went straight to parental injunctions, and now he was trying to shame her out of the blues apparently. It was sweet of him really, she supposed. He cared, but nothing he or anyone else came up with put even the slightest dent in her depression. Didn’t they understand she was inconsolable?

“Some people are destined to be together,” she’d tried to tell T.C. her second day back. In her frustration, she’d picked unconvincing examples: Antony and Cleopatra, Charles and Diana, Mickey and Minnie. “All right, maybe not Charles and Diana,” she’d admitted when he questioned her sanity, “but Marc Renaud and I are fated, I know it in my bones. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” She wouldn’t hurt this way for someone she wasn’t supposed to be with, would she? Sasha was too practical to believe that. She’d been heartsick since she’d left the beach house, that was all, heartsick. If the intensity of her pain didn’t indicate romantic foreordainment, then what did?