“Oh yes. Do you remember when you were on the run in Devil Slaughter? I loved that. I love it when it’s just you against them. That’s the kind of picture Jimmy would have made if he hadn’t died.”
“Jimmy?” He tossed the pillows against the headboard and settled into them.
“James Dean. You’ve always reminded me of him.” She rose and came toward the bed. In the dim light of the room, her blue eyes bathed him in admiration. “I’ve been so lonely,” she whispered. “Would you like me to get undressed for you?”
He’d gotten sick of playing games, and her directness was refreshing. “That’s the best offer I’ve had in months.”
“I want to please you.” She sat on the side of the bed and leaned forward to kiss him. As their lips met, her hands clasped his shoulders and began stroking his arms. He kissed her more deeply and touched her breast through the silky fabric of the dress. She immediately pulled away and began unfastening her blouse.
“Hey, slow down,” he said gently.
She looked up at him, her eyes clouded with confusion. “Don’t you want to see me?”
“We’ve got all day.”
“I only want to please you.”
“That works two ways.” He pushed her beneath him and slipped his hand under her skirt.
When Belinda felt Jake’s hand on her thigh, she saw the scene in Devil Slaughter where Bird Dog tangled with the beautiful Englishwoman. She remembered how he’d pulled her off her horse into his arms, how he’d run his hands over her body searching for the knife he knew she carried. As Jake’s hand circled her thigh, she pretended he was searching her.
Her mouth fell open to his kisses…wonderful, deep kisses. She’d meant to undress for him, but he took off her clothes, one item at a time. It didn’t feel right seeing his face so close, so she shut her eyes again and visualized the way he looked on the screen.
Better. So much better…
She parted her legs to offer herself. His beard scraped her skin, deliciously hurting her. And then he stopped.
As Jake gazed at Belinda’s closed eyes, he knew he’d made a big mistake. She was completely passive, like some kind of vestal virgin offering herself up to the gods. The adoration she’d showered him with since they day they’d met now felt faintly creepy. He could do whatever he wanted, but this was like making love to a blow-up doll.
Her eyes flickered open. He had the urge to wave his hands in front of her to see if she was still there. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
He told himself to do it and get it over with, but the image of Flower’s face popped into his head, and what had only seemed creepy now felt sordid. “Second thoughts,” he said, pulling away from her. “Sorry.”
She reached up and touched his shoulder. He waited for the cross-examination to begin—tried to figure out what to say—but to his shock, it didn’t happen. “All right,” she said.
Moments later, she was gone.
Three days passed, but as Jake sat on the back of a tractor, his bare chest oiled with phony sweat, the incident continued to bother him. He spotted Belinda perched by the wardrobe trailer reading a magazine. He’d been doing his best to avoid her. Unnecessary, as it turned out, because she treated him exactly as she had before. She didn’t seem to expect anything from him, and that alone was unsettling.
“Here’s your shirt.”
He hadn’t seen Lynn approach. “Since when are you working wardrobe?” he said, as he took the denim shirt from her.
“I wanted to talk to you without anybody listening in.” Lynn folded her arms over the phony pregnancy padding beneath her maternity top. Something in her determined expression made him wary. “I saw Belinda go into your room the other morning.”
Shit. “So what?” He came down off the tractor and patted her stomach to distract her. “How’s the baby doing?”
“You’re making a big mistake.”
“I need to find Johnny Guy.” He started moving away, but she stepped in front of him.
“She’s nothing but a well-dressed celebrity fucker.”
Lynn was right, but Belinda’s sophistication had kept him from seeing the truth. “Nice talk,” he said. “I saw her running lines with you yesterday. What is it with you women?”
“Did you even once think about Fleur?”
He wasn’t letting her drag Flower into this, and he slipped on the shirt. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you or with her.”
“Don’t be stupid. You have to know the way she feels about you.”
His hands stalled on the shirt buttons. “What are you talking about?”
“Apparently you and Belinda are the only ones who haven’t figured out that she’s fallen for you.”
“You’re crazy. She’s a kid.”
“Since when? I’ll bet anything you’ve dated women her age. Probably slept with a few of them, too. I don’t get your big brother act.”
“That’s the way I feel about her.”
“It’s not the way she feels about you.”
“You’re wrong.” But even as he said it, he knew he was kidding himself, and the coffee he’d drunk turned sour in his stomach. Fleur had given him subtle signs, all of which he’d chosen to ignore. From the day he’d met her, he’d sensed a fragility about her that made her off-limits to someone like him, so he’d deliberately taken on the big brother role to keep her safe.
“She’s my friend, Jake, and despite the fact that she doesn’t slobber all over you, she really cares about you.” Lynn rubbed her fake belly. “Fleur also loves her mother, and you’re setting her up for something nasty if she figures out what you and Belinda have been up to. I don’t want to see her hurt.”
Neither did he, and once again he cussed himself out for letting things with Belinda go as far as they had. “Nothing happened with Belinda and me.” Not exactly true. “And even if you’re right about Fleur, you know she’ll forget all about me as soon as the picture is over.”
“Are you sure? She’s a beautiful, intelligent young woman who’s attracted to you, and I don’t think she gives her heart away easily.”
“You’re making too much of it.” He poked her padded stomach. “This pregnancy has whacked your hormones.”
“You could do a lot worse than Fleur Savagar.”
“What are you saying? I’m supposed to keep my hands off Belinda, who damned well knows what she’s doing, but stick it to the kid with the big eyes. I don’t get you, Lynn.”
“A problem you seem to have with most women.”
They finished their location work in Iowa and returned to L.A. As August unfolded and they entered the final weeks of shooting, Fleur grew increasingly miserable. Jake had been acting strangely ever since they’d gotten back. He’d stopped ordering her around, and he never teased her anymore. Instead he treated her with professional courtesy. He’d even stopped calling her “Flower.” She hated it. She also felt a growing resentment toward Belinda, who acted as though their confrontation in Iowa had never happened and continued making plans for their future while she waved off any doubts Fleur expressed. Fleur was trapped.
She and Jake had just finished shooting a scene when Johnny Guy pulled them aside. “I want to talk about the love scene. We start shooting it on Friday morning, and you both need to be thinking about it.”
Fleur didn’t want to think about it.
“I’m not going to over-rehearse the scene,” Johnny Guy said. “I don’t want any damned choreographed ballet dance. I want sex, dirty and raw.” He curled his hand over Fleur’s shoulder. “I’ll clear the set to keep you as comfortable as I can, honey. Just me, the AD, boom, and camera. That’s about as stripped down as we can get.”
“Maybe you could put Jenny on boom instead of Frank,” Jake said. “And, Fleur, if you want somebody from SAG standing by, we can do that, too.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Check my contract. I don’t need a closed set. We’re using a body double, remember?”
&nbs
p; “Shit.” Jake shoved his hand through his hair.
Johnny Guy shook his head. “Your agent talked about a body double, but we wouldn’t sign you under those conditions. Not with the way we’re filming the scene. Your people knew that.”
Alarm shot through her. “There’s a mistake. I’m calling my agent.”
“You do that, honey.” The kindness in Johnny Guy’s eyes added to her anxiety. “Go into Dick’s office where you can have some privacy.”
Fleur rushed to the producer’s office and phoned Parker Dayton, her film agent. By the time she hung up, she was nauseous. She dashed out of the studio and rushed for her car.
She found Belinda at one of Beverly Hills’s most fashionable watering holes, lunching with the wife of a television producer she wanted to impress. Belinda took one look at her face and stood up. “Darling, whatever are you doing—”
“I need to talk to you.” The Porsche keys cut into Fleur’s palm.
Belinda took Fleur’s arm and smiled down at her luncheon partner. “Excuse us for a moment, will you?” She pulled Fleur into the restroom and locked the door. “What’s this all about?” she said coldly.
Fleur gripped the keys tighter. The pain of their sharp edges digging into her skin almost felt good, maybe because she knew she could make it stop. “I just talked to Parker Dayton. He said there was nothing about a body double in my contract. He said you told him I’d changed my mind.”
Belinda shrugged. “They wouldn’t agree to it, baby. Parker pushed them, but they said it was nonnegotiable. They wouldn’t film the scene with a double.”
“So you lied to me? Even though you know how I feel about working nude?”
Belinda pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse. “You wouldn’t have signed if you’d known you couldn’t use a double. I had to protect you. Surely you can see that now.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“Of course you are.” Belinda looked faintly alarmed. “My God, a breach-of-contract suit would finish you in Hollywood. You’re not ruining your career because of some silly bourgeois prudery.”
The keys cut deeper, and Fleur asked the question she’d held back for so long. “Is it my career, Belinda, or is it yours?”
“What a wicked, ungrateful thing to say!” Belinda pitched the cigarette she’d just lit to the floor and stubbed it out with the toe of her shoe. “You listen to me, Fleur, and pay attention to exactly what I’m telling you. If you do anything to jeopardize this film, things will never be the same between us.”
Fleur stared at her mother. A chill slithered through her. “You don’t mean that.”
“I’ve never meant anything more.”
As Fleur gazed into Belinda’s face, she saw only determination. Her lungs compressed, and she ran from the restroom. Belinda called out for her, but Fleur didn’t stop. She wove through the tables and out onto the street. The thin soles of her sandals slapped the pavement as she began to run, up one street, down another, trying to outrace her misery. She had no destination in mind, but she couldn’t stop. Then she saw the phone booth.
Her hands shook as she placed the call, and her dress stuck to her skin.
“It’s…me,” she said when he answered.
“I can barely hear you. Is something wrong, enfant?”
“Yes, something’s really wrong. She—she lied to me.” Struggling to breathe, she told him what had happened.
“You signed a contract without reading it first?” he said when she finished.
“Belinda always takes care of that.”
“I am very much afraid, enfant,” he said quietly, “that you have learned a most difficult lesson about your mother. She is not to be trusted. Ever.”
Ironically, Alexi’s attack on Belinda made Fleur feel an automatic need to defend her. She didn’t.
She waited until she knew Belinda would be at her hair appointment before she went home. As soon as she got there, she changed into a swimsuit and threw herself into the pool. Jake found her as she was climbing out.
He wore a pair of ratty navy shorts and a T-shirt so faded that only the outlines of Beethoven’s face were still visible on the front. One of his sweat socks had fallen into accordion folds around his ankle. He was rumpled and mussed, a hard-fisted cowboy misplaced in Beverly Hills. She was absurdly, insanely glad to see him. “Go away, Koranda. Nobody invited you.”
“Get your shoes on. We’re going for a run.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Don’t piss me off. You’ve got a minute and a half to change your clothes.”
“Or what?”
“I call in Bird Dog.”
“I’m scared.” She grabbed a towel and took her time drying off. “I’ll run with you, but only because I was planning to go out anyway.”
“Understood.”
She went into the house and changed. If what she felt for Jake was puppy love, she prayed the real thing never came along. It was too painful. Every night as she fell asleep, she imagined they were making love in a sun-drenched room filled with flowers and soft music. She saw them lying on a bed with pastel sheets that billowed over their bodies in the breeze from the open window. He pulled a flower from a vase by the bed and brushed the petals over her nipples and her stomach. She opened her legs, and he touched her there, too. They were in love, and they were alone. No camera. No crew. Just the two of them.
She snared her hair in a ponytail and tightened it with a hard yank. He was waiting for her in the driveway. They began to run, but they’d barely made it a half mile before she had to stop. “I can’t today. You go on.”
Normally he would have teased her, but today he didn’t. Instead he slowed. “We’ll walk back. Let’s take my car to the park and shoot some baskets instead. If we’re lucky, it’ll be deserted, and we won’t have to sign any autographs.”
She knew they had to talk about what had happened, and it would be easier if she didn’t have to look him in the eye. “All right.”
He’d driven over in his truck, a ’66 Chevy pickup with a Corvette racing engine. If he’d been any other actor, she might have been able to pull off the nude scene. As much as she would have hated it, she could have detached from what was happening and gotten through it. But not with Jake. Not while she dreamed about a room filled with flowers and music.
“I don’t want to do the scene,” she said.
“I know.” He stopped the truck next to the park and pulled a basketball from behind the seat. They walked across the grass to the deserted basketball court. He began to dribble. “The scene isn’t sleazy, Flower. It’s necessary.” He made a quick dunk and then passed the ball to her.
She dribbled toward the basket, shot, and hit the rim. “I don’t work nude.”
“Your people don’t seem to understand that.”
“They understand it.”
“Then why did this happen?”
Because she’d trusted her mother. “Because I didn’t read the contract before I signed it, that’s how.”
He made a quick jump from the side and sank a clean shot. “We’re not after the raincoat crowd. It’ll be handled tastefully.”
“Tastefully! What does that mean?” She batted the ball at his chest. “Let me tell you what it means. It means it won’t be your noodle everybody is seeing!” She stomped off the court.
“Flower.” She spun around and caught him smiling. He wiped it off and tucked the ball under his arm. “Sorry. It was just your manner of expression.” He walked over to her and brushed his index finger under her chin. “It won’t be your noodle, either, kiddo. The most the audience will see is your backside. Mine, too, for that matter. They may not even see your breasts. It depends on how it’s edited.”
“You’ll see them.”
“Actually, Flower…it won’t be a new experience. Not that I’ve seen yours in particular, but there are only so many variations. If you think about it, I should be the one complaining. How many noodles have you seen?”
“Enough,” she lied. “And that’s not the point.” Her ponytail tugged at her scalp, and she pulled out the rubber band. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”
“Only the ‘noodle’ part, not the fact that you were misled. I’d kick some major ass if I were you. But, bottom line, that scene is necessary to the film, and you’re going to have to come through.”
He cupped the side of her neck and gazed straight into her eyes. She had the horrible feeling she’d seen him do this in one of his films, where he had to convince some stupid female to do exactly what he wanted. But what if the tenderness was real? She desperately wanted to believe that.
“Flower, this is important,” he said softly. “Will you do it? Will you do it for me?”
Right then, she knew it wasn’t real at all. He was manipulating her. She jerked away. “Stop pretending I have a choice. I signed a contract. You know I have to do it.”
She ran back toward the bike path. He didn’t care anything about her. All he cared about was his movie.
Jake watched her running away from him, and something tightened inside his chest. She was so damned beautiful with her hair streaming behind her like spilled gold paint. As she covered the ground with long, clean strides, he realized she was the only woman he’d ever been able to run with. From the very beginning, those knockout chorus girl legs had been a perfect match for his own.
A lot of things about her matched him. That smart-aleck mouth and quirky sense of humor. Her boundless energy. But not her innocence. That wasn’t a match at all. Not her innocence, and not her fragile little-girl’s heart.
Chapter 12
Johnny Guy cleared the set of all but the necessary few, then called everyone together while Fleur was in makeup. “The first person who cracks a joke or does anything to make Fleur uncomfortable today is out on his butt, and the union can go screw itself.”
Dick Spano winced.
Johnny Guy cornered Jake. “You watch those wisecracks today.”
“You worry about yourself,” Jake retorted.
They were glaring at each other as Fleur came on the set. She wore a yellow cotton dress and white sandals. A baby-blue eyelet ribbon held her hair back from her face. She’d worn this yellow dress most of the week as they shot the dialogue that led up to the love scene, but today was the day it came off, and she was miserable.