Dying to Have Her (30 page)

“What are you doing?”

“Going back to sleep.”

“You have an early call, and now I have to see about this alarm business.”

“Not this early,” she murmured.

“I know how to wake you up.”

She smiled into the pillow, thinking he would have something artfully romantic in mind. A second later, the sheets were gone. She felt the sharp clip of his hand against her backside, and turned, half rising in indignation.

“That’s it. That’s what you get from a macho ex-cop—

But by the time she had gotten that far, he had crawled back into bed and silenced whatever other insults she had to hurl with his mouth. A moment later he murmured against her lips, “Now that I have your attention …”

It wasn’t, however, a morning that offered time for endless ecstasy, whispered conversation, or repeat performances. Within an hour they were both out of the shower, he was on the phone, and she was inhaling her second cup of coffee. He’d called Conar, whom she would have met at the studio anyway, but he wanted Conar in early, with her every step of the way.

“You have things to do again?” she inquired politely.

“I’m meeting a man from your alarm company at your house,” he told her. “Take your coffee in the car.”

A minute later he was propelling her out the door, and soon they were halfway to the studio.

“Are you just dropping me off?” she asked him.

“No. I’ll go in with you.”

She decided not to argue.

He parked in Joe’s spot, and they entered the studio. He walked with her to the elevator, and up to her dressing room. Conar was already in the hallway, leaning against the wall by her door, waiting. She arched a brow at him.

“You know,” she told them both, “this is rather cruel to Conar. He doesn’t have to be here until the Egyptian scene.”

“Not true,” Conar argued politely. “You have a scene with Kelly, ready to tape, set to go as previously written and rehearsed. You have a scene with Vera, who is going to tell you to quit sleeping with your sisters’ lovers. Of course, good ol’ mom doesn’t know that you’re sleeping with me, the horrendous, evil, and scheming David DeVille. If she did, she’d tell dad, and you’d both be horsewhipped—or thrown out of the old vineyard. We have a quick discussion about meeting later so that you can tell me off. Then you have a fight with Jay Braden, who is still married to your sister but has impregnated one of the illegal alien vineyard workers. Then, you have a discussion with the wine buyer from the very pricey new Euro-American restaurant. Then, my dear vixen, you have the scene with me, the fight with me, we roll around in the vineyard—they’ve brought in mud and vines just so we can do that convincingly, then I follow you to your workshop, you throw out more threats—and I lock you in the sarcophagus. Between scenes I pay a visit to your father so that he can be nasty and I can gloat about the fact that I’m sleeping with two of his daughters. Not at once, of course. We’re not getting that kinky.”

“It’s a full day,” Liam said dryly.

“Yes, all this sex,” Conar said. “It’s a bitch, you know, but someone has to do it.”

“See you both later,” Liam said. “I won’t be gone any longer than I have to be.”

“We should be okay. Olsen was in earlier, and Hutchens intends to stay for the taping today.”

“Did Olsen say anything about tracing the phone calls, or if they were able to pull any fingerprints?”

“They got tons of fingerprints—probably yours, mine, Jennifer’s, and so on. The last call to Serena’s house came from her sister; those made immediately before that came from a cellular phone belonging to a Harvey Moss, traveling salesman from Idaho, who reported the phone missing around midnight. He’d last used it to call his wife and child around six. You don’t look surprised,”

“I’m not. I was expecting something like that.”

“Yeah. Everything around here seems to be like that.”

Liam shrugged. “Stick close to her.”

“Like glue. I won’t leave her alone for a second.”

“Conar,” Serena said, “I’ll need to change, you’ll need to change—”

Conar grinned, waving a hand in the air. “Do you believe that? I’ve slept with this woman a dozen times onstage. I think we’ll manage.”

“Conar, that didn’t sound quite right,” she told him.

Liam lifted a finger beneath her nose. “Don’t go off without him,” he said.

“Yessir, just like American Express, I will not leave anywhere without him!”

Liam and Conar exchanged a last look, then Liam turned to leave.

“There is safety in numbers,” Conar told Serena.

“He trusts you,” she told him. “He doesn’t seem to trust many people.”

“He was a cop.”

“Was a cop? He thinks he still is. Born and bred, so it seems. You know how pit bulls and Rottweilers are bred to attack?”

“Whoa,” Conar said. “Are you telling me that you two argue now? Still? And it looked as if you were getting along.”

“Oh, we
can
get along.”

“Ah,” he murmured knowingly.

“What is that ‘ah’ for?” she demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Conar, dammit!”

“All right—I was thinking that you get along when you stay in bed.”

“Conar Markham!”

“You insisted on knowing my thoughts.”

“Remind me not to insist on it again.”

She opened the door to her dressing room. Conar followed her, picking up a magazine, sitting on the couch. Jinx came in and went through Serena’s wardrobe.

“Serena, I heard about those phone calls last night. Are you sure you’re all right? Ready to do this today?” Jinx asked her. “I can go to Joe … well,
I
can’t go to Joe, I’d stutter and be afraid, but someone could go to Joe—”

“I’m not giving up on the soap, Jinx. And I’m fine.”

Conar looked up from his magazine. “You know Joe, Jinx. Acts like a tough guy, but he’s a teddy bear. If Serena was afraid, she’d just go tell him, and that would be that.”

Jinx nodded happily. “I’m glad. I love my job. I’d hate to see us give in and fall apart.”

“We’re not going to,” Serena assured her.

When Jinx left, Thorne arrived with makeup.

Conar offered her coffee from a large thermos he had brought from home. She thanked him for it, and sipped it as Thorne went to work.

“Hey, give me your pages. I’ll prompt you while you run them.”

Thorne touched up her eyes. Conar gave her lines; she answered them.

The day had begun, and for once it seemed normal.

The fellow from First and Foremost Alarm was tall and lanky, a man of fifty or so who had been working with alarms for nearly thirty years and who had been with First and Foremost for twenty of those. He hailed from Texas, he told Liam, but he loved California. Lots of rich folks, and lots of folks who really valued their privacy.

“I’ve changed the locks on the front and rear doors. If you want, you can come around with me, and I’ll show you how her whole system works,” Judd Baker told him. They walked around the house and checked windows, doors, wires, the keypad, the connection to the home base, and the phone wires.

“She’s got her new locks, so you can rest assured. There wasn’t a thing wrong, so who knows? Maybe someone did get lucky with a key,” Judd told him. “Do you think she might have forgotten to key in the numbers on the pad? Or maybe she keyed them in wrong. That would fail to set up the system, and if she was distracted … well, she might not have noticed that the little light there didn’t go on.”

“You’re sure that the system was in no way tampered with?” Liam pressed him.

“Well, as sure as I can be. There’s nothing wrong with it today. No shorts anywhere. Phone system is working. Like I said, most probably she thought she keyed in the numbers but didn’t, or she hit a digit wrong. If strange things are going on around here, then she needs to be extra careful with details like that. You’ll tell her, won’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her,” Liam assured him.

“It’s a good system.”

“I believe it’s a good system,” Liam said.

“The whole thing is numbers. Numbers are codes, and if a code isn’t set properly, and if you don’t make sure the little light is on …”

“I’ve got it. Thanks.”

“The police didn’t find anything?”

“Nope.”

“Must have been prank calls, someone giving her a bad time. That’s the trouble out here, you know. You have those who get ahead and those who get real angry at those who got ahead when they didn’t. Someone jealous. But she’s all right, isn’t she?” Judd asked anxiously.

“Fine. In fact, I was just about ready to leave to make certain about that.”

Judd nodded. “I’ll let you get going, then.”

“Thanks. Thanks for all your help.”

Liam shook Judd’s hand and turned toward the car. Glancing skyward, he saw that the sun was already high in the western sky. He drove quickly, anxious to reach the soundstage.

The day had gone really well.

The scenes had been rehearsed and then taped. Costume changes had gone smoothly.

Because Kelly was doing a scene with Jay, Jim got it into his head that they could also do the scene in which Verona came upon her sister and mother, insisting that they do something to hurry the divorce—even though Natalie (Jennifer’s character) had gone to the islands to recover from the trauma of her affair with Dale Donovan (Andy’s character) while her marriage to Randy Rock (Jay) was in the process of falling apart. The maid, Serafina, had come to her to tell her that she had been seduced one night when Randy Rock was on the property, trying to see his wife and angry because the family wouldn’t let him near her.

Vera, who liked to study her lines, had only two of them in the scene, so she agreed to go with a quick rehearsal.

Amazingly, that, too, went well. Then Andy appeared and, exhilarated with the way the filming was going, he decided to do a scene with Serena that had been scheduled for the next day on her Egyptian set. He came to her, telling her that she was an idiot, she had loved him always, she needed to get away from Valentine Valley and come back to him. There was a killer on the loose. She took dangerous chances, working in her cottage alone at night, far from the main house. She told him she would never marry him again, or consider being with him again—he’d had an affair with her sister during their marriage. She threw him off the set, and he vowed that he’d come back and find a way to force her to listen to him.

She did the seduction-in-the-mud-and-grapevines scene with Conar; they were both laughing so hard that it had to be taped twice. Jim shook his head in dismay and disgust. His pros should have done better work.

Serena ignored Jim. It was all going too well.

Even the scene with the extra hired in to act as the sommelier went like clockwork. The extra’s name was Julian Page. Jim spoke highly of him once he’d left the set, saying that he’d be happy to work with the guy again.

Bill Hutchens soon arrived with a uniformed officer. He spoke with Serena and Conar about their findings on what had happened at her house, but unfortunately, he told her, he had nothing else new to report.

“I really don’t think anyone was out there last night,

“Serena,” he told her unhappily. “I think the caller is causing trouble, a lot of work, and costing the taxpayers a lot of money.”

“I think I’m glad.”

“You still have to be careful.”

“Of course.”

“Liam back yet?”

“No.”

“Well, he may be a while. There was a bad accident on the freeway.”

“It’s all right. Things are going great. You’re here, Conar’s here … and lots of others. Jennifer sent in coffee and sandwiches—and water bottles from their house. I’m on a roll. Things are going great.”

“Fine. Get back to work.”

Then it was time for the Egyptian sarcophagus scene.

Jim blocked the stage directions with Serena and Conar, showing him how the standing sarcophagus worked. He grew exasperated a few times, calling in someone from props when he couldn’t get the lid to swing open properly.

“This is an old magician’s trick,” he said. “It works perfectly when Jeff is around. I wish your brother-in-law hadn’t quit, Serena.”

“I wish he hadn’t either. I’m not sure what he said to Joe and Andy—he was under contract.”

“I guess he wasn’t too happy here. And I guess the thing with Jane upset him pretty badly. She was fighting with him before any of this started—”

“Jeff
was fighting with Jane Dunne? I thought he hardly knew her.”

“You didn’t have to know her real well to fight with her,” Jim said. “Hey, Conar, come closer. Here. The spring is here. I found it. This thing is great. When you open it, you see the huge spikes. When you close it, it looks like the spikes will pierce you. But there’s a thin steel slide that goes across them, pushing them back. Originally, it was a great Vegas showpiece. You know, the gorgeous assistant stepped in, the magician showed the spikes, they closed the lid … and the gorgeous assistant stepped out still gorgeous. Anyway, here’s the catch. You got it, Conar?”

Conar looked over the sarcophagus and the lid, checking for the catch. “I got it. Where’s the door thing that closes over?”

“It’s automatic. When the hinges move in, they hit that button, and the button triggers the inner lid.

“We’ll run the scene once. You don’t have to shut Serena in for that—we’ll just go with the lines until you get furious and start to throw her in. All right? Let’s run the rehearsal.”

The rehearsal went beautifully. She and Conar ranted and raved. It was convincing, and Jim applauded.

“One take, Serena, one take, and we’re done, ahead of schedule.”

“One take,
Serena!”
she protested, laughing.

“Excuse me. We don’t want to be politically incorrect here,” Jim said with a sigh. “One take,
Conar
and Serena. Okay?”

“Gotcha,” Conar said.

She went to work in her “cottage,” her private little domain with all her Egyptian treasures. Conar burst in, furious. They yelled at each other. She reminded him that he hadn’t had these problems with her in the vineyard. He told her she was always a problem, and that he loved her sister, Maria Valentine, and that she had to stay out of their lives. She told him he didn’t love Maria, couldn’t love Maria, if he could pursue her the way he did. Furious, he told her that she couldn’t keep her hands off a man—any man, so it appeared. She told him that he was a low-down wine-robbing bastard with a failing vineyard, that he was desperate for help from the Valentines, and that he wasn’t going to use her sister to get it; she was going straight to her father. He said no, she wasn’t. She started to scream for help. He clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her to the sarcophagus, telling her that he’d have her and her treasure moved to a real vineyard, and they’d talk there.