Her Red-Carpet Romance (4 page)

“But if it really does make her look fat?” Lukkas asked, curious as to what her thought process was. “Aren't you doing that friend a disservice by
not
telling her the truth?”

Yohanna shook her head. “If it really does look bad on her, she'll figure it out on her own. She wants to hear flattering words from you.”

“You can't be serious,” he protested.

“Completely,” she insisted. “What your friend will come away with is that you cared more about her feelings than making some kind of point by being a champion of the truth.”

“In other words, you're saying it's all right to lie,” he surmised.

“If you can't bring yourself to tell her a little white lie, say something nice about the color. Maybe it brings out her eyes, or makes her skin tones come alive.”

“In other words, say anything but the word
fat
,” he concluded.

She nodded. The smile began in her eyes and worked its way to her lips in less than a second. He found himself being rather taken with that. “
Fat
only belongs in front of the word
paycheck
or
rain cloud
.”

“That's two words,” Lukkas pointed out, not bothering to hide his amusement.

Yohanna suddenly became aware that she had been going on and on. Her demeanor shifted abruptly. “Sorry, I talk too much.”

“You do,” he conceded. “But lucky for me, so far it's been entertaining.” Lukkas grinned, then after a beat, asked, “How's that?”

She wasn't sure what he was asking her about. “Excuse me?”

“I just threw in the truth, but then said something to soften the blow. I was just asking how you thought I did, if I got the gist of your little theory.”

For a moment, as her eyes met his, Yohanna didn't say anything.

Was he being sarcastic?

Somehow, she didn't think so, but that was just a gut reaction. After all, she didn't really know the man, didn't know anything about him other than the information she'd gleaned from a handful of interviews she'd looked up and read yesterday before she'd come in for the interview.

Taking a chance that the producer was really being on the level, she smiled and said, “Very good,” commenting on his “behavior.”

“I wasn't trying to lecture you, you know,” she told him in case he'd gotten the wrong impression. “I was just putting my opinion out there.” And then she shrugged somewhat self-consciously. “My mother says I do that too much.”

He instantly endeared himself to her by saying, “Your mother's wrong.” She had to really concentrate to hear what he had to say after that. “There's nothing wrong with offering an opinion—unless, of course, you're delivering a scathing review on one of my movies. Then all bets are off.”

“Has anyone ever done that?” she asked incredulously. Then, in case he didn't understand what she was asking, she repeated his words. “Given a scathing review about one of your movies?”

He didn't have to think hard. He remembered the movie, the reviewer, what the person had said and when. Why was it that the good reviews all faded into the background, but the one or two reviews that panned his movie felt as if they had been burned right into his heart?

“Once or twice,” he answered, keeping his reply deliberately vague. The reviews hadn't exactly been scathing, but they had been far from good.

“Well, they were crazy,” she pronounced. “You make wonderful movies.”

He laughed at her extraserious expression. “You don't have to say that,” he told her. “You already have the job.”

“I'm not saying it because I want this job, I'm saying it because I really like your movies,” she insisted. “They make me feel good.”

“Well, that was their intention,” he said, carrying the conversation far further than he had ever intended. He rarely discussed his movies this way. He spent a lot of time on the mechanics of the movie rather than the gut reaction to it. The latter was something he felt would take care of itself. It was just up to him to set the scene.

 

Chapter Four

“D
o you get airsick?”

Lukkas's question came at her without warning.

As she had been doing for more than a week, Yohanna had driven to the producer's Newport Beach house.

She'd turned up bright and early, ready to put in another long day setting the man's professional life in order. He was bringing another project to life, and that involved an incredible amount of details that all needed to be attended to. Every day was a new learning experience for her.

She could hardly wait to get started every morning.

When she'd rung Lukkas's doorbell and he'd opened the door, she had offered up a cheerful, “Good morning.”

Rather than return the greeting or say a simple hello, Lukkas had caught her off guard by asking if she'd ever experienced airsickness.

Stunned, Yohanna looked at him for a moment, then replied with a touch of vagueness, “Not that I know of. Why?”

“Good,” he pronounced. “Because we're taking a little trip today.”

She hung on to the word
little
.

“Anyplace in particular?” she asked when the producer didn't volunteer a destination.

He grinned in a way that made him almost impossibly sexy to her.

“Of course there's someplace in particular.” He led the way back to his office. She saw his briefcase on his desk. It was open and he'd obviously been packing it when she'd rung the doorbell. “How many people you know fly around aimlessly?”

“Never conducted a survey on that.” She watched him tuck a tablet into the briefcase, putting it between a sea of papers. “Do I get to ask where we're going?”

Lukkas paused, appearing as if he was trying to remember something. “You can always ask,” he told her, sounding preoccupied.

“Let me rephrase that,” she said out loud. “If I ask you where we're going, will you tell me?”

“I guess I'll have to.” He closed his briefcase and flipped the locks into place. “Otherwise, it might be construed as kidnapping.”

“As long as I'm on the clock, I don't think it can be called kidnapping.” He walked out of his office. She fell into step beside him. “Not unless you tie me up,” she put in as an afterthought.

The description made him laugh. Lukkas shook his head. “Did you talk like this at your last job?”

“Oddly enough,” she answered, amused, “the topic of kidnapping never came up.”

He speared her a long, penetrating look as he armed his security system and closed the door behind them. “So you didn't talk?”

“I didn't say that.” She waited as he aimed the remote on his key chain at his car. All four locks flipped open. She got in on her side.

He tossed his briefcase onto the seat behind him, then got in behind the steering wheel. “You ever consider running for elective office? You've got all the evasion maneuvers down pat.” Starting up his silver-blue BMW, he commented, “I'll say one thing about you. You've certainly got your wits about you. I like that.”

She assumed that the first part of his comment was somehow tied to his query about whether or not she had any political aspirations. She couldn't think of anything she would have rather done
less
than that. Besides, the life she had jumped into, feetfirst, was getting more and more interesting by the minute.

“Then you won't mind telling me where we're flying off to.” It wasn't a question but an assumption.

“Don't you like mysteries?” Lukkas asked, playing this out a little longer.

“Just to read, not when I'm in them,” she told him honestly. “I like knowing.
Everything
,” Yohanna elaborated.

“Does that mean you don't like surprises?” he asked.

Thinking of the way the so-called “layoff” had been sprung on her, there was only one way for her to answer that question. “Only for other people.”

“A life without surprises.” He rolled the idea over in his head as he squeaked through a yellow light that was already beginning to turn red. “Where's the fun in that?” Lukkas spared her a quick glance. “You do like to have fun, don't you, Hanna?” he asked.

Finding herself being interviewed for a job by Lukkas Spader had been one giant surprise, but if she said so, he might mistakenly think she was flirting with him. There was no way she was going to allow her attraction to the man get in the way of her working for him.

“Lots of fun to be gotten without resorting to surprises,” she pointed out.

On the freeway for all of four minutes, he took the off-ramp that promised to lead him to the airfield he needed.

“If you say so,” he replied. “You like Arizona?”

Another question out of the blue. And then she remembered. He'd said something about his new project, a Western, being on location in Arizona. Was that where they were going?

Her stomach began to tighten up.

“I really can't say,” she answered truthfully.

“And why is that?”

“I've never been to Arizona,” she told him. He probably thought she was some sort of semirecluse. She hadn't been anywhere outside of a rather small area while he, she knew, was an international traveler, going wherever the movie took him.

“Well, Hanna, we are about to remedy that,” Lukkas proclaimed.

Her eyes widened just a shade. “We're going to Arizona?” she asked, doing her best to hide her nervousness.

“That would be the natural assumption to make from what I'd just said, yes.”

Traffic had gotten a little thicker. He was forced to go just at the speed limit rather than above it.

He hadn't mentioned anything about going on location to her yesterday. When had this happened?

“
Why
are we going to Arizona?”

“Because that's where the movie's going to be shot,” he said, referring to his new “baby,” a movie he had helped write, one based on his own story idea. “At least most of it. Whatever we can do indoors, we'll take care of at the studio. But there's no way, in this day and age, to be able to fake that kind of background—especially not Monument Valley,” he added. He slanted a long look in her direction. “Ever hear of Monument Valley?” he asked.

So far, she seemed like efficiency personified, but that might be because she had him on the rebound from his previous relationship with Janice. He'd leaned on her completely. When she'd told him she was leaving, he'd felt as if his entire foundation was about to crack and dissolve into pieces under his feet.

Hanna had appeared just in time to be his superglue.

“Several of John Wayne's movies were shot there,” she told him without pausing to think.

He smiled, impressed she knew that. Impressed with her. Something that was beginning to occur on a daily basis.

“You knew that,” he said, somewhat marveled.

“I knew that,” she reaffirmed. “So you're going to be shooting this film somewhere around—or in—Monument Valley?”

“No,” he answered breezily.

Okay, now she was confused, Yohanna thought. “I don't understand. If you're not shooting there, why did you just ask me if I knew what Monument Valley was?”

“I thought I'd spring a pop quiz on you,” he told her. And then he grinned again. “And maybe Monument Valley will sneak in a time or two when we're shooting background shots for the movie. But right now we're going to be flying to Sugar Springs, Arizona. It's near Tombstone.”

On what seemed like a winding road, they were approaching the small private airport that was his immediate destination. It housed approximately half a dozen private single-engine plans. Including his.

The area was a revelation to Yohanna. “I didn't know there was an airport there.”

“There isn't,” he told her, driving over to the hangar that housed his plane. “It's more like a landing strip than an airport. But the plane isn't very big, either, so it works out.”

She looked at him, a queasiness beginning to work its way into the center of her stomach. “You can fly a plane, too?”

“I've got a few hours of piloting under my belt,” he told her.

She immediately seized on what she hadn't heard. “But no pilot's license?”

“Not yet.” He saw grave concern etching itself into her features. “Don't worry, I'm not the one who's going to be in the cockpit,” he assured her. “I've got a pilot on call.”

Lukkas was on the private airstrip now. He drove straight toward where his plane was waiting. Arrangements had been made with the pilot the night before. He'd wanted to make sure the plane would be gassed up, inspected and ready to fly by the time he arrived this morning.

“Your color's coming back,” he informed her, amusement highlighting his tanned face.

She looked at him, bewildered. “Excuse me?”

“Just now, when you thought I was flying the plane, the color drained completely out of your face. It's back now,” he noted.

“Must be the lighting in here,” she said, grasping at any excuse. She didn't want him to feel undermined by what had to seem like a lack of faith in him. From what she'd learned, most of the producers had egos the size of Texas and wouldn't stand for any attempts at taking them down a peg or three.

Lukkas didn't appear to have an ego, but it was still too early in the game to tell.

“Maybe,” he intoned, appearing to consider her comment about the lighting being responsible for her ghostly pallor a few minutes ago. “Contrary to what you might think, I don't have a death wish, and the only risk I take is when I cast certain performers thought to be washed up in the business by everybody and his brother. What they don't seem to understand,” he continued, “is that if you show some faith in that person, they tend to try to live up to that image.”

Parked now, he opened his door. “Let's go,” he urged, getting out of his car. “Right now we're burning daylight.”

He was already walking toward the airplane before she could say a word.

Yohanna wasn't exactly sure why he wanted her to accompany him on this flight. She'd effectively begun to organize his vastly overwhelming schedule so that he could actually have a prayer of staying on top of his agenda. Educating herself as best she could about the man she was taking all this on for, she'd begun to prioritize what absolutely needed to be done and what could wait for another day to come.

She had a feeling the reason Spader was so disorganized was that his mind raced around, taking everything he had to do into consideration, going first down one trail, then another and another. It seemed as though the man's day was filled with a great many starts and no conclusions. Without someone to take charge of the details and put them into a workable order, the producer was headed for a complete meltdown, which would in turn lead to utter chaos in his professional
and
his private life.

And she could do all that right from his office in Bedford. Which was why she didn't quite understand why he was taking her with him to Arizona. Especially when it all seemed rather spur-of-the-moment. At least, he hadn't mentioned anything to her about it yesterday.

“And why are we going there?” she asked.

“Let's call it a final run-through,” he told her. “Among other things, I want to look around the town we're renting, make sure nothing modern's lying around to mess up a shot when we're filming. I don't want to be in postproduction and suddenly looking at an iPod left on the bar or something equally as jarring.”

Well, that part at least made sense. “And what am I going to be doing?” she asked.

“Off the top of my head, I'd say you can be the person taking notes to make sure that I can keep track of everything that occurs to me while I'm doing that run-through.” Then he summed it up for her. “You'll do what every organizer does. You'll organize,” Lukkas informed her.

Hurrying up the short portable stairs that had been positioned beside the sleek plane, Lukkas greeted the pilot as he entered the plane.

“Jacob, this is Hanna Something-or-other. She'll be taking Janice's place,” he told the pilot. “Hanna, this is Jacob Winter, the very best pilot around.”

The pilot flashed a modest smile. “He's just saying that because I didn't crash the plane.”

Obviously there was more to the story than just that, Yohanna thought, looking from one man to the other. But if there was, it would be a story for another day, she could tell.

Inclining his head ever so slightly for a moment, the pilot told Lukkas, “We'll be taking off as soon as you strap in.”

Lukkas looked at her as if they were equal partners in this, not boss and employee. “Then, let's get strapped in.”

* * *

A few minutes later Yohanna was gripping the armrests of her seat and holding her startled breath as she felt the single-engine plane begin its takeoff.

This was the easy part, she told herself, but she remained stubbornly unconvinced of this.

“I take it that you don't fly very much, do you?” Lukkas asked, looking at the way her very white knuckles seemed to protrude as Yohanna continued gripping the armrests.

“No,” Yohanna answered without looking in his direction.

He thought he heard a slight quiver in her voice. That didn't seem like the young woman he was getting to know. “How often
have
you flown?” he asked.

This time she tried to turn her head to glance in his direction. But something seemed to almost hold her entire body in place. She recognized it as fear and started to mount a defense.

“Counting this time?” she finally responded, answering his question with a question.

“Yes.”

She took in a shaky breath. “Once.”

That would explain the white knuckles and the death grip she had on the armrests, Lukkas thought. “Then, why didn't you say something to me before we got on the plane?”