One Night With You (3 page)

She heard her father move, heard his chair scrape back as he pushed away from the table.
He's so disappointed
, she thought miserably, her head still bowed,
that he can't stand to look at me
.

But he hadn't left and she felt his hand brush her hair gently back from her face, and her eyes came fearfully up to meet his. They were filled with loving compassion and concern for his only daughter.

"One question," he said, "do you love him?"

"Yes," she found herself saying, although she had not admitted it before. Until this minute she had not dared to say it out loud, even to herself. "Yes, Daddy. I don't want to, but I do."

Chapter 2

She had loved him, in a way, for years. Ever since that summer when her oldest brother, Zek, had used his influence and gotten her a temporary job on the movie he was working on.

The summer was supposed to have been a sorting-out period, a thinking time, before she went back to college in the fall. Her freshman year at UC Santa Cruz hadn't been very successful from an academic point of view. She'd changed majors three times and still hadn't found what it was that she wanted to do. Her mother had suggested that she get her teaching certificate so that she'd always have "something to fall back on," but that didn't appeal to Desi. She was drawn to drama and other artsy pursuits, but she had no burning desire to act. The trouble was that she had no burning desire to do anything in particular, and she was floundering among all the choices that were made available to her.

She didn't know what she wanted to do yet, she'd told Zek, but she was fast finding out what she didn't want to do. And she most definitely hadn't wanted to go back to school the next fall to drift for another year.

So Zek, who was a cameraman, pulled a few strings and got her a summer job as a gofer on the set of
December Fire
, the picture he had been working on. That way, he'd said teasingly, he could keep a brotherly eye on her, and she wouldn't be overburdened by the scope of the job while she did her heavy thinking.

She wasn't. A gofer does exactly what the name implies—goes for things. She went for coffee, for cigarettes, for forgotten items of clothing or small props, for lost scripts, or anything that anyone might want. Not a taxing occupation, to say the least, and not, especially when they were actually shooting, a very busy one.

Desi began hanging around the makeup artists, asking questions and making herself useful and finding, suddenly and decisively, what it was she wanted to do with the rest of her life. As she watched these movie artists at work, subtly aging the beautiful female lead, creating lines of debauchery and hopelessness around the eyes of the male star, she knew that this was what she wanted to do.

And then
he
came on the set.

The great Jake Lancing. He wasn't the great Jake Lancing then, of course. He was a twenty-six-year-old bit player with his first small speaking part in an important movie. But he sizzled on the set. He smoldered and struck sparks off of the cameras and the leading lady. During his one major scene everyone stopped to watch him,
really
watch him, and they applauded when it was over, Desi included, awed at the magic he had created with his voice and his dark eloquent eyes and his body.

He was given more lines and written into another scene and the rest, as all the movie magazines said later, was history. When
December Fire
was released the next year for the big movie-going Christmas season, Jake Lancing became an overnight success and a nominee for best supporting actor at Oscar time. He didn't get his golden statuette then, but two years later he was nominated again, for best actor, and he won that one.

Desi's career started that year, too. She hadn't gone back to college after that fateful summer. Over the initial protests of her parents, she had enrolled herself in beauty school, got her cosmetologist's license and then attached herself stubbornly to the same makeup artist whose work she had so admired on the set of
December Fire
.

Eldin Prince had laughed at her at first, amused by her youthful determination and earnestness, but as a favor to Zek he took her on. He had never been sorry. Desi was hardworking and quick and very talented. When she struck out on her own, nearly three years later, it added immensely to his prestige to have it known that she had been his protégée.

They still worked together once or twice a year. Whenever Eldin was in charge of makeup on a particular movie, Desi was always his first choice as assistant. And if she was free, she was always more than glad to work for him. She hadn't enough experience or renown to head up the makeup department for a major movie yet. But there was always next year.

"And then," she told Eldin, laughingly, "I'll hire you."

In the meantime she worked freelance, commuting from her home in San Francisco to Los Angeles when necessary and traveling, more and more often, to wherever the movies took her—and they had taken her to some pretty exotic places as well as some pretty dismal ones. She remembered Panama City as being a little bit of both. For six weeks one hot, humid summer she had applied and reapplied makeup that seemed to melt off the actors as soon as it was put on. But Vermont had been nicer, she thought, crisp and cool in the early fall.

She had not, by coincidence or divine intervention, worked on another movie with Jake Lancing, but she had followed his career with a rather proprietary interest over the years. They had, after all, started their careers on the same set.

She had seen all of his movies at least twice—because they were so awfully good, she told herself—and she tried never to miss one of his increasingly frequent appearances on late night talk shows. Only, of course, because he was so witty and knowledgeable and he made her laugh. But she was careful, for some deep and unacknowledged reason, to keep her interest in him from Zek and from Eldin, either one of whom could have easily and quite happily arranged for her to meet Jake Lancing personally.

All of this interest and admiration had gone on safely, from afar, for almost six years, and then one misty night in late November, without any prior warning, there he was—her seatmate on the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The flight was late taking off, which was unusual for this regular commuter run, and Desi moved restlessly in her seat, tired and longing to get home to her warm bed. Then the cabin door opened, and the reason for the delay was suddenly apparent. Jake Lancing strode, confident and unconcerned, into the airplane. Looking just as magnificently tall and whipcord lean as he did on the movie screen, and more handsome, now, at thirty-two, than he had been at the beginning of his career.

Desi saw rather than heard the stewardess gasp and then giggle delightedly at some remark he made as he showed her his boarding pass. His dark head bent to her blond one as he smiled his famous thousand-watt smile, and he chucked her playfully under the chin with one finger before he moved down the aisle to his seat, seemingly unaware of the eyes that followed his progress.

All except Desi's, that is. She, after one glance in his direction, was feigning sleep. Why, she couldn't have said. She didn't know, except there were only three empty seats, one of them next to her, and she was suddenly afraid that he would read her eyes and see how desperately she wanted him to choose it.

Idiot!
she chided herself silently.
He's just a man.

She felt him sit down beside her, and an unwilling excitement flickered along her veins and then, incredibly, she felt his hand on her thigh.

Her eyes flew open. "What—" she began indignantly and her eyes met his. Those dark dangerous eyes that had mesmerized millions of movie-going women. The angry words died on her lips.

He smiled and her heart turned over in her chest. "I'm sorry," he said softly, and he really did look sorry. "I didn't mean to wake you up." He made a motion toward her lap. "But you have the other half of my seat belt."

Desi looked down at her lap, tearing her eyes away from his with difficulty. His seat-belt strap lay coiled across her thigh, partially under the magazine she held. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, "I thought...." And then she blushed, the delicate telltale color stealing upward from the open V neck of her loose plaid shirt to stain her cheeks a fiery red.

"Yes, I know what you thought." He grinned disarmingly. "It always amazes me what dirty little minds you women have."

"Dirty minds! Well, I... " She sputtered and then stopped, because he was right.

"Did you, or did you not, think I was trying to play touchie-feelie?" he demanded, reaching again for the seat belt and fastening it securely across his lean middle.

"Well, yes, but..."

"Then I rest my case."

"Now, wait a minute," Desi tried again, preparing to defend her sex. "What would you have thought if you woke up and I was groping
your
leg?"

He made a thorough survey of her upturned face, taking in the coppery red hair pulled into a loose, untidy knot on the top of her head and the true redhead's complexion, as pale and smooth as fresh cream, and the dark blue eyes, unusual in any case, but even more so when you expected them to be green.

"I'd have thought," he said solemnly with completely convincing, and therefore enormously flattering sincerity, "that I was a very lucky man."

And then his eyes, those melting brown eyes, dropped from his scrutiny of her face to touch lightly and briefly on the hidden curves of her slender body.

Not that he could see much, she thought, as covered up as she was in her comfortable working clothes. Relaxed fit, stone-washed jeans, black Converse sneakers with bright fushia socks showing at the ankles and the oversized blue-and-beige plaid tunic she wore loosely confined at the waist with a wide webbed belt from the Army surplus revealed very little of her figure.

But it didn't seem to make any difference that she was so covered up. She
felt
as if he were looking right through her clothes to the slim curves beneath. As if he could see right down to the little reddish mole on her left hip, the only mark on the otherwise creamy flawlessness of her pale body.

She felt herself blushing again, not only with embarrassment but with shy, pleased delight because she knew with unconceited feminine certainty that he liked what he saw. She lowered her eyes protectively, the thick reddish-gold lashes fluttering against her pinkened cheeks, afraid that he would read her reaction in her too-expressive eyes.

"A very lucky man," she heard him say again, his deep voice soft and oh-so-seductive, seeming to ripple along her nerve endings with a sensation not unlike that of the finest silk being drawn over bare skin.

She shivered delicately and her blush deepened from pink to fiery red, causing her to silently curse the fair skin that exposed her emotions so easily. Never before had she wanted so much to appear cool and sophisticated and mysterious, and never before had she been so unable to do so. Her suddenly uncontrollable emotions were fully revealed on her face, she knew. There for the whole world and Jake Lancing to see. Her delight at his obvious approval of her looks, her embarrassment at that delight. And, most damning, the sudden fierce desire that had flickered wildly through her body as his eyes had slowly assessed her, bursting into flame at the seductive caress of his deep voice.

A voice that had seduced millions, she told herself sternly, in a vain attempt to break the spell he seemed to have woven so effortlessly around her.
He knows what effect he has, don't think he doesn't
, her mind tried to warn her.
It's practiced, it's refined to an art, it's fake
.

But, somehow, she knew it really wasn't, despite what she tried to tell herself. His charm, his magnetism were as much a part of him as his monumental talent. Each enhanced and strengthened the other.

Besides, even if it had been fake it wouldn't have mattered. She
wanted
to be charmed by this man. There was no way she could deny that fact. Not to herself and, maybe, not to him.

All she could do was stare blindly, mutely at her lap, feeling the hot betraying color staining her cheeks and hope that, by hiding her eyes, she could keep him from knowing just how deeply and how completely he had affected her. How utterly, wickedly, deliciously shameless he had made her feel just by looking at her the way he had, just by speaking to her.

You're acting like an idiot
, she told herself again,
like some dumb teenage groupie.
And, maybe she was, but she couldn't seem to help it.

"I've embarrassed you," she heard him say. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that."

He reached out and touched her face lightly, almost experimentally. Desi felt herself take fire immediately as the backs of his fingers brushed softly against her cheek, feeling the heat of her blush. Then his hand slipped under her chin, urging her to look up at him.

"I
am
sorry," he said again in that deep seductive voice of his. "I really didn't mean to embarrass you."