Reap What You Sew (7 page)

Margot stopped writing. “My coworkers? Huh! Not likely. Everyone hates Anita the Great. Well, everyone except the director.
He
thinks she walks on water.”

“Maybe she’s good at what she does,” the woman offered.

Margot’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I don’t doubt that at all. In fact, I suspect she’s very good at what she does. Though, from what I’ve heard, she’s got competition in that field should His Highness’s preferred flavor—the mysterious Pooky—ever decide to show her face this side of the pond.”

Tori’s interest in the conversation sharpened to a fine point. “Pooky?”

Margot buried her face back among her papers, substituting her pen for a finger that skimmed its way from top to bottom. “Uh-huh. Aka the supposed eye candy that landed Warren Shoemaker on the front page of some French tabloid last year.”

Eye candy?

Nibbling her lower lip inward, Tori did her best to sit still and let her fellow extras ask the questions that were begging to spew their way out of her mouth.

“I thought most of those stories were false,” the teenager mused.

“Some, maybe. But not all. Not by a long shot.” Margot’s finger reached the end of the page then flipped it over the top of the clipboard. “That story made things mighty tense with Anita the Great for quite some time.”

“They’re involved?” the woman asked.

Margot shrugged. “Anita certainly likes to think so. And since none of us know exactly what the deal is between the two of them, no one has had the guts to actually make her pay for the way she treats everyone, movie after movie.”

“That bad, huh?”

Glancing up from her paperwork, Margot pinned the woman with a stare. “You have no idea. No one does. Everyone thinks she’s the epitome of the graceful, classy characters she plays. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.”

Tori released her lip from between her teeth. “And if this… this Pooky suddenly showed up here?”

A maniacal laugh from Margot made more than a few heads turn in their direction, forcing the girl to lower her voice a few octaves. “Anita would rip her from limb to—”

“Margot! You won’t believe what I just heard from Max!” A woman sporting a name tag similar to Margot’s and Todd’s fairly skidded to a stop at Margot’s elbow.

“He actually did his job and found eleven more extras?” Margot commented dryly.

“Even better. Guess who’s here.”

A bored eye roll was followed by an exasperated sigh. “Who?”

Glenda, as her name tag read, reached out, grabbed Margot’s upper arm in a grip tight enough to leave marks. “Pooky.”

Margot’s eyes widened.

Tori swallowed as her fellow extras leaned forward.

“You can’t be serious….”

Glenda’s eyes shone with unbridled excitement. “That’s what Todd told Max.” Glenda pulled her hand from Margot’s arm. “The pot is already up to five hundred bucks.”

“Pot?” Margot asked.

“On who’s going to survive until the end of the day—Anita or Pooky.”

Reaching into her back pocket, Margot extracted a folded twenty-dollar bill and thrust it into Glenda’s hand. “I’m in. Pooky is going down.”

Tori rushed to cover her mouth with her hand but it was too late. Margot heard her laugh, anyway.

“Is there something wrong, Miss”—Margot flipped to the paperwork Todd had given her—“
Sinclair
?”

She dropped her hand to her lap. “Uh… no. Not really. I just, um, wouldn’t have made that same bet.”

Margot’s eyes narrowed in on Tori’s face. “Bet? What bet?”

“The one that has Pooky losing in a head-to-head with Ms. Belise.”

Margot’s mouth twisted into the kind of smirk most people reserved for idiots. “You don’t know Anita Belise.”

And you, my friend, don’t know Pooky. Not by a long shot…

Chapter 5

There was something about a newborn baby that could make you forget everything—the day of the week, your job, your name, even your role as an extra in a movie. It was as if the pure innocence and wonder of a new life made all else pale.

At least that’s all Tori could come up with to explain the total euphoria she felt as she left Westbrook Hospital hand in hand with Milo.

“Isn’t Lyndon absolutely precious?” Tori asked as they crossed the main road and headed toward Milo’s car. “I mean, he has to be one of the prettiest newborns I’ve ever seen.”

“I have a sneaking suspicion you said that about Molly Sue when she was born, too.” Milo released her hand just long enough to retrieve his key ring from his pocket and aim it at the car. “And I suspect you’ll say it again when Melissa has number eight in the spring.”

She smiled up at him as he opened her door and waited for her to sit down. “You’re right. I’m absolutely hopeless when it comes to babies.”

Leaning in, Milo planted a kiss on the top of her head. “That’s okay. I thought Lyndon was pretty cute, too.” He straightened up, shut the door, and walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side, slipping in beside Tori in a matter of seconds. “Thanks for waiting to see Nina and the baby until I could go with you.”

“My pleasure.” Settling into the seat for the ride back to Sweet Briar, she released a quiet sigh into the shadow-filled car. “It’s been my one moment of sanity all day.”

“Ah yes, the life of a movie star,” Milo teased as he pulled the car onto the road. “I should be jealous of you, you know. There I was standing next to you, waiting for my shot at daylong stardom, and the next—poof!—you were gone.”

She froze. Milo was right. She’d disappeared from the line with Todd and Leona and never said a word to Milo about where she was going or what she was doing. Awash with a sudden onslaught of guilt, Tori sneaked a sidelong glance in her fiancé’s direction. “Are you mad?”

The sound of his answering laugh chased away all worry. “Mad that you went over to talk to Leona and got snatched from the crowd for a movie? Are you kidding?” He pulled his right hand from the steering wheel and threaded it around Tori’s left. “I was just playing. But I
am
curious.”

Squeezing his hand, she leaned against the seat back once again. “Curious about what?”

“Everything. The process, what it was like on the other side of the fence, the celebrities you met… You know, the basics and that sort of thing.”

She peered out the window as he reclaimed the use of his hand, the streetlamps and businesses that surrounded Westbrook Hospital giving way to the quiet countryside that would accompany them for the bulk of the twenty-five-minute drive east. “The other side of the fence was basically what you saw—tents for extras like me, trailers for people like Anita Belise, Zack Quandran, and the director, Warren Shoemaker.”

“Did they feed you? Because Beatrice said movie sets put out a lavish spread for the cast and Margaret Louise was beside herself trying to figure out what they’d serve.”

The mention of her friends made her sit up tall. “Were they upset they didn’t get picked as extras?”

“Wait a minute. Who’s asking the questions here?” When she didn’t answer, his teasing tone was replaced with one of reassurance. “Hey. Don’t go there, Tori. Beatrice and Margaret Louise were happy for you. We all were.”

“But Beatrice is the one that called this whole movie thing to my attention in the first place.”

His hand found hers again in the dark. “That might be true, but this is Beatrice we’re talking about. She was just excited to be part of the whole experience. You should have heard her explaining everything to Luke.” He squeezed her hand. “Really. It’s okay. Now, if you don’t mind, can we get back to my questions? We’ll be back in Sweet Briar before we know it, and having answers might make it a bit easier to sleep.”

She laughed. “Okay, let me see… Yes, they fed us. Bagels and croissants for breakfast, sandwiches and fruit salads for lunch, and more of the same for dinner.” She stared down at her engagement ring as he disengaged his hand in favor of the steering wheel, the occasional streetlight making it sparkle. “There was a whole lot of sitting around for a shot that took all of about twenty minutes—tops. And during all that sitting-around time, I came to realize that my Monday night sewing circle meetings are not the only gossip game in town. A movie set—with bored extras sitting around—isn’t too bad, either.”

Their speed increased as they took to the wide open country roads that separated Westbrook from the next southern town. “Got an earful, huh?”

“I got a million earfuls about everything from local gossip to celebrity stuff.”

“Local gossip?”

She nodded. “Did you know that Leeson’s Market is thinking about opening a second location in Tom’s Creek?”

Milo slowed to avoid a possum in the middle of the road only to accelerate as they cleared the animal. “That’s good, right? Means Leeson is doing well.”

“True. Unfortunately Wendlyn’s fruit stand isn’t. According to one of the extras—Dusty, I believe—Carl Wendlyn is thinking about getting out of the business and heading down to Florida to do something else.” She shifted in her seat, the long day of 90 percent sitting and 10 percent standing finally taking its toll. “But it wasn’t just the locals who were gossiping. It was the set crew, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Only their gossip centered around the industry. You know, other movie sets they’ve worked on, favorite directors, difficult actors, that sort of thing.”

They slowed as they approached a four-way stop, Milo turning the steering wheel to take them south. “People on our side of the fence vacillated between wanting to catch a glimpse of Anita Belise and talking about how difficult she supposedly is during movie shoots. You hear anything like that inside?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “She was a favorite topic of conversation. And not in a good way. Seems she’s rather diva-ish. Which, of course, only magnified the whole Leona—or should I say, Pooky—situation.”

“Leona situation?” he repeated.

“You didn’t know?” she teased. “Why our own Leona Elkin is now playing the starring role in her very own movie and moonlighting as Anita Belise’s stand-in.”

“Come again?”

Closing her eyes, she ran through the day’s events in her thoughts, her lips providing the audio portion for Milo’s benefit. “Apparently Warren Shoemaker and Anita Belise have a bit of a fling going on. It’s been an on again, off again thing for about two years.”

“Is it on or off at the moment?”

“On. Or rather,
was
until Leona marched her way on set masquerading herself as some dalliance Warren had in Paris last summer.”

“Wait. What?”

“He calls her Pooky. Or, rather, the real woman he had his little encounter with.”

Milo pulled onto an expanded shoulder and shifted the car into park. “Oh boy,
this
I’ve got to hear.”

She waved her hand in the air. “I’m not sure I can explain it very well. I’m still having a hard time grasping the way this all went down in the first place.”

“Try,” he prompted.

“Okay. To make a long story short, Leona was aggravated she didn’t get picked as an extra. So she told this poor security guard at the gate that she was Pooky, the woman all the tabloid magazines have supposedly been whispering about for months.”

Reaching up, Milo turned on the interior light, his eyes wide. “And?”

“Well, she’s not… at least, I don’t think she is. But she pulled it off. The guard fell for her line and let her in.”

“And this director guy didn’t throw her out when he realized she wasn’t the right woman?”

She shrugged away her own disbelief. “Apparently not, because within an hour, the two of them were walking around the set like they were an item. A red-hot item.”

“If I didn’t know Leona, I’d have a hard time believing this. But I do, and so I’m not.” He shook his head quickly, as if trying to come to grips with what he was hearing. “So how did this Belise woman take to her competition?”

“Not well. Not well at all. And she took her anger and frustration out on everyone around her—the security guard who let Leona through and will probably get his walking papers because of it; the assistant directors who didn’t balk about Leona being cast as a stand-in for her during today’s scene; the extras, like myself, who dared to smile at her when she walked by; Margot, Todd, Max, Glenda—all of the people who were just there, trying to do their job. By the end of the day, it was a miracle she hadn’t been locked in her personal trailer with a lion trained to attack if she so much as opened the door.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You have no idea.” She reached across the center console and traced the edge of Milo’s jawline with the tip of her finger. “I much prefer my boring life in this one-horse open town, don’t you?”

He caught her finger with his and brought her whole hand up to his mouth. After a few gentle kisses, his eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “So where is Leona with all of this?”

“Smitten.”

Laughing, he leaned forward, his breath warm against her cheek. “Does she realize a director doesn’t wear a uniform?”

The million-dollar question. One she, herself, had posed to Leona midway through the day. She recited the answer as it had been given to her. “She does. But he does have
a title
. A very nice,
impressive
title.”