“I hope you were nice to her.”
He didn’t have the grace to apologize for his lie, but then he’d never told her he was sorry for anything he’d done. She moved in on him. “There’s no girlfriend, and there’s no apartment. This is your house, and I want you to stop lying to me.”
“Couldn’t help it. You were getting on my nerves.” He walked right past her toward the bathroom.
“I mean it, Bram! We’re in this together. No matter how much we hate it, we’re officially a team. I know you don’t understand what that means, but I do. A team only works if everybody cooperates.”
“Okay. You’ve gotten on my nerves again. Try to entertain yourself while I clean up.” He whipped off his damp T-shirt and disappeared into the bathroom. “Unless”—he stuck his head back out—“you want to hop in the shower with me and play some water games.” He deliberately smoldered her with his eyes. “After last night…I’m not saying you’re a nympho, but you sure are close.”
Oh, no. He wasn’t getting her that easily. She lifted her chin and smoldered him right back. “I’m afraid you have me confused with that Great Dane you used to own.”
He laughed and shut the bathroom door.
She grabbed her suitcase and carried it out into the hallway. Once again, the sense of being trapped made her heart race, and once again she fought to steady herself. She needed someplace to sleep tonight. She’d glimpsed a guesthouse in the back, but he almost certainly had some kind of household staff, so she couldn’t settle in that far away.
She explored the upstairs and discovered five bedrooms. Bram used one for storage, he’d converted another into a well-equipped exercise room, and a third was spacious but empty. Only the room next to the master had furniture, a double bed with an ornamental Moorish headboard and matching dresser. Light spilled in through a set of French doors that opened out onto the rear balcony. The cool lemony walls provided an appealing contrast to the dark wood and colorful Oriental rug.
Her assistant would bring over some clothes tomorrow, but until then, she had only one clean outfit left. She unpacked her suitcase and carried her toiletries into the adjoining glass block and cinnabar tile bathroom. She badly needed a shower, but when she returned to her room to undress, she found Bram stretched out on her bed in a clean T-shirt and cargo shorts with what looked like a tumbler of scotch balanced on his chest. It wasn’t even two in the afternoon.
He swirled the liquid in the glass. “Your sleeping in here isn’t going to work. My housekeeper lives over the garage. I have a feeling she’ll notice if we have separate beds.”
“I’ll make the bed every morning before she sees it,” she said with fake sweetness. “As for my things…Tell her I’m turning this into my dressing room.”
He took a sip of scotch and uncrossed his ankles. “I meant what I said yesterday. We’re doing this by my rules. A regular sex life is part of the deal.”
She knew him too well to even pretend to be surprised. “This is the twenty-first century, Skipper. Men don’t issue sexual ultimatums.”
“This man does.” He uncoiled from the bed like a tawny lion getting ready for the hunt. “I’m not giving up sex, which means I can either screw around on you, or we’ll do what married couples do. And don’t worry. I’m not nearly as much into S and M as I used to be. Not that I’ve given it up entirely…” His light mockery seemed more intimidating than the surly scorn she remembered. He took a lazy sip of scotch. “There’s a new sheriff in town, Scooter. You and Daddy don’t hold the power card any longer. We’re playing with a fresh deck, and it’s my deal.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast and disappeared into the hallway.
She took a dozen deep breaths, then half a dozen more. She’d known turning herself into a woman of purpose wouldn’t be easy. But she held the checkbook, didn’t she? And that made her up to the challenge. Definitely, absolutely, positively up to the challenge.
She was almost sure of it.
At the bottom of the stairs, Bram’s cell vibrated in his shorts’ pocket. He moved into the farthest reaches of his living room before he answered. “Hello, Caitlin.”
“Well, well…,” a familiar throaty female voice responded. “And aren’t you just full of surprises?”
“I like to keep life interesting.”
“Lucky I turned on the television last night, or I wouldn’t have heard the news.”
“Call me insensitive, but you weren’t at the top of my contact list.”
As she went off on him, he gazed out through the French doors onto the veranda. He loved this house. It was the first place he’d lived that felt like home, or at least the way he imagined home should feel, since he’d never before had one. The luxurious mansions he’d rented during Skip and Scooter had been more like frat houses than real homes, with at least four guys living with him at a time. Video games used to blare in half the rooms, porn in the others, beer cans and fast food everywhere. And women, lots of women—some of them smart, decent girls who’d deserved to be treated better.
As Caitlin ranted on, he wandered through the back hall and down a few steps into the small screening room he’d refurbished. Chaz must have watched a movie last night because it still smelled faintly of popcorn. He took a sip from his drink and sank into one of the reclining armchair seats. The empty screen reminded him of his current state. He’d blown the opportunity of a lifetime with Skip and Scooter, just like his old man had blown every opportunity that had come his way. A family inheritance.
“I’ve got another call, sweetheart,” he said as his patience ran out. “I have to go.”
“Six weeks,” she retorted. “That’s all you have left.”
As if he’d forgotten.
He checked for messages, then turned off his phone. He couldn’t blame Caitlin for being bitter, but he had a much bigger problem at the moment. When he’d heard that Georgie was going to spend the weekend in Vegas, he’d decided to follow her. But the game he’d set out to play had taken a lunatic twist he’d never anticipated. He sure as hell hadn’t planned on getting married.
Now he had to figure out how to turn this farcical situation to his advantage. Georgie had a thousand excellent reasons to hate him, a thousand reasons to exploit every weakness she could find, which meant he could only let her see what she expected. Fortunately, she already thought the worst of him, and he wasn’t likely to do anything to change her opinion.
He almost felt sorry for her. Georgie didn’t have a ruthless bone in her body, so it was an uneven match. She put other people’s interests before her own, then blamed herself if the same people screwed up. He, on the other hand, was a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch who’d grown up understanding he had to look out for himself, and he didn’t have a single qualm about using her. Now that he finally knew what he wanted out of life, he was going after it with everything he had.
Georgie York didn’t stand a chance.
Georgie showered and scrounged up a turkey sandwich. She ended up in his dining room searching for a book to read. A massive round, black, claw-footed table that looked Spanish or maybe Portuguese sat on an Oriental rug with a Moorish brass chandelier overhead, but the dining room was both a place to eat and a cozy library. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined every wall except the one that opened into the garden. In addition to books, the shelves held an eclectic mixture of artifacts: Balinese bells, chunks of quartz, Mediterranean ceramics, and small Mexican folk paintings.
Bram’s decorator had created a cozy space that invited lingering, but the diverse collection showed his decorator either hadn’t gotten to know him well or didn’t care that her high school dropout client was unlikely to appreciate her finds. She carried a lushly illustrated volume of contemporary California artists over to a leather easy chair in the corner, but as evening approached, her concentration faded. It was time to get down to business. Maybe Bram didn’t see the need for the two of them to have a cohesive plan for dealing with the press, but she understood it. They had to decide f
airly quickly when and how to handle their reappearance. She put aside her book and set off to track him down. When she couldn’t locate him anywhere, she followed a crushed-gravel path through a stand of bamboo and some tall shrubbery to the guesthouse.
It wasn’t much larger than a two-car garage, with the same red barrel–tiled roof and stucco exterior as the main house. The two front windows were dark, but she heard a phone ringing from the back and followed a narrower path toward the sound. Light spilled through an open set of glass doors onto a small gravel patio that held a pair of lounges with chartreuse canvas cushions and some potted elephant-ear plants. Vines climbed the walls around the open doors. Inside, she saw a homey office with paprika-colored walls and a poured-concrete floor topped with a sea grass rug. A collection of framed movie posters hung on the walls, some predictable like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, but others less so: Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon, Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda, and Meg’s dad, Jake Koranda, as Bird Dog Caliber.
Bram was on the phone as she entered. He sat behind an L-shaped wooden desk painted a dark apricot, an ever-present drink at his side. Built-in bookcases at one end of the office held a stack of the trades, as well as some highbrow film magazines like Cineaste and Fade In. Since she’d never known Bram to read anything more challenging than Penthouse, she tagged them as another of the decorator’s touches.
He didn’t look happy to see her. Tough.
“I’ve got to let you go, Jerry,” he said into the receiver. “I need to get ready for a meeting tomorrow morning. Give my best to Dorie.”
“You have an office?” she said as he hung up.
He hooked his hands behind his neck. “It belonged to the former owner. I haven’t gotten around to converting it into an opium den.”
She spotted something that looked like a copy of the Hollywood Creative Directory near the phone, but he flipped it shut when she tried to get a closer look. “What morning meeting do you have?” she said. “You don’t do meetings. You don’t even do mornings.”
“You’re my meeting.” He nodded toward the phone. “The press discovered we’re not still in Vegas, and the house is staked out. We have to put up a set of gates this week. I’ll let you pay for them.”
“There’s a surprise.”
“You’re the one with the big bucks.”
“Deduct it from the fifty-thousand a month I’m paying you.” She gazed toward the poster of Don Cheadle. “We need to make plans. First thing tomorrow we should—”
“I’m on my honeymoon. No business talk.”
“We have to talk. We need to decide—”
“Georgie! Are you out here?”
Her heart sank. One part of her wondered how he’d managed to find her so quickly. The other part was surprised it had taken him this long.
Shoes crunched on the gravel path outside the guesthouse, and then her father appeared. He was conservatively dressed as always in a white shirt, light gray trousers, and tasseled cordovan loafers. At fifty-two, Paul York was trim and fit, with rimless glasses and crisp, prematurely gray hair that caused him to be mistaken for Richard Gere.
He stepped inside and stood quietly, studying her. Except for the color of his green eyes, they looked nothing alike. She’d gotten her round face and stretchy mouth from her mother. “Georgie, what have you done?” he said in his quiet, detached voice.
Just like that, she was eight years old again, and those same cold green eyes were judging her for letting an expensive bulldog puppy get away during a pet food commercial or for spilling juice on her dress before an audition. If only he were one of those rumpled, overweight, scratchy-cheeked fathers who didn’t know anything about show business and only cared about her happiness. She pulled herself together.
“Hi, Dad.”
He clasped his hands behind his back and patiently waited for her to explain.
“Surprise!” she said with a fake smile. “Not that it’s really a surprise. I mean…You had to know we were dating. Everybody saw the photos of us at Ivy. Sure, it seems fast, but we practically grew up together, and…When it’s right, it’s right. Right, Bram? Isn’t that right?”
But her bridegroom was too busy reveling in her discomfort to chime in with his support.
Her father studiously avoided looking in his direction. “Are you pregnant?” he asked in the same clinical voice.
“No! Of course not! This is a”—she tried not to choke—“love match.”
“You hate each other.”
Bram finally uncoiled from his chair and came to her side. “That’s old history, Paul.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “We’re different people now.”
Paul continued to ignore him. “Do you have any idea how many reporters are out front? They attacked my car when I drove in.”
She briefly wondered how he’d found her back here, then realized her father wouldn’t let a small thing like an unanswered doorbell stop him. She could see him now, tramping through the shrubbery and emerging without a single hair out of place. Unlike her, Paul York never got ruffled or confused. He never lost his sense of purpose, either, which was why he found it so difficult to understand her insistence on taking a six-month vacation.
“You need to get control of this publicity immediately,” he said.
“Bram and I were just discussing our next step.”
Paul finally turned his attention to Bram. From the beginning, they’d been enemies. Bram hated Paul’s interference on the set, especially the way he made sure Georgie never lost her top billing. And Paul hated everything about Bram.
“I don’t know how you talked Georgie into this charade,” her father said, “but I know why. You want to ride on her coattails again, just like you used to. You want to use her to advance your own pathetic career.”
Her father didn’t know about the money, so he was uncharacteristically off the mark. “Don’t say that.” She needed to at least pretend to defend Bram. “This is exactly the reason I didn’t call you. I knew you’d be upset.”
“Upset?” Her father never raised his voice, which made his disgust all the more painful. “Are you deliberately trying to ruin your life?”
No, she was trying to save it.
Paul rocked on his heels just as he used to when she was a child and she didn’t have her lines memorized. “And here I thought the worst of this mess was over.”
She knew what he meant. He adored Lance, and he’d been furious when they split. Sometimes she wished he’d just come out and say what he really meant, that she should have been woman enough to hold on to her husband.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in you.”
His words bit to the quick, but she was working hard at being her own person, so she made herself manufacture another bright smile. “And just think, I’m only thirty-one. I have lots of years to improve my record.”
“That’s enough, Georgie,” Bram said, almost pleasantly. He let his hand slip from her waist. “Paul, let me lay it out for you. Georgie is my wife now, and this is my house, so behave, or you’ll lose your invitation to visit.”
She sucked in her breath.
“Really?” Paul’s lip curled.
“Really.” Bram headed for the doors. But just before he got there, he turned back, performing the old false exit as flawlessly as he’d done it in a score of Skip and Scooter episodes. He even started off with the identical dialogue. “Oh, and one more thing…” That was when he went off script, and he did it with a smile. “I want to see Georgie’s tax returns from the last five years. And her financial statements.”
She couldn’t believe it. Of all the—She took a step toward him.
An angry flush spread over her father’s face. “Are you implying that I’ve mismanaged Georgie’s money?”
“I don’t know. Have you?”
Bram had gone too far. She might resent the way her father attempted to control her, and she definitely questioned his j
udgment in choosing her latest projects, but he was the only man in the world she trusted completely when it came to money. All kid actors should be lucky enough to have such a scrupulously honest parent guarding their incomes.
Her father grew more outwardly calm, never a good sign. “Now we get to the real reason for this marriage. Georgie’s money.”
Bram’s lips curled with insolence. “First you say I married her to advance my career…Now you think I married her for her money…Dude, I married her for sex.”
Georgie rushed forward. “Okay, I’ve had enough laughs for tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow, Dad. I promise.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“If you give me a couple of minutes, I can probably come up with a good punch line, but for now, I’m afraid that’s the best I’ve got.”
“Let me show you out,” Bram said.
“No need.” Her father strode toward the door. “I’ll leave the same way I came in.”
“No, Dad, really…Let me…”
But he was already crossing the gravel patio. She sank into a saggy brown couch right underneath Humphrey Bogart.
“That was fun,” Bram said.
She clenched her fists in her lap. “I can’t believe you questioned his integrity like that. You—the go-to guy for financial mismanagement. How my father handles my money is my business, not yours.”
“If there’s nothing to hide, he won’t mind opening the books.”
She shot up. “I mind! My finances are confidential, and I’m calling my lawyer first thing tomorrow to make sure they stay that way.” She’d also have a private talk with her accountant about disguising the fifty thousand a month she was paying Bram from her father. “Household expenses” and “increased security” sounded a lot better than “blood money.”