Fucking brilliant, thought Siena. She’d been sweating her guts out since four, and all Hunter could think about was how much Tiffany deserved a break.
After twenty more minutes, she was finally ready to roll. The soup was a bit tasteless, but inoffensive and edible, a distinct improvement on her first attempt. The lamb was still roasting away in the oven, and the pavlova, if she did say so herself, looked fabulous if a little unstable: a towering triumph of cream and meringue that she had carefully placed to chill in the fridge with an entire shelf to itself.
“Shall we eat?” she announced brightly, standing in the kitchen doorway in Tiffany’s apron and looking, she fondly believed, every inch the relaxed and capable hostess. She’d been so busy in the kitchen that it wasn’t until that moment that she noticed they were a man short. “Where’s Max?”
“Oh, sorry, didn’t I mention that?” said Tiffany, scrambling up off the couch. “He called this afternoon and said he might be late. Something about a meeting at Balboa, I think. He said to start without him. I thought I told you already?”
“No,” said Siena through gritted teeth. “I guess it must have slipped your mind.”
Well that was just typical. Max knew how important tonight was to her, how she’d wanted them all there because that was what Hunter would have wanted. But he couldn’t be bothered even to show up. And instead of calling her himself, he’d deliberately left a message with Tiffany, knowing there was a good chance that she wouldn’t pass it on. The pair of them had made her look like a fucking idiot. Again.
“Sorry,” said Tiffany, who was starting to enjoy herself. She’d lost count of the number of times Siena had shown up late, or not at all, for one of her carefully prepared meals. Or the times she had suddenly “remembered” allergies to this or that, refusing to eat whatever it was that Tiffany had spent hours making. Short of grinding arsenic into her cherry crumble, she could think of nothing that would give her more satisfaction than to see Siena fall flat on her face tonight.
Hunter put a comforting arm around Siena. He could see she was upset at Max’s defection. “Hey, never mind,” he said kindly. “I’m sure he’ll show up later if he can.”
“Believe me,” said Siena unconvincingly, “it couldn’t matter less. Now, why don’t the two of you sit down and I’ll bring you your soup.”
The first course took longer than expected, mainly because Hunter begged for a second and then a third helping, insisting it was absolutely delicious. Meanwhile, Tiffany and Siena passed the time by trying to outdo each other conversationally on the nice-as-pie stakes, frenziedly smiling and complimenting each other in a none too subtle attempt to win his approval.
Max eventually fell through the door just as Siena had finished serving the lamb. He looked worn out and stressed, with his shoulders hunched over and his ancient brown leather briefcase dangling despondently from one hand. It must have been another bad meeting.
But as soon as he saw Siena looking so adorable, furious, and ridiculously out of place wearing Tiffany’s apron over her T-shirt, he couldn’t help but crack a smile.
Siena McMahon, homemaker?
Arnold Schwarzenegger would have looked more at home in an apron than Siena.
“Sorry I’m late, sweetheart.” He wandered over and kissed Siena affectionately on the top of the head. It was the first physical contact of any kind between them since Montecito, and it threw Siena completely.
She looked up at him, her eyes ablaze with hostility. “Yeah, well. You fucking should be,” she muttered. Fucking inconsiderate, self-centered asshole. And since when had he ever called her sweetheart?
“I’ve been trying to escape for the past hour,” Max explained, ignoring her glare. “Honestly. But I just couldn’t shut the guy up.”
He sat down opposite Siena and began helping himself to a huge serving of vegetables before hacking away at the remnants of the small, rather wizened-looking joint. Ines would have been pleased to hear that no one could have described it as undercooked.
“I’m famished.” He grinned at her. “This looks great.”
Blindsided by what appeared to be a genuine compliment, Siena accidentally smiled back.
Dammit. Why wouldn’t he just go away? Or die?
Flustered, she took a bite of her own lamb and nearly choked. It was so overcooked it was like chewing shoe leather. She glanced across at Hunter, who was manfully plowing through his own enormous helping, nodding appreciatively as though he were savoring the pinnacle of cordon bleu excellence. God, he was an angel. Why did she have to be so fucking incompetent at this?
While Siena sat gloomily cursing her lack of culinary prowess, Max was regaling the table with wonderfully funny impressions of the producer he’d met earlier, and anecdotes about the most disastrous meetings he’d ever been to. For such a cocky, arrogant guy, he had a surprisingly self-deprecating sense of humor, Siena noticed. Very British, in a way.
Tiffany and Hunter were both roaring with laughter at his tales of woe, with Tiffany trying to outdo him with stories of some of her most excruciating auditions. Having experienced very little failure in her own life, Siena was feeling rather left out of the proceedings.
“Oh shit, this one guy,” said Tiffany through tears of laughter. “He actually told me that in order for me to feel empathy with this character—who was meant to be dying from breast cancer, right?—I had to feel ‘exposed and vulnerable.’ Well, you can guess what it was he wanted me to expose.”
“No way!” said Max, gulping down a big slug of red wine. “Does that shit really happen?”
“Omigod, are you kidding me?” Tiffany shrieked, looking to Hunter to back her up. “It happens all the time. All the fucking time.”
“It’s true,” said Hunter. “Even I’ve been asked to get naked in auditions.”
“Really?” Max raised an eyebrow. “By whom? Not by Orchard?”
“Hugh? Noooo!” Hunter laughed. “He’s far too professional.” He caught Tiffany’s adoring eye and started hamming it up, pouting and preening immodestly as if entranced by his own beauty. “Not that he wouldn’t like to see me naked, of course.”
“Who wouldn’t, baby?” cooed Tiffany, leaning over and kissing him on the mouth.
Siena thought she was going to be sick.
“What about you, Siena?” asked Max playfully. “Have you ever fallen prey to the lure of the casting couch?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. Disheartened by her failure in the kitchen and fed up with being ignored by Hunter, she was having a complete sense-of-humor failure. “Directors only pull that shit with sad, desperate unknowns. The sort of girl they know would do anything for a part. I hardly fall into that category.”
“Oh, and I do, I suppose?” challenged Tiffany, whose cheeks had flushed red with anger and embarrassment.
Siena shrugged. “Not necessarily. But perhaps you give some people the impression that you’re willing to sleep with someone to get ahead. After all”—she gave an infuriating, smug little laugh—“hooking up with Hunter hasn’t exactly hurt your career, now has it?”
Tiffany’s voice was quiet, but she got to her feet, patently furious. “You fucking bitch.”
“Honey, calm down,” said Hunter. “I’m sure Siena didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that, well, you know what Hollywood’s like. People do tend to think the worst of someone, if their partner’s wealthier or better known or—”
“What?” Tiffany interrupted him, white-lipped and trembling with rage. “You’re telling me you actually agree with her?”
“Hey, come on now, Tiffany, calm down,” interjected Max, with a reproachful look at Siena.
“No, no of course not,” insisted Hunter, who now looked panicked. “It’s not that I agree with her. I only meant—” He looked around the table for help. “Siena,” he said eventually. “Perhaps you should apologize to Tiffany? I know you weren’t intending to upset her.”
Siena failed to suppress a triumphant smile.
This was fantastic. “Of course,” she said graciously. “I’m so sorry if you misunderstood me, Tiffany.”
“Oh, I think I understood you perfectly,” said Tiffany calmly.
She was evidently still livid, but she wasn’t going to give Siena the satisfaction of losing her temper. Picking up her jacket from the back of the chair and grabbing her purse, she headed for the front door. She’d had it up to here with Hunter’s constant defense of Siena’s atrocious behavior. If he wasn’t going to stick up for her when someone called her a whore, he could fucking well sleep alone tonight.
“Where are you going?” asked Hunter desperately, getting up to go after her.
“Home,” said Tiffany firmly, without breaking stride.
He reached out and put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Come on, baby, this is silly. You don’t have to go.”
“I want to go, Hunter,” she said nastily, inwardly cursing herself for losing it and lashing out at him. She knew this was exactly what Siena had hoped for, that she’d effectively played right into her hands. But she couldn’t help it. Sometimes Hunter’s blindness and total lack of support were just too much for her to bear.
She stormed out of the house with a look that told him in no uncertain terms he’d better not even think of following. Miserably, Hunter went back to the table and put his head in his hands.
“Who’d like some pavlova?” asked Siena brightly.
“Shut up,” said Max, before turning sympathetically to Hunter. “Don’t worry, mate. She’ll be back.”
“Will she?” asked Hunter. He hated it when he and Tiffany fought, but he hated it even more when she left him. No matter how many times it happened, he couldn’t shake the hideous, gnawing anxiety that this might be it, that she might never walk back through that door. “I don’t get it,” he complained in exasperation. “What am I doing wrong?”
Max poured himself another glass of wine and overruled Hunter’s protests, topping up his glass as well. “I think it’s more a question of what you’re not doing,” he said. “Why don’t you drive over there right now and tell her you’re sorry? Show her you’re on her side. I think it would make all the difference.”
Right at that moment, Siena came teetering over to the table with a huge, wobbling tower of raspberries and cream. Max, who had his back to her, suddenly tipped back in his chair and threw out both arms in a full-bodied yawn, catching her by the elbow. Hunter watched horrified, as if in slow motion, as Siena lurched forward desperately trying to regain her balance, before dropping the plate with an almighty crash on the maple floor.
She stood there in shock while shards of meringue flew around the room like sugary shrapnel and tiny drops of cream sprayed everywhere: on the walls, the chairs, the table, some even finding their way into Hunter’s hair.
For a moment, nobody made a sound. Then Max burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, wiping away tears of mirth and smearing his cheek with raspberry sauce in the process. “I’m really sorry. But that was pretty fucking spectacular—attack of the killer pudding!”
“It’s not funny!” wailed Siena. “Do you know how long I spent making that damn thing?” She ran her hands through her hair in despair. “I just wanted tonight to be so perfect for you,” she said, turning to Hunter. “But first Tiffany goes and freaks out about nothing. And then this giant moron”—she pointed accusingly at Max—“goes and destroys my pavlova, which was going to be the best part of the whole fucking meal.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be hard,” muttered Max under his breath, not quite quietly enough.
“Oh, fuck off, would you?” said Siena with feeling. She felt like she was about to cry, which she knew was utterly ridiculous over one stupid dinner.
Hunter, however, was completely oblivious, for once, to Siena’s pouting complaints. He could think only about Tiffany. Maybe Max was right. Maybe he had been unsupportive?
“I’m going over there,” he announced, getting up and grabbing his car keys from a hook by the door and leaving the house without a word or a backward glance at Siena.
“Can you believe that?” she said as the sound of his car died away.
Her cheeks were flushed from the evening’s trauma and exertions, and unruly tendrils of drying black hair had started to escape from her silver and topaz clip. Max could see the faint outline of her nipples through the worn green cotton of her T-shirt, and made a heroic effort to concentrate on her scowling, furious face.
“All that work. All that effort,” she moaned. “And he didn’t give a shit. That stupid fucking girl is all he cares about.”
“Would you listen to yourself for one minute?” said Max, squatting on the floor and scooping handfuls of pavlova into an empty salad bowl. “Can’t you hear how spoiled and selfish you sound?”
“Oh, change the fucking record, would you?” said Siena, kneeling down to help him. “What is it with you anyway? If you’d knocked over one of Tiffany’s desserts, you’d be all ‘Omigod, I’m so sorry, Tiffany, poor you, Tiffany, let me make it up to you, Tiffany.’”
She mimicked his English accent the same way she used to do when they were kids. Max remembered how much it used to infuriate him back then.
Now it turned him on like hell.
“But of course, because it was me,” she ranted on, “you think it’s funny. Fucking hilarious. It’s only Siena. Who cares if Siena’s evening gets ruined, if all her hard work was for nothing? You don’t apologize to me.”
“I did apologize,” said Max.
“Do you like her or something?” asked Siena bitterly, hurling a handful of creamy pink slop into the bowl.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied, slightly too defensively. “She’s Hunter’s girlfriend. I never think of her in that way.”
But Siena had picked up on his momentary weakness and decided to keep pushing. “Oh, I get it,” she said with a knowing smile. “You want his house. You want his fame.” She counted them off on her fingers. “You want his money and his looks. And now you want to screw his girlfriend, too. Why not?”
Max could feel his temper building. “Shut up, Siena.”
“You know, you really ought to try and get some kind of life of your own, Max,” she continued mercilessly. “You’re obsessed with Hunter. You always have been. All this envy, all this covetousness, it can’t be good for you. It eats you away inside, doesn’t it?”
“I mean it, Siena.” He grabbed her by the wrist. “That’s enough.”
Sensing that she had the upper hand, she refused to be intimidated, maintaining her smile and her eye contact. “You think about fucking her, don’t you, Max?” she taunted him. “Admit it. You’d love to get your desperate little hands on those perky brown tits, wouldn’t you? Or see those pretty pink lips wrapped around your cock? Do you think that’s what Hunter’s getting right now?”
Max felt his stomach churning, like he was going to be sick. It revolted him to hear her talk so crudely. He wanted to make her stop. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” he snapped, grabbing her other wrist and shaking her violently.
Her head whiplashed backward when he grabbed her, and the rest of her hair burst free from its restraint, tumbling down around her face like a glossy black dam breaking. The cream in his hands felt slippery against the skin of her forearms, and he could feel the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest when he pulled her to him.
Jesus Christ, he wanted her so much.
Suddenly, all the tension, all the longing he’d felt for her since that day at Montecito came bursting out. He started to kiss her with such force that she slipped backward and clunked the back of her head on the floor.
“Ow,” she said as Max scrambled to pull up her T-shirt. But she was smiling. “That hurt.”
“Shut up,” he whispered. He was staring down at her, with his face inches above her own, and a look of such desire and love in his eyes that Siena wanted to reach up and stroke him.
So he did want her.
He did feel something in Montecito!
She’d been trying to deny it to herself, but she’d known for weeks that her bad mood and frustration had not been due to Tiffany alone, or even to the traumas on-set with Dierk. She’d been trying and failing to stamp down her feelings for Max, convinced that he didn’t return them, didn’t even like her in fact.
But he did. He wanted her.
She felt deliriously happy.
Max bent his head and softly began kissing her bare breast, his warm tongue circling her nipple. She moaned.
“Tell me you want me,” he whispered, moving with agonizing slowness to her other breast while his hand strayed down to her suede-covered thighs, stroking upward teasingly but stopping just short of her crotch.
“Please,” she begged him, her voice heavy and groggy with longing, her hands reaching down for his belt. “Please, Max. Just do it.”
“Just do what?” he teased her, sliding down to undo her zipper and slipping her pants down to her knees, revealing a pair of pale pink silk panties.
Scooping a handful of cream and raspberries from the bowl beside them, he began smearing the sweet mixture on her thighs and stomach, studiously avoiding the one place that she was aching for him to touch.
Siena closed her eyes and allowed the wonderful sensations to flood over her. Max’s warm, calloused hands were on her breasts, while he torturously licked the cream from her thighs, inch by inch, the warm wetness of his tongue matching her own juices, which were already beginning to seep through the fabric of her panties. She tried not to think of all the legions of other women he’d done this with before her. Judging by how good he was at it, she imagined it must have been quite a few. His hot breath tickled her between her legs, and the roughness of his stubble scraped deliciously against her smooth skin. She felt like she’d died and gone to heaven.
This wasn’t some clumsy, casual lover.
It was Max. Her Max.
At last.
After what seemed like an eternity, having still not laid a finger on her pussy, he finally wriggled out of his own jeans, and she could feel his huge cock nudging against her. Instinctively, she reached down to touch it, but he grabbed her hands and, pulling them back above her head, pinned her arms so that she could barely move.