Golden Threads (2 page)

"Here we are," he said briskly as they reached a long, scarred wooden table placed as far out of the path of chaos as possible. "You've met everybody, Lara, except for your prince.
Lara Callahan—Devon Shane."

He's going to climb up a rope made of hair?
was
Lara's first thought, as the big, dark, coldly handsome man with brooding sapphire eyes rose politely from his chair.

"Hello, Lara," he said, studying her with a detachment that made her feel as if she'd been stripped naked, weighed and measured, and was about to be examined coolly under a stark fluorescent light.

"Hello," she murmured, taking the chair Nick indicated on the other side of the table from Devon. She felt wary, disturbed—and couldn't have said why, except for that dispassionate sapphire stare. She'd been instantly comfortable with everyone else she'd met since getting the part, but Devon Shane made her acutely uncomfortable.

She eyed him cautiously as they got ready for the read-through of the script.
Shane... another Irishman.
But this one wasn't cheerful and fiery like Luke; this man was Black Irish—a dark, brooding Celt, with all the signs of a dangerous temper only an insanely reckless person would willingly rouse. He was hardly the pretty, charming prince of fairy tales, despite being so handsome. Yet Lara knew this man would appeal to any woman far more than a bloodless fairy tale prince would.

They wanted happily ever after, Lara reflected of her own sex, but there was that part of every woman that longed wistfully to tame the heart of a savage man.

As for herself, Lara wanted nothing to do with savage men. She'd seen enough violence, too much. She wanted peace, wanted a normal life without the darkness of potential danger hovering over her like a vile shadow.

"All right," Nick said as his nervous hands smoothed open the plastic-bound script on the table before him. "Let's get started. Act One, Scene One..."

Lara paid little attention, since her own part didn't begin until the second act. Instead, trying to keep herself from becoming too absorbed with the dangerous-looking man across the table, she studied the other players as they spoke their lines.

The parents of Rapunzel were played by Sonia and Pat Arnold, a couple in their thirties with an obvious passion for amateur theater. Nick had explained that they often acted in the plays he produced, delighted merely to have minor roles. Sonia was a cheerful blonde with a trim figure, and Pat was a handsome man with a friendly smile and an amazing baritone voice.

Melanie Stockton, a newcomer to the area, was slated to play the witch. Melanie, with her black hair and exotically slanted brown eyes, had a deep and sultry voice that could sound utterly wicked. Nick had chosen her to play the part because he'd given the part a neat, modern-day twist—his witch wouldn't be an old crone, but a woman of evil glamour.

As for herself, Lara had no idea what she was doing in this theater. She had come to the audition on impulse. The walls of her apartment had been closing in on her, as they so often had these last months, and she had wanted badly to escape, to find something radically different for her life. She was tired of being alone, tired to being wary and afraid.

And here, in the midst of this noisy turbulence, she felt more alive than she had in a long time. She had never thought of herself as an actress and had been certain she'd suffer from stage fright, but from the moment she'd begun reading at the audition she had felt natural, comfortable. She hadn't been Lara Callahan; she'd been Rapunzel, alone and lonely.
Pleading to be set free, to
be allowed a life outside her dark tower.

Lara felt her lips twist as she silently admitted just how well the role fit. The difference lay only in Rapunzel's ability to plead her case; Lara had to bear her own isolation in silence, because no one could simply open a door and set her free. But at least she could pretend.

"Great, great," Nick was saying happily. "That was fine. Act Two, Scene One. Lara, can you sing?"

Turning the pages of her script to get to the right place, Lara said distractedly, "I don't know, Nick. I've never tried."

"Want to?"

"No."

He grinned at her. "Okay. I hadn't planned a song anyway. We’ll use some kind of music to lure the prince, though. Do you play an instrument?"

"Piano."

"How well?"

Lara started to tell him she'd competed as a teenager,
then
remembered that it had been in her other life.
A long time ago.
She felt a flash of pain, but ignored it. "Well enough," she answered briefly.

Nick nodded and made a note on the legal pad lying beside his script. "Well get a piano, then, and dress it up to look fancy. Well decide on the right music later."

She half-nodded an agreement, and then a prickle of awareness made her glance across the table. Devon Shane's eyes were fixed on her face. Lara tried to look away, but she felt curiously trapped by his sapphire gaze, caught by something she couldn't define. For an instant she thought of the fascination people had with gems, with their coldly luminous glow....

Then she realized that Devon's eyes were neither hard nor cold. They were bottomless, burdened eyes, filled with shades and shadows. She was conscious of a bone-deep ache, of something disconnected and alone and wary. It was a jolt, seeing those qualities in his eyes, an almost primitive shock of recognition and affinity.

"Lara? It's your line." Nick sounded impatient.

She broke Devon's steady gaze and stared down at the script.
Her line.
Rapunzel's line.
In a voice that shook, Lara read, "Why may I not leave this place, Mother? I wish to—"

Melanie broke in with the voice of the witch, soothing and authoritative, her cold smile for the benefit of the audience rather than the trusting Rapunzel. "My child, the world outside this tower is a cruel place, and I would keep you safe from it. I will bring you a nice pet, shall I? You will have a companion when I leave each afternoon."

"Damn!" Nick muttered.

"I wasn't finished," Melanie told him in her own voice.

He shrugged apologetically, but said, "I just remembered how much trouble we had the last time we needed an animal. Maybe I can find a bird or something."

Lara was still trying to ignore the man across the table, and said almost absently, "We can use my cat."

Nick looked at her.
"A cat?
Lara, if your cat's anything like Susie's, it won't take kindly to stage direction."

"You don't know Ching."

"A Siamese?"
Nick asked with foreboding.

She had to laugh.
"Yes, but not—not at all catlike.
I'll bring him in if you like, and you'll see what I mean."

"Worth a try," the director said. "Bring him in tomorrow night, will you? Okay, Melanie, go on."

Melanie went on with the witch's lines, and Lara concentrated carefully on following and reading hers. At this early stage they were just reading, occasionally trying a certain tone or inflection. Nick interrupted from time to time and suggested a slight change in wording or a different emphasis, and they all made notes right on the script.

Lara's concentration increased as the reading continued, until she was virtually unaware of the banging and thumps out on the stage; she didn't even notice when the workers packed up for the night and left.
But when Devon Shane spoke his first line, her thoughts scattered like leaves blown by a wind.
His earlier brief greeting hadn't prepared her for the effect of his voice. It was deep, compelling, curiously haunting; and the single, simple line he spoke was a plea that made her ache inside.

"
Rapunzel,
let down your hair...." Let me know you. Let me be with you. Let me love you. It was all there, an appeal to break a woman's heart.

As Lara looked up from her script to stare across the table at him, she realized she wasn't the only one affected by that dark velvet charm. Both Melanie and Sonia were looking at Devon with a kind of unconscious fascination; Pat gazed at him in surprise; and Nick wore a peculiar expression of baffled delight.

"Good," he said blankly. And then, as Devon looked at him somewhat enigmatically and without comment, Nick added more briskly, "Very good. Now, I skimped on the stage direction at this point, but here's what I've planned...."

What Nick had planned deviated slightly from the fairy tale. Rapunzel was trusting, he pointed out, but hardly an idiot and not at all deaf; she was bound to be able to differentiate between the prince's voice and the witch's. So he had decided that Rapunzel would lean out the tower window to see who was calling to her rather than meekly lowering her braid. The first meeting between the potential lovers would take place with the prince still outside Rapunzel's stone prison.

They talked to each other, two lonely people. Rapunzel was innocent and curious, needing what she couldn't put a name to, and this prince, like all fairy-tale princes, was falling rapidly in love with her beauty and purity.

Lara spoke her lines, gazing steadfastly at her script and trying to ignore the effect Devon's husky voice was having on her senses. But as they progressed to the next scene, where the prince charmed Rapunzel into lowering her braid, Lara slowly realized that Nick had chosen to portray the lovers realistically. She remembered, now, that in at least one version of the fairy tale, Rapunzel had borne twins by the end of the story.

Nick, adapting the tale for what would be an audience made up of adults, had decided to focus on the developing relationship, building sensuality as well as love and tenderness between them. By the beginning of the third act, Rapunzel and her prince were lovers in every sense of the word.

There would be no nudity, but the embraces Nick described with enthusiasm were passionate and sensual in the extreme. It was not something Lara had been prepared for—fairy tales tended to limit sexuality to chaste kisses—and she wasn't sure how she felt about the matter. Nor was she able to guess how Devon felt about it, since the expression on his darkly handsome face remained enigmatic despite the emotion in his haunting prince's voice.

She heard her own voice quiver with uncertainty as they continued reading lines, and wondered what the others heard in it. Nick, at least, seemed wholly satisfied, even delighted.

He glanced at his watch as they finished the first scene of the third act, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. "It's after nine. I think well leave the rest until tomorrow. Is anybody going to have a problem showing up by six every night?" He looked around the table,
then
nodded. "Good. Okay, then, same time tomorrow. Take your scripts home and study them if you get the chance."

Lara gathered her script and rose, fighting a craven impulse to tell Nick he'd have to find another Rapunzel. She was, she reminded herself, a grown woman, and it was only a play, for heaven's sake.
An adult version of Dress-up or Let's Pretend, with costumes and fake kisses.
She could handle that. And she needed it, needed the focus in her life right now.

She'd been working sixteen hours a day for too long, exhausting herself just to be able to sleep without nightmares. When the inevitable crash had come, weeks ago, it had left her limp and unable to work; the walls had started closing in on her, and she'd wanted to run—somewhere.
Anywhere.

Anywhere except home. She could never go home again.

It had hit her suddenly, a cruel blow battering her in her exhausted state. That she was totally cut off from her past, rootless in a present she hadn't chosen for herself. The numb acceptance of months had shattered, leaving her raw and scared and alone.

She had tried to see a future for herself, and had found only walls and aloneness.

Lara didn't know what she would have done if she hadn't seen the advertisement in the newspaper. Her only thought as she'd read the notice of auditions at the community theater had been to go, to escape the enclosing walls of her apartment.

So here she was. There were people around her who were brisk and friendly, who accepted what she seemed to be with utter unconcern. There was life around her, the chaos of creativity,
the
thudding pulse of activity. And it had helped her. She had felt herself steadying, calming,
rediscovering
her lost balance.

"Good night, Lara."

"Good night. See you tomorrow."

She responded automatically to the farewells, rolling the script up in one hand and using the other to fish in the pocket of her jeans for her car keys as she left the now deserted stage and headed up the dim aisle toward the front of the building. She had parked out front, learning later that everyone left their cars behind the theater. Absently, she made a mental note to park around back tomorrow night.

The lobby was silent, the dim light throwing eerie shadows into the corners. Lara walked a bit faster, conscious of those walls leaning in at her; she felt relieved when she pushed open one of the heavy doors and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Pinewood was a small town, and like all small towns, it closed early. The theater was on Main Street, where, now, three traffic lights blinked an idle yellow caution above deserted blacktop. Shop windows glowed faintly from single lights left on to discourage theft, and old-fashioned parking meters dotted the curbs like lonely sentinels.