Heartthrob (18 page)

Out of all the low moments in his less than exemplary life, it was one of the most shameful, one of which he was least proud.

“That must’ve been really hard for you,” Kate said quietly.

He made a sleepy sounding noise that might’ve been agreement.

“Good night, Jed,” she said after another moment of silence.

Despite everything, he had to smile at that. “David told you, huh?”

“When he called, he asked for Jed Beaumont. I guess I always figured that Jericho wasn’t your given name. But I didn’t know what it really was.”

His name wasn’t usually something Jed talked about, either, but coming off of the topic of Tom’s death, it suddenly seemed very safe. “When I got cast in my first
movie, I had to join the Screen Actor’s Guild,” he told her. “And you know, they have that rule—no two people can have the same name in the organization. Like, Michael J. Fox had to add the J. to his name because when he joined SAG there already was a Michael Fox. When I joined, there already was a Jed Beaumont. I wanted to use my full name, but my agent vetoed that. Tom came up with Jericho, and it stuck.”

“What’s Jed short for?” Kate asked. Her voice was relaxed, sleepy. Jed closed his eyes, imagining her in this bed instead of that one. She’d curl around him, all soft and warm and … “Jedidiah?”

“Nope—Jeddo.”

She laughed.

“I’m not kidding—and it’s sure as hell not funny,” Still, he couldn’t keep from laughing, either. “My daddy insisted it’s an old family name. I was always of the mind-set that old family names were okay if they were something like Washington or Vanderbilt. But when the ancestral fold were illiterate, no-account moonshiners, well, maybe it’s time to go with something new.”

Kate’s soft laughter wound its way around him in the darkness. He liked the way it felt. He liked the sensation of being on the same side, rather than going head-to-head as adversaries. He liked the thought that the more he made her laugh, the sooner she’d be inviting him into her bed. The sooner she’d be opening her arms—and her legs—to him.

“I think it’s cute,” she said. “Jeddo Beaumont.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

“I won’t,” she said, “Jeddo.” She snickered. “Good night.”

“What do you mean, good night? Now you have to tell me one of your deepest darkest secrets.”

“My real name is …” she paused dramatically. “Mary Katharine.” She laughed again.

“No fair.”

Kate lay in the darkness, crossed her fingers, and avoided lying by evasion. “I’m pretty boring.”

“Everyone has secrets.”

The fact was, she was a ball of secrets. She had so many, she couldn’t keep track of them anymore. She had the secrets she kept from her family. Her parents still didn’t know she’d done that nude scene in
Dead of Night.
And she’d never told about that incident at Nancy Breaker’s party in eighth grade, not even to Mickey, her youngest brother.

She had secrets she kept from Victor, too. The fact that she wrote the script they were shooting was pretty high on that list—never mind the details of that one awful, hazy month right before she filed for divorce, when she started playing
his
game, using
his
rules.

And now she had secrets she was keeping from Jericho, too. And she would keep those secrets from him. There was no way in hell she would ever let him know that the mere thought of spending the night in his trailer was so unnerving that all hope of getting a restful night’s sleep had flown straight out the window. She’d never reveal she had to work to remember to call him Jericho instead of Laramie. And she’d never let him know that she spent almost every night lying in bed, imagining Laramie was there with her.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. How about … when I was ten, I went to Girl Scout sleep-away camp, and I stood trial for stealing another girl’s bracelet, based on the circumstantial evidence that I was seen walking through the woods past that girl’s tent the day before the bracelet turned up missing. I’ve never told anyone about that—not my parents, not my brothers, no one.”

“Did you do it?”

“No!” Kate sat up in bed. “But when I told the other girls that, they didn’t believe me. It was the first time that
ever happened to me—my introduction to the real world. Up to that point, it never occurred to me there might be someone who wouldn’t simply take my word at face value. I wasn’t completely naive—I knew there were kids who told lies, and I knew enough not to believe everything anyone told me. But
I
wasn’t a liar, and I guess I always just assumed I had some kind of non-liar’s aura or something everyone would be able to see. Boy, was I wrong.”

It had happened B.B. Before Breasts. At the time those accusations had been the end of the world. A year later, she’d looked back on it and wished her life could be that simple again.

“God,” Jericho said. “When
I
was ten …”

Kate waited, but he didn’t continue. “What?” she asked.

“Just that … we come from two really different worlds.”

“I was so ashamed those girls actually thought I would steal. I spent the entire final week of camp in a daze. It really shook me up.”

“I learned to lie early.” Jericho’s soft southern drawl was warmer than ever in the darkness. “We learned to tell the neighbors that Daddy’s back was acting up, when, in truth, he’d drunk himself into a stupor again. And I don’t know
how
many times I told the school nurse that my lip was split or my eye was black because I walked into a door or a tree or fell off my bike. Hell, I didn’t even have a bike, but I figured she wouldn’t know that. I liked telling the lies, because in order to convince her that what I was saying was true, I had to believe it myself. And I liked believing I had a bike I could fall off of. I liked being this other kid whose father really did have a bad back.”

Kate didn’t know what to say.

“You would’ve been scared to death of me if we’d met when we were both ten,” he said with a short laugh.

She was scared to death of him
now.
Another secret to
keep from him. And yet, her fear had mutated. In the course of a single day, it had softened. Jencho was far from perfect, but his problems had had their causes.

Kate could picture Jeddo Beaumont, age ten, forced to create a fictional life and a make-believe family not just to get by, but also to give himself hope.

God knows without hope, very few could survive. And the jury was still out on Jericho. Had he made it? Would he continue to survive?

From the back room came the sound of his breathing—steady and slow. He’d fallen asleep just like that, all of his senses shutting abruptly down, as if someone had turned a switch.

Jericho had gotten through another day. Against all odds, five years, four months, and twenty-two days had become five years, four months, and twenty-
three
days.

“Good night, Jed,” Kate whispered, staring up at the darkened ceiling, willing sleep to come, but knowing it probably wouldn’t.

“Hey!”

Susie—Susannah—McCoy paused, turning to look back, and Jamaal ran to catch up.

It wasn’t quite nine a.m., and already the heat of the day was pressing in on him relentlessly. Even running just a little was enough to make him sweat.

“Heading over to breakfast?” he asked her as they walked toward the Grill.

“Yeah. My call’s not till late this afternoon.”

“I’ve got about an hour before they need me,” he told her.

Susie was wearing cutoff shorts and a baggy cotton T-shirt. Her hair was unwashed, and she looked every inch a sort of pretty but very grubby kid.

“I’ve already been in makeup—this is how they want my hair today,” she told him self-consciously.

“It’s looking … pretty authentic.” Jamaal wiped his face with the bottom edge of his T-shirt. “Hey, that was some show last night, huh? Jericho coming into the Grill and apologizing that way.” He poked her in the side. “Told you you were a good actor.”

She giggled, pushing his hands away. For a fraction of a second, their fingers were entangled, and she looked up, directly into his eyes.

His stomach did a triple lutz. It was the oddest thing. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

He
could
remember going to see
The Thing in the Basement
when he was eleven or twelve years old. He remembered staring up at the screen, into Susie McCoy’s big, innocent blue eyes, as Bunny, her character in the thriller was used as a pawn in her screen parents’ bitter divorce. Their self-absorption put her in dire danger from a psychotic killer.

He could remember watching Susie on-screen, and thinking he would take care of her. If he only had a chance,
he
would keep that little girl safe.

It must’ve been a residual of those feelings making his stomach do a funky dance. Remnants of being a longtime fan rearing up and biting him on the ass. Had to be. It was okay for her to have a crush on him, but the other way around was a little bit demeaning. He was eighteen, and she was a kid, just fifteen years old.

He jammed his hands into the front pockets of his shorts. “So how come you didn’t sit with me and Mindy last night?” He’d caught her eye when she’d first come into the Grill, but when he’d waved for her to join them, she’d shaken her head.

As she did now, again. “I had some lines to study. I’m sorry, I was … feeling a little antisocial.”

Yeah, and that pit bull of a father of hers had been sitting there, ready to bite the heads off of anyone who got too close to his daughter.

They stopped outside of the doors leading into the Grill, and he leaned back on the top edge of a bicycle rack. “How long is your dad planning to visit?” he asked.

She tensed. Jamaal didn’t so much see it as sense it. She was strung pretty tight to start with, but everything about her got that much more so.

“Actually,” she said, her voice giving away none of her tension, “he’s here for the duration. My mother left this morning.”

“Oh, shit.”

“He’s not that bad,” she said quickly, obviously lying through her teeth. “Besides, my mother had … she had, you know, business she had to take care of back in California. It came up suddenly, and …”

She trailed off, as if she realized how completely lame she sounded.

Jamaal clenched his teeth, not wanting to say anything that would dis her mother, but knowing full well that the lady had flat out deserted Susie. She hadn’t been able to deal with Pit Bull Man, so she’d split—never mind what her kid wanted or needed.

“Shit,” he said again, more softly this time.

Susie sat down next to him. “You know I was thinking about what you said—about winning an Oscar for this movie.”

“Yeah?” He let her change the subject. “You one of those Oscar crazies who run around putting a full-page ad in
Variety
two months before the nominations—‘For Your Consideration?’ ”

She stretched out her legs to touch the front bar of the bike rack with her bare toes. She may have been fifteen, but she had eighteen-year-old legs—no doubt about it. “I’ve never been in a movie that’s even come close to winning an Oscar,” she admitted.

“A lot of it’s political,” he said. “The nominations, the awards …”

“There’s a scene in
this
movie,” she said, “that’s going to get us all nominated—I know it. The scene where Jane and Laramie see Moses being sold. Up on the block.”

It was a scene that Jamaal was not looking forward to doing. Even though it took place early on chronologically, they wouldn’t be filming it until the end of the shoot, thank God.

“I’m supposed to be nearly naked in that scene,” he told her. “And you think
that’s
gonna get us the Oscar nod? I can just see the list of nominations. Susannah McCoy for Best Actress, Jericho Beaumont, Best Actor, and up for Best Supporting Actor, Jamaal Hawkes’s big bare ass.”

Susie laughed, and Jamaal grinned back at her, feeling his stomach do another gold-medal-winning leap.

The door to the Grill opened.

“Susie.”

Just like that her laughter dried up. Her shoulders tightened, and something odd flashed across her face as she turned to her father, who was standing just inside the Grill.

“Aren’t you having breakfast?” Pit Bull Man said pointedly.

“Yes, I’m—”

“I’ve ordered you French toast. Hurry up. It’s getting cold.”

Susie’s French toast wasn’t the only thing chilling. Jamaal could feel the icy blast of the arctic tundra as Susie’s father looked right through him.

“I better go,” Susie said. “See you around.”

“Right,” Jamaal said.

And as he watched her go into the Grill, he knew where he’d seen that odd look in Susie’s eyes before. He’d seen it frequently in his old neighborhood—on the faces of kids he knew were scared to death of their parents. It was a haunted and haunting look. And it was one he’d never forget.

He’d assumed Pit Bull Man’s bark was worse than his bite. But now he had to wonder.

“So how long were you and Victor married?”

Kate had just taken a bite of her sandwich, and rather than answer with her mouth full, she held up four fingers.

“Four years,” Jed answered for her.

She was wearing a light-weight, short-sleeved white cotton sweater that didn’t quite cling to her full breasts. But it didn’t matter that it wasn’t skintight. With her body, she could’ve worn a caftan two sizes too large and still looked unbelievably sexy.

She shifted in her seat, looping her arms loosely in front of her, blocking his view. “It wasn’t quite four years,” she told him, “but it was close.”

“I think it’s great that you can still work together.”

“I knew after just a few months that we would’ve been better off as friends,” Kate admitted. “But I couldn’t just give up on an entire marriage without at least trying.”

“I’m assuming—with his reputation—that he cheated on you.”

She pushed her half-eaten sandwich aside. “You’re also assuming that I’m going to talk about something that’s very, very private.”

She was smiling, but her mouth looked strained. It had been another tough day. This baby-sitting thing was really taking its toll on her.