Heartthrob (6 page)

In
Dead of Night
, the underwear had come off. Mary Kate O’Laughlin was only on-screen for a total of seven minutes in that entire movie, but, oh, what a seven minutes it was. She played the part of a college coed who had the misfortune of being picked up in a bar by a serial killer. She brought the man to her apartment, and the sex scene that followed was so steamy, so controversial, and so erotic that, even nearly a decade after the film was made, it was still the main topic of discussion on many internet bulletin boards.

Jed had rented the movie last night, and watched that famous scene. And he’d rewound the tape and watched it again. And again and again.

It was obvious that Katie Marie’s alter ego, Mary Kate O’Laughlin, was not eager to cast Jericho as Laramie. Victor had made that much crystal clear. She didn’t like him, didn’t approve of him, didn’t trust him, didn’t want him anywhere near this production.

She had only reluctantly agreed to meet with him today, here in Boston.

But he had seen her naked.

Jed took a deep breath, closing his eyes and rolling his head to relax the muscles in his neck as he got into character. Kate O’Laughlin—she’d dropped the “Mary” sometime in the past seven years—wasn’t going to meet Jed. She was going to meet Jericho Beaumont, the movie star.

Jericho was smooth. He didn’t have any of Jed’s insecurities or doubts. He was forthright and funny and friendly. He was going to walk into that office and charm the hell out of that producer.

The fact that he’d seen her naked was really just a bonus, an additional detail to keep him amused.

Fifteen minutes, thirty tops, and he’d have this job in the bag.

Jericho’s smile perfectly in place, he knocked on the door.

“Mr. Beaumont,” Kate said coolly as she opened the door. “Won’t you come in?”

God, he was tall. Movie stars tended to appear so much larger on the big screen, and Kate had found meeting them in real life could be a disappointment. When she’d met Tom and Mel and Jodie, they’d all been much smaller than she’d imagined. But Jericho Beaumont towered over her. He had to be at least six-three, maybe even taller.

And every single hard-muscled inch of him oozed charisma.

He was outrageously good-looking, down to his even white teeth. He was wearing softly faded jeans and a jewel-green poet’s shirt with loose, flowing sleeves. His dark hair was long, as if he’d been growing it out for the role, and he wore it pulled back into a ponytail. He wasn’t dressed anything like Virgil Laramie, but as Kate looked into his hazel eyes, she saw the character lingering there. She saw Laramie’s ghost, and all at once she felt as if she were on an elevator that was falling fast, with her stomach unable to keep up.

Something sparked in his eyes, and she saw a glimmer of sudden heat—and an amused acknowledgment of this sudden rush of odd animal attraction and fictional character overload she was feeling.

He wasn’t Laramie. In fact, he was about the farthest thing from Laramie she could possibly find. She straightened her shoulders and let a little Frau Steinbreaker slip into her smile, making it polite, distancing, chilly.

“It’s nice to finally get a chance to meet you, Ms. O’Laughlin.” His southern drawl was gentler than the accent he’d used on the audition tape, his voice a rich baritone. “And, please, call me Jericho.”

He held out his hand, and she shook as briefly as she possibly could before she pulled away. Of course his hand would be warm, his palm slightly work-roughened.

She cleared her throat. “Please come into my office.” She purposely didn’t tell him that he could call her Kate.

The words she hadn’t said seemed to hang in the air between them as she led the way into the room that used to be the old brownstone’s front parlor. She felt like a real bitch.

But that was a good thing. Bitch was a good word. Women who were aggressive and strong were tagged as bitches. She should buy herself a T-shirt that read “Proud to be called a bitch.”

Jericho was looking around, taking in the bay windows that provided a first-class view of trendy Newbury Street. It was a lovely office—spacious and pleasant. The wood floor gleamed as did the recently cleared top of her desk.

“Nice place,” he commented.

“Thank you. Please, have a seat.” Kate gestured to one of the leather chairs as she slipped behind her desk. She felt safer back here, separated from this man by four feet of shining wood.
Force field on full power. Frau Steinbreaker on stun.
“May I offer you some coffee or tea? Soda?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine.” Jericho sat down. “I didn’t realize this meeting was going to be quite so formal.”

“We have a lot to discuss.” She’d purposely planned this meeting to be painfully formal. She’d made sure it would take place here in Boston, on her turf, even though she knew they’d both been in New York just yesterday. She’d also prepared by wearing her hair combed back severely from her face, and putting on her stiffest, highestcollared business suit. She all but carried a riding crop. Frau Steinbreaker on stun, indeed.

Kate hadn’t set up this meeting to make friends with Jericho Beaumont. In fact, it was likely the opposite was going to happen. She’d done quite a bit of thinking, and she’d figured out the only possible way she could cast this man in her movie.

And he wasn’t going to like it.

She glanced at her watch. “Victor won’t be joining us for at least an hour. I thought it would be better if we had a chance to talk privately first.”

He looked up at her, and there was wry amusement in his eyes. “Okay,
Ms. O’Laughlin.
Let’s talk. But let’s cut the crap and do the long jump down to the bottom line. You don’t like me. You don’t trust me. You don’t want me in your movie. Anything I’ve left out?”

Kate didn’t let herself blink. “You’re a walking black cloud of bad publicity, and …” Fair was fair, and it
was
part of the bottom line, “I’m not sure there’s another actor in the world who could play Virgil Laramie the way you could.”

She’d surprised him. Out of everything he’d expected her to say, he hadn’t expected that.

“Well, thank you.”

“Provided you can stay sober long enough to get the job done,” she added bluntly.

He laughed. “Then, there’s no problem, because I have
no intention of going on a bender until after the shoot is done.”

She stared at him.

“That was a joke.”

“A bad one. I’m not laughing.”

“I noticed. Look, Kate …” He shifted in his seat. “May I please call you Kate? I could sit here and vow that I’ll never drink again—not for the rest of my life. But there’re no guarantees. I’m going to try my damnedest to die an old man, and never let another drop of alcohol cross my lips. But I can’t swear to you that’s what’ll happen. I’m going to try, that’s all I can do.”

Kate gazed at him across the wide expanse of her desk. “I’m supposed to be reassured by that? A vague promise to try from a man who was in and out of rehab five different times in half as many years?”

He didn’t even look embarrassed. “I only went into rehab once,” he said quietly. “The other times I was brought in by other people. I didn’t really want to be there, and it doesn’t work so well if you don’t want to be there.”

“And the last time you went in, you wanted to be there?”

He held her gaze steadily. “Yes, ma’am.”

He was remarkably charismatic. Kate found herself liking him despite her prejudices. She found herself painfully aware of his intense masculinity as well. God, he was good-looking. She found herself wanting to believe him.

But he was an actor. There was no way she could know for sure that he wasn’t simply acting sincere.

“What was different?” she asked.

“The official story is that my brother died and I realized I had to make some changes—but, to tell you the truth, even that wasn’t enough to wake me up. I, uh …” Jericho smiled ruefully. “This is going to sound really odd, but it’s true. There was a picture of me on the front of one of those
gossip rags—the
Enquirer
or something, I forget which. But some paparazzi photographer caught me on film during a barroom brawl. I looked … I don’t know. But the day after that picture was printed, I checked myself into rehab.”

Jed stopped talking. Why did he just tell her that? For the past few years he’d let people believe that his brother Tom’s death had pushed him into accepting that he’d hit bottom. It was easy to explain—the permanence of death forcing him to examine his own life, and him finding it seriously lacking. The real truth was far more complicated, and he hadn’t discussed it at length with anyone besides his private therapist in the rehab center.

So what on earth made him bring it up now?

Mary Kate O’Laughlin was sitting on the other side of that enormous desk, trying as hard as she possibly could to keep him from knowing that she found him attractive. Jed knew damn well she’d noticed the immediate chemistry that had sparked and hummed between them the second she’d opened the office door. And right now he saw she was working overtime to keep from being drawn into their conversation. She didn’t want to empathize with him. He knew she didn’t want to like him in any way.

She’d done everything humanly possible to hide her goddess-quality body. She was wearing a pantsuit, and although the light-weight fabric flowed pleasantly around her when she walked, her million-dollar legs were completely covered. The cut of her jacket was square instead of tailored. It wasn’t unattractive, but it did a great deal in negating the effect of her world-class curves. And the blouse she was wearing underneath—although soft and white—was buttoned nearly all the way up to her throat. Nearly all the way, but not quite. The very last button was left undone, softening the somber effect, but revealing absolutely nothing.

Her face wasn’t exceptional. Her nose was unremarkable,
her chin a little too stubborn. Her mouth was too generous to be called delicate, too graceful to be called lush. Her eyes were blue, and although they were pretty, they weren’t riveting. Her blond hair was short and combed back in a style that did nothing to soften her face.

But her skin seemed to glow, making all those not-quite-perfect features completely beautiful. She had—without a doubt—the most perfect complexion Jed had ever seen. It was beyond the legendary milkmaid ideal, beyond peaches and cream, beyond Ivory girl. At nearly thirty years old, Mary Kate O’Laughlin had skin like a baby. And Jed suspected that if he reached across that mile-wide desk to touch her, her cheek would feel softer beneath his fingers than the sand-washed silk shirt he was wearing.

All that soft, perfect skin kept going, down beneath the collar of her high-necked blouse. It was there even though he couldn’t see it, beneath the spring-weight wool of her trousers, covering the equal perfection of her incredible body.

Jed fought his thoughts, refusing to go with the fantasy of getting busy with this woman right on top of her kingsized desk. He crossed his legs, too. Mary Kate O’Laughlin already believed him to be a master of debauchery. All she’d need to completely convince her was the knowledge that he couldn’t sit and have a conversation with her without getting turned on.

It wasn’t just her perfect complexion that appealed to him. It was the one stray lock that had escaped from her severe hair style, curling gently around her ear, undermining the entire schoolmarm look. And it was the way she’d looked him in the eye and had the grace to admit that—from an artistic viewpoint—he was her first choice for Laramie.

She was both hot and cold, both sinfully soft and
unswervingly hard as rock. The combination was outrageously sexy, and he wanted to sit back and watch her for a while—try to see if he could figure out what was real and what was an act.

She was talking—something about backers and funding and her responsibility, about how nervous people could get when they put hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Her voice was melodic and soft. It had a breathiness to it that worked against her attempt to come across as hard as steel. She stated point-blank that hiring Jericho would be a serious gamble, that her financial backers would first recoil in horror, and then spend the entire summer of the shoot trembling in fear, waiting for him to screw up.

What she was saying was ironic, really. Mary Kate O’Laughlin was a novice when it came to producing a movie. Sure, she’d proven herself competent in the world of paper clips and printer cartridges. But moviemaking was an entirely different banana. It was far more likely if someone were going to screw up, it would be her.

And as much as she seemed to enjoy honest, everything out on the table communication, Jed decided he should probably keep his opinion about that to himself.

“Tell me, Mr. Beaumont, how badly do you want this part?” They were back to titles and formality.

He buried his frustration and shot her his least formal smile, letting himself remember the way she looked naked, draped across a bed. “Just tell me who you want killed.” Another joke that she didn’t find funny. Jed could have had Dave Letterman’s writing staff feeding him material from the waiting room, and she still wouldn’t laugh.

She wanted to be Serious, with a capital S. Okay. He leaned forward. “You know how badly I want Laramie, Ms. O’Laughlin. Badly enough to go to an open call. Badly enough to come here today and endure your relentless disapproval.”

He silently cursed himself. He’d let Jericho slip, and some of Jed’s insecurities had come sliding out.

But Kate didn’t blink. “You’ve earned my relentless disapproval.”

Frustration flooded through him again, and he bit back the edgy, angry words—Jed’s words—that filled his mouth. Her holier-than-thou attitude was crap. She was nothing but a B-grade actress cast for her exceptional breasts who’d gone on to be crowned Queen of Paper Clips.

But he wasn’t Jed right now. He was Jericho, and Jericho didn’t insult movie producers—at least not until a contract was safely signed.

Five years sober, Jed was still learning how to keep his anger tightly in check without the help of the numbing effects of drugs and alcohol. Somehow he suspected it would be a lifelong endeavor.