Starstruck (18 page)

“Good night,” she whispered beneath the clatter of the typewriter, and she blew him a kiss. Then she went upstairs to dream.

I
t was almost two in the morning when Joe ripped the sheet of paper that ended the scene out of the typewriter and sagged across the keys. What would happen if he let Elena have her say? Wow! Fireworks, that was what! People talked about characters coming alive. Well,
Elena had tonight. And so had Pi
o. Only, as he wrote, Joe had trouble keeping them black-haired and brown-eyed Spaniards. Elena kept turning into a blonde, slender and dynamic, with fiery dept
hs to her cool gray eyes. And Pi
o? Ah, yes, P
i
o. P
i
o wasn’t sure what he wanted
.
Was it the revolution? Was it Elena? Could he make up his mind? Joe snorted. It hadn’t been hard to identify with
Pi
o at all. He was a man in turmoil. A man who longed to get close to a woman for the first time in his life and who hadn’t the faintest idea how to do it. Everything he did w
orried him. Should he marr
y her? Shouldn’t he? Should he go away and fight or not? Did she care or didn’t she? Joe stood up wearily and flexed his shoulders, trying to shift the weight of his newly created world off his back. He had certainly written himself a pile of questions tonight. He wondered what Liv would think when she read it. He turned back to the couch, expecting to see her still sitting there, scowling when she was not.

“Liv?” He frowned and rubbed his eyes, knocking off
his glasses. When he retrieved them he saw the clock. No wonder she had gone to bed! Inside him there was an urge to go and wake her, to share with her what he had written. It wasn’t great, but it was better than anything else he had done so far. He was sure of that. Shutting out the lights and locking up, he weighed the manuscript in his hand. Then, on impulse, he carried it up with him. Maybe, just maybe, she was still awake.

There was no sound from her room, though, as he walked past it down the hall. He stopped and went back. The door was slightly ajar and he peeked in. He smiled. She was curled up, facing away from him, her slim body lightly covered with a sheet. Next to her he saw Jennifer in a relaxed sprawl. For a moment he closed his eyes and ached. Not, he was surprised to discover, the purely physical ache of desire unfulfilled, though there was of course that. Rather, he felt a yearning to share with her on all levels, mental and emotional as well as physical—a yearning to crawl into bed beside her and hold her, to wake her and share with her this marvelous thing he had just written, to share with her the only way he knew how, what she was coming to mean in his life.

Ah, Jennifer, you lucky kid, he thought and smiled wryly. How far he had fallen if he was in a position to envy a five-year-old girl with chicken pox!

Chapter Eight

T
he sound of cupboards banging woke him. Joe was amazed that he had been asleep at all. Visions of Liv and his yearning to be with her
had kept him awake until he hear
d the first birds of morning begin their song. To have finally fallen asleep to dream of her, only to be jerked awake again seemed cruel until he re
alized that the banging was ver
y likely being done by Liv herself. What on earth was she up to? He scrambled out of bed and stumbled out into the hallway. The light in the kitchen was on, so he made his way cautiously downstairs.

Liv was hunting through the cabinets, and he paused in the doorway, croaking, “What’s up?” his voice breaking as she turned to face him and he saw the outline of her lissome figure through the sheer pale-blue gown she wore. Just what he didn’t need on top of his dreams!

“Sorry,” she apologized, her eyes raking him with the same intensity with which he looked at her. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was, if you can believe it—” she gave a small laugh “—looking for a packet of Kool-Aid. It seems to be the one thing that would make Stephen happy.” Her eyes were wandering away from Joe’s face to his chest to his navel and below. Damn it, why hadn’t he thought to grab his jeans? All she had to do was look at him and all his dreams promised to come true. He raked a hand through his hair, trying to control feelings that threatened to overcome him. Remember the treaty, he told himself.

“I know where some is,” he managed, his voice jerky. “Hang on a sec.” He bolted out of the room and back upstairs, pulling on his jeans as quickly as he could. Stop it, he told himself firmly.
You might want it, but she doesn
’t
. He took deep, cleansing breaths trying to convince himself that it was true. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t.

She did want him—probably on all the levels that he wanted her—that was the whole trouble. Liv was no more indifferent to him than he was to her. He had thought so even before this week, but since she had come to stay, he felt more certain every day. The way she looked at him, the way she knew what he was thinking almost before he’d even thought it, all pointed to a sense of sharing, of oneness. It pointed, he thought grimly, to making love, didn’t it? Then why were they fighting it? He snapped his jeans, and his hands stilled at his waistband as he considered the question.

“Because she isn’t ready,” he said softly, the words echoing in the quiet of his room.
And are you,
he asked himself. “Of course I am,” he said into the stillness. But as he went back downstairs he wasn’t sure.

He met Liv again in the kitchen where she was now dressed in a robe that looked respectable enough for his own mother. She gave him a shy grin, sheepish almost, that made his
heart pound l
ike an awkward teenager’s. He shook his head wryly, wondering at the feelings this woman evoked in him, and bent to fish through the cupboard for Kool-Aid. “And the treaty lives another hour,” he muttered, shoved his hand behind the soup cans and came up with the requisite packet.

“Thank you,” Liv said primly. “You can go back to bed now. I’ll make it.”

“No. I can. You have to go to work in the morning.”

“He’s my son,” she argued, tilting her chin and facing him. She looked weary and rumpled, even though he could see she had tried to comb her hair, and he wanted nothing more than to fold her into his arms and soothe
away all her cares. He felt a warm protectiveness that caused him to reach out a hand and brush a stray tendril of hair back from her cheek, his fingers stroking the softness of her skin. For once she didn’t jerk away. He closed his eyes against the temptation, his teeth clenching so that he felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. Liv didn’t move; she stood rooted, her eyes dark and luminous, drinking him in, so that when he opened his eyes he was stunned by the look he saw on her face. Then, abruptly, she seemed to recollect where she was, like a sleepwalker come awake, and turned to pour a glass of grape Kool-Aid with only slightly trembling hands. Nothing like his own, which were shaking violently.

“I can manage now,” she told him, speaking to the window over the sink, where the darkness reflected their closeness. She sipped the Kool-Aid in her hand.

Joe’s hands went to her shoulders, and he stood directly behind her, his breath caressing the nape of her neck. His lips a
ched to touch it. “Liv, I, we…”

“Stephen’s waiting,” she mumbled, stiffening under his touch.

Joe sighed. “All right, we’ll take it up together.”

He put the pitcher in the refrigerator and turned off the light, following her up the stairs, not wanting to let her go, though he knew that if he had any sense he ought to. She was getting skittish again, ready to bolt, their closeness of the evening before evaporating, replaced by a tension as taut as an electric wire. Let her be, he told himself. But he couldn’t. Following her around in the dark of night, seeing her with sleepy eyes and tousled silvery hair was such a refined, exquisite form of torture that he was insane to do it, and helpless not to.

“Thanks for coming, too,” she said when they came out of Stephen’s room. “I know he was glad you came.” She looked as though the idea worried her, as though Stephen’s pleasure were not her own, but she was too polite to say so.

“You’re welcome,” he muttered, wishing for a little
pleasure from her, too. The silence lengthened between them, neither of them moving in the dimly lit hallway. Then Liv began to turn away and his control broke. His arms went around her like a drowning man reaching for a life belt, and his mouth came down on hers hungrily, seeking, tasting. She was so warm, so sweet, and he needed her so badly. In their mingling he tasted the grape Kool-Aid and felt his rough cheek move against the petal softness of her own.

“God, Liv, you don’t know what you do to me!” he rasped, willing her to respond, to yield, to hold him as he held her. Finally, with aching slowness, her arms did creep upwards, did encircle him, did press him more closely into the softness of her worn chenille robe.

“I do know, Joe,” she whispered, her hands stroking his back, sending shivers through him as they moved up and down his spine. Her voice trembled with an aching he didn’t understand. “I do. But it won’t work.”

“Why?”

Liv’s hands stopped and she stepped back to put a tiny distance between them. Joe inched forward to close it again, wanting—no,
needing—
her softness against him. But she put her arms between them, pressing them against his chest, holding him off.

“Look at me, Joe,” she commanded. “I mean it. Really look at me.” She stepped back even farther so that he could not help but stare down at her whole body, taking in the slender figure barely camouflaged in the nubby robe, the pale face with its generous mouth, regal nose, and wide, sad eyes, the shoulder-length hair almost silver in the moonlight.

“I’m looking,” he said hoarsely.

“Then ask yourself if this is the woman you want to follow in the footsteps of Linda Lucas, Shallie Holmes, Trisha Kingdom and whoever else.” She named several actresses with whom he had been linked in the news as she stared into his eyes, daring him to answer.

He felt as though she had hit him. Even to think of
her in the same terms as those women appalled him. But when he shook his head mutely, unable even to articulate how ghastly the comparison was, she nodded slowly and said, “See?” and turned to walk away.

“Liv! No, you don’t understand,” he gasped. “You’re not like them at all. But that’s good, don’t you see? That’s good!” He grabbed her arm and turned her back to face him, but the look on her face was not encouraging.

A small, almost wistful smile touched her mouth. “Good?” Her words echoed his with a hint of mou
rn
fulness he didn’t quite comprehend. “Yes, I guess it is,” she said with something like regret in her voice. “But just where does that leave us, Joe? What about you and me?”

The very questio
n he had left hanging between Pi
o and Elena just hours before. Joe swallowed. The question had ceased to be an academic one. And just as Pio was left dangling, so was he. Olivia James was nothing like Linda Lucas or any of the other lovelies he had hustled and seduced for so long. So what did he want of her? And what would he do if he ever got her? Love her and leave her? Have a fling and forget her? Marry her?

Marry her? He broke out in a cold sweat that owed nothing to the hot August night. “I don’t know, Liv,” he said softly, his voice low and confused. He ducked his head, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see the censure he expected to find in her eyes. And after a moment he heard her footsteps receding down the hall. There was a faint click as she shut the door to her room behind her.

“I don’t know,” he muttered to the silent hallway. “God in heaven, I really don’t know.”

H
e did know that he couldn’t get a damn thing written on the screenplay the next day because whenever he tried to write dialogue for Elena, he saw the moonlit blond Liv in his mind and heard her voice asking, “What about us?” He began to wonder if he would even
be able to
finish the play until he had answered the same questions it asked in his own life. He hoped so, or he was likely to be in for a very long haul.

Shaking his head wearily he crumpled up another paper and tossed it at the wastebasket. He missed. Ben and Theo booed from where they sat on the floor playing Chinese checkers.

“Stuff it,” Joe growled, but couldn’t help grinning when Stephen picked up the paper and faked a dribble around the den before hooking it over his head into the metal wastebasket. “Show-off,” Joe grumbled. “Go lie down. You’re supposed to be sick.”

“Naw, all I’ve got are sca
bs
now,” Stephen contradicted. “I just itch.” He made apelike scratching motions and beamed at Joe out of his scabby face. “Hey, there’s the doorbell. Shall I answer it?”

“No. You’d probably scare whoever it is to death,” Joe said, getting up to answer it himself. A moment later he wished he had let Stephen do the honors.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing here?” he demanded as Ellie swept past him into the living room and dropped her suitcase in the middle of the carpet.

“And I’m delighted to see you, too,” Ellie replied with her hands on her hips, grinning like a fool as she surveyed her surroundings.

“Do come in,” he said belatedly, knowing his sarcasm wouldn’t touch her. He shut the door and glared at her, part of him annoyed, but part of him enjoying the expressions that flitted across her face as she surveyed his kingdom—the boys sprawled on the floor of the den, the towheaded girl with the remains of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on her face, playing with some blocks in the corner, his typewriter and the scattered sheets of paper on the desk and floor.

“I haven’t come to the wrong house, have I?” Ellie asked, her eyes taking in the rooms once more before they settled on him in wide-eyed amazement. “You
are
my brother? You
do
live here?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Then, pray tell
—
” she waved an all-encompassing
hand.

“It’s a long story,” he said, not wanting to discuss it
.

“I’ll be here a while.”

“They’ve all got chicken pox,” he said discouragingly.

“I’ve had it.”

“What do you want?”

“A number of things. Offer me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you.”

It was obvious she wasn’t going to be got rid of easily, so Joe motioned her to a chair and escaped into the kitchen in search of coffee. When he returned, she was in the den playing Snap with Stephen, and Ben and Theo had abandoned their checkers game to watch. Even Jennifer, who had been in a fit of sullen itchiness for two days, seemed to have forgotten her own misery enough to leave her blocks and crouch on the floor beside Ellie, giggling at Ellie’s groans and moans as Stephen won time after time.

“That’s all,” Ellie said when Joe handed her the mug of steaming coffee. “I quit. You’re too good for me,” she told Stephen who beamed from ear to ear.

“Did you let him win?” Ben asked suspiciously.

“Me?” Ellie feigned horror. “Never! I always play to win. Ask Joe.”

“She plays to win,” Joe told him with the voice of years of experience. “She never let me beat her once. She picked on me constantly. Still does.”

“Absolutely,” Ellie agreed complacently. She stirred milk into her coffee and settled on the corduroy-covered sofa, regarding Joe silently over the rim of her cup. Then she smiled and said, “And I’m going to start again now. Picking on you.” She took a sip of the coffee and grimaced, waving a hand in front of her mouth to coo
l
it. “My word, that’s hot. Are you trying to burn me alive?”

“We’ll see,” Joe said equably, taking the chair across from her. “I won’t decide till I know why you’re here.”

“Well, Luther sent me to—”

“Luther! I told him no Steve Scott!” Joe sat bolt upright in fury, slopping his own coffee onto his pants.

“Luther sent me to see what you were up to. He couldn’t believe that you were just really writing a screenplay.”