The World is a Stage (25 page)

But Molly shook it off. “Oh, nothing. I think maybe I saw things as more serious than they actually are. But you know men—one step forward, two steps back.”

Rachel certainly knew
that
man. And all other scumbags like him, willing to toy with a woman’s affections like they meant nothing.

Which reminded her…she needed to check in with Nora. Other than a brief text message letting her know she was getting started on the case soon, things had been eerily silent on that front. It wasn’t that she thought her friend would keep the truth from her, but Nora might feel compelled to soften the blow. She was one of the only people in the world who knew just how hard it was for Rachel to trust anyone in Molly’s life. Or her own.

“Well, I’ll see you at rehearsal, then, yeah?” Rachel sprang to her feet and did a few stretches. “What are you going to do this morning?”

Molly paused. “Not much. Are you running at the cemetery?”

“Probably.” Rachel strove to keep her tone light.

“Give her my love, okay?”

Rachel leaned over and gave her sister’s cheek a kiss. A splash of salty water hit the top of her lip as she pulled away. That tiny tear, the only one Molly allowed, was enough to strengthen every last one of Rachel’s resolves. There was still too much emotion in that big heart of her sister’s. It needed protecting.

“Will do, Molly,” Rachel replied thickly. “And stay away from Mom if you can. I think she might try to tie you up and keep you from showing up for the rehearsal, like Kathy Bates in
Misery
.”

Molly’s laugh was mostly forced, and Rachel felt her sister’s sadness lingering on her lips as she set out for her jog.

The morning air, damp and fresh, partially refreshed her and cleared the mimosa fog from her brain. But she didn’t stop at Baby Hewitt’s grave and she didn’t take it easy.

Rachel would choose exhaustion over emotion every time.

She couldn’t stop staring at his ass.

Every step Michael O’Leary took across the stage was a swagger, a combination of manliness and purpose that worked on her as some sort of hypnosis. He moved his hips like a silver-screen cowboy, a Clint Eastwood daguerreotype in a short leather-plated skirt and nothing else. How on earth was she supposed to remember all her lines?

The costume Mary had created for him was something Gerard Butler would go to battle in, but filled in with Michael’s own chiseled abs and a pair of sandals that wrapped around his calves like a woman’s greedy hands. Each line of his stomach was molded as if of clay, a map of perfect twists and turns leading downward. And when he turned or bent over, it was as though her eyes glued themselves to his haunches, hoping for a peek at what was going on under there.

Her own costume wasn’t half bad either, with low-cut folds of opaque white cotton swathing over a gold lamé two-piece, a slit in the leg going almost all the way up to her crotch. It was a beautiful costume, but she couldn’t swagger or bend or do any of that ridiculous mock swordplay Michael threatened Larson with. Her headpiece had to weigh fifteen pounds at least, and her body was still recovering from her out-and-out sprint that morning. It was all she could do to keep from toppling headfirst to the floor.

“So, Cleo, what do you think?” Michael preened as he drew close. “Do I look like I’m going to go kick some Greek ass or what?”

“You look good, and you know it,” she said grudgingly. “But the question is, can you pull off the rest of it? You know—the actual acting?”

He laughed and flashed his teeth. “Even if I can’t, do you think the crowds will care? Maybe they’ll be happy with the gun show instead.”

As Rachel groaned, fully aware of what was coming, he flexed his arms and kissed the curve of each biceps.

“I swear, you get more and more classy each time I see you.”

“I’ll admit, I might have slipped Mary a fifty in hopes she’d do justice to my manly physique,” he joked. His eyes twinkled, and he reached out to adjust the hair-and-hat-in-one affixed to her head with about sixty bobby pins. “If I slip her another fifty, do you think she’ll let you come to practice tonight in the little gold bikini you’ve got going on under there?”

In true Michael form, he didn’t attempt to mask his perusal of her body, his eyes roaming appreciatively over every inch of her. She would not react. She would not let him see how much it affected her.

“Oh, get over yourself,” Rachel said, trying not to wriggle around to give him a better look. “It’s never going to happen. Not me in a gold bikini, and certainly not you enjoying it. If you ask me, what you really need is a woman with zero self-esteem and no intellect to speak of.”

“But I like you,” he said simply.

Mule. Mule, mule, mule.
She formed a kind of chant inside her head, forcing herself to focus on all the things about him that made her want to scream. And not in that guttural, wanton, delicious way she couldn’t seem to get out of her head—or her body.

Fortunately, Molly chose that moment to ask about some last-minute details. Despite a heavy layer of stage makeup—though not, Rachel knew, as heavy as her own—it was easy to see that her sister had spent the better part of the morning crying.

Rachel steeled herself against the sadness in the red-rimmed eyes. For Molly, tears were good. They were constructive. They were the slow but steady realization that she was making a mistake. With any luck, the relationship with Eric would end before Rachel had to resort to underhanded means. Then she wouldn’t have to play the cruel older sister. She could just be the sister, the one to hold her and promise it would all be okay.

“Well, ladies. Break a leg—that’s what you say, isn’t it?”

Molly beamed and grabbed Michael’s arm. “You’re going to be great. Don’t worry about it.”

“Oh, I’m not,” he said, puffed with his own vainglory. He put a hand on the hilt of his sword and stood tall, far too much like a true Roman sentinel for Rachel’s peace of mind. “But same to you. You two look spectacular. Is Peterson here, by the way?”

Molly’s face darkened. “I haven’t seen him yet, but I know they’re hoping he can run point on security. He should be here.”

There was a heavy note of accusation in her voice. Before Rachel could ask about it, Dominic entered onto the scene, holding a clipboard and a megaphone and looking like he was ready to murder the next person who didn’t jump when he asked.

“All right, people,” he announced. “Here we go. Let’s take it from the top.”

Everyone scrambled to their places. At least, everyone except Michael. He sauntered, all eyes in the place watching the flip and flop of those tiny skirt panels bouncing off the backs of his generously muscular thighs.

While his back was turned, Rachel lifted a hand and yanked on the neckline of her gown, not stopping until the tops of her breasts visibly swelled over the bikini and out into the audience. The heavy gold-and-turquoise necklace gave them a perfect frame, and for good measure, she went ahead and hiked up part of her skirt and tucked it into the waistband so her entire thigh flashed with the super exfoliated and spray-tanned smoothness that had cost her the better part of the previous week’s salary.

If Michael was going to treat the patrons to a gun show, she wasn’t going to be far behind. Never in her entire career on the stage had she been less beautiful than her male lead. And damn it all to purgatory and back, she wasn’t about to start now.

In the end, Michael was glad Rachel hadn’t opted to wear the bikini to practice.

For one, it started raining about an hour before they were all scheduled to be out on the field, the cold, stinging pellets like shards of ice on bare skin. Though, come to think of it, that might not have been so bad. In his fantasies, a cold, wet woman equaled erect nipples and a need for a warm male body to do something about them.

The real problem was just how much fun the guys were having rolling her over the ground, lifting her up over the biggest hurdles and putting their greedy hands everywhere. Even in her sensible sweatpants and T-shirt, it was too much. She was soaked to the skin, her wet hair stuck to her face, her wet clothes stuck everywhere else.

And all while Michael stood on the sidelines, blowing his whistle by himself.

The men—Julian, McClellan, Nick and Peterson—trailed behind Rachel as they finished a sprint in which she took the clear lead.

“Mikey!” McClellan called, his eyes practically glued to Rachel’s ass. His friend, already a mass of musculature that gave him a strangely rounded look, seemed to be growing stronger and bigger every day. Michael’s knee twinged as if jealous. “This was the best idea you’ve had in a long time.”

“Who knew you were the brains of the operation?” Julian added with a grin. He threw himself on the ground and panted heavily. “All this time, we’ve been trying to haul your giant ass over the course. What we needed was a lightweight.”

While the rest of the men followed Julian onto a groaning heap on the ground, Rachel began stretching. First her arms up over her head, breasts jutting toward Michael in a manner that demanded his complete attention. Then she bent over, touching her toes and twisting her hips in a way that seemed to defy the mechanics of human movement.

Nick’s eyes practically rolled out of their sockets until Michael reached over and slapped him on the back of the head.

“How is it you have any energy at all, kid?” he asked, emphasizing the word kid. Little punks needed to learn their place around here. “I thought you were helping Jennings all this week.”

“I am!” he protested, rubbing his head with a scowl. At least he’d taken the hint, though, and turned his eyes elsewhere. “We took it easy today.”

“Easy?” Peterson asked. Roared, more like it. The man had been in a pissy mood all day. He’d been late to rehearsal, and when he finally did show up, it was primarily to yell at Larson and sulk in the corner. Most of the crew chalked it up to preshow jitters. Most of the crew except the Hewitt women and Michael, anyway.

Michael knew it was the Nick stuff. Something about that situation was really getting to Peterson lately.

Fortunately, Molly had acted like a balm on him, and he’d instantly become more calm once she cooed up at him. Rachel had seen the interaction and went from some kind of crazy-hot Egyptian in a sheet to a furious, smoldering bundle of fury. Still hot. Even more so, if that was at all possible. She’d looked very much like a woman in need of a distraction—hard, fast and complete with hair-pulling.

Michael had provided it, of course.

Wardrobe malfunction—worked every time. He’d spent far too many years prancing around in a kilt not to know how to work a skirt to his advantage. As he leaped across the stage about to go to battle, he let his sword clatter to the ground and snag the clasp of his skirt as it went down. He caught it only at the last minute, saving the entire crew from an eyeful of his boys in all their glory.

There was something about a vulnerable, almost-naked man that worked magic on a woman. Usually, they swooned or came up with excuses to touch him—on the arm, the back, a quick twist of the nipple when they thought no one was looking.

Not Rachel.

She threw a piece of the set at his head.

It wasn’t a heavy piece—it was actually a giant block of foam painted to look like marble—but there was enough force behind her arm that it sailed across the stage and thunked him gently on the forehead.

“What was that for, woman?” he asked, adopting the same, dramatic theatrical voice Dominic had coached him on. The trick of it was to use all of his lungs. Fill the damn things up as full as they would go and push it out to the last word. It was a pretty good workout, actually.

“Stop showing off,” she returned. Her own voice was overloud to the point where he suspected she wanted an audience. Public spectacles, huh? He could accommodate that. “We’re here to do a job. Not preen.”

He’d put on a perplexed look, loving the way her face darkened even more. Playing dumb always seemed to infuriate her. “Isn’t preening when you pull your dress down so everyone can see your cleavage better?”

“Oh, like that’s any different than you thumping your chest so everyone is sure to notice your man boobs.”

“Fine. If you’re bothered so much by me upstaging you, why don’t you do the same? Whip off your shirt, Rachel. Do it right here. We’ll have a contest. See whose pecs are better.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, barbarian? Well, too bad. I didn’t get to this point in my life by taking off my clothes and making friends and pretending to be some overgrown, overly cheerful—”

He interrupted her with a loud laugh. “Don’t you worry, Ms. Hewitt. Making friends is something no one here would accuse you of.”

With each insult, they drew closer and closer to one another, until they were almost toe to toe, gold Egyptian sandal to rough, leather Gladiator wear. Her chin tilted up in defiance, her eyes sparkled with wrath. Peterson and Molly were all but forgotten by this time, and the wrath belonged solely to him.

He basked in it.

“I’m only here because you asked me to be,” he said. His voice was still loud, but he’d curbed a little of the resonance of it. “If you want me to leave, say the word and I’m gone.”