When Dreams Cross (2 page)

She took a deep breath and decided to face the problems head-on. “You can’t blame me for what happened to us, Justin.”

“Then who can I blame?”

She got up and shoved her chair back, then crossed her arms and paced over to the window. “My father lied to me, Justin. He told me he’d offered you fifty thousand dollars to break things off with me and leave town, and he said you took it.”

“And you believed him!” The words erupted as if they’d been held in too long. “You
believed
that I would take a bribe from him to end my relationship with you.”

“Well, you left,” she said, spinning around. “You disappeared for a week, without so much as a word. What was I supposed to think?”

“I was furious at your father,” he said. “And yeah, I disappeared, because I was angry and upset and didn’t know whether to tell you what your father had done and ruin your image of him. I didn’t know if we had a future together, if I could stand the constant pressure from the man who never thought I was good enough for his little girl. I didn’t know if I could ever be good enough for you, and I had to think—”

“So of course, I was the bad guy. I shouldn’t have accused you, Justin …”

“You shouldn’t have
doubted
me,” he said. “You knew what kind of a man I was. Your money and your family were liabilities to me, Andi, not assets.”

“I know that.”

“Then when did you come to know the truth?” he asked. “When did you finally stop thinking I had been paid off?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. “I knew it the minute you said it,” she whispered. “I knew I had made a mistake. But just thinking you had done it became the end of us.” She swallowed, tried to control the wobble in her voice. “And then a few years ago, my father’s life changed. He became a Christian, Justin, if you can believe that.”

Justin looked up at her, doubtful.

“He confessed everything, and I forgave him. I think he even tried to find you, to ask for your forgiveness. But nobody really knew where you were at the time.”

He looked down at the plush carpet beneath his feet, and she couldn’t tell from his eyes what was going through his mind.

“When we started looking for an animator, Wes brought in your cartoon and included it with the tapes we were considering. When I saw Khaki’s Krewe, I knew it was just what we needed, Justin. I had no idea it was yours. I was doubly surprised to find that you were back here, in Shreveport.”

“My mother had a stroke two years ago,” he said. “I moved back to help out. My staff agreed to come with me. Mom died, eventually.”

“Oh, Justin,” she cut in. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “She’s with Dad now. She was really suffering. Anyway, we decided to stay here. I inherited their house, so I set up the studio there. We’ve been working hard to get our cartoons into the right hands. But I don’t think I want to hand them over to you. I’m not that hungry.”

Andi swallowed the lump in her throat, and slid her hands into her pockets. With a lift of her chin, she walked around her desk to stand in front of him. Her voice was hoarse when she spoke. “Justin, as a businessman you must realize what Promised Land could do for your characters.” A smirk told her he was enjoying this. “Absolutely. Just as you realize what my characters can do for Promised Land.”

She locked eyes with him for a moment, then bit her lip and went to peer out the large plateglass window, seeking a way to put this ruinous enmity between them to rest.

He strode toward her. “As I said, I won’t give you exclusive rights. But there are other possibilities,” he began in a soft, matter-of-fact monotone. “I might consider working
with
you. My staff and I would have to retain absolute control of our characters, have the last word concerning everything that’s done with them, and of course continue producing the cartoons. And we would sell them to anyone else we choose. I’m no fool. Profits made from merchandising—like toys or clothes or movies—would go to me, not to you.”

She turned to him, her back against the window that held the view of the amusement park that had been the focus of her plans and dreams for six years now. A moment of silence followed as her emerald eyes cut into him with cool contempt. “I don’t do business that way, Justin,” she said finally. “When something concerns Promised Land, I like to be in control.”

A sarcastic smile tipped one side of his full lips. “Like father, like daughter,” he mumbled under his breath. “Manipulative, dictatorial …”

Andi swallowed and tried to step back, but the window against her back prevented her. “And I suppose I controlled you?” She held his intimidating gaze, refusing to let him know his devastating effect on her.

“Didn’t you?” The muscles hinging his jaw rippled. “I’ve learned a lot of lessons since I saw you last,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Hard ones. And you probably have, too. If anything, we’re probably both more stubborn than we were before, and you’d have to be crazy to think either of us could compromise.”

“Have you learned any lessons about pride or arrogance, Justin?”

His gaze locked with hers. “Have
you?”

Andi swallowed and stepped away, putting safer distance between them as she cut out a mirthless laugh that contained more emotion than she’d counted on. “Justin, Wes taped that cartoon at two o’clock in the morning at the tail end of a program that no one in his right mind would watch. And you have the nerve to pretend my offer doesn’t mean anything to you? If I were you, I’d be thinking about my future.”

“Don’t tell me about my future,” he said. “I’m the one who has to work nights to supplement my income. I’m the one in hock up to my ears to finance something I believe in-something I believe is my own divine calling. But I’m not going to hand my cartoons over to you the way everything else in your life has been handed over. You want to do business? Then you think about my terms. And if you decide that we have something further to discuss, you know where to reach me.” He started toward the door, but Andi’s words stopped him.

“You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?” she asked him through tight lips. “You love throwing your poverty at me like it’s some elite club I’m not invited to join. Well, wallow in it, then. It’s always easier to settle for something, isn’t it? As long as you convince yourself that it’s your
calling
—” Her words choked off, and she turned her back to him and forced the mist in her eyes to dry. Struggling to rid her face of expression, she stalked back to her desk and closed the file as if the offer was no longer extended. “There are other animators, Justin,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth she remembered a similar threat flung eight years ago. “There are other men,” she had said in desperation, grasping at anything that would have kept him from walking out the door.

He remembered, too, and as he had done the last time, he called her bluff. “Then do business with them,” he said simply, walking to the door. He stopped halfway out, then turned to voice an afterthought. “And if you do decide to contact me again, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call until after ten in the morning. I allow myself four hours of sleep a day, and between six and ten A.M. I don’t like to be disturbed.” The door slammed behind him, leaving Andi staring after him in silent rage.

Chapter Two

J
ustin’s foul mood had only gotten fouler as he pulled onto his gravel driveway behind the cars of his staff members who were, no doubt, hard at work, while waiting with bated breath to hear how his meeting had gone. He had warned them what his answer would be, but they’d convinced him to go, anyway, and just hear her out.

He went in the screen door on the side of the house and let it slam behind him. Madeline, one of his chief animators, looked up from her work at her drafting table, her black curls bobbing in her big eyes.

“Justin, how’d it go?”

“Justin’s back?” he heard from another room, and Gene and B.J., two of the other animators, dashed in. “What happened?” they asked.

He plopped wearily down in a chair and pulled his feet up. “Where’s Nathan? I might as well get it all out at once.” “Nathan!” Madeline shouted indelicately. “Justin’s back! Get in here!”

Nathan plodded in, three straight pins in his mouth and a handful of sketches to be put on the storyboard. He dropped the sketches on the shelf beneath the board and took the pins out of his mouth. “You’re back,” he said. “So, has our ship come in?”

Justin blew out a disgusted breath. “No. I told you yesterday that Sherman Enterprises was not going to be our ship. Nothing’s changed.”

Madeline got up from her table and came around to perch on the arm of the couch. B.J. couldn’t stand the suspense. He propped his foot on a stool and leaned his elbow on his knee as he asked Justin, “Did she make you an offer?”

“Yeah, if you want to call it that.”

They all kept staring at him, waiting, and when he didn’t volunteer it, Madeline asked, “Well, are you going to tell us what it is?”

He shrugged. “I don’t see the point. I’m not taking it.”

Madeline looked at Gene, who had plopped down on the couch next to her. They both rolled their eyes.

“Buddy, you’re gonna have real low morale around here if you don’t at least tell us what she said.”

“That’s right,” Nathan told him. “You expect a lot out of us, and none of us has even gotten paid regularly in the past few weeks. Man, we’ve all got investments in Khaki’s Krewe
.

Justin rubbed his eyes. “I know you do. You have every right to know.” He sat up and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Okay. She wants to buy exclusive rights to the Krewe and use the characters in Promised Land.”

“That’s great!” Madeline shouted, springing off of her perch. “Do you have any idea what that could do for the cartoons? Can you even imagine how great this is?”

“It’s a God thing, man,” Gene said. “You know it is. We’ve been struggling and scraping and sacrificing—we’ve each had to maintain second jobs to supplement—and every day we sit in here and pray that God will deliver us if he’s really calling us to do this. Don’t you see, buddy? It’s an answer!”

“It’s not an answer,” Justin said. “God would not answer my prayers through Andi Sherman. You have to trust me on this.”

Madeline’s face was reddening. “Justin, did you turn her down because of a busted relationship when you were in college? You wouldn’t really be that stupid, would you?”

He didn’t like being called names, but Madeline had always gotten away with it. “No, it wasn’t the relationship. You all know there’s no love lost between me and the Sher-mans, but that wasn’t the only thing. She wants absolute control over the characters. You know I can’t give her that.” “There’s a real important word you should learn before you grow up,” Nathan said. “It’s ‘negotiation.’”

“She wasn’t interested in negotiation. She’s used to getting her own way.”

Madeline breathed a mirthless laugh. “And you’re not? Give me a break, Justin. I can just see you two standing there like the characters in that Dr. Seuss book. You know, the ones who refused to get out of each other’s way, so they just stood there as cities grew up around them and the world changed …”

“I don’t have to play this game with her, Madeline. She’s out of my life.”

“Oh, no,” B.J. said as he lowered to a chair and covered the back of his head with his hands. “It
is
about their relationship. We’re not going to get paid and all our work is going to keep going to waste on obscure cable channels at two o’clock in the morning, all because of a stupid teenaged romance.”

“You guys have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“We know that our paychecks are late,” Madeline said. “We know that we’ve hung in here with you for a long time, killing ourselves to meet deadlines for those obscure little cable stations, just knowing that one day God was going to turn everything around. And when he does, you have too much pride to accept it. You beat everything!”

“All right, that’s enough,” Justin said, storming out of the room. “I have work to do. In fact, we all do.”

He left them in the room and slammed into his own bedroom that he sometimes used for an office when he couldn’t concentrate in the studio. He looked down at the stuff he’d been working on yesterday. It was a funny gag, one they’d all brainstormed on, but today it seemed dry, lifeless. What would it have been like to see his characters made into three-dimensional creatures, roaming around the park shaking hands with children, singing and dancing on stage …

There was no use dwelling on it. It wasn’t going to happen. His staff would get over it, if they didn’t mutiny first. Someone knocked on the door, and irritated, he called, “What?”

Madeline opened the door and peeked in. Her face was downcast and still angry. “I’ve decided to work at home for the rest of the day.”

He sighed. “Yeah, it figures. Tell you what. Just tell everybody to go home. If everybody stays, we’re going to wind up getting into it again, and I’m just not up to it.”

She hesitated at the door. “Justin, if you got some sleep and thought this over, maybe you’d have a clear head. Maybe then you could reconsider.”

“My head is as clear as it’s going to get,” he said. “I’m not giving her the exclusive control of my characters, and that’s final.”

Madeline didn’t have anything to say as she turned and walked away. In a few moments, he heard the others leaving, one by one. Was that the mutiny he’d worried about? he wondered. Was he going to lose his staff if he didn’t do something quick? Something that would make a difference?

He got up and went back into the studio, crossed to the storyboard, and pinned up the sketches that Nathan had brought in. Then he went to Madeline’s table and worked for a while on the continuity sketches that would take them from one gag to the next. His shoulders ached with the effort, and his head ached with the angry thoughts that kept flitting in and out of his mind.

It was late afternoon when he moved to the couch. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on the storyboard mounted on the wall in front of him, representing one scene in the segment he was working on. Fatigue diluted concentration, but he pushed the thought of sleep to the back of his mind, for he simply had too much to do before he left for work at nine that night. He checked his watch. Five o’clock. He wondered if his staff had accomplished anything today or if they’d just spent the hours stewing.

He shouldn’t have told them of Andi’s offer. What was it to them if someone else owned his characters? They weren’t the ones who stood to lose anything. He grabbed a sketch pad and sank back onto the small couch facing the story-board. Did they think he
liked
living one day at a time? Didn’t they know that a true answer to his prayers wouldn’t come with Andi Sherman attached? Didn’t they realize how important these cartoons would be if he just waited patiently for the right offer, one based on God’s terms?

He leaned his head back on the cushions of the couch and crossed an ankle over his knee, propping the pad there. Absently he began to sketch Bucky the rock ’n’ roll horse, with a microphone in his hand. Around him grew the figures of the other characters—Khaki Kangaroo; Ned the nearsighted farmer; the bird named Melody; the dowager pigs; the bear named Bull; the Cha-Cha Chickens; and Trudeau the troll. Without any conscious thought, he let his pencil fly across the page, sketching the background buildings and rides of the amusement park. His characters looked right. If only Promised Land weren’t synonymous with Andi Sherman.

Andi,
he thought, remembering how he’d hated that name when he’d met her in college so many years ago. He wondered if he would have fallen so hopelessly in love with her if he’d known at the outset that she was the daughter of
the
Andrew Sherman. But she, knowing his feelings toward the upper class, had led him to believe she was just another middle-class daughter attending a middle-class college. That deception had been her first mistake. For when he’d discovered who she really was, the seeds of distrust sprouted and grew. But he hadn’t been shallow enough or biased enough to let her go for that. He couldn’t help recalling the heartrending pull he’d felt toward her regardless of the way her social position had changed things. Despite who she was, he had loved her.
That
had been his mistake.

He turned back the page on his sketch pad and tried with his pencil to recall the almond shape of eyes the color of willow leaves, and the way the light had danced in them today, blatantly revealing the moisture that she hadn’t been able to hide. He sketched the soft lines of her nose and the full lips beneath them that he had seen stretched taut with anger on more than one occasion. They had been like that the last time, when he’d made their breakup permanent. She had not groveled or begged when he’d left her then. Instead she had wrapped herself in that cold armor she still wore today. With tears in her eyes, she had made it clear that there were “other fish in the sea,” and now he wondered if she’d found anyone else in those eight years. Of course, he told himself. She was not the type to waste away over what might have been. The image of Andi with someone else made his fingers curl into a fist, and his instinctual reaction filled him with unaccountable dread.

His pencil left her face and called up memories of her hair, long, blonde, and silky, shimmering with a multitude of colors when the sun hit it just right. That hair had been part of the power she’d had over him. Thank heaven she had worn it pulled back today.

His eyelids grew heavier as the frustrations released themselves through his pencil, and he studied the sketch, wondering if he’d been responsible for turning her into a strong, beautiful glacier who threatened to freeze or drown anyone who came near. She hadn’t been cold when he’d known her before. She had been full of warmth then, and so sweet …

His eyes drifted shut and the tension seeped from his body. His pencil traced a soft line around the edges of her lips before his hand fell limp as sleep overcame him.

A
ndi pulled her car into the driveway next to the old frame house where his parents had lived before they died. She’d half expected a zany sign out front, a Beware of Troll warning, or a picture on the door of Khaki in her karate gear, poised for spiritual warfare. Instead, there was nothing to set this house apart from the other ordinary houses on the street, and she wondered if Justin lived in the house he used as a studio.

It seemed impossible that she had lived in the same town with him for two years and not known he was here. But then, Promised Land was so isolated, and she had remained in its cocoon since its plans had begun. It had kept her safe some- how, promising her that life could be everything God intended if only she worked hard enough to make it that way and kept her focus.

The sun was falling behind the paint-peeled structure, and she checked her watch. Five-thirty. It had taken her all day to work out her fury and depression, as well as the alternate terms her board of directors had agreed to so that she could approach Justin Pierce a second time. It hadn’t taken much probing to discover why he was so wary of her offer. He had been on his way to success a few years ago when someone very much like her had double-crossed him. They had gotten exclusive rights to his characters, then hired most of his staff out from under him and written him out of the picture. Khaki’s Krewe was a new set of characters with a new staff. In light of the circumstances, she didn’t blame him for his suspicious attitude. And he had reason to suspect the Sherman name. He had been double-crossed and lied about by her father, and Justin had heard much about her father’s ruthless business dealings before he was saved. He probably thought that ruthlessness was genetic. If she was going to work with him, she would have to give a lot more than she’d planned.

When no one answered the front door, Andi left the creaky porch and looked down the side of the house for another entrance. A screen door drew her, and when she had reached it she saw that the door behind it was open as if in invitation. She knocked on the frame, waited, knocked again. When no one came, she cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the black screen. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw Justin asleep on the couch, a pencil in his hand and a forgotten sketch pad on his lap.

Quietly she opened the screen door and stepped into the studio. For a moment, she stood looking at him, stunned at how good it felt to let her eyes linger over him without that pride between them.

Unbidden memories brought bitter tears to her eyes. She had long ago forgiven her father for his mistake, and her mother for her passive acquiescence, made out of love for their only child. They had never understood that the extremity of their care had helped to rob their daughter of the only man she had ever loved. But that was in the past. Her parents had both come to know Christ at a revival service she’d brought them to several years ago, and she knew that they would never attempt anything so dishonest or manipulative again. Still, her father’s offer of a payoff had not been what killed their relationship. It had been her own willingness to believe the worst about Justin.

Breathing a shuddering sigh, she stepped further into the room, smiling at the drawings of Khaki Kangaroo and some of the other characters on the walls sketched from different angles. Clay models of the characters topped some of the shelves above inclined tables cluttered with papers. She went to the storyboard on the wall next to the couch where Justin lay sleeping. The pictures representing each action in the scene gave her a clear idea of the gag the characters were pulling on the troll. Silently she laughed. Justin’s talent had always been brilliant.