Leader Lion (Protection, Inc 5)

Grace

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Grace Chang was done with handsome men.

And not just handsome men. She was also done with sexy men, suave men, charming men, men with easy smiles, men with funny banter, and men with suspiciously polished manners. Any extra-hot man who tried extra-hard to make a good impression had to have something wrong with him that he was trying to cover up. He’d turn out to be a cheater or a jerk or a criminal. Or, like Dean, her handsome, sexy, suave, charming, smiling, bantering, well-mannered ex-boyfriend, all of the above.

She settled back into her seat in the front row of the theatre, adjusted her clipboard and laptop, and scowled at the gorgeous actors singing their hearts out onstage. The lights were out in the audience but lit the chorus and the set brilliantly, shining right into the actors’ eyes. Grace could glare all she wanted, safe in the knowledge that no one onstage could see. And since she was the stage manager and controlled the lights, along with the sound and the set changes, she’d always have advance warning to adjust her expression.

Actors! Handsome. Charming. Sexy. And bad, bad, bad news.

Grace had been fooled once. But it would never happen again. Oh, she wasn’t swearing off all men forever. Just the ones who were clearly too good to be true. The next man she dated might not set her body on fire, but he’d also never cheat on her with sixteen strippers while committing credit card fraud in his spare time.

She hated to admit it, but Mom had been right. Grace had been shallow. She’d been swept away by Dean’s looks and charm and talent, missed all the warning signs, and only discovered his mile-high stack of dirty little secrets when he’d called her from the police station to try to sweet-talk her into paying his bail. She’d been shocked and horrified, certain that he’d been wrongfully accused and outraged on his behalf. Then he’d whispered that he’d hidden enough stolen money to pay his bail behind the bookshelves in her apartment, and all she had to do was go get it.

She got it, all right. Accompanied by the police, plus a lawyer she’d had to spend half her savings to hire just to make sure Dean’s crimes didn’t get pinned on her. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment and fury at the memory.

If it had been up to her, she’d have been vague about the exact reason for the break-up, but Promising Young Actor Arrested had hit the papers the very next day after the phone call from hell. And more headlines had followed, finally concluding with Formerly Promising Young Actor Gets Ten-Year Sentence.

Grace nodded firmly to herself. Her next date might not be sexy or witty, but he’d be reliable, considerate, and honest. What she needed was a nice, plain, ordinary guy, like her mother had always told her she ought to date. A guy like her assistant, Carl.

Carl leaned over from his seat beside her and whispered, “It’s 2:00 AM. Can I get you some more coffee?”

“Sure,” Grace whispered back. “Two—”

“Two sugars, one cream,” Carl replied. “I’ll be right back.”

He got up and tiptoed out of the near-empty theater. Grace watched him go. Maybe she should date him. He was nice. He was thoughtful. He was an excellent assistant stage manager. She’d been incredibly lucky to find someone this competent, especially considering how hard the job had turned out to be. And he seemed to like her, though he’d never asked her out.

Maybe he was just being professional, waiting for the show to open—or close, which the way things were going would probably be two nights later—rather than take the chance of mixing work and relationships. Carl was a conservative guy who didn’t take risks, which, like Mom said, was exactly what she needed.

Grace imagined Carl naked.

The mental picture didn’t exactly get her all hot and bothered, but she guessed he’d be... okay.

Good enough. On to step two. She imagined having sex with Carl.

That would probably also be... okay.

She shuddered inwardly. If she couldn’t have absolutely fantastic, melt-your-panties sex, she didn’t want any sex at all. Sex that was just okay was even more depressing than bad sex. With bad sex you could walk away sure that the next time would be better, because it couldn’t be worse. With just-okay sex, you walked away thinking, “Is this as good as it gets?”

Who needed sex, anyway? She had more important things to worry about. Like her supposed big break stage managing Mars: The Musical, which was looking more and more like a big impending disaster. When the actors thought she was out of earshot, they referred to it as Mars: The Mistake, Mars: The Menace, and Mars: The Megaflop.

Their mistake. A stage manager was never out of earshot. Grace touched her headset. With it, she could communicate with the backstage crew and Carl. She could also hear anything going on near a headset that anyone backstage had taken off and then forgotten to switch off. Someone had once again done exactly that, so she could hear an actor doing vocal exercises and several crew members reviewing the upcoming scene shift, plus the usual footsteps, squeaks, and creaks.

“Mars!” sang the actors. “Mars!”

The actor playing Mars stepped forward. Grace hit a key on her laptop, switching on his red spotlight. Her fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard, activating more lights. In perfect time with the music, a pair of white spotlights picked out the actors representing the moons of Mars. The rest of the chorus faded into darkness.

The two moon actors began to dance around the Mars actor. One of the moon actors moved out of synch with his pre-programmed moving spotlight, so it left him in the dark and lit the floor in a white circle one step ahead of him.

Irritated, Grace hastily re-programmed the spotlight, setting it to move three seconds slower. Just as she hit the “go” button, he suddenly noticed that he was dancing in a blackout. He sped up. Now he was still in the dark, but with the spotlight trailing him like an eager dog.

“Vast space,” sang the chorus. “Two moons!”

“I am Deimos,” sang the out-of-step actor. “Named for terror!”

“I am Phobos, named for fear,” sang the other moon actor. She was moving in perfect synch with the spotlight, but her singing was completely off-key.

The director, Lubomir, who sat on Grace’s other side, muttered, “Dear God.”

Grace felt for him. This was supposed to be his big break too. In the US, anyway. Supposedly he was famous in Bulgaria.

“Hey!” came a loud voice from behind them. “That’s not right. You’ve got the orbit of Deimos moving faster than the orbit of Phobos, and it’s the other way around!”

Grace turned to meet Ruth’s familiar frown. The NASA consultant looked as cranky as always, her eyes bloodshot and her brown hair pulled back into a painful-looking bun. She was brandishing a calculator as if she meant to shoot a laser beam from it.

“Write down your note, and give it to me and Lubomir after the rehearsal,” Grace whispered to her for the millionth time.

“But it’s wrong.” Ruth sounded personally offended. “I’m here to ensure scientific accuracy, and that’s not accurate.”

Lubomir held up his hand. “Ruth, please write down your note. Grace and I will meet with you after the rehearsal.”

Ominously, Ruth said, “This show is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for Science Education, and the terms of the grant state that a NASA consultant must be present at all times.”

Grace bit her tongue to point out that the grant only provided a small percentage of the show’s budget. It was true, but they needed that small percentage. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to keep the show going if the audience hated it. Ruth might be driving them all crazy making them jump through her scientific hoops, only to have the production flop anyway.

“And here you are,” Lubomir said mildly. “Present and ensuring accuracy.”

“I’ve noted twenty-three separate inaccuracies tonight alone,” Ruth protested. Flipping a page in her notebook, she said, “Number one, the Tyrrhenum cartographic quadrangle—”

“Notes after the rehearsal,” Grace and Lubomir hissed.

Ruth subsided, scowling, and began to scribble notes. Grace couldn’t usually read upside-down, but by now she’d learned to recognize Ruth’s favorite note, which was WRONG. Also her second-favorite, which was MARS DOESN’T DO THAT. They were followed by a despairing scribble of WHY AM I EVEN HERE???

The actors sang on, oblivious and ignored.

Carl returned to his seat beside Grace. “Got your coffee.”

She took it gratefully. “Thanks, Carl. You’re the best.”

He was considerate. Grace once again imagined having sex with him, reminding herself that he was the opposite of her evil ex and therefore perfect.

It didn’t feel perfect. In fact, it made her feel vaguely nauseated.

Forget sex, she told herself. Just focus on your job. You can’t have everything, and if you have to choose between success and sex, success is better.

But a rebellious part of her muttered, Why do I have to choose?

“I got coffee for you, too.” Carl offered a cup to Lubomir, who took it with thanks and tossed it down in a gulp. He turned to Ruth. “The vending machine was out of herbal tea. Sorry.”

“Thanks for checking,” Ruth said glumly. The vending machine was always out of herbal tea.

Carl put on his headset and began murmuring directions to the stagehands backstage. “Ready to receive backdrop.”

“Backdrop go!” Grace whispered to stagehands. She mentally crossed her fingers that it would all work right. The machinery controlling the stage had a tendency to jam, be late, move too fast, or make weird, un-space-like noises.

But not this time. The black flats studded with brilliant stars slid off smoothly and silently, and a huge curtain painted with a beautiful panorama of the red sands of Mars dropped neatly down from the ceiling. Black-clad stagehands emerged from the wings, placed the props and set pieces for the next scene, and vanished backstage.

Grace brought up the lights. An otherworldly glow slowly brightened on the Mars landscape, while a pair of spotlights illuminated the leading actors, Paris and Brady, who played a pair of astronauts trapped on Mars.

It was a lovely effect. At least, it would have been, except that the Deimos actor, who should have exited with the stagehands during the blackout, forgot to leave. When the lights came up, he scuttled offstage like a cockroach scurrying under a refrigerator when someone turned on the kitchen lights.

Grace sighed and took a note to remind him to leave sooner. At least Paris and Brady had managed to enter in darkness and hit the marks for their spotlights.

Paris stood poised like a dancer, with the cascade of blonde hair that Ruth was always complaining ought to be scraped into a bun tumbling down her back. Grace liked her. Paris could be a bit over-dramatic, but she was professional, always knew her lines and found her light, and occasionally brought in homemade cookies. They were good cookies, too.

Brady... Well, Brady was a typical actor. Handsome. Charming. Sexy. Flirtatious. On his fifth divorce.

He’d already dated a Mars actress, violinist, and stagehand, causing a three-way meltdown when he accidentally triple-booked a date and they all found out about each other. The very next day, he’d turned his charming smile on Grace and asked her out to a champagne brunch. She’d stifled the impulse to tell him to break the bottle over his head, and instead suggested that he date anyone not involved in Mars: The Musical.

Baffled, he’d replied, “But it’s so convenient. We all get out of work at the same time.”

Now, Brady stood in his spotlight in a long, dead silence. Finally, he turned to Paris. “Did you forget your line?”

“It’s your line,” Paris said.

“What?” Confusion was written all over his too-handsome face. “No.”

“The first line’s yours, Brady,” Grace said, and read it to him.

As he sheepishly repeated it, she thought, This play is doomed. I’m doomed.

Grace had moved to Santa Martina to stage manage a different show. She’d thought it would be her big break. Instead, she’d gotten fired on opening night. And that was the end of her first big break.

Then she’d been hired to stage manage the play where Dean had played the leading role. That producer had been too cheap to hire an understudy, so the play closed when Dean was arrested, putting everyone out of work. And that was the end of her second big break.

Mars: The Musical was her third big break. Three strikes, and she’d be out for good.

Grace had spent her life savings on the move. If Mars: The Musical failed, she’d have to move back in with her parents in Delbert-by-the-Sea, Florida. Her family, who had never approved of her weird, risky career anyway, would say, “I told you so.” She’d have to get some dull desk job that would bore her to tears. And to get it, she’d have to strip the dye out of her hair, hide her tattoo, and wear business suits. It would be the end of all her dreams.

It was such terrible timing, too. Mars: The Musical was set to open the week before Christmas, competing with a new revival of My Fair Lady. The two musicals would go head to head, and since most people had limited money for theatre tickets, only one could survive. Within the week, one was sure to close. And if it was Mars, Grace would have to slink back home for the worst Christmas ever.

And the worst life ever would follow. After her days slaving away at her boring job, she’d return to a lonely, empty home. She’d lived in Delbert-by-the-Sea long enough to know what the available men there were like. They all fell into one of two bad categories: corporate drones who disapproved of women with purple hair and creative clothing, and complete lunatics who appeared in headlines like Florida Man Tries To Sell Three Iguanas Taped To His Bike To Passersby For Dinner and Florida Man Dances On Top Of Police Cruiser To Ward Off Vampires and Florida Man Files Patent For “Living Parachute,” Ties One Hundred Giant Flying Roaches To His Suspenders, And Jumps Out The Window Of The Department Of Motor Vehicles.

Which reminded her of another reason she didn’t want to move back to Florida: the giant flying roaches. And the fire ants. And the alligators. All of which might unexpectedly invade your home. In Santa Martina, the only animals she’d seen were dogs on leashes, cats in apartments, and birds on telephone wires, and that was exactly how she liked it.

While half of Grace’s mind was on her probable horrible future, the other half was watching the action onstage and listening on her headset. She could hear the backstage crew preparing for the upcoming zero-gravity scene, in which Paris and Brady would be strapped into harnesses and flown around the stage on wires. Grace blacked out the stage and watched in the dim blue set-change lights as the stagehands clipped the wires to the actors’ hidden harnesses, checked and double-checked them, then hurried backstage.

“Confirm that the wires are safely attached,” Grace murmured into the headset.

The backstage crew confirmed that they were.

“Confirm that you’re in place and ready to pull her up,” Grace said.

“In place and ready,” said the crew.

Nothing seemed wrong, but something nagged at her. Maybe it was just that flying was dangerous. Grace poised her hand over the key that would bring up the lights and started to open her mouth to tell the crew to start the flying sequence.

Then she realized what was wrong.

“HOLD!” Grace yelled.

Silver glinted over Paris’s head, quivering in the blue light. Despite Grace’s command to stop, someone had already started pulling on Paris’s wire.

Grace sprang to her feet and vaulted on to the stage. The wire attached to Paris straightened and grew taut.

“HOLD!” Grace shouted again as she threw herself at Paris, clutching the actress around the waist. “Grab her, Brady!”

At that instant, Paris was yanked into the air, violently and way too fast. She screamed. Brady flung his arms around Paris, and Grace desperately tightened her grip.

The wire pulled tight, but Paris’s upward motion stopped with her feet dangling a few inches above the stage. She hung in mid-air, the wire straining above her, but Grace and Brady’s weight held her in place.

“What’s going on?” Paris gasped.

Grace had no time to explain. Keeping her arms tight around the actress, Grace wriggled around until she could reach the clip attaching the wire to the harness Paris wore under her costume. Grace’s fingers closed on cold metal. She opened the clip.

Relieved of its weight, the steel clip rocketed into the air. The wire yanked it all the way to the ceiling, where it smashed into a light with a sound like a gunshot. Broken glass showered down. Paris screamed again, Brady ducked, and Grace flung up her hands to shield her face.

“What the hell...?” Brady began, then put Paris down and hurriedly undid his own clip. It stayed dangling in mid-air, attached to its wire.

“Nobody move!” Lubomir shouted, scrambling onstage. “What just happened? Who jumped their cue? If the stage manager says ‘hold,’ everything needs to stop!”

Grace, Paris, and Brady began to gingerly shake bits of glass out of their hair.

Paris stared upward, stunned. “I could have been killed.”

Everyone came onstage, from the crew to the musicians to the rest of the actors. Even Ruth left her seat to peer at Paris with concern.

A chorus member said doubtfully, “The wire only flew up like that because it got pulled with no weight attached to it... right?”

Grace, Carl, Lubomir, and the stagehands shook their heads.

“No,” Lubomir said. “It should never have gone up that fast or that high, no matter how much weight was on it. If Grace and Brady hadn’t caught her, Paris would have been slammed into that light. She could have been seriously injured. Who rigged her wire?”

The stagehands who had set up her wire and the machinery controlling it protested that they’d done it correctly and tested it before the rehearsal.

“They did set it up right,” Grace said. “I watched them. It was fine before. Whatever went wrong happened during the rehearsal.”

“I watched too,” Carl added. “It worked fine an hour ago.”

“And why did it go after Grace called a hold?” Lubomir asked.

A stagehand shook his head. “I don’t know. It flew up by itself. I never touched it.”

“It’s true,” a chorus member said. “I was standing right next to him.”

“All right,” Lubomir said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this. Paris, I am so sorry. Actors and musicians, you can go home. Everyone else, we’re staying until we figure out what happened and how to make sure it never happens again.”

Carl touched Grace’s elbow, catching her attention. “How did you know something was wrong?”

Grace had to think about it. The whole thing had happened so fast. Then she remembered what had alerted her. “There wasn’t any noise. The wires always squeak a little, but they didn’t this time. So I knew something had changed. I had no idea how important it was. But flying can be dangerous, so I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“You saved my life,” Paris said. Her voice shook.

Grace felt shaken herself. Awkwardly, she said, “Just doing my job.”

Ruth looked from the glass on the floor to the broken light overhead to Paris’s frightened face. “That must have been terrifying. At NASA, if there’s anything that could kill someone if it goes wrong, we don’t just check it once. We check it hundreds of times! Thousands!”

“We didn’t just check it once,” Grace protested. But she could hear the defensive guilt in her voice. Considering what had happened, she should have stopped the rehearsal before the flying scene to run another test. The safety of the cast and crew was her responsibility, and she’d let them down.

“This is a plot!” Paris yelled suddenly, her trained voice echoing throughout the theater. “Someone’s trying to kill me!”

“No, no,” said a musician.

“Accidents happen in theater,” said the Deimos actor. “I’ve never worked on a show that didn’t have at least one.”

“Especially in musicals,” Brady added. “When I was in Phantom of the Opera, a wire broke during a performance and the chandelier smashed on the floor.”

“Paris, I’m very sorry this happened to you,” Lubomir said. “But it was an accident. Nobody is trying to kill anybody.”

Paris was not reassured. “I’m telling you, too many ‘accidents’ have happened, and too many of them have happened to me! I must have a stalker. I’m not coming back here without a bodyguard!”

Grace opened her mouth to list all the accidents that had happened when Paris hadn’t even been around. Then she closed it again. Why had there been all those accidents? It was true that musicals were disaster-prone... but this disaster-prone?

Maybe Paris is half-right, Grace thought. Maybe there is a plot. But I don’t think it’s against her. I think someone’s trying to shut down Mars: The Musical.