Lovescenes

‘Yes, I understand,’ she said carefully. ‘I’ll get it right the next time.’

‘You have to feel the passion, Shannon. You meet this guy, you talk for an hour or so, he takes you back to his apartment, and wham! The feeling between you is so strong, so powerful, that you fly in the face of every convention you believe in. You fail into his arms and into his bed.’ Jerry gave her an encouraging hug. ‘You and Tony have to make the audience understand that. What I want is... is instant heat. There's an old movie, Body Heat. Did you see it? There’s a scene between the two main characters the first time they go to bed together that just blows the audience away.’

Shannon nodded. ‘I know the scene,’ she said. She certainly did. She’d felt like a voyeur watching it. It had been hard to believe that the man and woman on screen were acting, even for someone with her training in the theatre. ‘All right, Jerry, I know what you want. I...’

A buzz of sound erupted at the entrance door to the studio.

‘What the hell’s all that about?’ Crawford said.

He and Shannon turned toward the door.

A small crowd had gathered around the door. A small crowd had gathered beside it. More and more people joined it until he and Shannon were the only ones at the far end of the huge room.

‘Just what I need,’ he said sharply, taking Shannon’s elbow. ‘A party of VIPs out slumming.’

Shannon hurried along beside him, her bare feet padding softly across the floor. The crowd was babbling with excitement; the sound guy and the cameramen were staring as if royalty had just stepped into the room. The script girl and the make-up woman—all the females, in fact—had grins on their faces.

Crawford muttered something as he shouldered his way through the crowd, Shannon beside him.

‘Come on, people,’ he said, ‘get back to work. We have a final shoot for tomorrow’s show in a little while, and I want to finish rehearsing before—' Crawford stopped in mid-sentence. 'Well, I’ll be damned!’ he said softly. ‘! I didn’t expect to see you today.’

Shannon fell back as Crawford moved towards the man in the center of the crowd. ‘Why didn’t you let

us know you were coming, Cade? I’d have had the welcoming committee out.’

The man separated himself from the group sur­rounding him and stepped forward.

‘This looks like a pretty good welcoming committee to me,' he said, grinning as he took Crawford’s out­stretched hand in his. ‘How've you bee, Jerry?’

‘My God,’ Tony’s voice drawled softly in Shannon’s ear, ‘it’s Cade Morgan.’ He shook his head and droplets of water rained on to her face. ‘Isn't he one gorgeous sight?'

Usually, Shannon laughed at Tony’s ov­erblown adjectives, but not this time.

It was hard to quarrel with Tony’s description, although she wouldn’t have used the word to describe Cade Morgan.

Gorgeous was a word that conjured up images of softness, and there was nothing soft about this man.

He was a world-famous musician and she’d seen him dozens of times before—on television, in magazines and newspapers—but never in person.

‘Did you see him on the tube with the Boston Pops the other night?’ Tony whispered. ‘How can a guy head a group like the Marauders one day and play classical guitar the next?’

It was an interesting question, Shannon thought, staring at Cade Morgan, one which had intrigued music critics for years. Only Morgan’s admiring fans asked no questions. They were content simply to pack his con­certs and buy his CDs, whether they were blues, rock, or classical.

And, yes, she'd watched him with the symphony. Dressed in black tie, he’d been incredibly masculine and almost heart-stoppingly handsome.

Today, he was all that and more, although the formal outfit had been replaced by a black leather motorcycle jacket, tight, faded jeans, and dusty black leather boots. Add amazingly sexy to the list of words that described him, she thought, watching as Jerry led him through the excited crowd. The two of them were talking but Morgan still managed to pause and smile, shake hands and exchange pleasantries.

‘Somebody’s going to whip out a piece of paper and ask him for an autograph any second,’ Tony whispered. He chuckled softly. ‘You’d never think we were a bunch of pros, would you?’

No, Shannon thought, you certainly wouldn’t. Even Rima was gushing like a schoolgirl.

Clearly, Jerry wasn't going to hold to his usually rigid five-minute break—al­though it wasn’t rigid when Rima wanted to take time out for coffee or to have her hair fixed or her make-up touched up and it evidently wasn't rigid for the Cade Morgans of this world, either.

"Told you," Tony said when somebody thrust a script and a pencil in front of Morgan’s face. ‘Can you imagine the future I'd have if I looked like that?’

He grinned. ‘I’m not modest, love—you know that— and I like what I see in my mirror, but there’s something about that man. You’d think Hollywood would have picked him up by now, wouldn’t you? Jeez, if I were in his shoes, I’d be beating the studios off with a stick.'

Shannon looked up sharply. Tony, too, she thought with disgust.