Lovescenes

He laughed. ‘You’ll be too busy holding me.’

‘No, I won’t, I...’ She broke off in confusion. Of course she would, she thought, staring at the menacing- looking machine. How else would she keep from falling off? ‘Look, maybe this isn’t such a good idea...’

‘You don’t have to worry,’ he said, and she could hear the laughter in his voice. ‘I said you’d be holding me, not the other way around. Come on, Shannon. Hop on.’

She hesitated briefly and then she took his out­stretched hand and straddled the leather seat behind him. God, she thought, where did everything go? Her hands and her arms and her legs...

‘OK? Hang on, now.’ He revved the engine and the bike began to move. She put her hands on his waist and kept her back straight so that their bodies were separ­ated by inches, but then the bike began to pick up speed.

‘Cade,’ she said, but how could he possibly hear her? He was wearing that helmet and the engine’s roar drowned out her voice, anyway. And they were moving more and more quickly, heading towards Ninth Avenue and traffic and... ‘Cade,’ she said again. The bike heeled gracefully as they rounded the corner. ‘Oh, lord,’ she whispered, and she wrapped her arms tightly around him and closed her eyes. She felt her breasts flatten as they pressed against his back, felt the brush of his thighs against hers as she hung on to him for dear life. His body was hard and alive under her touch; she thought she could almost feel the heat of him through the leather jacket he wore.

Wild laughter bubbled in her throat and she fought it back. And I was worried about being in something as confining as a car with this man, she thought.

Then they were flying towards lower Manhattan and she gave herself up to the excitement of the ride and the feel of Cade Morgan in her arms.

CHAPTER SIX

The unseasonable, early evening chill seeped through the walls of Shannon’s apartment, crept through the ill- fitting doors and windows, and seemed to linger like the ghosts of years past in the high-ceilinged rooms.

Still, the apartment had an old-fashioned charm and grace which soothed the spirit. The bathroom, the hand­somest room of all, had Italian marble fixtures, hand- carved moldings, and a huge, claw-footed tub. It was a tub in which you could lie back and let tension drain from your mind and body.

The only thing wrong with that idea this evening, Shannon thought, shivering as a draft played over her wet shoulders, was that she had forgotten how chilly the room was once the cool nights set in.

She stepped out of the tub and wrapped herself in a terry-cloth bath-sheet. The long soak had eased some of the weariness from her bones. A glass of sherry would take care of the rest.

She tossed the towel aside and slipped into an old flannel robe.

What an exhausting few days it had been, she thought, stuffing her feet into a pair of scruffy Mickey Mouse slippers she’d owned since her senior year at college. A week of rehearsing her new part had all but wiped her out—and she had yet to play her first scene with Cade.

She padded through the dark hallway and switched on the kitchen light. Should she scramble some eggs for dinner? That didn’t sound very intriguing. Well, she could always heat up the leftover Chinese—what was that stuff?—ah yes, Moo Goo Gai Pan. But there were no eggs in the refrigerator and the Moo Goo Gai Pan had turned into a bright gree

n science experiment in bacterial growth.

Shannon made a face and tossed the container into the bin.

No problem. The market had promised to deliver her groceries sometime this evening. She’d have a glass of red wine—half a jelly glass, actually,--and by then, her order would have arrived and she could pop a TV dinner into the oven. She’d bought chicken and salisbury steak—or something. It didn’t much matter, when you came down to it. All that frozen stuff tasted the same.

Then she’d brew a strong pot of coffee and get down to basics, which meant curling up with tomorrow’s script and going through it until she had every word and every stage direction com­mitted to memory. She and Cade had started to run through their first scene, and she’d made a mess of it. She’d blown her first lines so many times that he’d never even got to his.

‘You’re trying too hard,’ Jerry had said that afternoon, looping his arm loosely around her shoulders and walking her to a quiet corner of the set. ‘Just take it easy, OK?’

‘Sure,’ she’d said, as if she hadn’t been trying to do just that all morning.

The scene, an easy one, was set at a cocktail party, and all she had to do was look across the set at Cade and see him for the first time. Meeting her eyes, he was supposed to shoulder his way through the room to her side.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met,’ was her line.

‘Oh, but we have,’ he was to answer, ‘you’ve been in my arms in another lifetime.’

But they never got that far.

‘Have we met?’ she’d asked once. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know you,’ she’d said the next time. And once she had simply stood mute, staring past him into the distance. And that had bothered Jerry as much as the fact that she kept forgetting her line.

‘You’ve got to look right at Cade when he reaches you, Shannon,’ he’d said. ‘I’m going to bring the camera in tight—I want every housewife from here to California to feel what you fed.*

So far, all she’d felt was stupid. She kept wondering how long Jerry’s patience would last before he screamed or shouted or wrote her out of the part. When Claire had arrived, unexpectedly, at coffee-break time that af­ternoon, Shannon had immediately suspected Jerry had sent for her.

‘Jerry asked you to come by, didn’t he?’ she’d asked. ‘He called you and said I was making a mess of things.’