Lovescenes

‘I just don’t want to waste any more time,’ she added carefully. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t mention it...’

‘It’s OK, Shannon,’ Crawford said. ‘It won’t collapse again.’ There was another giggle and then a soft laugh. ‘Quiet,’ Jerry barked, ‘or I’ll clear the damned set. We’ve got work to do.’

Please, Shannon thought, please, let something go right. Maybe someday she’d be able to look back at today and laugh—from the start, things had gone like a skit from Saturday Night Live—but right now she felt closer to tears than laughter.

At nine o’clock, the mike boom had collapsed for

no apparent reason. They’d no sooner fixed it than Rima the Prima had gasped and dropped to her knees. For a few panicked seconds, everybody had thought she’d had a heart attack. But it turned out that Rima had lost a contact lens, and the cast and crew had spent twenty minutes crawling around on the floor, looking for the darned thing, which, of course, they never found. What they did find was that the famous Rima the Prima’s emerald eyes weren’t emerald at all. Without the artificial color added by the contacts, they were a pale, near-sighted brown.

And then it had been time to rehearse the scene and, as the time had grown near for the first run-through, Shannon had started to feel the cold touch of panic. Who would be on that bed with Cade Morgan? Shannon Padgett or the character she was playing?

Cade’s assurance that the scene would sizzle was suddenly not comforting at all.

Why hadn’t it oc­curred to her that knowing he could draw such a pas­sionate response from her was dangerous? If she wasn’t going to be an actress playing Alana Dunbar, who would she be? Crawford had hated the way she’d played this scene with Tony. No passion, he’d said, but that had been safer than losing control of herself in Cade’s arms...

At least they hadn’t been in costume for the first re­hearsal.

If Jerry had told her to change into the flesh- colored bodysuit, she’d never have been able to walk to that awful bed, much less sit down on it. As it was, she’d moved towards it with all the grace of a badly con­trolled marionette. She’d managed to say her lines when Cade had materialized before her, but even she knew her delivery had been wooden.

And when he’d smiled and walked towards the bed, his eyes and voice ca­ressing her as if they were a man and a woman alone in a real bedroom in a real apartment, panic had exploded deep inside her.

‘You’re going to feel the planet spin when I touch you.’

That was Cade’s first line. Would it? An actress couldn’t afford to lose control. She couldn’t afford to lose control.

He’d come down beside her and then the damned bed had swayed, groaned, and with a shriek of rending metal, it had collapsed in a heap, tumbling them to the floor in an undignified spill of pillows, sheets and blankets.

There had been a second of stunned silence, and then everybody, including Cade, had burst into peals of laughter.

Everybody but her.

Well, Jerry hadn’t laughed, either, but it wasn’t because he’d been mor­tified the way she’d been. It was because he was angry at all the delays. And there were more to come.

‘Fix the freaking bed,’ he’d snarled, stalking off the set. While the grips had hammered and sawed, the make-up man had scurried over and said he’d been asked to make her eyes look darker.

Wearily, Shannon had closed her eyes while he applied some new shadow and liner.

‘Smashing, darling,’ the make-up man had cooed, but by the time the bed was in one piece again and Jerry had waved her back to the set, her eyes were tearing and red.

‘It’s probably just a little allergic reaction,’ she’d said desperately, while she tissued the make-up off. ‘Really, it’s nothing.’

‘Nothing,’ the make-up man had echoed frantically. ‘Nothing!’ He’d rushed to her side and when he did, he’d tripped over a cable and blew out an entire set of lights.

‘God give me strength!’ Jerry had screamed. ‘What next?’

The heating system was what had come next. The studio was old. So were the ra­diators that heated it, and they’d suddenly set up a clatter that was loud enough to raise ghosts on Halloween.

Then they went silent.

That was the good news.

The bad was that the whole system had died. Within minutes, the huge studio was like a walk-in refrigerator, so that now everybody was standing around in coats and hats.

But there were still small miracles in the world, Shannon thought, shifting cautiously on the bed. Jerry had wanted a dress rehearsal, which meant that if the heat hadn’t failed, she’d have been sitting here, staring into the darkness, wearing nothing but a flesh-colored bodysuit, feeling naked as the day she’d been born, waiting for Cade, waiting for him to make his entrance and move on to the bed beside her, waiting for him to take her into his arms…

‘Shannon?’

A shiver of apprehension ran through her. Jerry’s voice was a silken sigh, an ominous portent considering the mood he was in. ,