Текст книги "The Gideon Affair"

Автор книги: Suzanne Halliday

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Her insides tightened. She liked this bubble. Liked the teasing and the flirting very much. And the kissing? Hmm. Maybe needed a bit more of that before expressing an opinion.

An amused snort, which was a total reflex, echoed off the hallway walls. Who was she kidding?

The man kissed like a … something. Jeez. There wasn’t a good way to describe it. All she was sure of was that she wanted more of where that came from.

Paige could hear Edward puttering in the kitchen—cleaning up. She’d found it amusing from the get-go that he was so neat and organized. Clutter made him twitchy. Over time, she had figured out that while his mom would never put up with her boys being slobs, it was his Army training that had formed many of his habits.

They were compatible in that way ‘cause she also had a hard time with mayhem in her daily life. Even as a kid, having a personal retreat that reflected her need for tranquility had always been part of who she was. Discovering they shared the same trait had been a bonus, like the icing on an already spectacular cake.

“Hey, you forgot something,” he hollered from the kitchen.

Purse. Keys. Backpack. iPad. Shoes. Nope. She had everything.

Pulling a hair tie off her wrist, Paige gathered big handfuls of her long mane into a thick tail and deftly secured it. Glancing at her pile of stuff, she pulled a thoughtful frown and shook her head.

“I don’t think there’s anything,” she yelled while turning around. She jumped back and squeaked with fright. He was right on top of her.

“Good lord! You scared me shitless,” she exclaimed. Paige shivered slightly from the sensation rushing along her skin. Whoa. What was happening?

His eyes. She didn’t know they could look like that. All smoky and somehow hard and glittery at the same time. And big. When he stood this close, he pretty much covered her completely with his size, surrounding her with his essence—something powerful, intoxicating. Real.

The real got to her.

“The after,” he murmured as he took her face in his big hands. “You forgot about the after.”

“Oh,” was all she had time to blurt out before he closed the slight distance between their mouths and slowly began brushing their lips together. The delicate friction made her lips pulse with need.

They were breathing each other in, her hands clinging to his forearms as he held tight to her face, her heart thumping hard enough for Paige to hear.

After a few barely-there flutter-by kisses, he groaned against her lips. “Open for me, babe.”

By that point, she was already so completely undone that he could have asked her to meow and she would have. Paige felt something different in this kiss from what they’d shared earlier. The feeling was unnerving, but that didn’t stop her from giving him what he asked for.

The second she opened, he deepened the kiss, wrapping her in a passionate embrace that she gladly returned. Putting her arms around his neck, she had to rise on her toes to reach his mouth. This was no hesitant exploration. Edward went deep, commanding everything from her response.

His pace never changed, never became frantic. He just kissed her; really, really slow and really, really deep.

Paige moaned with desire. She couldn’t help it. And the more she moaned, the slower and deeper the kiss became. He kept it up for a while—how long she couldn’t even guess. Her mind had gone to mush when his tongue had claimed hers.

Her mind dimly registered that one of Edward’s hands was squeezing her ass and that his other hand was gripping the back of her head and neck. The twin grips felt possessive and very, very sexy.

So did his hair. Felt sexy. He was growing it out for his next role, so mostly it was turning into a shaggy mess that she surprisingly found quite appealing. Made it easy to run her fingers through and rub his scalp.

Mmm. His tongue exploring every inch of her mouth with that slow rhythm that scattered her mental marbles turned Paige to jelly.

When he ended the kiss, she leaned her head back and held on to his broad shoulders for balance. The way he was looking at her took the wind left in her sails and blew it all to hell. So too did the firm grip he maintained on her neck.

With his free hand, Edward gently caressed her cheek before swiping his thumb back and forth over her bottom lip.

“You taste like wonder,” he growled.

She’d never heard that sound before. It was raw and kind of menacing.

“And garlic and tomatoes and blue cheese and red wine.”

Paige smiled. At least, she hoped it was a smile and not a grotesque facial spasm.

“Oh, and French Roast.” He was smiling into her upturned face.

Finding her sense with a good deal of effort, she bantered right back. “Too much garlic, you think? I don’t know,” she teased with a slight shake of her head. “It’s hard to tell.”

His bark of laughter sealed the deal for her. She would never know another man his equal.

“Are you crazy? There’s no such thing as too much garlic!”

And then he simply pinned her to the wall and kissed her senseless. It wasn’t until she felt his hand on a thigh left bare by her skimpy shorts that she pulled it together.

Pushing him with a gentle shove, she smacked him lightly on the chest. “Okay, okay. Enough with the Mr. Handsy thing,” she teased.

“No good?” He chuckled back.

He was still crowding her personal space, not that she minded in the least, so she surveyed the mess she’d made of his hair—reaching up to push it off his forehead.

“Well,” she shrugged, smiling with a half-grin, “coming out of left field and all, you have to give me a chance to catch up.”

She didn’t expect the rough grunt he made when he pushed off her and backed up. “No left field for me, Paige. This has been a long time coming.”

Her mouth dropped, and she was pretty sure her eyes had the deer in the headlights look to them. Finally, she frowned, her eyebrows almost meeting from the tension on her face. “Edward, what are you saying?”

He tapped her playfully on the nose. “You’re a smart girl. Can’t you figure it out?”

“Uhh …” Paige mentally rolled her eyes. Smooth. And to think, she aced a public speaking course at the university. Pfft. “Should we be doing this?” The question appeared out of nowhere, but she trusted her judgment enough to know it came from honesty. Should they be doing this?

“There is no this, babe. There’s only us. So what you’re asking is if we should be doing us.”

He sounded so serious.

“Us,” she murmured.

“Come on, Paige. You can’t be that surprised.”

Surprised? She was flabbergasted. Wanting Edward Banning was practically on her résumé but that didn’t mean she’d ever let those feelings out of the box where she kept them. Until now. And now seemed like a good time to take a big breath and a deep gulp.

Those mesmerizing blue eyes bored into hers. “Don’t you think we should talk about this?”

Hmm. Fight or flight? Talk or run? Run sounded good. For now. She needed time to think about everything. That did not mean, however, that she didn’t secretly want him to make the decision for her, just tear off their clothes, and make love to her right there in the damn hallway.

Giving him a cheeky grin, she fished her keys from the pocket of her shorts and jangled them.

“Nope.”

Ducking her head under the strap of a purse that she had placed across her body, Paige stuck her arm through a loop on the backpack she took everywhere and turned for the door.

“Wait!” He chuckled. “Are you fucking serious? Nope? That’s what you have to say? Just nope?”

Toeing her sandals with one foot, she arranged them on the floor to make them easier to slide into.

With a final smirk and a wink, she laughed in his smiling but shocked face.

“That’s right, sweetie. Nope.”

Yanking on the door, she made to leave turning one last time to wiggle some fingers at him in good-bye.

“Toodles,” she chirped then quickly bolted through the door when Edward burst out laughing and lunged for her as if he meant to unleash the tickle monster.

As she scurried along the path to the driveway, she heard him still laughing in the doorway. “Did you just use the word toodles?”

She smiled the whole way home.

Sometimes, the lag between the end of one project and the start of another was so laidback and slow that life almost felt normal. And then there were times when the transition from one movie set to another took on time warp qualities. Everything sped up, which in turn made Paige feel like she needed to be operating at Mach speed to stay on top of things. They had a long few weeks until they had to be in Montana, but her days were full and busy.

Even though just twenty-four hours had passed since the extraordinary encounter she’d experienced with Edward, it seemed like the following day had gone on for a year.

Fresh from excitement of their dangerous game of flirt, retreat, flirt, kiss, and then run like hell, she’d barely survived the sleep-deprived coma of yesterday. The detailed and highly erotic scene that had played out in her dreams after she had dragged her grinning ass home hadn't helped.

It was one thing to watch Gideon Shaw make love to a movie character and another thing altogether to experience firsthand, deliciously so, how Edward went about kissing. His movie star alter ego might be one of the sexiest men alive, but the fabricated individual was a pale shadow to the real man.

Had it been inevitable then that her dreams would be a veritable encyclopedia of carnal scenes? Probably.

Her thighs were burning from the grueling workout she’d programmed into the hi-tech treadmill on which she was currently pounding out a rhythm. Hiding out at the gym had seemed like such a great idea after the hellacious day she’d just endured. Between an excess of unfulfilled sexual desire and after a workday that had tried her patience as well as her composure, working up a serious sweat and burning off some energy had been her only choice.

Things had steadily gone from bad to shit-tacular as the day wore on, starting with a full bore argument she’d walked in on between a red-faced and furious Mickey and the director of Gideon’s just-wrapped movie.

Markus Gladford was one of a handful of in-demand directors who was enjoying his fifteen minutes of applause and industry fame. Edward had been excited to work with the intense, mercurial visual artist who’d racked up one box office hit after another.

The shoot had been uneventful until the last couple of weeks when Gladford had gone off the rails. At the time, she had figured the pressure of directing a highly anticipated adaptation of a famous book was making the man lose his shit.

But finding him at Mickey’s swank Beverly Hills office and looking like a bad kid who’d just been handed his ass by a stern parent, Paige couldn't ignore the warning bells.

With Edward off radar going through a standard physical– that the insurance company handling his next film always insisted on when the script in question contained stunts and physical exertion—, she’d put on her serious business face and headed to Mickey’s office. One look at the worried expression on the receptionist’s face, and she knew something was up.

The yelling in Russian that was evident despite a closed door was the perfect soundtrack for everything that happened next.

Marilyn … was that even her real name … cringed at Paige when a string of blunt expletives filled the air. Clearly, the agent was on a roll.

With an arched eyebrow, Paige asked as coolly as she could, “Who’s on the receiving end of that bad-ittude?”

One of the agency’s top draws, a Stepford Agent as she liked to call the cookie-cutter squad of ruthless people who controlled nearly everyone and everything, strolled by and gave her a wry grin. “That ass reaming is being handed to one Mister Markus Gladford.”

Oh, no. Not good, not good at all.

She all but sprinted in to Mickey’s office, not waiting for Marilyn to announce her.

It was like a scene from a movie, with the director hunched in a chair placed in front of Mickey’s gargantuan desk, something he insisted came from the palace of a Czar.

Taking a page from the dictionary of body language, she quickly noted Gladford’s hanging head. Somebody had been a bad boy.

The Mad Russian? His body language was a mix of classic fury and suck-my-dick.

As usual, she had to jump in at what was always mid-sentence with Mickey to figure out what was going on.

“… you-dumb-as-fuck-putz! What-the-hell-Markus?

You-have-three-young-kids-and-a-Latin-wife-with-a-hot-temper. Are-you-insane-man?”

“I know, I know,” the director mumbled.

“You’re scaring the peasants,” Paige mocked, making her presence known. “Maybe lower the volume just a tad, hmm?”

Her attempt at humor to defuse the tension fizzled when Mickey hit the next stage of fury.

“Paige! Fuck.” Pointing a damning finger at Markus, he boomed, “Shut-the-door-and-grab-a-chair-because-you’ll-need-to-be-sitting-when-you-hear-what-this-shithead-has-done.”

He hadn’t been kidding.

Pressing a button to increase the intensity of her workout, she strained to keep up, silently hoping the grueling effort would soak up some of her tension as she reviewed the day from hell.

Hadn’t taken but half a minute for Mickey to unload enough detail for her to know all bloody hell was about to break loose.

The stripped down four-one-one with no extraneous whiny laments for forgiveness went like this—Markus had been fucking Joann. Actually, that wasn’t quite it. Not exactly. In the most vulgar of terms, it had been Joann fucking the director. Think strap-on dildo and the picture became complete.

Because that wasn’t enough, this fucking involved an audience. Of course, it did. Why the hell not?

And the audience in question? Paige shuddered with revulsion. One of the movie’s producers, a man with deep pockets and unimaginable behind-the-scenes power had been involved.

Involved was putting it lightly.

There had always been whispers about this guy, but truthfully, most stories that sounded like Hollywood legend, laced with current day fuckery, were a dime a dozen and easily discounted. Plus, worrying over some dude’s idiosyncrasies wasn’t a contributing factor when choosing movie roles.

Blind items about pool parties with naked starlets, rails of coke long enough to form a conga line, and some S&M shit that sounded made the hell up were being posted more and more often. His business partner, a highly talented mega-producer with serious family money, was supposed to be the one who kept the other guy’s debauched ways hushed up.

Never in a million years had it seemed remotely possible that what went on in someone’s personal life could impact a project. Boy. Had that assumption ever been wrong.

As if an audience of one wasn’t bad enough, finding out this regular occurrence took place in what one could only describe as a communal setting, took Mickey and her to DEFCON status.

Having taken in way too much detail as the sordid tale unfolded, now she had forever burned into her brain an image best described as the polar opposite of hot and sexy. The strap-on thing notwithstanding, the imagined visual of Joann Jones being DP’d by the director and producer was enough to make Paige almost lose her breakfast in spectacular fashion.

Holy mother-of-pearl. No wonder Markus had lost his mind at the end of the filming. Joann was the catalyst for all the bad shit happening. Obviously, the woman was desperate to hang on to her legendary status in the ever-changing court of public opinion, so she’d hitched her tarnishing star to the producer—a fucked up, drug using freak.

Mickey had been apoplectic, making Paige briefly toy with the idea of giving his wife a call. He needed calming before a gasket blew, or he dropped from the balls-out fury he’d unleashed on Markus.

The shitstorm, however, had not stopped there.

Huddled with the Russian agent through lunch and well into the afternoon, they’d worked their sources and had honed a plan for keeping as much of the blowback off Gideon Shaw when this story hit as possible.

She’d texted Edward at some point and told him in direct terms to put his sunglasses on and keep his head down. He was to get from the medical building where he’d spent most of the day back to the safety zone of his house and then wait for her call.

At exactly four fifty-two in the afternoon, eight minutes before the agency closed and all calls went to voice mail, the whitewashing producer had rang Mickey on his direct line.

Cue the dramatic background music. Someone like John Williams would have a composer’s field day with this.

A dozen epic movie lines came to mind as Paige remembered that phone call. The moments before had been the like Gandalf’s, “Deep breath before the plunge.”

And after? Any damn quote that implied doom. They were all good.

Above her head as she thundered against the treadmill, a nighttime entertainment show was starting on the TV. She could have put in her earbuds and ignored the host’s witty repartee but hadn’t bothered. The sound of her heart pounding as she ran as if the devil was chasing her was enough to drown out most of the sounds around her.

Back to the phone call … when it was over, Mickey had looked at her with real concern in his eyes.

“He wants a meeting. Something private.”

He wasn’t talking in his normal, full-speed-ahead way, and that alone bothered her.

“Meaning?” she’d asked.

“I don’t know, but my gut tells me we have a bargaining chip. Thing is …”

Paige was on pins and needles waiting for his thoughts to form and finish.

With an expression that swung between shrewd and intrigued, he had shrugged slightly. “I have no idea why that’s the case or what kind of bargain is on the table. But this is big … whatever it is.”

And that was why and how she had ended up at the gym. Burning off the tension squeezing her into a twisted pretzel of anxiety was an absolute necessity.

It was either this or a fall off the ice-cream wagon.

Sweat soaked through her sports bra and a t-shirt, dampening the elastic band of her workout pants, but she powered through, chasing the limit of her endurance. Deftly reprogramming the treadmill, Paige downshifted to a less vigorous pace for her cooldown and refocused on her surroundings.

The stationary equipment zone was packed. All around her were bodies in motion under the bright lights of the fancy workout space. At that moment, she was just another gym rat trying to squeeze in a workout.

There were two women on elliptical trainers in the row in front of Paige, who were laughing somewhat loudly and gesturing between the push-pull of the moving handlebars.

“Oh lordy, he’s hot!” one chortled.

Her friend laughed. “I’d do him. No problem.”

Paige glanced at the TV and immediately stumbled when Gideon’s smiling headshot filled the giant screen.

Having lost her footing, she grabbed for the treadmill safety bar to stop from falling, but it was too late. Next thing she knew, as Gideon’s unseeing face looked on, the still moving machine ejected her, and she had landed like a bumbling clown on her hands and knees.

Immediately, one of the gym staffers came running over to see if she was okay. Distracted by the TV, she brushed off the help and got up with a groan. A knee had smacked the equipment on her way to the floor, tearing a hole in the thin pants that upon inspection showed a bloody gash.

Hobbling to a nearby bench, she sat down and shushed the attendant blathering on about getting the first aid kit because she needed to hear what the TV was saying.

Gideon’s headshot faded, and a clip from an interview began. A cute entertainment reporter was asking him questions, and the snippet they chose had to do with his professional name.

“So, the name Gideon Shaw. Many have said it’s the perfect marquee name. How’d you come up with it?”

Paige remembered this interview. The reporter had soft balled her questions and then offered up her phone number in the hopes of a personal one-on-one. There wasn’t any need to clarify what that meant, and she recalled having thought of the reporter as an idiot for being so blatant and unprofessional. No wonder it was damn hard for women to gain power and be taken seriously in this town when that kind of stuff was the norm.

Turning on the mega-wattage of his growing superstardom, he’d given as good as he got by smirking a little and grinning a lot.

“Actually, I was drunk when the name came to me, Alycia. So if it’s perfect,” he stopped and laughed for emphasis, “Captain Morgan gets all the credit.”

Paige rolled her eyes. Yeah, right. The truth was that the name had been a group effort that the three of them had come up with that had involved a PowerPoint but no swashbuckling alcohol.

The gym attendant returned with a tiny Band-Aid and a disinfecting wipe as if those two things would stop the blood trickling from the gash.

Not that Paige cared. She could just as easily have brought over a chainsaw and a stick for her to bite down on, and her disinterested reaction would have been the same. An important entertainment program was doing a story on Gideon and that almost always signaled fresh gossip building in the wings. Paying attention was her job, and if that meant she bled to death on the gym floor while she kept an eye on the TV, well … so be it.

The taped piece returned to the two hosts who immediately launched into a performance of raised eyebrows and subtle insinuations that made Paige’s blood curdle.

“Well, Avery,” the blonde with the obvious extensions tittered to her on-air partner, “it looks like our sexiest celeb has a bit of a PR nightmare on his hands. Sources close to his latest production, the much anticipated screen adaptation of Forward and Back, report that he’s been putting in extra time with one of his co-stars, the phenomenal Joann Jones. And that she might know more than anyone dreamed about his now famous sex tape.”

The styled to perfection hipster next to her picked up a stack of papers in front of him and arranged them with deliberate flair while murmuring a bitchy sounding, “Mmmhmm.”

Next, he fanned himself with the pages and made a couple of suggestive faces. “Shaw Me the Way,” he snickered as Paige held back a howl of anger.

Those assholes!

Story over, she picked up a gym towel, assured the staff that she was fine, and then limped to the locker room.

This really and truly was getting ri-goddamn-diculous.