she was asleep and only dreaming. This time the dream was so real that she woke up all spaced-out and it took a minute or so to register that the blissful scenario she’d been so immersed in hadn’t actually happened.
And she thanked her lucky stars it hadn’t. Because in her dream she’d slept with Alex, and her heart thudded, wondering if that embarrassing little gem was going to be written on her face the minute she set eyes on him. He’d stirred up a mess of emotions. She hadn’t just been a little bit in love with him, she’d been head over heels, and right when she’d not been able to resist him a second longer, he’d upped and gone and vanished from her world. She’d thought she was oh-so-over him, but the deep down, buried truth was that she’d gone on being hooked on him for much too long after he’d left. No one measured up to him. The guys she’d dated never stood a chance by comparison, because she didn’t allow them to. When she got anywhere near starting a relationship she let it fizzle out. Fearing rejection somewhere down the line, she pushed men away. Until Marcus. Marcus had taken her over, organized her, a self-appointed personal drill sergeant. She’d trusted him completely.
She felt raw. It didn’t help that her hormones had begun to whoosh around uncontrollably like fallen leaves being whizzed into the air on a gust of autumn wind. She wasn’t just as susceptible to the charms of Alex Wells as every other fan of the show, she was more so. She’d known him before he shot to fame – that was the trouble.
Awkwardness set in the moment Alex arrived at the studio. Hannah popped out for some takeout coffees, leaving Maggie to dress Alex ahead of Nick and the two models who hadn’t shown up yet.
The dream memory returned. It seared her mind’s eye with an image of hot, tangled bodies, obliterating reasonable thought processes. A sensuous picture of soft, warm skin and hard muscles filled her imagination; her lips seeking his, his mouth devouring hers, hands clasped, bodies entwined.
Trapped in tongue-tied silence, Maggie forced herself to focus on the brick walls and wood floors of Hannah’s warehouse studio. They helped ground her. Samples of photographic work dotted about the place gave her something more appropriate to visualize. She picked out a photo of white sailboats afloat on glassy water against the Back Bay skyline with powder-puff clouds in an azure sky, and honed in on that.
Outside, Boston basked under just such a perfect blue sky.
“Great day for it.” He oozed confidence. His drawl set off those hopping hormones again. He could make reading aloud from the telephone directory sexy without even trying.
“Couldn’t be better.” She ignored the fact that he was attempting to snare her gaze. She resolved to avoid looking him in the eye, if at all possible. If she did, he’d be bound to see all the things she’d dreamed in the night swimming in her head. Utter torture.
“Good day yesterday?”
“Um. Busy. Getting this lot ready.” She turned her back to him and stood at the hanging rail shuffling the clothes about a bit on their hangers, pretending to be absorbed in her work. “You?”
“The usual. Interviews. The final series airs here next week. And the big question on everyone’s lips is “How does Jago die?”.”
“What did you say?” Maggie grabbed a pencil and over-acted the need to score off a couple of items on her to-do list.
“I told them Nick – sorry, Jarvis – ties me up in a string of garlic, and shoves me out in the sunlight with a stake through my heart.”
Maggie turned to face him. “So it was you that started the rumor?”
“Actually – it was you! But I liked it, so I borrowed it.”
She wrinkled her nose. “So what does happen to Jago? Maybe I’ve lost the plot, but I thought he was the bad guy in this set-up?” Her tone was deliberately blasé, as if she wasn’t really that interested.
“Nice try, Maggie. I’m afraid I can’t let you in on that secret.”
“Not strangled by your brother in the sunshine with the garlic, after all? Someone should invent a board game. I bet there’d be a market for it. Great merchandising opportunity. It’s sounding more like a whodunit and less like warring vampire twins every minute.”
Wry tension twitched in the corners of Alex’s mouth. “It’s war. Make no mistake.”
Maggie guessed he wasn’t talking about their TV characters. “What’s up?”
“It’s no secret that Nick wasn’t ready for Mercy to finish. But I was. My leaving was okayed with the powers that be. They told the writers to write me out. Then the studio did an about face and cancelled the show.”
“I suppose it’s a question of balance. Without the good-vampire-twin-bad-vampire-twin thing going on there wouldn’t be much drama left.” Maggie chewed on the end of her pencil.
Alex’s shoulders tensed. He watched Maggie with deep concentration, mesmerizing her with his eyes, and lowered his voice, “I’ll swear you to secrecy. There’s a big twist in the final episode. Turns out Jago isn’t evil after all. He’s the good vampire and Nick’s character is the one that’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
“I’m guessing he’s not very happy with that.”
“Let’s just say that’s an understatement.” He sucked in a sharp breath and scraped his fingers through his hair. “It was time the series ended. It had a good run. If we’d gone on any longer the characters would have dried up. People would have lost interest. It’s better this way. We’re ending on a high.”
Alex’s tension filled the air in the empty studio. He stared off into space. “Nick doesn’t agree with you on that?”
He let out a grating laugh. “Nick blames me for the show being cancelled. He’s livid.”
“He’ll come round.”
“He has no choice. He’s going to LA to talk movies. I’m going to London to do theater.”
“Cool.”
“It’s time for us both to move on with our lives, and he knows it. Even if he’s not ready to admit it.”
Alex’s moodiness and her wayward pheromones produced a terrible combination of angst and attraction. She wished Hannah would come back with the coffee, although she still had that weird metallic taste in her mouth. She didn’t want to be so interested, but she was itching to know if Alex had managed to find a way back into serious acting. She couldn’t picture him headlining a West End musical, somehow. “What theater are you doing?”
“Hamlet.”
“Wow. Shakespeare in London. That’s a far cry from vampires in LA.”
“That’s the general idea.”
“To be or not to be.” She put on a tone of ominous gravity.
Suddenly she blushed, thinking about her own date with destiny. She hadn’t done the pregnancy test. She told herself she’d been way too busy, but she was putting it off.
“To be honest, I’m ready to disassociate myself from the vampire gig. It’s been a blast, but it wasn’t part of my plan. I did
