Bad Boy Boss (11 page)

The trades announced that a remake of Four Faces West was going to begin principal shooting in February, with location shooting in New Mexico in March. The title was going to go back to the original as Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ Paso Por Aqui. A major action star was signed and I got mentioned with Harrison as ‘major acquisitions to an A list cast.’

I had a minor breakdown before going to New Mexico. It was only a week, but it coincided with Peter’s one man show, and it would be the first time since the day we met that we’d be apart. Actually, it was only the second night since I’d met him that he wasn’t in my bed. It worked out better than I expected. Peter’s show sold out on the second day. The picture that features my tush is now owned by an oil company and hangs in its corporate offices. After that, he drove eighteen straight hours to be with me.

We drove back to Glendale together. Just past Flagstaff, I rolled down my hose past my knee and put my leg up next to the gearshift lever. This, of course, led to changing our route to go through Laughlin and spending the night in the Golden Nugget.

I guess we could have done Vegas almost as easily, but Laughlin just seemed more intimate, like making love in Sugarloaf or Glendale, where Vegas would feel like making love in the Valley: more like sex, raunchier.

The Nugget in Laughlin had a motel feel to it. Only the Riverside felt like a true Vegas hotel in Laughlin. Of course I was recognized, given a nice comp on a room and had my picture taken so I could sign it and they could put it on a wall with the rest of the celebrities that had enjoyed the Golden Nugget – Laughlin. I was actually brought down by the fact that they no longer had ‘magic-fingers’ beds along the route of Old 66: the road that made ‘magic-fingers’ beds iconic. In any case, we got a nice room with a river view. Peter insisted on playing blackjack, so I joined him for an hour before we went into the buffet for dinner. Peter, I later found out, counted cards with the best of them and he won a couple hundred. I played differently. My only real advantage was that I didn’t have to bust and they can be forced to. So I just hit eleven and under and stayed at twelve and over. So okay, I didn’t win a couple hundred; I won six bucks. But because I won, I walked over to the desk and asked if they still had my picture around. Someone found it and I wrote “I won!!!” over my signature.

Our buffet and drinks were comped as well. We had steak and a California Merlot that probably would have been better off used to clean windows. Once again, I compared my new life to my pre-Peter life. Once upon a time, I would have thought that was a good wine, but the past months had woken my palate up. I turned into a coffee snob and a wine snob when given the chance.

Peter tipped the girl who brought us our drinks fifty dollars; before we left, Peter tipped all of his winnings, so we drove back into California with only my six dollars to show for our stop in Laughlin.

We also stopped in Palm Springs because there was a gourmet store in Palm Desert that had connections for some really fabulous wines that didn’t come from the foreign wine market in Marseilles.

I started to tuck my hand suggestively under my skirt, but Peter reached over and stopped me.

“We want to go back to Glendale,” he said, grinning. “If you do that before Yucaipa, I’ll end up telling myself I can make Sugarloaf and Glendale. Wait for Redlands, then you’ll get your just desserts.”

When we got back to Glendale, we actually got back to work. Peter was getting into Caravaggio and Chiaroscuro; we were working in pastels, which is actually a fancy name for colored chalk. I worked in the nude and needed a series of strategically placed robes to do something as simple as answer the door.

The poses were simpler and I could hold them longer. Peter was learning a technique rather than learning me. A lot of people never quite understand that an artist and his model have a special relationship. The artist has touched, felt, experienced every part of his model. Dante Gabriel Rossetti rather famously had three models, and the rumors circulated and became the scandal of an entire age. The kicker to all this is that it isn’t sexual. Rachel told me she was touched everywhere by female photographers who were so straight they’d go out after work after guys together.

Peter was getting to the point where he was ready to start his next show when Sisters kicked in again. This meant weeknight massages and carnal weekends for a while.

What was weird was that I actually missed Sister Anne Victoria. Getting back into the character and handling being the very pineapple of politeness in introducing people to the abbey, while demonstrating I was illegible to do so was quite wonderful.

The movie took over almost immediately. Paso Por Aqui was so iconic, so just downright American, that it topped the box office for three weeks. I later learned a lot of things with the success of Paso Por Aqui. I learned that the Baker family could invest a little more than two million dollars and profit well over half the gross of any movie they chose to invest in. The profit from Paso Por Aqui was obscene.

The hero was a goddamn bank robber, faced with being the last resort for people, people who were second class citizens, what did he do? I have to admit Rachel built the character to epic proportions; this was the superman, the guy who did it his way, and he chose to stay, to save them. My only problem with the movie was the hero. I don’t know, but he just didn’t do it for me; I was trying to portray a chemistry that didn’t really exist. But then again, I was his maid of honor a year later when he married Rob, so that might have been the problem, considering I was playing his love interest.

I was famous. In ten months, I went from a fantasy catfighter in the San Fernando Valley to a movie star. I was the model of the world’s most acclaimed painter. And it was all in Never Never Land. It wasn’t fairy dust, it was a Jaguar. It wasn’t a fairy named Tinkerbell, it was a squirrel named Mickey. And all I had to do was clap my hands.

The last pastel Peter was doing before we started on the paintings was an interesting piece because it was done with some Venetian blinds. It was dead stark frontal nudity, but the shadows from the blinds hid everything but a nipple. We had a hell of a time doing it. The positioning had to be perfect and by the time he did that, we were both so damn hot that if he didn’t go down on me I went down on him. It sort of went like this: he’d give me an orgasm, I’d grab him and he’d come down my leg, he’d kiss me and get his fingers in me again and, well we were averaging three sex acts to every hour of drawing. Not that it wasn’t a rather pleasant way to say that you’re working; it was.

In any case, Harrison loved the blind pastel; he had it matted and custom framed with archival glass to put in the bedroom in Glendale.

Clap Your Hands was published about a month after the movie came out. It’s like I became hard to avoid. Art magazines were still praising my tushie, I was on TV, in movie theaters, and now the bookstore. If I wasn’t me, I’d be sick and tired of hearing about me. Dillon, however, didn’t think I was overexposed at all and felt that I should be picking my next role out of the avalanche of scripts, mostly from the RomCom he kept sending to me.

That’s when Peter and I decided we were due a little R&R. We packed up the Jaguar and the Mustang and headed for Sugarloaf. We decided just to stay in Peter’s cabin so that I could beat him at bumper pool and strip him at will. We did a lot of hiking up the side of Sugarloaf Mountain, which we found out was a very diverse and beautiful place. We took turns preparing picnics and making love on the blanket after the food was eaten.

I got the germ of an idea about the third day we went hiking.

“I have a thought about a new book,” I started rather tentatively to Peter.

Immediately, his interest was piqued. “Tell me.”

“It’s probably dumb,” I began but he immediately cut me off. “You’re talking to the man who spearheaded a book about fairies,” he responded and kissed me on the nose.

I loved the way he touched me, kissed me, respected me. I took a deep breath. “Well, we’ve done fairies, but fairies aren’t the only creatures living in the uninhabited, wild and free areas left in the world, right? What about other woodland creatures?”

He grinned and hugged me tightly. “This is why I love you,” he said, his words muffled in my hair.

“This is why?”

“Well, one of many, many reasons,” he clarified, heading for his laptop. “Research time!”

We both jumped on the Internet. Peter had made some French Onion soup in a crockpot, so he fired up some edge of leftover French bread and fontina cheese, and we had that for dinner. It was over dinner that we pooled our information and came up with the idea for Naiads and Dryads. Greek mythology had groups of minor deities who were basically nymphs. The Naiads were water nymphs and the Dryads were the spirits of trees. Now we had a lake, streams, rivulets and a really diverse forest that was on the verge of putting on its yearly autumn show.

Peter called Kate who started mining the Internet for costumes and pictures. Each type of tree had its own type of dryad. For example, the dryad for walnut trees is called a caryatid and the Greeks used to sculpt caryatids as pillars to show the connection. Naiads are easier; there are only five types: Crinaeae who inhabit fountains; Eleionomae who live in marshes; Limnades watch over lakes; Pagaeae rise with the springs and Potameides who ride the rivers.

So we kept up our hiking and picnics, but with a map in hand to trace and identify the hidden habitats of the nymphs that guarded the forest. By the time Kate delivered our first costumes, we were ready to begin shooting. Peter carried a ladder on some of the shoots and I would get up in a tree, partially hiding myself so it would look as if I were a part of the tree. Both naiads and dryads had been major subjects of Renaissance art, so we had a lot of classic poses to copy, and Peter’s study of Chiaroscuro really helped him frame some of the photos with light and shadow creating pretty dramatic effects.

We were back; working together, just like it started. Those were the absolute best times for the both of us. I really don’t know how Peter felt about it, but for me, just about every day that came along brought with it another reason I should be in love with him.

It had been exactly one year since my life really started. One year since I pulled my last punch in my last fantasy catfight, stripped my opponent and danced around waving her panties. One year since I learned that the bundle of nerves behind your knee can make you horny as hell. One year since I first saw Sugarloaf. One year since I fell in love, and didn’t even know it.

Men are rather notorious for forgetting anniversaries and Peter hadn’t mentioned celebrating it in any way. Waking up on the edge of an orgasm wasn’t all that unusual anymore. If he woke before I did, chances were very good that I would wake up with his thumb gently but firmly rolling my clit, his fingers against my pelvic bone, stroking it and flicking out in thrilling little ways. He kept at it a bit longer than usual and pulled me on top of him so that he could get to me with a hand on my tush and one on my back. He would move his hands in circles, almost in rhythm. The one on my tush would move me against what was inside of me sliding me over all sorts of little thrills, chills and shivers. The hand on my back was actually using his chest to massage my breasts and had my nipples send out little thrills to play with the ones between my legs. This was his ‘I do all the work’ position and it only worked when a second orgasm had drained me enough that I wasn’t participating. He lasted so long that I could swear he probably got up and masturbated before starting so he’d last longer.

Well, in any case, I was lying on top of him in the thrall of this mild electro-shock therapy, and drained by – at that point – three orgasms. I was half awake when he finally rolled me over and timed his orgasm with a lick across my breast. It was a great way to begin just about any day on the calendar, pick one. The fact that it was an anniversary improved it, I guess, but to be truthful, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to improve upon.

We showered. The shower stall in his cabin is really small, which was perfect. Soaping and sliding around each other, tingling with the feel of the washcloth across all those little places that send little non-returnable messages of pleasure to all the right places.

He made what I now thought of as his signature breakfast: Eggs Benedict with corned beef hash. My favorite.

“Snow Summit said that we could buy a ride on the chair lift at three o’clock today,” he said. “I want to get some shots from up there and see what we can figure out. We have to get out of the forest about then usually, so maybe we knock off a couple hours early and take the ride.”

I was disappointed that he didn’t mention the anniversary, but I covered with what I hoped was enthusiasm. “That sounds like a great idea,” I said, sticking to my resolve not to mention the anniversary if he didn’t bring it up first.

Naiads and Dryads
was easier than
Clap Your Hands
because neither water nor tree spirits flew. Kate had outdone herself again with the costumes and we already had some really impressive photos.

We worked until about one. I wore the Meliae costume all day because the ash trees in the San Bernardino forest tended to turn in late summer so that we could get shots of mostly green trees with sprinklings of red, gold and purple. The Meliae are the dryads or nymphs of the ash tree and are known to be very shy, but very good at minding children, the Meliae tended the infant Zeus in Rhea’s hidden cave on Crete; they were the daughters of Mother Nature Gaea.