Crossed Hearts (Matchmaker Trilogy) (17 page)

“Leah!”

Garrick stole the receiver from Leah’s hand. “Victoria?”

There was another brief silence on the other end of the line, then a cautious, “Garrick?”

“You play dirty pool.”

“Ahh.” A sigh. “Thank God. She’s with you.”

“As you intended.”

“Do you hate me?”

“Not now.”

“But you did at first. Please, Garrick, I only wanted the best for you both. You were alone. She was alone. I’m sure my letter explained—”

“I haven’t read your letter.” His eyes held Leah’s, while the arm around her waist held her close.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“You were that angry? I didn’t tell her anything about you, Garrick,” she rounded defensively, then paused and lowered her voice. “Have you?”

“Some.”

“But not … that?”

“No.”

“She is staying with you?”

“I couldn’t very well turn her out into the rain with nowhere to go,” he said, a wink for Leah softening his gruff tone. Of course, Victoria didn’t see the wink.

“Oh, Garrick, I’m sorry. I thought for sure you two would get along. You’re so
right
for each other.”

Garrick covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Leah, “She says we’re so right for each other.”

“Wise busybody,” Leah whispered back, then grabbed the phone. “I won’t be sending any rent money, Victoria Lesser.”

“But you called. You can’t be totally angry.”

“I have more of a conscience than you do,” Leah said, but she was smiling and Victoria knew it.

“Should I ready the green room for you?”

“Not just yet.”

“You’ll be staying there awhile?”

Leah didn’t bother to cover the phone this time when she spoke to Garrick. Her free hand was drawing lazy circles on the firm muscles of his back. “She wants to know if I’ll be staying here for a while.”

He took the phone. “She’ll be staying. I’ve discovered that I like having a live-in maid.”

“I am
not
his maid,” Leah shouted toward the mouthpiece, while Victoria added her own comment.

“Garrick, you are not to use Leah—”

“And a cook,” Garrick injected. “She makes super egg foo yong.”

“I do not make egg foo yong!” Leah protested, snatching the phone. “He’s pulling your leg, Victoria.”

Garrick grinned. “Another body phrase. Write it down, Leah.”

“Leah, what is he talking about?”

“He’s making fun of my cooking and my crossword puzzles. The man is impossible! See what you got me into?”

“Let me speak with Garrick, Leah.”

Rather smugly, Leah handed over the phone.

“Garrick?”

“Yes, Victoria.”

“Are we alone?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want her hurt, Garrick.”

“I know that.”

“She’s been through a lot. It’s fine for you both to rib me—I deserve it. But I want you to treat her well, and that means using your judgment. If you’d read my letter, you’d know that she’s totally trustworthy—”

“I didn’t have to read your letter to learn that.”

“If the two of you don’t get along, I want her back here.”

“We get along.”

“Get along well?” Victoria asked hopefully.

“Yes.”

“Well enough for a future?”

“I … maybe.”

“Then you’ll have to tell her, you know.”

“I know.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“If you wait too long, she’ll be hurt.”

“I know that, Victoria,” he said soberly.

“I trust you to do the right thing.”

“Yes,” he said, then added, “Here’s Leah. She wants to say goodbye. Say goodbye, Leah,” he teased as he handed her the phone, but inside he was dying.

The right thing. The right thing. He had to tell her. But when?

7

A
S IT HAPPENED
, the truth spilled without any preplanning on Garrick’s part, its disclosure as spontaneous as the rest of their relationship.

Leah had been with him for better than two weeks. On that particular morning they’d slogged through the mud to check on the progress of the beaver dam that had been growing steadily broader over a nearby stream. Later, returning to the cabin, they’d changed into clean, dry clothes and settled before the fire.

Garrick was reading one of the books Leah had brought with her from New York; they’d found they enjoyed discussing books they’d both read. Leah was close beside him on the sofa, her back braced against his arm, the soles of her feet flat against the armrest. She was listening to music, wearing the headset he’d salvaged from his nonfunctional CB and adapted for her cassette. On pure impulse, he set down his book and removed the earphones from her ears.

“Unplug it,” he said over her forehead. “Let me hear.”

She tipped back her head and met his gaze. “Ah, Garrick, you don’t want to do that.”

“Sure, I do.”

“But you like the quiet.”

“I want to hear your music. And besides, I don’t like feeling cut off from you.”

Turning, she came up on a knee and draped her arms around his neck. “You’re not cut off. I keep the music low. I’d be able to hear you if you spoke.”

“I want to hear your music,” he insisted, wrapping an arm around her hips. “If you like it, I might like it, too. We have similar tastes.”

“You hated the new Ludlum book that I loved.”

“But we both agreed that Le Carré’s was great.”

“You hated the curried chicken we had the other night.”

“Because I added too much curry. And don’t say you didn’t find it hot, because I saw you gulping down water.”

“You hated the roadrunner I folded for you.”

“I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t know what it was.” He closed his fingers on a handful of her bottom and gritted his teeth in a pretense of anger. “Leah, I want to listen to music. Will you unplug the headset and let me hear?”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m
sure
.”

Inwardly pleased, she removed the plug to the earphones. As the gentle sounds of guitar and vocalist filled the room, she sat back and watched Garrick’s face.

He was smiling softly. “Cat Stevens. This is an old one.”

“Seventy-four.”

Sinking lower in the sofa, he stretched out his legs before him and listened quietly. He wore an increasingly pensive look, one that seemed to fade in and out, to travel great distances, return, then leave again. Leah knew the songs brought back memories, and when the tape was done, she would have been more than happy to put the machine away.

But he asked her to put on another tape. Again he recognized the song and its artists. “Simon and Garfunkel,” he murmured shortly after the first bars had been sung.

“Do you like it?”

He listened a while longer before answering. “I like it. I’ve never paid much heed to the words before. I always associated songs like this with background music in restaurants.”

“Where?” she asked, surprised at how easily the question came out.

“L.A.,” he answered, surprised at the ease of his answer. It was time, he realized.

“Were you working there?”

“Yes.”

“For long?”

“Seventeen years.”

Leah said nothing more, but watched him steadily. When he swiveled his head to look at her, her heart began to thud. His eyes were dark, simultaneously sad, challenging and beseechful.

“I was an actor.”

She was sure she’d heard him wrong. “Excuse me?”

“I was an actor.”

She swallowed hard. “An actor.”

“Yes.” His eyes never left hers.

“Movies?” she asked in a small voice.

“Television.”

“I … your name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I used a stage name.”

An actor? Garrick, the man she loved for his private lifestyle, an
actor
? Surely just occasionally. Perhaps as an extra. “Were you on often?”

“Every week for nine years. Less often before and after.”

She swallowed again and twined her arms around her middle as though to catch her plummeting heart. “You had a major part.”

He nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“You know it. It’s the one I was christened with.”

“Your stage name.”

“Greg Reynolds.”

Leah paled. There wasn’t a sound in the cabin; she felt more than heard her bubble of happiness pop. She’d never been a television fan, but she did have eyes. Even had she not had an excellent memory, she’d have been hard-pressed not to recall the name. It had often been splashed across the headlines of tabloids and magazines, glaring up from the stand at the grocery store checkout counter, impossible to miss even in passing.

“It can’t be,” she said, shaking her head.

“It is.”

“I don’t recognize you.”

“You said you didn’t watch television.”

“I saw headlines. There must have been pictures.”

“I look different now.”

She tried to analyze his features, but they seemed to waver. There was the Garrick she knew and … and then the other man. A stranger. Known to the rest of the world, not to her. She loved Garrick. Or was he … “You should have told me sooner.”

“I couldn’t.”

“But … Greg Reynolds?” she cried in horror. “You’re a star!”

“Was, Leah. Was a star.”

She lowered her head and rubbed her forehead, trying to think, finding it difficult. “The show was …”

“
Pagen’s Law
. Cops and robbers. Macho stuff—”

“That millions of people watched every week.” She withered back into her corner of the sofa and murmured dumbly, “An actor. A successful actor.”

Garrick was before her in an instant, prying her hands from her waist and enveloping them in his. “I
was
an actor, but that’s all over. Now I’m Garrick Rodenhiser—trapper, Latin student, whittler, model maker—the man you love.”

She raised stricken eyes to his. “I can’t love an actor. I can’t survive in the limelight.”

He tightened his hold on her hands. “Neither can I, Leah. Greg Reynolds is dead. He doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why I’m here. Me. Garrick. This is my life—what you see, what you’ve seen since you’ve been here.”

If anything, she sank deeper into herself. She said nothing, looked blankly to the floor.

“No!” he ordered, lifting her chin with one hand. “I won’t let you retreat back into that shell of yours. Talk to me, Leah. Tell me what you’re thinking and feeling.”

“You were a phenomenal success,” she breathed brokenly. “A superstar.”

“
Was
. It’s over!”

“It can’t be!” she cried. “You can’t stay away from it forever. They won’t
let
you!”

“They don’t want me, and even if they did, they don’t have any say. It’s my choice.”

“But you’ll
want
to go back—”

“No! It’s over, Leah! I will not go back!”

The force of his words startled her, breaking into the momentum of her argument. Her eyes were large gray orbs of anguish behind the lenses of her glasses, but they held an inkling of uncertainty.

“I won’t go back,” Garrick said more quietly. His hand gentled on her chin, stroking it lightly. “I blew it, Leah. I can’t go back.”

The anguish wasn’t hers alone. She saw in his eyes the pain she’d glimpsed before. It reached out to her, as it had always done, only now she had to ask, “What happened?”

For Garrick, this was the hard part. It was one thing telling her he’d been a success, another telling her how he’d taken success, twisted it, spoiled it, lost it. But he’d come this far. He owed it to Leah—and to himself—to tell it all.

Backing away from her, he stood and crossed stiffly to the window. The sun was shining, but the bleakness inside him blotted out any cheer that might have offered. Tucking his hands into the back of his waistband, he began to speak.

“I went out to the coast soon after I graduated from high school. It seemed the most obvious thing to do at the time. The one thing I wanted more than anything was to be noticed. I think you know why,” he added more softly, but refrained from going into further self-analysis. “I had the goods. I was tall and attractive. I had the smarts that some others out there didn’t have, and the determination. I just hung around for a while, getting a feel for the place, watching everything, learning who held the power and how to go about tapping it. Then I went to work. First, I talked a top agent into taking me on, then I willingly did whatever he asked me to do. Most of it was garbage—bit parts—but I did them well, and I made sure I was seen by the right people.

“By the time I’d been there three years, I was consistently landing reasonable secondary roles. But I wanted top billing. So I worked harder. I learned pretty quick that it wasn’t only how you looked or acted that counted. Politics counted, too. Dirty politics. And I played the game better than the next guy. I kissed ass when I had to, slept around when I had to. I rationalized it all by saying that it was a means to an end, and I suppose it was.

“Five years after I arrived, I was picked to play Pagen.” He lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Don’t ask me why the show took off the way it did. Looking back on it, I can’t see that it was spectacular. But it hit a vein with the public, and that meant money for the sponsors, the network, the producers, the directors and me. So we kept going and going, and in time I believed my own press. I convinced myself that the show was phenomenal and that it was phenomenal because of me.”

He hung his head and took a shuddering breath. “That was my first mistake. No, I take that back. My first mistake was in ever going to Hollywood, because it wasn’t my kind of place at all. Oh, I told myself it was, and that was my second mistake. My third mistake was in believing that I’d earned and deserved the success. After that the mistakes piled up, one after another, until I was so mired I didn’t know which side was up.”

He paused for a minute and risked a glance over his shoulder. Leah was in the corner of the sofa, her knees drawn up, her arms hugging her body. Her face seemed frozen in a stricken expression. He wanted to go down on his knees before her and beg forgiveness for who he’d been, but he knew that there was more he had to say first.

He turned to face her fully, but he didn’t move from the window. “The show ran for nine years, and during that time I flared progressively out of control. I grew more and more arrogant, more difficult to deal with.” His tone grew derisive. “I was the star, better than any of the others. I was the hottest thing to hit Hollywood in decades. What I touched turned to gold. My name alone could make the show—any show—a success.