Her Red-Carpet Romance (11 page)

Lukkas allowed himself a short laugh. “The Shadow knows.”

Obviously confused, Yohanna paused to look at him quizzically.

Lukkas realized the obscure reference had gone right over her head. “Sorry, that was way before your time—and mine, if you're wondering,” he added quickly. “I was raised on old classic programs.
The Shadow
was an old, old radio program. The opening and closing lines were always—”

Yohanna nodded. They were finally outside the theater. After being inside for so long, the cool night air felt almost downright chilly. She pulled her wrap closer around her, silently blessing Cecilia's instincts.

“‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,'” she quoted.

The completely stunned expression on Lukkas's face pleased her.

“You're familiar with that?” Lukkas asked in disbelief.

“Guilty as charged.” And then she admitted, “I'm a trivia buff.”

Lukkas raised his hand, signaling their position to his limo driver. The same fans who had lined the streets earlier were still there, waiting to catch another glimpse of the film's celebrities.

“You are just full of surprises, Hanna,” he told Yohanna with a wide, approving smile.

The limo pulled up, and rather than wait for the driver to hop out and open doors for them, Lukkas opened the rear door, gesturing for Yohanna to get in.

“C'mon, let's get this party over with,” he urged. “With a little luck, I'll have you back, safe and sound, in your own bed by midnight, Cinderella.”

“You're the boss,” she said, sliding carefully into the limousine.

“For now,” he agreed.

Yohanna wasn't sure just what he meant by that, but she thought it best to leave it alone. That way, she was able to put her own meaning to things without being disillusioned.

* * *

She had to admit she was pleasantly surprised that Lukkas remembered his initial promise to her even at the party. She'd expected him either to wander away or be drawn away by one of the myriad of people—men and most notably women—who were competing for his attention. But each time he did move on to talk to someone, Lukkas ushered her along with him.

And if, by some chance, someone was talking to her at the time, Lukkas waited until she was finished and the verbal exchange was over.

She caught herself thinking that it was almost as if they actually
were
a couple.

Almost.

But she knew there was a fine line between reality and make-believe—especially here, in the very birthplace of make-believe—and she knew the difference.

Still, it was hard not to fall into the very tempting trap of pretending, just for a little while, that things were the way they seemed rather than the way they actually were.

* * *

The party continued until after midnight.

Lukkas had checked with her a couple of times to see if she wanted—or was ready—to go home. But each time he asked, she convinced him that she was wide-awake and doing just fine.

Until she was fading and tired.

The next time he asked, she still made the proper protests, but this time he overrode her.

“Save your breath, Cinderella. I'm taking you home,” he told her.

She didn't want to be the reason why he had to leave the party. As the producer of what was, by all indications, a blockbuster of a movie, this was his time to shine and she didn't want to spoil that for him. After all, he owed her nothing. He'd already been far more thoughtful than she would have expected him to be.

“No, really,” she protested with feeling, “I'm fine. We can stay—or you can stay and I can just get a cab to take me home.”

But Lukkas shook his head. “I'm going home with the one I brung,” he told her.

His grammar had always been impeccable. Had he had too much to drink? But she'd been with him all night and as far as she knew, he'd only had two flutes of champagne. Maybe
she
was the one out of kilter.

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” he laughed. “It's just an old saying that used to make the rounds a few generations ago.”

“What are you, a time traveler?” she asked, thinking of some of the previous remarks he'd made that sounded as if they had come from another era.

“Sometimes,” he conceded. “Did you see
One Foot in the Past
?”

He had just mentioned one of her favorite movies. “Yes, I did. That one really made you think,” she told him.

Lukkas grinned with genuine pleasure. “I'm beginning to like you more and more with every passing hour, Hanna.” He looked as if he was only half kidding.

Don't get carried away
, Yohanna warned herself. He was just going along with the party mood. In any event, she was certain he wouldn't remember any of this on Monday morning.

Still, she thought as he called for his driver, what he'd said to her did have a nice sound to it.

Savoring it for a little while longer wouldn't harm anything.

 

Chapter Eleven

“W
ould you like me to come back for you later, Mr. Spader?” the limousine driver asked as Lukkas stepped out of the vehicle and then took Yohanna's hand to help her get out.

Lukkas didn't want to communicate the wrong idea to either his driver or to Yohanna.

“No, Henry. Stay right here. This won't take long,” he promised.

Lukkas saw the way his driver eyed him and then slanted a glance toward Yohanna. It was obvious what was going through the man's mind. His driver just assumed that he would be capping off the evening with a dalliance. There was no denying that the woman with him was gorgeous, not to mention approachably tempting.

He knew Henry meant well, but the driver was also wrong. Nothing was about to happen other than his walking Hanna to her door.

Yohanna smiled to herself. “I think your driver expects me to invite you in,” she said to Lukkas as he brought her to her door.

He wasn't about to explore that possibility. “I learned a long time ago not to concern myself with what others expect of me. I only need to live up to what
I
expect of me,” he told her. They were at her door already. It was time to wrap this up and gracefully take his leave. “Thank you for a very nice evening.”

“I should be the one thanking you,” Yohanna pointed out. She'd had a really wonderful time.

Yohanna suddenly remembered that she was still in possession of the card he'd given her to buy her outfit. “By the way, here's your credit card back,” she said, taking it out of her purse and giving it to him. “I just want you to know that I intend to pay you back for the gown and everything else. Just not all at once,” she qualified. The bill had come to a figure that represented six months of regular expenses on her budget.

Lukkas shook his head, dismissing her promise. “You wouldn't have had to buy ‘the gown and everything' if I hadn't asked you to accompany me to the premiere, so don't worry about it.” He flashed an easy smile at her. “I consider it an investment.”

Yohanna caught her lower lip between her teeth, chewing on it as she looked down at her gown. She couldn't have him paying for her clothes. “I don't feel right about this,” she told him.

“You might not feel right, but you certainly look right,” he heard himself saying, giving voice to the way her appearance was affecting him. “And I appreciate you doing this for me.”

He made it sound like a sacrifice on her part when it was anything but. She couldn't help the smile that rose to her lips. All evening she'd felt like a fairy-tale princess. “All my assignments should be so hard.”

Initially, he was just going to bring her to her door and watch her go inside. But he found himself wanting to linger, to stay with her a little longer.

Perhaps even go inside.

But he was afraid of where that might lead, and he wasn't ready to go down that path yet.

And he
definitely
wasn't ready to lose possibly the best assistant he had ever had because of a misstep he felt himself being so tempted to make.

He needed to go.

Now.

“See you Monday,” he said, taking a couple of steps back, away from her.

“Monday,” Yohanna echoed. Instead of opening her door, she remained exactly where she was, struggling with an urge that had materialized out of nowhere.

She desperately wanted him to kiss her good-night. Just one kiss.

Who are you kidding? You don't want just one kiss, you want more. And “more” is just asking for trouble, you know that.

She had a good thing going here: a job she was quickly growing to love. The worst thing in the world would be to allow a spurt of hormones to ruin that for her.

With effort, she took out her key and unlocked her front door.

A moment later she was closing the door behind her.

She was safe.

Safe from herself.

And never sadder about it than right now.

* * *

Yohanna came to work Monday—as well as all the rest of that week—acting as if there hadn't been a moment there, on her doorstep, when she had ceased to be someone who just worked for Lukkas Spader. She decided to make it a mission in her life to learn as much as she could about the man. There was an underlying sadness that reached out to her. She'd always had an inherent desire to help people heal.

For now, though, she needed to concentrate on getting her job done, which in turn meant helping him get
his
job—the movie—done. And something like that, she was beginning to realize, had a great many moving parts that needed to be attended to.

So for now, she pushed that part of herself, the part that was curious about the man, into the far background and did what she always did whenever she couldn't deal with—or have the time for—her private life: she threw herself into her work.

She organized Lukkas's appointments, revamped his schedule, got in touch with people he had penciled in on his calendar and prioritized his would-be “crises” as they came up.

As a small part of that, she made an effort to learn his favorite foods and took to ordering his lunches and, in some cases, his dinners, as well.

Working diligently, she trained herself to anticipate what Lukkas needed even before he realized he needed it. The upshot of that was that within four short weeks, she had his life running like clockwork. That made her completely indispensable to him.

Unknown to Yohanna, in addition to becoming indispensable to Lukkas, she also became the woman who preoccupied him in unguarded moments.

She also began popping up in his dreams, a fact that both intrigued Lukkas and disturbed him.

The latter reaction was because it made him feel that he was being unfaithful to the wife he'd so adored. When Natalie had died so suddenly, he'd been convinced that his heart would never seek anyone out again. That with the threat of loss moving like a specter in the shadows, he couldn't bear to become involved with another woman since that woman could die and leave him, just as Natalie had.

He could, with some effort, guard his thoughts during his waking hours. But when he was asleep, all bets were off—and all fences were breakable. His thoughts of Hanna would creep in and fanciful scenarios would be constructed that he would never allow when he was awake.

This complicated his life, and Lukkas was trying to cope with that as well as with feelings of guilt while attempting to mount a new production and bring it up to its wobbly feet.

At times it felt as though he was constantly shadow boxing, vanquishing one problem only to have another spring up in its place. On occasion he would consider throwing in the towel—those were the times when Hanna would come through the best.

“Your director's on line one,” she told him on a particularly exasperating Tuesday morning, bringing a cordless receiver over to him.

Taking the phone from her, Lukkas frowned slightly. He knew before another word was said that he needed to go back to Arizona to find out what was—and wasn't—going on.

His hand covering the mouthpiece, he said, “Hanna, I'm going to need—”

Nodding, she interjected, “I've already called your pilot. The plane will be gassed up and ready to go within the half hour.”

That almost left him speechless. “How long have you been a mind reader?” he finally asked her.

Yohanna didn't let the question go to her head. She didn't read minds; she read body language as well as the particular situation that her subject might be in.

“It comes with the territory,” she answered. But she was smiling broadly as she said it.

“Just as long as you do, Hanna, that's all that counts.” He made a quick calculation. “I hate to ruin any plans you might have for your evening, but I'm going to need you to—”

She'd anticipated this, as well. “I've got a go bag in the trunk of my car. I just have to get it before we leave for the airstrip.”

He could only stare at her. There was no way she could have known that he would be receiving this call from Montelle, his director, nor could she have anticipated what the man would say to him.

“What am I thinking now?” Lukkas challenged, his green eyes narrowing ever so slightly as he looked at her, waiting.

“That's easy.” She tried to keep a straight face, but failed within a few moments. Her grin was wide. “You're thinking that you don't know how you got so damn lucky to have found someone like me to anticipate your every need, your every move.”

“Not exactly, but close enough,” he answered with an amused laugh. “We might have to be there a couple of days. Is that all right with you—or would that be interfering with any plans you have for your evenings?”

“I
have
no plans for my evenings. You have my undivided attention,” she assured him. “I signed on for the long haul. This is just all part of that.”

He really
had
gotten lucky here, Lukkas thought, looking at her. “Right, but that doesn't mean that you have to be enslaved,” he pointed out.

“I'll let you know if I feel as if I've been enslaved. Until then, I believe we have work to do,” she reminded him. She pointed to the receiver he was still holding in his hand. “Dirk Montelle is still waiting.”

He'd almost forgotten. “Oh, damn.”

She went to get her go bag.

* * *

It was gratifying to find someone who had as much energy as he had, Lukkas thought a short while later. At the same time, it was also somewhat unsettling. He'd never had anyone match him step for step before. In so many ways, Hanna was the perfect assistant.

He just wished that she wasn't so damn attractive, so
distractingly
attractive, he silently amended, while she was at it. Because once each workday was finally done and they had accomplished—thanks to her—everything he had set out to do, thoughts of Hanna—a civilian Hanna—insisted on creeping into his brain and by her very presence, that caused things to get scrambled in his mind. Things such as priorities—even with Hanna prodding him.

Blocking those kinds of thoughts about her was getting harder to do.

* * *

“How much are you paying to rent this ‘town'?” she asked Lukkas as they got out of his rental car. It was more or less a rhetorical question, asked in reaction to the oppressive blast of heat that hit her as she got out of the vehicle.

The dusty, weathered town was standing in for Tombstone for another five weeks. “Tombstone,” the town that famously watched history being made and legends being born, did not come cheap.

Lukkas quoted the price he and the company that was behind the tourist attraction had arrived at.

“Enough to keep the locals contented,” he added. Anticipating a negative remark from her, he was quick to hedge it. “It might look like a lot on paper, but it's actually a bargain. If we had to have these sets built back on the lot, it would have wound up costing a hell of a lot more than what we are currently paying to rent it,” he told her.

That part she was well aware of. Yohanna nodded. “I know. I already ran the figures.”

“Of course you did,” he quipped. “Do you ever do anything spontaneous?” he asked her.

“Yes.” Suppressing a smile, she looked him right in the eye and said, “I applied for this job.”

Lukkas inclined his head. “Touché.” He turned to the director. “So exactly what's our crisis of the day?”

Dirk Montelle took no pleasure in being the bearer of any sort of negative news. “We're falling behind schedule, and if that keeps up, I'm going to lose our leading lady, who can only give us five more weeks. After that, she's committed to a play they're trying out in LA before taking it out on the road.”

Always something, Lukkas thought with an inward sigh. “Any way we can speed things up?”

The director laughed shortly. “I wish. But Maddox fancies himself a method actor. Every scene he's in—and that's practically all of them—he wants to shoot over and over again until
he's
‘satisfied.' See the problem?” Montelle asked, exasperated.

Lukkas dragged a hand through an already unruly mop of hair. His hair insisted on curling in the heat. “I see the problem. What I don't see is a solution without getting someone's feathers ruffled in the process.”

Yohanna spoke up suddenly. “Bribery,” she volunteered.

Both men turned toward her. “Come again?” Lukkas asked.

“Bribery,” she repeated. The idea began to take shape in her mind as she spoke. “Offer Maddox a percentage of the picture if he helps you bring it in on time. Tell him if the movie isn't wrapped by the date that your female lead needs to leave, he doesn't get his piece of the movie. You'd be surprised how many mountains suddenly find they can move when the right amount of money is flashed before them.”

Lukkas glanced toward his director.

The latter nodded, pleased with the suggestion. “Might be worth a shot,” Montelle agreed.

“Okay, let's do it,” Lukkas instructed, then looked at Yohanna. “You want to sit in on this since it's your idea?”

“I think it'll probably go over better with Maddox if he thinks this is something going down just between the guys,” she pointed out. “Maddox might be charming on the big screen, but the man is a card-carrying male chauvinist pi—” At the last minute she stopped herself and offered Lukkas a wide smile. “You fill in the blank,” she told him.

It was a rather insightful description of the man, Lukkas thought. “Someday, you're going to have to tell me where you picked up all this insight on David Maddox,” he said.

The smile on her lips turned enigmatic. “I do a lot of reading,” she replied vaguely.

“Yes, but Maddox's true state of mind is kept pretty secret,” he told her.

“In order for there to be a secret between two people,” she told Lukkas, “one of the two has to be dead. Otherwise, the secret—
any
secret—has a time limit on it. When that runs out, the secret ‘mysteriously' becomes public knowledge.”