Once in a Blue Moon (6 page)

Isabelle changed her clothes and went for a brisk walk on the beach, hoping that would clear the sensual thoughts from her head. It was only partially successful. She ate supper alone on the terrace overlooking the ocean and went to bed early. But as soon as her head touched the pillow, the memory of her dream came flooding back, filling her mind, and it was a long time before she finally fell asleep.

The next morning she arose early, as they all had to, and ate breakfast in the hotel café with Debbie and Callie, the hairstylist and makeup artist. They were the only other women from the show on the location shoot. Both the women were nice, and generally Isabelle found their conversation interesting enough, but this morning their chatter merely irritated her. Their main topic of conversation was Michael Traynor, who walked into the restaurant while they were eating. He smiled and stopped by the table to say hello, then made his way to his table, stopping with a gracious smile to sign an autograph for an adoring fan.

Callie sighed and said, “He is
so
yummy.”

“Why is everyone so gaga over him?” Isabelle asked sourly.

Debbie gaped at her. “You mean you don’t like him?”

“Not much.” Isabelle shrugged. “He’s handsome, but...”

“Oh, he’s a lot more than that. He’s nice, too,” Debbie assured her. “I mean, he’s not a stuck-up mannequin, like Brooks Fitzgerald was.”

Isabelle groaned. Brooks had played her first husband on the show and had been immensely popular with the viewers, but he had been a constant source of irritation to everyone who had to work with him. Almost the whole cast and crew, not to mention the writers, had heaved a collective sigh of relief when he had left the show.

“No one’s like Brooks.”

“Yeah, but Michael’s different from lots of them. He doesn’t just turn your knees to water. He’s friendly and polite and...well, treats you like a regular person. Whenever I’m doing his makeup, he asks me about my little boy.”

“Don’t you like him, Isabelle?” Callie asked, her expression almost worried. “In that seduction scene, you two looked like you got along pretty well.”

“That was acting,” Isabelle replied promptly.

“Well, it was
some
acting, then.”

“You aren’t at all interested in him?” Debbie added. “I mean, both of you being single and all. And if you set off sparks like that just acting...”

“No,” Isabelle replied firmly, standing up and laying her napkin down on the table. “I am not at all interested in him. Sorry, I have to run now. I’ve got to go over the script again.”

She started away, but as she did so, she overheard Debbie whisper to Callie, “Well, I’m still betting on them getting together.”

She came to a dead stop and listened as Callie agreed, “Yeah, me, too. I think she’s protesting too much.”

Isabelle turned back around. The two women glanced up and saw her, and their faces flooded with guilt. Isabelle took the two steps back to the table.

“What are you talking about? Is there a bet on the show about us?” There was a great deal of tedium involved in producing a television show, and it was often relieved on “Tomorrows” by practical jokes and bets on all sorts of events.

“Well...yes,” Debbie replied reluctantly.

“How could you!” Isabelle’s face flushed with anger. “That’s an invasion of privacy. What gives you all the right to bet on my love life?”

Callie defended herself. “Everyone does it. You bet on Phil’s baby last year.”

“There’s a good deal of difference between betting on whether a baby will be a boy or a girl and betting on whether someone goes to bed with someone else!”

“Only in degree,” Debbie affirmed. “You can’t keep people from being curious about it after that scene between the two of you.”

“It was just a scene!” Isabelle snapped. “Why can’t anybody realize that?”

“Because your love scenes with Jim never steam up the cameras,” Callie replied bluntly.

“It didn’t mean anything. I am
not
interested in Michael Traynor! And you can tell all your buddies that they’re wasting their money if they’re betting on us going to bed with each other.”

She turned on her heel and stalked off, leaving the two women gazing after her thoughtfully. They looked back at each other.

“Who said anything about going to bed with each other?” Callie asked. “The bet’s just for a date, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Debbie grinned suddenly. “I think that’s what’s called a Freudian slip. I believe I’ll double my bet.”

* * *

They spent the morning shooting a beach scene in which Jessica and Curtis argued in their usual biting way and which ended with Jessica pouring a tall glass of a tropical drink into Curtis’s lap. Isabelle derived a great deal of satisfaction from doing it; it banished the nasty mood she’d been in all morning.

The AD gushed about how wonderful Isabelle’s wickedly gloating expression was. Isabelle wondered if the girl had money down on the opposite side—that she and Michael wouldn’t get together. The thought struck her as amusing, and after that she could not recapture the indignation she had felt earlier. When Callie pleaded for her not to be mad during the afternoon makeup session, Isabelle had to smile and shrug the whole thing off.

In the afternoon, they shot an exterior scene in town where she and Michael came running out of the front of a shop and down the street after a man who had offered them information about Mark’s whereabouts. After that, they shot two more scenes of them chasing the man through the maze of stalls that made up the open-air market. They finished the day with sunset shots of Michael walking along the beach, looking troubledly out at the ocean and of Isabelle standing on the terrace of the hotel, watching Michael.

The next morning they were up at dawn to ride out in the vans to shoot the car chase scenes. They were to be shot on a side road that led to a small beach from the main highway. The road had been blocked off at the highway. While the crew set up to shoot, Michael strolled over to the nearby beach, and Isabelle went into the deserted tropical juice bar. She sat down at one of the empty tables to wait. As she sat, idly watching the crew work, dark clouds massed on the horizon and moved toward them. Suddenly, wind was whipping through the open-air building in which Isabelle sat, and the skies opened up, sending down a torrential tropical rain.

The crew and director jumped into the vans down beside the shoot. Isabelle settled back in her chair to wait out the storm alone. Then Michael came running up from the beach and into the bar. He was already drenched, his thick hair dripping water and his shirt plastered to his muscular body. He swept his hands back through his hair, squeezing out the water, and glanced around.

“Well,” he said, taking note of the empty building, “looks like we’re stranded here together.”

I
sabelle was reminded forcibly of her dream from two days before, and she flushed, her mind suddenly flooded with images from the dream. Her mouth was dry, and she was incapable of saying anything.

Michael walked over to Isabelle’s table and grasped the back of one of the cane chairs. Grinning down at her, he asked, “Do you think you can stand being alone with me? Or shall I sit across the room?”

His joking words made Isabelle feel foolish, bringing her joltingly back to reality, and she said ungraciously, “No. Sit down.”

“Why, thank you.” He ran his hand down his face and over his hair again, sluicing the water from himself, then sat down in the chair. He pulled the wet shirt away from his body, looking down at it ruefully. “Callie’ll be on my case about soaking this shirt. I’m supposed to be crisp and pressed when we start out.” His wry smile invited her to join in his amusement at his own sorry state. “A Townsend would never look like a drowned rat, after all.”

“It’ll dry soon enough when the sun comes out,” Isabelle replied unsympathetically. “Besides, I don’t imagine Callie would scold you even if you’d dragged your shirt through the mud.”

He raised an eyebrow at her remark. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That every female member of the office staff and crew and cast practically swoon over you.”

“Not
every
one,” he replied, looking pointedly at Isabelle.

She shrugged and turned her head to gaze out at the rain. Michael, shivering a little as the wind swept over his wet body, stared stonily in the same direction for a few minutes.

Finally Isabelle broke the silence. Still staring straight ahead of her, she asked in a determinedly casual voice, “Did you know that they’re making bets on us?”

Michael glanced at her, puzzled. “Bets? On us? What do you mean?”

“You know. Surely you’ve made them. A few years ago, everyone was betting on whether Sandra Fein would go through with her wedding. She’d been engaged three times, and the others all fell through.”

“I see.” He looked at her profile for a moment, then said quietly, “And what are they betting about us?”

“Whether we’ll get together.” She looked at him. “You didn’t know anything about it?”

“First I’d heard of it. But, then, I suppose you and I would be the last to know.”

“Obviously it doesn’t bother you.”

Michael shrugged. “What’s to bother me? They’re just amusing themselves, and it doesn’t hurt me any.” He studied her. “Why does it bother you?”

“I don’t like people poking their noses in my private life.”

“I presume they aren’t spying on us all the time to find out.”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past them,” Isabelle said darkly.

He chuckled. “Come on, I think you’re reaching for that.” He paused, then went on, “It’s because they’re linking us together, isn’t it? You don’t like that even in jest.”

There was another long silence. Isabelle refused to let herself turn and look at Michael. Finally he said, his voice low and husky with emotion, “You know, Isabelle, I never wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry. I wish I could take back what I did to you then.”

Isabelle crossed her arms over her body. “You don’t need to apologize. I was young and stupid. I should never have gotten involved with you.”

“I know. I knew it then. You were too young. Hell, I was too young. I tried not to fall for you. You probably don’t believe that, but I did. I knew you were too innocent for me. But I—whenever I was around you, I didn’t have much luck keeping my head. I told myself it wouldn’t hurt to be around you, to talk to you. Then that wasn’t enough. I had to be alone with you. Of course, that wasn’t enough, either. Nothing was enough until you were in my bed.”

Isabelle’s body contracted involuntarily at the sensual picture his words conjured up, and heat stole through her as she remembered that first night...the two of them lying close together in Michael’s narrow bed, his heat enveloping her, his hands drifting over her body.

“Then I couldn’t stop,” Michael went on baldly. “Once I’d known that pleasure, been so close to you, a part of you, I couldn’t give it up.”

Isabelle hated the warmth flooding through her, hated the fact that he could stir her with nothing more than his voice. She stiffened against the treacherous feeling, tightening her mouth into a thin line.

“Stop it!” Isabelle snapped, whirling to face him. She intended to say more, to cut him with her words until he withdrew from her table. But the sight of his face, warm and soft with sensuality, stopped her. For an instant, she could not breathe.

This time, it was he who looked away. “God! When you look at me, I want to...” Michael drew a long, shuddering breath. “I never dreamed that you could still do the same thing to me. I thought when I took this job that we could put the past behind us, that maybe somehow we could even be friends.”

“I think that’s impossible,” Isabelle said in a choked voice.

“You’re right about that.” Michael ran his hands over his face. “Oh, hell.” He rose to his feet, shoving his chair back abruptly. He started to walk away, but then he turned and leaned down, bracing his hands on the table and staring directly into her face. “I want you to know one thing. You seem to think that I just tossed you aside like an old shirt or something, that I walked away without a backward glance or the slightest twinge of pain. But let me tell you, I lay awake at night, thinking about you and sweating, wanting you so bad, I thought I’d do almost anything to make it stop. I hated myself for leaving you, for making you suffer, for making me suffer. I picked up the phone so many times and called you, but then I’d hang up. Once I even got on a train and rode halfway to Virginia before I came to my senses and got off and went back. You were not a few casual nights in the sack for me. I loved you. And when I left, it hurt like hell.”

Isabelle gazed at him, bereft of speech. Michael pushed himself away from the table and walked to the other side of the bar, where he stood, arms crossed, leaning against one of the supporting posts, staring out at the rain.

Isabelle stared at his back, struggling to pull her scattered thoughts together. Michael’s words had hit her like stones, painful in their intensity. For a moment she was stunned. Then a variety of emotions began to well up in her—sympathy, bewilderment, even guilt and a strange longing to comfort him. A saving anger swelled up in her, sweeping away the other emotions.
The nerve of him, to try to make her feel sorry for him, when he was the one who had left her!

“Just a minute!” she exclaimed, jumping up and crossing the room in a few quick strides. She grasped his arm and pulled. He turned with the movement of her hand, not resisting, and looked down into her face. “Tell me something. If you loved me so much, if you were so damn hurt, then why did you leave?”

“You know why. I explained it in my letter.”

“What! You mean, leaving me because you loved me?” Isabelle asked sarcastically.

“Yes, dammit, that’s what I mean!” he snapped back, his brows drawing together thunderously and his eyes shooting sparks. “It’s what I said. I didn’t lie. Although obviously you chose to believe what you wanted to.”

“You don’t leave someone because you love them!”

“You do if your love is going to hurt them. What was I supposed to do? Stay with you in Virginia and say goodbye to my career? Take you with me to New York? Good heavens, Isabelle, you were only eighteen years old. I already felt like a heel for getting involved with you, letting the situation get so out of hand. I was the one who was older, experienced. I knew better than to go out with you, let alone sleep with you. But having done it, I had to figure out how best to...to limit the damage.”

“Limit the— You broke my heart!”

“You were eighteen. You’d never been in love before, never slept with a man. How could you really know whether you were in love with me or just infatuated?”

“You could have let me figure it out as we went along. That’s the way most people do it.”

“After I’d taken you away from college? Away from your family and friends, and brought you to a completely different world, a huge city where you knew nobody, where we’d be struggling to have enough to eat and a place to live? I was a poor actor who could barely earn enough to keep myself alive. How was I to support you? You don’t know what it was like, living the way I did, hand to mouth, day to day, crashing in a friend’s apartment when I had no place to live, eating one meal a day lots of times. That was no life for you. I could deal with it. I’d never had a lot of money. You’d grown up wealthy, the pampered only daughter of a country club family.”

“So you just made the assumption that I couldn’t take it? That I would fold?”

“I wasn’t going to inflict it on you!” he shot back. “Sure, if I’d been selfish enough, I would have asked you to go to New York with me. I’d have let you endure that kind of life so I could have you. But even if I was enough of a heel to let you fall in love with me, I wasn’t enough of one to put you in that kind of situation. To let you throw away your life so that I could make love to you for a few more months.”

“A few more months? There was a time limit on it?”

Michael grimaced. “Be reasonable. It wouldn’t have lasted. I had enough sense to know that. You would have, too, if you hadn’t been a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old romantic.”

“Obviously you weren’t.”

“You’re right. I wasn’t. I was five years older than that and I’d learned my lessons in a much harder school than you’d ever known. You were young and you were sheltered. You had no idea what awaited you. If you stayed there without me, I knew you’d go on to college like you had planned. You’d meet boys like yourself, a guy who could give you the kind of life you were used to. That’s who you should have married. Not some actor from the wrong side of the tracks who couldn’t offer you anything but poverty and uncertainty.”

Isabelle crossed her arms, regarding him coolly for a moment. “So you decided I was better off without you. Tell me something, Michael. Are you a liar or just unbelievably arrogant?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Did it ever occur to you that I might have some interest in the matter? That I might want to help decide what to do with my future? I wanted to be an actor, too, you know. Why wouldn’t I have thought that New York City was exactly where I wanted to be? Why do you assume that I was too weak to put up with a few hardships? It isn’t as if I had no idea what an actor’s life was like. I’d just spent several weeks with you and the other professional actors. I think I had a pretty good idea how you lived. And I knew that that was what I was facing when I got out of college and tried to find a job acting. I was ready to face it because I loved to act. Why wouldn’t I have been ready to face it for the man I loved?”

“Hearing about it isn’t the same as experiencing it.”

“No. But you could have at least given me the chance. You didn’t have to assume I was weak and shallow.”

“I didn’t think that of you.”

“No? What else could you have thought of me? A woman who’d rather marry some guy with a nice car and ‘prospects’ than the man she loved? A woman too snobby to live in a crummy apartment, too fragile to cook or clean or get a job to help out with the expenses? Oh, that sounds like an admirable sort of person.”

“That isn’t what I thought of you. I just wanted to protect you, to keep you from making a serious mistake with your life. I wanted you to have a chance to see more of life before you tied yourself down to one person. I wanted you to have all the things a girl your age should have. Hell, Isabelle, I was thinking of you! I gave you up because I loved you!”

“Then God preserve me from your kind of love,” Isabelle retorted bitterly. She turned and started away, then stopped and swung back around to say, “You didn’t even have the nerve to tell me to my face. You could at least have done that, instead of leaving me a note.”

“You weren’t there. You were at your parents’ house.”

“You could have called. You could have come to see me. You didn’t have to leave it in a note. But I can guess why you did. You were afraid to tell me face-to-face. You were a coward.”

Michael shook his head, regret and frustration mingling in his face. “I tried to call you later, and you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Did you honestly think I would? After what you’d done?”

He sighed. “I never meant to hurt you. I figured before long, after you’d gone to college and met someone else, you’d realize what a favor I’d done you. That you’d say, ‘Thank heavens I didn’t run away with that starving actor when I was eighteen.’”

“You say you loved me,” Isabelle said coldly. “But you obviously didn’t even know me.”

* * *

Isabelle got through the rest of the day in an odd, numbed state; she felt almost as if she were sleepwalking, doing all the things she was supposed to, but without really feeling or thinking about any of it. She got in the open Jeep beside Michael, and they drove along the highway while the van drove in front, behind and beside it, taking shots. Then with the cameraman and the camera attached to the side of the car, they drove slowly over the same stretch of road while they took the close-up shots. Later the shots would be spliced together to be shown with music playing in the background.

When they were through, Isabelle rode back to the hotel in the van with the others, her eyes closed, pretending to sleep. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, and when she reached the hotel she ordered her supper from room service and spent the remainder of the evening in the room by herself. She sat for a long time on the balcony, watching dusk settle over the ocean, remaining even after it was dark. The lights of a cruise ship anchored offshore twinkled in the distance, and the faint sounds of music from one of the party boats traveling over to the Isla Mujeres drifted across the water to her.

She thought about what Michael had told her, about the pain and sorrow she had seen in his face.
Had he really loved her ten years ago? Had it hurt him to leave her? And had he truly left her because he thought it would be the best thing for her?