Only for You (6 page)

“That was . . .” She faded off because her lips felt strange and uncooperative, and her throat was sore—perhaps from holding in tearing screams of pleasure?

Besides, words failed her.

“It was amazing,” he finished for her without hesitation. The sound of his deep, gruff voice and absolute certainty made her focus on his compelling face.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said honestly. What had just occurred slowly started to penetrate her haze of arousal and tickle at rational thought.

“You don’t witness falling stars every day,” he said dryly.

“You mean it’s only going to happen once?” she asked worriedly, lifting her head off the cushion.

“Shhh,”
he hushed, a small smile ghosting his mouth. He brushed her hair back from her face. His gentle caress should have soothed her. Instead, his cherishing touch, lambent stare and god-awful-sexy smile made desire flicker across her nerves like heat lightning on the night sky. Encroaching logic slinked back into the shadows.

He leaned down and brushed his lips against hers. She inhaled the intoxicating, male scent coming off his skin and wondered what the hell was happening to her.

“The rarity I was referring to is you and me together. What just happened is going to happen many,
many
more times,” he assured her before he covered her mouth with his.

*   *   *

Gia never could claim that he’d broken that promise. It
did
happen again and again later that night and the next morning in Seth’s bed at his attractive and comfortable Silver Lake home.

He’d also said he would call her after she returned to New York.

That was a promise Seth Hightower never kept.

PRESENT DAY

Seth had promised himself he’d be free for Charles Trew’s visit at three o’clock, no matter what catastrophe occurred in the makeup room today. Luckily, his partner in Hightower Special Effects—his niece, Joy—had promised to cover for him for the meeting.

Charles was an old friend from their Army intelligence days, and was now the assistant district attorney in charge of Special Operations for the County of Los Angeles. Seth could immediately tell from Charles’s brisk manner on the phone that he wasn’t calling to get together to watch a football game, rehash their old Army days and shoot the shit. No, Seth had a sinking feeling his friend was calling him for a consultation.

It wasn’t that Seth was against helping out for a good cause when the situation arose. He’d done it before. There weren’t that many ex-intelligence operatives who possessed Seth’s specific skills for disguise, after all. It was just that he was on the final day of a grueling schedule. Not for just any movie either, but a high-budget zombie flick. They were reshooting two short, but major, scenes that involved a lot of special effects makeup. A horde of zombies and free time just didn’t go hand in hand, not for the co-head of the makeup department.

Seth finally peeled off a silicone throat-and-chest prosthetic from an actress and replaced it carefully on a stand. He glanced up and saw Charles walking toward his station.

“That’s it, Sherry. You’re officially back to being a human for good. Thanks for all your patience, and congrats on finishing up,” he told the actress.

“Thanks, Seth. You too. It’s been so great working with you. I hope I get the chance to work with you on another project sometime soon. Good luck with the rest of the day, and I’ll see you at the party later?”

“Sure,” Seth said when Sherry went on tiptoe and gave him a brief hug and kiss.

Activity in the lab was high today, given their tight final-day shooting schedule. Seth saw Charles approaching in the midst of the chaos. Without a spec of blood and gore on his conservative suit and with his meticulously neat, modernized crew cut, Charles looked like zombie bait approaching.

Sherry turned to go and halted, smirking slightly when she noticed Charles’s startled expression as he stared at her. She unhurriedly finished buttoning her “bloody” costume shirt over her bare breasts and walked away.

Charles whistled softly under his breath and met Seth’s amused stare.

“I knew I should have gone into showbiz instead of law school after the Army. You have all the luck,” Charles mumbled, still gazing after the departing actress. “Who
was
that? Anyone I should know?”

“I doubt Cara thinks so,” Seth replied, referring to Charles’s wife of eight years and Seth’s friend.

“I didn’t mean should I
get
to know her. I meant is she famous? I couldn’t recognize her with her hair under wraps like that and all the paint.”

“I doubt you’d be able to come up with an identification by staring at her tits and ass,” Seth said without an ounce of inflection in his voice.

“Yeah, but it never hurts to scan the whole territory,” Charles replied, turning to him with a broad grin. Seth chuckled and began scrubbing his hands and forearms briskly in a nearby sink. He’d bunked with Charles in basic training and served with him for three out of his five years in Army Human Intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was enough time in the trenches for Charles to know when Seth was ribbing him and when he wasn’t.

“Is Joy around?” Charles asked. He’d met Seth’s niece on several occasions. Seth had told him during their recent phone conversation that he’d asked Joy to join him in heading Hightower Special Effects.

“She’s doing some fabrication for me so I could meet with you.” Seth toweled off and stuck out his hand in a belated greeting.

Charles shook it warmly. “Which I can’t thank you enough for in advance. If you can help us out with this in any way, there are quite a few others who will be lining up to thank you as well.”

“Let’s go over to my office and talk. I assume this is top secret business?” Seth asked dryly, but to no effect. Charles had become distracted yet again. A few feet away, a female extra had whipped off her robe in preparation for a prosthetic application. Charles stared as she stood there wearing nothing but a nearly nonexistent G-string, while one of Seth’s female artists started to paint adhesive on her chest with a brush in preparation for an application.

Charles sighed and waved Seth in front of him. “I really did pick the wrong job,” he said resignedly.

*   *   *

Charles sat in front of Seth’s desk in the ad hoc office he shared with Joy, cradling a cup of coffee between his bent legs. The din of the makeup room was muffled to a hum in here, but they still spoke in low voices. As Charles began talking, an uncomfortable, tight feeling had started to rise in Seth’s chest. He had a feeling he knew why Charles was visiting him.

Knew
who
this whole meeting was about. He found himself both dreading and wishing for Charles to just say her name out loud.

“I was wondering if you were working on the McClarin case,” Seth told Charles quietly after they’d talked for ten minutes. “I haven’t noticed your name in the papers. Nice job on the indictment.”

“We didn’t get him for a fraction of what we wanted to pin on him. We’re glad to have
something
solid to get Sterling McClarin out of circulation. So are the feds. The FBI is still building their own case for suspected white-collar crimes involving that multibillion-dollar cult of his. Both Madeline and the FBI are hoping our case will discredit him with the public and his followers, and witnesses will start to come forward as things begin to crumble around McClarin,” Charles explained, referring to Madeline Harrington, his boss, the Los Angeles County district attorney. “But we haven’t nailed McClarin yet. There’s a little matter of the trial. And if you’ve been reading the papers or caught the news, you must realize what a media frenzy it’s turning into.”

“Thanks to your high-profile witness,” Seth said, frowning.

Charles’s gaze flickered up to meet his. “Exactly. The darling and icon of young adults across the globe, Gia Harris.” Charles flourished his hand drolly before he took a sip of coffee. “McClarin sure screwed himself big time by giving in to temptation with Harris in his vicinity.”

There. Her name had been said out loud. This
was
about Gia. Seth took a long draw on his water.

“Have you ever worked with her on a movie?” Charles asked.

“No,” Seth replied shortly.

He had suspected the day would arise when he came face-to-face with Gia again. She was an actress—a truth she’d glaringly omitted on that single electrical night they’d spent together two years ago. Since then she’d made the leap from Broadway to Hollywood and rocketed to the top of the A-list after her debut role in a legendary blockbuster young adult film. She’d rapidly moved on to more adult roles and huge stardom. He’d wondered if he would ever run into her again. He’d assumed if he did, it would be on a movie set or a chance meeting at a party or something. Not that Seth partied with the Hollywood elite much. He tended to avoid glamorous bashes like the plague.

He would never have guessed in a million years that he would run up against the vivid memory of Gia under these bizarre circumstances.

“Did you hear what happened yesterday?” Charles asked.

Seth nodded soberly. “She’s had a mob of reporters and photographers hounding her ever since the news broke about her being your star witness against Sterling McClarin. A high-profile young movie star testifying in a lurid trial involving the forty-year-old charismatic leader of a modern day ‘religion’ raping the fourteen-year-old daughter of two of his followers? It’s got all the makings of a media frenzy. Gia can’t go into hiding because she began filming this week on a blockbuster Joshua Cabot movie. Yesterday, a couple of overeager members of the press drove her car off the road.”

Charles nodded grimly.

“Is she okay?” Seth asked quietly.

“Yeah. Her driver was a little beat up, but Gia wasn’t hurt physically. Whether it got to her mentally is another matter. She’s been through a lot in the past few months. I’m glad you’ve been following the case. Saves me the effort of explaining the background.”

Seth quirked his brows in sarcastic amusement. “Everybody in the country is following it. This thing is bigger than the O.J. Simpson spectacle. It’s being shoved down our throat by the media everywhere we turn. You’d have to live in a hole not to know about the New Temple and Sterling McClarin and how Hollywood’s sweetheart is taking part in his downfall.”

Charles nodded. “Therein lies the problem. Everybody in the country is following it. What’s worse, my boss is concerned that an ‘accident’ like what occurred yesterday could potentially be more than what it seems.”

Seth sat forward. “You suspect Gia Harris was run off the road intentionally?”

“We don’t have any proof of that. But the New Temple has some avid followers and a long reach,” he said, referring to McClarin’s pseudoreligious organization.

Seth scowled. Didn’t he know it?

“Can’t you get Harris into protective custody or something?” Seth asked.

“She has police protection, something she’s really starting to resent now that she started shooting a film. She’s not really a candidate for the U.S. Marshall’s Witness Security Program. There isn’t any kind of tangible threat to her life. Even if she were a candidate, she’d never agree to leaving her career and starting over again in Boise, Idaho, or Amarillo, Texas.”

“And give up all her fame and fortune?” Seth asked with grim amusement. “Not likely.”

“Exactly. And Sterling McClarin is no godfather of organized crime or a gangbanger. More like a spider. He’s not going to whack a witness, especially when it’s someone as high profile as Gia Harris, and the world has both of them under a microscope right now. He knows as well as anyone how bad that’d make him look. Sterling McClarin and the New Temple have a lot of tentacles in the show business community, though. A disturbing amount. The DA—and the FBI on a more-removed level—is more concerned about one of McClarin’s minions ‘influencing’ our witness in some way to change her testimony than actually eliminating her altogether.”

“Either that, or engineer some scenario to make Gia look bad in the public eye,” Seth said.

“You’ve got it. You probably know that circumstances being what they are, there were huge challenges for jury selection. Judge Halloran has already selected a jury and alternates, although the trial probably won’t begin for three to five weeks. The jury has repeatedly been instructed by Halloran about avoiding media and any queries about the case, but with a furor this loud, we’re worried a juror would have to be a hermit not to be influenced.”

“It seems to me McClarin and his followers were hard at work trying to defame Gia
before
jury selection,” Seth said with a sharp look, referring to a recent rumor that had been circulated in the tabloids about Gia having a drug problem. It’d died out quickly enough.

“You caught that, huh?”

Seth nodded. “There’s no truth to the rumors, right?” he asked. He somehow doubted that fresh, beautiful girl could ever succumb to drug addiction, but who knew? Hollywood was a cruel, ruthless place to exist. Many couldn’t survive it.

“No. We’ve been fortunate in that. Harris has a squeaky-clean record. Even the smallest smudge on it might have been fuel for the defense team.”

Seth took a sip of water, considering. “McClarin
is
a spider. A big, nasty, dangerous one,” Seth stated unequivocally. He noticed Charles’s upraised brows at his venom. “One of McClarin’s ‘knights’ tried to recruit Joy’s husband.”

“Everett Hughes?” Charles asked, looking startled by the news. Seth nodded, distractedly studying his water glass.

Joy was his niece, but she was more like his younger sister. They were much closer in age than most uncles and nieces. For years, they’d been the only family each other had. Joy had married superstar Everett Hughes almost a year ago. Seth had never made it a secret that he thought it wise to avoid actors in the romantic arena, especially ones of Everett Hughes’s caliber. He hadn’t hesitated to warn Joy of the potential pitfalls. Movie stars were a different breed from everyday humanity, in his considerable experience. Fortunately, Everett was one in a million—a megastar with his feet planted firmly on the ground and a family-and-friends structure that had insulated him from the pitfalls of narcissism and sycophantic followers. It had been an unlikely match, and one that Seth hadn’t approved of initially. He couldn’t complain at the end result though. Joy was euphorically happy with Everett, and if Joy was happy, Seth was. Still, he’d been personally offended at even the slightest chance of the shadow of the New Temple darkening Joy’s world.

Not that it had ever been a remote possibility, Everett had reminded him repeatedly with exacerbated, pointed irony.

Still, neither Joy nor Everett suspected the subtly dangerous threat a cult like the New Temple represented. Not like Seth did.