Reilly's Return (11 page)

“I’d have everything a man could want if I had your love,” he murmured, his words sweet with longing and wishing. “I’d be everything I’d ever hoped to be with you by my side.”

Dazed and dazzled, Jayne stared up at him, barely aware that they were on stage. Breathlessly she recited her next line, her heart skipping erratically in her breast. “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” he said hoarsely. The script dropped from his free hand and fell to the floor unheeded. He speared his fingers into Jayne’s hair, his big hands framing her face, and lowered his mouth to hers.

Jayne sighed and leaned into him. It was a sweet kiss, full of hunger and hesitancy, and she drank it in as if she hadn’t been kissed in years.

The cast broke into wild applause, cheering and whistling.

Reilly lifted his head, his eyes cloudy with confusion. Jayne reacted more quickly, bolting out of his arms, scrubbing at her flaming cheeks.

“That was wonderful!” Cybill exclaimed, her eyes brimming with tears as she came forward to congratulate Jayne on her performance. “But I’ll tell you something, Jayne. If he kisses me that way, I promise you I’ll have an aneurysm and die.”

That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea, Jayne thought. She was trembling all over as if she had severe malaria. Fever and chills chased each other over her skin. She felt as if her bones had all dissolved. One kiss and her sense of self had shattered like a supernova.

And for Reilly it had all been an act.

H
E’D PUSHED TOO
hard.

Jayne, who usually rambled on nonstop, her conversation flowing from one topic to the next, had been virtually silent on the drive home from play practice. Candi had filled the awkward quiet with her wry observations about the cast, about the way rehearsal had gone, about Timothy Fieldman, who she thought was kind of cute in a nerdish sort of way.

Reilly hadn’t had much to say. He’d been too caught up in memories of the way Jayne had felt in his arms during the scene they had played together, of the way the whole world had disappeared and every ounce of his energy had been concentrated on Jayne. More than once during the past year he had wondered if what he’d felt that day at Mac’s
graveside had been a figment of his imagination. It hadn’t been. He’d felt it again tonight.

They were on the verge of something special, he and Jaynie. He could feel it in his gut. He only hoped he hadn’t blown it by taking the bit in his teeth earlier in the evening. Yes, Jayne had responded to his bullying. She had also sought the refuge of her bedroom the instant they walked into the house.

Reilly didn’t waste time wishing he’d been born with the capacity for self-restraint. Nor did he waste time regretting what he’d done. He did waste a considerable amount of time sitting on the sofa in Jayne’s den, staring at her closed bedroom door.

Not that he had anything better to do. It was two-ten in the morning. Everyone and everything on the farm was asleep, including Rowdy and the llamas. Even the tarantula was dead to the world. But Pat Reilly was wide awake, suffering through yet another bout of the insomnia that had plagued him for months now. He hadn’t even bothered going to bed. He knew he’d be lucky to get two or three hours of sleep, and those wouldn’t come for a while yet.

The turmoil of self-doubt that lay beneath his veneer of macho self-confidence always seemed to
simmer a little hotter during the night when there was no escaping it. The idea of distracting himself in a woman’s arms had crossed his mind more than once, but the one and only woman he wanted hadn’t been available to him. Tonight she was within his reach, but a wall stood between them—an emotional wall that could prove to be much trickier to get around than the wooden one that surrounded her bedroom door.

Needing to move and stretch the muscles that coiled with tension, Reilly hauled himself to his feet and began to prowl the den.

It was a comfortable, rustic place with rough planking covering the north and east walls. The room had been divided from the guest quarters by elevating it, giving it a loft effect. A large, soft, white U-shaped sectional sofa invited a person to sprawl out to listen to music or perhaps to watch a movie on the big-screen television. Most of the east wall was taken up with shelving and a cluttered desk area. As with the first level, the south wall was one enormous window.

The view tonight was nothing but a weird combination of moonlight and fog. It made Jayne’s big barn house seem cozy and warm, the only solid, safe place to be in a world that had mysteriously evaporated into mist. Once again Reilly had the
sensation of being at home. His family’s station wasn’t often enveloped in a bank of fog, but there was ever the feeling of being in a pocket of security surrounded by wilderness. It was a good feeling, a safe feeling, one he eagerly embraced now, during the long night when there was no one he needed to impress with his sensible self-reliance.

Not wanting to think another thought about this horrible weakness that was afflicting him, he climbed the four steps leading up to Jayne’s office area and began to poke around, searching for things of interest. He inspected the desk that was littered with notes, mail, old copies of
Variety
. It never occurred to him to feel guilty about snooping. He wanted to know more about Jayne, so he looked.

There was a half-finished review in the typewriter, waiting for the final touches before she would submit it for her column. He read it over, wincing at the concise manner in which she had cut the film to shreds. It seemed a paradox to him that Jayne, who was one of the most compassionate people he’d ever known, could be so brutal in her critique of someone else’s work. Knowing her personality, one might have expected her to be kind and sympathetic toward a bad performance or an unfortunate choice of scripts. Instead, she was painfully honest in her
opinions, padding nothing with kind words that could have been misconstrued as praise when she felt none was due.

What Jayne did for a living bothered Reilly much more than her penchant for palmists and paranormal phenomena. The people in the film industry worked long, hard hours to put a movie together. They put heart and soul into their work. It just didn’t seem right to him that a critic should be able to sit in supreme judgment like some kind of Grand Inquisitor, able to make or break a picture according to her whim. It just didn’t seem democratic. He wondered how big a fight he’d have on his hands if he tried to talk her into quitting.

Mac had been able to live with Jayne’s profession, Reilly reminded himself as his gaze fell on a photograph of his old friend. The picture in its ornate, silver filigree frame stood on the shelf above the typewriter. Mac stared out at him with wise dark eyes and a crooked smile, looking enough like Sean Connery to make feminine hearts flutter despite his age.

They had been best friends, he and Mac, but they had been very different from each other. Mac had been calm and pragmatic. Those words were noticeably absent in descriptions of Reilly. It stood to reason his relationship with Jayne would
be very different from her relationship with Mac. He wondered now if that idea frightened her. Jayne liked security. She tended to back away from anything that threatened to overwhelm her.

Mulling that thought over, Reilly examined the photo that sat next to Mac’s. It was of Jayne, two other young women, and Bryan Hennessy, all in graduation caps and gowns with a rainbow staining the sky behind them. Moving on to take a look at the stuff crammed onto her shelves, he let the subject slide from his mind. He let his gaze drift over a collection of books on theology and mythology. A copy of the
Kama Sutra
caught his eye, and a grin tugged at his mouth as he wondered just how closely Jayne had studied the classic Hindu text on love-making. Lord knew, he was dying to find out.

Another shelf was stacked with books on the film industry, books on screen writing, and on directing and cinematography. He pulled out one of the texts on screenwriting and a sheaf of papers that had been tucked inside the cover dropped to the desk. Curious, he picked it up and read the cover.

“Everlasting
by Jayne Jordan,” he mumbled, his brows lifting in surprise.

It was a script, a screenplay Jayne had written. Before he had a chance to turn back the cover, the bedroom door to his right opened, and Jayne
poked her head out. She was hugging her robe around her petite frame. It looked like silk and was black with splashes of fuchsia, purple, and emerald in the form of tropical flowers. She looked sleep-rumpled and wonderfully sexy with her cheeks rosy and her wild mane of dark auburn hair mussed around her head and shoulders. A surge of desire seared Reilly’s veins as he looked at her.

“What are you doing up?” she asked, her voice soft and smokey. It was almost like a caress to Reilly’s already-aroused nerve endings. He had to clear his throat before he could answer her.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He gave a nonchalant shrug of his massive shoulders as if to say he didn’t find it all that unusual to be prowling around someone else’s house in the dead of night.

Jayne didn’t fall for the offhand manner. She caught the subtly mutinous set of his jaw that dared her to challenge his casual attitude. Wisely, she chose not to. Reilly would sooner have had his tongue cut out than admit to a woman that something was bothering him. Silly, macho Australian man. Oddly enough, his reluctance to confide in her just brought out her nurturing instincts all the more. She wanted to help him. She wanted to hold him and soothe away his worries, whatever they were.

She wanted to do a darn sight more than mother him, she admitted. He looked impossibly sexy standing there beside her desk wearing gray sweatpants and an old black T-shirt that strained to span his shoulders. His golden hair fell across his forehead in a fashion that hinted strongly at numerous finger combings. The lean planes of his cheeks were already darkening with the shadow of his morning beard.

He was every woman’s dream of a rough, maverick male who needed a woman’s gentling touch to domesticate him. That look had sold a lot of movie tickets and captured a lot of hearts. Hers was no exception, Jayne admitted with equal doses of resignation and reservation.

When they had returned from rehearsal she had sought the solace of her bedroom, hoping to sort through the complicated maze of feelings Reilly inspired in her, but she’d come to no conclusions as to what to do about him. Now she felt like a kitten that had exhausted itself chasing its own tail—dizzy and confused, no farther ahead than when she’d started.

“Did I wake you?” he asked quietly.

“No. I wasn’t sleeping either.” For the first time her gaze fell on the papers in his hand and she
laughed in delighted surprise. “Where did you find that?”

“Stuck inside one of your books.”

Smiling fondly, Jayne moved to stand beside him, her small hands lifting the script away from him. “I’d lost all track of this,” she said, her fingers brushing across the cover. “I tried to sell it when I first moved to L.A., but of course I couldn’t find anyone who would even look at it.”

“You wanted to be a screenwriter back then?”

She gave him an enchanting smile. “I wanted to set the film world on fire as a writer-director. But, like most people who go to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, I ended up waiting tables. When I was offered the chance to do movie reviews for a local TV station, I jumped at it.” She shrugged, her dark eyes twinkling with memories. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

“You never tried selling another script?”

“No,” she murmured, absently paging through
Everlasting
, not really seeing the neatly typed pages, but thinking of the rainbow she had followed to Hollywood and how it had somehow just faded away. Holding the long-forgotten script in her hands now brought back the memory of it with a bittersweet pang. “My life took a different direction. I suppose it was my karma all along.”

“Bunk,” Reilly muttered on a snort as he moved on to examine her shelf of videocassettes. It was lined with movies, old and new, movies that ranged from
Casablanca
to
Gone with the Wind, The Big Easy
to
Bull Durham
.

“You like being a critic, do you?” he asked, sneaking a hard look at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Yes. I feel like I’m doing the public a service.”

“Imposing your opinion on them, you mean,” he grumbled.

Jayne frowned at him. “I help people make decisions on how to spend their free time and their entertainment money, both of which most people consider too important to waste on worthless movies.”

He intended to turn and level a scowl at her, but a title on the shelf caught his eye, and he did a double take. “Speaking of your idea of worthless movies, what are these doing here?”

Jayne blushed as if he’d just stumbled across a secret stash of porno flicks. She watched as he ran his index finger over the spine of each protective jacket and read aloud the titles of the films that had catapulted him to the stratosphere of superstardom.

“You’ve got every movie I’ve ever been in,” Reilly said, his disbelief more than evident in his
voice. “What the hell is this, Jayne? You hated these films.”

“I didn’t hate
Outback,”
she said defensively.

“I hardly had any lines in
Outback!
That was my first.”

“I know,” Jayne mumbled. She busied her hands straightening things on her desk, keeping her head down. She was embarrassed to have Reilly discover her secret obsession with his work. It was like having him read her diary or look through her lingerie drawer or find a stack of love letters she’d written but never sent. Still, the cat was out of the bag now. “You were wonderful in it, lines or no.”

“I was—” He stopped dead and stared at her as if he needed to translate her words in his head before he could understand them. Then his scowl darkened even more. He jammed his hands on his hips. “The hell I was.”

“You were,” Jayne insisted. She knew the movie scene by scene. It wasn’t a classic. Nevertheless Reilly had stood out like a diamond among rough stones. His natural talent had been obvious and Jayne had been captivated. Her frustration with him had stemmed from his failure in subsequent roles to tap into that talent, a waste that broke her heart as a lover of fine acting.