Wild Honey (5 page)

“Well, Sasha, what do you think?”

Maxwell’s quietly voiced question pulled at her. She looked up at Gemini’s production chief and smiled. “I think I’d like that drink now.”

The next day an elderly houseboy let Sasha into the Malibu beach house. He looked as old as Confucius in his white, surgically clean smock coat, and was probably just as wise, she decided.

“Where should I put these?” the limo driver asked, arriving in the doorway with her bags.

The houseboy motioned him toward a freestanding stairway that seemed suspended on air, then he darted up the steps to the first landing, turned, and smiled.

“Follow him?” Sasha suggested. She supposed she should follow them, too, if she wanted to know where her room was, but the view from where she stood had captured her attention.

Her heart, her senses, quickened in response to the beauty. Drawn slowly toward a thirty-foot-high wall of glass, she looked down over sun-bleached cliffs to the relentless roll of high tide battering against the rocks below. Magnificent, she thought, feeling a tug of something elemental inside her.

Her gaze softened as she stared down, details blurring as white cliffs, blue sea, and sky blended like watercolors framed in a halo of fuzzy white light. A quietness touched her, gentle, enveloping. Her eyes misted, stinging pleasurably. A second or two elapsed before the soft thud of footsteps roused her.

“Anything else you need, miss?” the limo driver called out, clumping down the stairs.

Sasha swiped at her cheek and turned unsteadily, feeling caught and suddenly foolish as he came toward her.

“You okay? Miss?”

She saw herself in the reflection of his dark glasses, saw the bright sad blink of her own eyes. “Sure. Thanks for taking the bags up.”

“No problem.” Smiling awkwardly, he took off his glasses, revealing tiny close-set eyes. “Name’s Bink,” he said, “any problems, you call me. I’m out in the guest house. I guess they told you you’re not supposed to leave except to go to the studio. And don’t answer the phone. In fact, they’d rather you didn’t use the phone at all unless there’s an emergency.”

He left by the louvered French doors that opened onto a terrace. The colonel would approve of the way they keep this place up, she thought, looking around for the houseboy. When he didn’t appear, she began to explore her surroundings.

The living room tempered the celestial grandeur of its floor-to-rafter windows with warm, hardwood floors, faded Persian carpets, and antiques upholstered in rich, satiny brocades. Armloads of fresh-cut flowers were in lead-crystal vases.

Sasha wandered down a short, skylighted hallway, through a gleaming kitchen, and into a bedroom suite that took her breath away. This has to be Leslie’s room, she thought, feeling like an interloper. It was an Arabian Nights fantasy in shades of peach and gold, much too opulent for Sasha’s taste, but breathtaking nevertheless.

A picture, framed in gilt, stood on a white Bombay desk to Sasha’s right. She stepped closer, mesmerized by the couple’s unsmiling pose. The man was Marc-André Renaud. The woman—her hair white-blond, her eyes as languid as reflecting pools—could have been Sasha McCleod!

Apprehension curled inside Sasha. She drew back from the picture like a fragile clover drawing into itself at dusk. Shivering, she couldn’t take her eyes off the sensual tableau. Marc, his hand tangled in the woman’s hair at her nape, was staring down at her. Light played dramatic tricks with his features, flickering a nuance of cruelty along the classic lines of his mouth, offsetting the harshness with the shadowy melancholy in his pale eyes.

The picture’s startling black and white tones created an illusion of such mystical sensuality that Sasha could feel it alter her breathing.
Leslie Parrish,
she told herself. But it was impossible not to see, not to imagine herself in that pose. Impossible not to imagine that man looking down at her, touching her...

She backed away slowly, her heart a flurry of wing beats in her chest. Only as she reached the door to the hallway did she realize that someone was in the room with her.

S
ASHA WHIRLED AROUND
and saw an indistinct form poised in a shaft of sun from the skylight. Her breath welled up in her throat.

“Who is it?” she asked.

As he stepped out of the sun, tiny, bowed, and blinking, she nearly sagged to the floor. The
houseboy.

“Dear God,” she said, slumping against the doorjamb, her head coming to rest against the lacquered wood. “You’ll never know how badly you startled me. How long have you been here?”

His alert eyes told her he’d probably been there for some time. He lifted a shoulder noncommittally, and at the same time crooked his finger, urging her to follow him.

When she could gather herself together, she did. “Lead on,” she said with the resigned irony of a woman who has lost control of her life. “Take me to Nirvana, or wherever else happens to be on the itinerary this morning.”

They ascended the stairs and traveled a long hallway toward the ocean end of the house. Trudging behind him dutifully, Sasha figured out he must be taking her to her room.

They entered a French country drawing room, its centerpiece a brass daybed dressed up in deep Bordeau red, navy blue, and creams. Two cherrywood wing chairs sat by a large multipaned window, and a regal ficus in a Portuguese planter reached nearly to the ceiling.

Perfectly charming, Sasha thought, peering through opened double doors at a bed canopied in eggshell French voile, and beyond the bedroom, to a small, sunny alcove that housed a writing desk and chair.

The houseboy began opening drawers and closets as she entered the bedroom, showing her that he’d unpacked her things and put them all away. Glancing at panties meticulously stacked in a paper-lined dresser drawer, Sasha sighed. A man after my own heart, she thought. He knows how to fold.

“Thank you,” she said, subduing the urge to hug him. Serenely she walked through the alcove and out onto the terrace. The view was every bit as beautiful as before. Steeped in the seacoast’s rippling blue majesty, she only gradually became aware that the room had grown silent. She turned around and found the houseboy gone.

It hit Sasha some fifteen minutes later, after she’d thoroughly appreciated her immaculate surroundings, that she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The picture she’d seen downstairs flashed to mind, piquing her curiosity. The woman with Marc had to be Leslie, but where was she now? And what had caused them to end their relationship? Sasha turned the questions over in her mind. Any more exploring seemed out of the question with the houseboy lurking around.

Ten more minutes ticked by, and her French country suite began to feel like San Quentin done up in chintz. She had a million questions and no one to pose them to. She couldn’t even use the phone.

She slipped on a leotard and whiled away a few more minutes with stretching exercises. Then, gazing longingly out the terrace windows, she decided, somewhat desperately, to risk another tour of the premises. Perhaps she’d get some sense of the place and its inhabitants.

She hit pay dirt with the first door she opened. “Good grief,” she murmured, startled. The spacious room might have been beautiful once. At the moment the scene looked like the morning after the Roman festival of Bacchus. A semi-circular bar was stocked with fifths of every kind of liquor imaginable, most of them standing half full along the bar top. Overflowing ashtrays dotted tables and straddled chair arms, their stale stench burning into Sasha’s nostrils.

A couch was strewn with newspapers, legal pads, and trade magazines. On a marble-topped coffee table, a half-eaten sandwich and an opened bottle of beer languished.

It was a disaster in need of a woman’s hand, and Sasha’s own hands twitched with unrequited urges. The satisfaction her soul would receive from seeing this place squeak and sparkle with cleanliness was intoxicating.

Sasha steeled herself against the bewitchment and inched back toward the door. Her foot snagged on something, and she looked down to see a glass ashtray tipped beneath the toe of her shoe, its contents leaking out all over her Reeboks. She swallowed, felt sweat break out on her brow, and whispered a hoarse, “Oh, God.” Helpless, she dropped to her knees, frantically brushed off her shoes, whisking up butts and burnt matches as she swept away ashes with her fingers.

Was there such a thing as a perfectionist’s hotline, she wondered despairingly. Blotting up the last of the gray powder with a damp finger, she knew it was too late. Even the pros couldn’t save her now. The beast was loose. She dusted the residue off her hand, looked around the room, and planned her attack.

“Dig in, McCleod. Latrines first,” she said, savoring one of her father’s militarisms. Collecting loose debris in a wastepaper basket, she worked her way toward the room’s messy center of gravity, the couch.

The newspapers could go, she decided, but perhaps she’d better save the trade magazines and certainly the legal pads. Curious, she picked up one and began to flip through it, more certain with every line that it was Marc’s handwriting.

Translating the masculine shorthand, she said aloud, “An establishing shot on the beach...a wide pan along the coastline at dawn ...zoom in on dead body washing in the tidal foam....”

A chill shook her at the image—and at the knowledge that she was reading his directorial notes. It felt uncomfortably like snooping in a private journal. Caught in the squeeze between conscience and curiosity, she continued flipping through the pages until she came to what appeared to be a story overview.

She read, her voice dropping to a whisper, “Natural antagonists, Jesse and Lisa are caught in a nightmare. Jesse has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Lisa is the rookie cop who helped bring him to justice. He takes her hostage, uses her to escape and to find the man who framed him. He’s wounded and suddenly Lisa’s in control. Does she turn him in? Does she help him?”

Transfixed, Sasha flipped the page and continued. “The sexual tension is high. In a shattering choice, Lisa betrays her professional ethics and her deepest loyalties and chooses Jesse. Their passion is the desperate wildness of a man and woman who are risking everything—and may not live to love again.”

Breathing faster, Sasha read on, poring over the scribbled description of a love scene passionate beyond anything she’d ever imagined. “Jesse tears off Lisa’s ragged dress as she drops to her knees in front of him. Tangling his hand in her hair, he lifts her to him and kisses her with all the harrowing hunger in his soul....”

A fist pounded in Sasha’s chest, a damp film covered her body as she read on and on, devouring a love scene so emotionally wrenching, so wild and beautiful, it left her trembling with excitement.

Somewhere in the house a door slammed.

To Sasha’s taut nerves it was a crack of thunder. She dropped the legal pad and whirled around, every cell of her mind registering the sound of footsteps climbing the stairway, striding down the hall toward her.

This time Sasha knew who it was. And it didn’t matter that she could hear him coming or that she was anticipating his appearance in the doorway. When he flashed into view, strangely surreal and compelling, his eyes as desolatedly beautiful as ice crystals, she started like a frightened animal and stumbled backward.

Lord, she thought, does this man know how to make an entrance! “Do you always have to storm a room?” she asked, taking the offensive.

As Marc Renaud’s wintry gaze swept over her, she took another step back. “Well, what’s wrong?” she asked, her calves pressed up against the couch behind her.

Ignoring the question, he hesitated in the doorway and considered Sasha’s leotard-swathed body. Dispassionately taking in her hardening nipples, he asked quietly, “Cold?”

Sasha’s eyes flicked down and up again just as quickly. Heat pooled in her face; color tinted her throat. “Ever worn a damp leotard, Mr. Renaud? Yes, I’m cold.”

His expression softened as he surveyed the room. Slipping his hands into his pants pockets, he considered the sparkling bar at length, his lower lip drawing in thoughtfully at one corner.

Sasha relaxed her defenses a bit. Perhaps he wasn’t angry. Perhaps he’d just
looked
angry. Feeling generous, she granted that a man couldn’t be held responsible for the fact that he’d been born with the eyes of a mythic god of wrath and hellfire.

He settled his gaze on her again, a Gallic shimmer of confusion in his features. “Why?”

Unexpected, his half-whispered word swept through Sasha’s barriers like winds through a field of wheat. The way he said it, it could have meant anything.
Why are you so beautiful? Why am I inescapably drawn to you? Why do I want you so badly? Why?
As he gestured around the room, she forced herself to acknowledge that he meant her cleaning spree. “I had to,” she said, lifting her shoulders. “It was so dirty.”

Marc was looking at her with skeptical fascination. “Arturo called me. He told me you were . . . cleaning. A madwoman, he said.”

Sasha might have taken issue if her conscience hadn’t snuck up and ambushed her. Her guilt was tenfold. Not only had she given in to her demons, but Marc clearly didn’t appreciate her frenzied efforts. Brought down by a dirty ashtray, she thought, sighing. “Who’s Arturo?”

“My houseboy.”

“I guess you’re one of those types who needs disorder to create?”

“Something like that,” he said, dropping his suit jacket over the nearest chair and walking toward the bar.

Sasha couldn’t help but notice the dramatic change in his appearance. In charcoal gray suit pants, and a white shirt open at the neck, he looked as though he’d come from an obligatory lunch with the film’s foreign investors. His tie was pulled loose, its tails hanging down his shirt-front. It was a comfortable image on most American males, but oddly, on him, a European, it gave off Wall Street—like waves of power.

Watching him pour brandy into a sparkling snifter, one of several that she’d saved from the blight of water spots, Sasha ran a finger along the neckline of her leotard and lifted the material away from her moist skin.