

Heart Throbs

A Romantic Comedy

Karen Tomsovic

Not So Maverick Publishing

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

Copyright © 2016 by Karen Tomsovic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions Coordinator," at the address below.

Editing: Robin Patchen

Cover Design: Robin Ludwig Cover Design

Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout ©2013 BookDesignTemplates.com

Sign up for news on my latest releases, previews, free and discount books, giveaways & more:

karentomsovic.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Saturday

Chapter 2 Sunday

Chapter 3 Monday

Chapter 4 Tuesday

Chapter 5 Three Years Earlier

Chapter 6 Wednesday

Chapter 7 Thursday

Chapter 8 Thursday

Chapter 9 Friday

Chapter 10 Saturday

Chapter 11 The Next Week

Chapter 12 The Next Day

Letter from the Author

Also by Karen Tomsovic

For indie authors everywhere

1 Saturday

"Actors!" Amanda Monroe rolled her eyes even as she huffed and puffed and carried one end of a _chaise longue_ up a Greenwich Village street on a sun-streaked Saturday morning. "Ugh."

"But Amanda," her equally burdened best friend, Michele, said from the other end of the chaise. "You're an actor." Then corrected herself. "Actress." And again. "Whatever."

"It doesn't really count with me." Amanda was so sincere she half-believed herself. Unlike her critically acclaimed parents with their long, storied careers, hitting the bright lights for her was a fleeting endeavor, a temporary state of being. Not unlike a Hollywood golden marriage. She strengthened her grip on the chaise. An accident of birth, one she would correct, and soon. "I'm getting out."

"If you say so."

She didn't blame Michele for being skeptical. How many times had Michele heard her make that vow? A hundred. Yet Amanda Monroe wasn't one of those flaky actresses, the kind who invented their own religions and insisted their toilet bowls be bedecked with fresh, floating lilies—though she did play one on TV.

But only for ten more episodes.

They inched their way toward Michele's place. Another block to go. A thousand people out and about on this bright October day and not one stopped Amanda to say, Hey, aren't you the girl from _Knightley_ and what are you doing carrying an overstuffed _chaise_ up West Fourth?

"So starting Tuesday no one is allowed to look Knightley directly in the eye?" Which figured. Amanda's pompous blowhard of a co-star would demand that. Knightley Stapleton was the kind of actor who refused to soil his creative efforts in the "cultural wasteland" of L.A., insisting his eponymous sitcom be produced in culturally fertile New York.

But only for ten more episodes.

"Well, you can," Michele said. "You and the rest of the talent."

Amanda had dutifully played Fleur Harte, Knightley's dutiful but dumb blonde daughter throughout the show's Top Ten, five-season run on a three-letter network. Along the way she'd managed to acquire a home in Queens and sneak a few jokes of her own into the script, but enough was enough already.

"Oh brother. How are we supposed to get any work done?" As if she weren't itching to wrap the series and get started on her real life, a normal life that would include—she hoped—four kids, a dog or two, and a real marriage to a grown man who did something for a living that didn't involve putting on makeup and pretending to be an FBI agent or a top surgeon or a wedding crasher.

Ten more episodes.

"He says he needs his privacy," Michele said.

"Puh-leez." Not another privacy-demanding attention hog. The industry was full of them. "This is nothing but a power trip, and one borne of insecurity at that." She didn't have the heart to add that even if Knightley Stapleton did deign to acknowledge the woman who'd been dressing his sets for the past five years, all he'd likely see would be a well-toned, over-tanned nobody in a skimpy top planting a dieffenbachia in the middle of his fictional law office and not Michele's heart of gold.

"It's not about you." she said, supplying sorely needed assurance to her friend, whose full, bunny cheeks were swelling to a pout. "With these bloviators, everything revolves around them. My sense is Knightley knows he's about to be upstaged big-time. His poor dainty ego can't take it."

"You think this is really about Harry Ritter Johnson and Darrell guesting next week?" Michele said.

"Yep."

Nothing could wreak havoc on an actor's insecurities like having the current box office king of romantic suspense and his second banana on the set every day for an entire week. Harry Ritter Johnson, he of the devastating chin dimple, was the kind of star with enough clout to need an entourage. Darrell Rawlings, on the other hand, was too normal for entourages.

"Can we stop a minute?" Amanda said. "I need a break." They set the _chaise_ down by the curb and sat. All around, tourists who'd come for autumn in New York were taking snapshots of everything in sight—except, of course, her.

"This will be perfect for 'Darrell's apartment'," Michele said, running a French-manicured hand over the smooth nap of chenille. Michele had a terrific sense of style, with an _èlan_ that enabled her to dive into a pile of old junk, extract two chairs, a stack of mismatched china plates, a few lamps and the odd easel and voilà, achieve that artsy Left Bank look.

"Why on earth did you have to call me for this?" Amanda said, fingering the still-attached, hand-drawn "Please Take" sign that had graced the pristine, off-white find ever since Michele had come upon it parked at the curb.

"Because you're the only one I could get ahold of on a Saturday morning. Everyone else is busy," Michele said, turning up her hands.

True. Amanda had been home, (ironically) repotting a dieffenbachia at the time.

"I assumed you'd bring along Al to help," Michele said.

"Al's..." Amanda stopped and looked down at her hands resting in the folds of her skirt. She rubbed her engagement ring with her thumb as she frequently did ever since Al slipped the antique piece onto her finger a month ago. Yep, still there. Still intact. "Why didn't you bring Jesse?"

"Because I've only known Jesse two weeks. I can't ask him to help me move furniture." In other words, not engaged like some people. "Besides, I knew you'd be home."

Michele had nailed her on that count. When she wasn't putting up with Knightley Stapleton's temper tantrums on set Amanda led a boring, semi-reclusive life. Everyone knew it.

"Never mind that this is the sort of thing Darrell wouldn't be caught dead having around in real life," she said, touching the ultra-feminine tufting.

Michele nodded agreement. "It is very yin. But this is what's hot right now. Our core demographic will love it." Meaning female viewers between eighteen and thirty-five. "Isn't it kind of ironic? Decorating a New York apartment that's supposed to belong to Darrell when in real life he's always stayed with you?"

Amanda shrugged. In addition to being your typical cinematic success with average talent and middling looks who had made it on hard work, charm, and a little bit of luck, Darrell Rawlings was her second-best bud. They'd met as co-stars in a cable remake of the Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward classic, _The Long, Hot Summer_ , and gotten along like the proverbial house afire. Later, he'd crashed in her spare bedroom for the better part of nine months. They enjoyed a fabled reputation as platonic pals. Soaking up sunshine in her non-skimpy twinset, Amanda mentally ticked off everything there was to know about Darrell Rawlings: his favorite color (orange), his favorite old movie ( _The Great Escape_ ), his favorite animal (giraffe) and his favorite food (pork chops).

Watching the sun glint off her engagement ring, she thought about one more thing there was to know about Darrell Rawlings. His favorite thing to wear to bed (nothing). But she saw no reason to get into that now, not even with her first-best bud.

"It certainly will be an interesting week," Michele said, her Bambi eyes taking on that lost-in-the-woods look. "Considering Darrell hates me."

"Darrell doesn't hate you," Amanda lied, riffling through her brain for a euphemism. "It's just that he has, _er,_ strong opinions." _When someone's been seeing her shrink every week since the dawn of the millennium, it's a bit of a red flag._ And _A man has his limits,_ being among them.

With her cell, Michele snapped a photo of Amanda sprawled on the chaise—no doubt for the "core demographic" following on social media then glanced at the time. "We'd better get moving. I have a cupping treatment at two."

Back on her feet, Amanda sighed and prepared to lift. It could have been so perfect—not to mention convenient. Her two best friends together as a couple. But no, she thought, hoisting the _chaise_ off the sidewalk. Darrell had to run right back to Willow Chaney. A woman who would never have something so yin in _her_ apartment. Darrell always ended up back with Willow Chaney. This last time, like the time before, it had been all because of Amanda.

***

Walking up MacDougal toward her car after dropping the chaise at Michele's place, where it would remain until someone from the crew could haul it to the studio, and then seeing her off to the cupping therapist's, Amanda still had Darrell on the brain. Sure, she'd known he was coming for weeks. But handling that unwieldy, ginormous prop just now made it feel real. Darrell was coming. It wouldn't be awkward, would it?

Amanda was weighing the possibilities when something caught her eye and made her stop short. She'd lived her entire life in NYC—except for a year in L.A. during her mother's ill-fated attempt at late-night TV and, later on, four years at college in Virginia—and nothing much surprised her.

Still, as she passed the worn green and red striped awning of a venerable coffee house, tucked away at an outdoor table something—someone—caused her to approach the corroded metal guard rail.

Amidst the packed scene there was no mistaking the tousled, cropped mop of black hair of the woman with the bright red mouth or the elbow-patched blazer and florid, fresh from summer on the polo fields fitness of the man beside her.

"Mother?"

Not five feet away. And next to her mother, her father. In posing her question, Amanda made sure to employ a proper dramatic intonation befitting her station in life as the progeny of Sukie Dyan and Geoffrey Monroe.

She walked up.

Her mother met her gaze dead-on. "Daughter." And then turned to her ex-husband of twenty years, who rose to his feet. "Dude, we are so busted."

The bouncy youthful exuberance belied Sukie's slight wattle of a turkey neck. Amanda cringed, as she did every time her mother prattled like a twenty-something. It reminded her of Barbara Billingsley's cameo in _Airplane_ as the white woman who spoke jive, only Amanda didn't laugh.

"Mother, why are you in New York?" Didn't she have other places where she could hold court? Like, say, on a Burbank soundstage, wearing a hound's-tooth suit and pearls while being the butt of mother-in-law jokes instead of slurping cappuccino outdoors dressed in urban hipster black and trading bawdy one-liners with her ex-husband of twenty-five years, an activity which, knowing them, surely preceded their daughter's arrival.

Sukie tilted her face upward. Despite the dramatic contrast among her alabaster complexion, raven hair and crimson lips, Sukie Dyan did not do "stunning." At least not in the symmetrical features way that counted with casting directors looking for romantic leads. Her nose was a smidge too bulbous and she had no chin. Nor were her looks the odd kind that could be marketed as striking. But she had vivacious blue eyes—obscured though they were now by oversize Wayfarer shades—and a crackly laugh and a sarcastic way with a well-written line.

"Because I live here?" Sukie said.

"Last I heard from you, you were in L.A."

"Well I was, Madame Officer, but _my_ sitcom got the ax. No final season big sendoffs for _Indira and Bob_. So I'm back—and looking for work." She produced a put-out look that Amanda recognized from her repertoire of acting tics as feigned resentment. "Just when I was starting to sizzle again."

"Oh Mother." She reached out over the rail and grazed her mother's shoulder.

The woman had a point. Ever since the success of _Knightley,_ Amanda's parents' careers, never lackluster, burned all the brighter. If one considered _Indira and Bob,_ broadcast TV's multicultural take on modern marriage—heavy on the stereotypes—a bright spot.

It used to be the other way around. Amanda would snag auditions because of who her parents were. It proved the old adage, _it isn't what you know, it's who you know_. The old adage was a shame, because Sukie Dyan and Geoffrey Monroe were truly gifted actors in their own right.

"When have you ever lacked for work?"

"I mean _meaningful_ work," Sukie said, brushing away her daughter's hand, not to mention her sympathy.

Amanda's father rose from his seat and leaned over the rail for a hug. Pulling out of it, Amanda smiled. "And what's your excuse?"

"Who, me?" He swept an arm toward the rickety round table set with two demitasse cups of espresso and foam. "Just spending a lovely afternoon with your mother."

Admiration tugged at Amanda's heart even as suspicion raised her eyebrows. Every divorcing famous couple vowed to remain friends who loved and supported one another. In the case of her parents, who'd split up before she'd turned four, it had actually been true.

And really, why not spend the day together? Lovely it was, drenched in rich amber light, though a slight breeze had kicked up. The people watching was fantastic. Though she did not care to inquire what brought her uptown parents downtown. All that mattered was that they were home.

"You could have called," she said, starch working its way into her voice and causing her father to shrink back into his chair. "Both of you."

"Because of your pressing need to check up on people?" her mother said.

Sukie Dyan saved her calls for special occasions, like when her only child was nominated for an Academy Award. That one had come pre-dawn, accompanied by a scream so loud it scattered pigeons.

Amanda's voice softened, even as her shoulders held firm. "No, so that I could know that you're in town and I could see you and find out how you are and know that you're not lying dead in a ditch somewhere."

"Oh, _pfft_."

"Your mother's right, darling," Geoffrey said, as if _pfft_ were a splendid point. "If we were lying dead in a ditch somewhere, you'd hear it on the news."

Sukie nodded. "You don't have to have a cow." She exchanged a look with Geoffrey, and back to Amanda. Then she actually took a second look and noticed her daughter's earnestness. "Oh all right then." She put forth an age-spotted forearm and did a theatrical sweep. "Pull up a chair and moo."

Amanda skirted the railing and sank into the chair her father rounded up for her. "I could use a glass of wine."

"You?" her mother said. "Wine? Before five?"

"Michele and I just walked five blocks with a _chaise_ she garbage-picked for the show this week."

"Ah, yes," her father said with relish. "The big episode."

"Well, your father and I are—"

_Please, God,_ Amanda thought, _don't wreck my whole world and say, "in love."_

"—taking in a gallery showing this afternoon. Care to come along?"

Amanda demurred. "I have to get back home. I'm supposed to be repotting a dieffenbachia."

Sukie dipped toward Geoffrey. "The world's least-fun blonde."

Amanda deflected the comment by changing the subject to her wedding plans, which were, so far, not much.

"You're not going to celebrate the engagement with a formal affair?" her father said, crestfallen.

Formal affair. She tried to picture what that might look like. Al would have to shave, possibly eat canapés. Definitely make chit-chat. Some kind of suit or at the very least a jacket would be required. A formal affair would call for major movement on Al's part. She winced and was, thankfully, saved by her roaring mother.

"'Formal affair'? Sukie howled. "What year are we living in, 1912? Formal affairs blow." Of course, to Sukie, so did engagements period, not to mention marriage in general and bearing more than one child. "No one wants to go through invitations and RSVPs and party planners and all that. Can't we get by with just brunch? Bring along Al, we'll look at the ring, we'll have a toast, we'll hear your plans, et cetera et cetera."

"It would have to be soon," Amanda said. "Next weekend I'm off to Seattle."

Geoffrey set down his cup and retracted his pinkie. "You still haven't finished that big crackup project? Earthquake wracks the Pacific Northwest."

Overlooking the obvious dramatization in his tone, she drew a patient breath. _Big crackup._ "The name of the film is _Seismic Event._ "

Very high-concept and big-budget. It was a girlfriend role. Beautiful seismologist who wins the hero's heart. Most of the filming took place last summer in Canada during her _Knightley_ hiatus, but they needed to do some final exterior scenes of the emerald city's landmarks before the quake.

"The following week, I'll be off myself," Geoffrey said.

"Oh?" Sukie asked. "What do you have going on?"

" _Ahab_." He pronounced the title of the dubious _Moby Dick_ prequel with a groan that could have raised the _Pequod_.

"So that leaves us with this week," Sukie said. "Are you free tomorrow or not?" A nod from Geoffrey. "See. He's free. Honey, are you free?" she asked Amanda. "Of course you're free. You never do anything. There, it's done."

A sliver of doubt crept across Amanda's mind. "I suppose Al could manage brunch, although I don't know. We do have the wedding planner to see on Tuesday."

"Ooh, heavy schedule."

"More like a can't-miss appointment if we want to use Christoff." To say nothing of the dent it would make in Al's writing time. That was sacrosanct.

"Why must it be Christoff?" her father asked.

"Because Christoff has impeccable taste," Amanda said. And, as planner to New York's luminaries, he practiced the utmost discretion if one wanted a private, intimate affair, which Amanda did. What other kind was worth having? Moreover, like most difficult geniuses, Christoff refused to be rushed. "Let's do brunch at my place." That way Al would have to trudge no farther than up the basement stairs. Besides, it had been forever since she'd had people over.

She squinted against the sun. Everyone always seemed to be moving away from her, when what she wanted to do was gather. A random wind fluttered their paper napkins. Darrell wasn't moving away from her. Darrell was heading toward her faster than a speeding bullet. When exactly was he flying in?

Her father cleared his throat. "Puckle Warts." At the sound of his pet name for her, so old it predated the divorce, she perked up her head. "I know you adore being the mother hen in your world, but there's no sense in the two of us trouping all the way out to Queens on a Sunday morning."

All the way out to Queens. Crossing a bridge, what a hassle.

"Not that whatever you would prepare wouldn't be perfectly delicious." He paused. "We'll do it at your mother's."

"Thanks a lot."

"Oh," he told her, "it wouldn't hurt you to open a can of soup every once in a while."

"A can of _soup_?" Amusement lit Sukie's eyes. "I'll make reservations."

Amanda sighed. They were such great big bags of wind. Always "on." And hammier than a holiday buffet—not that you could ever get them home for a holiday.

"Listen to the two of you," she said. "You ought to be studded with cloves and glazed."

Though it did no good to point that out. It only encouraged them. Even now her parents looked at her in delight, her mother with her electric grin, her father with his swelled chest. They may have been great big bags of wind, but they were _her_ great big bags of wind.

Twenty minutes later, Amanda was in her car, heading for home and the dieffenbachia and the beloved drudgery it represented. As she neared the Queensboro Bridge, her phone rang. She recognized the ringtone of _Knightley_ 's publicist but answered on speaker anyway.

"What, all of a sudden you're picking up these days?"

She caught the tiny note of surprise in Jac Cohen's voice. Who could miss it? She let it pass. It was a reference Jac often brought up, rude though not inaccurate, to her client's distaste for the mobile devices. Entering the bridge's upper deck, she glanced out at the East River. Somewhere in its depths lay the last one Jac had driven her to toss.

"I don't suppose since the last time we talked you've developed a secret pill-popping habit that's threatening to destroy your health, your relationship, and your last remaining months on the show, by any chance?" Jac said, hope leavening her flat Long Island tone.

"Oh, you know me."

Jac let out a long harrumph. "Pity." And then, "Amanda Jane Monroe, you are the world's most boring celebrity."

And you are the world's most ambitious publicist, Amanda thought, ignoring Jac's invoking of her middle name. God knew her mother never invoked her middle name.

"Don't you think that's a bit of a stretch?" she said.

"Some assistants write tell-alls about the stars they work for. Yours is threatening to write a nothing-to-tell. And then, put you together with Alfie boy..." Jac's voice trailed off. "No offense, but the two of you are like a couple of old shoes."

Amanda peeked past the steering wheel down at her old shoes. A pair of freshly laundered white Keds. No problems. And why did Jac have to throw shade on Amanda's assistant? Paris was perfectly happy with her job, and so was Paris's husband. Paris's non-event-filled workload ensured his wife was home most nights in time to put dinner on the table by six.

"You spend your days holed up in Queens and don't do anything remotely interesting," Jac said.

For the second time that day, Amanda pled guilty.

"I'm not in Queens now," she said brightly, bounding toward home in her vintage sports coupe. Technically true, at least until she finished crossing the bridge. "And I'm interesting. It's just that you can't see it. Don't you think someone in show business who makes wise personal choices is a refreshing change of pace?"

"You want a refreshing change? Try pitching a hissy fit outside Harry Winston's when they won't let you in after closing. Now there's a refreshing change."

Jac was constantly haranguing Amanda to do something gossip worthy. For the good of the show, of course. "Really, Amanda," Jac would say, "So-and-so just named their firstborn Avocado. Why can't you do that?" Or "Go have something surgically altered and call me in the morning." In Jac's worldview, there was no career glitch that making a sex tape couldn't fix.

"I make your job so easy." She showed up on the set when she was supposed to, she didn't storm off when she wasn't supposed to, she didn't get arrested or make embarrassing public remarks. She was the antidote to the bloated gasbag ego that was Knightley Stapleton.

"Are you kidding me?"

"I'm a publicist's dream."

"You are a publicist's sleep aid. Do you have any idea what it's like to represent someone who behaves like a responsible adult? How do you make someone sensible and level-headed sound exciting?"

"I can be exciting," Amanda said. Oops, she'd almost forgotten—if she was going to make meat loaf for Monday night, she'd better hit the market today.

"What, puttering around your urban garden all day picking out herbs?" Jac said. "Drawing up grocery lists?"

"No," Amanda said, checking off "mushrooms" in her head.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Jac said with a tone that meant tsk, tsk, tsk. "And your parents are actors and were always on the road and so you never really had a home of your own and were an only child of only children with no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins and all you've ever wanted is to settle down with Prince Not-an-Actor and four blond children and a blond dog and a white picket fence and blah blah blah I've heard it." Jac took a breath. "And I'm not unsympathetic. Okay, so you don't want to be identified with celebrity idiocy. I can live with that. Next to hydrogen, it's the most abundant element in the universe. But the fact remains. No one knows who you are."

"And I like it that way." And what did everyone have against white picket fences?

"Right. Because you're getting out." Jac sniffed. "So's everybody. Leaving Hollywood—it's the new 'giving back.'"

"Well, _I_ know who I am. My loved ones know who I am. God knows who I am."

Jac heaved a sigh that said, _why do I get stuck with all the saps,_ and followed it up with a sustained, impatient tapping. Knowing Jac, that meant inch-long fingernails. "It's the jinx award you won," she said. "Best Supporting Actress. One way or another, it makes sure you never have a career again. But let's move on. The purpose of my call—"

"—is the Six3 opening on Tuesday," Amanda said. In her head, she made an addendum to her mushroom list: hen of the woods.

"You mean you're actually going to show up?"

"Of course." With reluctance.

"No toothache? No 'I have to wash my hair'? No 'exhaustion'—as if?"

"I said I'd be there and I'll be there." Boring, dependable, responsible Amanda, true to her word.

"Yes, and once upon a time you said you'd call me right back on your cell and then—splash. Listen, I realize a night on the town might cause you and Alfie boy to die catastrophic deaths, but this is important for the show."

Meaning it was important for Jac. Her husband, nightclub impresario Hugo Flick, owned Six3.

"Knightley won't lower himself to appear if you all are there, that's a given. But I was thinking more along the lines of you and Darrell, seeing as how you two are such buds. Anyway—"

"Willow would be thrilled to see that fact in print," Amanda said. "That we're such buds." Although they had made a film together—and bonded—before Willow ever entered the picture.

"Blah blah blah Willow. An innocuous name for a humorless woman."

Jac herself went by an acronym. She'd been born Jennifer Allison Cohen, but since the world needed another Jennifer like it needed another expose in _The Weekly Star News_ about the size of Harry Ritter Johnson's manhood, she went with the acronym.

"Hold on," Jac said. "I've got an urgent message coming in."

Amanda heard muffled sounds on the other end of the line. As she turned off the bridge and into Queens a warmth settled in.

A moment later, Jac came back. "To reiterate: You are coming to the opening on Tuesday."

"I am coming to the opening on Tuesday."

"Good, because I've got a real PR emergency to go handle. You'll never guess who just had a baby and named it Merlot!"

"Poor little girl," Amanda said and thought of another reason to ugh over actors: her own near-miss at having to bear the name Titania. The brainchild of her mother, who had to counter her father's choice of the more romantic yet equally Shakespearean Rosalind with something outrageous. How those two had come up with the vanilla Amanda, she didn't know. She simply thanked God they did.

"Imagine going through life with a name like Merlot."

"Oh, it's not a girl," Jac trilled, and then she was gone.

***

Once _Knightley_ became a solid hit, the first thing Amanda had bought with her new raise was a house. She set her heart on a century-old duplex, blue with black shutters, in the gentrifying working-class neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, quickly turning it into a home. She remodeled so the kitchen could be useful for more than heating up leftover takeout. She eked out a tidy garden. She maxed out the place with boarders, Darrell in the extra bedroom and in the basement, a sad-sack reporter-turned-novelist who seemed to require nothing more than someplace to be alone so he could type.

Not even Amanda's formal father bothered with the front door. When he bothered to come by, that was. Everyone came round to the side, directly into the kitchen where the action had always been.

Today, inside, no action, only the basement door standing ajar. She poked her head into the black stairwell.

"Honey?" She waited for the usual grunt. There was no grunt. "Honey?"

She waited again, but again, no grunt. The lack of a grunt was odd, because nothing signified the presence of Al Romano more. Except, perhaps, the clack of his typewriter.

No clack today, either.

Amanda checked upstairs. She stopped in the shunt of hallway flanked by the two bedrooms, hers (whoops—hers and Al's) on the one side, Darrell's on the other. No one there, either. Darrell hadn't slept in that bedroom in ages.

Darrell would be at the wedding, of course.

Turning left into her (their) room, Amanda gripped the doorknob and worked her feet out of her Keds.

Much as she loved this, her first home, they'd outgrow it quickly once they started their family. They'd have to leave it behind for someplace else. Someplace, if Amanda had her way, that had what every New Yorker wanted more of, namely, space. A yard bigger than an eye patch. Rolling hills, primrose paths, a hammock lazing between tree trunks, the calming sea frothing at one's feet.

And a white picket fence wouldn't hurt, either.

Not that Al could ever see it. "Leave New York?" he'd said. "Where the hell else would anyone want to live?"

Giving her foot a final jerk out of its shoe, her fourth toe clunked against the doorstop, which also happened to be arguably the most recognizable trophy in the world.

"Ouch!"

She glanced down at the gold-plated statuette with its naked knight holding a crusader's sword. Heavier than it looked, that was for sure. She hopped on one foot over to the bed and rubbed her sore toe, taking in the silence.

Peace and quiet. This had been what she'd always wanted; this had been what she'd longed for all those childhood years of living in high-rises above taxi-choked avenues. A normal home, in a normal place, whether a close-knit ethnic neighborhood like where Al came from, or Main Street, Kansas, USA like Darrell.

When they (she and Al) eventually moved out, they'd (she and Al) take her Oscar with them.

Probably.

"And they say I like to brood."

She looked up.

Against the backdrop of family photos hanging in the hall—her mother and father at some soiree for the arts, Gran as Imogen in _Cymbeline_ —stood a much more comforting figure than Oscar—stoop-shouldered, clad in baggy khaki shorts, his white T-shirt untucked, Italian loafers.

"There you are," she said, getting up on her feet.

"What happened?" Al said.

"That thing," she said, giving one final angry glare at the statuette's golden tush. The last time she'd seen Darrell...

That was a year and a half ago. So many things had changed. They had not exchanged more than the occasional tweet or text since then. She liked to think that was a good sign. It meant Darrell had moved on.

Al lumbered in and wrapped her in welcoming arms. A shock of thick, black hair fell across one eye. Al's stock in trade. He was hairy everywhere, including his head. Unlike Darrell, who was hairy hardly anywhere except his head. But there was no need to get into that now.

"You okay?"

The warmth of his breath tickled her ear.

"Oh, it's fine. Just a scrape." She leaned back against his chest, content to sway in his embrace. "You?"

"Girlfriend trouble." He gave her middle a squeeze.

"Ooh." She laced her voice with mock intrigue.

"Not me." He clarified. "Rossetti." His detective. "His woman's holding out on him. There's something up with her, something she's not telling him."

"Sounds like a juicy subplot."

They continued their entwined sway. Amanda in bare feet was just the right height for rubbing shoulders with him.

"And Loretta sounds like she needs a tune-up."

Amanda tilted her head. "The Olivetti?"

"Yep."

Some men had love affairs with their secretaries, some with their automobiles. Amanda's fiancé had one with a 1951 Italian manual typewriter he'd named after Cher's character in _Moonstruck_.

Darrell had named his dogs after characters in _The Great Escape._

They continued to make small talk about their respective days, and Amanda mentioned the meeting—and subsequent brunch date—with her parents.

"Tomorrow?" he said. "Isn't that kind of soon?"

"Well." She knew she shouldn't have committed to it without consulting him first. "I kind of already said yes."

"Oh." Al shrugged. He sounded so soothing, so reasonable, so cushy soft. Having a conversation with Al was like sinking your head into a goose down pillow.

A year or so ago, when she'd found herself with an empty house, her father had made another blanket pronouncement. "You need direction, an anchor."

So she anchored herself to Al. For the reason her father mentioned and for other romantic ones. But there was no point getting into that now.

"You know how they are. They went on and on and I couldn't get a word in edgewise and the next thing I knew, I was committed."

Clasping hands with Al, she admired the ring on her finger.

"We'll need to set a date," she reminded him.

"Do we have to know exactly?"

"Ballpark."

"Say," he said. "Ballpark. That's not a bad idea."

"Stop." She inched out from his grasp and reached up to pat his cheek. "I am not getting married in a Mets cap on home plate."

To his credit, Al did not share the same exasperation she had with Sukie Dyan and Geoffrey Monroe. Score one for Al.

Not that she expected him to understand. Al had a normal upbringing. She came from actors. Actors were weird.

"Yeah, but you gotta love your family," he said, the Italian in him talking.

"I do love them. Why do you think I try so hard to get them to sit in one place long enough to have a home-cooked meal? But I want a normal home."

He patted her hand in reassuring tolerance. Yet another point in his favor. "Well then." He whispered in her ear as the darkest little cloud passed over the maple tree out front, casting a slight shadow over the room. "We'll have one."

2 Sunday

The next morning Amanda stood in front of her mother's Upper West Side high-rise in the shade of the awning over the main entrance at ten sharp. For such an important building, one of the priciest in Manhattan and situated on Central Park West, the entry was appallingly understated, flanked by two measly topiaries and one bald doorman.

Sunday turned out to be as brittle-breezed and warm-hued as Saturday had been. She tightened the belt on her trench and had barely finished glancing at the time when a cab pulled through the gate and into the porte cochere and deposited her father at the curb.

In the crook of his left arm he cradled a bottle of champagne. A selection rare and hard to find, no doubt.

"To toast the happy couple," he said, tipping his hat. They exchanged quick kisses. "Where is the happy couple, by the way?" He made a point of looking around, underscoring the absence of Al.

"His writer's block broke." By the time she awoke this morning at eight, Al was already in the basement, pounding the keys.

"Hooray for him."

"He says that once it's started, he can't interrupt the flow." He'd been sleeping on the girlfriend—so to speak—and now the backstory was filling in.

"Is Al a man or a pregnant woman about to give birth?"

"He's just trying to find the real killer is all." She shrugged. "He loves his work."

Her father's tone croaked disapproval. "It's Sunday."

She fought not to guffaw. "And since when did that ever stop you from going on with a show, hmm?" If only she had a bottle of bubbly for every childhood weekend with her father during which she did her homework backstage by dressing room light.

"We're supposed to be celebrating the engagement of both of you. If he wasn't going to show up, we might as well have canceled the whole thing."

She eased the champagne from its place in the crook of her father's elbow. "Then I'll just take this home, and Al and I can sip it together later." She studied the label. "Ooh, vintage."

It deserved to be sipped in a marble tub full of suds, or beside a mosaic-tiled pool in the moonlight. Granted, two scenarios that were far more glamorous than she and Al were prone to live out. The last physical activity of any kind they'd shared was raking up a pathetic collection of leaves last Sunday from the maple tree in front of the house, and that had hardly been a romantic affair. They didn't even jump into the pile.

"As long as we're here..." her father said and offered her his arm. "Shall we?" She took it. They strolled toward the covered entry.

"We've set a tentative date," she said. "The middle of May."

"Marry in May, rue the day," he sing-songed.

"Will you stop?" The response she'd been going for was "lilacs in bloom," not "rue the day." Even though technically he was quoting an old saw, it sounded suspiciously like a blanket pronouncement, and she did not need one of those set loose in the universe. Those blanket statements of his had an uncanny way of coming true.

"I want you to know that I think what you're doing is smashing," he said. "Settling down and all. And you have my whole-hearted support." The warmth crept back into his voice. "You'll make a beautiful bride and a wonderful wife."

She noted that he'd left out "marvelous mother." Big surprise. Children vexed the man. The moment Amanda had outgrown her Pampers he'd started treating her like a miniature adult. Not that it was so bad. From him she'd learned to have impeccable table manners, ride a horse like an expert equestrian, say her prayers at night, and never, ever, under any circumstances—as the vintage champagne proved—drink cheap liquor.

While he exchanged greetings with the doorman, she pictured him as a grandfather of four. It was hard to hold back a smile.

"Any man would be lucky to have you," he said, continuing on with her through the lobby. She braced herself for a soliloquy. He obliged. "Marriage is truly a blessing." He spread his hand like Charlton Heston at the Red Sea. "It is the cornerstone of civilization." His baritone thundered inside the cavernous marbled space, disrupting the Sunday morning peace. "It is a sacred bond that unites—"

"I'm glad to hear you say that," she said with a lilt.

"You are?" He beamed, flattered. _Actors and their egos._

"Yes. It gives me hope." She put one suede-booted foot into the elevator and stepped in.

"Hope?"

She nodded as he followed her in. The elevator operator pushed a button and the door closed. "That you'll take a wife again someday."

The elevator shot upward and as it went, Geoffrey's face fell, as if the bubbles in his champers had gone flat.

"N-n-no," he stammered. "When I say the cornerstone of civilization, I don't mean for me. I mean for _other_ people."

Casting a wary gaze over his shoulder, the elevator operator raised an eyebrow. Geoffrey dismissed him with a polite nod and wagged his finger at his daughter.

"Unlike your mother, I have the utmost respect for the institution."

She sensed a punch line in the offing.

"And that is why I shall never go near it again."

Rim shot.

"Dad..."

"Darling, what would be the point? I'm no good. I would only make a mess of things."

"I don't believe you mean that. You tried it before..."

"And in doing so proved a fundamental truth of life: Some people are not suited for marriage."

"You could be if you put your mind to it."

He set a firm gaze dead ahead on the closed door before him. "I could very well put a needle through my eye, too, but you don't see me doing that, now do you?"

"So whom do you have for company these days?" she said, palms turning up.

"Well, there's Basia."

"Your cleaning lady."

"And I won't hear a word against her."

In other words, good help was hard to find.

She sighed. Her father worried her. He needed more than good help. His second—also brief—marriage had collapsed some years ago. Lately, he seemed a man adrift. It brought to mind that line in _Rear Window,_ when Jimmy Stewart quipped that one day, Miss Eat-Drink-And-Be-Merry in the apartment across the way would turn fat, alcoholic and miserable. The last thing Amanda wanted was to see her father dissolve into just another stage actor souse.

Geoffrey Monroe played too much polo to be fat, and though he did give his daughter a bottle of vintage port for her sixteenth birthday ("Puckle Warts, by the time you turn thirty it will just be coming into its own. It's a metaphor for life!") it was the "miserable" part that troubled her. A good wife—someone lively and upbeat, to smooth out his rough edges—would keep him on an even keel. And, in turn, with his large spirit and generous heart he'd make a nice catch, provided the prospective missus didn't have a no-actors policy like his daughter did.

"Dad, you need someone." That brought a scowl. "Seriously. Being alone isn't good for you."

The elevator doors opened and they stepped out into a mirrored entryway. Her mother's luxe penthouse awaited.

"Give me one good reason," Geoffrey said.

"Because someday you're going to be old and decrepit." He frowned. She leaned in and gave him an affectionate kiss. "And you are not coming to live with me."

***

In the vast, walnut-paneled foyer of her penthouse, Sukie greeted them in more black—knit pullover, yoga pants, open-toed slides.

No surprise there, Amanda thought, but then, as she looked down—nail-charmed feet. Knobbier, wrinkled doubles of Michele's.

Sukie's gaze went straight to Amanda's handbag. "What in the goddess's name are you schlepping?"

Amanda held out her gently used leather satchel. It was her favorite everyday purse; she'd been using it for years to tote scripts. "What's wrong with it?"

"Only that it's so 2007. You should join my bag of the month club."

"Bag of the month?" Geoffrey said.

"Yes. It's totally fab." Sukie led them through the main hall and past a few keys pieces of her impressive modern art collection on the way to the living room. "You pay a flat fee and every thirty days, they send you the latest. And you turn in the old one." She reached for a fuchsia crocodile-skin clutch embossed with her initial, the bag conveniently posited on a console table. "October is monogram month."

"Nice S," he said suggestively.

"Why, thank you."

How droll, Amanda thought. There they went again. Always "on". She did her usual best to ignore them, focusing on the framed riotous squiggles that adorned her mother's walls.

The entire three-thousand-square-foot spread took up half the thirty-fourth floor. Window walls on three sides gave way to views of Central Park, both the East and Hudson Rivers, and numerous bridges.

In other words, totally fab.

Amanda walked to the window and the view. Native New Yorker though she was, it still took her breath away. This time of year the Park looked as if someone had spread a blanket of rust, olive and gold across the trees.

In a greener season, Darrell had been up here attending one of her mother's cocktail parties. He likened the trees in the Park to broccoli florets.

She noted a six-foot potted tree in a corner. That was new.

"That fiddle leaf fig looks amazing," she said.

"What? Hmm?" Sukie glanced around. "Oh, that thing."

Gardening was not exactly her cup of organic oolong. Amanda had picked up her green thumb from her English Gran. Her mother's style was strictly a few show plants nourished by the cleaning service.

"Oh, Mother, you'd have a cactus begging for water."

"I did all right with you."

Hmm.

"Oh, you poor Dickensian waif," her mother added. "How did you ever survive to adulthood?"

Amanda ignored the rhetorical question and joined her father on perpendicular custom-made sofas.

"And by the way, why is your future husband not with you?" her mother added.

Amanda sighed, pressed, yet again to explain his absence.

"He's under pressure to deliver a second best-seller. You know how hard it is to beat the sophomore jinx." Being actors, they understood the difficulty of pleasing a fickle public. "Plus, he's worried about his typewriter." She garbled the last word, knowing how silly it sounded.

Her father did a slow blink. "Come again, darling?"

She repeated the lame excuse, her voice as tight as a squeaky space bar. "I said, he's worried about his typewriter."

Thankfully, she was spared further explanation by the distraction of her father helping himself to a script lying on the coffee table.

"What's this now?" he asked.

"Sob fest for women's cable I've been offered," her mother said dismissively, crossing the room and taking the script off his hands. "Yet another Fragile Woman Seized by Unexpected Longings. Doesn't anybody know how to write good parts anymore?"

She slipped on a pair of black, owl-framed readers and began scanning lines.

"Ten pages into it and it reads like a dirge. Mariah, our hero"—she sniffed—"is seeing her twenty-three-year-old daughter off to the Peace Corps, which I wholeheartedly applaud, but it's all, _Mariah is tired,_ _Mariah feels drained_ , _Mariah pleads exhaustion_ , until you're about ready to shoot Mariah."

Considering Sukie's stance on gun control, that was saying something. "They actually expect me to deliver the following line to my husband: 'Chase...'" Sukie grew shivery, clutching the script with the white-knuckled panic worthy of a daytime diva. "'We'll get each other through this.'" She gave the script a salutary toss. "She's dropping the kid off at the airport. It's not like anyone's died. And then you know what happens? That's right, you guessed it: The minute they get home, our buddy Chase up and leaves her."

The bound pages hit the leather floor tiles with a thud. "Wouldn't we all? By the time Mariah broods her way through her country French kitchen with her second glass of chardonnay, pouting about how she spent the best years of her life putting everyone else's needs ahead of her own, it's only a few more pages and then the inevitable phrase 'time to heal' shows up. Gack!"

She collapsed into a curved gray upholstered armchair modeled after an egg carton and waited for the accolades. "The only one wimpier than this woman is her husband. And of course, we've yet to see hide nor hair of the new love interest. He's probably a wet noodle. And no doubt her pottery instructor. I can hardly wait."

"Mother."

"Will you stop 'Mother'ing me?"

Amanda leaned toward her father and whispered. "Feisty today."

A definite change in subject was in order. Sticking to shop talk, Amanda steered the conversation to something they all could have a few yuks over: Knightley Stapleton and his no-eye contact edict for this week's episode.

"Darrell's not staying with you while he's here, is he?" her mother said.

"I'd put my money on Willow's loft in Tribeca," Amanda said.

"Is he back with that bloody Chaney girl again?" her father said. Clearly the man was spotty in his reading of _The Weekly Star News_. If he'd kept up, he'd have known Darrell and Willow had been back together for over a year.

"Blood _less_ is more like it," her mother said. "And what a barrel full of monkeys she is. Do not tell Bitsy I said that." In addition to being Willow's mother, Bitsy Chaney was one of Sukie Dyan's most social of social chums.

"Talk about your bag of the month," Geoffrey said, never able to resist a dig at the Chaney women.

Sukie gave him a playful shove. "Oh, behave." And then promptly resumed criticizing her daughter. "You, at least, used to be some fun," she said. "And to think you could have had Darrell."

"You've always said Darrell is uncouth," Amanda said.

"He is uncouth. And I said you could have had him, not that you had to keep him. You could have taken a tumble or two when you had the..." Sukie stopped herself. "Oh, that's right. You're above all that."

Amanda fought not to let on how wrong her mother had been, that Sukie Dyan's daughter had in fact been above, beneath and all over the uncouth Darrell Rawlings. But there was no need to get into that now.

"Oh, Mother, don't you think it's better to let that sleeping dog lie?" Would Darrell bring Cavendish with him to New York? She hoped so, though it would mean Hilts, too.

Sukie sprang to attention. "And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," she lied. "Just that the ship has sailed, the horse has left the barn, Elvis has left the building. It's a moot point." Another lie. Sort of. One of omission. "I'm marrying Al and Darrell's—" How to say it? "likely talking the same with Willow." Emphasis on talking.

"When I think about the two of you," Sukie went on, reveling in innuendo, "sharing a bathroom, sleeping across the hall from one another for months, and never once going bump in the night..." Her voice petered out. "What a waste. But Al is nice."

Amanda smiled and nodded. Smiling and nodding was good for making like you had nothing to hide. "Mother, have you been taking that new female Viagra again?"

"Daughter, first of all, you are much too young to sound so bloody post-menopausal. And second, if there is any female around here whose sex drive needs enhancing, it's you." She paused and did a _whatever happened to you_ thing with her hands. "You used to give great parties."

"That was another lifetime ago. I'm older now. I'm at a point where I want to settle down."

"Yes, way down," her mother said, like the wicked queen proffering the poisoned apple. "As in catatonia."

Amanda would not give her mother any satisfaction. She would not reveal that she was hiding a secret that was, apparently, as juicy as an evil-twin-in-the-attic storyline on an afternoon soap. No, she'd remain wide-eyed and silent, pulling a dumb blonde to her mother's sardonic brunette.

"You know, in my day we wanted to prove you could stay together for life without the piece of paper."

Oh, who was her mother kidding? The woman wouldn't commit to a pocketbook, much less set a trendy toenail near the institution of marriage again. "You, Mother?"

"Well, not me personally. My generation. Your generation, on the other hand, wants the piece of paper but not for life."

"How about the piece of paper _and_ for life?"

"Fine." Sukie gave a gasp of exasperation. "Go get yourself a husband and four children if you need to have someone to smother. Just as long as it isn't me." She clutched her monogrammed bag. Then she turned to Geoffrey and mouthed the words UPTIGHT, UPTIGHT, UPTIGHT like a lighthouse flashing its beam to all the ships at sea. "You can fall in love with an interesting man as easily as a dull one, you know."

Amanda rested her chin in her hand. "Mother, I do believe you're mellowing. You mentioned the word 'love' and didn't wretch."

Sukie shrugged. "It happens to the best of us."

"This from you, who constantly bangs the drum about women having options."

"Yes, women have options. And I have opted to be happy." She folded up her arms. "And I'd hoped you would do the same."

Amanda had a sense where her mother was headed. "Is this about Edie Temple again?" The actress had a brief run in early '60s comedies. She was best known as the suburban housewife in the sex farce _My Wife Next Door_ , in which she wore an iconic powder blue headband in her blonde bouffant. The first time Amanda saw _My Wife Next Door_ was as a teenager. Instantly she was enthralled. When she heard that Edie Temple had faded away from motion pictures not from scandal or tragedy but gracefully to live a semi-reclusive life as the wife of a shoe salesman in Chuckanut, Washington, it inspired her. Amanda's own white picket fence fantasy was born.

Her poor mother. Sukie never could understand that someone's idea of contentment might not be the same as her own.

"Edie Temple was quite fetching in her blue headband in her day. Nothing wrong with playing to that type," Geoffrey observed, not quite taking his daughter's side as much as she might have liked, and instead focusing on the work.

Actors.

Her mother reached out and grazed Amanda's chin. "What I could have done if I'd had your looks."

Her father smiled appreciatively. "Puckle Warts, you have your grandmother's luminous quality. Which, I might add, is a far more valuable commodity than any baby blue headband, fetching or not."

"Give it up, both of you. I'm getting out. The world isn't going to sit up nights wondering whatever happened to the girl from _Knightley._ "

"Darling," he said. "You are much too good to get out. You've managed to get steady work even after winning the jinx award."

Sukie sighed, a little overdramatically, Amanda thought. "My daughter, the nester. Where did I go wrong?"

But before Amanda could interrupt to ask what was wrong with finding fulfillment in the home, her father issued another blanket pronouncement.

"Say what you will. However," He paused to clear his throat.

Amanda clenched for the kicker.

"You'll never get out. Acting is in your blood, Amanda Jane Monroe, and don't you forget it."

***

What if she said no?

Through the dim lighting of first class, Darrell Rawlings peered over to the seat next to his, where his girlfriend sat in self-satisfied, if not sweet, repose. Willow's gray eyes were soft tonight, her taupe hair slashed with streaks of yellow and smoothed back with a _peau de soie_ bow. If there was one thing that Darrell knew after four years with Willow, it was the definition of _peau de soie_. Not to mention the difference between that and _soie_.

Willow exhaled through burgundy-stained lips. Back at her place in Tribeca, she had an entire drawer devoted to lipsticks, all in various shades of cool red, and only cool red. It was one of her iron-clad Rules of Beauty. This particular rule had a sub-rule, which stated that nail color, too, may only be red or clear—not brown, not black, not tangerine, not Smucker's grape, and certainly not _Soylent Green_.

The reference to the futuristic Heston flick always made Darrell smile.

He ought to at least try to catch some sleep. It would be after midnight local time when they landed at La Guardia. Not that he had any place he had to be the next morning. _Knightley_ followed a slacker sitcom schedule of four work days a week. Darrell didn't have a call until eight a.m. on Tuesday, day after tomorrow.

Looking into Willow's eyes and seeing the old soul that lived behind them, Darrell continued to smile. It was one of the qualities that had drawn him to her. With her sheer hose and suit made of a nubby material that Darrell knew to call bouclè, she called to mind the pre-eminent Rule of Beauty from which all others sprang: There is no excuse for not looking presentable.

The flight attendant came through with coffee, which Willow accepted. She drank hers fully caffeinated. The stimulant didn't keep Willow up at night; she simply wouldn't allow it. She pulled out her laptop and set it on the tray table next to her cup and her notepad. She relished her job, penning celebrity profiles for the style magazine _Haute_. (As Willow liked to say, "If you can't pronounce it, you have no business reading it.")

Darrell leaned over the double-wide arm rest. "Scribbling?"

Willow half-smiled. "Scribbling." She preferred to be undisturbed while writing.

By the looks of the squiggles on her notepad, Darrell guessed she was transcribing quotes from her latest celebrity victim. That being Hollywood tartlet Lavender Davis.

"Darrell."

Willow gave him a mild push back to his side of the arm rest. The movement released the scent of her Chanel No. 5. (Iron-clad Rule of Beauty number two. Or was it number three?) She set down her coffee, lifted her hand to her ear, and gave her earring a twist. In her lobes shone platinum and garnet studs, Darrell's gift on her last birthday. A birthday gift she'd kept. (Platinum and garnet studs passed muster Rules-of-Beauty-wise.)

Willow's place of employment was, it went without saying, an upmarket publication. The down-market gossip rags had dubbed Lavender Davis "The Storm Goddess of the South" because she claimed to have been born in the middle of a hurricane. (According to Willow's research, however, no hurricanes had passed through Lavender's home state of South Carolina within a five-year radius of her supposed date of birth.)

Nonetheless, the epithet fit. Lavender Davis wove a path of chaos and destruction everywhere she went, especially on movie sets. She'd used the occasion of one shoot to bed the married director, an ossified horn dog five years older than her own estranged father.

Darrell stretched out his legs. He had no interest in oversexed women with father-abandonment issues.

Lavender's fans loved her because she supposedly didn't care about her image. Showed what they knew. Most of them refused to see through the veil of illusions about their favorite stars. Of course Lavender cared about her image; she wasn't an idiot. She paid good money for that image; she had the best media strategist in Hollywood on retainer. Saying she didn't care about her image was like saying a starlet piled on the pancake to achieve "that natural look."

No doubt there was an egregious breach of the Rules of Beauty in there somewhere. He glanced over at Willow, tapping away.

At any rate, Lavender was now on a scorched-earth campaign to look respectable. Somehow The Storm Goddess of the South had latched onto a bedridden aunt and was using the caretaking opportunity to pay tribute to her dead mother. It was a convoluted stretch, but that was Lavender for you.

"Are you going to rat her out?" Darrell asked.

Willow cocked her head. "She is all veneer."

A non-answer. That meant Darrell would have to wait months and months to read the published article like the rest of the world. No previews for the reporter's boyfriend. Curiosity won out. He reached for the laptop even though no one touched Willow's laptop.

"Must you?"

Darrell peeked at the screen. "'When I'm changing Auntie's colostomy bag is when I'm the most beautiful'? Did she really say that?"

"That is _it_." Willow swiveled the laptop out of his view. "No more reading the notes."

"Okay, okay. No more reading the notes," Darrell said, even as he inched toward her.

"Darrell."

"Relax. I want to check out _The Weekly Star News_ , that's all."

Willow's facial muscles calcified. "You and your tabloids."

People said, _don't believe the tabloids_. Ha. Darrell always believed the tabloids. When it came to celebrity scandal, the tabloids were the canaries in the coal mine.

"Everything they print is a lie," Willow said.

"Until two months later when it's confirmed by _People_." Darrell wrested the laptop from her. The rags usually contained some level of truth; you just had to know how to read them. And read them Darrell did—and so did Willow. The difference was that he wasn't ashamed to admit it.

Darrell clicked a link, and the home page of _The Weekly Star News_ loaded. The screened filled with their lead story about a certain married rock star whose wife left him two months ago after he admitted fathering a love child with his band mate's girlfriend. This month he'd been "accidentally" photographed poolside in Rio with a topless aspiring Brazilian supermodel.

"Who do you suppose tipped off the paparazzi about that? Rock star or model or both?" he said.

"I say she did, and he didn't know a thing about it, seeing as how he's temporarily insane and permanently stupid." Willow narrowed her eyes at Darrell in mock suspicion. "A bad combination."

"It says here they're 'relaxed and happy.'"

"They always say that." Willow folded her hands and began to parody. 'Darrell Rawlings and Willow Chaney went to their own funeral yesterday,'" she said, nearly jovial. "'As the hearse rolled up to the cemetery, the couple, looking relaxed and happy, dotdotdot.'"

Ah, Willow. His Chillow. His Chill Pill.

"As long as we're gossiping..." he said.

"We are not gossiping."

"Oh yes, we are," Darrell said with guilty satisfaction. He smiled, thinking of something else Chill Pill was ashamed to admit to. Her secret weakness for schmaltz. It included late-night showings of _The Sound of Music_ (she did a dead-on impersonation of the baroness) and binge listening to the entire compilation of Carpenters recordings for hours at a stretch.

"Let's see what Chet's got to say," he said.

Chet Porter's "Chet Chat" column made the reporter one of the hottest in Internet celebrity gossip.

"The guy's been in a slump. Whatever he's got, I'm sure we've already heard it in five other places. Why is he considered hot? Dude's stuff is old."

"And mostly lifted from your vaunted tabloids."

"It may be stale, but that doesn't mean it isn't true." Darrell brought up the site. "I like Chet. He's got a great BS detector. When he thinks he's being snowed, he works it into his copy."

Darrell paused thoughtfully. His girlfriend, too, had a great BS detector. Willow could interpret celebrity doublespeak with the best of them. For instance, saying a couple "knew how to enjoy life," was as good as calling them hedonists with uncontrollable spending habits; being "fiercely independent" meant given to three-day champagne and cocaine binges, while "down to earth" equaled "hippie pothead." And when someone had "a family back in Podunk he remains close to," Willow could tell you there were obscure relatives coming out of the woodwork looking for money.

"Chet was the first to predict Demi and Ashton would never go the distance."

Willow rolled her eyes in disgust. Darrell's heart did a tiny flutter. Darrell's heart always did a tiny flutter when Willow did something in disgust.

He thought of the opportunity that lay ahead.

What if he asked her and she rolled her eyes in disgust?

"Darrell, a two-year-old could have seen that Demi and Ashton would never go the distance. Lavender's deaf, dumb and blind Auntie could see that Demi and Ashton would never go the distance."

Willow tapped the down arrow three times and scrolled to the scoop about a famed couple who recently tied the knot. "It says here they took each other to be lawfully wedded spouses..."

Over her shoulder, Darrell followed along. "...For as long as they both shall grow?"

What the hell was that?

"Why not just make it 'until someone hotter comes along'?"

"Or how about, 'for better or forget it'?"

"Or better yet, 'until it shall be time to move on.'"

"Not to overlook the classic, 'hey, let's see where this thing is going.'"

Grow, respect, communicate—all vague, nonspecific words. Weasel words, that's what these people spoke. Weasel word vows for weasels who wanted to wriggle away. What was the matter with the hardcore nitty-gritty? Sickness. Health. Richer. Poorer. Until death.

Darrell grew quiet while Willow drained her coffee cup. What was with everyone and their half-assed approaches to holy matrimony? Marriage wasn't supposed to be this way. Marriage was supposed to be like a roach motel; you checked in but you didn't check out. People told Darrell, you have no right to criticize. You've never been married. Well, screw people. Darrell was going to get married.

And Darrell was going to stay married.

Willow set down her cup and blotted her fading lips with a cocktail napkin. "At least they refrained from promising to bake each other's favorite chocolate chip cookies for the foreseeable future. That's a comfort."

"Now you know why people get dogs, Chill Pill."

Willow tensed at the subject; animals did that to her. "At least dogs are loyal." He thought of his two, Cavendish and Hilts, in their cages in the cargo hold.

Willow, ramrod straight in her seat, pointed to the screen. "Darrell."

"Yes?"

"We're not going to be those people."

She kissed him lightly and settled back for a nap. As she dozed, Darrell reached out and brushed her knee. (Sheer hose, Rule of Beauty.) Willow was no weeper, but she was no Storm Goddess either. As far as wives went, she'd be solid. He would ask her this week, while they were both in New York.

It was time.

***

This place didn't feel like "theirs."

Amanda tucked the covers under her arms and stared at the ceiling.

She and Al had only been engaged a few weeks. Al had barely even moved in—or she should say, back in—since his previous stint on the basement futon. Not that Al had many possessions. He had his Olivetti, and that was about it. Adjusting to the dark, her eyes fell upon the outline of her creamy white bedroom furniture.

Oh, and his Mets cap. Al possessed a Mets cap. It now lay casually atop the dresser.

Thirty-four floors up though it was, her mother's penthouse had never felt like a nest when Amanda was growing up. But Amanda had managed to make one right here, in her house in Astoria. And her mother was right; she did used to give great parties, though most of them had been Darrell's idea. He even supplied cooking lessons. There was _101 Uses for Bacon Grease_ , as well as _How to Cook a Turkey Proper_. And some recipe for pork chops that started out promising enough, with a light dusting of flour, but ended up a busy mish-mash of cream-of-something soup, ketchup, potato chips and "the cheese of your choice." The lesson in turkey came about one Thanksgiving when Darrell decided not to troupe back to Kansas and instead hauled a deep fryer onto Amanda's back stoop.

But most of the time it had been quiet, like now. Especially in the bedroom. She heard a replay of Darrell's voice, from long ago, a conversation about her constant lack of a love life. "I mean, come on, you're on the other side of the hall, and yet do I ever hear a peep?"

"Good grief, Darrell."

"But I've been here for months and months and—nothing."

There was a creaking, now, on the basement steps, the product of either the stairs themselves or else Al's tired bones. She was never quite sure.

A minute later Al shuffled in and stripped down to his shorts.

"Progress?" she asked.

"Girlfriend's still holding out on him," he answered.

"Really? Interesting."

Amanda hadn't held out on him. Al knew about she and Darrell, thanks to Darrell's flapping gums and inability to tell a lie. Well, not _all_ about it, but as much as he needed to know, namely that their time together had been a momentary lapse of reason. If Al hadn't told her otherwise, it never would have occurred to her that what the two men talked about down in the basement was her. She'd figured it was all football and movies, the merits of the Jets and the Chiefs, which of the spaghetti westerns was best. Still, she could imagine how the conversation had gone.

Al: "There was something between you?"

Darrell: "Yeah."

Al: "Physical?"

Darrell: "Briefly. Very briefly. But it ended badly—mostly because I was a jerk."

Al: "I did not know that."

Of course, Al didn't act like a jerk. He rightly assumed the coast was clear and made his move—when he was ready. Not that Al should have asked for Darrell's permission or even his blessing, since Amanda certainly wasn't Darrell's possession. So when Al, by then in his own writer's hovel, called her up at the beginning of the summer before last, thirty had been a scant two years away, and she wanted to get moving on her white picket fence dream, so she let him swoop in and whisk her off her feet. Although with Al, it was more like schlumping.

Schlumping to the edge of the bed, Al, in his shorts and a white T-shirt, dove under the covers.

Creak.

In Amanda's head, Darrell's voice butted in again. _Life is too short not to sleep naked, pork chop._

She felt the warmth of Al's arm circling her neck, pulling her close.

"Good night, honey."

He kissed her lightly on the lips and rolled over.

Before she could say, "Good night," back to him, the buzzing of snores came rippling across the covers. She lifted the corner of the sheet and peeked underneath. It was probably just as well they weren't naked. Every time they were, she felt like they were at a funeral, and that didn't make any sense at all, because who was ever naked at a funeral?

Maybe things had grown a tad quiet between the sheets since they'd become engaged. So what? Their future looked bright. They had a plan. They'd continue to live here, in the house, until they started their family. Still, caught under the warmth of his arm, hearing the wheeze of his snores, she couldn't help but feel a chill.

And then an unbidden thought. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she did need female Viagra.

3 Monday

If Darrell were careful, he could sneak in a whole smoke before Willow caught him. He reached across Willow's reclaimed barnwood coffee table for his lighter. He probably should wait and light up outdoors. Willow could detect cigarette smoke in the living room all the way from her cubicle in Midtown if she put her mind to it. Besides, Hilts had launched into his _I'm ready for my morning walk, now_ prance.

The antsy Jack Russell terrier's paws scrip-scraped across Willow's cool concrete floor.

"Ssh." Darrell said, poised in mid-strike. "She'll hear you."

He reconsidered his gamble and set his lighter on the table top's black iron inlay. What was he thinking, trying to smoke in Willow's loft? He might as well poke a coiled snake with a stick. Then it hit him: If smoking indoors wasn't going to fly now, it certainly wasn't going to fly once they got married.

Well, they'd work something out.

Darrell glanced at the latest news displayed on Willow's tablet. Lavender Davis made the cover of _People_ again. STRONGER THAN DEATH, the story declared in bold white capital letters with a smaller, more subdued subhead: _The star nurses a beloved aunt back from the brink._

What a pant load.

Hilts added a whelp to his dance repertoire. Darrell glared. "She'll hear you." As if understanding, the dog retreated behind one of the loft's original iron pillars. Cavendish's ancient, gray figure remained sprawled on the hand-hooked wool rug.

One of the bathroom's two sliding doors whirred, causing both Darrell and the dogs to anticipate the emergence of Willow. But then she came out through the kitchen, not the bedroom, as they'd expected. Hilts turned up an ear. Darrell glanced up. Cavendish's lazy eye tracked her as she rounded the sharp edge of a countertop, her hands clasped in glee.

"I love the smell of deadlines in the morning!"

Today was closing day for the latest issue of _Haute_ , which meant Darrell likely wouldn't see her until the opening at Six3 tomorrow night. A club opening not to be missed, since Lavender Davis would be in attendance. More fodder for Willow's future hit piece.

But then, after Tuesday, the rest of the week remained wide open for Darrell to pop the question.

This morning she'd dressed for another day of being on New York's Most Influential 30 Under 30 list. Her hair was wound into a no-nonsense knot, her feet shod in gun-metal sling backs, her jacket the color of armor. Darrell, on the contrary, was dressed for a hard day of being an unkempt movie star—orange hooded sweatshirt, purple-lensed rimless eyeglasses, jeans the color of dust.

Darrell adjusted his glasses—without which his sweatshirt appeared as nothing but an orange blob under his nose. "Cheating Rock Star and Estranged Wife are 'taking their commitment to each other very seriously'," he said, indicating a teaser headline on _People._

"Uh-oh, brink of divorce." With a deft movement of the hand, she eased the tablet off the table and into her briefcase.

"Looks like it," Darrell said.

"I'm off." She disregarded the animals and breezed toward the door, nearly trouncing Cavendish's ear with her heel. Cavendish, too old to fear anything anymore, rolled his eyes and let out a hmmph.

"Don't expect me till late," she sang, almost giddily.

The elevator clunked, whisking her down to Leonard Street.

Darrell peered around the pillar where Hilts huddled. "Okay, boy. At ease."

The park across the street seemed like a good bet for the dogs to get in a walk and a frolic. A few minutes later, Darrell leashed them up and headed out onto the cobblestones and into the world. Hilts raised his snout a little higher. Seeing New York for the first time, the dog clearly loved the stimulation of the city, not that he needed it.

A sign on the park's high metal fence brought Darrell to a halt. _No dogs allowed_. He rattled the gate. Willow _would_ live across the street from a park that didn't allow dogs.

Lighting up, Darrell's thoughts returned to the smoking issue. How could they ever "work it out?" Willow wasn't good at compromise. Willow was good at _my way or the highway_ —and she was the one who usually did the leaving. Darrell would have to quit.

Peering through the bars, Darrell took in the crowd. Kids climbing on monkey bars, swinging on swings. On painted wooden benches, watching out for them, young women weighed down with diaper bags and strollers. Their mothers? Hardly. Not in in this, the most expensive zip code in America.

Nannies.

Darrell took a drag on his cigarette. Would his and Willow's future kids play here?

The smoking issue was not the only one they'd have to work out. A one-bedroom loft, even one with twelve-foot ceilings and authentic iron pillars, would never do when a baby came along. Willow would require an entire floor, possibly more.

Willow would also require a full-time nanny, possibly more. Either that or Darrell would have to do playground duty himself. He squeezed his eyes and squinted into the distance, picturing the scene. Just him and the ladies sitting on the bench, rocking their strollers and hashing over the headlines in _People_ and _Haute_.

Feeling the dogs straining against their leashes, Darrell gave the lines a tug. "Come on boys. Let's move on."

Hilts sprayed the fence post, and they left.

Happily, Darrell found a dog run along the Tribeca waterfront, and soon Hilts was yipping his way through the neighborhood, passing happening restaurant after happening restaurant. Darrell studied menus, scouting locations for his proposal. _Obviously, you'll want sushi_ , said a voice in his head that sounded like Amanda Girl's. _What better choice when you're asking such a cold fish to be your wife?_

At the dog run, Cavendish wasted no time flopping on the soft grass while Darrell and Hilts played fetch with a tennis ball.

Tomorrow Darrell had a full plate. There'd be the table reading of the script in the morning, followed by an appearance on _The Tonight Show_ in the afternoon. Then he and Willow would pop in to the Six3 opening after dinner.

The words "full plate" brought breakfast to mind. Biscuits and gravy, specifically, and he knew the best place in town to get it: Amanda Girl's neighborhood. That would be a hike, going out to Astoria. But why not? He hadn't paid her a visit in ages, not since she'd started dating Al.

Darrell would explain away his intrusion. He'd say, _I realized that as an engaged couple, the two of you would want nothing more than to share your joy with ol' Darrell, seeing as how he's in town and all, and the lack of an invitation was just an oversight on y'all's part, so here I am, come to share your joy._

Amanda wouldn't mind. Darrell was family. She loved company when it was family.

He stomped out another cigarette. "Giddy up," he told Cavendish and Hilts. "We're going on a field trip." They'd never been to Amanda Girl's. She'd only visited them, out in California. He let the tennis ball dribble away then put the pooches back on their leashes.

Before Hilts caught sight of the doggie drinking fountain and got a yen to lift his leg in there.

***

Amanda flung wide the glass vents of her very own backyard greenhouse and took in a deep breath of fresh air—well, relatively fresh, considering the presence of a Con Ed power plant in the neighborhood. Through the glass all around, light flooded in, bringing with it a feeling of spaciousness. After years of appearing on talk shows to promote _Knightley_ and the occasional film, Amanda had at last found a "green room" she could love.

She had managed to pack a country house's worth of charm into a space the size of a second bedroom. At the open vent she paused; from here she could look up and see the window of her actual second bedroom—the one formerly inhabited by Darrell.

"A greenhouse?" she'd said when he proposed it. "I can have one of those?"

"This is New York City, pork chop. You can get anything here."

She'd known it was possible; she just hadn't considered it. The inspiration had been all his.

"The space would be perfect," he'd said as they stood by his bedroom window, visualizing. "The exposure is to the south and east, the garden wall will cut the wind from the north, and the house will block the afternoon sun on the west."

"Aren't you smart."

Darrell shrugged with characteristic affability. "I've thought it through is all."

The result was a custom-made affair, Victorian in style, octagonal in shape, with dark green wrought iron finials crowning the high-pitched roof. The free-standing structure hogged most of the concrete scrap of space that could be called a garden. Raised outdoor vegetable beds filled the rest.

Somewhere in the lush oasis, her visiting grandmother puttered away the morning with her.

"Now where have you gone, precious?" Gran's whimsical voice said. Amanda looked up to find Gran's face, still dreamy and fairy-like at seventy-seven, peeking out over a cluster of geraniums. "Oh, there you are."

If someone were to do a film version of _Cinderella_ meets _Peter Pan_ , Amanda's grandmother, Dame Wendy Bentley-West, would be a casting director's dream to play Tinker Bell's fairy godmother.

Hollywood hadn't discovered Gran until her golden years. Before that, she'd been long renowned for her work on the British stage. About the only things Gran had accrued more of than theater honors were husbands.

Like Amanda, Gran had fair hair (though hers had gone grayish). Like Amanda, Gran played characters with winsome charm (though her pixie face could turn puffed-up and grouchy like her pet budgie). Like Amanda, Gran had a smashing garden (hers was at her flat in London.) And, like Amanda, Gran had been nominated for an Academy Award three years ago. (though Gran, up for the big award, Best Actress, had been robbed.) Grandmother and granddaughter had graced the cover of _Haute_ on their Oscar issue (though both managed to escape being savaged by the pen of Willow Chaney.)

"You've been in town since the day before yesterday? Why didn't you call?" Amanda said, trying not to sound irritated. "Did Dad know you were coming? Why didn't he think to call?" She tossed her hands up. "What is with this family?"

Gran's blue eyes fluttered. "Don't be angry, precious." Gran, too, had a movie coming out. An animated feature. She supplied the voice of the matriarch of a school of mermaids. "I'm to do those dreadful morning shows."

"I'd have invited you along yesterday. You could have shared in my good news." And perhaps rescued brunch.

She took Gran's age-spotted hand and curled her fingers over it, so that Gran could admire her engagement ring. She'd always remembered Gran's hands as plump and doughy. Now they'd begun to wither with her advanced age.

Releasing her gentle grip, Dame Wendy pronounced the ring brilliant. Then she patted her only grandchild on both cheeks. "Precious, I'm positively delighted for you and this Alfred fellow of yours."

It was Al as in Alphonse, not Alfred, but Amanda hardly minded. Unlike the ones her father issued, Gran's pronouncement had Amanda dancing on tiptoes. Gran was thrilled for her! It did make sense. Yes, Gran always did like Al. Yes, Gran always did think they'd make a lovely couple. Yes, Gran always knew Al was sweet on Amanda, that he would be devoted to her, that he would make her happy, and she, him. Yes, Gran could see the two of them having a loving home and beautiful, bright children. Yes, Al did seem a man devoted to his work, but weren't they all?

Amanda made her way to the orchids. Gran followed, dodging to avoid a hanging fuchsia. She'd shown up via hired car unannounced on Amanda's doorstep at the crack of Al's typewriter this morning. Not that Amanda minded that, either. And not that Al's typewriter had been cracking. In fact, she knew a parent or two who could take a lesson from Gran about coming to visit.

"My, these orchids. They are lovely." Gran fingered the roots at the base of a mauve and white Phalaenopsis.

"Darrell gave me that one." Her first. A greenhouse-warming gift. Now she had a collection. She loved raising them. They were exquisite and serene and gave her something to fuss over.

"This little guy's not happy over here." Amanda fingered a bloomless stalk in the collection. "It's too cold at night. He likes it better over there." Amanda relocated the orchid, then went outside to the raised beds and started picking last-of-the-season greens for salad.

"You should stay for supper," she told Gran.

Actually, the one Amanda should have invited was Darrell. Okay, Darrell and Willow. For him, this house had been home. And if anyone in her life was the type to barge in without calling first, it was the "uncouth" Darrell. Yet, nothing. Surely he'd hit town by now. Work on _Knightley_ began tomorrow at eight sharp.

"Oh, precious, no," Gran said. "I've dinner plans already."

"Too bad you'll miss Al. He had to take his typewriter for repair."

"Typewriter?" Gran said, a confused look settling on her, as if she'd suddenly lost the plot somewhere. "Good heavens, what for?"

Amanda gently took her elbow. "For the novel he's working on. He has a tight deadline with his publisher and well, he's old school. He doesn't do computers."

Gran relaxed into dazed laughter. "My dear, you really have snared quite the Renaissance Man, haven't you now? A man of dual careers."

Amanda thought that was laying it on a bit thick. Sure, Al had started out as a crime reporter, but it wasn't that drastic a jump into writing detective fiction.

Gran's voice fluttered. "That reminds me. I've a new joke for him. A man walks into a library. 'May I help you?' the librarian says. 'Yes,' says the man, 'I'd like a book on French war heroes..."

Except that Al didn't really make fun of the French. Al made fun of the Yankees. _Darrell_ on the other hand...

"N-no, Gran, that's Darrell."

Gran looked around for this Darrell fellow. Not finding him, she asked, "Then which one is your boy?"

"Al."

Gran continued to look clueless. Amanda's voice grew squeaky and high as she muttered, "The one from down in the basement," before turning away to pick more lettuce.

Had Gran gotten muckled on gin already today? Clearly, that would explain everything, the aimless wandering, the banging into potted greenery, and, most of all, the assumption that her granddaughter would marry Darrell Rawlings.

"Come on, Gran, have a seat." They settled onto a white wrought-iron settee just inside the greenhouse door, next to a Meyer lemon tree. Resting her hand on the settee's curlicue arm, Amanda brushed up against the potted citrus.

Her bag of salad greens in her lap, she rustled the leaves of the Meyer lemon with her fingertips. She should have invited him over. That was clear. As crystal as dew on a leaf.

Enough. She'd see him on set tomorrow.

Taking Gran's hand, Amanda helped her to her feet and they headed out the glass door and back up the brick path. Amanda invited her to the filming of _Knightley_ on Friday.

"It'll be fun. As it happens, Darrell's guest-starring this week." She gave Gran's arm a nudge.

Gran let out a non-committal, leaking balloon sound.

Then in lieu of dinner tonight, Amanda suggested lunch. "There's a new cafe just around the corner on Thirtieth. They make their own patè. My treat." Leaning into Gran, she sniffed discreetly around the old woman's breath. No gin. "Shall we?"

Gran sighed and looped her arm through her granddaughter's.

"Problem?" Amanda asked.

"Only that you know how it is with French food. Thirty minutes later you're arrogant and rude again."

***

Amanda had never wanted to play Clara Varner in _The Long, Hot Summer_. She auditioned for the vampy part—Eula, the oversexed wife of the wimpy son—not the uptight spinster part. But by then the producers had found someone else for Eula: bewitching brunette Lavender Davis. You, you're a Clara, they told Amanda. Goody-two shoes, school teacher, sexually frustrated.

Terrific.

Clara was hung up on drippy writer Alan Stewart until mysterious drifter and reputed barn burner Ben Quick came along and lit her fire. Amanda had related to the story and its themes: pairing up, settling down, making babies, things most people wanted out of life. Plus, it had great scenes between Clara and her cigar-chomping blowhard papa, who connived to marry her off to Ben in a shady business deal.

Jac had been unimpressed. "That movie? Spare me. In real life, the drifter and the slut sister-in-law would have a shameless affair and make a mess of everyone's lives. Birds of a feather and all that."

Amanda saw only rich metaphors and lush dialogue. And she wanted to be part of it, and if that meant having to play a frustrated schoolmarm, well...

Besides, Amanda could handle blowhards. She had a lifetime of experience. And so, during her first summer hiatus from _Knightley_ , Amanda dutifully headed down to what was supposed to be Mississippi (but was in fact, a location shoot in Louisiana) to deliver her lines with crispness and aplomb.

Until she found out who her co-star would be.

"Darrell Rawlings? The _Frisky Puppy_ guy? Are they kidding me?"

Normally Amanda left the on-set hissy fits to the divas and the whack-jobs, but the day she learned Darrell Rawlings would play the male lead... Well, she would have stormed into the producer's office and demanded they get someone new, but she was a lowly ingénue and Darrell had just broken out. The most that powerless Amanda could do was vent to Michele over a glass of wine.

"Ben Quick has an edge. We need an actual actor for this part, not a clown. The audience has to believe this man is capable of getting under this woman's skin."

"And clearly he doesn't," Michele said with rare sarcasm, noting Amanda's clenched shoulders.

"The actor who plays Ben Quick has to have an intensity," Amanda insisted.

The very notion of a Darrell Rawlings was completely cheesy, leading man-wise. Cheesy would have been great had they been doing purely romantic comedy, but how would it go down during the heavy parts? Ben Quick was tormented by a no-good father, and from the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed manner of him, Darrell Rawlings looked like he'd never been tormented by anything more than a losing night at poker. A frat boy. A towel-snapper. That's what Amanda decided Darrell Rawlings was. A lightweight, cast as someone with a dark past.

But then, he'd gone and surprised her.

Oh, Darrell had turned out to be a towel-snapper all right, but Amanda discovered she liked him despite, even because of (maybe) that fact. His Ben Quick was oilier than Newman's (though not as classically handsome). She'd been impressed. She didn't think a chipper type like Darrell Rawlings could pull off oily.

It was nearly sundown—and hours after Dame Wendy had returned to Manhattan—by the time Amanda finished her errands and parked around the corner, groceries beside her, a pleasant chill in her bones, and a rush in her blood over seeing and working with Darrell again.

Nights had started to get cold. A fire would portend romance. Al would be home, Loretta the typewriter resting comfortably. No slouch in the kitchen himself, he'd help with dinner. They'd cuddle up with a movie—old, her favorite kind—and discuss possible wedding dates before their initial meeting with the wedding planner tomorrow. Middle of May sounded sublime.

Heading through the narrow walkway toward the side door, she did spot a familiar drooping face, mushed up flat against the slate pavers, ears to the sides.

It was not, however, Al's drooping face.

"Cavendish. Oh, Cavendish!"

She set her groceries on the ground and knelt next to the hound. Then she cupped Cavendish's chin in her hand and stroked the top of his head.

"I've missed you."

His eyes held the same weary tenderness as always. She swore Cavendish and her late grandfather—Gran's first husband, retired military and from whom Amanda had inherited her long body line—had once, long ago, been separated at birth. Same long ears, same droopy eyelids, same loyal, faithful bearing.

"You're a good soul, Cavendish."

Then she noticed the short, erect tail and frantic step of a Jack Russell.

"Hello, Hilts."

"They the only ones you're glad to see?" a voice said from the greenhouse. The guy ambling up from the settee inside, rustling the Meyer lemon leaves in the process was most definitely not her future husband.

She got up. "I knew I should have locked the place up earlier. Didn't Al let you inside the house?"

"Al still lives here?" Darrell said. Mock incredulity. The _Frisky Puppy_ guy again, turning on the smarmy charm. Who did he think she was, some fawning female fan and not his old friend? One hand palmed the baggie of salad greens she'd left behind, which he appeared to have been snacking on as if they were potato chips.

"Cute."

"No trace of Al," he said, letting the bag of greens slide lazily to his side. "I hopped the gate out front. And tried calling but you're not answering." He smiled. "Some things never change."

The memory of discarded sweat socks strewn about her living room prompted a sideways glance from her.

"You didn't bring any dirty laundry with you, did you?" Although if he had, he knew where the machines were.

"Pork chop, I would never impose my dirty laundry on your newly engaged domestic bliss."

Amanda felt her nose twitch. "So Al's not home. That's odd. Are the Mets playing?"

"It's the post-season. Of course the Mets aren't playing."

Still quick with the wit, Darrell was.

She fished around in her satchel for her keys. "He must be at his mother's."

The cellar, his mother's, and Citi Field. That covered the bases as far as Al's potential whereabouts were concerned. She had to admit, bantering with Darrell had its joys. It was a far cry from grunts out of the basement.

"Sorry," she said as they headed for the door.

"S'okay," he said, taking up her groceries and giving her a kiss.

A friendly kiss, polite, non-suggestive, the hello kind that landed squarely on the cheek and nowhere near the lips, never mind the nape of the neck or the back of the ear, thank goodness. But there was no reason to get into that now _._

"And by the way," Darrell said, "I saw you drive up in your Z. Are you still driving that thing? Woman, don't you know how to spend your cash?"

She pulled away from him. "What's wrong with my Z?"

"Nothing. Your Z is a very cool car. But you can't drive it forever."

"Why not? It only has eleventy-thousand miles on it. It's barely broken in."

Besides, Amanda loved her Z. It was another old thing in her life that she'd never bear to part with. And it was not dated. Anymore. An '80s car from the year of her birth. As vintage as her father's bottle of port. She'd bought it when she turned eighteen with her money from her bit part as a candy-striper in the teen cult film _Student Nurses_. Though the car had been dated then, it was a classic now. And truly mint.

"Why aren't you downtown with Willow?" she said cautiously. Darrell and Willow were so on and off, you had to be careful about making assumptions.

"Willow has a magazine to put to bed."

She held back a snort. "Whose enemies list is she trying to get on these days?"

"Miss Lavender's."

Amanda smiled. "She could do worse."

It was weird to have to let Darrell in, when this had always seemed like his home, and she moved with tentative, almost nervous steps.

"So tonight I'm the Romanos's," Darrell said.

"The whose's?"

"Yours and Al's."

"Oh. Right." She hadn't begun to think of herself as a Romano. Or a Monroe Romano. Or a Monroe-hyphen-Romano. She hadn't thought at all about what to call herself as a married woman.

Darrell pushed his glasses higher on his nose. He'd lived in her spare bedroom for nine months while Willow attended Princeton, and she couldn't recall him wearing the same pair twice. Behind the funky lenses, the irises of Darrell's blue-green eyes were flecked with gold. The whole world got to see the funky lenses; a precious few got to see the specks.

"You really wear those when you go out?" she asked.

"I like to think they get to wear me."

Amanda groaned and led the dogs inside while Darrell followed with the groceries. He couldn't use "smarmy egotistical actor" on her and get away with it; she knew him too well.

"I see they got you purtied up these days."

Amanda gave her curls a swish. "Oh, the hair. Fleur's getting closer to reuniting with her true love, can't you tell?" The show's style team had glammed up Fleur's look for the final season. Amanda's hair had been bobbed and returned to its naturally loopy state, then lightened from waxy yellow buildup to pale silvery lemon. And Fleur's clothes were designer these days, not discount.

"Stay for dinner?" she said.

"That depends. What's for chow?"

"Butternut squash risotto and wild mushroom fricassee."

She'd changed her mind about the meat loaf. After dealing with a temperamental typewriter all day, Al, she figured, would want a romantic dinner to complete their romantic evening with their romantic fire in the romantic hearth while they watched their romantic movie.

So much for that plan.

Darrell whistled. "Mushroom fricassee, huh? Just like Ma used to make."

"Heh."

***

As with the other windbags in her life, Amanda worried about Darrell. Darrell believed honesty was the best policy, and that kind of policy could land you in a world of trouble in Hollywood, whether it was a sham marriage, a substance abuse habit, bad plastic surgery, money scams, any number of ways to lose touch with reality.

During the time he'd lived in her house, they'd covered a million personal subjects in what Amanda fondly called their kitchen table talks, those late nights and lazy afternoons whiled away stuffing their faces and talking about everything under the sun. The kitchen table occupied the exact geographical center of her home. Amanda had measured. According to Michele, the geographical center ought to remain empty, so that energy could circulate, but Amanda liked the idea of conversation flowing there.

"This house is all you," Darrell said, sitting at the table, warmth in his words. She took that as approval of the subtle grey hardwood floor and soft yellow wallpaper that were new since he'd moved out.

"Not all me," she said, inclining toward the room they still called his, above their heads.

"Still got the round table," he said, gripping its edge of smooth polished teak.

"So you like the new look?"

"Sure."

"You'll never guess who helped me with it." She leaned close. "Your favorite set decorator."

"You mean in between appointments taking her cat to the cat whisperer's?"

"It's not a 'cat whisperer,'" she said. He always made Michele sound flightier than she actually was. "It's a _pet psychic_."

"Shame on me."

She opened a cupboard and pulled out her favorite pan, a two-quart saucier, and started sautéing.

"I forget, do you eat mushrooms?" she said, as he leaned over and peeked at the simmering creminis and black trumpets (her produce guy was out of hen of the woods). "I was going to put them in the salad, but seeing as how you've already eaten the salad..."

"Which, thanks to ol' Darrell and his inspirations, you can go out back now and pick more of," he said, gesturing toward the greenhouse.

Bowed over the pan of hot mushrooms, Amanda felt warmth rise within her. Small talk with Darrell. Not a bad way to kill time waiting for Al to return.

"Just to forewarn you," she said, looking over her shoulder at him, "Knightley's insecure about you and Harry being on set this week. He's been issuing edicts."

"Such as?" Darrell asked, gathering plates and silverware and setting the table for three.

"As of tomorrow, no eye contact with the star."

Darrell made a face. "That is so 2004. But what do you expect? The guy's got a forehead as big as the outdoors."

She gave her spatula an incredulous whack against the pan. "Excuse me?"

"Famous people have big foreheads. It's common knowledge. More room for the light to bounce off of. Makes you look better on camera. We've all got 'em. It's why we're on the screen."

The things he said.

"That may be true of your forehead, but it certainly isn't true of mine."

"Oh yeah? Take a look in the mirror, sweetie, next time you're primping."

"Darrell..."

"Yeah?"

She gave the saucier a firm shake. The creminis jumped. She delivered her punch line. "Underworked and overpaid much?"

He smoothed a hand through sandy hair. "I am not underworked. I have a Swiss watch commercial coming up next month."

The minute he'd hit L.A., Darrell had landed a role on one of those prime-time military dramas. He ended up parlaying it into his own overnight success story. It was the old _he was supposed to get killed off in the pilot but was kept on_ cliché, and the rest was history.

In Darrell's case, his being kept on had to do with the smoldering chemistry between him and his sexy but older co-star. One season turned into three, when along came his part in the frat-boy comedy _Frisky Puppy_. Darrell managed to upstage everyone in that cast, too, with his comic portrayal of a druggie deadbeat boyfriend.

Darrell Rawlings was a scene-stealer. He could never play the bad guy. Darrell played the screw-up private eye or the easy-going dad or the cocky deputy sheriff. At the very worst, Darrell would be the guy you'd believe could be the hero if only he weren't such an ass: the highly amusing dope fiend, the slick romancer who comes to love the lady he's been hired to kill. That would be the closest Darrell Rawlings would ever come to playing the true, evil-to-the-bone villain.

The dinner hour neared without any trace of Al. Finally, the phone did ring. Al did turn out to be at his mother's in Bayside. Yes, he'd stopped there on his way home from the repair shop. Yes, he'd lost track of time. Yes, he'd decided to stay for dinner there.

Disappointed, Amanda hung up. It was the second time in two days he'd no-showed on her. To be fair to Al, she'd lost track of time, too.

"Let me guess," Darrell said, glancing at the trio of table settings. "Al's at Citi Field, and the Mets asked him to stay for dinner."

"Ha ha," she said, not laughing. "His mother's making eggplant Parmesan, which just so happens to be the most killer eggplant Parm ever."

She looked forlornly at her own meal simmering on the stove.

"It blows the doors off—"

"Oh, come on," Darrell said, sensing her deflating mood. "Chin up. I'm sure that, er, um, butternut squash and mushroom fricassee is delicious."

"It's not exactly comfort food."

He poked at a mushroom with the spatula. "Now, now. We'll open a bottle of fancy wine, have a nice dinner, and admire your remodeled décor. I'll keep you company until Al comes home. We could go out later for dessert if you want. Coffee and tiramisu. My treat."

Amanda sighed and forced a smile. "You're just saying that because you want leftover eggplant Parm, too."

***

It was a chilly night, but Amanda didn't mind walking the three blocks to Thirtieth Avenue for the dessert and coffee Darrell had promised her. It gave her the chance to put on her new-for-fall sweater coat. Dusty powder blue, her favorite blue. They left the dogs behind. As they walked, she pointed out condo development after development, new buildings that had sprouted up since Darrell lived here. They'd always loved talking about houses together.

Her spirits lifted, and she noticed Darrell also sporting a grin.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked.

"Just thinking about your and Al's future kids."

"Oh yeah? What do you see?"

"Six boys, lot of black hair."

Thinking of the cozy image, she huddled inside her sweater coat. The risotto was still warm in her stomach, the wine still supple on her tongue. "Sounds like heaven."

"All of them named Louie."

"Heh."

"I know," he said, his tone teasing. "You like the name Charlie."

Yes, he did know. They'd confided their dreams to one another many a time across the kitchen table.

"And you want _four_ kids," he went on. "Two boys and two girls, so each one will grow up with at least one sibling of the opposite sex and one of the same sex."

She dropped back a step. "You remember all that?"

"Pork chop, I remember everything."

They walked on. His tenderness surprised her. Usually, this was the part where he kidded her about spending too much time in school studying math problems or literature and generally living inside her head.

"We still have to decide your future career plans once your _Knightley_ gig is done."

"You already know my future career plans. Six boys, all named Louie."

"Woman, you belong on a damn screen. There's no reason you can't..." he stopped, disgusted. "You mean to tell me you're just going to up and quit?"

She nodded.

"But you can't!"

Pleading wouldn't work. "I might like to teach," she said.

"Teach?" He said it with the repulsion of a ten-year-old ordered to eat his broccoli.

She gave him a look and he went silent.

"Al and I talked about it," she said. "I've been thinking about opening a drama school. Maybe in another city. Maybe Seattle."

Which was about ninety percent fabrication wrapped around one-tenth of truth. Al had once taken acting lessons (to help him with character development), and she had been thinking about Seattle, but only because it wasn't New York, it wasn't L.A., it was out of the way (and also the place where Edie Temple lived in obscurity), and Amanda would be shooting scenes there next week for _Seismic Event_.

"Drippy Seattle aside, you'd be very good at teaching," Darrell said. "Except for one thing: You belong on a damn screen."

"A moot point," she said, choosing to steer the conversation away from that topic. "You know Al. He won't be taken out of the five boroughs alive."

"Al won't be taken out of the basement alive."

An ironic remark, considering the basement—not to mention the rest of the house—sat empty of Al tonight.

"You can't go on living in your broom closet of a house in Queens and using your Oscar as a doorstop forever."

"People all over this city live in broom closets," she countered. "And as for the Oscar, why is everyone in this business allowed to have eccentricities except me?"

"A-ha!" He jabbed his finger in the air. "So now you're 'in this business.' Two minutes ago you were getting the hell out."

She held back a smile. "Figure of speech."

Time to steer the conversation again. "What's on your horizon?"

"Besides Swiss watch commercials and getting to gaze at your angel face for the week?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Getting to the church on time."

Amanda froze in her tracks. Maybe she ought to have bundled up in more than a sweater coat. It was a calm night, but the shudder coursing through to her fingers and toes signaled otherwise.

"It's time," Darrell said. Then, after a moment, "Of course, Willow doesn't know it's time."

She took a hesitant step forward, her heel scuffing the sidewalk. "And good luck with that." She didn't even try to disguise her irritation with his girlfriend around Darrell. He knew her thoughts on the subject.

Willow. She was always manipulating Darrell, treating him like something to be scraped off the bottom of her sling backs. Of course, she treated most everyone like something to be scraped off the bottom of her sling backs.

From their kitchen table talks, Amanda knew that Darrell took marriage seriously. In fact, he took it more than simply seriously; he took it permanently. And because he took it seriously and permanently, it would have to happen at the right time and with the right woman. Darrell was a risk-taker, but the risks he took were calculated.

Darrell rushed to Willow's defense. "We agreed a long time ago that marriage meant sticking it out through thick and thin and that we would wait to undertake it until she was mature enough. We've been headed in that direction from the beginning. It's always been understood. You know Willow. She's always been mature beyond her years."

"Like when she couldn't decide whether she wanted you or not and dumped you for a year and then changed her mind and made it seem like she was doing you a favor by taking you back?"

Darrell shrugged. "That's called being fickle. _Cosi fan tutte_ , including you, pork chop."

The rough translation of the Italian meant, _thus are they all._

"Maybe," Amanda said, overlooking his botched pronunciation. "But Willow more so than most."

"See now, men..." Darrell began.

Amanda braced herself for a blanket statement. Her father wasn't the only man she knew who liked to issue them.

"We men are simple," Darrell said. "We either love you or we don't. You're either the kind we marry or the kind we don't. But you women, you make everything complicated. You con yourselves into thinking that we love you but just don't know it, when, trust me, if we did, we'd know it. Or you take too damn long to fall in love. Or you think that with time, you can learn to love a man, when, trust me, you can't."

She chose to freeze him out with an icy glare rather than reply with words. Darrell could say what he wanted about women in general being fickle and Michele in particular being an insecure dingbat, but Michele didn't toy with people and Michele wasn't mean. Not unlike some people _mature beyond their years_ that Amanda could have mentioned.

"All I need to propose to Willow is the right moment," Darrell said.

"When will that be?" She spun her words with a neutral voice.

"That is what I have to figure out." No neutrality on Darrell's part. His voice brimmed over, full of supreme faith that such a moment would surely come.

She frowned.

"You don't seem enthused."

"I'm enthused," she said weakly, brushing her hands across her upper arms for warmth.

"Funny, isn't it?" he said. "Both you and I ending up with scribblers."

"Al doesn't scribble. Al pounds keys."

"Yeah, gets his fingers stuck a lot too, doesn't he?"

She narrowed her gaze at him. "It happens when you use an old machine."

They arrived at the café in silence, Amanda still trying to absorb Darrell's news.

"Well, there's no need for you to worry your pretty little head about Willow using ol' Darrell for a play toy," he said, pulling out a chair for her. "That's all over with."

Amanda ignored the "pretty little head" comment. She was not about to be taken off point.

"You said that once before," she said firmly, "and then she went and did it all over again."

"This time it's for good."

Now who was making things complicated? Now who was trying to convince himself of things that weren't so? Damn that Willow. Why couldn't she have been nicer? Then Amanda could send Darrell off to marry with a clean conscience.

On the one hand, Amanda wanted Darrell and his previous puppy love for her off her hands. On the other, she felt a pang of guilt knowing it was coming at the expense of him having to share a lifetime with someone so warm and personable she was known as Chill Pill. Darrell was Amanda's buddy, her best male friend. Of all the boarders she'd taken in, he was the most special. She did not want to see him taken off the market by just any old hag.

And certainly not a young one.

But maybe Darrell did know what he was doing. He had to love Willow. And in that case, who was Amanda to judge? But then again, it wasn't Darrell's love for Willow that caused Amanda to hesitate to embrace him and wish them well. What Amanda wanted to know was, how much did Willow really love Darrell?

"Willow's grown up," he said.

She gave him her most sympathetic smile and picked up the dessert menu lying on the table. "I hope so. For your sake, Darrell, I really hope so."
4 Tuesday

"Let's see the ring, love."

Amanda gazed deep into the perfect proportions of Harry Ritter Johnson's face, at hazel eyes that twinkled merrily, at the dimple in his chin that winked even more merrily, at lips that pouted, lush and full and—

Loose.

The man had a reputation for gossiping (among other things). If you read in _The Weekly Star News_ that "a Hollywood insider" was listed as the source of a story, chances were the insider was Harry Ritter Johnson, aka the Wonder from Down Under, aka Dirty Harry.

Yes, Harry's lips were loose, like his morals, she reminded herself. This was a man rumored to have hit on cocktail waitresses while on his honeymoon.

Both times.

"I hope you didn't settle for anything less than five carats," he said.

The earthy scent of musk wafted across her nostrils and she held back a sneeze. Say this for the man: he did have that intoxicating thing going for him.

"Listen to you, Harry. You sound like a trophy wife."

She extended her left hand and wiggled the fourth finger. The aquamarine shot off slivers of light from its Art Deco setting.

"It's many more than that."

Twelve, to be exact.

Harry pulled her hand close and took in its seventeen-by-fourteen-millimeter rectangle of pale cloudless blue.

"Aha," he said.

"See. It's old and beautiful." She angled her hand so he could take in the tiered, diamond-studded levels of platinum leading up to the center stone.

"And also not a diamond." A skeptical Darrell, butting in.

She pried her gaze away from Harry to glare at Darrell. A pair of metal aviators, today's eyewear du jour, shielded Darrell's eyes.

Sheesh. What a couple of she-men. They were cattier than a room full of starlets at an audition.

Four days a week Amanda got to trot out her British accent and look winsome playing Fleur Harte. After five years on the series, Amanda had the parameters of her character down. They weren't difficult: eccentric, aspiring actress, with a streak of vulnerability so as to be endearing. Fleur was perennially unlucky in show business but destined to be lucky in love. Her big break constantly eluded her, but the show's story arc had her headed for the altar with her one true love, nice guy police officer Joe Nunez.

This week's episode was a diversion from that. Harry and Darrell were playing themselves. Average Joe was nowhere in sight. The fun part was that Amanda-as-Fleur would get to reject them both.

The three sat with rest of the _Knightley_ cast and crew—plus assorted onlookers—in orange plastic chairs at a square arrangement of conference tables, awaiting the arrival of Knightley Stapleton so they could begin the weekly ritual of reading the script aloud, line by line, testing out the jokes, gauging the response so the writers could tweak and toss all week long until, theoretically, they arrived at the perfected version, which would be filmed before a studio audience Friday evening.

For now, the atmosphere was decidedly casual. Even Amanda was in a dressed-down version of presentable. Today's twinset came accompanied by flared jeans and pale blue Keds.

At whatever hour Knightley did show up he'd encounter little resistance to his silly no eye contact decree. Everyone in the room—and from the size of the crowd, Amanda swore it included half the women in Midtown—had eyes for Harry and Harry alone.

Amanda glanced at the gathering, not unaware that her character was the stand-in for all those females watching and drooling and twirling their hair on the sidelines. She had to represent.

Never one to shirk her obligations, she was keeping the show's high-profile guest stars entertained until Knightley Stapleton arrived. And if it meant being in the middle of a movie hunk sandwich with Darrell Rawlings on one side and Harry Ritter Johnson on the other, well...

She touched her fingertips to Harry's chin, gently turned his face aside. So suave. So debonair. A girl could forget he was untrustworthy.

Still, for five seasons, she had been on time for every call. She had never taken a sick day, never stormed off the set in a tantrum. Wasn't she entitled to a little distraction?

Knightly pulled this practically every week, and Amanda always came prepared. Usually she passed the time with the _Times_ crossword puzzle.

Maybe this week wouldn't be so bad, as hell weeks went. All she had to do was get Al out of the house, resist Harry Ritter Johnson's charms, disregard her mother's bawdy suggestions for her love life, ignore her father's blanket pronouncements, and pretend to be happy for Darrell and Willow.

She could do that. She was a good actress.

In return for stretching out her hand, she earned the privilege of having it batted away and then being on the receiving end of Harry Ritter Johnson's world-renowned devilish grin, the one that had earned him his "Dirty Harry" nickname.

"I wouldn't kick it out of bed," he said. The twang of his Australian accent tickled her ears and she set her hand in her lap.

Harry was being awfully familiar for someone who'd only met her once before. That introduction occurred at the Oscars the year after her win for Best Supporting Actress, when she'd returned to present the award for Best Supporting Actor. Every year Harry hosted the most swinging after-party in town. Alas, that brief encounter was not enough to put Amanda on a hip, Hollywood insider, call-him-by-his-macho-middle-name basis like Darrell was.

When they filmed, Amanda switched her ring from her left hand to her right; that way, it didn't really count as taking it off, something Amanda swore she'd never do.

With hungry eyes Amanda sized up the spread of pastries, sliced fruit, lox, yogurt and cream cheese in the center of the configuration. Even the craft services department had gone all out for Darrell and Harry's appearance.

Not that anyone would actually eat anyway at a table read. Who wanted to begin a line and not be able to get the words out if you had a glob of bran muffin stuck in your throat?

Darrell reached out to make a selection from the smorgasbord. Leave it to him to go for a bran muffin. At least it was a healthier alternative to biscuits and gravy. Amanda hesitated, then decided she couldn't let Darrell eat—or make a fool of himself—alone. She reached, too, and helped herself to a poppy seed bagel then pulled over the tub of herbed cream cheese and gave the bagel a schmear.

"It's probably best I eat now," she said sheepishly. "Seeing as how I'll have to skip lunch."

"That's right," Darrell said, beholding an orange. "Christoff at noon."

Not that she wanted her appointment with the wedding planner broadcast, what with Harry Ritter Johnson and his gargantuan yapper around. The news would probably end up on _The_ _Weekly Star News's_ web site by two. Fortunately, Harry had managed to take his nose out of her engagement ring and was now happily posing for selfies with a gaggle of squealing production assistants.

Ritter wasn't Harry's real middle name, of course. He added it because it sounded manly and macho, and also because no one was going to take a star seriously with a double-entendre of a name like Harry Johnson. Win-win, as Jac would say.

Harry had landed in New York with a staff that required two private jets, multiple chauffeured vehicles, and numerous assistants. Darrell showed up with a following of two: Cavendish and Hilts. At the moment the dogs were holed up in a dressing room with one of Harry's lackeys, watching the "dreadful" morning shows. She wondered if they'd catch Gran.

As the company waited for Knightley, the morning wore on. Darrell and Harry spent the better part of it juggling oranges, flying paper airplanes, and promoting their efforts on various digital devices to the delight of their female audience.

Amanda extracted her crossword from her satchel and started filling in clues.

"Who's a four-letter rap star slash actor?" she asked. "Begins with an I."

"Try Ice-T," Darrell said.

"Okay, but shouldn't it be Iced T?"

"You are a hopeless dork."

She penciled in I-C-E-T and visibly winced at the bad grammar.

"Seventeen down, 'illicit affair.'"

Harry sparkled. "Assignation?"

"Five letters."

Channeling Clark Gable, he smoothed his mustache. "Fling. Tryst."

"Tryst fits." She entered the letters and sighed. "I've never had an illicit affair."

Darrell did a slow turn. "Ahem," he said.

What was his problem? What had happened between them was so momentary it hardly counted. Still, he had that look that said, _what am I, chopped liver?_

She leaned toward Harry and took it back. "I've had _one_ illicit affair."

Intrigued, Harry leaned in closer.

He looked into her eyes, then chortled and grinned. Then he looked at Darrell and chortled and grinned. Amanda lingered on Harry's grin, then moved her gaze up. There was more to it than mere seduction. A mischievous quality lurked behind those eyes. Harry knew something he wasn't telling. And that told _her_ something: If she ever needed a living, breathing reminder of why not to get involved with an actor, she had one now.

She ran her thumb across the comforting flat face of her aquamarine. Fortunately, she'd be marrying Al and they had nothing ahead of them but blue sky. Yes, Dirty Harry was the type of man Amanda would never in a million years consider becoming involved with in real life. She looked to her left, at Harry, with his bedroom eyes, then at Darrell on her right, with his frustrated grimace.

But it sure was fun pretending for a while.

***

The chin dimple isn't real!

A charge for which Darrell had no evidence. But still, watching Amanda Girl with Harry Ritter Johnson, he couldn't help the exasperation.

His old chum was about to lose her bubbled head.

Pretty-boy actors usually didn't stand a chance with Miss Amanda Monroe, though today Ritter seemed to be making headway. Like every other woman in the civilized world, Amanda was held spellbound by the cleft in the man's chin. (Big deal. The thing looked like a little rear end staring out.)

Earlier, at the table reading, Amanda Girl had not only polished off her bagel, but also helped herself to sliced fruit. It wasn't until she'd moved on to dessert, a piece of crumb cake she devoured by pulling off one gob of streusel topping at a time, that Stapleton finally stomped in, leading with his square jaw and following with a roly-poly belly and ridiculous penguin feet that jutted out at right angles. Amanda claimed the writers loved to put him in tuxedos. This week's episode supported that. It was right there on page twenty-one. _Knightley in a tux._ If they ever got around to page twenty-one.

Today Stapleton wore an ensemble of earth tones and suede, no less ridiculous than a penguin suit. With no apology for keeping his colleagues waiting for forty-five minutes, he plunked his larger-than-life derriere into an orange chair while half a dozen lackeys directed their sights elsewhere.

Table reads were supposed to be done straight. Figured Stapleton insisted on doing his part in character. He continued to be a pain in the ass throughout, stopping every five seconds to insist the dialogue was too long-winded ("People, can we prune this, please?") and finally grinding the entire enterprise to a halt by starting a debate with the writers over subject-verb agreement.

Once they settled the all-important question of whether Knightley's line should read "give her an outlet for her fears" or "gives her an outlet," the reading proceeded to the closing tag without incident. At that point Jac Cohen managed to wrangle Ritter into a backstage tour of the set. Ritter wisely and smoothly insisted he couldn't _possibly_ spare the time unless the show's supporting female—and lead dish—Amanda Girl, showed him around personally.

Brother.

As if Ritter were a tourist from Duckbreath, Iowa, who'd never been on a set before.

It was one thing to stand by and watch Harry's womanizing when it came after a long day's shooting and they were at a Hollywood after party, or the backroom of a Vegas casino, or the plunge pool of Harry's yacht. Darrell could take a detached, amused stance in those situations. But this was Amanda Girl and as far as Darrell was concerned, she was off-limits. And Darrell found it hard to stay amused and detached.

As they were breaking for lunch, breathless and fluttery from Ritter's attentions, Amanda got up from her orange chair and, turning to Darrell, did a hand-fan movement, eager to give Harry his grand tour.

Except for one little problem.

Christoff at noon.

In the hubbub of the table read, she'd forgotten all about it. _Come and get her, Al_ , Darrell thought. _Take her to the wedding planner so she can have what she's always dreamed of. Don't let her get sidetracked by cads and egomaniacs._

"It is impossible to say no to that man," she said.

Darrell shifted his slouch from one side of his plastic chair to the other, not wanting to know exactly what it was Ritter had asked her in the first place that was causing her the vapors.

"Great," he said. "Let's send him to the Middle East. Maybe he can settle things there. Because he certainly isn't ever getting invited over to our place."

"'Our' place?" Amanda looked puzzled, carrying her dumb blonde character over into reality. Then, light dawned. "Oh, you mean yours and Willow's."

Oops, not what he meant. "Old habits. Your place. Yours and Al's."

"Oh, right." A nervous laugh fluttered out. "Mine and Al's."

_Hint, hint. Wedding planner. Wedding planner._ Didn't register. She gave Darrell a blank stare.

"Is something wrong?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," he said. "I am shocked by your behavior, Miss Amanda. Shocked and dismayed."

"You mean about the 'illicit affair' business? Because I can explain that."

Yeah, yeah, he already knew. She wanted a Prince Charming to give her beautiful babies, and she'd passed on Darrell for the part long ago.

"Of course not."

"Good."

Because that was ancient history. Book shut, case closed, over and done. They'd been over it and over it.

"I'm talking about flipping your hair, twirling your foot." Darrell flipped his hair and twirled his foot.

She frowned. "Nice pale imitation."

She got up to latch on to Ritter again. Darrell paused a moment, considering whether to remind her about the wedding planner. That was what friends were for. And since friends was what she wanted to be...

"Listen, missy..." he said.

"'Missy'?"

Didn't he owe it to Al as well, to look out for Al's woman while the man wasn't around to do it?

"I'll call you whatever I please when you start forgetting you belong to someone else," he said. _And you're supposed to be at snooty Christoff's with that someone else_.

Lips pursed, she held up an index finger. "I had one conversation."

Sure, like she'd had "one" illicit affair.

"I am not about to throw over Al for the likes of Harry Ritter Johnson. So, you can relax."

_This is your cue, Al. Ring the phone, Al. Ring the phone._ Darrell waited. There was no call, and there was no getting through to Amanda's lost head. _Now would be a great time to call, Al._

If Darrell were a stand-up friend, he'd give Al a call. Or Amanda a nudge.

Again, Darrell cleared his throat.

"What is it this time?" she said tersely.

So that was how she was going to play it: Darrell as nuisance rather than well-meaning friend. Fine. Two could play that game.

"Nothing," he said. "Just clearing my throat."

Stand-up guys were suckers.

"Good. You're welcome to join us. Or not."

Darrell gave a nod. Then he gathered up his phone, his cigarettes, his lighter, and his indignation, and opted to join.

They went first to one the show's most iconic sets, the cocktail lounge on the first floor of the high-rise where high-profile attorney Knightley and his daughter, Fleur, lived. Lots of black, lots of leather, lots of chrome, lots of sleek. Darrell, Amanda, and Ritter would have a big scene in one of the half-round booths, trading barbs. Given the antics at the table read, Darrell could hardly wait.

Amanda perched on the edge of the seat, where her long legs could be apparent to all.

The booth, naturally, was not truly made of leather. And, upon closer inspection, it wasn't truly black or truly chrome, either.

Television.

Ritter poised a too-smooth hand on her shoulder. "All right, love, here's one. This dyslexic walks into a bra..."

How did she not lose her crumb cake over Ritter's stale jokes?

Instead, she melted, kicking her foot in a wide circle and the conversation into a higher gear. "So, what's your favorite drink, Harry?"

Ritter nuzzled up to her ear. "The next one." He paused. Amanda Girl, in suspense, awaited his next line. "And you'll never guess who my favorite woman is."

"Don't tell me." Giggle, giggle.

They cried the answer together. "The next one!"

Amanda did a flippy thing with her head. "Oh, Harry!"

Oh, barf.

The guy shouts his own name in the sack!

Probably. Darrell hadn't done any actual research on the matter, hadn't interviewed any conquests of Ritter's and so forth. But it stood to reason.

Darrell's phone blipped with a text. It caught Amanda's attention and she glared. He checked the caller's ID. Amanda's assistant, Paris. She wanted to know whether Darrell knew her employer's whereabouts.

Well, Paris, right about now she's nagging Dirty Harry to introduce more love and commitment into his life. She suggests he start with a pet.

Darrell began to eke out a reply to Paris while Amanda Girl blabbered on.

"You know, Harry, you think that by not committing, you're escaping bad stuff, but you're also missing out on good things," she said.

"Name three," Harry replied.

"Faithful companionship." She paused. "Soulful, watery eyes. Drooling."

Darrell closed his app. What the heck, he was feeling in a generous mood. He'd give Amanda Girl a nudge. At the mention of soulful watering eyes, he went for a joke. "Are we still talking about Al?"

Eureka, that did the trick.

"Al?" Her mouth fumbled around the word as if it were a foreign object. "We were never talking about Al. We were talking about..." Face palm. "Al!" Her voice became a moan. "I for-got." She grabbed hold of Darrell by the lapels. "We had the wedding planner today."

Then she reached for a pocket. "Give me your phone. Mine's in my bag."

"Oh sure, now the phone's okay."

She took a swipe at him and missed, then wrangled the device away and scrambled for an app. "Maybe he can still squeeze us in." Making a connection, she excused herself to converse in private.

A moment later she was back, disappointment on her face. "That was Paris." She handed him the phone. "Christoff won't take my calls. I have no idea when we'll get to reschedule."

Better luck next time, Al.

***

The motif running throughout all three levels of Six3 was "hell" and anything associated with it, from its suspended sunken pit of a dance floor to the passed trays of shrimp _fra diavolo_ , devil's food cupcakes, and habanero martinis.

Amanda had to admit, a simple one-hour promotional appearance at the thumping disco inferno in the Meatpacking District certainly felt like an eternity.

To make matters worse, not only had Al emerged from the basement and bothered to show up, he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. It turned out his old high school girlfriend worked on the management team. They'd become so engrossed in junior prom memories that he barely made a grunt when Amanda slipped away to join Jac and Michele for a nose-powdering and gossip session.

Jac's voice zinged around the muraled walls of the ladies' lounge, alive with pictorial tongues of flame. "She starves herself into a size zero so she can wear that?" Heads turned to watch the famous woman everyone was sizing up. Necks craned. And not a few of the so-called ladies nodded in wicked agreement.

Amanda noticed Michele shift uncomfortably on the word _starve_. "The dress is beautiful," Michele bemoaned. "Just not on her."

Jac looked appalled as more big names filed in. "It's a coffin lining. She ought to fire whichever hired flunky actually said, 'Miss Moore, that looks good on you.'"

"Got to say, coffin lining—not out of line in this place," Amanda said.

She sat on a velvet bench the color of hot coals before a vanity table in front of an oversize mirror with a scarlet frame, reapplying her decidedly non-fiery, pale pink lipstick, considering her reflection as she blotted. Darrell didn't know what he was talking about. Her forehead was a perfectly normal size. Perfectly respectable. Perfectly symmetrical. It was a non-celebrity, non-famous, non-high forehead.

Michele sidled up, checking herself out in the mirror. She looked her usual sex bomb self, blending into the club's theme with a strappy, sequined, burnished amber top and snug snake-patterned ankle pants that rode low across the hips and tight across the buns. "Do these make my butt look big?"

"What, that perky pair of cappuccino cups you call a rear?" Jac said. "Spare me." The publicist wagged a red fingernail at Amanda's ensemble: navy silk cap-sleeved turtleneck, loose-fitting slacks, low kitten heels. "You, on the other hand, could have sexed it up a bit. Even your mother is here rocking magenta hair."

Amanda jolted upright. "My mother's here?"

And magenta hair? The woman couldn't have just gotten another tattoo?

Michele peeled away to join her boyfriend on the dance floor, and Amanda was left to roam with Jac and wonder why she seemed to be the only one on premises content to blend into the wallpaper—if only the wallpaper weren't flocked with flames.

"Thank God I can at least count on Darrell to do his part to promote the show," Jac said.

"Darrell's doing his part to promote his movie."

"His movie, our show, I can live with that." Jac's fingers snapped twice. "Blah blah, win-win."

They stopped at the rail overlooking the maze of sectional seating and flickering candle light one level below.

Jac cocked her head toward a far corner of the room where Lavender Davis was chatting with her handlers. "See? See? Now there is an example of someone who knows how to do publicity."

"Let me guess," Amanda said knowingly. "You get your rep to make a big announcement about how you need to have your 'privacy'." Which Lavender had just done, according to this morning's tabloids.

Jac did another double-snap. "Win-win. You get to bash the media, whom everyone loathes, so people sympathize with you, and you still get coverage."

Amanda smiled. "What a shame Dirty Harry isn't here. If only he and Lavender could cross paths, they might become a perfect storm of scandal for you."

"Those two? Forget it, they'd cancel each other out. For a scandal to sizzle, there has to be some element of surprise. Someone pure has to be corrupted. You'd have to have Lavender hook up with some choir boy." Jac paused, then added with a hint, "Or Ritter with a good-girl type." She pointed a manicured talon at Amanda's heart.

"Don't look at me," Amanda said.

Jac sighed. "Tell me about it. I don't have that kind of luck."

Leaning over the railing, Amanda scanned the crowd. Al was still locked in conversation with the wounded-bird burgundy redhead who'd claimed his heart in high school.

"Look at Al sitting there," Amanda said, warmth oozing through her voice. He'd come to the party looking like an unmade bed—rumpled shirt, rumpled pants—and not unmade in a good way, say, by an early evening of unbridled passion and naked piggybacks around the boudoir. At least Al's rumpledness was part of who he was and not a fashion pose like it was with some other men. "He's so sweet."

"The kiss of death in a man," Jac said, not as sensitively and under-her-breath as she might have, considering she was speaking about Amanda's soon-to-be-husband.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." Jac shrugged. "Sweet is what women call men they aren't in love with."

"I'm marrying that man."

Amanda conveniently neglected to mention she'd conveniently forgotten to meet with the wedding planner earlier today to iron out the actual details of marrying that man. But she saw no reason to get into that now.

They descended more stairs and arrived at the main level.

"You know," Jac went on, "a woman will forgive a man for losing his hair or for having bad fashion sense—but for being sweet? Not a chance. Because no matter what women say about wanting sensitive men, mark my words, Amanda Jane, deep down, we don't respect them, don't desire them."

Jac inclined her jaw toward a cluster of somebodies up ahead. "And look, there's Ms. Chaney, swanning around like the most stuck-up bitch who ever lived."

Amanda followed Jac's gaze over to the well-put-together wisp of disdain to whom Darrell would bond himself for life. True to form, Willow had dressed appropriately ghoulish for Six3 in a slinky sheath the color of death warmed over that blended seamlessly with her pallid skin tone.

To be profiled by Willow Chaney and survive had become a badge of honor among the stars. In being her victims, celebrities (for once) came off looking like sympathetic underdogs instead of pampered, lavishly paid space cadets. So they kept lining up. Willow did have a rare talent; not everyone could pull off her _sangfroid_. But while her subjects loved the publicity they derived from her pricks, nobody much liked Willow herself.

Except Darrell.

For some strange reason, he savored her putdowns. He found her hauteur hysterical. He swore up and down she had another, secretive, sensitive side.

Amanda didn't see it.

"Darrell says Willow thinks Michele dresses like a hooker who's come into money," Amanda said.

Dangling a remark from Willow like that in front of Jac was like dangling a windsurfer in front of a great white.

Jac bit. "Tell Darrell Jac says his girlfriend is a snot drip."

"Michele's a little insecure, sure," Jac said. "But vulnerability I could use. We'd just need to add a dash of soap opera. Think of it: Plucky girl rebounds from heartbreak to make it big on her own. All she needs is the right straying man to come along and fulfill the prophecy. Though I don't think this Jesse is The One."

"I still say Michele and Darrell could have been great together," Amanda said. "I'll never understand why it never happened between them."

Jac let out a snort. "I'll tell you why it never happened. Darrell, whether he knows it or not, and I'm guessing not, is looking for a mother for his future children. And Michele ain't it."

"Hmm."

Amanda had second thoughts about running into Darrell tonight. The whole "illicit affair" business from this afternoon kept popping into her head. What bothered her was that they were still arguing over it, after all this time. She'd hoped Darrell would finally have let go of his one-time pipe dream of a future with her.

Thick in the mass of revelers, Lavender Davis was now chatting up a reporter.

Jac nodded approval. "Hooker with a heart of gold—blah, blah, blah, yawn—but my God, she has a way of making it seem fresh. The woman is a pro."

Lavender twirled her hair for the reporter, giggled, and strode off.

"Amanda, maybe _you_ should try going the boy-toy route. It seems to be working for J. Lo."

"I'm marrying Al. Al. Remember him?" Amanda tightened her grip on her evening bag. "Why doesn't anyone remember Al?"

"Yes, how could I forget. So, so sweet Al." Jac stopped short, nearly causing a pileup en route to the dance floor known as the Seventh Circle.

"Uh-oh."

Amanda's gaze followed to the cause of Jac's concern. Lavender Davis was still twirling her hair and giggling, but this time "the pro" was making a beeline for the man of the hour, Jac's husband, Hugo.

"That little—"

And before she could say "burn, baby, burn," Jac charged through the crowd to extricate her husband from Lavender Davis.

Amanda drifted back to her table alone. "Swanning" perfectly described Willow's manner tonight. Amanda wondered whether it meant Darrell had seized his moment and proposed. And did Willow's ensuing smugness mean yes, she'd snagged herself a groom? Or was it the smugness of a woman who'd declined his proposal, broken his heart, just so she could have the upper hand?

She was pondering the possibilities when a streak of wild pink that did not appear to be a strobe light caught her attention.

"Mother?"

Clenching her pocketbook at her side, she zeroed in on the source of the flashing. It was coming from the VIP section. She walked over.

"What on earth have you done to yourself?"

Sukie gave her cropped 'do a shake, showing off ombre levels of platinum and magenta alternating with her usual black.

Amanda tucked her evening bag under folded arms. "Are you all right? Because you appear to have fled the zombie apocalypse."

"My, my. You are cute when you go into a tizzy," her mother said, then winked. "I bet that Dirty Harry thinks so too."

Good God. She was marrying _Al_.

"And the hair color is temporary, my sweet shockable one," her mother said. "By the time you see me again, it will be just colored water going down the drain." She gave her locks a saucy pat. "Unless, of course, I keep it through Halloween."

"And unless you dyed it before circa 2012, you are hopelessly unoriginal," Amanda said, hoping to instill some good sense into her mother by levying the ultimate insult upon her.

"G-O-S, my dear." Grain of salt. "Coming from someone who is so hopelessly old-fashioned she thinks the way to a man's heart is through his stomach."

Not to mention so unhip she'd wear navy gabardine to a nightclub.

"I've never been hired for my looks, and I'm not about to start now," Sukie said, shimmying in her ankle pants, even as she sat. "But I do still have a butt, and tonight I'm showing it off. Now pick your jaw up off the floor and quit blocking my view. I'm trying to get a look at Lavender Davis." She craned her neck toward the other side of the room and smiled. "Tsk tsk, girlfriend does bring the crazy."

Sharing her mother's table—and bottle service—was Bitsy Chaney. Amanda wondered whether the purpose of the champagne on ice was to toast Bitsy's new son-in-law to be.

Sukie gestured for Amanda to sit and share a glass. "I've been made the most brilliant offer for a part, and you'll never guess by whom," she said, relishing every syllable as if it were Beluga. She paused a moment for suspense, then let the other shoe drop. "Dirty Harry." She waited for the surprise to register on her daughter.

Amanda did not disappoint; this time her jaw did drop.

So _that_ was what Harry Ritter Johnson knew but wasn't telling.

Her mother beamed. "He wants me for his Riviera project."

" _South of France_?" Harry's upcoming romantic thriller; he'd be playing the male lead.

Sukie nodded.

"Mother, that's wonderful." Brilliant, in fact. Sure, it was another feisty mother-in-law role, but even so... "If anyone can take that part and run with it, it's you."

"Especially since I'll be playing Maxie's mother to your Maxie," she said, giving Amanda an exaggerated wink.

What?

"Oh, Mother, dream on. There isn't a way in the world I'm signing on for that project." Though she had read the script. Months and months ago, before Harry signed his first choice for the female lead, a far bigger name than Amanda with a proven record at the box office. But the bigger name recently announced that she was expecting her first child and would have to drop out, leaving the producers—which included Harry—in need of a new female lead on very short notice. Principal photography was set to start in April.

"Okay, two things," her mother said. "A, you don't have to freak out, and B, learn to live a little. Why not you? Who else should Harry Ritter Johnson take for a love interest?"

Amanda lifted a glass and sipped at the champagne. "Darrell with a dress on?"

"How marvelously droll."

"Okay," she said, pausing while fine bubbles shimmied down her throat. "Lavender Davis without a dress on?"

"Enough. It's going to be you."

"Mother, even the short list of actresses for that role is as long as Harry's yacht."

"Please tell me you won't be this much of a buzz kill when we're shooting on the Mediterranean."

Nice way to try to guilt-trip her daughter into saying yes, but no dice. "I am not going to be on the Mediterranean."

"An empty threat."

"I'm marrying Al."

Sukie spread empty hands. "You keep saying that, and yet we never see this Al."

Amanda sighed. "He's right over there. The rumpled one, talking about the Jets with his old high school sweetheart. And we have set a date for the middle of May. Mark it on your calendar. We already have Christoff at work on the arrangements." As long as he started taking her calls again and they remembered to keep the appointment.

Her mother shook her head. "You can't get married in the middle of May. We'll still be shooting in the middle of May."

"I am not shooting in the middle of May! I am finishing up _Knightley_ in March, I'm getting married in May, turning thirty in June, and that is it."

"And then what are you going to do? Spontaneously combust?"

"No." She drew out the word, meaning for it to sound emphatic, but a hint of frustration somehow worked its way in at the end.

"Harry wants you," her mother said calmly.

"Oh-ho, so that's what his end game is. Use you to get to me."

Considering she was an actress of high regard, Sukie ought to have been insulted by that, but to her credit, she didn't bat a glittery eye. "Yes, the man wants you. The big movie star wants you. Wants you wants you wants you. Why don't you let him have you?"

"Because." She slammed her evening bag onto the table. Its sequined plushness made nary a thud. "Edie Temple!"

"Fine then," her mother said evenly. "Go have four children and helicopter parent them if that's what you want. But before you do, why not live a little and make this film with Dirty Harry and me?"

***

After some last-minute once-overs courtesy of the _Haute_ legal department, Willow's piece for the latest issue was deemed to be free of anything actionable and then cleared for publication. As of tonight, Willow was relieved of pressing deadlines and free to be proposed to.

At least temporarily. The latest rumor had her ghost-writing a tell-all memoir by Hugo Flick's first wife.

Still, when it came to proposing marriage, timing was everything.

And that time was not now, Darrell thought. Hell was too loud. It was too crowded. And most urgently of all, in the middle of it Amanda Girl sat in dire need of rescue.

He watched as across the dance floor she sat propped up at a perfectly good, perfectly round table made for flowing conversation without anything to eat. Or anyone to converse with, seeing as how Al, right next to her, seemed to be engrossed with some sourpuss redhead.

"Who's that?" he said to Willow, trying to be heard above the music. She shook her head, meaning, _I can't hear you_ , so he pointed to the threesome in the distance behind her.

Willow turned around and looked over her shoulder. "Girl from the old neighborhood," she shouted. "Part of Hugo's team."

"How do you know this stuff?"

Looking bored—but different from Amanda bored, bored with confidence, chic-ly bored, bored with _ennui_ , as only the French could be bored—Willow shrugged.

"It's my job to know this stuff."

Amanda Girl's chin was practically dragging on the table. A wavy lock of blonde slooped over one eye. She might as well have been Cavendish at the dog run.

"As much as I love the thrill of the chase," Willow said, lazing back against a red settee that set off her thin, wan, figure, "it's nice to have the magazine put to bed."

She gave her head a relaxed tilt to Darrell's right, obscuring his view of Amanda, Al, and the redhead. Darrell leaned to his left. What in the world was going through Amanda Girl's head that had her so spaced?

"I'm beginning to think you _are_ ghost-writing that book about Jac's husband's ex," he said, half-listening.

Willow extracted the long wooden cocktail skewer that held a single green olive from her dirty martini and took a sip. "Mm-mm," she managed.

After another sip, and another, she lay the olive on her tongue, closed her lips around it and pulled the skewer out. Watching her bite down, Darrell had never felt so sorry for a cocktail garnish in his life.

"Possibly," she mouthed.

While Chill Pill absent-mindedly stroked the thin bracelet around her ankle, Darrell racked his brain trying to figure out a way to perk up Amanda Girl. Problem was, the woman didn't know the meaning of the word fun. She'd been born and raised in New York City and had never eaten a corn dog until Darrell took her for one at the age of twenty-six. Without him as her personal good luck charm, where would she have been?

Back at zero illicit affairs, that was where.

"Darrell," Willow said. She had finished relaxing and was now leaning across their table, her face inches from his.

"Huh?"

"We really must circulate."

"Circulate" was Willow talk for I-need-to-dig-up-dirt-on-my-latest-victim, which, he guessed, meant Jac Cohen's husband.

As he resigned himself to once again having to pick up Al's slack, he caught sight of a cocktail waitress bearing a tray of appetizers. Unfortunately, no corn dogs, but you couldn't have everything.

Seized by an idea, he met Chill Pill's gaze. "I couldn't agree more."

"Excellent," Willow said, grabbing her evening bag. "Divide and conquer, I say. I'll start pumping the redhead for information about her boss. That will free up Al to pay more attention to his fiancée." Rising from the settee, she gave Darrell the once-over with steely eyes. "So that you don't have to."

***

Eventually, Amanda was going to have to connect with Darrell and Willow and possibly congratulate them. Then Binky and Sukie would join in because Binky and Willow were tighter than Michele's tush, and then Sukie would start in on Harry's movie and what a dullard her daughter was and then Amanda would be reminded of how close she and her mother weren't, and then...

The long trail of _and thens_ made her yawn, and that was why she'd peeled herself from her mother and Binky and returned to Al's side. If she tucked herself under his arm, she could listen to him and the redhead reminisce about the gang. Who was still living in the old neighborhood? Who'd moved away and where? What had become of everyone?

At least then she could get in a little snooze and be more refreshed before she had to face sly fox Harry and big wind Knightley and jealous frat boy Darrell tomorrow at rehearsal. So while the music pulsed in her bones and the lights swirled her into near hypnosis, Amanda leaned into Al's shoulder, closed her eyes, and did a little reminiscing of her own.
5 Three years earlier

High Noon was the main feature showing in Amanda's living room "home theater" that night. Home theater meaning comfy couch, TV screen, bowl of popcorn.

She curled up in her favorite worn-out red flannel nightshirt and scruffy moccasins. Darrell fanned out on the floor in front. Gary Cooper was trying to convince the townspeople that the bad guy was a bad guy and needed to be stopped. The townspeople weren't buying it.

Darrell picked a popcorn kernel out of his teeth, and then Amanda felt something, which turned out to be his other hand on her lower leg. His eyes looked up into hers.

"Ever think about us?" he said.

"Of course not," Amanda said, suddenly dithering about for the remote.

"Pork chop," he said with an oily Ben Quick grin, "You can act, but you cannot lie."

Oh, really?

"Don't look so shocked," he said. "You're single, I'm single. It's only natural to wonder."

"You do realize that you and Willow will get back together."

"Not gonna happen."

"Sure it will. Everyone knows the first breakup never works out."

No way would Amanda get involved with someone just because he wanted to sow a rebound oat. Not that he and Willow had taken any concrete steps toward getting hitched, though they sure talked the hell out of the subject.

Darrell didn't have a response. Amanda thought, so much for that. _We can get back to our platonic friendship._

And they did.

For fifteen minutes.

"So, have you?" he asked.

"Have I what?" Like she'd forgotten their previous conversation.

"Ever thought about us?"

"Darrell, knock it off," she said, and not just because Grace Kelly had finally come to believe in Gary Cooper. Amanda didn't want to open the door Darrell was knocking on. For that way madness surely lie.

"Aren't you curious what it would be like?"

Men! Couldn't they do anything without bringing up sex?

On one level it had been flattering to be asked. Sort of like having your best friend's big brother suddenly notice you one day. And then there was that other level, the one where Amanda wanted to take her fingers and let them run wild and rampant through Darrell's...

No.

"Shoo."

Darrell smiled. More oiliness. "I get the hint." Then he gave her an (oily) peck on the cheek and whispered into her ear (oilishly). "You should think about us."

He rose from the floor and disappeared down the darkened hallway.

Fade to black.

***

"You know," Darrell said two weeks later out of the blue, "it's not like we're ugly or anything."

He trailed behind her, pleading, as she went room to room collecting dirty laundry. Amanda had thought the matter settled.

She picked up one of Darrell's stray shirts. "Do you ever listen to yourself?"

"I'm just trying to understand what you could possibly have against me. It's not like I have such an ego that I go after plain women in order to feel better about myself."

No, he just had the audacity to hit on a woman while Gary Cooper was on the screen.

"And I don't torture the public with my two-bit political opinions," he said.

"No, you just torture my mother with them." She spun halfway round to face him. "Darrell, listen. You mean much, much more to me than... Look, you're my friend."

He groaned. "Not the ruin-the-friendship schtick. Can't you come up with a better way to shoot me down?"

She shrugged. It was the truth. It _would_ ruin their friendship.

He took her hand. She didn't fight him, but she didn't exactly give it a heartfelt squeeze, either.

"And anyways," he said, "friendship is overrated." He pulled her toward the bedrooms. "Let's fool around."

"Darrell." She pushed his hand away. "Please stop saying those things."

"I am not going to apologize for being a single man approaching a single woman."

"This is an issue of forbidden fruit. Can you honestly say you would be doing this if you and Willow were still on?"

He tilted his head. "Well, no..."

"See. You're on the rebound. And that is all." Her voice softened, but not her resolve. "Look. I'd rather have you really love me—as your friend—than be some notch that your wandering eye will forget about once you ..."

He held her eyes with a steady gaze. "You're hardly a notch, and my eyes don't wander. In the time you've known me, have you ever once seen my eye wander?"

That was not the point. Darrell was an actor, and she'd sworn off actors. Amanda knew what she wanted in a husband, and it certainly didn't entail some Hollywood ham bone who looked at the world through funky lenses.

"I don't see it," she said.

"What 'it'?"

"Us, 'it.'"

Darrell whined like a ten-year-old and stamped his foot. "Oh, come on."

Mildly irritating, though Amanda wasn't going to dwell on that when there were plenty of other solid, sound reasons Darrell was unsuitable. "You're an actor."

"Therefore I must be deluded?"

"You _are_ wearing those glasses. And that shirt."

"What's wrong with my shirt?"

She fed him a head tilt that signaled _questionable design, and it's orange_.

Darrell shrugged. "I'll quit the business."

"Be serious."

"I'll go work in a gas sta –"

"Please."

Of course Darrell thought that was best. All men thought that the—she visualized air quotes and the word bedroom—was best. But Amanda would put a stop to it. She had to, for Darrell's own good as well as her own.

"Darrell..." Her voice trailed off. "After all the lousy dates you've seen me go out on, I never thought you'd trifle with me like this."

"It doesn't have to be a trifle."

That made her tilt her head. "You mean I'd dress up for you and you'd bring me flowers and take me out, and we'd be sweethearts?"

"Sure."

"Then, no."

"But you just said..."

Poor Darrell; he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. But that was how it had to be.

"I just don't see it."

"What is not to see?"

It was up to her to save him—all of them—from his misguided optimism.

"Darrell, it isn't what I want." She saw the frustration behind the funky lenses. Clearly he didn't agree; but he wasn't going to argue any further.

"Okay."

***

"Let's play hooky."

"Hooky?"

Neither of them was working. It was a holiday, or close to it, the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend.

"Yeah," Darrell said. "Blow off our other plans. I'll skip the Hamptons, you call up Michele and give her some excuse."

But it was Michele's birthday on Saturday. That new guy she'd started seeing was throwing her a party. Amanda couldn't remember his name. As for the Hamptons, Darrell must have had a power clambake on his urgent agenda.

"Tell her you've got cramps," he said.

"That's original. And miss her party?"

"It's going to rain all weekend anyway." His eyebrows did a quick double-lift.

Amanda caught his drift and sighed. This again.

"No one has to know," he said. "Come Tuesday, we forget it ever happened."

Aha. So much for I'll bring you flowers, and we'll be sweethearts.

"It's only going to rain," he whined, doing a stomping thing while his arms swung helplessly at his sides. Darrell did not do discouraged well.

Amanda put on her calm voice, the one she used when she had to talk the other windbags in her life down off some ledge. She hoped Darrell would get her drift and see that she wasn't playing around.

"Darrell, the reason I let you live here is not because I have some secret desire for you to want me. I like having you here because I like having you here."

"I know that," Darrell said, his pitch leveling off.

"And now you're talking about a weekend. And that's not what I want." And he knew it. Knew what she wanted out of life. Knew her.

And so she wasn't surprised when he said it again. "Okay."

***

At lunchtime he approached her, hand extended. "Peace?"

She took it. "Peace."

They shook.

"Let's do something we haven't done before."

Uh-oh. She pulled her hand back.

"Will you at least trust me?"

An hour later they were sitting on opposite sides of an outdoor picnic table in Astoria Park, eating corn dogs in the drizzle. The conversation turned to the first time Amanda had gotten her heart broken.

"I was so besotted," she said. His name was Eric, and he was a Frenchman. And an actor.

"And yet you never bothered to mention him," Darrell said.

"Maybe because I'm always too busy arguing nonsense with you."

"Did you ever consider that maybe it was his nationality that was the problem and not his profession? Hmm? That maybe you adopted the wrong policy? That you should have a self-imposed ban on Frenchmen instead of actors?"

Amanda sat silent while Darrell grinned and slathered his dog with catsup.

After a minute he said, "So it's been how many years now since Frog Actor Boy?"

She dabbed up crumbs with her forefinger. "Four, I guess."

"Four! God, Amanda, what are you doing with your youth?"

She was about to give what he'd probably see as a totally unreasonable answer— _waiting for someone special_ —but he cut her off.

"You know what your problem is? You've got too good a head on your shoulders. You've got to be like other women nowadays, giving it away to all the wrong men because you think it'll make you mean something to them."

The only thing more remarkable than what Darrell put into his mouth was what had a tendency to come out. Amanda realized that she didn't exactly disagree with his point, and she told him so. By the time they made it back home, they were friends again.

***

Amanda sat on the edge of her bed. It _had_ been a long time since—

And, really, did she have any other candidates on her horizon? Was Darrell so bad?

She'd come across too harsh. It wasn't as if she were physically repulsed by him. She had never even attempted to pretend that.

She sneezed and shook her head. Darrell and his bright ideas. Corn dogs in the rain! She'd probably wind up with pneumonia, and then it'd be a room in the ICU instead of her bedroom door here in the house where he'd be knocking and asking if he could see her.

The door opened, and Darrell's head poked in. "Bless you."

"Thank you."

He let the rest of himself in and sat at the foot of the bed. Close, but not too close. He leaned back in a casual sprawl. He had a good, solid build, not too beefy but not too slight.

But what gave a jolt down there—and his presence did give her a jolt down there—was the go-for-it quality about him.

She parted her lips slightly. Darrell rolled into a prone position. She leaned his way, her shoulder doing an inviting dip as he crawled up the bed.

He finished with a kiss to her cheek.

She opened her mouth for him, and his kisses did travel, but not there. They covered her chin and throat, down into the soft hollow there. They opened, and his tongue left a wet train on her skin as he worked his way up her neck and behind one ear and then inside.

He made his determination known, pressing his shoulder into hers until she lay back on the bed underneath him. His thigh slung over her pelvis and kept her under his spell as a bubble of heat enclosed them, sheltered them from the rest of the world.

She couldn't say she didn't like that.

She couldn't say anything, as her mouth busied itself drawing his tongue deeper and deeper into it.

Deep kisses taking her breath away. Each one pulling her as if she were on a string, toward Darrell, her friend. Longing welling up from deep inside, longing she hadn't felt in so, so long.

"Oh."

Darrell took her gasp as a cue to lower his attentions. His nimble finger cleaved the fabric of her halter, sliding it over, over. Over just the one little inch, and coolness hit as her breast was exposed to the air.

And then she heard something. Something sharp, piercing, coming from outside. The kids next door? A rock against the window?

"What was that?" She sat up and their bubble of heat dissipated.

They'd never know, and what did it matter, because without a word Darrell slid off the bed, went into his room, and shut the door.

Great. She'd ruined the moment, and now he was mad. She folded herself back into her halter. Then she grabbed her pocketbook and her keys and went for a walk.

***

It rained the next morning, too.

The two of them sat at a sticky table for two in the hope that food would make things normal between them again.

"Ever have the hash?"

The coffee shop was one of Darrell's neighborhood haunts. He hit it for biscuits and gravy once or twice a week whenever he was in town. Amanda signaled no, she'd never had the hash.

"So what looks good to you?" he asked.

She'd dressed for breathing room amid the mugginess: a navy bandana print skirt that tied at the waist and a sleeveless blouse that was little more than a wisp of white gauze, barely enough to keep out Darrell's potentially prying eyes.

While those eyes poured over the menu, Amanda regretfully watched the cubes in their glasses of ice water slowly melt. It wasn't such a good thing, running off the way she had yesterday. First, because, look at them. They were mad at each other. Second, how could they stay in the same house together with that unresolved episode hanging over their heads? Once you'd had someone's mouth on you like she'd had Darrell's on her yesterday, nothing would ever be the same between you—which was, incidentally, exactly what she'd told him would happen.

But there was a third, best reason she regretted not letting Darrell make complete love to her.

He would have been good at it.

Just then something tickled the soft flesh behind her knee, something that wasn't red-checked and vinyl and covering the table.

Amanda shifted her gaze. Look at him. Mr. Multi-talented. He could peruse the menu, comment on the hash, and feel her up all at the same time. And have a complete air of obliviousness about it, too, she added, taking a sip of water. Its fishy, chlorinated taste played over her tongue even as she overlooked Darrell's thumb and forefinger, which were still in the crook of her knee, rubbing a steady back-and-forth rhythm on the softest, weakest part of her anywhere.

Darrell realized she had no interest in the menu. His eyes, equally wet, stared straight into hers.

And then they both knew.

The laminated pages fell to the floor as the two of them flew away from the table and out the door, a dinner bell jangling in their wake.

This shouldn't take long, Amanda thought during the three blocks home, considering Darrell's penchant for forgoing underwear.

He backed her into the bedroom—her bedroom—as his fingers worked loose the knot at her waist.

"It's time to get you naked."

She eased her out of her huaraches and then hopped on the low surface of a bureau to let him do the rest. As her top things and then bottom things sailed to the floor—Hee!—she discovered that it was weird being completely naked with Darrell Rawlings.

For about two seconds.
6 Wednesday

At either end of a long corridor behind the scenes of _Knightley_ , Darrell's dog Hilts and Knightley Stapleton holed up in separate dressing rooms, having respective snits. In between, Amanda holed up in her dressing room, massaging the dull ache at her temples while Harry Ritter Johnson flashed his megawatt chin dimple.

"I hear you had a chat with your mum last night," he said.

She looked up. "Not now, Harry," she said, fighting to remember what had happened last night that she wished hadn't happened. A person didn't wake up with a head full of rocks without having done something they must regret.

The broad gold and silver stripe of the wallpaper shimmered much too much for this time of day, and she lowered her head and let out a muffled groan.

"Talk to my agent."

"The one you let go due to your impending retirement?"

"Harry," Amanda said slowly, because her head felt both fragile and yet a hundred pounds. "I know you're using my mother to get to me."

Harry's voice feigned shock. "Use Sukie 'divine' Dyan? Are you casting aspersions on your mother's talent?"

More muffled groans. "We all know how things work. It's not what you know, it's who you know."

"Yes, we do. And we all also know there is a dearth of parts for women of a certain age."

"Ah, the old dearth-of-parts line. Lame. You can forget it. Scratch me off your list for _South of France_."

"You're obviously in a fragile state, ay," he said, pretending to be cooperative, which only added to her misery. "We don't have to talk about this just now."

"Good." God, her head. "Because I'm dying."

"What's gotten into you, love? You can tell Harry."

A new voice cut in. "Amanda had a stiff one earlier."

Amanda raised her head. The persistent throbbing swelled to massive pounding. Darrell, never one to lack for comic timing, made a guest appearance in the doorway with an obedient, leashed Cavendish.

No Hilts. The rumors must have been true.

Amanda lifted her eyes unto the heavens and sighed. "Let's not get into that," she said, remembering what it was she wanted to forget: the mental reliving of that weekend in the rain.

Darrell glanced over the top of his specs. "Miss Two-Glasses-of-Wine-with-Dinner broke protocol and had one whole flaming rum thingy."

Which was all his fault. It came back to her now. She remembered being in her daydream and vaguely hearing an extended Blondie dance mix, and then perking up as if someone had turned up the lights out of nowhere. She scanned the mass of boogieing bodies only to lock eyes with Darrell approaching with, of all things, a tray of food. Before long, he was pumping her full of kimchi sliders and flaming drinks.

Amanda paused, hoping to ease the crushing between her ears. "It felt like two."

"Let's split the difference," Harry said, playing mediator. "It was a rum thingy and a half."

"And you could see how that could mess a person up," Darrell said. Cavendish started to pull away, then heeled at Darrell's command. "Pork chop, I've known you for five years and it's still fun watching you with a cocktail."

A rare occurrence, she might have added. "What can I say, darlin'? You bring out the animal in me."

Darrell sighed. "Would that it was true. The only man you were winking at last night was the bartender."

Harry stroked his facial hair and smirked. "Feel better, love. And no need to give this matter another thought. I'll just assume you'll come on board unless you give me a compelling reason not to."

He left, enabling her to air her displeasure with Darrell. "Thanks for the hangover."

"Pork chop, you've got to look on the bright side."

She covered her eyes. "Please don't say bright."

"Have you forgotten how I've always helped you with your problems?" he said. "I brought you Harry, whom you seem to enjoy flirting with."

"No, you've helped me forget I have a fiancé. Now I have more problems." She let it drop, and patted Cavendish on the head. He reciprocated with a lick of her cheek. "No Hilts?"

"He locked himself inside his dressing room."

"Is he jealous of the attention Harry's getting, like Knightley?"

Darrell shook his head. "There was an incident this morning at home. He got ahold of one of Willow's shoes."

"The gray ones?" Amanda deadpanned. Darrell guffawed because ninety percent of Willow's shoes were gray.

"She accused him of being flea-bitten, and things got ugly."

"I take it then you haven't found your moment."

"Oh, the moment's not until Friday." His face beamed with characteristic unbridled optimism. "Got a whole romantic evening planned after we film."

His plan? Pop the question during a late-night showing of Willow's favorite schmaltzfest, _The Sound of Music_.

"This wouldn't be that burlesque version that's playing off-off-Broadway, would it?" she asked.

"It just might be." He brightened like Amanda had given him a great idea. "Willow is not the type to sit home."

And watch her old movies there on a small screen, unlike Amanda. "Good," she said, trying to portray _yeah, that's gonna work._ God, was it time to start the day's acting already? "I'm glad."

Like any good walk-on player, Darrell knew when to take his leave. He tugged on Cavendish's leash, the dog gave Amanda a final slobber and they departed.

But he'd been wrong about last night, of course. Darrell did bring out the animal in her. Their history proved it.

That weekend in the rain, Michele ended up having a boyfriend crisis on her birthday, which turned out to make a convenient excuse for Amanda to tear herself away from Darrell that same afternoon. Not that it turned out to be any great loss, because by Monday, Darrell had reunited with Willow at her party in the Hamptons.

As Amanda had predicted.

Now with Darrell having moved on down the hall and Harry gone to hair and makeup to have his mustache tweaked, Amanda finally secured a moment of peace and quiet. A brief moment, because Jac stopped by with an important news flash.

"Check this out." She wagged her smartphone before Amanda's still-bleary eyes. "Miss Willow Big Mouth's been tagged on UrIt."

The social media site where hot topics—and people—were voted up in popularity with green arrows and down with red.

"She got caught posting about someone else's breakup. 'This will never happen to Darrell and me, because we never go to bed angry, and we tell each other everything,' she says." Jac's eyes widened with joy. "Red arrows all over the place. Can you say beeyotch?"

A jingle came from within the depths of Amanda's satchel. Could that possibly be the wedding planner now? She flew to her bag and fished for her phone. She found it—and something else, too. Smack in the middle of her handbag, obscuring her phone and everything else, lie a rolled-up script. And not an episode of _Knightley_. No, this was for a different project, and someone besides Amanda had put it there.

She glanced at the cover.

_South of France_.

Argh. Harry.

At the sound of the voice on the other end, most definitely not the smooth singsong of Christoff, Amanda's spirit sank.

"What's the matter, PW, trouble in your world?" her father said, his baritone missing its edge.

"No trouble, just Knightley being a gasbag and Darrell, an irritation, and Harry, a shameless seducer. Oh, and in the midst of all this, Al and I missed our appointment with Christoff, and I don't know when we'll be able to reschedule."

She omitted the hangover part; no need for a discussion about how Geoffrey Monroe's daughter couldn't hold her liquor.

"You know, darling, the best way to get what you want is to stop wanting it."

"Tell that to Dirty Harry. Then maybe he'll stop pestering me to do his film."

"The advice is for you. And now that we've arrived at the reason for my call, perhaps you shouldn't turn down Johnson's project so hastily."

Amanda let out her breath. "Mother told you."

"A bit. Tell me more. What's the part?"

She cast her mind back to the spring when she'd first read the script. "I play—would play—a married makeup artist who has a torrid on-set affair with a charming rogue actor, played by whoever they can get to out-dimple Harry. And I dump my nobody of a husband—played by Harry, if you can believe that—to marry the star. But that's just the setup. Then the plot turns."

"Naturally."

"Turns out Harry and I are cons who want to go straight, but first we want to pull off one last scam—on the movie star. The plan is to get the guy to break us up so he can marry me, preferably without me having to sign a pre-nup, then wait a suitable amount of time and divorce him for big money."

"Whence it goes horribly awry."

"Horribly. Harry accuses me of falling in love for real with the movie star, and we have a falling out—until the movie star drops dead during the honeymoon, and we become the prime suspects."

"At which point you're forced to set your differences aside and work together to find the real killer."

"Precisely."

"And in the process, you fall in love all over again."

"Exactly."

"And where does your mother fit in?"

"She's the comic relief."

"If she can pull it off." He delivered the line straight, an interesting acting choice, Amanda thought. "She tells me you want no part of it."

"And you're calling to persuade me otherwise."

"Now Puckle Warts, hear me out."

The forcefulness in her father's voice prompted her to sit down.

"You say family is important to you."

"Of course it is. _You_ are."

"Like it or not, we are your family."

She understood. Wasn't that why she'd gone into the business in the first place: To be closer to her mother and father? And Gran. She thought if they had this in common, it would bring them closer somehow. Funny how even though her parents had divorced long ago, it was always Amanda who felt like the odd one out.

"PW, you are more than either your mother or I ever dreamed we wanted, and despite your mother's declarations of independence, nothing would be dearer to her heart than to share the stage with you before you exeunt forever," he said. "And before I say goodbye, I shall take my leave with one final observation."

Great. Blanket pronouncement coming up.

"Go ahead, shoot," she said. Better to get it over with.

"In the words of a famous philosopher. Remember: All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, then it is accepted as inevitable."

"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind." So, he thought she should do the film. She dropped her head into her hands and threw herself onto the mercy of the countertop. Did that count as ridicule? Or violent opposition?

Michele in the doorway bearing a steaming mug of something saved her from her pity party of one.

"You got some free publicity last night," Michele said. "Darrell said nice things about you on 'The Tonight Show'." She dunked a teabag up and down in a cup of hot water, inching forward with great care so as not to spill on her bare toe and its silver ring.

"Well, you know Darrell," Amanda said. "All you have to do is baste his eggs the right way and he'll say nice things about you."

Michele offered the mug.

"What's that?"

"My favorite hangover tea."

"What's it got in it?" Amanda asked with hesitation. There was always the possibility Michele would tell her.

"I'm not going to tell you because then you won't try it." Michele always was good at reading her mind. "But you should try it because it's good for you."

Amanda took a polite sip. Licorice laced with dirty dish rags and a dash of wet cigars on the finish. She stifled a gag. Definitely a cure worse than the disease.

"Who cares about publicity?" Amanda said, laying cup to countertop as a gesture of finality. "All I want is out."

"You keep saying that."

Amanda filled Michele in on the chat with her father.

"Mr. Unwanted Advice with his blanket pronouncements."

Michele crossed her arms. "Your father may have a point. He thinks you were born to be on stage, and I think on some level, you realize that, too."

"Okay, look, I have known what I wanted since I was twelve. I want to be a wife and mother and live a domestic life." And what was wrong with that? "So maybe Al and I are going through a dull patch," she confided. Michele reached out and touched her shoulder. "Dull patches don't have to be so bad." Michele shook her head in sympathy. _No, they don't_. "They can deepen love." Michele nodded her head. _Yes, they could._ "You don't think Al and I can have deep love?"

Michele puckered with concern. "Maybe you think Al is going to somehow take you away from it all, and maybe that's not true."

"Well, Darrell's not exactly doing that, either."

Michele startled. "Who said anything about Darrell? I'm talking about you and your work."

Oh, heck. That again.

"You're looking at your life as something terrible to escape from instead of something wonderful to run to." Michele clenched her hands and socked the air with gusto. "You've got to have a dream and go for it!"

"I have a dream," Amanda shot back. "Remember Edie Temple?"

Michele looked askance at the name. "I think that's a negative. At least, the way you talk about it."

"There's the wedding," Amanda reminded her. "That's a positive."

Michele started to say something then hesitated. She cleared her throat for emphasis and tilted her head. "I will say this: It is the one part of your life you seem to want to blare from the rooftops."

***

Someone sure forgot about her hangover, and quick. All it took was a wardrobe rack full of designer cocktail dresses beckoning. And another dose of Ritter.

Through a series of mishaps too convoluted to go into, in the script for _Knightley,_ Fleur would end up in a booth of the cocktail lounge with Darrell and Ritter. She was supposed to reject them both. If ever the writers would figure out a decent way to end the damn scene.

The possibility of spying Amanda Girl in an LBD drew Ritter to her dressing room like a moth. That, in turn, drew Darrell and he casually set on down the hall to keep an eye on things there.

Purely for Al's sake, of course.

Nauseating as it would be to watch Ritter ogling and doing possibly more to Amanda, it beat blocking scenes with Stapleton, who was accusing his poor stand-in of trying to sabotage him for the one hundredth time.

But Darrell wasn't keeping tabs on Amanda in the way Willow had insinuated the night before. No, he was chasing down Ritter chasing down Amanda because Al had called only moments ago.

"I tried calling her on her cell," Al said, "but she wasn't picking up, so I thought I'd try you instead."

"Hold on a sec," Darrell told him. Sure, _now_ Al called, he thought. A day late and...

Darrell had offered to track down Amanda's whereabouts for Al. He skipped the part about Ritter's _South of France_ offer; she'd have to tell him that herself.

When Darrell arrived, Amanda was testing out a little number with a floppy off-the-shoulder neckline and a defined waist that Ritter appeared only too eager to cinch for her.

"If shooting becomes too tense," the Australian said, "you can sail off and unwind at my _finca_."

Amanda let out a giggle. "Your what-a?"

"My villa on Mallorca."

Amanda ran her fingers through her ruffle. "Mallorca," she repeated.

Darrell felt a line of heat burn its way up his neck. He'd been to Harry's pad on the island off the coast of Spain. He'd seen what went on there, and it wasn't—

"It's very private and very lush." Ritter made sure to overwork the "l" sound in lush.

Checking herself out in the mirror, Amanda's gaze fell upon Darrell behind her in the doorway.

"Hi."

"Hello."

A nod from Ritter. A wave from the costume designer, sorting through more dresses on a metal rack.

Darrell took a seat on the tasseled ottoman.

Holding onto Ritter for support, Amanda slipped her feet into backless black heels. "Why does it have to be me in your film?"

"Because you are the challenge, lass." Ritter held onto Amanda Girl a little too long. "You said no."

"Haven't you heard?" She spread her arms and twirled. "The best way to get what you want is to stop wanting it."

Ritter dimpled. "In due time, love."

Darrell eyed the costume designer, taking in the scene along with him. From the swooning looks of her, she did not share his desire to wrap her tape measure around Ritter's smarmy neck.

Amanda made a mock attempt at wiping the grin off Ritter's face. He dodged. "Sure, go ahead, love. Flee reality."

She gestured to the lineup of designer frocks. "Since when is this reality?"

Amanda Girl had funny notions about things. One of these days, she'd get honest with herself. Well, maybe not in the non-actor husband department, but at least in the career department. She loved acting more than she let on, but she needed to come to that conclusion on her own.

Darrell wondered if Al knew that about the woman he planned to spend the rest of his life with. Darrell wondered if Al knew anything about her at all, because if you asked Darrell...

He had to hold the thought because inspiration struck. He pulled out his phone and tapped his call log and dialed. Al picked up. "Here she is," Darrell told him. He got up from the ottoman and held the phone out to her. "Just so you don't think I'm making you forget you have a fiancé."

"Al?" She stared at the phone like it was a nuclear device. "Al's on the phone?"

Darrell inched it closer.

"He says you were supposed to call. And he sounds a little irate."

"He does?"

Hmm. Sounded like the combination of Al and emotion were a new discovery to Amanda Girl.

Taking the phone, she gave Darrell what felt like a cool—but not cold—shoulder and turned away for privacy. "Hi, honey..."

All Darrell made out was "parsnips for dinner" before she handed it back to him.

"Here. Thanks. Al wants to say goodbye."

Al wanted to say goodbye? To Darrell? What for?

"She sounds giddy," Al said.

"We're doing stuff with hair and makeup and wardrobe this afternoon," Darrell said. "It's the fumes." Which was true, though the noxiousness was coming from a certain Australian playboy.

Sounded to Darrell like Al was getting proprietary. Proprietary was good. About time, too, considering absentee Al already had two strikes against him this week—three if you counted ignoring Amanda for the old girlfriend last night at the club—and it was only Wednesday.

Maybe there was hope for Al yet.

And just in the nick of time, because Ritter had resumed pressing his case—not to mention his shoulder—against Amanda.

"I would think the role just Grace Kelly-ish enough to pique your interest," Harry said.

Darrell blanched. This could go on all day. And none of it mattered. _South of France_ was a done deal, and that included casting the female lead. If for no other reason—not glamour, not prestige, not money, not even heavy flirting—Amanda would do it for Sukie.

Guaranteed.

Ritter had gone for Amanda's weak spot: family. And now he was going to have his way with her.

So to speak.

Darrell retook his seat on the ottoman, keeping his thoughts to himself. For the past two days he'd been telling himself that the reason he was keeping tabs on Ritter and Amanda was purely for Al's sake. Now he wasn't so sure. Amanda wasn't the only one not keeping it real, he feared.

Harry grabbed a backless number from the rack of gowns and held it up to Amanda's front. "You would play the unfaithful wife," he trilled.

"No frustrated school teacher, you're saying."

A flicker in those soft violet blues of hers. She was beginning to weigh the prospects of extending the life of her career by just one more project. Glamorous wardrobe, sun-splashed Riviera, backdrop of the film festival at Cannes.

"My dear, you'd be quite the tart," Harry said.

She pawed at the ruffle criss-crossing her bustline. "That does change the picture somewhat."

Doesn't matter, Darrell thought. Amanda Girl was already gone. Getting to her mother sealed the deal. Not that Darrell planned to do anything to rescue her from Ritter's film. It would be good for her to do _South of France_. The woman belonged on a damn screen.

No, sweetheart, he thought, holding back a pang of nausea as Harry Ritter Johnson circled a hand round her nipped-in waist and dipped his gaze into her modest cleavage. You're a goner.

***

It was awful.

Out in the greenhouse, plucking herbs to season the parsnips she'd be roasting for dinner, Amanda thought about the night she'd won her Oscar. The events of the day had brought it up.

She always figured she'd come out on top due to a divided vote and a weak field. There was no other rational, reasonable explanation for her winning an Academy Award at the age of twenty-six. She'd been up for her dual role in the psychological thriller _O.C.D._. The role required her to play the two things the industry loved to typecast her as: poor little rich girl and dumb blonde.

She'd never actually _said_ that winning was awful, of course. She wouldn't dare utter such a thing in public.

Winning had just seemed so wrong. But how could she say so without insulting the Academy? Unless, of course, the Academy had only selected her because of her lineage. A possibility not lost on her.

So she'd accepted her nomination with grace, as a tribute to the acting family from which she came.

Tonight, before starting on dinner, she called her mother. She wanted to talk about Harry's project, to ask if it would make Sukie happy if they worked together before Amanda retired.

She didn't get the chance to ask.

"I hear you've invited your grandmother to the filming on Friday night." The first thing out of her mother's mouth, even before "hello."

Oy. Word traveled fast.

"How come I never get invited?"

Amanda closed the greenhouse door behind her on her way back to the house. A stiff breeze blew through the trees. The creak of a branch somewhere had her looking toward the treetops and rushing to the side door.

"You very well know you have an open invitation," she told her mother.

"How come I never get harangued into going?"

She pushed into the side door. The wind slammed it shut behind her. "I harangue you all the time. I—"

"Not since Season Two," her mother pointed out. "You haven't harangued."

Amanda stammered around a bit, the squeak in her voice building. "I gave up. I thought there was no point."

On the other end of the line, a sniff. "A person notices."

That night at the awards, she'd sat between Gran and her mother. To her left, Gran held Amanda's trembling hands to her billowing bosom, steeling her for a loss. Poor Gran, she didn't realize Amanda's hands trembled in prayer that last year's Best Supporting Actor would call someone else's name and spare her from having to be a pretender.

To Amanda's right, her mother crackled with energy on the edge of her seat, ready to jump on a victory. How would Amanda console her mother if they called the winner and it was someone else's daughter?

So yeah, it was awful. But only for those few minutes.

After that, it became merely wrong.

As she'd made her way toward the podium in her shimmering white crystal-beaded gown, with every step of her matching heels, her mind cried out.

It should be them.

_It should be Gran_ , who stood no chance of winning Best Actress because hardly anyone saw her film and no on in this country knew who she was.

_It should be Mother_ , who before the ceremony had told Kelly Ripa: "If there's anybody one would like to have surpass them in life, it's one's own child." She'd spoken with an air so pretentious, it would have made both Chaney women blush.

_It should be Dad_ , who insisted it would be far better this way because if he'd ever won an Oscar, he'd speak so long, he'd run into next year's telecast.

It should have been any one of them. Among them, they'd won an impressive array of Tonys and Emmys and BAFTAs and SAGs, but never a golden doorstop.

When Amanda did deliver her speech, tasteful and proper and respectful of the Academy and the ticking clock, all three of her windbags cheered and roared as if it had been their own win, or something better.

In the kitchen, Amanda set the herbs on the countertop.

"Now about Harry's project," she said.

"Never mind," her mother said. "I knew you wouldn't be down with it."

"Not necessarily."

"Oh?" Sukie's tone changed instantly. She no longer sounded like a spoiled child being sent to bed without dessert.

Amanda swallowed hard. How negative she must have sounded all these months since she'd decided on retirement. It had never occurred to her that her mother might be just the teensiest bit jealous of the closeness between her daughter and her former mother-in-law.

And if her daughter was going to retire, it might be nice to have shared the screen once with Sukie Dyan.

"Mother, it would be a joy and a privilege."

"You're only saying that."

"Mother..."

"Oh, all right, if you insist. Twist my arm."

From the basement, the keys on Al's Olivetti whirred in the background.

Ticktickticktickticktick.

Grind. (Carriage return.)

Ticktickticktickticktcik.

Grind.

"Of course, I'll have to talk it over with Al."

"Right. Al. Well, he's very on the ball. I'm sure he'll be a help."

Amanda ignored the sarcasm and clicked off, quiet but resigned, and thinking of a certain famous movie line.

Every time she thought she was out, they pulled her back in.

While dinner roasted, she went to her satchel and grabbed the script. Not the latest revised version for _Knightley_ with its jokes, still too on-the-nose after two days of tweaking. No, the one Harry thought he was being cute about by slipping inside when she wasn't looking.

She sat down at the kitchen table and began to read.

EXT: A yacht cruises on the Mediterranean...

***

Jokes aside about the Best Supporting Actress award being a career killer for younger actresses, Amanda couldn't deliberately disappear into obscurity after winning it, could she? It would have been bad form. She soldiered on with her role on _Knightley_ , returned to the Oscars a year later to present the award for Best Supporting Actor, followed by more _Knightley_ and the forthcoming _Seismic Event_.

Until finally nerdy Knightley Stapleton embroiled himself in a dispute with the network over money and decided not to renew his contract. The show going off the air provided the perfect opportunity for Amanda to pencil in her retirement.

And then Al proposed, and the final pieces of Amanda's white-picket-fence fantasy fell into place.

She pushed parsnips around her plate while Al filled her in on the progress of his manuscript. The murder was still there, unsolved. And Rossetti's girlfriend trouble?

"It's early Act Two," Al said. "He's still ignoring the signs."

"Ah." Amanda took a sip of her white wine. "Will she turn out to be The One?"

Al sat up straight. Amanda took note because Al never sat up straight.

Black hair fell over his right eye, and he blinked.

"You mean the killer?" he said.

"No, I mean his true love."

"Oh." With his third (or was it fourth?) shrug of the evening, Al slouched into his seat. "If there's no trouble, there's no story."

"True."

Amanda set down her fork. Why didn't Al give her more trouble? Everyone else in her life did. Mother and Dad and Gran and even to an extent, Darrell. They certainly gave her their opinion on what was best for her. Although Darrell had been silent on that subject lately. Still, she knew where he stood. _Woman belongs on a damn screen_ and all that.

Even this afternoon, when Al had gone to the trouble of calling Darrell to try to reach her, for a brief moment, she'd fantasized he might be pulling a Knightley and going stark raving mad with jealousy over his future wife dallying with Harry Ritter Johnson all day long.

Instead, all Al had wanted to say was that he'd pulled the parsnips out of their deep tubs in the garden.

"Speaking of stories..." she said, steering the conversation toward _South of France_ and the character she'd be playing. Oops—might be playing. If she continued to let the windbags blow their blather in her head.

She explained that it was all about family. He understood the importance of family. And it would only be for a few months, and then they could get on with their life together.

He could even come and visit. They could take a side trip to Capri. He'd always wanted to go there.

"So do it," he said.

"But what about the wedding?"

He brought his hand to his mouth and started tapping his lip, as if some deep thought had seized him. "Then don't do it."

"We wouldn't be getting married in the middle of May," she reminded him.

He slumped. "So then we get married later."

"Are you saying you _want_ to postpone the wedding?" But that couldn't be. He said it in a tone too easy, too agreeable to want to postpone the wedding.

Al stretched his hands out in a wide gesture of openness. "I'm just saying, whatever makes you happy makes me happy."

As if that helped. He was so supposed to be her voice of sanity, her anchor. He thought he was being sensitive, leaving the decision for her to make. Instead, she found him frustrating, not the least because for the first time in ages, she didn't know what she wanted anymore.

Then her voice of sanity curled his hand into a fist with the index finger outstretched and pointed at something invisible. She looked outside the window. Nothing outside but night. Must have been that deep thought that still seized him.

"Honey?" she asked.

He started shaking his fist, as if to make a point.

"You know what?" he said. "I think I will."

She leaned forward. "Will what?"

"Make Rossetti's girlfriend the killer."

Amanda fell back against her chair.

_That_ was what his excitement was all about? Well, at least one of them had found an answer to a problem. Amanda stood and slung her arm over his shoulder. She kissed him.

"Good for you, sweetheart. I won't keep you then."

After they did the dishes together, Al went back to writing, and Amanda settled into bed with an old movie.

Sweet... the kiss of death in a man.

Pfft, she thought, grabbing for the remote. What did Jac know?

Al was her refuge. Her anti-windbag. And, unlike the windbags, he wasn't pushing her into extending her career. Or pulling her out of it, either. He was leaving it up to her. How many women would kill for a man like that?

She started the video, hoping a few hours of Edie Temple and _My Wife Next Door_ would put it out of her mind.

The opening credits began to play. She hadn't watched the film in years, and she'd forgotten how discordant its early '60s jazz theme was. She lay back on the pillow, letting the cacophony coming from the television match the one in her head. A thought kept coming back, a thought she couldn't escape.

Amanda had never acted for any other reason than it was the family business.

It was her family's dream she'd been living, not her own. That was what she'd always told herself. But was it the whole truth? And if it truly was, then what was her dream? To follow in the footsteps of Edie Temple? Or something else?

She let her eyes close—only for a little while—and everything around her became a groovy mix. There were squeaky saxophones and jiggling martini shakers, Capri pants and bouffants, tweaks and tosses and dull patches and kisses of death and houses in the suburbs.

Marry in May...

Tweak? Or toss?

... on the French Riviera?

Whatever makes you happy...

Amanda curled with the remote tight against her chest and began to drift off into sleep while _My Wife Next Door_ ran its course in the night. Surely in the morning everything would look clearer.

7 Thursday

Amanda had planned to waken gradually the next morning, sipping her coffee on the way to the studio, refreshed with the sure knowledge that her decision would come and life would at some point settle down to some sort of quietude. There would be long days of wacky _Knightley_ rehearsals, sure, and more Harry to handle, as well as Darrell, and Al's absences to deal with, but...

With a single _brrring_ of the vintage ringtone from her phone, she was blasted out of her morning calm. Amanda reached out beyond Al's snoring figure and fumbled along the night table for the device. She was rewarded by an equally blasting—and familiar—pigeon-scattering scream.

"Good grief, Mother," she said, palm to forehead, "is it Oscar nom time already?"

"Ah, yes, Oscar nom time," Sukie said, her voice laden with suggestion. "Funny you should mention that."

Next to Amanda, Al slumbered on. She kept her voice low. "At least you're not lying in a ditch somewhere."

"You mean you haven't heard?"

Her heart clenched. Was it Dad? Or Gran? "What are you talking about?" she said slowly.

"Oh, grab a wireless device and read up," her mother snarked. "Better yet, let me fill you in, and I quote—"

A breathless pause.

"From Chet Porter's column, 'Chet Chat,' posted at one minute after midnight Pacific time. 'Darrell's Oscar Night of Passion with TV Beauty.'" There was another pause, for sardonic effect. "That's you, my dear, although you'd think with an Academy Award under your belt, you'd rate higher than a mere 'TV beauty.'"

"Mother, stop paying attention to the tabloids. They'll only give you apoplexy." Amanda's voice was cool even as she bolted upright in bed (the most exciting thing to happen there in weeks).

"Chet Porter is reputable."

"A regular Pulitzer prize winner. The tongue-wagger of record." She kicked back the covers as her mind worked feverishly for answers.

How did Chet Porter find out?

"And he's not one to riffle through people's garbage cans just to see who's taking pre-natal vitamins," her mother continued.

"I'll bear that in mind for future reference." Nobody knew about what happened between Amanda and Darrell on Oscar Night but the two of them—and Al, of course—and certainly neither of them would have...

"And you accuse your father and I of not sharing," her mother said. "Shall I go on? There's more."

Would they?

Her mother did a conspicuous throat clearing and read on: "The TV beauty, who once cooed lines to _The Long Hot Summer_ co-star Darrell such as, 'We're giving you a ride, mister, and that's all we're giving you,' has been outspoken in her desire to settle down and leave show business behind."

Her mind quickly cleared of sleep, Amanda said breezily, "You know _The Weekly Star News_. They print nothing but poppycock."

"Nevertheless, it's juicy poppycock, and I'm glad to see you're finally getting some good press instead of the usual 'Amanda Monroe showed up at a nightclub wearing a navy turtleneck and went home early after behaving herself for a reasonable amount of time.'"

"Poppycock," she repeated, all casual dismissal on the outside.

Inside, she cursed her rotten luck. Dammit, dammit, dammit, where did Chet Porter dredge this up? And why did he have to dredge it up now?

"Utter poppycock." Breezy again. "I mean, really, Mother, this Oscar 'date' between Darrell and me was over a year and a half ago. And anyone with half a brain and a passing acquaintance with the saga of Darrell and Willow's relationship would consider a year and a half ago a distant memory."

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Amanda felt her mother's energy crackling through the phone. "There really _was_ a 'secret romp at Darrell's ultra-posh pad in the Hollywood Hills?'"

Busted, Amanda gulped. "No?" she said weakly.

How had she managed to secure an Academy Award, a role on a hit show, and leading lady offers from big-screen hunks and not learned to put up a better front? Where was her stiff upper lip? Gran would be appalled.

Her mother let out a whoop of overjoy. "I knew it! And to think, I'd almost lost hope for you. Well, at least now we know Darrell has a type."

"And that would be?"

"Leggy blondes with pedigrees. And really, I should have known—he's been crazy about you since forever, and don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about." She stopped to take in much-needed air and then, for the first time since Amanda had taken home that golden doorstop, Sukie Dyan burst with maternal pride. "Oh, my naughty, naughty girl!"

***

Amanda stood in the doorway of her dressing room, the picture of guilt, huddled in a silver trench coat and dark glasses, though the sun had barely risen. Ha, some disguise. It did nothing to stop Jac and Michele from rushing toward her the instant they caught her in their sights.

"Unattached man meets unattached woman for night of nookie!" Jac cried, feigning shock and embarrassment. "Cover my ears!"

Two steps behind, Michele nodded "me-too," though not so much with glee as concern.

Slyly, Amanda removed the dark glasses, loosened the white silk scarf at her throat, and led them inside before closing the door.

"So you've heard," she said, her voice level.

Jac could barely contain her elation, clapping her hands and bopping on her toes. "So how does it feel being a scarlet woman? I hope to God you're savoring it, seeing as how, knowing you, at midnight tonight you'll turn back into a pumpkin."

Amanda peeled off second-skin leather gloves. "The security guard in the lobby just winked at me for the first time in five years." To say nothing of the strange looks from the barista at her favorite coffee stand. Amanda Monroe didn't get strange looks when she was out in public. Amanda Monroe barely got looks.

Somehow she managed to slink through the building unnoticed by keeping her head held low, like an underling about to run into Knightley Stapleton. Now, safe at last in the confines of her dressing room, she sank onto the tasseled ottoman and breathed relief.

In fact, she'd left the house so early—she had an early call—that she'd let Al sleep. Why wake him with this news? After all, he and Darrell had once had that little chat about her history with Darrell, so he already knew. It could wait until later.

"See, I told you a sex scandal could only help your image," Jac said. "Not that this is much of one. I mean, salacious? Not." She scrolled the screen on her phone and began to read. "'Home-loving Amanda typically avoids party scenes. The New York native rarely stays in L.A. any longer than she has to, says one _WSN_ source.'"

"That wasn't me," Michele pointed out.

"'But apparently a week with Darrell was enough to make her change her mind,'" Jac chirped. "My God, I practically have to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks to keep from nodding off. But this is you, so it'll have to do." She quoted further. "'People don't normally think of lovely lass Amanda as a sexpot. But there's something about Darrell that brings out the animal in Amanda'." Jac paused and imitated sleep. "Zzzzz. I'm not shocked, your grandmother won't be shocked. God is not shocked. This is not news."

But the publicist's eyes sparkled with intrigue even as her lips professed ennui. "In fact, there is only one aspect to this that makes the whole thing mildly interesting."

Amanda nodded. "Let me guess. Sticking it to Willow."

"Exactly. She who takes down gets taken down. Oh, to be a fly on the exposed brick wall of her Tribeca loft when she reads this." Jac rubbed her hands greedily. "How Darrell will duck when the china starts to fly!"

"Over something that happened over a year ago with someone like me?" Amanda said. "I hardly think she feels threatened."

Jac's head spun. "What?" she cried. "You mean it's actually true?"

Stripping off her trench coat, Amanda realized she'd hit a new low in lame, even for her. When would she learn to lie convincingly?

Meanwhile, an exultant Jac raised her head toward the allegedly unshocked Almighty and beamed. "Why, this is even better!"

Michele, heretofore content to stay on the sidelines, stopped nodding along with Jac and furrowed her brow. "Don't you suppose on some level she already knew?" she said. "Willow, I mean."

Amanda shrugged. "I don't know what he tells her, but I can't imagine she thinks Darrell lived like a monk during their breakups."

"A girl can dream," Jac said, back on planet earth. "The thing that gets me is, how did I not sense this sooner?"

"It should have been obvious," Michele agreed.

"After all"—Jac cleared her throat and continued in the tone of a special report—"'Amanda loves taking in strays, and Darrell was no exception. The source confides: 'Amanda's a great girl, and any man would be lucky to have her.'" She gave a cynical snort. "Platonic friendship, blah blah. 'Just good friends' always means going at it like a couple of bunnies."

Amanda had always wanted to be the murderer in an English drawing room mystery, to be exposed in the final scene in the library. This was the closest she'd probably ever get. Right here, right now, as she prepped to do one of her final turns in front of an audience.

"All right, Amanda Jane," Jac said. "You've been holding out much too long and it's time to divulge every disgusting detail of your"—she nodded to her screen—"'Oscar Night of Passion.' So spill it."

"Yeah," Michele's head bobbed along as if she were the sidekick to the popular mean girl in _Student Nurses_ who tried to be vicious but didn't have it in her. "Spill it."

***

Two years earlier

It had been one of those East Coast wet, West Coast dry winters. As February drew to an icy end, after one too many nor'easters slamming the Eastern seaboard, Amanda grew itchy for respite in the sun and warmth.

February also meant awards season. Once again, duty called. As the previous year's winner for Best Supporting Actress she was expected to show up at the Academy Awards and present the award for Best Supporting Actor. It had become a tradition.

Only this time she wouldn't have to make a speech, she wouldn't have to feel conflicted about having won, she wouldn't have to attempt sitting down in a flared ball gown so wide it could shelter all Southern California, or totter on heels that pinched her toes and pitched her body forward with each painful step. She could relax during the buildup to the event, sprinkling in a bit of rehearsal here, a fitting with a stylist there. She'd even wear her own jewelry.

So by the time her flight touched down in the middle of Oscar Week, she was ready to wake up from her long winter's nap, leave her wool sweaters behind, and feel the sun's rays on her neck. Maybe hop on a bike. One of those cruisers with thick tires that you'd ride down by the beach. Adorned with a basket to carry fresh flowers and fruit.

Long ago, during one of their kitchen table talks, Darrell had offered to reciprocate in the hospitality department. "Someday, Amanda Jane," he'd said, reaching for the milk to douse his Cap'n Crunch, "You're going to come out to California and be my house guest for a change."

"Is that an offer?"

"Sure. Why not?"

Darrell decided that Oscar Week would be the perfect time to make good on his invitation. His reconciliation with Willow after the weekend in the rain the previous summer had gone kaput. Amanda had no non-actor suitors in sight.

"Why don't we go together and have a blast?" Darrell suggested. "We'll form our own lonely hearts club."

"My hero," she said, trying to sound jaded when in fact she felt relief at having someone to pal around with.

He confessed he'd never attended the awards before. He thought a person shouldn't until they'd been nominated for something. "But shoot, I want to go." He swore his invitation had nothing to do with lusting after her body. "This is purely about using you for your position and status."

"Promise?" she said.

"Promise."

"Okay then."

Armed with an itinerary long as a rope line that included rehearsals, media conferences and fittings, not to mention free and unsolicited beauty tips from Michele ("Drink dandelion tea to reduce stress and flush out toxins. The last thing you need on the red carpet is bloating.") and her assistant, Paris, to coordinate it all, Amanda arrived on Darrell's doorstep on Blue Jay Way in the so-called Bird Streets of the Hollywood Hills high above the Sunset Strip.

If one judged it by the street view, the neighborhood didn't look like an ultra-chic, exclusive enclave for producers, musicians, actors, and moguls. You'd think the place consisted of privacy walls and a few trash cans. But that was because the jaw-dropping frontage lay on the other side.

As her hired car departed, Darrell met her in a doorway, and they exchanged a quick peck. Gold highlights—eighteen-karat at least—shot through his sandy hair as he stood in open sunlight.

"Getting your beauty treatments along with the rest of the ladies?" she asked.

She slid her sunglasses down her nose to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. The garment he was wearing was orange. And purple. With zippers all over. You couldn't call it a shirt, the thing having no collar or cuffs, but it wasn't what anyone would call a pullover either.

"Nice top," she said.

Darrell frowned. "Only women wear 'tops.'"

She breezed past him and over the threshold. "Exactly."

"You're casting aspersions on my masculinity," Darrell said.

"I am not _exactly_ casting aspersions on your masculinity."

There her teasing ended, because the next sight to greet her eyes made her totally, utterly, and completely _whoa-ho_.

Amanda had been to the manor born, and she had seen some luxury. She'd grown up in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, for heaven's sake. But even for her, Darrell's bachelor pad took grandiose to a new level.

Darrell hooked a finger onto the front pocket of his jeans. "This is just a rental."

A Hipster Hunk Central rental.

From what Amanda could see, the glass-and-steel contemporary "jewel box" boasted fluid indoor/outdoor transitional spaces that became as one at the click of a glass-wall-moving remote control (the better to allow supermodels to sashay in and out); privacy-reflective glass to keep out the prying eyes of the paparazzi; and Italian marble finishes around the multi-level pool that would make a starlet doff her skivvies.

And Amanda hadn't even left the formal entry yet.

Darrell led her past an arrangement of orchids that dwarfed anything in her greenhouse back home, past the sweeping glass-and-marble staircase, and into the custom-built living area and a modular seating arrangement that made her feel like Judy Jetson. He sank into a sofa.

"A rental, hmm?" she said.

"With an option to buy."

Darrell had just finished that Harry Ritter Johnson project, and Amanda feared the unreformed bachelor was having a bad influence on her old pal, especially now that he was (for the time being) single.

She folded her arms and looked down at him. "You seem comfy here."

He crossed his legs. "Play your cards right, and twenty years down the road when you've gotten tired of my hound dog ways and decide you want some 'me time,' you'll get it in the dee-vorce."

He inclined his head toward the transitional space and hollered. "Boys!"

Amanda waited for the echo. There was none, just the skittering of doggie toenails. A moment later Cavendish and Hilts came running in from the pool, leaving wet tracks. No doubt Cavendish had been sacked out on one of the three sundecks while Hilts frolicked under the built-in waterfall.

As Amanda tousled ears and scratched bellies, she laughed inwardly because of course, Darrell's last remark was ridiculous. Though she couldn't put her finger on which part of what he said sounded most preposterous—that they would spend twenty years together married, or that they could ever become bitter and tired with one another if they did.

***

Michele called throughout the week for daily updates on the diet and workout regimens she'd drawn up for Amanda.

"First things first, let's talk about your juice cleanse," she rah-rahed Friday morning. A juice cleanse, she insisted, would give Amanda renewed energy and a red carpet glow.

Amanda fudged her reply, since her _actual_ diet and workout regimen consisted of a few sets of tennis with Darrell in the morning followed by a liquid lunch—as in white wine—then a spin through the hills on the back of his Ducati. Then an evening watching old movies in the full-size screening room. Willow may have been gone from Darrell's life, but her riding clothes—leather boots, jacket, gloves and a helmet—remained, and Amanda had them at her disposal.

On Saturday, after she'd gone through every rehearsal, had the final fitting for her gown, and blown off every kooky health and beauty do or don't she could, she sat in a _chaise_ on the grand balcony rehearsing her presentation in the voices of legendary actors just for the fun of it. _And the Oscar goes to..._ as Katharine Hepburn. _And the Oscar goes to..._ as Marlon Brando. _And the Oscar goes to..._ as Elizabeth Taylor. _And the Oscar goes to_... as Jimmy Stewart.

She was about to give her impression of Marilyn Monroe when Darrell waltzed through the transitional space and announced the day's itinerary.

"Today I'm going to show you the real house."

She looked up from the hand-held mirror into which she'd been practicing. "What real house?"

"Trust me, will you?"

He led her out to the driveway and the Ducati and fished around the garage for her—er, Willow's—helmet.

"Are we going house-hunting? I love house-hunting."

"Sort of."

Amanda still had one last appointment to shirk, the "re-sculpting" facial _Haute_ swore by to erase fine lines and define the jaw line.

She clicked her phone and her assistant responded. "Say, Paris. How'd you like a free facial?"

Fine lines? Peh. Amanda was but twenty-seven. If her face couldn't go "unre-sculpted" at twenty-seven, when could it? She gave the assistant the time and place of the appointment and met Darrell by the motorcycle.

While Paris enjoyed yet another complimentary beauty treatment, Amanda changed into Willow's leather clothes, and they set off.

The first day they'd ridden, he'd schooled her on how to ride. _I'll signal when I'm ready for you to get on. Here's where your feet go. Don't touch that, it's hot_.

She found she loved their excursions. She loved leaning onto his shoulder as she mounted. She loved the fit of her arms around his waist as they rode, their synchronization as they leaned into turns, the nonverbal cues between them as she tapped his knee to communicate. One tap for _Don't worry, I'm fine_. Two for _Slow Down_. _Three for Hey, that's enough._ It was scary at first, having to lean into a turn rather than against it. But after a while, it felt right.

She trusted him with her life, even if she didn't trust him with her heart.

Today, as Darrell steered the machine farther and farther up the coast, her curiosity grew. Finally, they reached their destination: Santa Barbara and an estate in a gated community.

They passed a one-story school. No kids today, it being the weekend. She almost tapped Darrell twice to take a closer look, but he was already rounding the entrance to the estate. Still she couldn't help but notice the convenient proximity.

They pulled into a circular driveway built around a central fountain and parked.

The estate occupied a level parcel and had ocean and mountain views.

The house itself was a bit dated, with seventies laminate throughout the inside. Still, it had an open and airy floor plan that screamed California living with its broad, curved archways and its beamed ceilings.

They passed a first-floor bedroom off the kitchen that would have made a fantastic guest room for a mother-in-law. Amanda kept picturing her own mother in there, which was silly, because if anyone would be sleeping over in such a room, it would be Bitsy Chaney.

"Now see here, pork chop, you come around this way," he said, wandering down a hall toward a cluster of more rooms, "and this is where kiddies would sleep." He pointed. "Got a bathroom right across the way."

"Once again, you've thought it through."

"And you say I'm nothing but a rosy-eyed optimist."

"Heh."

One didn't necessarily preclude the other, and she would have picked that bone with him, but the kitchen! Once Amanda overlooked the cobalt tile and warped cabinets and stood in the drenching sunshine coming through the skylight, her mind played host to a warm thought.

I could totally make peanut butter sandwiches here.

She took in the sight of twisty oaks beyond the sliding doors and imagined kids at play. Girls squealing their way down a slide as their flowery dresses rode up their legs. Boys climbing trees for days. Would they come back with snakes in their pockets? She gave a mental shudder at the thought. Then a hand on her shoulder that felt as sneaky as a reptile made her shudder for real.

"So what do you think?" Darrell said.

She jumped back into her skin, a hand to her chest to make sure her heart was still intact. "I love it."

"It's over an acre."

Down a dirt road at the edge of the property sat an outbuilding with dark wood beams. Still looking out the window, she gestured toward it. "What's that?"

"The stable."

Forget the thirty-mil party pad up in the Bird Streets with its views of L.A. off the grand balcony. This was the stuff that made Amanda's jaw drop. This was the good life.

"There's a _stable_?" She craned her neck to see if she could spot any tell-tale white equestrian fencing. It wouldn't exactly be a picket fence, but still...

Horses and gardens and trees to climb and this kitchen. She could live here.

Amanda got her jaw working enough to talk. "And you own this? You never told me you owned this."

"That's because I haven't decided what to do with it yet."

"What do you mean? Update the kitchen and live happily ever after, that's what you do with it."

At least, that was what she would have done.

If this house were hers.

***

On Oscar Day, Amanda started getting ready around noon. First she went for a manicure and pedicure and proceeded from there — hair (loose curls), makeup (subtle), gown (pastel minty green sheath), shoes (silvery kitten heels), bag (hardly large enough for the emollient lip butter her makeup artist insisted upon), diamond drop earrings (a gift from Gran) and a last-minute pearl from Michele ("Don't forget to hydrate!")

Meanwhile, Darrell ran some gunk through his hair and was ready in twenty minutes.

The ceremony itself had two high points, the first being the Best Actor acceptance speech. The winner shambled up, uttered four words ("I'm honored. Thank you.") and shambled back down.

The other high point came during the award for Best Documentary Short Subject, when Darrell saw fit to slide his hand through the slit in Amanda's gown.

Since the outcome of the night's balloting had all the surprise of a Communist election, Amanda spent the final half hour of the show wondering what he'd meant by his move.

After the ceremony, they headed out of the auditorium, melding into the flow of the famous. A reporter shoved a mic at her.

"Amanda, can you tell us what's been the biggest surprise of the evening so far for you?"

She fought the temptation to say what popped into her mind: That Darrell was turning out to be quite the leg man. Then she gave a canned answer and flashed a smile, super whitened from the cube of solidified coconut oil she'd swirled around her mouth in the shower at Michele's behest to pull out impurities.

Darrell steered her into the crowd.

"Can you believe this madness?" she said as they fought their way through the thickening throng.

"I know, I know," Darrell said, growing impatient. "Let's party."

"Let's party" meant heading over to a hotel on Sunset and Harry Ritter Johnson's swanky after party—big stars, hot women, premium liquor, the best band, and, reportedly, plenty of hanky-panky to go around. Darrell, by virtue of being Harry's co-star in their recently-wrapped buddy flick, had wangled a coveted invite.

As they dove into the limo, Amanda's stomach fell. So Darrell hadn't meant anything by his come-on gesture. It had merely served to pass the time, like a commercial break.

Shoot. Just when she began to warm to the idea.

At the party, her hunger intensified, and it wasn't for the In and Out burgers the cocktail waitresses were hawking from silver trays, which Michele had given Amanda permission to finally eat. Darrell was camped out in an overstuffed chair, smoking cigars and drinking scotch with host Harry and a few of his B-list cronies. The megastar had begun to attract beauty after beauty and they were rapidly amounting to a bevy. With the ratio of females to males increasing the odds against her, blood rushed in Amanda's veins. She had to stake her claim—now. Drifting over from behind, she draped her arms over Darrell's shoulders and buried her head on his shoulder, letting her curls graze his cheek. Then whispered that she wanted to go home.

This instant.

"All right," he said. Not "in a minute," or "in a little while," or "we're just getting started here."

She thought, Now I've got him.

Propositioning Darrell was a pretty safe bet. Darrell had a soft spot for her, and always would.

And so she sat in the limo letting show what Darrell had just recently touched with his hand—only a little bit of leg, but enough to make her feel swishy on the inside.

She leaned back and purred over how nice this felt, to have her insides swirling and her mouth, watering. Who needed coconut oil?

Darrell climbed in and shut the door. "Do you mind telling me what that was all about?" His voice had an edge.

Ooh.

"Well, um." Oh, baby. Even if it stopped here, this was more arousal than she'd felt in ages. Since that weekend in the rain. "You put your hand on my leg."

"You noticed that." And eyebrow went up. He was playing along. It wasn't going to stop here. They were going to go beyond banter. Amanda pressed her legs together.

Goody.

"It got me thinking," she said.

"Thinking? That kind of stuff gets you _thinking_?" He gestured... "Look where you are."

The limo pulled away from the hotel and began its winding ascent to the hills. They'd be home in minutes.

"That maybe we could go home early." Gulp. "And you could..." She drew and with scorching breath whispered a suggestion she'd never said in her life, not even from a script. Something along the lines of _I'm not wearing any shapewear_ but sexier.

His hand again broached the slit at the top of her thigh.

"It's that dress."

"This dress?" she said innocently.

"It's so..." He inhaled sharply. "ladylike. Those shoes."

"These shoes?" They were only low sandals, with tiny white bows on the toes. They were shoes a woman could actually walk in. They were the prissiest shoes.

"They make clip-clip sounds when you walk. Drives me mad."

He reached for her, but she pulled back. "Not here. People will see." She nodded toward the glass partition and the driver. "When we get home."

"Home."

"Don't be so impatient," she teased. Home was less than five minutes away. "The dress and the shoes will still be here when we get there."

"That's what you think."

***

Somehow, they both managed to have all their clothes on when the limo dropped them off at home. Darrell headed round back, toward the pool. Amanda wasn't sure if she was supposed to follow him out there, or go inside.

Somewhere in the background, beyond the pepper tree hedges, came a whistle sound. And then Darrell's voice.

"You want to walk those legs out here?"

"Who, me? You don't want the dogs?"

But the dogs were either fast asleep or inside somewhere, drinking from one of the home's eighteen toilets.

She rounded the house toward the pool and stationed herself on one of the platforms above the surface. Night jasmine tumbled out of a nearby urn. She inhaled its sweet scent and melted into shivers.

Darrell stood in the water up to his waist, naked to his trousers. Jacket on a chaise, shoes and socks strewn about with the bougainvillea and the jasmine. He paced, sluggish, not making much progress in the shallow end.

Amanda remained riveted to her place on the marble inlay, a light breeze swirling through her slit gown, her head swimming in sexy possibilities.

Slowly she lifted the hem of her gown and kicked off her sandals. Her right big toe dipped into the water, making lazy circles, sending out ripples toward him.

"Off, please," he said, a man about to explode.

First came the shoulder straps, which she eased off the right, then the left, all the while projecting her best picture of innocence face. She stopped. A breeze kicked up, and vague fumes of chlorine invaded her nose, and she thought, _no, all of Hollywood lies behind and beneath me._ Coyness was not the right dramatic choice.

Starlet dropping her skivvies.

That was the right dramatic choice.

To hell with clutching the gown around her armpits. She leaned her head back and opened her arms to the night sky and let the gown shimmy to the ground.

Let Darrell take in _her_ jaw-dropping frontage.

She eased into the water one tantalizing step at time, watching anticipation grow on his face, until she felt the cool of the surface hit her there.

He licked his lips and moved into deeper water.

Then she pushed off, the water up to her shoulders, and stroked her way over to him.

"Save your hair," he ordered, wriggling out of his tuxedo trousers. Their nude bodies rippled under the surface, and she clasped her legs around his waist while he whispered into her ear. "I know the perfect spot."

***

Brilliant sunshine sliced through the paparazzi-proof windows the next morning, bringing Amanda out of sleep.

She didn't need to look at a clock to know what that meant. "Guess I'm not going to make my plane home," she said to the ceiling of the master suite.

What made her think she'd catch such an early flight only hours after Hollywood's biggest party anyway?

Last night Darrell _had_ found the perfect spot. After scooping her out of the water, he'd carried her piggyback through every transitional space in the place, up the winding staircase, and finally into a home office and a bright yellow leather rocking chair. Then he pulled her onto his lap while she closed her eyes to the shiny surfaces and, through a lustful haze, felt his kisses stamped across her wet forehead. For starters.

She always did love yellow.

"You didn't really want to go back to New York right away anyway." Darrell spoke from deep within his pillow. "Otherwise you wouldn't have booked a flight so early you were bound to miss it."

He swiveled underneath his half of the covers. "Go back next Sunday."

"Stay a whole week?" she said. Her entire hiatus?

"A day, a week, a lifetime."

Doubtful, she wagged her head.

"Pork chop, I say that not without good reasons to back me up." He sat up. "Let me enumerate them for you. A. We're friends. We know everything there is to know about each other—and yet we like each other anyway. B. We know how to talk to each other, sometimes really dirty, which leads to, C. We know how to have a damn good time together." He pointed to the mattress for emphasis. "And finally, D. There isn't anything in the world that could make me not do everything for your happiness, so I don't know what you mean when you say you can't see it."

Always the optimist. He brightened even more.

"We'll do stuff!" he chirped. You'd think they were cub scouts on a campout.

Amanda made a drama of glancing around at the disheveled room, the rumpled sheets, the wall of windows that looked down onto the pool. Their evening wear still lay in heaps by the water's edge. "What would you call last night?"

"The latest twist in my master plot to make you mine."

Poor Darrell. He was so kidding himself in that department.

He reached over to the bed table and snatched up her phone. "You can swing it. Make a few calls. Paris should be up by now."

Darrell nodded toward the full-height transparent panes.

"Now is this a window or is this a window?" Last night's blanket of lights seemed a mirage. This morning all Amanda saw was rocky canyon and smog.

"We can walk around _nekkid_ all we want. There's nobody to see us."

So that was it. Typical oat-sowing talk. Amanda had no words.

Until Darrell swiveled out from under the covers. Then she had a thought. _That ass was still delectable._

"Correction," she said. "You can walk around _nekkid_ all _you_ want."

***

"I know you don't take me seriously," he said later, dressed, trailing her while she, also dressed, picked up their formal wear that lie discarded by the pool. Her gown hung half on the edge, half in the water. She wondered whether the designer would charge her for that.

"Someday you'll see," he said with that hokey seriousness that she was a sucker for and nothing of the cockiness that usually made her want to slug him.

"And what exactly is it that I'll see?"

"That I'm telling the truth. I can make you happy."

He kept at it with the forever talk, throughout their breakfast of leftover Kung Pao chicken and juice laced with Prosecco.

"And our would-be children," she argued, "have you stopped to think about them? You know at least one of them would be bound to get 'the gene.'"

"That's it? That's your objection? That a kid gets bitten by the acting bug? The way I see it, we'd be doing the world a favor."

"By foisting dizzy blonds on it?"

Defiant, Darrell nodded. "Shoot, yeah. It's a fine Hollywood tradition, I say. Are you aware that if current demographical trends continue, natural blonds will be extinct in two hundred years? You and I have a responsibility to give back."

Amanda blinked, grateful that she only had to put up with these ludicrous arguments for a short while and then they could get on with their lives.

But he insisted they have dinner first. Again, he knew the perfect spot, this time down the coast.

She crossed her arms. "You're taking me someplace out of the way." Because it seemed all of a sudden Darrell was trying to avoid the social scene. With Willow they did nothing but hit the social scene.

"I'm taking you someplace romantic." He drew her toward him. "With a view." His arms traveled up from her waist. "And ambiance."

She rested her hands on his shoulders. "Like with intimate tables and pretty candles?"

"Sort of."

"So you've been there before with other women."

"Tons and tons."

Amanda doubted that. But it wasn't tons and tons, only one that made her wary, despite her teasing. And that woman, despite her current absence, already had a pair of broken-in leather riding boots and a helmet in this house waiting for her anytime she had a yen to return.

Darrell took Amanda's face in his hands and pulled her closer still. Their noses touched. "When will you get it straight that I love you really?"

***

Amanda doubted that, but she gave in.

She agreed to dinner, but only on the condition that she found something decent to wear, for which she headed into Beverly Hills. It took her an hour to find the perfect spring frock and then another to accessorize. She was at a cosmetic counter, having a concoction whipped up to address her supposed particular, individual "skin issues" and thinking she could get used to this life, until the ringing in her pocketbook shocked her back to reality. Twice.

Somebody didn't like being ignored. Amanda picked up. Darrell's voice was deep, laden with desire. It stayed on the line long enough to croak three urgent words: "Get back here."

So much for "I love you really." She knew what he loved really. And never mind it was what she loved really last night, either. That was her wanting to get all this out of her system. This, now, was Darrell wanting to keep it going. But this, now, was also the cold light of day and she, at least, was living in it.

She did not want an actor. She did not want a rosy-eyed optimist.

When the white-coated "technician" asked if there would be anything else, Amanda decided that a non-fat cappuccino sounded good. "And a biscotti, too," she added. Let him simmer down. It would do him good. And her as well.

A while later, after ignoring a message from Michele recommending she ease slowly back into solid food with a soy latte and poached egg, she dialed her assistant. Paris, now the proud recipient of an Oscar presenter goody bag, picked up. Amanda instructed her to search for available flights, because the fantasy was over and they were heading back to New York and their day jobs, as soon as possible.
8 Thursday

Knightley was to film tomorrow night and the writers still hadn't come up with a satisfactory ending for the Three in a Booth scene in the cocktail lounge.

On the set, Amanda shifted in a director's chair. This wasn't a dress rehearsal; she wasn't wearing her LBD with the floppy neckline, just another favorite faded blouse and turned up jeans.

Knightley Stapleton had finally deigned to put himself through a rehearsal. He sat in a similar chair next to Amanda, grumbling in his earth tones.

Harry was on set, too, and Amanda never realized what a clumsy oaf the idol was until she watched him shuffle everywhere. Knightley did have a point about Harry. Harry had a habit of blocking the star's light.

Now if only Darrell would show up. He was thirty minutes late for his call, and Amanda was growing concerned.

It was so unlike him. He may have been a goofball at times, but he didn't screw up, and he didn't pull diva crap.

Not that she feared he'd fallen into a ditch somewhere. No, she could sum up in one word what Darrell's problem was.

And it was spelled W-I-L-L-O-W.

Thirty minutes later, Darrell did show up, head bowed, wearing a gob-smacked look and apologizing to everyone in sight. At least there was that.

Amanda waited until lunch, and then, as everyone feasted on a buffet of Reuben sandwiches and root beer, figured she'd coax an explanation out of him.

First Jac came by to happily give them an update. "What? You haven't heard? There's an It-storm brewing on UrIt, and you're in the middle."

Pretending nonchalance, Amanda dismissed Jac with a wave. "By tomorrow, the whole thing will blow over and the haters will be on to something new." God, what were people saying?

"Exactly," Jac said, tapping fingernails to screen. "If we're going to capitalize on this, we have to act fast. Give me a couple hours, and I'll boost this baby into the stratosphere."

Amanda held up her soda can. "Too bad this isn't a real beer."

Darrell held out a snack size foil bag. "Have a chip."

She took one. "Thank you." In between bites, she thought, this was the way it should be between them, sharing the small joys of daily life—food and conversation—and the experience of working together.

She read trouble on his face and answered for him, saying simply, "Willow."

"Let's just say Hilts has some company in the doghouse."

"I'm sorry." She bit down on a caraway seed. Its pungent flavor filled her mouth.

"Not your fault," Darrell said.

"Still..." Thousand island dressing dribbled onto her lip, and she dabbed at it with a brown paper napkin.

"You know, one thing makes me wonder," she said. It had been on her mind all morning. "How did this get to Chet Porter in the first place? Because I certainly didn't tell him. And I know Al never would..."

Darrell raised an eyebrow. "Al?" He grew quiet again, then spoke. "I may kinda know something about where Chet got his information."

Good old honest-to-a-fault Darrell.

Her voice hardened. "Kinda something, what?"

"I may have kind of mentioned it to a mutual friend."

Not only was he being honest, he was using weasel words to do it. Couldn't he blurt out a lie for once in his life?

"What mutual friend?"

Darrell's gaze swooped in a pitiful arc over to the director's chair where Harry Ritter Johnson sat, taking selfies with Michele.

Amanda tried to keep her voice restrained. She failed. "You told _Harry_? I can't believe you told Harry."

"Hey, I waited a long time for you to get back from shopping that day. I had to talk to someone. Besides, it's what we men do. We brag."

Aha. So she _was_ nothing more than a conquest. So much for horseback riding on the beach and peanut butter sandwiches and spare bedrooms for mothers-in-law. What a waste of energy and daydreams.

"If it makes you feel any better, that's not the worst news."

"Oh, great, there's more."

Darrell displayed his phone, screen out, so she could see. "It seems Willow's been posting on UrIt. Seems she thinks of you as 'that blonde Laura Petrie.'"

Amanda snatched the phone and read for herself. Sure enough, Jac had sparked a war of words and Willow had responded. Amanda thrust the device back at him. "Can't you control your girlfriend?"

"Are you kidding?" Darrell went annoyingly slack-jawed with helplessness. "Even if I wanted to..."

Argh.

"And good luck proposing to _that_ tomorrow night."

***

"Now, love, you mustn't back out of our deal."

Standing before his sorry butt seated in his director's chair, her hands planted on the chair's arms, Amanda leaned in inches from Harry's face and shook her head slowly, drawing out her words for emphasis. "We don't have a deal."

"A verbal agreement is—"

"We don't have a verbal agreement."

Coming up empty in reply, Harry haplessly stroked his dimpled chin. Gad, how did she ever let him charm her into even considering making a film with him?

"Deep down, you must not want me to do this movie," she began. "Because if you think blabbing about me to the media is going to make me more disposed to be your Maxie..."

Apparently over his loss for words, Harry grew a cheesy grin. "I may have slipped a tidbit or two Chester's way, but not deliberately. I'm trying to get you into my movie, not make you hate me." His smile turned wry. "Though I do like to be smacked around occasionally."

Swigging from a bottle of water, Darrell wandered over.

"I see Ritter's pushing your buttons," he said as Harry acknowledged him with a nod. "A worthy goal, I might add, and one that I highly recommend, based on previous experience."

Amanda didn't want to hear it. "Oh, knock it off, Romeo. This is all your fault."

"My fault?"

"You opened your big fat mou—"

"I told you, I had to talk to somebody."

"So you called up Harry and told him why you bailed on his after-after party, and then the two of you had a good laugh at my expense. I can hear it now. You,"—she turned to Harry, putting on her best Aussie accent—"'Aye, mate, why'd you bail last night?' Then you." Now, to Darrell, with his lazy lilt. "With your towel around your hips"—she shimmied with an invisible towel around her hips—"'Dude, I have been getting so lucky.' Then Harry would say, 'Gee I wonder what that must have been like with Amanda around. Ooh!'"

"Listen." Darrell pointed his water bottle at her. "It's what we men do. We brag. And Ritter would never say ooh."

That part at least was true.

"I don't know what you're getting so upset at me for," Darrell went on, pointing the water bottle at Harry next. "I only blabbed to one man. He blabbed to the whole world. Give him a slap across the face."

Amanda glanced at Harry. "Harry is too cute to slap."

Harry chortled and grinned.

"And he would only enjoy it, so the effort would be wasted," she added.

"Do you know what all this is?" Darrell said. He took the water bottle and undulated it as if it were bobbing on a wave. Then he made a _pssh!_ sound. "Water over the dam."

But Amanda wasn't buying his sound effects any more than she bet Willow had earlier that morning.

"You started the whole ball rolling anyway," Darrell insisted. "You wore that dress."

"That was the most chaste dress," she said with disgust.

"It had a slit up the side."

"Only to the knee."

"Exactly."

"Whatever."

***

A while later, just as they'd gotten back to work, rehearsal came to a halt once more. Knightley wanted more dialogue pruning. "People, people," he condescended to the writing staff. "We need dialogue that sings. The words have to flow. Like... like..."

Sitting in the cocktail lounge booth between Darrell and Harry, Amanda mentally completed her co-star's sentence. _Like water over the dam._

She was trying like hell to stay in character, but it was a struggle. It was hard to project fluffy and light when what you really wanted to do was fling Wedgewood.

At that point a thunderbolt cracked in her brain. "I've got it!" she cried, pushing her way past the two dolts. She broke the "fourth wall" and retrieved Darrell's abandoned, half-full water bottle on the sidelines as the entire crew watched. Hard to believe no one had thought of it before. The answer was so obvious.

"The scene! The scene! Three in a Booth. I know how to end it." She held up the water bottle. "Say this is Fleur's cocktail. Clearly," she said, swinging her arm wide, "Fleur needs to throw it in the star's face." An arc of water shot out and splashed across Harry's freshly shaven cheek.

"Now, hold on, pork chop..."

So help her, God, she thought, rounding on Darrell. If he did that _pssh_ thing again...

"Seems like the second banana could use a refresher, too." She turned the bottle upside down over Darrell's head and emptied the dregs. Water ran down his head and over his glasses, forming little droplets on the rosy lenses.

"And that, my friends," she said, as the bottle fell to the floor and she wiped her hands clean, "is your ending."

***

By nightfall, thanks to Jac's fingertips, Team Amandas and Team Willows had formed on UrIt. Arrows, green and red, reverberated around cyberspace with Amanda cast as the heroine and Willow as the villainess.

Naturally, Typewriter Al would be in the dark, Amanda thought, walking past the slice of light in the basement window and letting herself in the back door.

Her fiancé lived in such a hermetic bubble, and now she was going to have to pop it. What if she didn't tell him? A cynical, resentful voice rose up inside her.

Like he'd ever know.

The man could go for days without ever connecting to civilization.

This morning's slightly naughty feeling had faded. In her trench coat she still felt like the minister's wanton wife, only now she enjoyed it less.

She stepped inside and there was Al, standing in stark relief against the open black hole of the basement, a shiny new wireless tablet dangling from one hand, a page of tabloid news on display.

"What the hell is going on?"

She stared at the device. "Where did you get one of those?"

"I asked you first."

Wonderful. Of all the times he had to pick to step into the new millennium.

"Well that's just ..."

She told herself there shouldn't be much to confess. She and Al had talked about it already, at the beginning of their relationship, and agreed it didn't matter. But it was another thing for it to be offered up for public consumption.

She glanced around the kitchen. He had the table set. "You made dinner."

A glimmer of the Al she'd fallen for a year ago last summer. The Al that liked to cook. And garden. Darrell may have inspired Amanda to install a greenhouse, but it was Al who liked to putter there as much as Amanda did.

Chalk up another reason for her to Get Out. In a few short months, nine and a half episodes to be exact, give or take a feature film and a few re-shoots for another, and the only wacky celebrity hijinks Al would ever have to endure again would come from his in-laws.

She turned back to him. "Remember about Darrell and me? That 'brief, investigatory whatever' that you called it that you and Darrell talked about? It seems a gossip columnist has gotten wind of it."

"The weekend in the rain." But then he held up the tablet, and the Oscar Night story. His face was a question mark.

Amanda froze. "Wait. When exactly did that conversation with Darrell take place?"

"I dunno. Years ago. In the basement, I guess."

"Not last year when you and I started dating?"

Al stood like a stone. She'd never seen him like this before. A lump, maybe, but a stone...

"No, when Darrell and I were both still living here."

_That_ long ago? So Al had known about her first fling with Darrell, but not the second. Huh.

They sat down to the meal Al had lovingly made—his mother's recipe for eggplant Parm, second time in a week—and she began to talk.

She told him about the weather and the sun and how unreal it had all felt. Seductive, and she'd given in to it. She had wanted to be bad, eating her way through Oscar Week. She fast-forwarded right up to today. How furious she was that Darrell—towel-snapper that he was—had to blab to Harry, another towel-snapper, who had to blab to Chet Porter, who was probably also a towel-snapper, and that was how the whole story was revealed.

She left out the parts about Darrell's Ducati and their ride up to Santa Barbara and their house-building and horse-keeping talk.

"It's just industry idiots with an agenda," she insisted.

"A night of passion?"

"That's all it was."

"You and I never had a night of passion."

She and Al had never had an eye blink of passion, but pointing that out right now seemed to be salt in the wound. Plus, she didn't want him to doubt he was the one for her.

She gulped her wine.

Come to think of it, she'd never taken umbrage with Al over a snotty ex-girlfriend he kept taking back, either.

"So you understand?" she said. "I mean, we're okay? It's just media idiots trying to get Willow's goat."

Al, a former media idiot, took no notice of the slight. "So, it was actually a night and a day of passion."

She wasn't sure where this was going.

"We never had a night of passion," Al repeated, a shock of hair hiding his sorry eyes.

She tugged at his arm. "But you and I, we're going to have our whole lives together, and that's better." If this were a sitcom, this would be the point where the studio audience would go _Aw_ , and the lovers would kiss and make up.

She would stretch out her hand across the table. He would take it. They would both gaze at her engagement ring as the dim light from the chandelier glinted off its surface. He would smile, and she would laugh, and it would be a true heartfelt moment.

Then she would lean in close and confide. Want to hear something really funny? And reveal a juicy tidbit of her own: Guess who's supposed to propose to Willow tomorrow night? Then Al would deadpan that such a fate was punishment enough for Darrell, and they would giggle like teenagers, and everything would be all right.

Instead, Al's shock of hair tumbled forward as he slowly shook his head.

"We never had a night of passion."

***

It looked as if Darrell wasn't going to get his moment after all. Thirty minutes into their late-night supper he came to that conclusion. And not just because Willow had already sent her drink back twice. Nor because she'd browbeaten the kitchen staff into making something for her that wasn't on the menu. No, it was the sight of their waiter that gave Darrell pause. The poor schmo's face had a worried look, one that Darrell could only describe as, _please don't be breaking up in my section._

It was almost as if the waiter had been a fly on the wall at the loft that morning.

Watching her pitch pottery in her woolen straightjacket of a dress, Darrell had had the urge to scratch. But then again, scratching an itch was what had gotten him into this predicament in the first place.

Not to worry, though. Chill Pill did have some color: the furious pink of her rage. It tinged her face from neck to meticulously parted hairline.

As the china had flown, Hilts barked his objections on all fours from the seat of a high-backed kitchen chair, where he was not allowed to be. Willow barked hers from a wide stance in front of a built-in that housed a row of breakable objects. Darrell glanced from one outraged party to the other. At Willow's neck, a pearl choker. At Hilt's neck, a collar with a tag.

It was hard to say who'd been yapping louder, and for the briefest, most fleeting of moments, like a ray of light tearing a hole in cloud cover, the resemblance between their respective fighting stances struck Darrell, and suddenly the reason for the enmity between prospective missus and canine became clear.

Too much alike.

Willow raised an index finger to point. Darrell followed with a hand to block. "Now hold on a sec, Chill Pill..."

"Don't. You. Even. Start." Her words came at him through gritted teeth. "What did you have to go and tell Ritter for?"

Darrell's hands flailed as if he'd just been handed a hot potato. "Because it's what we men do. We brag."

One sinewy arm reached behind her back and discovered a blown-glass candy dish—a never-used piece in her collection. It came hurling his way. But Darrell had done too many of his own stunts in films to not know when it was time to duck, and the poor thing's projectile flight was interrupted by the brick wall immediately behind him.

Smash!

"So you told Ritter, and now all of New York knows. Perfect."

And cyberspace, too, Darrell thought, sidestepping an errant, icicle-like chunk of frosted sharpness. Though New York knowing mattered far more to Willow.

Willow's voice cranked up a notch to match the heat level of her complexion. "You said she was your ideal woman!"

"Whoa." That had been two days before, and he'd been making small talk on _The Tonight Show_ for promotional purposes. "I said she was _the_ ideal woman. _The_ ideal woman. In the general sense. For all mankind."

"That is so much better."

Darrell made a sweeping movement with his arm. "Do you know what this is?" He made a _pssh_ sound. "It's water over the dam."

But now, at their late-night supper, it was clear that no one was over anything.

Since this morning, Chill Pill had had a chance to not so much unwind as stand down. This morning's nubby, iron-hued wool sheath and chic knee-high boots gave way to this evening's white silk sheath and heels.

She had her legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. Severely demure, not real demure, not honest and gentle and natural, the way, say, someone like Amanda Girl, for instance, would do demure.

Their food arrived, and Willow inspected her poached fish—plain—accompanied by sliced tomatoes, a sprig of parsley and two—not one, not three—wedges of lemon.

Hardly mushrooms fricassee or corn dogs in the rain or even corner-diner hash.

Though the waiter might beg to differ, eating here in silence beat staying home sweeping up pot shards. Darrell didn't think there were any more Peruvian antiques to be had in all of Tribeca, let alone Peru. Willow had cleaned out all of downtown in her rampage.

Despite her recline, Willow lacked her customary satisfied air of a lioness feasting on a gazelle, the one she took on when capturing some poor unfortunate A-lister in her journalistic snares.

Her coffee arrived, and she dropped four blips of half-and-half—not three, not five—into it and stirred in a straight line. Back, forth. Back, forth. Not pell-mell, not higgledy-piggledy, not in little circles.

Straining forward against the table, she said, "Darrell, this is ridiculous, us going around and around." Back and forth her spoon went three times. Not two, not four.

He didn't detect body odor or clammy hands or even a cold sweat about her, the latter of which would seem more to suit Willow's style. No. Tonight...

She.

Was.

Just.

A.

Little.

Too.

Tight.

Skittish. That was it. Like the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs—with Hilts jumping on every one. Which reminded Darrell to bring home a doggy box of leftovers. That might assuage some hurt feelings in the morning.

The waiter pulled a cigarette and lighter out of his pocket and headed for the back. A bad sign. Someone was expecting a long night.

And that was when Darrell realized what was different. Tonight, Willow wasn't the lioness. Tonight, she was the gazelle.

"Darrell, I've come to a decision," Willow said, drawing his gaze back around toward her. "It's time."

9 Friday

The next morning Darrell happened by Amanda's dressing room on his way into hair and makeup. It seemed a major wig crisis had erupted concerning Knightley's character's housekeeper, Berta, and they weren't ready for Darrell yet.

She sat on the small sofa, her head buried in one of the daily tabloids. "Harry does work fast," she said, showing him the paper. "Check out this tidbit."

At least she was speaking to him this morning. Her anger appeared to have diminished from yesterday.

"Water over the dam, I tell ya," Darrell said, motioning. Whoosh, _pssht_.

"Would you stop doing that?" She looked up. "So? Doghouse?"

"No doghouse," he said cheerily. "As a matter of fact, we're going ring shopping Sunday." Darrell could hardly wait for the Rule of Beauty his fiancée would lay down for picking out that sucker.

Amanda put down the paper. "Congratulations."

Congratulations, ha. They were said with the stilted, transparent cheer of a first day's table reading.

"You found your moment."

Not what he'd expected Amanda Girl to say. He'd expected a crack about how ring shopping with Willow was like being in the doghouse, or punishment enough, or preferable to a doghouse. Darrell could rattle off a million possible punchlines. And so he found it easy to reveal the truth to her.

"More like _Willow_ found the moment."

"Ah." Though he knew what Amanda was thinking, because although she had manners, she was no fool. She was thinking that Willow was using this public humiliation as leverage, a way for Darrell to make it up to her by getting hitched.

"It's what you wanted," Amanda said.

Where was her rallying to his supposed defense? Where was her _but she's not good enough for you, Darrell!_ of Monday night?

Darrell ignored the omission and played along. "Exactly. I mean, what difference does it make who and how and why it came about? The point is this thing"— he couldn't bring himself to say out loud the "m" word, marriage, or the "w" word, wedding "– is happening. It's a good, solid move. You don't see a lot of those among our kind. We've even set a date. Valentine's Day."

That brought a look of surprise.

"Whoa."

"You think that's moving too fast?" _Please say yes._

"I'd say so."

"I'd say not." _But thank you._ "It's only been four years in the making. So what about you? Doghouse?"

"Actually," she said, flexing one Ked, "no doghouse for me, either."

"I expected to wake up to Al's grimy mitts pummeling my sorry mug."

"Oh, pish," Amanda said gaily, breezing through the paper. "I'm marrying such a wonderful, non-violent man. You know how unmoved to fisticuffs he is. Why, this sort of high-school nonsense rolls off him like water off a duck's back."

Again with the bad line reading. It was the sorriest, phoniest impersonation of a cool, imperturbable Grace Kelly he'd ever seen Amanda Girl attempt.

She laughed, high and fluttery. "In fact, last night when I got home, we actually had a good laugh about the whole thing."

"Good." Darrell nodded, slow and stilted, not sure whether to believe her. "Good."

"Not that he isn't rightfully upset, of course." As she said it, squaring the edges of the tabloid so it lay in a neat pile, she squirmed, and for the slightest instant, Darrell got the feeling Al's animated emotion at breakfast this morning more concerned how many Cheerios were at the bottom of the cereal box than who'd gotten into his fiancée's undies eighteen months ago.

"Embarrassed more than anything," she went on, rubbing imaginary ink stains off her fingers. Great, now she'd moved on to Lady Macbeth.

"But you just said..."

"I mean, it's all so silly. And you know how I am... old frustrated, prudish Amanda..." The ink wouldn't go away. The more she tried to de-smear, the more she smeared.

Ha. "That's not the way I remember it," Darrell said. "The way I remember it you didn't act very frustrated. In fact, you were kind of an animal."

She gave up on the ink and dropped her hands in her lap. "About that," she said nervously. "The thing is... Well... Last night as I was lying in bed thinking..."

Amanda Girl would spend her time in bed thinking, especially when Darrell wasn't there to amuse her. It was possible, of course, there was hot makeup sex with Al before the thinking part, and she was censoring that part of it for Darrell's benefit. Though Darrell wasn't sure what he would hate more—if she did have hot makeup sex with Al, or didn't have hot makeup sex with Al.

Come to think of it, last night in bed, next to Willow, Darrell had done a lot of thinking, too, after her proposal. Actually, it was less of an acceptance and more of an agreement with her during their discussion.

"Look, you can save your apologies," he said. "It was just good old-fashioned sinning. It's what people do. And you know why? Because it's F-U-N, that's why."

Darrell would have thought she'd give him points for honesty, but no such luck. She studied her engagement ring and went on apologizing anyway.

"No, no, hear me out. Please." She paused; he let her finish. "I knew very well that once upon a time you wanted more than I did, and that night I took advantage of it and I'm sorry."

"Only you, Amanda, would apologize for us groping one another like teenagers. Can't you do anything, anything at all, without feeling guilty about it?"

He moved in close and did a forehead bump. She let him. He looked into her soft blue eyes. She looked back into his.

"Again, I repeat: Why can't you be a normal person?"

"You may not want to hear it now," she said. "But someday you'll be glad I said this, because you'll see that you deserve better than being toyed with."

***

For Darrell's sake. For Darrell's sake.

Amanda repeated the words to herself as she faked a polite greeting to Willow in the wings at _Knightley_ , all the while suppressing a mental picture of the woman standing in a sun-drenched Santa Barbara kitchen forbidding her children to have peanut butter sandwiches.

Talk about heightened tension.

_Wow! The energy tonight!_ Michele posted on her social media accounts. _Never seen a_ Knightley _taping like this before!_

That was one way of putting it.

Amanda was in full "Fleur"—hair, makeup, wardrobe, ready to go on.

Beside her, Gran wore her puffed-up, grouchy budgie scowl and aimed it straight at Darrell's girlfriend. Er, betrothed.

Darrell in turn aimed quizzical looks at Gran, who kept referring to him as "Alfred." The four of them were milling around backstage before it was time to take their seats in the audience. Somewhere, too, was Amanda's mother, probably on the receiving end of a Harry Ritter Johnson charm offensive.

Amanda heard titters coming from the audience, and was sure it wasn't because of Darrell's way with a punch line or Dirty Harry's ace delivery.

It was the subtext, the scandal. The social media war.

Between "Chet Chat" and UrIt, the latest bombshell had Amanda walking around _without her engagement ring!_ (Cue the _Dragnet_ theme.) She'd had Jac try to clear things up, explain that Amanda Monroe was an actress who cared deeply that her portrayal of Fleur Harte be authentic, and since her character was a single woman, she always shifted her aquamarine to her right hand while filming, and there was absolutely no truth to—

Oh, heck. People would believe what people would believe.

As she reached out to take Willow's hands, her bare ring finger began to itch. They followed up with an air kiss and equally high, tinny laughs.

"This whole thing is so silly," Amanda said.

"Beastly."

"I can't believe I'm being green-arrowed for once, and it's over something like this." She gave Willow's elbow a playful tap. "Really what we should be talking about is yours and Darrell's good news."

Willow reciprocated with _her_ congratulations and added, "We really do the four of us have to go out together and compare plans."

Willow's curious eyes darted around, and Amanda had a good guess why. She was taking note of the missing member of their merry foursome. Again, the absence of Al being noticed.

Again, Amanda explained. "These days filming is girls' night out for me." _Not_ a fib; she, Jac, and Michele always went out for late-night happy hour afterward. "Al's such a dear about letting me have my routines. Plus, you know the Mets..."

Her voice trailed off. Of course, it was October and the post-season and, Darrell being right again, the Mets weren't playing. But Amanda was counting on Willow to not know that.

"Can't take the Queens out of the man," Willow said, none the wiser.

Darrell shifted his insouciant stance from one hip to the other. "And apparently can't take the man out of Queens, either," he said.

Pretty cocky for someone who had to perform any minute in an unfamiliar medium. Perhaps he was just getting into character. Still, it irritated her.

And to think she'd _apologized_ to him earlier today. That irritated her, too.

And even though Darrell had no experience filming a sitcom before a live audience, he'd no doubt pull it off. In rehearsal, Darrell hit his mark, every time. He had his trademark pained expression of "snot-nosed jerk" down cold.

And it irritated her.

And it irritated her that Gran fancied him so, and he, her. It irritated her that they went around backstage cutting each other up with their old war jokes.

How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?

No one knows, it's never been tried.

So, when their guests were escorted to their seats a minute later, and the warmup comic was about to go on, she was so irritated with Darrell that she couldn't resist getting in a dig of her own.

"We're not on camera," she snapped, adopting an insouciant pose of her own. "You can put away the jackass look."

Darrell let out a snide guffaw.

"You heard me."

She turned away from him and thought that would be the end of it, but then he had to add, "You need to be angry at someone, fine. I can take it. You been doin' it all week."

"Darrell, that's it. I'm done." She scratched her itchy ring finger. "Of course you think no one could ever possibly be angry with you. You think the whole world is so giddy and taken with your frat boy act. Like those women out there in the balconies beyond the rail. They're not just here for Harry."

"That upset you?"

Amanda closed the door behind them, heat burning up her ears. "Why are you such an idiot?"

"Why don't you tell me?" Now his voice was starting to rise.

"Why don't you tell me? Why have you been jealous all week of a bounder like Harry instead of Al," she said, holding a hand to her chest, "who actually is someone I love and respect?"

Darrell made a slashing motion toward the floor. "Harry may be a rat, but at least he makes you smile. And you should have a man who makes you smile, just not him."

"Regardless of your _expert opinion_..." Oh, did she spit those words as she pressed in on him. "Yes, I am set on Al. And how that must bother you."

"Yeah," Darrell said, "Sometimes I wonder."

She crossed her arms. "Excuse me?"

"Well, why else hire a twee wedding planner you're not into except because you don't really want to marry someone? Makes a convenient excuse when you never seem to get around to going through with it."

"I am marrying Al."

"Fine. Say you are set on him. That isn't what _bothers_ me. What bothers me is that he isn't set on you, and you insist on being Miss I Don't See It." Then, with a mix of disappointment and contempt, "I used to think you were the smartest person I knew."

How dare he? She was about to tell him so but he cut her off, as if they still had ten more pages of dialogue to get through and he was just getting started.

"You say I made you forget you had a fiancé? Blinding news flash, lady: Your fiancé forgot you long before."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, that's so. Your fiancé..."

He didn't call Al by his name, and for some reason that raised her temperature even more.

"Who couldn't be bothered to attend a simple brunch with you and your folks, suddenly got up the energy to go to his mother's right when you had a fancy dinner cooking at home. And then he stayed there even though he knew that another man was going to be there alone with you."

"You are not another man. You are family."

"Tell that to 'Chet Chat' and the readers of _The_ _Weekly Star News_."

Not to mention the one billion users of UrIt.

"And that was just the beginning of the week."

She couldn't believe he was laying into her like this, when the one he should have been laying into was himself.

"Okay, here's what you consider a bright idea," she shot back. "I marry you, ham bone actor. We go off and live a life of endless cosmetic treatments and children named after grocery items."

"Okay." He echoed her tone, snottily, "Two things. One, I am not a ham bone actor. I'm a corn pone actor. There's a difference. And two, when did I ever bring up marriage in the context of you and me?"

She couldn't believe he was denying what had been so obvious. "You were thinking it.'"

"Thinking?"

"Yeah, for five years now that's exactly what you've been thinking."

"Prove it."

"Uh, 'Stay for a week, stay for a lifetime.'"

"That? That?"

There he went again. Twelve-year old, towel-snapping boy.

"I know you, Darrell. I know exactly how you operate. I know exactly what your values are. I know what those looks you gave me meant."

"So now you're conceding that I was serious?"

"Well, what does it matter, since it's all ' _Pssht_ , water over the dam?'"

She fought to keep her clenched fingers from clawing him. What was wrong with this picture? Why was she always apologizing and giving in? Why was she the one to say _You're right_ all the time? When men and women argued (not that she and Darrell were a couple) wasn't it supposed to be the other way around? Wasn't the man supposed to swallow his pride and automatically say, _Yes, dear_ to the woman?

It proved they weren't a couple. If they were a couple, Darrell would be caving in to her wishes.

He did it with Willow all the time.

"Just because Willow and I don't fart around and have actually set a date."

What? That was all they'd done for four years.

He snapped his fingers. "It's not that hard." Then he went into smarmy gesture mode. Calendar, finger, point, date.

Towel snapper.

"Yeah, talk big," she said. "Your girlfriend had to propose to you."

"Okay, look, you don't like what I'm doing with my life, and I don't like what you're doing with yours. We're even."

"I guess so."

"Fine."

"Fine."

She was marrying Al, with or without Darrell's blessing. But first, she had an episode to finish shooting.

"You don't help matters by blabbing on late shows."

"What did I say?"

"God, she's good at going limp in a man's arms." She flounced her curls and limpened her wrists.

"Calm yourself, pork chop."

_Calm yourself, pork chop?_ Her temperature shot up another ten degrees.

"Oh, and by the way." She flung an arm wide. "You were off your mark out there during rehearsal." It didn't matter that she made that up. She was an actress. Making stuff up was part of the job. "I _hope_ that doesn't happen for the rest of the night."

She wouldn't ease up and mention that Harry blew it bigger, and that was why they had to keep doing scenes over and over again.

Or that during the entire Three in a Booth scene, she'd kept trying to forget what Darrell had said way back a hundred years ago on Monday, that a woman can't learn to love a man, she either loved him from the start or didn't, even though it didn't matter anyway, because it didn't apply to her situation.

At all.

***

The neckline on Amanda's little black dress flopped one more time as she took the last bow. Her left hand clasped in Knightley Stapleton's right, and the two of them rose in unison from their deep bend at the waist.

Maybe it was the blood rushing back into her head that caused the warm feeling to wash over her.

Or maybe it was the ending for Three in a Booth. She'd run her idea—Fleur throwing her drink in both men's faces—by the director, and he'd loved it. Tonight, she'd made sure to flub it twice with each man, so that they had to do retakes.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was the satisfaction of a job well done, of jokes that somehow, after days and days of tweaking and pruning, ended up actually landing. Of one more step in the chain of events that would lead to her character getting what she always wanted before the lights dimmed on the fictional world of _Knightley_ forever.

In true scene-stealing fashion, after the final take on the final scene of the night, Darrell scaled the railing that separated the upper and lower levels of the audience and let the disbelieving females who packed the stands swallow him up. Some turned scarlet, most shrieked, a few reached out to grab any part of him they could—elbows, shoulders, designer lapels. Dirty Harry, not willing to settle for being left in the dust, followed him into the nosebleeds.

Amanda was still angry with both men, but she'd let herself forget for a few hours even as she'd had to draw one in (Harry) for a sudden kiss and then later throw a martini at both.

The two movie hunks climbed down from the stands. She sidled up to Harry.

She was the daughter of Geoffrey Monroe and Sukie Dyan, the granddaughter of Dame Wendy Bentley-West. There was no denying that. It would always be part of who she was. But at this moment, Amanda Monroe approached Harry Ritter Johnson not because of who her parents were, but because of who she was: a performer who wanted to play a part.

She glided toward him and gave him a tap on the shoulder.

"Ritter," she said, assuming the privilege of using his insider name, "Do you perchance have any projects in development that call for a blonde Laura Petrie type?"

"Why, I believe I just might."

He took her hand—Darrell stood by seething, she could tell—and kissed the fingertips. "I'll see you in the South of France."

She let out a giggle, and tension released from within her and wafted up to the rafters. "You certainly will. After nine more episodes."

***

"And when is this plighting of troth supposed to take place?" Jac said over her cocktail and the hum of a packed late night happy hour.

"Valentine's Day."

Jac roared, and Amanda wished she'd shush. After the last two days, Amanda didn't need any more stares from strangers.

"Darrell keeps insisting Willow has a heart somewhere under all that gray, but I never saw it," Amanda said and shrugged. "Maybe he's on to something."

"The Valentine's Day nuptials. The be-all and end-all that never is. That wedding ain't happening," Jac assured her.

The women sat on stools at a three-deep bar, Amanda in the middle. Jac and Michele perched to her left, Gran and her mother to her right.

It was good to have a ladies' night out. Good to unwind. Good to be in a normal place with right-thinking people instead of bizarro world where Amanda had to pretend Darrell marrying Willow was a good, solid move.

Even the Internet was on her side about that.

Gran, clutching her cell phone, cut into the conversation to make an announcement. "Precious, I'm green-arrowing you straight away. 'Blonde Laura Petrie' indeed!"

Amanda's mother did likewise. "And I'm having my street team goose Harry in the rankings to boot."

"He should enjoy that." If _The Weekly Star News_ had it right, and Amanda was beginning to believe it might, Harry enjoyed being the goosee as much as the gooser.

"One good thing about all this," Michele said, swirling the olive in her martini, "is it explains why Amanda wanted to set Darrell up with me."

"Clarify, please," Amanda said frostily.

"It certainly wasn't because of any compatibility between him and me," Michele said. Then, _sotto voce_ to Jac, "He's the one she loves."

"Listen, just because some guy requests a song doesn't mean he's suddenly the love of my life," Amanda butt in. After going over everything that had transpired this week, she'd figured out where the Blondie tune had come from.

"And then there's the ego boost," Michele said.

"Of course, of course," Jac said, chin in hand. "Go on."

Michele went on. "She thinks, _I'm the woman who gets to turn Darrell Rawlings down_."

Amanda cut in. "Oh, who is Darrell to be turned down?"

"She has a point," Jac conceded. "Darrell's no Harry Ritter Johnson."

"It's obviously a kick," said Michele. "Like having your friend's cool older brother suddenly notice you're alive."

"Yes, well, I know Darrell and his older brother, and believe me, the brother is cooler."

"Are you taking notes?" Jac said to Michele. "Never, ever believe anyone who says, 'believe me.'"

"Shouldn't you be moving along to your husband's club by now?"

Jac waved sparkled fingernails. "He can wait."

"I hear Lavender Davis may be making another appearance there," Amanda said, hoping to coax the publicist onto a different subject.

Jac raised an eyebrow but stayed put.

Michele continued to trumpet pop psychology. "You like having him around," she theorized, "because he flatters your ego."

"That is not true. And I turned him down because there was no future in it. I was saving him heartache."

"Good for you, lady," Jac jumped in. "Playing hard to get."

"I wasn't playing hard to get. I..."

They ignored her; she saved her breath.

"Now, see, here's where she's not making sense," Michele said to Jac. Terrific, now they were talking about Amanda as if she weren't there. "Because if she didn't think he was worthy, she wouldn't be so concerned about Willow doing him wrong."

Amanda did a _hello, I'm right here_ snap to get their attention. "It's not a matter of trust," she said. "It's just that Darrell tends to be overly optimistic about things, and he ends up hurt and disappointed."

Michele twirled on her stool and clapped. "I've got it! Yes, that's it! That's why she pushed so hard to get Darrell and I to go out. Because that way he'd still be around and they could still sort of flirt."

"Keep going," Jac said with a hopeful nod, as if they were solving some great mystery.

"But if he finally did go through with marrying Willow, everything would change. There'd be a permanent break."

Jac nodded. "It would mean the end, and the one thing she couldn't live with is never seeing Darrell again." A highly romantic statement for Jac. "And then there are the pictures."

_Pictures?_ Had someone breached the paparazzi-proof windows of Darrell's bachelor pad?

Jac read the question on Amanda's face. "Chet follow-up item. Oscar after party."

Amanda flopped onto the bar. "Oh, God, don't tell me this story has legs."

"Yes, legs are indeed involved." Jac ho-ho-hoed. "Yours specifically, peeking out of the slit in your dress."

"That was the most chaste dress!"

"Pictures don't lie," Michele said.

"Michele," Amanda said, raising herself up, "I've been in this business since before I was born. If pictures didn't lie, all three of us would have to do something else for a living."

Michele threw Jac a look. "Did you catch that? Suddenly she's 'in this business.'"

"Like I told you. Conflicted. Big-time."

Amanda held up her left hand and pointed to it with her right. "Hello? Ring on, finger not itching. And for the last time, I am not conflicted. I have known since I was twelve..."

"There she goes again."

"Protesting too much again."

"This listening to your suspicious little minds feverishly at work is all _très, très_ amusing, but did you ever consider the possibility that Darrell and I enjoy each other's company because we're friends and that maybe there is absolutely nothing else to it?"

The two women fell silent for a moment, and just when Amanda thought she had shut them up for good, Michele looked to Jac and cocked her head.

"She said the same thing about lymphatic drainage until I took her to the spa."

Amanda picked up her rum thingy and knocked it back. She also said the same thing about men's ass cheeks until she'd grabbed one of Darrell's for the first time. But she wasn't about to cop to that publicly, either. Pictures or no pictures.

***

The things Darrell did for love.

Even he couldn't believe it sometimes.

It was early Act II, Willow's favorite part of the movie. The captain and the baroness were strolling along the lake. If ever there were a time for Willow to go all gooey with romance, it was at this point in _The Sound of Music_.

His feet propped up on Willow's faux Indiana Jones artifact of a coffee table, now stripped of a few choice antique vessels that had died premature deaths against the brick wall yesterday morning, Darrell hit the pause button. A minute ago Willow had disappeared into the kitchen for more popcorn and had yet to re-emerge.

"If you want to hear the baroness plotting with Uncle Max, you better hurry."

This point in the story would have been The Moment—should have been The Moment—if Willow hadn't stolen it out from under him instead when she pushed the button on The Nuclear Option last night at dinner and "strongly recommended" they wed.

Now they were making plans to go ring shopping before he hopped on his flight back to L.A. Sunday night.

Willow poked her head around the corner, gave him her you-can-be-replaced glare, and dodged back into the kitchen.

A cynical part of him still loved that glare.

The question remained: Why did Darrell allow Willow to treat him this way? He'd always told himself she was immature, that she'd grow out of it, and he'd forgive her during the process.

He saw the pattern: the first time he rebounded during their weekend in the rain but snapped right out of it when Willow called from the Hamptons. Then, the second time, Willow crooked her finger, and he'd jetted off to Paris, where she'd gone to skewer—er, interview—a certain expatriate screen star embroiled in a bitter custody battle.

He remembered how she looked the morning after their passionate reunion as she sat brushing her hair, dressed in her peignoir, the veiny pink color of which took on the transparent hue of the lids of her eyes.

"Darrell, I think we should get back together." She'd put down her hairbrush and reached across the bed toward him. "This is ridiculous."

As if she weren't the one who'd broken it off to begin with over some minor issue he couldn't even remember anymore. As if he were the one holding up the show.

He'd never seen it with such clarity before. He saw it now.

She'd never said she was sorry. She'd never said she was wrong. She'd never said she'd made a mistake, never showed gratitude or humility that he'd given her another chance.

Amanda at least apologized for their Oscar Night. _I took advantage of you and your infatuation with me. You deserved better, and I want better for you, and I want to treat you better. Will you forgive me and can we still be friends?_ More or less.

Willow's voice called out from the other side of the false wall. "Why don't you act it out for me? I know you know the lines."

Now he and Amanda Girl were on the outs. Now they'd gone and had a stupid fight, and it _was_ stupid. He couldn't let things stand between them. He'd have to fix it, somehow.

Darrell went through the motions of mimicking the dialogue on the screen so Willow could be amused, but inside his thoughts kept wandering.

Yes, he'd miss that glare, the _you can be replaced_ one. But evidently, he couldn't. Be replaced that was. Otherwise, why would she constantly, time after time, crook her finger and call him back?

For him, it had always been Amanda. Even way back on the set of _Summer_ when she was stroking that Appaloosa's snout during the horse-trading scene. He hadn't known it then. He hadn't known it when he was bunking in her spare bedroom. He hadn't known it at the Oscars. Hell, he hadn't even known it when he touched down in New York this week. But sometime between dinner on Monday and their fight tonight when she hit him with that awful truth about himself, he'd realized this other awful truth about _her_.

Darrell had had his chance, twice, it was true—and both times he'd let Amanda go. Because that was what she'd wanted.

But now Darrell had had enough. This time, it would be someone else's turn.

10 Saturday

Willow's mother, Bitsy, looked like a bird, her thin frame perched incongruously on her daughter's inhospitable hulk of a sofa as Darrell took in the evidence of their afternoon shopping spree spread hither and yon around the living room.

"Listen, I know you've got to head back tomorrow night," Willow told Darrell, "but I was thinking." Unlike Amanda Girl, who couldn't seem to stick to any agenda at all, Willow was bursting with plans. "I've already had a preliminary phone consultation with Christoff."

"Really?" Darrell said, trying to sound perplexed at the mention of Amanda's would-be wedding planner. "I hear he's hard to get ahold of."

Willow steeled her gaze, seeing right through him. "For some people. Anyway, he says Valentine's Day is eminently do-able."

She patted him on the chest and went off for a brisk walk-through of the loft. A moment later she was back in the living room with her arms folded across her chest.

"Why are your bags packed already? You don't leave for L.A. until tomorrow night." A good reporter, her powers of observation keen as ever. No fool, she.

"I'm not staying."

"Oh," she said, giving a slight start. She and her mother exchanged barely perceptible what's-up looks. "Did you forget our preliminary ring shopping?"

Darrell met her mother's eyes. "Listen, Bitsy, not to be rude, but could you excuse us?"

One raised eyebrow and a forsaken glass of chardonnay later and Bitsy was grabbing her wrap and making apologies that she _did_ need to be going after all. Then she kiss-kissed her daughter, brushed past her would-be future son-in-law, and left them alone in brick-walled silence, broken only by the tick-tock of the statement wall clock.

Everyone insisted Willow Chaney had a heart as bricked-up as those walls. Darrell knew better. And now he had to break it.

It was going to be terrible, but there was something he knew he couldn't go through with even more, and that was tying his future to hers.

The kitchen counter with its bottle of white and two glasses setup stood between them.

Darrell took a step. "This engagement," he began, then faltered. He tried again. "Marriage is too serious to..."

Willow drew a sharp breath.

She knows.

Her face.

It had _that baroness on the balcony about to pack her little bags and return to Vienna where she belonged_ expression about it.

She took an awkward step away from the wine setup and looked anywhere but at him.

"We're doing this for the wrong reasons," he said.

The clear tips of her Rule of Beauty manicure began to twiddle. Pale, dainty, feminine trembles. Darrell had never before seen them do that.

"You're still young enough to believe that getting married is the answer to everything," he said.

For the first time he noticed, really noticed, her turtleneck. Red and ribbed. She was right—the color did make her look wan. She looked around—for anything, a lifeline, perhaps, a cudgel, maybe—and settled on a nearby dish towel, with which she undertook a furious wiping of her hands, as if she realized she were about to become distraught, and that a distraught Willow would be as comfortable and appealing as a cat in a soaking tub.

"But Chill, you're sophisticated. Sophisticated enough to know..."

But no. What did _èlan_ and refinement and social grace matter when one's heart was at stake? Willow shot out from behind the rampart of the kitchen counter, and in a whir of her kicky gray skirt and boots, was gone, sophistication dissolving into tears.

She did not take it like the baroness. She sputtered and sniffled and was probably wiping her nose with the back of her hand, but Darrell couldn't tell for sure, because she'd fled into the bathroom.

He remained in the hall, and a locked door stood between them.

"Go away."

"Will you listen to me for a moment?"

"I said, go away."

"Stop and think about this. The other night. Is that really the way you want to embark on the path to marriage? With fear and desperation?"

If he'd been more of a man or any kind of gentleman, he'd have seen it sooner and done something about it before it ever got to this point. But there it was.

"Two or three years ago, if I'd asked you, you would have jumped for joy at it," he said.

The pocket door slid open as if under its own power, until Darrell saw Willow's fingers curled around it at the bottom. She was on her haunches, holding her knees. Darrell reached out and pulled her to her feet until they were standing face to tear-stained face.

She leaned into the door frame as if for strength. "Darrell." Her voice was as dull and wan as her skin tone.

"Yeah?"

"Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I what?"

"Ask me two or three years ago when I would have said yes?"

"Because—" He stopped and spread his hands wide. Her eyes caught his shrug, heard the silence that spoke volumes. And she realized she already knew the answer.

"I see."

11 The next week

Seismic Event was a "back to front" shoot. The earliest scenes in the film were shot last. In other words, Seattle before the quake. There would be lots of exterior shots in public places, beautiful fall foliage of forested hills, lakes awash in deep, bone-chilling blue, before Mount Rainier crumbled and buried the entirety of Puget Sound under hella crap.

On her last night in town, Amanda opted for a quiet dinner out.

Yesterday had been a glorious orange and gold autumn day, perfect for shooting the sunset scene on the back deck of her beautiful seismologist's lakeside home.

Not so this evening. Hunkered down in her trench coat, Amanda ducked her head against a thrashing rain and dashed down a set of stairs that led to the restaurant's front door. The place, perched on an incline overlooking the city's waterfront, came highly recommended by others in the crew, despite the absurd name: The Plastic Owl.

She'd had Paris make a reservation under a false name so as not to attract attention. "Finkle," Amanda told the host at the door. "Clara Finkle."

"Right this way," the man said, meaning, _Yeah, right. Like I don't know you're Amanda Monroe who's all over the Internet_.

She should have told him "Edie Temple."

A quiet dinner didn't mean dinner alone.

Darrell had called her the other day out of the blue, asking her to dinner. Just dinner—even though he'd have to fly in from L.A. Well, it wasn't unlike him to be extravagant. Plus, she took it to mean he wanted to bury the hatchet. It was a peace offering after their big blow-up on filming night.

"I hear you're having trouble on the set," he'd said. "That you could use a visitor. No one should dine alone."

She'd tried to protest. "I have an entire crew here—"

"And knowing you, you'll still dine alone. So I'll come up to see you." Thus Darrell talked his way onto a plane and up to Seattle for dinner out.

She followed the host to their table, front and center by a window, then ordered a decent Chateauneuf de Pape and watched the raindrops spatter against the windowpane while the wine breathed.

Amanda swirled the wine in her glass and began to think about her altercation with Darrell. Already she was feeling better about the whole thing. Tonight, they'd make amends. She'd be sorry, he'd be sorry, they'd be pals once more.

Out on Puget Sound, the lights of a ferry cut through the gloom. Somewhere around this rain-soaked city lived Edith Gunderson, nee Michalek, better known—or should she say little known—as Edie Temple.

She heard the whap of the wooden door and then sensed someone approaching from behind.

"Some gentle mist," Darrell said, brushing a river of wet off his coat.

"Some shirt," she retorted. Underneath his coat he wore another eyesore of a garment, this one with a pattern of brown and yellow over orange. "You look like Liberace threw up all over you."

"You call that a joke?"

It had been done to death. Still, she laughed. They both did. She started to get up to greet him but he waved her off.

"Sit, sit," he said and pulled out his chair and sat.

She offered her cheek, which he kissed.

In other words, it felt like old times. Like the same old Darrell and Amanda that they used to be, before all this fighting—the real fighting, not their usual playful peevishness.

For the occasion, she had put on a softly draping dress in a muted lavender, one of her best colors.

"You wear this kind of stuff hanging around the house with Al?"

"Heh."

Diners nearby gaped and gawked at the two actors. Perhaps a pair of mystique-inducing sunglasses wouldn't have been a bad idea—cloudy skies and pouring rain be damned.

She accommodated them with an eye roll. "I hate to say it, but Knightley Stapleton was onto something. When I look at all these people watching us, I think I'd prefer avoiding eye contact with any of them."

"Look who's sounding like a movie star, _dahling_."

"I could use a little privacy, that's all."

"Which is why you're sitting out in the open where everyone can see you." Then he made a "gotcha" sound effect that might as well have been the snap of a towel.

So that was how it was going to be—banter, their usual, with a side of flirtatiousness and a dose of what might have been. Amanda lifted her glass. If that was the way it was going to be, she could live with it.

***

Darrell kept his gaze on the blurry scene outside the window. "Doesn't Edie Temple live around these parts?"

Amanda Girl shook her head and laughed. "How do you do it?"

"What?"

"Read my mind."

Women were always expecting men to read their minds. Darrell had to find the one woman in the universe who resented him for it.

"I was just thinking of Edie Temple," she said.

"And?"

She smiled. "Six boys named Louie. Though I reserve the right to come out of retirement should the occasional _South of France_ come along."

Sitting at the table, watching the light play on her tangled romance of curls, Darrell knew that he loved her, and he knew that Al didn't. Didn't she get that by now?

He pulled out his phone. "I was just..."

"If you start with that thing," she broke in, her back arching in indignation, "I'm throwing it into the bay."

"... putting it away," he said, slipping it inside his jacket pocket.

She backed down.

"There, it's gone. The evil, wicked cell phone is gone."

He was saved by the waitress soliciting his drink order. Darrell waved the list of spirits under Amanda's nose and pointed to the single malts.

"You tell me," he said. "Which one?" What kind of daughter of Geoffrey Monroe would she be if she didn't know her scotches?

"Mmm, Bunnahabain," she said thoughtfully.

"You just like saying Bunnahabain." He ordered Lagavulin.

In addition to knowing that he loved Amanda, Darrell knew that he wasn't going to marry Willow—ever. Amanda definitely didn't know that.

But he would tell her. All of it.

And he'd be willing to spirit her away to live the bucolic, secluded Edie Temple existence she so craved. Even if he disagreed.

His drink arrived and she helped herself to a nip. "Wretched stuff." Yet she said it with a smile.

"More for me," he said, taking back the glass.

Once upon a time, she'd blasted _The Long, Hot_ _Summer_ producers for choosing Darrell to play Ben Quick. Cheesy, she'd called Darrell. A lightweight. Then she'd actually met him. And he had changed her mind about him.

Now, breathing in the smoky, peat smell of his scotch, Darrell grew confident. What he'd done once before, he'd do again.

***

Yes, the old warmth and familiarity between them was back. Amanda felt it as Darrell sliced off part of his pork chop. She reached over to his plate to snatch it for herself.

"It's not polite to do that at the table, Miss New York Manners."

"Sorry," she said. Demi-glace sauce ran down her chin. She dabbed it away then pronounced it the best thing ever, her mouth full, earning another reprimand about her manners.

Night fell. More ferry lights crossed the bay. Darrell gnawed his pork chop down to the bone, and then Amanda began to feel something not quite right—a tilting sensation, like the earth had tipped a smidge.

"That's odd," she said, gripping the table. "Did you feel that?"

Darrell wiped his hands on his napkin. "What?"

She felt it again. Tilting and tipping.

"That." She peered under the white cloth to make sure it wasn't Darrell's hands venturing where they ought not. "I think we're having an earthquake."

"Oh, woman, what is this?" he moaned, throwing down his napkin. "Have you ever actually experienced an earthquake?"

"Well, no, but I just made a whole movie about them," she said, knowing what a ninny she sounded like. _I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. I'm not a flighty actress, but I play one on TV. I'm not a beautiful seismologist, but I ..._

"It's not the same thing," he said. "And believe me..."

Uh-oh, Jac's dreaded words of warning. Don't believe anyone who says _believe me_.

"If we were having an earthquake, there'd be more things knocking around this place than your dainty knees." He gestured to the glassware on the bar shelves, the bottles in the wine rack, the oblivious patrons carrying on as if nothing were happening.

He was right; it wasn't an earthquake making the room tip. She had barely taken a sip of her second glass, but still, it had to be the wine that was making everything seem...

Off.

No. No, she knew.

It was the balance of their relationship changing. They could never go back to the way they used to be. The natural, casual friendship, the genuine affection, the warmth. She'd saved their friendship from the dangers of heading into romantic territory before; she'd have to do it again.

It had to stop.

"Darrell." She paused, cleared her throat. "I don't think we should..." A clean break would be best.

She saw the hopeful look on his face. Now she'd have to play Lucy to Darrell's Charlie Brown. He really thought he was going to kick the football this time. But no, she was going to have to yank it away. This couldn't go on. It was unfair. Unfair and dishonest.

"I haven't exactly told Al about...this."

"'This'?"

"In light of the recent 'star news' about us, I didn't want him to take it the wrong way."

God, what had she been thinking? She ought to have told Al she was coming here tonight. Except that she'd never asked permission to see Darrell before. She'd never had to. But now she was making a commitment to another man. If she kept up with this deception, it would undermine his trust. She couldn't do that, wouldn't do that.

They had to stop kidding themselves, and Amanda would have to take the first step.

"Darrell," she began again.

Darrell, sensing the seriousness in her tone, glanced up.

"We can't see each other anymore."

Yank.

He spoke softly. "Oh, woman, what is this?"

"I'm saying we can't, you know, be in each other's lives anymore because it's too..."

"Like, never? Again? Our whole lives? That is impossible. No, it's _wrong_." His voice wavered. "You and I are never going to see each other or talk on the phone or eat corn dogs or go to each other's weddings—"

"Which you have barreling down on you on Valentine's Day."

"Well."

Well?

What did that mean?

"Willow and I aren't getting married."

Tilt.

She knew the subtext, the unspoken declaration of love in that decision. The reason he wasn't marrying Willow was because he was hoping Amanda would marry him. She couldn't do what she had to do next. She couldn't bear to say it, knew how it would hurt him.

"—our whole lives?" He said again.

"If need be," she said. "Darrell I'm—"

"Do not say it."

"—sorry." His face fell. "I thought this was behind us. I want it behind us."

And then, for the last of what felt like a hundred times in the past two weeks, she said it again.

"I'm marrying Al."

***

Darrell had planned to pour his heart out to her. And then the air got sucked out of the room.

It was never going to happen between them.

He wouldn't argue. No more "womaning" her to death. He wasn't going to say it; he wasn't going to say anything. She wanted to marry Al, and that was final. That was her final decision.

But still, words floated into his mind, words he'd never get to say.

I wish it were me you were six months away from marrying.

I wish I'd gotten down on my knees that night in L.A. when I had the chance.

I wish I'd never let you get back on that plane to New York the next day without a ring on your finger.

I wish you'd taken me seriously when I said you could stay forever, because I was serious.

And now I'll never get over you.

But what good would it do? What good would it do her and Al? What good would it do Darrell to say those things now?

"Oh, Darrell."

Her words bent downward, like the bow of a violin. Wonderful. Pity.

Darrell gave a signal to the waitress and somehow managed to find his voice.

"You can bring me the check," he said with a confidence he didn't feel. "We're done here."

And then for the last time, Darrell Rawlings let Amanda Monroe go.

***

Amanda ran with her back against the squall. She'd torn out of the restaurant even before he did. Darrell Rawlings with his hopes dashed was the saddest sight a person could see. Still she saw his face. It would never vanish from her mind, no matter how hard the rain tried to wash it away.

She poured herself into a taxi. The car wobbled and crunched as it made its way along the cobblestone streets of the Pike Place Market.

You can't learn to love someone.

All women are fickle.

A man has his limits.

He'd been serious about her—not just tonight, not just now. But all this time. He'd kept hoping, year after year, believing that each time it would be different. He'd kept at it because her rejection had never been total.

Damn, damn, damn. I'm Lucy with the football. I hate Lucy. Everybody hates Lucy.

For Darrell, this night was supposed to have been It, the miracle, the super-romantic ending that would confirm his faith in Them.

Why did he keep doing this when he always got shot down?

She knew why. She knew him so well.

It was his eternal optimism that kept him going, going in the faith that This Time It Would Be Different. He'd kept on over the years, through the ons and offs with Willow, because Amanda's rejection had never been total.

Until tonight.

Why would the earth not stop tilting?

The cab sloshed through the wind and rain down the sloping street on its way back to her waterfront hotel. Wild thoughts lashed at her. What if she didn't marry Al? What if it was true, that she didn't love Al?

You're an actress. Pretend. Pretend for a moment that Darrell really is the one.

What would that look like? How would that be?

And then Amanda knew that it wasn't the earth that was opening up; it was her heart.

Now she saw it; now she saw why. Why she really went running back to New York after Oscar Night. It wasn't because she didn't think Darrell was serious. Not really. It was because she knew he was serious, knew how he felt about her, knew he wanted her, and a part of her, the part of her she didn't want to face, didn't want to admit he might be right. That part of her had wanted him, too, just like he wanted her.

And no, she'd come to realize. He wouldn't be a hard dog to keep on the porch.

And it terrified her. Darrell Rawlings.

Frisky Puppy.

Frat boy.

Actor.

Her father's corny quotations played across her mind. All truth must pass through three stages. First it is ridiculed... (Chet Porter? He makes up quotes and doctors photos!) Then it is violently opposed... (I love Al! I'm marrying Al!) Then it is widely accepted.

One frantic hand plunged into her pocketbook, feeling around for the blasted phone. Where was the damn thing now that she needed it? There it was. She pulled it out and started pushing numbers. A ring, and then an answer. Darrell, perfunctory, worn out. Already at his hotel.

"Can I come up?" she asked gently.

She held her breath. Her stomach jumped as live wires danced inside it.

Please, God, don't let Darrell have reached his limit.

***

Long ago, Darrell had asked her, "Ever think about us?" And she'd repeatedly told him, "I don't see it." Now her mind whirled with images—Darrell's estate-in-waiting, the ride on the Ducati, her arms around his waist. Standing with him in her backyard while he sketched out the dimensions of her future greenhouse. Every conversation that had ever flowed around her circular kitchen table.

Terror seized her. Terror of what lay ahead if she did marry Darrell, and also terror that she'd made a fool of herself having the driver turn the cab around and bring her to Darrell's hotel for nothing. Whatever happened now, things would never be the same.

It didn't matter that it would never be the same. It was worth the risk.

They were worth the risk.

Hadn't he proved that time and again? It was time for her to take a risk.

If she had enough breath left in her.

After hotel security escorted her up, she stood inside his suite, her back flat against the closed door, her chest heaving, her hair tangled and wet. They stood there for a moment, locking eyes, taking each other in. Then just as quickly as she'd come in, she did a crazed sidestep toward him.

"I can't marry Al." There, she'd said it.

The world tilted right into place.

She did a one-eighty, moving dumbly back toward the door. "I have to tell him."

He raised his brow. "Now?"

"As soon as I get back." Her eyes grew as wet as her coat, her hair, her skin. "Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"And I love you."

Hands splayed, she crept forward on tiptoes, close enough to press her fingertips to his.

"And since I can't marry Al could you and I get married instead?"

The second time in a week the poor guy had been proposed to.

"Yes."

She inched forward. He pulled her toward him, taking her chin in his hands. Their heads bent toward one another. Their oversize, perfect-for-the-spotlight foreheads. They touched.

"Would you love me and stay with me?" he said. "Even if it means you won't be totally out of the business?"

"Yes."

"Even if one of our children someday decides to—gasp—try out for the school play?"

Oh, good Lord, what havoc were they about to wreak upon the world? Her progeny, thespians. She resigned herself. "Even then."

"And if I become washed-up and miserable?"

"Yes."

"Or a two-time Oscar winner and insufferable?"

"A stretch for a second banana, but yes." She allowed herself to laugh, and the knot in her stomach uncurled.

"Okay." Darrell pulled back. His warmth stayed with her.

"And you won't shoot me up with Botox?" she asked.

"No. Truth serum, maybe..."

"And I won't have to name our children after inanimate objects?"

He held his hand up as if to swear an oath. "I promise."

"Or prescription drugs?"

"Or prescription drugs."

"Or any place where they might have been conceived?"

"Oh, come on now. Kitchen Table Rawlings would be a great name for a kid." He gave her his smarmy smile, and she'd never been so thrilled to see it in her whole life. She regretted she had no towel with which to snap him.

He moved to kiss her hand. She retracted it. Another man's ring still graced her finger.

She imagined the talk she'd have to have with Al, the breakup. But she could muster her courage on the long flight home. And then the freedom she'd feel when it was finished. Suddenly, she couldn't wait.

"I have to go."

She wouldn't be Amanda Girl if she stayed. And a woman who stayed wouldn't be a woman Darrell Rawlings could love.

12 The next day

Amanda did not break up with Al the minute she began her journey home to New York. She'd recognized the danger of becoming everything she hated, a pampered diva throwing tantrums and keeping everybody waiting while she jetted from one coast to the other over her turbulent soap opera of a personal life. And so as she winged her way home alone on a red eye, she called the one person who could dispense solid, sensible advice and give her the comfort of a blanket pronouncement.

"But Puckle Warts, that's what engagements are for," Geoffrey said.

And then her mother.

"What that guy needs is a girl from the old neighborhood," Sukie said, meaning Al. "Preferably one who isn't his mother."

In the kitchen while Al sipped his morning coffee, Amanda sat next to him. He saw the glum look on the outside that matched the depths of her regret on the inside. As Amanda fumbled with her hands, he reached out and lifted her mass of curls.

"Hey. I know there's a face under there." Al's voice was pure tenderness.

She had no idea how to start.

He set his coffee down. "What is it?"

She searched for the right thing to say, but another part of her wanted to blurt, _Really? You mean you can't guess? Like your detective, you've been ignoring the signs?_ Because he had. But she'd been blind, too. To so much, for so long. And now it was time to come clean.

"I c-c-c..." Words choked her. "I ca-ca..." She tried again. Then, out like a cherry pit after the Heimlich, "I can't marry you!"

A tilt of his head. Major movement for Al. "Aw, c'mon."

He didn't believe her. Why should he? She wasn't making any sense. She was fighting not to blubber, and she was failing. With one trembling hand, she yanked at the ring finger on the other, finally wrenching Al's promise free. She set it on the table in front of them.

That made him stop and stare.

Her sobs intensified. She'd been fooling herself, thinking she wanted a future with Al. He was a good guy. She wished she'd wanted that week of passion with him. She wished he'd find it with someone.

He started to fill the vacuum left by her silence. "You're about to commit yourself to one person for the rest of your life." His voice was so patient. So reasonable. "You're reacting to that by doing one last, impulsive crazy thing. Sow one final wild oat."

"Darrell's not an oat," she said numbly.

"Darrell?" His eyes widened, then fell back into place, as if it all made sense to him now. "Oh."

Unable to bear the hurt she was causing, she looked away, peering through her tears at the family heirloom. It was ruined now. How could he give that ring to anyone else?

"We aren't kids anymore," Al said. "It's time to make hard and fast decisions. Sometimes that means closing doors. And... and..." He was reaching now, and he knew it. "All right, maybe you and Darrell have always been a little bit in love, and now that you're on the verge of marrying other people, it means you have to shut off those feelings for good. It's an adjustment. But you'll get used to it."

It would have been sad enough if he'd stopped there, but he didn't. "Right now you're confused."

Oh. Not the pretty-little-head argument. She'd always thought Al was above condescension.

"But you'll come to your senses," he droned. "You don't mean this. It's cold feet." He paused for breath. "Cold feet," he said again, as if to convince himself.

Swallowing hard, Amanda shook her head, thinking what a shame it was because she really, really did love—

—his mother's eggplant Parm.

***

June

Geoffrey Monroe stepped forward to deliver the father of the bride toast. "Married in the month of roses, June..." He lifted his glass of vintage champagne.

His daughter, the bride, finished the pronouncement. "...And your life will be one long honeymoon."

And not a moment too soon. Amanda would turn thirty the day after tomorrow. After dinner there'd be port, from the "metaphor for life" vintage bottle Geoffrey had given her for her sixteenth birthday, just coming into its own.

All around the courtyard of Harry Ritter Johnson's _finca_ , the guests clinked their glasses.

"See, daughter," Sukie Dyan said, "I knew you'd be perfect for the part."

"Thanks, Mother."

Beyond the earthen walls, the Mediterranean shimmered. Two days earlier, _South of France_ wrapped filming on the French Riviera. Harry's supposed offer of a birthday celebration provided a convenient cover story for the movement of Amanda's family and closest friends to the Spanish island of Mallorca for the hush-hush nuptials.

At first Ritter hadn't taken to the idea. "I don't get to be best man? I don't get to give the bride away? I offer you my _finca,_ and I get nothing?"

"You get to keep the secret, Harry," Amanda had said. "And you will keep the secret, this time. Right, Harry? For us?"

He had.

Naturally, Jac had words of marital wisdom to offer: "Since you insist on doing this, two things: One, do not breast feed. Two, hire ugly nannies only." She paused. "Unless, of course, you want to get rid of him. Then come see me, and we'll talk."

As Amanda clinked glasses with her groom, the sun glinted off her diamond ring, its center stone round like the kitchen table where she and Darrell had always spent so much time.

Darrell had picked it out himself—with Michele's tasteful assistance and knack for finding the perfect item. Over the course of their ring-browsing excursions, the two managed to make peace. Michele stopped accusing Darrell of hating her, and Darrell stopped insinuating Michele was a hot mess.

The strum of guitar and click of castanets carried on the air as the band played a flamenco version of "My Cherie Amour."

Barely audible under the music, Sukie whispered to her ex-husband in her best Shakespearean aside voice. "You do realize what's going to happen? They're going to move to California. They're going to take that property of Darrell's and turn into a zoo. It's going to be nothing but dogs and horses and children."

"And what is wrong with dogs and horses?" Geoffrey boomed.

"Oh, don't start."

The mermaid train of her gown puddling on the painstakingly restored tiled patio, Amanda took her seat for dinner.

"Mother, you won't be saying such things when your future grandsons have you playing cops and robbers," she said. "You'll be bound and gagged and loving it."

Then she leaned over and nuzzled her groom, her spray veil tickling his cheek and her bare shoulders. "Wine and horses. I can't wait." She gave him a sly look. "My father will come to visit and never leave."

Darrell seemed to take it in stride. "So what you're saying is..." He put his hands together and shaped them into a megaphone. "Once again, the unbridled optimist emerges victorious."

"What did you say?" She gave her ear a long-drawn-out tug, then put on her best quizzical expression. Ah well, once an actress, always an actress.

"Good. I'm glad we agree," Darrell said. "And now, pork chop, about that white picket fence we're going to build..."

THE END

HI, READER,

I hope every page of _Heart Throbs_ brought a smile to your face. It was a joy for me to write this lark of a story. I was first inspired to do so in a previous decade (before a 1980s Z was considered a vintage car) and ended up stashing it away, half done. I truly thought it would never wind up in the hands of readers. I'm so glad I picked it up again, saw it through and am now able to share it with you.

We authors value every bit of feedback we can get, even just a few sentences. Would you consider leaving a review? Your comments help both readers and authors.

And if you want to read more smart comedy and feel-good romance, join my email list. You'll be the first to hear about new releases, get sneak peeks, hear about free and discount books, giveaways & more. Sign up here: karentomsovic.com.

Follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on Facebook.

Follow me on BookBub.

Thanks and Happy Reading!

Karen

ALSO BY KAREN TOMSOVIC:

A Birthday in December (City Lights New York #2)

A holiday novella

Twice-divorced, globe-trotting Geoffrey Monroe's portrayal of Scrooge isn't winning anyone over on Broadway. But a sexy younger widow moves in across the street and soon Geoffrey risks finding his heart for real.

Who Wants to Know? (City Lights New York #3)

They say you can't go home again, but thirtysomething New Yorkers Al, Vicky, and Margy do, and the old neighborhood will never be the same. Margy's opening her dream restaurant, Vicky's making a fresh start with her three boys, and Al's chasing a story that's sure to re-start his stalled career. Who'll end up at the most romantic table in the house?

Spare Me the Drama

_"Quirky and fun but it's also full of heart." –_ Romantic Reads and Such

When lonely star Roxanne accepts a belated invitation from widowed soap opera writer Martin, it's only to check up on an old friend and his many children, not fall for him again.

Thanks to St. Jude.

