Callie’s breath came a little faster. This was exactly what she’d been hoping for. “Anyone in particular?”
“Darling, in this business just about everyone is capable of stabbing you in the back.”
“You’re very cynical.”
“I’m very realistic,” Lindsay corrected. “I’ve been around the block a few times. Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Why do you stay in the business if it makes you so unhappy?”
The actress smiled. “Who said I was unhappy? The important thing is to know your enemies. Once your backside is protected, you can relax and enjoy yourself. The adulation from all those people out in TV land is a real rush. You must have felt it at all those appearances you’ve been making.”
Callie nodded. “But it’s not real. It’s not for me. It’s for the character I play.”
“That’s close enough to satisfy me,” Lindsay said. “I’ll take applause wherever it comes. I’ve done some real stinkers off-Broadway just to hear people clap. Of course, there you get the boos and hisses firsthand, too.”
Callie thought of the charity event for which she needed to rally a team. She hadn’t done much about it. If Lindsay loved adulation so, perhaps she could be convinced to play. “I don’t suppose you’d like to play softball in Central Park in a couple of weeks.”
Lindsay stared at her as if Callie had just invited her to romp naked through the tulips. “Softball?”
There was a world of meaning in the way she said that single word. Callie could relate to the incredulity and the disdain.
“I don’t think so,” Lindsay added.
“My reaction exactly,” Callie told the other actress. “Unfortunately, they want a team from this show for a charity event. I have to pull it together. There will be scads of publicity, I’m told. Jenny Harding practically salivates when she talks about it.”
Lindsay appeared to be weighing her ego against the thought of all that dust and physical activity. Her ego won. “When and where?” she said with a resigned sigh.
Callie filled her in. “Anyone else who’d be good?”
“Forget good. Go for the ones who’ll actually show up. Who do you have so far?”
“You, me and Terry.”
“My God, you are in a jam, aren’t you?” Lindsay said. “Okay, then, ask Lisa and Jonathan, for sure. Randall Trent, I suppose. He hates to be left out, and it will do him good to see that Lisa has moved on to greener pastures, so to speak.”
She suggested several others, including Paul Locklear, the show’s frequent director. “He’ll make a great captain, darling. You do know how he loves to order people around.”
Callie considered the quiet, unflappable, low-key man with his balding head and slight paunch. He looked more suited to a slow-paced game of chess than anything requiring physical exertion.
“He doesn’t exactly strike me as the baseball type,” she said.
“Maybe not, but he’ll come if you tell him Terry’s playing. I can promise you that.”
Callie swallowed hard and tried not to seem too eager when she asked, “Why is that?”
“Oh, darling, everyone in town knows Paul is gay. Haven’t you seen how the camera hugs Terry’s cute butt whenever Paul’s directing?”
Callie hadn’t noticed that. She’d been all too self-conscious thinking it was focused on her own butt. What was it someone had once said? Essentially that people wouldn’t worry so much about people talking about them if they realized how seldom they did. Apparently the same general thing applied to camerawork.
24
“No, no, no, Gina. Like this,” Mikel ordered. His large hand enveloped hers and directed her brush across the canvas in bold, sure strokes.
“No, not like that,” Regina said, surprising herself as much as Mikel when she resisted. Her confidence must be coming back if she was willing to pit her own artistic instincts against Mikel’s genius.
Or perhaps she just enjoyed seeing the flare of temper such defiance put into his dark eyes. They smoldered with suppressed passion, reminding her of days long ago when all too often paints and canvas and artistic differences had been forgotten in the heat of lovemaking. It had been a scandalous, incredible time in her life, one for which no amount of penance in Iowa could atone.
He grinned at her now, the deep creases in his face curving into laugh lines. “You plague me deliberately, do you not?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “Just a little.”
“Why is that, my Gina?”
“Because it is so easy,” she said, smiling.
For too many years she had had to stifle such wicked impulses. There had been little teasing between her and the somber man she had married. Perhaps the fault had not been solely Jacob’s. He had known from the beginning that she had agreed to marry him only to give her daughter her father’s name.
Their affair had come in the aftermath of her fleeing New York and Mikel’s apparent disinterest in marrying her. She had turned to Jacob, a man she had known all of her life, for comfort. Her parents had encouraged the relationship. It had been easy for comfort to become physical as well as emotional after a time. They had been careless, and the result was Callie and a marriage that should never have been, not when her heart belonged to someone else.
One small mistake. A mistake that had had so many tragic consequences for all of them, she thought sadly. Wasted years of her life. Heartache even for the daughters she had borne Jacob Gunderson. She could never regret her children, never, but the lost time with Mikel? Only now, aware of the vast difference between being alive and merely surviving, did she realize what a waste those years had been.
Everything in Iowa had been hard, from the weather to farming to surviving Jacob’s constant criticism. By contrast, being with Mikel was astonishingly simple. It felt so right that it scared her to think she might never have found it again had it not been for Eunice’s selfishness. More terrifying was the possibility
