Starstruck Read online

  “Cut that out,” Joe said firmly. “I’m not going to attack you. I haven’t attacked you yet, have I?”

  “No,” she allowed shakily. But it doesn’t mean you won’t, she thought, or that I might not attack you.

  “Was that a note of disappointment I heard?” His voice was teasing, but she thought she detected a note of hope in it.

  “No!”

  “Rats.” He sat down next to her, the couch sinking under his weight, and turned her shoulders away from him, continuing to massage them with his large, strong hands, working the tensions out of her. “Now,” he said lazily, his voice a rough whisper almost caressing her ear, “listen to my version of the ground rules. Your sleeping arrangements are fine—I'm not expecting you to share my bed. You can cook breakfast if you want, because I’ll probably never get up early enough to eat it anyway. Lunch, however, is my job, and so is dinner. Hush,” he commanded as she started to protest. “I make terrific peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

  “I heard,” she murmured wondering how he could talk about peanut butter at a time like this. His breath was warm on her shoulders. She could feel it through the thin shirt she wore as it raised goose bumps on the back of her neck.

  “Right. And I want to cook dinner. When I’m doing a movie I never have time. Now I do, and I have people to do it for. So the job is mine.”

  “If you insist.” His hands were reducing her to putty. She should get up and move away, but it felt so good and she’d had a long, hard day.

  “I insist I also insist that you stop worrying that you and the kids are an unwelcome burden and stop trying to hide away in a closet somewhere. That’s ridiculous. If you persist I will have to take measures to see that you behave.” His thumbs were massaging the sensitive cord at the back of her neck, and she felt as though she would melt against him in another second.

  “Whatever you say,” she mumbled, trying and only just succeeding to remain upright.

  Joe chuckled, his thumbs working their way down the column of her spine, teasing each ridge as they went. “I’ve never seen you so malleable and amenable.”

  “You’re hypnotizing me,” Liv complained. If he could reduce her to jelly with no more than a back rub, what could he do if his hands had her whole body as a playground? The thought hit her like a bolt of lightning and she jumped up.

  “What’s wrong?” Joe was staring at her, astonished, as she scurried across the room and took refuge behind an overstuffed chair.

  “We need a rule about that, too,” she said, her voice so breathless that she was humiliated. She cleared her throat.

  “About what?”

  “About… about your touching me,” she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, feeling like a first-rate fool.

  “What?” His face was all innocence, but for the twinkle in his eyes. “No back rubs?” He lifted an eyebrow in amusement.

  “Something like that.” She groped about for an explanation that wouldn’t sound too inane. “When I was in high school, our drama teacher had a rule he used to call the one-foot rule.”

  Joe’s mouth quirked. “Which was?” he prompted.

  “Well, it was dark backstage, and people kept, um, bumping into one another and, um, well, you know—” She knew her face was the color of Theo’s toy fire engine. “So he had this rule that said that everybody had to stay a foot apart.”

  Joe’s grin was all over his face. “Are you making this up?”

  “Of course not! I wouldn’t be capable of making it up, it was too stupid.”

  “And yet you’re suggesting the same thing now,” he reminded her softly, still grinning.

  “Well—” Liv shoved a nervous hand through her blond hair, wishing she had pinned it up again when she’d changed into more casual clothes. It made her feel more businesslike that way, more remote, more able to resist the likes of Joe Harrington. “I still think we need something,” she maintained.

  “A treaty? With boundaries?” Joe asked, cocking his head so one dark strand of hair fell across his forehead.

  “Yes.”

  “To keep me in my place?” His eyes bored into hers.

  “Yes,” she said, and then, because she wanted to be honest with him, she added, “And to keep me in mine.”

  Joe’s eyes widened momentarily. “You can touch me all you want,” he said magnanimously. “I don’t mind if we have an affair.”

  “But I do,” Liv replied, her fingers clenching in the nubby tweed fabric of the chair. “I couldn’t handle it.”

  Joe didn’t say anything for a moment. He chewed on his thumbnail, considering, and then scratched his nose. Liv watched him warily, thinking how unutterably stupid she had been to come here in the first place. How could she ever think that she could live in a platonic relationship with Joe Harrington in the same house for more than a week? How could she have imagined that he would even go along with that?

  “All right,” he said slowly now, nodding his head.

  “All right what?” she asked, wanting to get it straight, not willing to believe that he was agreeing.

  “All right, I won’t seduce you. I won’t touch you. I won’t do anything,” he said roughly, jamming his hands in his pockets and dipping his head so that he looked for all the world, Liv thought, like a boy whose mother had just slapped his hands away from the cookie jar.

  “Thank you,” she said, wondering if she was losing her mind. She was certainly losing her sense of propriety—and, she thought ruefully, her sense of danger. Otherwise she’d be backing out the door this minute, saying, thanks, but no thanks, no matter what he promised. “I’m sure we can work it out,” she said, more to convince herself. “After all, we are adults.”

  “That,” Joe told her scathingly, “is the whole problem.” And he turned and walked out of the room without looking back. It was Liv who rescued the pork chops burning in the kitchen.

  It might be a problem, Liv thought, but it definitely had its compensations. For one thing, it was glorious to have another adult in the house full-time. Life was so much smoother when there was someone else besides herself to say “Time to brush your teeth” or “Pick up your tennis shoes before you go upstairs.” She smiled thoughtfully as she curled into the comer of the couch and remembered hearing Joe herd the kids upstairs to bed. He had read Jennifer a story while Liv finished doing the dishes, and had poked his head into the boys’ room while she was saying good night to tell her, “I’m going to take a shower now.”

  It was as though they were a family, she mused, and then corrected herself. They were living together, for convenience’s sake, for a week. He was a famous Hollywood star, she was a divorcée with five kids. He was doing her an enormous favor and she was giving him nothing in return Absolutely nothing, she thought, remembering his reluctant agreement to what he had referred to all evening as The Chicken Pox Treaty.

  Well, at least he had been a good sport. Given the press coverage of his libido she would hardly have suspected it. She sighed and opened the book she had taken from a shelf of the late architect’s library. It was a novel written about two years ago that, like almost everything else written since she had become a full-time single parent, she had never read. But it was immediately absorbing, and she sat bathed in the pool of light from the table lamp, reading and listening to some lilting, haunting music by Debussy until she heard Joe’s footsteps on the stairs, and she looked up to see him come into the room.

  He was wearing clean jeans and a pale blue open-necked sport shirt, buttoned only halfway up his chest, affording her a glimpse of a tanned, hair-roughened chest. Her heartbeat quickened, and she swung her feet off the couch planting them firmly on the floor. “How was your shower?” she asked, hoping for a noncontroversial topic.

  “Cold.”

  He gave her an ironic grin that accelerated the thuds inside her chest even further, and she buried her nose in her book, intent on ignoring him. Joe must have had similar intentions, for he didn’t comment further, just padded silently on
bare feet over to the bookcases built into the wall next to the fireplace and poked through them, eventually extracting a book, which he took to the chair farthest from her and sat down.

  Liv’s eyes flickered once or twice to glance at him in the warm, golden lamplight, but he was motionless in his chair, scowling at the book in his lap. Gradually, then, she relaxed, burrowing deeper into the corner of the couch, tucking her feet back under her and laying her head against her arm as it rested along the back of the sofa. The haunting softness of Debussy’s music wove a spell around her, and she closed her eyes, reaching over to shut off the reading lamp beside her. Gentle breezes blew through the open windows, and cicadas hummed in the trees by the lake. Her body drifted on the sounds, mellowed by the music, the steady hum of the insects, and cushioned by the plush softness of the corduroy couch beneath her.

  The sound of bare feet hitting the polished wooden floor with a thwack jolted her. She opened her eyes to see Joe striding across the room to the stereo, pausing only to flick on the bright overhead light before he jerked the needle off and yanked the Debussy record off the spindle. Liv stared open-mouthed as he bent down and riffled through the records in the cabinet below, pulling out another album and slapping it on the turntable. Moments later the sounds of John Philip Sousa reverberated throughout the room.

  “What the…”

  Joe spun around, hands on his hips, legs spread slightly, enough to tauten the material across his thighs. “Do you want this treaty to work or don’t you?” he growled.

  “Of course!” Liv was astonished, looking into the full brunt of his glare.

  “Then don’t sit around in half-lit rooms, playing soft music and wearing that skimpy top without a bra!”

  “It’s hot!” Liv retorted, bounding to her feet and flinging the book down on the couch. “And I’ve been wearing this skimpy top all evening and you haven’t said a word till now!”

  “What was I supposed to say in front of all those big-eared children, ‘Put a bra on, sweetie; seeing you falling out of that shirt is driving me wild’?”

  Liv made a strangled sound, wrapping her arms across her breasts. “The only thing you think about is sex!”

  “I’m human,” he said. “Put a normal human male in the same room with a woman he’s attracted to, dim the lights and play seductive music and dress her in tight jeans and a flimsy shirt that—”

  “At least it’s buttoned,” Liv shouted, her eyes raking his chest which was still visible beyond the open front of his shirt.

  “Turned you on, did I?” he mocked, his hands going to his shirt front, doing up the buttons with a seductive slowness that was calculated to drive her mad. Only Joe Harrington, she thought, could make getting dressed seem sexy.

  “No,” she lied. “After all these years I’m quite familiar with the male body. I shouldn’t think yours is substantially different from Tom’s.” Which was, she realized, almost as absurd as saying that a Maserati wasn’t much different from a middle-of-the-line Ford.

  “It’s not the body, it’s the performance,” Joe replied and stuck his tongue in his cheek, a grin twitching the corners of his mouth. “But in the interests of preserving your blasted treaty, I’ll forbear—for the moment—to demonstrate mine.”

  Thank heaven, Liv thought, trembling all the way to her toes. If he knew how strongly he affected her their treaty would be in shreds in seconds. She’d never been one for believing in a strong defense, but with Joe Harrington she could definitely see merits to that argument for the first time. “I would appreciate it,” she said coolly, having paused long enough to get a good grip on her emotional response to him. “In any case, since your tolerance for seeing my body appears to be severely limited, I’ll just remove it. Good night.”

  She was halfway up the stairs when she heard him snort, “Good?” and that one word echoed in her mind all the while she was brushing her teeth and getting into her thin cotton nightgown that she was desperately glad Joe wouldn’t see.

  Even after she had checked on the children and had got into bed, her cheeks still burned and her heart pounded as she remembered the look on his face as he stood glaring at her. The march music ended abruptly downstairs and she heard his footsteps pass her room on the way to his. Moments later the shower was running again. Cold, no doubt, she thought. She wished she were taking one herself—anything to soothe the heat that coursed through her body as she remembered his gaze. It was going to be a long week.

  In fact it was nowhere near as trying an experience as she had imagined it might be. Joe’s march music the first night set the tone for the entire interlude. The days were upbeat, peppy, cheerful—at least as much so as a household full of children whose entire vocabulary ran to “I itch,” and “Mommy, I’m burning,” and “Mommy, can I have some Kool-Aid?” could be. She marveled that Joe stood it as well as he did; he saw them for far more of the day than she did. But he was unfailingly easygoing and seemed to cope far better than the average father might have.

  It’s because they aren’t his, she reminded herself. He knows he can tell them when to leave. If they bug him enough we’re the ones who will be out on our ears, not he. But she suspected that she was selling him short. She had to, however. If she didn’t it was far too easy to simply let her fantasies run away with her. What would it be like to come home to him every night, she found herself wondering more than once.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said aloud now as she shut off the light in her bedroom, having determined that Jennifer, whom she was sharing the bed with, was fast asleep. “He’s not going to turn himself into a house-husband just for your convenience,” she told herself and pulled the door shut, padding down the hall to the room Stephen and Theo were sharing. The thought of Joe as a house-husband was almost laughable. A pity it was also so tempting.

  “Can’t we stay up?” Theo asked plaintively when she went to switch out their light. “There’s an old movie of Joe’s on tonight.”

  “You’re too young for any of Joe’s old movies,” she said, smiling as she kissed his scabby nose. “Besides, the real thing is right downstairs.”

  “Yeah, but he isn’t half as exciting,” Stephen grumbled, shutting his book.

  “Tell me about it,” Liv said lightly. He was quite exciting enough, thank you, she thought as she kissed Stephen and put out the light. “Good night,” she told them both. “Maybe you won’t itch so much tomorrow.”

  “Don’t talk about itching,” Stephen growled. “It just makes it worse. It’s terrible being reminded.”

  “I know what you mean,” Liv replied. “I’m sorry.” She gave him a short wave of her hand before pulling the door closed. A living reminder of her own personal “itch” was right downstairs. It wasn’t just a physical itch, either. That she could have rationalized away. That was the sort of thing she could have joked about with Frances. What she was beginning to feel about Joe was far more than that. Of course she was aware of him as a man. Who wouldn’t be, she almost snorted as she went down the stairs. His smouldering glances were even more effective in person than in wide-screen technicolor. But then, so was everything else about him—his caring, his gentleness, his patience with the kids, his tolerance of her treaties and her one-foot rules. He might be a famous actor, a talented director, and a struggling screenwriter, but he was also just about the most marvelous man she had ever met. She stopped at the foot of the stairs to stand and simply look at him.

  Joe was hunched over his typewriter, where he had been since helping her with the dinner dishes. She had hustled the kids out of his way, determined to give him some time for himself, and occasionally she had heard the tap-tap of the machine while she was bathing them and reading stories, but now he sat unmoving, his head resting on the top of the machine, hands limp in his lap, looking like a sacrifice to twentieth century technology. Liv felt an almost overpowering urge of longing for him, wanting to go up behind him and rub the tension out of his slumped shoulders and run her fingers through his thick dishevele
d hair. But that, she knew, would be extreme foolishness, especially when it was because of her wishes that they had a treaty at all. So she crossed quietly to the sofa and sank down, observing as she did so, “You look exhausted.”

  Her voice caused Joe to raise his head, but he didn’t turn around, staring instead at the sheet of paper halftyped in front of him. “I am,” he confessed, the weariness evident simply in his ragged tone of voice.

  “The kids are too much for you,” Liv said quickly, smote by another pang of guilt for all she was taking from him while giving nothing in return.

  “No,” he disagreed. “It’s not the kids at all. It’s this play.” He waved a hand at the paper in the typewriter and the crumpled ones in the wastebasket beside the table.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Everything. The characters are flat.” He sighed and stretched his arms over his head. “The scenes don’t move. You name it, it’s wrong.”

  “May I read it?” She didn’t know how she dared ask it, except that somehow she had the notion that perhaps it would help him to share some of the frustration he obviously felt.

  Joe looked at her skeptically.

  “I do know something about writing,” she went on hurriedly. “It is my job and all.”

  He seemed to consider this, then a half-smile tugged at his mouth and he shrugged. “Sure, why not? But it isn’t very good,” he added self-consciously. He handed her the thin manuscript and watched as she settled back against the cushions and began to read. Then he got up and paced to the sliding doors overlooking the patio and came back again. Once she had the manuscript in her hands, she didn’t notice him again, starting instead to read. When she finally looked up, having finished as much as he had given her, she found him leaning against the fireplace, arms folded across his chest, his hooded green eyes watching her carefully.