Just Not Mine (23 page)

Erica had gone away once she’d delivered them back to makeup, and now she came back into the room, approached Hugh.

“
Josie wonders,” she told him, “if you’d like to come on back for a second.”

“Yeh
,” he said. “Of course.” He saw the look Will and Koti exchanged, told himself she wanted another chat, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it?

He followed
Erica around a few corners, down a passage, stopped at the door she indicated, the one with “Jocelyn Pae Ata” printed on a plaque. No actual star, but she didn’t need a star, because she was one. The girl left, and he lifted his hand and gave the door a quick rap with his knuckles.

“Come in,” he heard, and he opened the door and stepped inside.

She was sitting on a padded pink stool in front of a big square mirror outlined with lights, exactly the way he’d have imagined, creaming off the heavy makeup that had made her look a different person—the hard, cruel person she wasn’t. Her heavy hair was down, and she was beautiful.

She smiled at him in the mirror. “How’d you boys go, then? Everyone in one piece? Thought I’d better check.”

“Dunno,” he said with a grin of his own. “Not sure Will’s ever going to be the same again. I think a whole new world’s just opened up for him.”

She laughed. “Shocked him, did I?”

“Well,” he said, “if you get one of those letters, about the boots and the tying-up and all, let me know, because that could be him getting carried away.”

“You going to protect me?”

“You know I am.”

She smiled into the mirror, finished wiping off the makeup, swung around on the stool, and he saw what he’d been doing his best not to notice since he’d come in, that she was in a dressing gown. Another silky one, long this time, in a sort of bronze color that shimmered in the light of all those bulbs. She was covered from neck to ankle, but that didn’t matter, because he could still see that vee of skin at her throat, catch a glimpse of shapely calf above her bare, high-arched brown feet with their pink-painted toenails.

Feet that he’d seen over and over again during the months of their acquaintance, because she didn’t like wearing shoes any more than he did. She was wearing more than she’d done when they’d laid her brick,
more than she’d done when she’d served him dinner in her white dress on her new patio, and definitely more than she’d done when she’d pulled off that same white dress and gone for a swim in her black bikini. But she hadn’t been wearing a silky dressing gown that clung to her curves, held closed with a sash that his hands itched to yank open so he could see and touch what lay beneath. And the two of them hadn’t been in an intimate, completely feminine little room with the door shut, and there hadn’t been a double row of costumes hanging just to one side of his shoulder, and some of those costumes hadn’t been hanger after hanger of bras, undies, and, in some cases, suspender belts. White, ivory, red, black. Silk and lace. Lots and lots of lace.

He glanced at them again, he couldn’t help it, and she smiled. “Admiring my wardrobe?”

“Well …” His gaze met hers, and they were both still smiling, but her eyes had widened, her lips had parted, and she wasn’t acting now. “How often do you take your clothes off on this show, anyway?” he asked her, the words coming out a bit husky.

“You mean you haven’t been watching to see?” Her own voice was low, teasing, and his body responded to it like she’d pushed a button, because she had.

“I have been,” he said, “which I’m sure you’ve guessed. Wondering if I missed the good stuff. Because this …” He reached a finger up to hook a filmy bit of silver lace decorating a scrap of pale pink, let it fall. “This would be the good stuff.”

“I don’t always show them,” she said. “But I usually wear them, because Dr. Eva does. Because she’s always aware, no matter what else she’s doing, of what she’s got to offer, what she’s got that they all want.”

“This would be what they call Method acting, then,” he said, and she shifted on her stool, the carefully closed neckline of the gown opened a little wider, and he could see an edge of ivory under there, scallops of lace against the golden brown of her skin.

“You
have
been studying,” she said. “Want to see the rest of it?”

Hell, yeh, he did.

“Come here and I’ll show you, then,” she said.

She
stood, a graceful movement, turned to open a drawer in a cabinet beside her, and he saw the shape of her under the gown and covered the space between them in two strides.

He was l
ooking down into a shallow drawer divided into diamond-shaped compartments, each containing a filmy mass of … something. Black and gray and nude this time, with black heavily represented.

“These are my other secret weapon,” she told him, pulling out one black bundle and unrolling it. “Dr. Eva’s stocking collection. These are fishnets,” she added unnecessarily. “Always effective.” She rolled them up again, put them back into their spot. “The ones
with the seam running down the back are good too, and these.” Another silky length dropped from her hand, black again. “Don’t need the suspender belt for these, which is helpful when Dr. Eva’s wearing knits. And when she finds it more convenient to do without her knickers.”

“You go out there,” he managed to say, “witho
ut your knickers on? Wearing those?” They had lace at the top, were nearly transparent beneath, and he needed a dress rehearsal. Right now.

“I do,” she said, her smile inviting him to share her secrets. “Want me to tell you next time that happens? Increase the entertainment value?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he took the stockings from her hand, dropped them back into their drawer, and shoved it shut with his knee. Then he reached for her shoulders.

“I think we both know
the entertainment value I want,” he said, just before he lowered his mouth to hers.

This time, it didn’t start out gentle. It started out hot and hard, and it got hotter, because her mouth was opening under his, welcoming
the invasion of his tongue. His hands were tight on the backs of her shoulders, until she reached up to grab his upper arms. Her hands were gripping him hard, then, and she was making noises into his mouth, little smothered sounds deep in her throat that were rapidly pushing him past the point of thinking.

He had to plunge a hand into her mass of hair
then, because he needed to pull her head back to kiss that throat. His other hand was at her waist, and she was holding on, gasping, turning her head to the side so he could do it some more. He found a spot that made her squirm, and stayed there, the sound of her breath with its keening undertone competing with the roaring in his own head. His hand moved down a perfectly curved hip, his fingers closing over the roundness of her, and he didn’t have a choice. He had to give her a stroke or two there, to run his hand over her curves, and she was sagging at the knees now.

He couldn’t have that,
so he let go of her hair, put a hand on either side of her waist and lifted her onto the top of that chest of drawers, which was exactly right, because her knees parted, and he was standing between them, grasping the edge of the dressing gown and pulling it aside so he could touch her, his hand stroking higher over the silk of her skin, his thumb drifting up over the soft, secret flesh of her inner thigh.

He wanted to watch, but she had her own hands in his hair, was kissing him with a hunger he needed
to satisfy, because that was what he was here for.

He did his best,
took his time, kissed her until she was melting into him, until her own tongue had come out to play. He explored the curve of her upper lip, gave the deliciously plump lower one the nip he’d been imagining for weeks now, drawing a gasp from her, a little whimper that had his blood heating. And eventually, he found his other hand reaching for the opening at the front of the dressing gown as if it had a mind of its own, and he was parting it, breaking the kiss and pulling back from her to look.

He’d been
right, because she was wearing an ivory bra underneath. Low-cut, the swell of her upper breasts showing above, so tantalizingly close to revealing the treasures beneath.

“Aw, Josie,” he groaned, his fingers lightly tracing those scallops. “You’re beautiful.”

He felt her shiver as he touched her, as he reached down and yanked that tie loose from around her waist, and the bronze fabric parted completely, revealing the tiny undies that matched the bra, more ivory scallops decorating their top edge.

He took another step back to appreciate the picture she made, ran his fingertips delicately across the edge where lace met firm brown flesh, so far beneath her slit of navel with its winking diamond, and he could actually see her flesh quiver.

“I’m going to kiss you everywhere,” he warned her, his voice hoarse in his ears. “I’m going to do it now.”

“Huhhhh.” It
was a sigh, or a groan, and her eyes were closed.

“Open your eyes,” he told her gently. “Know who I am?”

He watched the lashes flutter, saw the delicately carved lids opening to reveal dilated pupils, the flush that had risen on her cheeks.

“Hugh,” she sighed. “Hugh.”

“That’s right,” he said, his fingers continuing to trace their slow path, then, just for a moment, sliding down, touching her through the silk, one fingertip gliding lightly over her, finding the spot. He felt the moisture that had soaked through the fabric, the spasm as she jerked against him, and he smiled. Oh, yeh. This was going to be so good. He was going to make her feel so good.

Knock knock knock.

The rapping at the door was so sudden, they both jumped.

“Josie
?” the feminine voice came through, muffled by the wood. “Excuse me.”

Hugh
expelled his breath in a curse, and Josie hastily pulled her robe together and tied it shut with hands that he saw were shaking. Then she shook her hair back, stood tall, and walked to the door to open it, and Hugh turned toward her dressing table and tried to pretend a fascination for her cosmetics he definitely wasn’t feeling.

“Sorry,” he heard the
assistant saying. “The other fellas are leaving, thought I should let you know. I think they wanted to say goodbye.”

Hugh would bet they did. Especially Will. Well, goodbye was all right. Goodbye was perfect.

“All right,” Josie said. “Tell them I’ll be right out, and Hugh will be too.”

“
Will do,” the voice said, the door clicked shut, and Hugh turned around again to see Josie shedding the dressing gown with nothing but efficiency this time, pulling the little yellow skirt on over the undies, the white T-shirt over the bra before adding her high-heeled brown ankle boots and zipping them up with a couple quick motions, the whole thing taking her about thirty seconds.

“Ready?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “Nowhere close to ready, because we’re nowhere close to done.”

“My recovery period’s over, you think?” she asked, a faint smile curving the lips he wanted to be kissing again. The ones he
would
be kissing again.

“I think,” he told her, “your recovery period just came to a crashing end.”

She walked back out into the makeup room, so aware o
f Hugh walking behind her, and used every bit of her training not to show how shaken she still felt.

“Thanks,” she told Will and Koti, shaking hands all around. “You did awesome,” she said to Will. “Good job acting terrified.”

She gave him a smile and a wink, and he laughed back at her and asked, “Who says I was acting?”

“You’ll have picked up a few new fans, anyway,” she said, “this side of the Ditch. I predict a good turnout for your first appearance at Eden Park.”

She dropped his hand, turned to Hugh, standing there staring at Will, and if that wasn’t a warning-off glare, she’d never seen one. “See you, then,” she told him.

He shifted his frowning attention back to her. “You
’re not coming?”

“Nah, got a few more things going on here, now we’re done filming.”

“Right,” he said, and she held out a hand to him, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he took her by the shoulders, leaned down, and brushed his lips over hers.

“
Be good,” he murmured in her ear, just loud enough for the others to hear, then turned and walked away.

“Uh, Josie?” Clive asked from his spot at the table with Valerie when the others had left. “Something you want to share with the group? Thought you were still getting over Derek. You done getting over?”

“C
ould be,” she said. “Or I’m going to be.”

“With a bit of help, I take it.”

“Well, yeh,” she said. “Maybe. Working on it. Or he is. Or …” She sighed. “Something.”

“Uh-huh,” Clive said with satisfaction. “Looks to me like he’s ready to start working hard. Remember our little talk about weeing rou
nd the boundaries? That, my darling, was a champion exhibition. That’s our boy Hugh saying he’s won, and letting everybody know it.”

“He’s
won?”
Josie sat down with them, grabbed Val’s cup of tea and took a swallow, trying to laugh it off. “Because he kissed me goodbye?”

“Because he put his stamp on you,” Clive said, “in front of Will Tawera
, and anybody here who needed to know it, too. That was the point.”

“His stamp,” Josie said. “That is disgusting.”

“Then my work here is done,” Clive said. “Men
are
disgusting. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“And here I was,” Val
complained, “letting myself get excited to see him in his undies this morning. Thought you didn’t care, when you didn’t look. You could’ve warned me so I wouldn’t have wasted my energy flirting. Though Will’s more than all right too. Pity I didn’t get a chance to check out what was in
his
undies.”

“You didn’t check out what was in Hugh’s,” Josie
protested.

“Well, not
check,”
Val said. “But I got the chance to take a pretty good guess. And my guess is, it’ll do.”

“Maybe women are disgusting too,” Clive said. “Or maybe that’s just you, Val.”

“Oh, you know you love it.” She stuck out her little pink tongue at him, and he laughed.

Mike walked in, all efficiency, and cut to the chase, as usual. “Ready for you, Josie,” he said.

“Break a leg,” Clive said, his voice low, and Josie saw Val lose the smile and give her a meaningful look that she knew meant the same thing, and she forgot about Hugh.

“You’ve got maybe ten minutes,” Mike said
as they walked. “Make them good.”

She longed to ask him what they’d thought of her idea, to attempt to get some last-minute reassurance, but it sounded needy, so she didn’t. She took a breath, put her shoulders back, and channeled Dr. Eva as she
stepped into the writers’ room ahead of Mike.

“Mike says you have an idea,” Victor, the hea
d writer, said without preamble once she’d sat down, and his expression in the heavy black glasses didn’t look welcoming. He shoved his stocky frame back from the conference table, gestured with a meaty hand to the other three writers, and added, “Actors telling me how to write my characters aren’t my favorite thing, but he asked us to hear you out, so we’re all ears.”

Josie gave him a cool smile, then made eye contact with each of the four others at the table. “I do have an idea,” she told them, “thank you. We’ve had Dr. Eva being Dr. Evil for three years now. I thought it might be interesting to show a different facet to her character.”

“Such as?” Victor asked, his unkempt beard bristling pugnaciously.

“Nobody’s ever suggested she’s anything but a good surgeon,” Josie said, keeping her tone level, impersonal. “In fact, I’ve always thought a lot of her confidence comes from knowing she’s a
great
surgeon. If she’s arrogant, well, surgeons are. It’s just that most of them are men, and arrogance in men is called ‘confidence,’ isn’t it?”

She saw
the nod from Samantha, the youngest writer on the team, and went on. “She’s sexually aggressive, she’s arrogant, she’s cold, and she’s unpopular. But she also does right by her patients, at least in the operating room. Even if it comes from her pride in her skill rather than her humanitarian instincts, she does care. So what if somebody else wasn’t providing that level of care? How would she feel about that? I think she’d hate it.”

“Go on,” Victor said, his expression giving nothing away.

“What if there were a surgeon who was stuffing up,” Josie asked, leaning in, looking around again, ramping it up a little bit, impressing her personality, her own confidence in her idea on all of them, “and Dr. Eva was the only one who saw it? What if he was a man who’d refused her, and everyone knew it? Say he had a drug problem, or an alcohol problem. You all would know what would work best, could give him a tortured past. Make him complex, a tragic figure. Nobody better at that.” Buttering them up couldn’t hurt. “Say Dr. Eva brought it to the chief medical officer’s attention, and he brushed it off, because of her reputation. Thought she was trying to get revenge because he—the other surgeon—had turned her down. Say patients started dying, and some of the hospital staff were covering up. And she couldn’t get anyone to care, and didn’t have any allies to call on.”

“That’d mean a
new character,” Mike pointed out.

“Yeh, and one people could change their minds about, gradually,” Josie said. “Just like they could change th
eir minds a bit about Dr. Eva. It’d get the viewers talking. Get them thinking. I got the idea from a headline about a surgeon like that, big news at the time. You may have seen it yourselves, because it’s a horror story everyone can relate to, isn’t it? Dad going in for a heart op, your partner going in for a Cesarean, dying because the doctor was drunk. The baby dying, too. Pure drama. Cue the tears.”

She stopped,
because it was time to listen, looked around the room, and saw them considering. Well, considering was good.

And then Victor ruined it. “So you want your character to be more sympathetic,” he said. “All the work we’ve put in to make her not be, and you want to take out the villain of the piece?”

“I put in a bit of that work myself,” she said, “and I’m not saying to take out the villain. I’m just saying, add a bit of nuance. A spin.”

“I like the spin,” Samantha said, which was brave of her
as the newest writer on the team, and Josie shot her a smile of gratitude, got a smile back. “I think Josie’s right, it’d get people talking. How many men is Dr. Eva going to be able to work through? She’s shagged half the cast already. Unless she starts in on the women as well, there’s only so far we can take that storyline.”

“An alcoholic surgeon’s n
ot a bad idea,” Ian, the other junior writer, said with a judicious air. “But I’m not so sure about the other. You’re meant to hate Dr. Eva, full stop. And nuance? This isn’t a BBC costume drama. It’s a soap.”

Victor looked at the fourth
writer, Rose, an older woman and the second-most senior member of the team, but she only shrugged. “Sounds good to me, but I’m not fussed either way,” she said.

“But would you want to watch that?” Josie pressed a bit, because she could feel the tone of the meeting shifting away from her.

“I don’t want to watch any of it,” Rose said. “I just write it.”

“And I don’t like the idea
much at all,” Victor said. “Turning your villain sympathetic isn’t a recipe for ratings. Mike?”

“It’s your call,” Mike said. “
I could do something with it, yeh. I think it’s good. But I’m not going to shove it down your throats if you don’t want to do it.”

“We’ll think about it,” Victor said.
He looked at Josie. “And let you know.”

She nodded, stood up with a smile.
Never let them see you sweat.
“Good. I’ll look forward to hearing more,” she said, and left the room with her head high.

Mike followed her out. “Sorry that didn’t go better,” he said when they were walking down the passage again.

She tried not to let the exasperation show.
He hadn’t exactly stuck his neck out for her. “Thanks for getting me the meeting,” she said. “If it doesn’t fly, well, there’s always next time. And who knows, maybe Victor will change his mind.”

“Yeh. Maybe.” Mike sounded about as convinced as she felt.

Clive and Valerie looked up inquiringly as she entered the makeup room again. They’d stayed, she knew, just to see how her meeting had gone, and she felt a rush of gratitude.

“No joy,” she told them, n
ot sitting down with them again.

“Ah,” Clive said. “Hard luck.”

“Yeh. Win some, lose some,” she said. “Thanks for hanging around. But it’s late. See you both tomorrow.”

Her thoughts on the drive home in the thinning post-six-o-clock traffic caromed between the disappointing meeting, her optimism taking a hit as she contemplated the dashing of an idea on which she’d pinned too much hope … between that, and Hugh. Down, and then, oh yeh, up again.

It was such a good diversion
to think about Hugh making those slow turns in nothing but his black boxer briefs. No matter what Val had thought, Josie had looked, and it didn’t seem to matter that she’d seen him in his togs just a few days earlier. He was what she wanted, and she couldn’t get enough.

She’d looked at broad thighs defined by heavy muscle,
at the wide shoulders and deep chest with its light furring of dark hair, all of it narrowing so satisfactorily to his trim waist and hips, at the arms he held out from his sides, so much of them it seemed like it would need some strength just to hold them up like that. At everything she’d been looking at for weeks now, so tantalizingly close to being fully revealed. When he’d pulled his jersey over his head again afterwards, tugging it into place down his torso, she’d wanted to take it off again. To stroke her hands up his sides, over his chest in its wake, listening to him groan out her name, her real name. Not because he was acting, but because it was real.