Dreaming With My Eyes Wide Open (Hollywood Legends #2) (3 page)

Behind the shield of his sunglasses, he gave her another
look. Up close, the view was even better. Her face wasn’t beautiful in the
classic sense. Nate preferred a woman with character. What looked good on a
glossy magazine cover didn’t always transfer well to real life. What looked
perfect on paper often turned out to be cold, shallow, and uninteresting.

No one would ever call Paige Chamberlin’s face boring.
Lively. Vibrant. Expressive as hell. Nate wondered if she realized how much a
person could see in those deep chocolate-colored eyes of hers? Her stance said,
Warning — tough girl
ahead
. Her eyes showed a touch of
vulnerability that reached something inside Nate.

Always the champion of the underdog, glimpsing behind the
mask that Paige presented made him wonder what else she was hiding.

Time to readjust his thinking. A trip that had seemed like
an obligation had taken a sudden and interesting turn. The last thing Nate had
expected to find in Basic, Montana was a sexy, interesting woman. A week or two
getting to know Paige? Maybe coaxing her into his bed? Or hers? Or both?

Nate liked Montana more and more by the second.

“Throttle back on the wolf grin,” Jack whispered. “If I can
read your thoughts, imagine what the ladies are thinking.”

“This lady thinks it’s fine and dandy.”

Lottie slowly straightened, pretending to smooth the front
of her shirt. It was her experience that if she could draw a man’s attention to
her chest, the rest was a piece of cake. A little flirtation. A few drinks. It
didn’t always end with sex. However, in the case of Nate Landis, Lottie
couldn’t wait to see that long, muscled body stretched out underneath her.

“No offense,” Jack said. “But you have ears like a bat.”

“I consider it a compliment.” For a second, Lottie forgot
this one had a wife. She bit her bottom lip. Another surefire attention-getter.
“Paige tells me your friend is Nate Landis. I’m Lottie. Who are you?”

“Jack Winston.” Jack shook the brunette’s hand. When she
moved a little closer, he held up his hand, wiggling the finger with the ring
firmly in place. “And happily married.”

“Oops,” Lottie’s laugh was light and good-natured. “My
mistake. Paige already told me you were off limits. I was so dazzled by that
killer smile, I forgot.”

“Lottie, you are a born heartbreaker.” Jack appreciated a
person who could flirt one second and take rejection with ease the next. “Miss
Chamberlin?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been a pleasure to meet you and your friend.” Jack
shook her hand. “A few years ago, I would have happily stayed for a few days to
see the sights.” Jack winked at Lottie. “But those days are in the past. I need
to do a check of the plane then it’s back home.”

“Thanks for the lift, Jack. Excuse me for a minute, ladies.”

Nate walked Jack back to the plane.

“I know it’s turned into a brick wall, but if anything turns
up in the investigation?”

“You’ll be the first to know. And Nate?”

“Ya?”

“Keep your powder dry.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I think I’m mixing up my sayings.” Jack shook his head and
shrugged. “Rose is a big old movie fan. I think it was a Revolutionary War
thing.”

“Okay.” Nate’s look made it clear he had no idea what that
had to do with anything.

“Let me simplify. Watch your back.” Jack reached into the
cockpit, coming back with a list of things he had to check before taking off
again. “It’s possible that the attempt on your life was a one-time thing.
Somebody saw their chance and gave into temptation. Or…”

“Okay. I get it.”

Nate sighed. It wasn’t as though the thought hadn’t entered
his mind. Somebody wanted him dead and he was still breathing. It was part of
the reason he gave in so easily to his father’s request. If he was a target, he
wanted to be far away from his family.

“If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call. You know how
much Drew and I love an excuse to take our babies up.”

H&W owned five planes ranging in size from a two-seater
to one that could fly them and fifty friends and family anywhere in the world.
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Nate gave Jack a friendly slap on the back. “Thanks
again.”

“Ready?”

Nate lifted his duffle bag into the back of an old Ford. His
eye told him late sixties to early seventies. For its age, the truck was in
amazing condition. The shine on what looked to be the original paint job
gleamed with a spotless luster in the afternoon sun.

“Is this yours?”

“It is now,” Paige said as she opened the driver’s side
door. “My grandfather bought it new. He passed it on to my father and my father
on to me.” She gave him a steady look. “Not exactly what you’re used to.”

Was that a jab
? Nate considered it as he held the
passenger door for Lottie. Letting her climb into the cab, he followed close
behind.
It felt like one
.

Never afraid to ask a question, no matter how awkward, Nate
decided it would be better to get all the cards on the table.

“You think I’m a pampered Hollywood trust fund baby?”

“I think you’ve led a privileged life.”

“I won’t deny my parents’ money and position allowed my
brothers and me to enjoy the good things in life.”

Nate stretched his arm with the cast along the top of the
bench seat. His fingers were close enough to brush Paige’s hair if the impulse
should arise. Or give it a firm tug. Right now, he didn’t know which would be
more satisfying.

“I’ll bet you have all kinds of interesting stories about
your movie star friends.”

Lottie turned a dazzling smile on Nate. The effect was
completely wasted. Nate’s attention was focused on the woman shifting the truck
into third.

“I’ll bet I’ve roughed it in the wild twice as many times as
you have.”

“Probably.” Paige gave him a quick, sneering glance. “The
difference is I can’t call for a limo to pick me up when I get bored. When
you
rough it
,
you’re on vacation. This is my life. Sun up to sun up.”

“Snob.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“Damn straight. And proud of it.”

Lottie’s head whipped back and forth, eyes wide with
confusion. She didn’t know what had gotten into Paige. The last time she was
this rude was… well, Lottie couldn’t remember when it had happened. Certainly not
to a stranger. One who was here to help her. As for Nate Landis. His smile was
still as charming as when he got off the plane. However, there was something in
his voice. Not anger. More of an edge.

Lottie hated tension. She grew up in a household that always
seemed to be one step away from all-out warfare. Smoothing over a tense
situation was her specialty.

Before Lottie could intervene, she heard a snicker from
Paige.

“Well, damn.” Nate grinned. “She has a sense of humor.”

Paige sent him another look, this time with a slight smile
and sparkling eyes. “On occasion. How about you, Hollywood? Can you laugh at
yourself?”

“On occasion,” Nate shot back. For good measure, he gave her
hair a gentle tug. “Blondie.”

Lottie almost slapped herself on the forehead. So that was
it. Paige wasn’t pissed off at Nate. She was attracted to him. And if her
instincts were right, Nate was attracted right back.

Instead of lamenting the loss, Lottie silently rejoiced. It
had been a long time since Paige met a man who interested her. Her best friend
wasn’t in the middle of a sexual dry spell. It was a certified drought. If she
didn’t get laid soon, her vagina would dry up and blow away.

Nate would have his work cut out for him. Paige wasn’t a
push over. If he wanted her, he would have to work for it.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lottie gave his long, muscular
body another once over. From the tips of his scuffed work boots to the top of
that dark, wavy hair, Nate Landis would make any woman’s mouth water. Paige
wouldn’t be immune to that sexy smile and bright blue eyes. Getting her to
admit it was another matter.

Lottie mentally rubbed her hands together in anticipation.
She didn’t know who would win the battle of wills. But for Paige’s sake, she
rooted for the Hollywood hunk.

THE CHAMBERLIN RANCH had been in the family for close to a
hundred years.

Paige’s great-great-grandfather came to Montana to work in
the copper mines. He didn’t make a fortune by most estimation. However, for an
Irish immigrant who came to America with little more than the clothes on his
back, having enough money to buy a few acres of land was exactly what he
dreamed of.

Cyrus Chamberlin wasn’t afraid to work hard. He started
small. Two head of cattle turned into four. Then ten. Soon, he purchased more
land and more cattle. In time, he sold beef to the very mine owners he once
worked for.

The Double C Ranch never became a huge moneymaking
enterprise. Some years were better than others. They survived the Depression.
Heavily fluctuating cattle prices. More often than not, they were cash poor and
land rich.

When Paige’s father was born, there were already two
brothers ahead of him. He loved Montana. He loved his home. It was his dream to
run the Double C. Turn its fortunes around. He had ideas that he knew would
work.

However, he understood that as the youngest, he was never
going to get the chance to put those ideas to use. So he moved to California
where he hoped he could find work. In his mind, Chuck pictured himself working
the land. He was an outdoor person. He didn’t want to be trapped all day with
four walls surrounding him.

He fell into the movie business. A friend of a friend set
him up with a one-day gig moving scenery. It meant joining a union. Once he had
his card, Chuck soon had more work than he could handle. He was reliable, fast,
and did the job right the first time. He made a reputation for himself and, as
a result, was paid well.

It wasn’t the glamorous end of the business. Not by any
stretch of the imagination. He was a grunt. One who was known by sight by the
biggest of the big.

Chuck had a nice nest egg put aside when he received a call
that would change his life. His brothers had been killed when their truck went
off the road, flipping several times. Neither wore a seatbelt. Both had been
drinking.

Since his brothers never married, the ranch went to him.

It was hard to be happy when the fulfillment of his dream
came at such a heavy price, with no family left and a heavily mortgaged ranch.
After such a long time, Chuck hadn’t known what he would feel when he stepped
onto the familiar Double C soil.

It took only seconds to find out. For the first time in ten
years, Chuck Chamberlin was home.

Everything he had learned in Hollywood came in handy. The
main house was a mess. Calling it rundown was being kind. Chuck didn’t mind. He
rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

Winter would be on him before he knew it. He hadn’t been
gone so long that he didn’t remember what it was like when the heavy snow hit.
The roof needed repairs before anything else. When that was done, Chuck fixed
the sagging back porch, the front entryway. It seemed like there was an endless
list.

Chuck tackled every task with happy gusto. When the first
snowflake fell, the outside was ready. With only a few head of cattle to tend,
he spent the next few months making the inside of the house shine like it did
when he was a small boy.

There was no time to be lonely. Or so he thought. It was a
bitterly cold day in early January when his isolation hit him. The snow piled
up. He made a run into Basic once a month to replenish his supplies, but other
than that, human contact was non-existent.

Chuck was almost at his wits’ end when an angel came
calling.

Erin Wakes was the new schoolteacher in Basic. A Southern
girl, she wasn’t used to snow of any kind. Her first Montana winter had come as
a shock. On weekends, she liked to visit the families of her students. An icy
patch of road and a large snow bank proved providential.

Chuck’s was the nearest house. When the pretty, rosy-cheeked
blonde knocked on his door, it was love at first sight. For them both.

Though she had never hammered a single nail, Erin began
spending her weekends helping Chuck fix up the house. She was a fast learner.
By spring, her stamp was in every room from the paint color on the walls to the
fabric hanging at every window.

In June, when Chuck carried his new bride over the gleaming
threshold, it wasn’t his house. It was theirs.

Erin was his helpmate in everything he did. He shared his
dream to raise horses instead of cattle and soon it was her dream too.
Separately, they had always been determined, capable people. Together, nothing
could stop them.

For the next thirty years, that remained true. Chuck and
Erin grew their fledgling business slowly but surely. They bought horses at
bargain basement prices. They came cheap because they were considered misfits.
Too small. Too slow. Untrainable.

What other people saw as a problem, Chuck and Erin saw as a
challenge. They were seldom wrong. Chuck knew horseflesh — one of the many
things he learned while in California.

It turned out Erin was the one with
the touch
. She
shied away from terms like
horse whisperer
. She called it common sense.
Yes, she talked to them. However, they didn’t talk back. It was instinct and
trust that allowed her to get so much out of the horses no one else wanted.

Soon, they made a good living selling the animals to the
proper owner. Erin insisted on making sure there was a proper fit before they
exchanged money. She took pride in what they did. That included her care and
love for each and every horse.

It took five years to pay off the debt Chuck had inherited.
The business grew to a comfortable size. They weren’t rich, but they wanted for
nothing. A healthy, bundle of energy only added to their happiness. Their
beloved daughter had her father’s brown eyes and love of the land. She
inherited her mother’s honey-blond hair and her way with horses.

For thirty years, it was a near perfect life.

That life changed forever when Erin was diagnosed with an
aggressive form of liver cancer. A year later, she was gone.

Chuck Chamberlin had lost his anchor. His partner. The love
of his life. Paige helped. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have gotten out
of bed each morning. For those first few months, all he wanted to do was curl
up and forget the world existed. For him, without Erin, it didn’t.

Going through the motions became a habit. He would smile
when it was appropriate — even laugh on occasion. He showered. Ate three meals
a day. Worked. At the end of the day, he crawled back into the bed he had
shared with his wife and tried to pretend she would be there when he woke up in
the morning.

After a while, the pretending became easier. The pain
lessened. The hole that Erin’s death left in his heart didn’t go away, but
Chuck wasn’t constantly aware of it.

That should have been a good thing. The passing of the
crippling grief should have made life easier. Instead, it sent Chuck into a
state of panic.

If he stopped thinking about Erin every second of every day,
that meant she was slipping away from him. He needed something to bring her
close again. That was when he hit on the idea of making Erin’s movie.

Before Erin met Chuck, she wasn’t just a teacher. She was a writer.
A closet novelist who never had the time or courage to follow her dream. She
shared her secret with Chuck because they shared everything. They were just
married. The house and business needed their full attention.

Erin thought Chuck had forgotten her confession until one
day when she was four months pregnant with Paige; he presented his wife with an
electric typewriter. Now was the time. It was November. She would soon be too
far along to do anything but stay in the house and nest. Why not take the opportunity
to finally turn that dream into a reality.

Later, Erin would refer to that time as her winter of
discontent. Writing didn’t come naturally to her. She knew what she wanted to
say. The story had simmered in her brain for years. Getting it from her
thoughts to her fingers wasn’t as easy as she imagined it would be.

The idea to make it a screenplay instead of a novel came one
evening when Chuck told her stories about his old Hollywood friends. He would
often amuse her with outrageous stories. They were over the top. If Chuck
hadn’t sworn on his mother’s grave that they were one hundred percent true,
Erin would have thought he was the fiction writer in the family.

On a snowy night, curled up together in front of the fire,
Erin realized her story was meant to be a visual experience. She had struggled
to express her thoughts on paper without realizing they needed to be seen, not
read.

With Chuck’s full support, Erin switched gears. She read
several books about screenplay writing, absorbing the process like an eager
sponge. Soon she wrote with abandon. Ideas and words flowed from her like
water. Erin had found her medium of expression.

By March, when Erin was round and ready to pop, her
screenplay was finished. And so was she.

The screenplay was decent. With some time and a lot of
polish, she might elevate it to not bad. The problem was she didn’t want to
spend any more time on it or any other writing project.

The process was excruciating. The entire time she typed, all
Erin wanted was to get outside. Horses were her passion — not stringing words
together. She would always be grateful to her husband, her pregnancy, and a
long winter. She found out her dream had changed.

Erin Chamberlin was not a writer. Finding that out didn’t
make her sad. It was a relief. She would never lament what might have been.
With no regrets, she put the screenplay into a box and stored it in the attic.

As far as Chuck knew, Erin never again gave the screenplay
more than a passing thought. She had been happy with him, their daughter, and
using her magic on the dozens of horses that came and went over the years.

If life had been kinder, someday one of their descendants
would find the screenplay long after he and Erin were gone. A funny piece of
nostalgia.

However, Erin was gone. Taken from him much too soon. That
screenplay was a part of her. A part he could hold in his hands.

When Chuck scoured the attic, searching for the
long-forgotten screenplay, he didn’t have a plan beyond reading it again. When
he found it in an unmarked box in the back corner, he felt like he had
uncovered a priceless treasure.

It was only as he read the words that Erin had spent hours
crafting that the germ of an idea began to form. He could follow through on the
dream she put aside. Her words the way she saw them. Up on the screen for the
world to see.

Erin’s name in bold letters. A permanent tribute. A love
letter from him to the woman who had changed his life for the better.

Chuck started the project in secret. He didn’t want to face
the inevitable questions or deal with any negativity and doubts. Especially
from Paige.

He knew she worried about him. Paige was a loving, caring
daughter. Strong. Independent. She grew up running free on the ranch. Her
mother had called her a beautiful soul. He called her stubborn and opinionated.
She was used to doing things her own way.

A perfect example was when Erin was diagnosed with terminal
cancer. Paige was in Illinois attending Northwestern University on a full
scholarship. Three months to go and she would have her Bachelor’s degree in
business.

Their girl had her mother’s way with horses. Where she got
her head for finance, neither of her parents knew. Paige saw a bright future
ahead. They would branch out. Expand.

College wasn’t necessary for that. Paige was smart enough to
learn everything she needed to know without traveling halfway across the
country. Furthering her education wasn’t about expanding her brain. It was
about seeing something outside of Montana.

Basic was home. She loved it there. However, Paige had
always had a wandering heart. She didn’t have to tell her parents. They knew
she was restless. Like Paige, they saw college as a way for her to decide if
she wanted to settle down on the Double C.

Chuck and Erin wanted their only child to be happy. Going
away to college was the perfect way to explore a different way of life.
Many
different ways of life. If Paige decided Montana was what she wanted, they
would welcome her back with open arms. If her future was someplace else, so be
it. They wouldn’t lose their girl simply because she was no longer down the
hall.

Dreams were funny things. Chuck’s had always been on the
ranch. Hollywood was a detour. When he came back, he appreciated his home that
much more. Erin’s dreams shifted over the years. Writer. Teacher. Horsewoman.
She happily left the first two behind, adding wife and mother along the way.

Paige had always been a wildcard. She spoke of spending her
life on the Double C, but her yearning to see the world warred with the rural
life she would have if she chose Montana.

Erin’s cancer put a halt to everyone’s dreams. Their world
became rooted in a tragic reality no one could ignore.

Paige insisted on leaving school to help take care of her
mother. Erin didn’t want her to leave school when she was so close to
finishing. When it came to a battle of wills, it was no contest. Paige was on
the first flight home.

Erin could have put up more of an argument except for one
thing. She and Paige knew her time was limited. They wanted to spend it
together. It was a beautifully tragic and bittersweet year. They spent it as a
loving family.

When Erin couldn’t fight any longer and the time came for
her to let go, Paige and Chuck were by her side, holding her hand.

Chuck broke. Paige became stronger. Not that she didn’t miss
her mother. She did. Every day. But unlike Chuck, Paige looked at life with a
new sense of urgency. Her mother’s death taught her that tomorrow wasn’t a
given. There were no guarantees, no matter your age.