Isabelle paused in her thoughts and smiled wryly; she wondered if any woman who was still breathing could be totally unaffected by Michael Traynor. Perhaps not, but she was armored against him better than most, she thought; she knew what could happen to her if she used poor judgment.
He wouldn’t necessarily learn about Jenny. Isabelle had been careful to keep her private life separate from her job. She presumed a lot of people knew that she had a daughter, but less than a handful knew anything about that daughter. She never brought Jenny to work with her. Michael Traynor would certainly never be at her house. Even if, by some remote chance, he did see Jenny, he wouldn’t necessarily assume that she was his. Isabelle could see the resemblance in her, but that wasn’t to say that anyone else would. Jenny was quite small for her age; she looked more like seven or eight than ten.
The important thing, of course, was that Jenny not find out the truth. Jenny’s tender feelings were easily hurt, and she could hold on to the pain for much longer than Isabelle would have thought possible. It would never do for her to know that she had a father alive and well, a father who had run out on them before he even knew about her. Worse yet would be for her to know it and see him pull away from her now. No, Jenny must not know. But that would be easy.
There was a rap on her door, and Isabelle’s head came up with a snap. Her heart began to pound. For one crazy moment she thought it was Michael, coming after her to talk to her. But then Tish Klegman’s voice sounded in the hall. “Miss Gray? You start shooting again in fifteen minutes.”
“Oh.” Isabelle pulled herself into the present with difficulty. “Yes. Of—of course. What scene?”
“Three. You and Paul and Phil, in the restaurant.”
“Oh, yes.” It was the scene they had been rehearsing when Danny and Carol had waltzed into practice with their new acquisition.
Isabelle glanced around her, looking for the script. All her lines seemed to have flown from her head in the last few minutes. It took her a moment to recall that she must have left the script out on the set. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. She had to pull herself together. She couldn’t go back out there in this frazzled condition.
Isabelle checked her image in the mirror, straightening her clothes, tidying her hair, smoothing away a smudge of mascara beneath her eye. Callie would refresh her makeup right before they shot, of course, but she needed the confidence of looking perfect when she walked onto the soundstage. No one must suspect that Michael Traynor’s arrival had upset her.
Isabelle stood up, drawing another deep breath. Then she opened the door and marched out into the hallway, head high, a faint smile on her lips as she strode along the hall and onto the soundstage.
“Isabelle,” the director said, smiling. “Great. Now maybe we can get back down to business. Need to run through it again?”
Isabelle smiled, picking up her script and glancing down the page. “No, I’m fine, Lyle. Let’s go ahead and shoot.”
* * *
It was a long two hours later when Isabelle finally left the soundstage. She walked tiredly back to her dressing room to remove her makeup and change clothes. Despite her confident assurance to the director, she had had difficulty with the scene, blowing her lines three times in a row before she got them right. Her nerves had infected the others, with the result that the two scenes they filmed had taken them much longer than normal. She was going to have to retain control of herself better than that, Isabelle thought in disgust as she kicked off her spike heels and wriggled her toes in relief.
“Feet hurting?” a sympathetic voice said as Amanda from Wardrobe stuck her head in the door.
Isabelle cast her a wry smile. “As usual. The worst thing about playing a silver-plated bitch is the stiletto heels I have to wear. Come on in. I’ll have the suit off in a sec.”
Amanda came farther into the room, closing the door behind her, and picked up Isabelle’s shoes from the floor. Then she took down a hanger and hung up the skirt and jacket of the elegant business suit that Isabelle had pulled off and handed to her.
“I saw the new hunk,” Amanda said jokingly and fanned herself with an imaginary fan.
“Mmm,” Isabelle replied noncommittally. Now she understood why Amanda personally had come to retrieve her outfit for Wardrobe. A middle-aged woman with short graying hair and no makeup, Amanda looked more like a librarian than someone in charge of glitzy costumes, but she had razor-sharp taste in clothes and loved to indulge it with the studio’s money. She was equally fond of gossip and could usually be found at the center of any studio rumors.
“Word has it that you know him,” she went on when Isabelle said nothing to relieve her curiosity.
“Briefly, a long time ago,” Isabelle replied casually, pulling on her own jeans and a simple short-sleeved sweater. She strove to keep her tone light and uninvolved; she had to set the pattern right from the beginning. The show’s gossip was the best place to start, she supposed—as long as she managed to hide all traces of residual emotion.
“We worked in the same summer theater—Shakespeare,” Isabelle went on. “He was one of the professionals who had come down from New York to work with Dr. Carlysle, and I was a mere intern. I was only eighteen. I hadn’t even started college yet.”
She would not mention the afternoons of drinking coffee with Michael in the café across from the amphitheater or the evenings when he had walked her home, the long kisses on the porch of the big old house where the interns had roomed. She would not reveal how everything inside her had turned to Jell-O everytime Michael looked at her.
“But he remembered you. Phil said he did.” Amanda gave her a conspiratorial smile. Her eyes were alight with the greedy flame of an inveterate gossip. “You must have made an impression on him.”
Isabelle chuckled. “I was surprised he remembered me, truthfully. We did work together on a play, but he was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and I was one of the townspeople.”
She pushed out of her mind the memories of lying beneath a tree with him, the sun dappling her legs and the branches rustling over their heads, the green summer grass a tangy scent in her nostrils and the heat of Michael’s body lying only inches from her as his smooth voice rolled out the lines of the play, the Shakespeare on his tongue as intoxicating as wine. There hadn’t been a time, before or since, when she had felt as alive as she had that summer.
“Mercutio! I would have figured Romeo was more like it, the way he looks.” Amanda fetched up a grandiose sigh.
“As I remember, he liked the part better. It suited him, anyway—charming and cynical.” There had been something dark and mysterious about him. It was intriguing that his charm had a slightly rough edge, that he was not the familiar Southern boy that she’d grown up with, but a Yankee, and one with a sad history, as well. He had been orphaned at thirteen and had been bounced from foster home to foster home for a few years. His love of acting had been the thing that had saved him from following some of his New Jersey friends into a criminal life.
Isabelle had fallen for him hard. To give him credit, he had tried to ignore her, but she had been determined to reach him. She had arranged accidental meetings and flirted and schemed. It had been two weeks before he broke down and invited her out to coffee one afternoon. It had been even longer before he had finally kissed her. After that, though, they had become inseparable. Eventually, inevitably, they had come together in a cataclysmic night of lovemaking.
Three weeks later, Michael had gotten a call from his agent in New York. There had been a part in an off-Broadway play for him. He had, of course, taken it, leaving the last week of playing Mercutio to his understudy. Isabelle had been away that weekend, visiting her parents at home, and she had returned to be told by her roommate, in a tone of mock sympathy, that Michael had gone back to New York. He had left her a letter.
Isabelle would never forget the chill that invaded her being as she read that letter.