Grace winced and held up a hand. “Don’t be cruel. It’s not nice to taunt the animals,” she said.
Sadie shook her head and reached into her desk drawer. “Here, have some aspirin,” she said, tossing the pack over. Then she caught Claudia’s eye and lifted an eyebrow. Claudia shrugged a shoulder in response to her friend’s unspoken question. The cat was out of the bag already, after all.
“But before you go off to nurse your hangover,” Sadie added, “I’ve got some news. Well, really, it’s mine and Dylan’s news.”
Grace sat up as though someone had goosed her. Her glasses slid down to the end of her nose as she looked over them at Sadie.
“Get out of town,” she said. “You’re not pregnant!”
“Incorrect. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars,” Claudia said.
Leaping to her feet, Grace raced around the desk and threw herself into Sadie’s arms.
“You and Dylan are going to make the best parents,” she said, hugging Sadie fiercely. “The absolute best. Imagine the bedtime stories that kid’s going to hear.”
They spent another twenty minutes combing over the few bare details of Sadie’s pregnancy so far—two missed periods, no nausea, no tiredness, definite increase in bust size—and discussing Sadie’s Alien fears before peeling off to go to their respective offices.
Claudia found a pile of phone message slips on her desk, all of them congratulation messages bar two. Her voice mail was likewise clogged, and she put a call through to her assistant to ask her to sort through the backlog and let her know if there were any genuine callbacks required.
Then she sat back and stared at her office wall. Sadie was going to have a baby. She and Dylan were going to have a little family. If Grace’s rapt expression and intent questioning were anything to go by, she and Mac wouldn’t be far behind, either. Grace had a couple of years on Sadie, after all.
And Claudia was older than both of them.
It wasn’t something she’d ever really registered before. They’d all met at university when they joined the Undergraduate Film Festival Committee, and soon formed a firm friendship. Even though Sadie had skipped a year at school, and Claudia had tried her hand out in the workforce for a few years before opting for higher education, age had always been irrelevant in their bonding.
Frowning, Claudia checked her e-mail. She didn’t care about her ovaries aging. They could self-combust for all she’d notice—she’d fought too long and too hard to get where she was to walk away from it all to serve up puréed apple and change diapers twenty-four hours a day. Babies were fine for other women, but not for her.
Ruthlessly she squashed the memory of holding her eldest brother’s first son in the hospital. She’d been surprised by the fierce tug of love she’d felt, the instinctive desire to protect and nurture the tiny red person bundled in the blanket. Almost as though to eliminate any maternal longing, a grim memory pulled at Claudia: an image of a woman huddled on a bed, sobbing her heart out.
Impatient with her self-indulgence this morning, Claudia brushed it away. While she was contemplating her navel, Ocean Boulevard awaited.
It was mid-morning when her assistant, Gabby, buzzed a call through to her.
“I have Leandro Mandalor on line one,” Gabby said. She sounded faintly scandalized that the competition would dare to call.
Claudia pursed her lips.
“Tell him I’m unavailable,” she said. “Tell him to call back in an hour.”
Smiling to herself, she bent to her work again. Did he really think he could just call her after what had happened and she’d jump at the chance to talk to him like a good little girl?
Probably he did, she knew. That ego. That selfassurance—of course he did.
Well, he had another think coming.
Exactly an hour later, Gabby buzzed her again.
“I’ve got Mr. Mandalor again,” she said.
“Tell him my meeting has run overtime. He should try again in another hour,” Claudia said.
An hour later, Gabby came through to Claudia’s office.
“It’s him again,” she said. She looked faintly harassed. “I think he knows I’m lying.”
“I’m a busy person, Gabby. He has no way of knowing if I’m in a meeting or not. Tell him I went straight out to my lunch meeting without checking my messages. You don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Looking distinctly uncomfortable, Gabby picked up the line from Claudia’s office.
“Mr. Mandalor? I’m terribly sorry, but Ms. Dostis has gone straight out to her luncheon appointment. Perhaps if you tried later this afternoon…?”
Claudia could hear the low bass of Leandro’s voice without being able to discern actual words. She frowned as Gabby flinched, then went pale.
“Um, just hold on a moment,” Gabby said, reaching for the hold key as though it were a lifeline.
“What?” Claudia asked. “Did he bully you? What an asshole.”
“He said that you’ve had your fun, but that he wasn’t calling about the kiss. He said that something very important has come up and unless you want to see it across the front page of The National Enquirer, you should take his call.”
To her everlasting shame, Claudia felt herself blush with self-consciousness. How dare he mention that stupid kiss to her assistant?
“Give me that,” she said, wresting the phone from Gabby’s unresisting fingers.
Her finger punched down onto the hold button.
“What do you want?” she asked bluntly as soon as the line went live.
“My, my. What a terribly quick lunch that must have been,” Leandro said.
It was the first time she’d heard his voice over the phone. To her astonishment, the deep vibrato of his baritone made something utterly primitive and feminine within her snap to quivering attention.
“Do you or do you not have a business matter to discuss with me?” she said.
Gabby was standing in her doorway, hovering curiously. Claudia gave her a thumbs-up to indicate all was well and sent her on her way.
“That kiss was hot, but not hot enough for me to jump through all those flaming hoops like a dumb circus pony, Claudia. Yes, I have a business issue to discuss.”
Not hot enough? Where did this guy get off? Claudia puffed her cheeks out and put her free hand on her hip, really ticked off now. Then she noticed Gabby still hovering.
This time she waved her hand at her sticky-beak assistant, indicating she should go, and Gabby had no choice but to slink away unsatisfied.
“Fire away, then, Mr. Mandalor. I’m a busy woman.”
“Not too busy for this. Are you aware that a member of your cast is, shall we say, getting it on with a member of mine?” he asked.
Claudia blinked and sat back in her chair. She usually had a pretty good grip on who was doing what with whom. It was part of the job—she needed to know who might be at risk, and who was putting the show at risk.
“No. Who are we talking about here?”
“Alicia Morrison on your side, Wes Brooks on mine,” he said.
Claudia winced. Alicia was just seventeen, Wes in his thirties. Not a particularly good look, especially when Alicia played a character called Angel.
“But wait, there’s more,” Claudia said, anticipating