Not at Eight, Darling Read online

  “What’s your problem?” Barrie snapped.

  “Nice looking, isn’t he?”

  “Who?” It seemed to be a good time to be deliberately obtuse.

  “Who? Attila the programmer, of course.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  Danielle regarded her skeptically. “The woman who has taken a personal oath not to marry until she finds the perfect set of male thighs did not notice a man whose legs could have been carved by Michelangelo? I find that difficult to believe.”

  Barrie’s eyes flashed dangerously. “There are other directors in Hollywood.”

  “But I’m good,” Danielle retorted cheerfully. “I am also available, reasonably inexpensive, and I know all of your character flaws and love you, anyway. You can’t top that.”

  Barrie sighed. “You’re probably right, but could we drop the subject of Michael Compton for now? We have to go over this opening scene again. The pacing is all wrong.”

  An explosion of sound erupted just behind Barrie’s shoulder. “What do you mean the pacing is all wrong?” Heath Donaldson hissed. “I’ve been writing comedy since before you were born. If you’d hired actors who knew how to deliver a line, the pacing would be just fine.”

  Barrie rolled her eyes at Danielle and turned around slowly. She put her arm around the short balding man who’d been huffing and puffing angrily in her ear. “Sweetheart,” she began soothingly. “Your script is just fine. We all know you’re one of the best in the business.”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And you’re right about some of the cast being inexperienced. But, love, you know they’re just perfect for the parts. I think if you work with them and make just a few tiny adjustments to help them out, the opening scene will click right along.”

  Heath blinked back at her, and the fiery red that had crept up his neck was fading away. He now looked a little less like a coronary waiting to happen. Barrie breathed a sigh of relief as he muttered more calmly, “Well, I suppose I could change a few lines just a little, tighten it up.”

  “That’s it,” Barrie said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I knew you could do it. Why don’t you and Danielle go over the first couple of pages of the script and see what you can come up with?”

  For the next few hours Barrie felt like a firefighter who’d been asked to put out an entire county of brush fires with a pail of water. There was one crisis after another, none of them serious, but all of them requiring diplomacy, patience and a serenity she was far from feeling. The only possible advantage to a day like today, she decided, rubbing her throbbing temples, was that it had left her absolutely no time to work herself into a state over her impending dinner with Michael Compton.

  At six-fifteen she sent the cast and crew home, touched up her makeup, took another stress-reducing deep breath that didn’t do a bit of good and walked across the studio lot to the nearby network facilities. At precisely six-thirty she presented herself to Michael Compton’s secretary, a cheerful woman with gray hair, rosy cheeks and sparkling, periwinkle blue eyes.

  Mrs. Emma Lou Hastings looked as though she’d be perfectly at home in the kitchen making applesauce with an army of grandchildren underfoot. She also seemed like the type you could come to for motherly advice, Barrie decided, suddenly struck by the oddest desire to sit down and tell this perfect stranger that she was a nervous wreck because she was having dinner with a man who held the key to her future, a man who also had incredible thighs. She wondered what Mrs. Hastings would have to say about that.

  Since Barrie kept her mouth clamped firmly shut, Mrs. Hastings only said, “You can go in now, Miss MacDonald. Mr. Compton is expecting you.”

  Barrie had started toward the door when the secretary added softly, “Don’t worry, dear. He’s really a very nice young man.”

  Very nice young man, indeed! Mrs. Hastings obviously didn’t know that Michael Compton had virtually threatened to cancel Barrie’s series unless she agreed to this dinner. What would she say about her nice young man if she found out about that? Barrie looked into her round, honest-looking face with the tiny laugh lines around the eyes and the encouraging smile and didn’t have the heart to tell her. After all, she defended herself, could you tell a mother that her son is rotten to the core? Of course not. No more than she could tell Mrs. Hastings that her obviously well-liked boss was a thoroughly obnoxious louse who indulged in emotional blackmail.

  Instead she smiled back. “Thanks,” she said as she turned the brass doorknob and walked into Michael Compton’s office. Grateful for any reprieve, she was delighted to see that he was on the phone. He looked up and grinned at her with that sinfully sensual smile of his and motioned for her to sit down. She selected the chair farthest from his desk and sank down, tucking her legs back in a futile attempt to cover the run that displayed a pale white trail of skin from her ankle up, disappearing at last under the hem of her beige linen skirt. Why the hell hadn’t she remembered the damn run earlier? She couldn’t very well go tearing out of here now to buy new hose. Blast Michael Compton, she thought irrationally. Somehow this was all his fault.

  She glanced over to discover that the object of her irritation was paying absolutely no attention to her. His head was bent to one side in order to keep the phone braced against his shoulder. If he did that long enough, he was going to have one heck of a neck ache, Barrie noted. She was torn between a perverse delight at the prospect and an even stranger desire to massage the soon-to-be-knotted muscles. She blinked and looked away, but, as though she’d been hypnotized, her eyes were drawn back time and again.

  As Michael listened to his long-winded and apparently irate caller, he tapped a pencil idly on his huge rosewood desk. With his other hand he shuffled through a stack of papers, sorting them into two compulsively neat piles. Periodically he jabbed at another of the lit buttons on the phone, rumbled directives first into the receiver and then into the intercom on his desk. Two assistants scurried in and out, handing him papers to sign, waiting as he jotted notes on them, then rushing back out. A clerk from the mailroom came in with a half-dozen videotapes, piled them up next to his VCR and the bank of television monitors and left. Mrs. Hastings hurried in with several bulging file folders, dropped them into his In basket and picked up one of the stacks he’d just created. On her way out, she smiled sympathetically at Barrie, who’d begun to feel as though she’d fallen into the rabbit hole and wound up in the middle of Alice in Wonderland. Never in her life had she seen such perfectly orchestrated chaos. Never in her life had she felt so blatantly ignored.

  “It won’t be long, dear,” Mrs. Hastings promised. “It’s always this way at the end of the day.”

  Barrie glanced at her slim gold watch. It was seven-fifteen. She had suggested that Michael meet her at the studio at seven, but he’d refused and insisted instead that she meet him at his office at six-thirty. He was now forty-five minutes late, and Mrs. Hastings’s reassurances to the contrary, he was showing no sign of quitting for the day.

  Barrie waited and fumed. Eager to find any excuse for escape, she prepared herself mentally to rise as regally as she could with that blasted run in her hose and walk out of his office in a dignified protest of his imperious rudeness. Just as she started to stand, the phone clicked into place on his desk. He dropped the pencil, stopped shuffling papers, switched off the intercom and leaned back in his chair.

  His pale blue tailored-to-fit shirt with his initials embroidered on the cuff emphasized his broad chest, his tapering waistline. His tie was loosened, his collar open at the neck to reveal a provocative amount of tanned skin and a shadowing of dark, tightly curled hairs. Eyes that now seemed more blue than green stared knowingly back at her. Barrie gulped and studied the pictures on the wall. They were modern splashes of bright, formless color. They were awful.

  “So…Miss MacDonald,” he said softly, seductively. “What do you think of my—” there was a suggestive hesitation that brought a guilty blush to Barrie’s cheeks “—office?”

 
“I think the network overpaid the decorator,” she responded tartly.

  He grinned at her. “That’s a rather dangerously blunt comment, don’t you think? How do you know I didn’t do it myself?”

  “I’ve been in this office before. The pictures preceded you.”

  “Very observant,” he noted approvingly, then added with a weary sigh, “I wish more people in this business would develop their powers of observation. It might improve the quality of the stuff that gets brought in here.”

  Barrie’s brown eyes sparkled with excitement as she recognized a perfect opportunity. Heath Donaldson couldn’t have scripted a better opening line for her. “That’s what I want to do with Goodbye, Again,” she said enthusiastically. “I want to create characters and situations that people will recognize. Relationships today aren’t what they were when I Love Lucy went on the air. They’re freer, more open. Women are less dependent on the men in their lives, married or not. They stay married out of choice, not necessity. How many families today are like the Andersons on Father Knows Best? We might wish they were, but, as the saying goes, wishing won’t make it so.”

  “So you want to force-feed reality, when what the audience wants is fantasy?” he challenged.

  “No,” she responded heatedly, so caught up in explaining her show so that he would understand that she once again missed the teasing glint in his eyes. “You’re twisting my words around. You make reality sound like a dirty word.”

  As Michael rose and walked slowly around to where she was sitting, her breath suddenly caught in her throat, her argument sputtered to a halt, and she was immediately struck by the strangest sense of heightened anticipation. It was like waiting for a roller coaster to inch over the crest of its highest peak and fly down the other side. One knew something incredible was about to happen but had no idea quite how to prepare for it. Michael’s impressive body towered over hers, sending out little electrical currents that seemed to head straight for her abdomen, flooding it with a pleasant warmth and a tormenting ache. Barrie’s eyes were drawn to his, locked in a fiery awareness, challenging him to defend his statement.

  “Actually, I like reality, Miss MacDonald,” he protested softly, the velvet-smooth tone affecting her like warm brandy. It felt soothing and intoxicating. “In fact, I’m liking it more by the minute.”

  His charming, roguish grin brought a responding tilt to her lips. The man could obviously sweet-talk his way past Saint Peter at the gates of heaven. What possible chance did she stand, Barrie wondered a trifle desperately. She’d come here to have a serious discussion to assure the integrity of Goodbye, Again, and here she was melting like some damned stick of butter left out in the sun. Spineless. She was absolutely spineless.

  “Mr. Compton, I thought you wanted to have dinner and talk about Goodbye, Again.”

  “I do.”

  “Well?”

  “Dinner’s on the way.”

  Barrie gulped. “Here?”

  “Why not? It’s more private than a restaurant, and despite the lousy artwork, the atmosphere isn’t bad.”

  It is also entirely too intimate, Barrie wanted to shout.

  So what? a voice shouted back. Intimacy is only threatening if you allow it to be. After all, the man has done absolutely nothing to indicate that he wants to seduce you. That was an idea that popped into your mind sometime between his thorough, unblinking survey and the soft, sensual smile that made your heart flip over.

  Okay. So I’ll force that idea right back out of my mind.

  Right. The worst thing that could happen would be that he’d make a pass at you, and you’d file a sexual harassment suit.

  No, she correctly dryly, the worst thing that could happen would be that he would make a pass, and she would respond. She steeled herself against that embarrassingly distinct possibility.

  “Dinner here is just fine,” she said airily, taking off her glasses. Maybe if she couldn’t see the man, his potency would be less dangerous. Of course, she also might miss the first signs of any planned seduction. She put the glasses back on, just in time to see a waiter wheel in a cart laden with covered silver dishes.

  In less time than it would normally take her to scan the contents of her virtually empty freezer, the waiter draped a small table with a spotless white damask cloth, added an Oriental-style arrangement of tiny orchids, lit several tapered candles and set two places with heavy silverware and English bone china that Barrie recognized as one of the most expensive patterns on the market.

  “I take it you didn’t order from the commissary,” she commented dryly.

  He smiled back at her. “Wait until you see the food before making judgments, Miss MacDonald,” he warned. “Isn’t Hollywood known for creating atmosphere without worrying about substance? You could be in for a dinner of ham on rye.”

  “You don’t strike me as the ham-on-rye type. Maybe bologna.”

  “Careful. That tart tongue of yours is going to get you in trouble yet.”

  “It usually gets me back out of it, as well.”

  “Perhaps it has…in the past,” he taunted. “But you haven’t come up against a man like me before, Miss MacDonald.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m one of a kind,” he informed her with a wink as he sipped the wine and nodded approvingly to the waiter. “This is perfect, Henri.”

  “Bon appetit, monsieur.”

  “Merci.”

  The waiter bowed graciously to Barrie and pushed the cart out of the office, leaving them alone.

  “Well, Miss MacDonald,” Michael said softly as he held out a chair for her. “Your dinner awaits.”

  Barrie sat down to a meal that was expertly planned, perfectly prepared and, despite Michael’s warnings, quite obviously not commissary fare. It began with pâté and ended with fresh strawberries and thick, sweet Devon cream, each course a sensual delight.

  Their conversation throughout was surprisingly light and witty. In fact, on several occasions Barrie had the feeling she was caught up in the middle of a briskly paced Noel Coward script. Never had she met anyone who could match wits with her so easily, who could make her feel so much like a woman while at the same time treating her as an equal. It was exactly the sort of relationship she hoped to create on Goodbye, Again, straightforward, intelligent, lively and provocative. Ah, yes, she thought with an unconscious sigh. Most definitely provocative.

  As the meal ended at last, she was savoring one of the strawberries, slowly licking the cream from its sweet tip before taking the bright red berry into her mouth, when she noticed that Michael seemed fascinated with her lips. His eyes sparkled as he licked his own lips in unconscious imitation of her actions. Stunned by the obvious sensuality of his response and heady from the fine wine and the unexpected knowledge that she could stir him as he did her, Barrie almost involuntarily prolonged the moment, biting into the juicy strawberry with slow deliberation. A husky moan rumbled deep in Michael’s throat, and at last he blinked and looked away.

  My God, what am I doing? The thought ripped into Barrie’s mind, and she practically swallowed the strawberry whole. She had been taunting Michael Compton, practically daring him to respond to her as a woman. He did not strike her as the type to back away from a challenge, and she had just presented him with a practically irresistible one. I must be out of my mind.

  “About Goodbye, Again,” she prompted in a voice that had a distressing quiver in it. Damn! All those acting classes, and she still couldn’t hide her nervousness.

  “Why don’t we sit over here and talk about it?” he suggested agreeably, leading her to a sofa and then sitting down entirely too near to her.

  She studied him closely and promptly projected her wayward thoughts onto him. “Is this the part where you tell me you’ll cooperate with me, if I cooperate with you?” she asked, actually managing a lightly teasing tone, despite the fact that her blood was roaring in her ears like an erupting volcano. In anger? Or anticipation? She wasn’t at all sure and, di
sgustingly, he only seemed to find her implication amusing.

  “No. This is the part where I tell you what’s going to happen to your series.”

  “And?”

  “And you tell me you’re a professional, and you can handle the changes I’m demanding.”

  Changes? Demanding? She had the distinct impression he had deliberately chosen those words just to unnerve her. Well, she was not too proud to admit—to herself—that he’d succeeded. For his benefit, she plastered an interested, calm expression on her face and asked quietly, “What did you have in mind?”

  “For one thing, I’ve been taking a look at the fall schedule, and I don’t think it’s as competitive as it could be. In order to make it more effective, I’m going to move your show.”

  Barrie eyed him cautiously. “Yes?”

  “I think it’ll be perfect for the eight o’clock slot on Saturday.”

  All attempts at studied tranquility flew out the window. Barrie’s protest began as a small grumble, but by the time it exploded from her mouth it was a full-blown roar of incredulous frustration. “Michael…I mean, Mr. Compton, no! You can’t do this!”

  “Oh, yes, I can,” he said evenly.

  Of course he could. She took a very deep breath and decided to appeal to his sense of logic. “I’m not sure you realize what a risk you’re taking. You could kill the show. This program is targeted for young adults. Young adults do not watch television at eight on a Saturday night. Kids watch television at eight on Saturday.”

  “That’s right. But I’m betting that the right show can keep some of those young adults hanging around home a little later. If it’s good enough,” he said slowly, throwing down the gauntlet, “they’ll watch it while they get ready to go out.” He paused to let that sink in, then added pointedly, “They watched Mary Tyler Moore on Saturday nights.”

  Mary Tyler Moore, indeed! They didn’t even bring her back on Saturday night. Barrie’s eyes were flashing, their usual soft brown shade glinting with sparks like flaming firewood. “Are you challenging me?”