Stunned and appalled, Yohanna could only numbly stare at the heart-wrenching headline, unaware that her mouth had literally dropped open.
The next moment her brain kicked in and she quickly pressed the home button at the bottom of her smartphone. An array of apps sprang up, very effectively replacing the article as if it had never been there to begin with. Under different circumstances, she would have gone on to read the article, but this was definitely not the time for her to fill in the gaps.
The idea of Lukkas looking over and accidentally seeing what she was reading was just unthinkable to her. It was bad enough that she’d carelessly said what she’d said just now, comparing the crash rate of planes to cars. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t known Lukkas’s wife had lost her life in an event that she had so cavalierly tossed out. Her not knowing hadn’t lessened the pain Lukkas undoubtedly felt at the unintentional reminder of his loss.
More than anything, she would have loved to apologize to him, to tell him that she hadn’t known he’d lost his wife this way. Until just now, she hadn’t thought that he was ever married.
She’d done her homework on him but only partially so. To do her job well, she had been trying to educate herself about Lukkas Spader the producer, not the private man. The one article that had touched on both his professional and his private life had referred to him as being one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. That, to her, had translated to his not being married.
Had the article been written by a more accurate writer, it would have made some sort of a reference to his being a widower. At least that would have given her some sort of a heads-up.
Yohanna slanted a look in his direction. How did she go about making this right? She didn’t have a clue, so for now, all she could do was leave the matter alone.
“We’re about to land,” Lukkas told her, his deep voice cutting through the fog still swirling around her head. “You might want to secure that.” He nodded at the smartphone still in her hand.
“Yes, of course.” Feeling like someone who was just now coming to, Yohanna quickly slipped the device back into her pocket.
After a beat, as they began their slow descent, Lukkas quietly said, “They said that she didn’t feel any pain.”
Yohanna’s head jerked up as she looked at him. Had Lukkas glimpsed the article she had pulled up on her phone? She fervently hoped not.
But then, how did she explain the remark he had just made?
“Excuse me?” she said in the most innocent voice she could muster.
“My wife. Her car crash,” Lukkas said, filling in the pertinent words. “The first responders on the scene said she died instantly and mercifully hadn’t felt any pain. She didn’t even have time to react, actually.” Then, as if aware that he was speaking in fragments, he told her, “I saw you looking up the article.”
There was no point in trying to deny it, Yohanna thought. She wasn’t about to insult him like that or by pretending that he could be diverted by some fancy verbal tap dancing. He’d already showed her that he valued honesty.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have made that thoughtless comparison about planes and cars if I had known about your wife.”
“I know,” Lukkas told her. An extremely bittersweet smile curved just the edges of his mouth. “It’s just that, even after almost three years, I’m still not really used to it.” His voice took on a wistful tone. “There are times that I still expect to hear her voice, or see her coming out of the kitchen, telling me she’s in the mood for pizza when what was really going on was that she’d burned dinner beyond any hope of recognition—again,” he added, grinning as he fondly recalled the memory.
“I am so very, very sorry,” she told the producer in what amounted to a whisper.
Yohanna felt utterly helpless. She wasn’t going to mouth the utterly overused and hopelessly clichéd phrase that she was sorry for his loss because it didn’t begin to encompass, in her opinion, the grief the man must have felt and that he still continued to feel.
She remembered when her father had died the summer that she’d turned twelve; for weeks afterward she just couldn’t find a place for herself. It was as if every place, both physically and emotionally, felt wrong to her, as if she didn’t belong in it. It didn’t matter if that place was familiar to her or not, she was still uncomfortable.
It had taken her a long time to make peace with her sense of loss. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for Lukkas to lose a spouse, not to mention their unborn child, as well.
“Yeah, me, too,” Lukkas murmured more to himself than to her.
The next moment she saw the producer unbuckling his seat belt.
“Wait, shouldn’t you keep that on?” she asked, afraid her initial careless observation had triggered a reckless reaction from Lukkas.
“Only if I want to try to take this chair with me on location.” He pointed to the window next to her. “We’ve landed.”
She blinked and looked out. They were on the ground. How had that happened without her realizing it?
“Oh.”
She felt foolish. So far, today wasn’t going well at all. She’d been so concerned about his feelings of loss as well as how callous he must have thought she’d sounded that she hadn’t even paid attention to the fact that the plane had descended and made its landing.
Lukkas pulled down his briefcase from the overhead compartment. “Don’t worry, you’ll be a seasoned flier in no time,” he assured her, verbally moving on and putting a world of distance between himself and the previous topic.
Unbuckling, Yohanna grabbed her things and was on her feet, following him off the plane. As she went, she made a mental note to find the article again when she got home tonight. She wanted to familiarize herself with the details of the story so she wouldn’t be guilty of making another thoughtless reference to a very painful period in his life.
The sun, definitely not in hiding when they left Bedford, seemed to have been turned up to High as it greeted her the second she left the shelter of the single-engine Learjet. She shaded her eyes with her free hand, but that still didn’t make visibility even an iota more tolerable.
Halfway down the ramp that had been placed beside the plane’s open door, Lukkas turned toward her. “Watch your step,” he warned. “The sun can be a little blinding out here until you get used to it.”
She had a habit of dashing up and down the stairs without bothering to even marginally hold on to any banister or railing. But because Lukkas had specifically cautioned her, she thought it best to slip her hand over the railing and slide her palm down along the bar as she descended. She didn’t want him to think that she was ignoring his advice.
Besides, it never hurt anything to be careful—just in case.
There was a silver-green, fully loaded Toyota waiting for them. It was parked well inside the gates. The plane hadn’t landed far from it.
“Welcome back, Mr. Spader,” the man standing beside the vehicle called out to Lukkas the second they were within hearing range. Of average height and build, looking to be around forty or so, with a thick, black head of hair, the man opened the rear door behind the driver’s side, then waited until they reached the vehicle.
“Thanks for coming to pick us up, Juan,” Lukkas said to the driver. Then he nodded in her direction. “This is Hanna. She’ll be taking Janice’s place.”
The man he had called Juan nodded at her politely, then flashed an easy smile. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, Hanna,” he told her. “Janice found a way to be everywhere at once.”
No pressure here, Yohanna thought. She forced a smile to her lips in response. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
Lukkas spared her a look before he gestured for her to get into the vehicle first. “You’ll have to do better than that to stay on the team,” he informed her. “I can’t have you just trying, I need you doing.” He pointedly emphasized the word.
Really no pressure here, Yohanna thought, feeling a little uneasy—but just for a moment. The thing about pressure was that feeling it made her more determined than ever to succeed. She had decided a long time ago to be one of those people who had made up her mind to rise to the occasion rather than to fold under the specter of insurmountable obstacles or to listen to someone when they said something couldn’t be done.
She was, at bottom, a doer. It wasn’t in her nature not to give something her absolute all.
“Don’t worry about me. With all due respect to Janice, I’ll do whatever you need done,” she replied with quiet determination. “And I’ll do it fast.”
Listening—even though he looked to be elsewhere—Lukkas inclined his head, as if conducting a conversation with himself.
“We’ll see,” he said, and then repeated even more softly, “We’ll see.”
Yohanna squared her shoulders. We sure will, she silently promised.
* * *
“Did you do this?” she asked Lukkas, wonder clearly shimmering in her voice as, twenty minutes later, she stared at the town coming into view.
At first glance, it was as if all three of them—Lukkas, Juan and she—had crossed some sort of a time-travel portal, one that separated the present from the long-ago past.
Sitting inside a brand-new state-of-the-art vehicle, she found herself looking out at a town that for all the world appeared to have literally been lifted from the late 1800s. Here and there were horses tied to hitching posts outside weathered wooden buildings, the tallest of which was, very obviously, the town saloon. The streets were paved not with asphalt or cement but dirt—hard, sunbaked, parched, cracked dirt.
Rolling down the window on her side, Yohanna leaned out to get a better view. Everything that she would have imagined to have existed in a slightly romanticized version of the Old West seemed to be right here. She began taking inventory.
There was a newspaper office, a barbershop that doubled as a doctor’s office, and an emporium that was twice as wide as the other buildings because it contained the only so-called shopping area for the citizens of and beyond the town.
There was another rather dilapidated tiny hole-in-the-wall building, which, she saw as they drew closer, was actually the sheriff’s office. One street away, dominating almost that entire block and two stories tall, was the town’s one and only saloon. Big and gaudy, the Birdcage Saloon seemed primed for business even at this early an hour in the morning.
“No.” Lukkas answered her question. “I found the town like this. It’s perfect, isn’t it?” She didn’t know if he was still talking to her or sharing something with someone in his mind. “Pull over here, Juan,” he instructed, pointing.
“Here” was in front of the saloon. Getting out, he waited for her to slide out of the car after him.
When she did, Yohanna looked around in complete wonder, unable to make up her mind whether or not the producer was putting her on. While the town looked weathered, something about it didn’t strike her as genuine.
She couldn’t put her finger on it, but this old-fashioned Western town didn’t appear 100 percent authentic to her, either.
“You didn’t help it along to arrive at this Old West town look?” she asked.
She’d initially looked too innocent to be this sharp, he thought. He didn’t know whether to be proud that she could be this forthright, or leery of dealing with her on general principle.
In either case, she was still waiting for an answer, he reminded himself.
“I didn’t, but Jeff Richards did.”
The name meant nothing to her. Yohanna shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t—”
He hadn’t expected her to know who he was referring to unless she’d read the article in that popular magazine a few months ago.
“Richards is the one who bought this entire town by paying off its back taxes. It was his idea to turn it into a tourist attraction,” he told her. “He was trying to make it into a Tombstone look-alike.” He went on to explain. “We’re renting it for the duration of filming the exterior shots—and a couple of the interior ones, as well. After that, we fold up our tents—or get into our trailers and drive as it were—and he gets his town back with the added benefit of being able to advertise that The Sheriff From Nowhere was filmed here on location.”
He smiled to himself about the predictability of the situation. “You’d be surprised what a little publicity like that does to attract people. By the way, while we’re renting this town, it’ll be your job to make sure Richards gets his checks on a regular basis. You’ll also make me aware of any snags, misunderstandings and problems that might crop up due to our arrangement.”
“Problems?” she questioned.
“Like fees suddenly being raised or doubled. You’d be surprised what some people try to pull,” Lukkas told her.
“Got it,” she said, making a notation in her notebook.
That she had written down what he’d said caught his attention. “Why aren’t you making an entry on your smartphone calendar?”
“I will,” she told him, wondering if he thought she was archaic in her methods. “But I have to admit that I like the feel of putting a pen to paper when I make my notes. This way, I’ll wind up with two sets of records about the things I’m supposed to take charge of and keep after.”
Yohanna had a feeling this was going to be a lot to contend with, especially since she knew the man’s actual handwriting looked to be about preschool level quality. It was difficult to make heads or tails out of some of it.
She would have preferred if he had dictated and recorded his notes into his cell phone. But although it was apparent he felt electronic devices were tremendous work savers, in the long run, he obviously still was very tied to the old-fashioned way of keeping track of the events—large and small—of his life.
“Huh,” he murmured in response to her claim of liking the feel of putting pen to paper.
Lukkas couldn’t help but wonder if she was being genuine, or if she was merely saying that because she’d learned from someone that he felt the same way about the notes he made to himself.
The veteran producer was the first to admit that he was scattered from here to eternity and the notes he cared about...well, they could still be found somewhere between those two points. He had good intentions, but heaven knew he wasn’t organized.
That was where she was supposed to come in.
It was up to her to keep after him as well as to make his hectic world as organized as humanly possible.
“There’s Dirk Montelle,” Lukkas suddenly announced, giving the man the hello sign when the latter looked in their direction. “He’s signed on to direct this little movie,” he told her.
The man had a real gift for understatement, she thought. That was a revelation to her.
She would have thought that a man of his capabilities, not to mention the perks he probably had written into his contracts, would have had a giant ego and a way of pounding his own chest and putting everyone else down. She’d known men like that before. Actually dated men like that before she’d decided she was better off sitting home alone than being out with one of these egotists, chairing a fan club meeting of one.
But before she could make some sort of a response to his last comment, Lukkas was taking off, striding across the parched and cracked streets to reach the man he had ultimately selected to helm his movie. He’d told her how he’d thought long and hard over making an offer to the director. This was his life’s blood up there. That was a hard thing to ignore or even remain neutral about. Finally getting the proposed movie off the storyboards and onto a set with a final script was like having a dream come true. The movie he was now in charge of making had been a secret project of his for the past ten years.
Watching Lukkas pick up his pace, Yohanna shook her head. She picked up her own pace to make up for the head start the man had on her. Yohanna pressed her lips together, looking for strength even though she knew it could have been so much worse.
Even so, she couldn’t help wishing that Lukkas would give her some kind of a warning before he took off like that.
She assumed he wanted her to get acquainted with the people working on this film so that when he asked her to do something with one of the cast or crew, she would know who he was talking about.
That meant becoming familiar with the names and jobs of more than two hundred people.
Fast.
Well, she’d wanted something a little more exciting than the work she’d done before, right? Office manager for the law firm had been good, steady work—until it wasn’t, of course, and she’d become a casualty of the company merger—but it had also admittedly been dull as dishwater in its day-to-day routine.
This, however, had the makings of some sort of a wild, no-holds-barred adventure in fantasyland. For the moment—and hopefully for some time to come if everything went well—she would be dealing with both the present-day world and the past, and probably the future if what she’d heard about the producer’s next project was true.
The words dull and boring were definitely not words to be applied to this job description, Yohanna thought happily.
“C’mon, catch up, Hanna,” Lukkas urged as he turned for a moment in her direction and called out to her. “We don’t want this project to start falling behind schedule before it even gets under way.”
“No, sir,” she responded—only to have Lukkas shoot her a look that stopped her in her tracks.
Instantly she realized her mistake. “No, Lukkas,” she corrected herself.
“Hope you learn the routine faster than you learned that,” he commented.
“Old habits are hard to unlearn,” she told him.
“Didn’t ask for an explanation, Hanna,” Lukkas pointed out. “Just make it happen, starting now.”
She inclined her head rather than open her mouth. Just for now, Yohanna thought that it might be better that way.