“Do you want to press charges?” the police officer asked, looking expectantly at the man standing next to him.
Stunned, Yohanna’s eyes widened considerably as she stared at the man she had thought was her new employer. Had her signals gotten somehow crossed and she’d misunderstood him yesterday?
No, that wasn’t possible. He hadn’t given her anything in writing, but she remembered every word he’d said and could recite them back to him verbatim. Her very precise photographic memory was part of what made her so good at organizing things. It also helped her take care of what needed to be done—and then remembering where everything was hours, even days, later.
She was about to nudge the producer’s memory a little so this officer could move along when she heard Spader tell the man, “No, not at this time, Officer.”
The police officer was still eyeing her as if she was some sort of a criminal deviant. She needed her new boss to say something a little more in her defense than a barely negligible remark.
“Mr. Spader, tell him I work for you,” she requested with more than a little urgency.
The corners of Lukkas’s mouth curved just a hint as he turned toward the officer and said, “She does, actually. This is Hanna’s first day. She’s here a little early,” he commented. “But that’s a good thing.”
The officer removed his hand from his weapon. “Oh.” There was just a sliver of disappointment in the man’s voice. He glanced from the producer to the woman who had almost been arrested. “Sorry about that, but it’s better to be careful than let things ride and then be sorry.”
The apology was halfhearted, but Yohanna considered it better than nothing. She inclined her head, silently indicating that she accepted the officer’s rather paltry excuse.
A huge range of emotions swirled through her like the wind gearing up before a storm. This was a whole different world that she was signing on for.
She focused on the one piece of information she had picked up out of all this. “You had a stalker?” she asked Lukkas incredulously. She’d occasionally read about things like that happening, both to famous celebrities as well as to average, everyday people, but it had never touched her life or happened to anyone she actually knew.
Until now.
“What happened?” she asked him.
Lukkas didn’t answer her and gave no indication that he had even heard her. Instead, what he said was, “Ready to get started?”
She took that to mean that the subject of his past stalker was off-limits. While her curiosity was still rather exceedingly ramped up, she could understand why the producer wouldn’t want to pursue the subject. This was obviously something out of Spader’s private life and she was just an employee—a new employee at that—hired on a probationary basis. That didn’t exactly make her someone he was about to bare his soul to within the first few minutes of her first day on the job.
So she buried the question as well as her growing and somewhat unbridled curiosity and cheerfully replied, “Absolutely,” to his question.
But even with her ready and eager to get started, it turned out that the producer wasn’t quite ready to go back into his house just yet.
Instead, he took out what looked like a weather-beaten wallet from his back pocket. When he opened it, she realized that he wasn’t holding a wallet. What Lukkas had in his hand was a checkbook.
The next moment he had turned toward the officer who was still standing there. “I heard that the department is collecting ticket money for their semi-annual basketball-for-charity game,” Lukkas said as he began to write a more than substantial check to the Bedford Police Department, earmarking it for the basketball game.
Seeing the sum, the officer beamed, instantly forgetting all about the arrest he had been deprived of. “Yes, sir.”
“Here.” Lukkas tore out the check and handed it to the officer. “This might help a little.”
Looking again at the sum the producer had written in, the police officer’s eyes seemed about to fall out of the man’s head. Yohanna thought that perhaps the number hadn’t quite registered when the man had first glanced at the check.
“Yes, sir, it sure would,” the officer said with no small enthusiasm.
“Keep up the good work,” Lukkas said, turning his back on the man and striding back to his house.
Yohanna tried to fall into place beside the producer. She found herself all but racing to keep up with him. In the background, she heard the patrol car driving away.
Glancing over his shoulder, Lukkas asked, “Am I walking too fast for you?”
“No,” Yohanna answered stubbornly, doing her best to move even faster.
He stopped abruptly at his front door. Fueled by momentum, Yohanna almost crashed into him. Had he not caught hold of her shoulders just then, her body might have wound up vying for the exact same space that his was in.
Hiding his amusement, Lukkas held her in place for a moment. “Never be ashamed to admit the truth,” he told her, referring to the answer she’d given him.
Rather than meekly accept the castigation, she lifted her chin ever so slightly and asked, “Does that work both ways?”
He didn’t answer her immediately. He took his time, as if he was weighing something.
“Yes,” he said after a beat.
She decided to see if he actually practiced what he preached. “Then, did you have a stalker?”
Releasing her shoulders, instead of being annoyed, Lukkas laughed. “Touché,” he acknowledged, inclining his head.
Then he pulled open the front door. He’d left it unlocked earlier when he’d come out to see what was going on.
Yohanna just assumed the man was going to leave the question she’d repeated hanging in the air, unanswered. To her surprise, as she started to enter the house, she heard him say, “Yes, I had a stalker. It was a few years ago.”
Closing the door behind them, Lukkas began to lead her through the house to the room he’d converted into his office. The same place where he had conducted her interview yesterday.
This time, since she was just a shade less nervous than she had been the day before, she took in more of her surroundings. Rather than modern or austere, the furnishings struck her as comfortable with warm, friendly lines. She wondered if her new boss had done the decorating himself, or if he had hired someone to do it for him.
Maybe he’d left it up to the woman she was replacing, she mused.
“Did they catch the person? The stalker,” she clarified. Since Lukkas had opened up a little, she did her best to follow up on the subject. The more she knew about her employer, the more efficiently she could serve him.
“Why do you want to know?” As a rule, Lukkas didn’t like being questioned. He turned the tables on his new assistant. Every word she uttered painted that much more of a complete picture of her.
“Just curious if there was still someone out there who felt they had the right to a piece of your life,” she told him.
He thought that was rather a unique way of describing his stalker. Maybe there was more to this woman he’d hired than he’d thought, which was all to the good in his opinion.
“There’s always someone out there, Hanna,” he told her. “But if you’re asking specifically if that misguided young woman is liable to pop up outside my window at a time of her choosing, the answer’s no. To the best of my knowledge, she’s still being treated as an inpatient at a psychiatric facility.” This time he stopped right outside his office door. “Anything else?”
She got the distinct impression that the topic of conversation was to end right here, at his door. She wasn’t quite sure if that meant she had stepped over some invisible boundary, or if the tone of voice he was using was just the way he sounded when he spoke to someone who was working for him.
If he decided to keep her on, she supposed she’d find out.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Go ahead.” There was no indication that he was running out of patience as far as she could see—which was good.
“Shouldn’t I have filled out some sort of paperwork for your human resources department?” Yohanna asked.
Although overjoyed to actually be working, especially for someone like Lukkas Spader, there was still a small part of her that was highly skeptical about the validity of the entire arrangement. That left her wondering if perhaps, at the end of the day, she was not only off the record but completely off any books, as well.
Lukkas made no answer.
Instead, he pushed open the door to his office and silently gestured toward his desk.
There, lying on the blotter, away from the rest of the disorganized array that covered more than seven-eighths of his desk, were several pristine white pages stacked one on top of the other.
Crossing over to his desk, Yohanna saw that they appeared to be meant for her. Her first name was written on the top sheet.
“I would have put down your full name,” he told her. “But there’s no way in hell I would have spelled it right.”
She smiled at that. Her last name had been misspelled more times than she could count.
“It took me two days to learn how to spell it when I was a kid. I thought about having it legally changed a couple of times,” she confided, even though she had never gone through with it.
“Don’t,” he told her. “It has character. This is a place that tends to spew out carbon copies,” he said, referring to his industry. “Being unique is a good thing.” He paused for a moment. “When you finish with those, I’ll give you a number and you can fax them to Human Resources,” he told her. “Then we’ll get down to the real work.”
Yohanna had already sat down and begun filling out the employment forms.
* * *
Lukkas looked up from the preproduction notes he’d been working on. The center of his back was aching, the way it did when he remained immobile for a long period of time. It was due to an old college football injury, reminding him that he wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t like being reminded.
He glanced at his watch.
It was past seven-thirty in the evening. More than twelve hours since he’d gotten started. Not that that was unusual. He was used to driving himself relentlessly whenever he was working on a project, especially at the very beginning of it.
He was also used to his people wearing out and leaving before his own day ended.
He had to admit he was surprised that this new woman not only hadn’t said anything about the amount of time that had passed since she’d arrived at his house, but she appeared to be keeping up with the grueling pace he had set for himself.
Empty cardboard containers were piled up in the wastepaper basket beside his desk, evidence of the food they’d consumed. He’d sent out for lunch, but that had been close to six hours ago.
He felt his own stomach tightening in complaint, and he was accustomed to this sort of pace. He expected to hear Hanna’s stomach rumbling at any second. He had no doubts that the woman probably thought he was some sort of an inhumane slave driver.
Pausing, he studied her unabashedly. She seemed to be oblivious to it, but that was probably an act. She didn’t strike him as the type to be oblivious to anything in her immediate surroundings.
“You tired?” he asked her.
“No,” she answered as she went over the notes he had completed earlier and handed to her. He’d wanted her to familiarize herself with what was involved on his end of preproduction. He planned to take her every step of the way just once. After that, she had to sink or swim on her own.
Raising her head for a split second to look in his direction, she assured him, “I’m fine.”
“What did I say about the truth?” he asked her.
“Ah, a pop quiz. You didn’t tell me about that.” Her quick grin faded as she gave him the answer he required. “To never be afraid to admit it.”
He nodded and then said, “Let’s do this again. You tired?”
For a second Yohanna debated repeating her denial, but obviously that wasn’t what Spader wanted to hear from her.
“Maybe a little,” she allowed, even though it was against her nature to complain.
When he kept on looking at her, as if his eyes were drilling right into her mind, searching for the truth, Yohanna mentally threw up her hands and said, “Exhausted, actually.”
The smallest of smiles briefly made an appearance on his lips. “There, that wasn’t really so hard, was it?” he asked.
“It wasn’t actually easy, either,” she told him. “Especially since I wasn’t sure what it was you wanted to hear,” she admitted.
“The truth, Hanna, always the truth,” he stressed. He put his pen down. Right now, this was more important than the notes he was making. “You’re not going to do me any good if I have to read between the lines anytime I ask you a simple question. I need total honesty from you,” Lukkas told her.
She spoke before she could censor herself. “No one wants total honesty. They just want their version of total honesty.”
The words surprised him and managed to catch him completely off guard. He scrutinized her for a long moment, as if trying to decide something. “How old are you, Hanna?” he finally asked.
“Thirty.”
He noticed there wasn’t any hesitation before she volunteered the number. Most women over the age of twenty were coy when it came to the age question. She really was unique, he thought.
“Thirty, and already so cynical,” he commented.
But Yohanna had a different opinion about her view. “Not cynical,” she contradicted. “Being completely honest a hundred percent of the time is really cold and unfeeling.”
He leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly as he regarded her. “How do you figure that?”
“For instance, if a girlfriend asks you if what she has on makes her look fat, she really doesn’t want to know that she looks fat. What she really wants is to hear how flattering the outfit she’s wearing looks on her.”
“But if it really does make her look fat?” Lukkas asked, curious as to what her thought process was. “Aren’t you doing that friend a disservice by not telling her the truth?”
Yohanna shook her head. “If it really does look bad on her, she’ll figure it out on her own. She wants to hear flattering words from you.”
“You can’t be serious,” he protested.
“Completely,” she insisted. “What your friend will come away with is that you cared more about her feelings than making some kind of point by being a champion of the truth.”
“In other words, you’re saying it’s all right to lie,” he surmised.
“If you can’t bring yourself to tell her a little white lie, say something nice about the color. Maybe it brings out her eyes, or makes her skin tones come alive.”
“In other words, say anything but the word fat,” he concluded.
She nodded. The smile began in her eyes and worked its way to her lips in less than a second. He found himself being rather taken with that. “Fat only belongs in front of the word paycheck or rain cloud.”
“That’s two words,” Lukkas pointed out, not bothering to hide his amusement.
Yohanna suddenly became aware that she had been going on and on. Her demeanor shifted abruptly. “Sorry, I talk too much.”
“You do,” he conceded. “But lucky for me, so far it’s been entertaining.” Lukkas grinned, then after a beat, asked, “How’s that?”
She wasn’t sure what he was asking her about. “Excuse me?”
“I just threw in the truth, but then said something to soften the blow. I was just asking how you thought I did, if I got the gist of your little theory.”
For a moment, as her eyes met his, Yohanna didn’t say anything.
Was he being sarcastic?
Somehow, she didn’t think so, but that was just a gut reaction. After all, she didn’t really know the man, didn’t know anything about him other than the information she’d gleaned from a handful of interviews she’d looked up and read yesterday before she’d come in for the interview.
Taking a chance that the producer was really being on the level, she smiled and said, “Very good,” commenting on his “behavior.”
“I wasn’t trying to lecture you, you know,” she told him in case he’d gotten the wrong impression. “I was just putting my opinion out there.” And then she shrugged somewhat self-consciously. “My mother says I do that too much.”
He instantly endeared himself to her by saying, “Your mother’s wrong.” She had to really concentrate to hear what he had to say after that. “There’s nothing wrong with offering an opinion—unless, of course, you’re delivering a scathing review on one of my movies. Then all bets are off.”
“Has anyone ever done that?” she asked incredulously. Then, in case he didn’t understand what she was asking, she repeated his words. “Given a scathing review about one of your movies?”
He didn’t have to think hard. He remembered the movie, the reviewer, what the person had said and when. Why was it that the good reviews all faded into the background, but the one or two reviews that panned his movie felt as if they had been burned right into his heart?
“Once or twice,” he answered, keeping his reply deliberately vague. The reviews hadn’t exactly been scathing, but they had been far from good.
“Well, they were crazy,” she pronounced. “You make wonderful movies.”
He laughed at her extraserious expression. “You don’t have to say that,” he told her. “You already have the job.”
“I’m not saying it because I want this job, I’m saying it because I really like your movies,” she insisted. “They make me feel good.”
“Well, that was their intention,” he said, carrying the conversation far further than he had ever intended. He rarely discussed his movies this way. He spent a lot of time on the mechanics of the movie rather than the gut reaction to it. The latter was something he felt would take care of itself. It was just up to him to set the scene.