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Lukkas still appeared skeptical. “Really? Not even a boyfriend?” His eyes never left hers, as if he considered himself to be an infallible human lie detector—and being as attractive as she was, the young woman couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.
“Not even a boyfriend,” she echoed, her face innocence personified.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said in disbelief. How could someone who looked like this woman not have men lining up at her door, waiting for a chance just to spend some time with her? He knew this was none of his business or even ethical for him to ask, but curiosity urged him on.
“No,” she replied. “I just never experienced that ‘walking on air’ feeling, si—Lukkas,” she quickly corrected herself.
“Walking on air,” he repeated. “Is that some sort of code?”
“More like a feeling,” she explained then added quickly, “I’ve never met a man I felt I had chemistry with. In other words, I didn’t experience any sparks flying between us. Without that, what’s the point?” she asked with a vague shrug.
“What, indeed?” he murmured, thinking back, for a second, to his own solitary life. It hadn’t always been that way.
Talking about herself always made her feel uncomfortable. Yohanna was quick to return to the salient point of all this. “The bottom line is that there isn’t anyone to complain about my hours even if they do turn out to be extensive.”
“No ‘if’ about it,” he assured her. “They will be extensive. I’m afraid that it’s the nature of the beast. I put in long hours and that means so will you.” Again he peered closely at her face, as if he could read the answer—and if she was lying, he’d catch her in that, too. “You’re all right with that?” he asked again.
“Completely.”
“You haven’t asked about a salary,” he pointed out. The fact that she hadn’t asked made him suspicious. Everyone always talked about money in his world. Why hadn’t she?
“I’m sure you’ll be fair,” Yohanna replied.
Again he studied her for a long moment. He didn’t find his answer. So he asked. “And what makes you so sure that I’ll be ‘fair’?”
“Your movies.”
Lukkas’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of her answer. “You’re going to have to explain that,” he told her.
“Every movie you ever made was labeled a ‘feel good’ movie.” As a child, the movies she found on the television set were her best friends. Both her parents led busy lives, so she would while away the hours by watching everything and anything that was playing on the TV. “If you had a dark side, or were underhanded, you couldn’t make the kinds of movies that you do,” she told him very simply.
“Maybe I just do it for the money.” He threw that out, curious to see what she would make of his answer.
Yohanna shook her head. “You might have done that once or twice, possibly even three times, but not over and over again. Your sense of integrity wouldn’t have allowed you to sell out. Especially since everyone holds you in such high regard.”
Lukkas laughed shortly. “You did your research.” He was impressed.
“It’s all part of being an organizer,” she told him. “That way, there are no surprises.”
There were layers to this woman, he thought. “Is that what you consider yourself to be? An organizer?”
“In a word, yes,” Yohanna replied.
He nodded, as if turning her answers over in his mind. “When can you start?”
There went her pulse again, Yohanna thought as it launched into double time. Was she actually getting the job?
“When would you want me to start working?” she asked, tossing the ball back into his court. It was his call to make.
He laughed shortly. “Yesterday.” That way, he wouldn’t have lost a productive day.
“That I can’t do,” she told him as calmly as if they were talking about the weather. “But I can start now if you’d like,” she offered.
Was she that desperate? he wondered. Or was there another reason for her eagerness to come to work for him? Since his meteoric rise to fame, he’d had friends disappoint him, trying to milk their relationship for perks and benefits. As for strangers, they often had their own agendas, and he had become very leery of people until they proved themselves in his estimation. That put him almost perpetually on his guard. It was a tiring situation.
“You can start tomorrow,” Lukkas told her.
She wanted to hug him, but kept herself in check. She didn’t want the man getting the wrong impression about her.
“Then, I have the job?” she asked, afraid of allowing herself to be elated yet having little choice in the matter.
“You can’t start if you don’t,” he pointed out. “I’ll take you on a three-month probationary basis,” he informed her. “Which means that I can let you go for any reason if I’m not satisfied.”
“Understood.”
He peered at her face. “Is that acceptable to you?”
“Very much so, s-si—” She was about to address him as “sir” but stopped herself, uttering, instead, a hissing sound. “Lukkas,” she injected at the last moment.
“I’m currently producing a Western. We’re going to be going on location—Arizona. Tombstone area,” he specified. “Do you have any problem with that?”
She wanted to ask him why he thought she would, but this wasn’t the time for those kinds of questions. They could wait until after she had entrenched herself into his life. The fact that she would do just that was a given as far as she was concerned now that he had hired her.
“None whatsoever,” she told him.
“All right. Then go home and get a good night’s sleep. I need you back here tomorrow morning at seven.”
“Seven it is. I’ll be bright eyed and bushy tailed,” she responded, thinking of a phrase her grandfather used to use.
“I’ll settle for your eyes being open,” he told her. “See you tomorrow, Hanna.”
Yohanna opened her mouth to correct him and then decided she rather liked the fact that her new boss was calling her by a nickname, even if she didn’t care all that much for it. She took it as a sign they were on their way to forming a good working relationship.
After all, if someone didn’t care for someone else, they weren’t going to give them a nickname, right? At least, not one that could be viewed as cute. If anything, they’d use one that could be construed as insulting.
“See you tomorrow,” she echoed. “I’ll see myself out,” she told him.
Lukkas didn’t hear her, his mind already moving on to another topic.
Yohanna had to hold herself in check to keep from dancing all the way to the front door.
Chapter Two
The landline Yohanna had gotten installed mainly to placate her mother—“What if there’s a storm that takes out the cell towers? How can anyone reach you then? How can I reach you then?”—was ringing when she let herself into her condo several hours later that day.
Yohanna’s automatic reaction was to hurry over to the phone to answer it, but she stopped just short of lifting the receiver. The caller-ID program was malfunctioning, the screen only registering the words incoming call.
Frowning, she stood next to the coffee table in the living room and debated ignoring the call. Granted, everyone she knew did have this number as well as her cell number, but for the most part, if they called her, it was almost always on her cell phone, not her landline. That was for sales people, robo calls and her mother.
Which meant, by process of elimination, that the caller was probably her mother.
Yohanna was really tempted to let her answering machine pick up. Talking to her mother was usually exhausting.
But if she ignored this call, there would be others, most likely coming in at regular intervals until she finally picked up and answered. Her mother had absolutely unbelievable tenacity. She would continue calling, possibly well into the evening, at which time her mother would make the fifteen-mile trip and physically come over. Her hand would be splayed across her chest, as she would dramatically say something about her heart not being up to taking this sort of stress and worry.
Yohanna resigned herself to the fact that she might as well answer her phone and get the inevitable over with.
Taking a deep, bracing breath, she yanked the receiver from its cradle and placed it against her ear—praying for a wrong number.
“Hello?”
“It’s about time you answered. Where were you? Never mind,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski said dismissively. “I’m calling you to tell you that I’ve got your room all ready.”
Yohanna closed her eyes, gathering together the strength she sensed she was going to need to get through this phone call.
Until just a minute ago she’d been walking on air, still extremely excited about being hired. She would have been relieved landing any job so quickly, on practically the heels of her recent layoff, but landing a job with Lukkas Spader, well, that was just the whip cream and the cherry on her sundae.
However, dealing with her mother always seemed to somehow diminish her triumphs and magnify everything that currently wasn’t going well in her life. Her mother had a way of talking to her that made her feel as if she was a child again. A child incapable of doing anything right without her mother’s help.
Yohanna knew that, deep down, her mother really meant well; she just wished the woman could mean well less often.
“Why would you do that, Mother?” she finally asked. She hadn’t used her room since she’d left for college and moved out on her own.
“So you’ll have somewhere to sleep, of course,” her mother said impatiently.
“I have somewhere to sleep. I sleep in my bedroom, which is in my condo, Mother, remember?” Yohanna asked tactfully.
She heard her mother sigh deeply before the woman launched into her explanation.
“Well, now that you’ve lost your job, you’re not going to be able to hang on to that overpriced apartment of yours. You should sell it now before the bank forecloses on it.”
Yohanna was stunned. Where was all this coming from? She’d had this so-called “discussion” with her mother several years ago when she’d first bought her condo. Her mother couldn’t understand why “a daughter of mine” would “waste” her money buying a “glorified apartment” when she had a perfectly good room right in her house. She’d thought that argument had finally been laid to rest.
Obviously she had thought wrong.
“The bank isn’t going to foreclose on me, Mother,” Yohanna informed her. “My mortgage payments are all up-to-date.”
“Well, they won’t be now that you’ve been fired,” her mother predicted with a jarring certainty.
“Laid off, Mother,” Yohanna corrected, trying not to grit her teeth. But there was no one who could make her crazier faster than her mother. “I wasn’t fired, I was laid off.”
“Whatever.” The woman cavalierly dismissed the correction.
“There is a difference, Mother,” Yohanna insisted. “One has to do with job performance. The other is a sad fact of modern life. In my case, it was the latter.”
“Potato, potato,” her mother said in a singsong voice. “The bottom line at the end of the day is that you don’t have a job.”
The words suddenly hit her for the first time. “How did you find out?” Yohanna asked.
She hadn’t told anyone about her layoff except for Mrs. Parnell, bless her. Granted, the people that she’d worked with knew, but a lot of them had been laid off, as well. She didn’t see any of them sending her mother a news bulletin. They didn’t even know her mother.
So how had her mother found out?
“I’m your mother,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski replied proudly, as if that alone should have been enough of an explanation. “I know everything.”
“You’re not omnipotent, Mother,” Yohanna told her mother wearily. “Spill it,” she ordered. “Just how did you find out about the layoff?”
The silence on the other end of the line began to stretch out.
“Mother...” Yohanna began insistently.
Elizabeth huffed. “If you must know, I went to the office to surprise you and take you out for lunch today. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and found out that you didn’t work there anymore. Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, sounding as if she had been deeply wounded by this omission of information.
“I didn’t want you to worry—or get upset,” Yohanna answered.
That part was true, although there were many more reasons than that why she had kept the news to herself. Specifically, she didn’t want to have to fend off her mother’s offers for “help,” all of which revolved around getting her to move back home. She’d moved out once, but she had a feeling that next time would be a great deal more difficult.
“You didn’t want me to worry.” Elizabeth practically sneered at the words. “I’m your mother. It’s my job to worry about you. Now, I won’t take no for an answer. I’ll come over tomorrow morning to help you pack up your things and—”
Her mother was more relentless than a class-five hurricane, Yohanna thought. But she was not about to throw up her hands and surrender.
“I’m not selling the condo, Mother,” she began patiently.
“All right, rent it out, then,” her mother advised, frustrated. “That’ll help you cover the cost of the exorbitant mortgage until you’re about to get back on your feet again—”
“Mother, I am on my feet.”
She heard her mother sigh again. This time, instead of sounding dramatic, there was pity in her mother’s voice.
Irritating pity.
“There’s no need to put up a brave front, Yohanna. Lots of people lose their jobs these days. Of course, if you had married Alicia Connolly’s son, that nice young doctor, you wouldn’t be in this predicament, wondering where your next dollar is coming from.”
Her mother was referring to a setup she’d had her hand in. As Yohanna recalled the entire excruciating event, it had truly been the blind date from hell as well as ultimately being the reason she had vowed to never allow her mother to set her up with a date again.
“For your information, Mother,” she said, enunciating each word so that her mother would absorb them, “I am not wondering where my next dollar is coming from.”
“Well, then, you should be,” Elizabeth told her with more than a touch of indignation in her voice. “The bank isn’t going to let you slide because of your good looks, which, as you know, you’re not going to have forever,” she added, unable, apparently, to keep from twisting the knife a little bit. “Which reminds me. My friend Sheila has this nephew—”
Although she was always somewhat reluctant to keep her mother in the loop—mainly because her mother always found something negative to say about the situation—Yohanna knew that the older woman was not about to stop trying to manipulate her life—big-time—unless she told her mother that she was once again gainfully employed.
“Mother, stop, please,” she pleaded. “I don’t need to move back into my room or to rent out my condo.”
“Oh, then, just what is your brilliant solution to your present problem?” Elizabeth asked.
I’m talking to my present problem, Yohanna thought.
However, she kept that to herself, knowing that if she ever said those words or similar ones out loud, her mother would be beyond hurt. She couldn’t do that to the woman no matter how much her mother drove her up a wall.
“I’ve got a job, Mother,” she told her.
“Honey, I told you that you don’t need to pretend with me.” It was obvious by her tone of voice that her mother simply didn’t believe her.
“I’m not pretending, Mother,” Yohanna answered, struggling to remain calm and clinging to what was left of her dwindling patience.
“All right.” She could all but see her mother crossing her arms in front of her, fully prepared to sit in judgment. “And just what is this ‘job’ you’ve gotten so suddenly?” Before she could tell her, Yohanna heard her mother suddenly suck in her breath. “You’re not doing anything immoral or illegal, are you?”
It was more of an accusation than a question. Among other things, her mother, an avid—bordering on rabid—soap opera fan, had a way of allowing her imagination to run away with her along the same creative lines that many of the soap operas she viewed went.
“No, Mother. Nothing illegal or immoral.” She really hadn’t wanted to tell her mother until her three-month probationary period was up, but, as with so many other things that involved her mother, she found that she had no choice in the matter. “I’m going to be Lukkas Spader’s assistant.”
“And just what does this man want being assisted?” Elizabeth asked suspiciously.
“Lukkas Spader, Mother,” Yohanna repeated, stunned that her mother didn’t recognize the name. “The producer,” she added. But there was apparently still no recognition on her mother’s part. “You know, the man who produced Forever Yours, Molly’s Man, Dangerous.” She rattled off the first movies that she could think of.
“Wait, you’re working for that Lukkas Spader?” her mother asked, sounding somewhat incredulous.
Finally! Yohanna thought. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Suspicion leeched back into Elizabeth’s voice. “Since when?”
“Since this morning, Mother, when Mr. Spader hired me.”
Elizabeth obviously wasn’t finished being skeptical about this new turn of events. “And what is it that you say you’re going to be doing for him?”
Yohanna silently counted to ten in her mind before answering. “I’m going to be organizing things, Mother. Movie things,” she elaborated, knowing how her mother tended to think the worst about every situation. Given the choice of picking the high road or the low one, her mother always went the low route.
As proved by her mother’s next question. “Are you telling me the truth?”
Yohanna rolled her eyes. This was not a conversation that a thirty-year-old should be having with her mother. Anyone listening in would have thought her mother was talking to someone who was twelve. Maybe younger.
“Of course I’m telling you the truth, Mother.”
To her surprise, instead of continuing to harp on the subject, she heard her mother give a huge sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God. Now, remember not to mess anything up, understand?”
“I’m not going to mess anything up, Mother.” And then it hit her. She knew what her mother was thinking. Yohanna nearly groaned. Her mother never gave it a rest. Never. “He’s my boss, Mother,” she said in a sharp warning voice.
“So?” Elizabeth asked defensively. “Bosses don’t get married?”
Enough was enough. She was not having this conversation. “I’ve got to go, Mother. I’ve got some things to take care of before I go in tomorrow.” It was a lie, but it was better than slamming the receiver down in the cradle, which she was very tempted to do.
Rather than attempt to pump her for more information, her mother surprised her by saying, “Go get some new clothes. Sexy ones. These Hollywood types like sexy women.”
There was no point in arguing about this with her mother any longer. She had never known her mother to admit she was wrong or that she had overstepped her boundaries. Not even once.
There was no reason for her to hope that her mother would suddenly come to her senses at fifty-seven and turn over a new leaf.
For better or worse, this was her mother.
“Yes, Mother,” Yohanna replied in a near-to-singsong voice. “Bye.” And with that, she hung up, promising herself to get a new phone—one with a working caller ID—the first opportunity she got.
* * *
Yohanna didn’t remember when she finally closed her eyes and fell asleep.
All she knew was that it felt as if she’d only been asleep for ten minutes before she opened her eyes again and saw that, according to the clock on her nightstand, it was quarter to six.
Spader wanted her at his Newport Beach home by seven.
Stifling a groan, she stumbled out of bed, then somehow made her way down the stairs and into the recently remodeled kitchen.
If she was going to get anything accomplished, she needed coffee. Deep, hearty, black coffee. Downing one cup fortified her enough to go back upstairs, take a shower and get dressed. All of which she did at very close to top speed. She needed to get out and on the road as quickly as possible.
She didn’t anticipate any large traffic snarls from her home to Spader’s but there was always a chance of a collision and/or a pileup—and she didn’t like leaving anything to chance.
She also didn’t like calculating everything down to the last possible moment. On time wasn’t her style—being early was.
Fueled by an enormous amount of nervous energy, Yohanna was on the road less than half an hour after she’d woken up.
Twenty minutes after that, she was parked across the street from Spader’s impressive three-story house. As usual, she was early and, ordinarily, she would walk up to the front door and ring the bell. She just assumed that to most people, being early was a plus. But Lukkas Spader might be one of those people who actually didn’t like anyone arriving early, possibly before he was ready to see them.
She needed to find that little detail out before tomorrow morning. In the meantime, she looked at her wristwatch and continued to wait, parked directly across from his slightly winding driveway.
Which was where the patrol officer who tapped on her driver’s-side window found her.
Startled by the knock—her mind was elsewhere—Yohanna looked up at the officer. To say she was surprised to see him was putting it mildly.
The officer motioned for her to roll down her window. Which, after one false start, she did.
“Is there something wrong, Officer?” she asked him, even though, for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine what that could be, or why he’d want to speak to her in the first place.
“You tell me,” he replied, waiting. When she continued watching him without saying a word in response to his flippant remark, the officer appeared to be losing patience as he asked, “Mind telling me what you’re doing sitting out here all alone like this?”
“I’m waiting until seven o’clock,” she explained. To her, it was all very logical.
“What happens then?” he asked.
She found the officer’s tone just slightly belligerent, but told herself it was her imagination. “I knock on Mr. Spader’s door.”
The officer didn’t seem to believe her. “And then what?” he demanded.
“He lets me in.” Why was he asking all this? she wondered. She certainly didn’t look unsavory.
“That the plan?” the officer said sarcastically.
Yohanna began to feel a little uneasy. “I don’t think I understand.”
The officer blew out a breath, sounding as if he was struggling to keep from raising his voice. “Look, honey, why don’t you just drive off, buy yourself some popcorn and watch one of the guy’s movies like everyone else does?”
The officer clearly didn’t understand. “But Mr. Spader is waiting to see me.”
“Sure he is,” the officer said in a humoring voice. “You look like a decent kid. Stalking never ends well. Not for the stalker, not for the person they’re stalking. So why don’t you just—”
“Wait, what?” Yohanna cried, stunned at the very suggestion the officer was making. “I’m not stalking Mr. Spader,” she insisted. “I work for him.”
“Suuure you do.” He stretched out the word, mocking her before he suddenly became stone-cold serious. “I don’t want to take you in, but you’re really not leaving me much of a choice here, lady. Now, for the last time, start your car and go home—”
“Ask him,” Yohanna cried quickly. “He’ll tell you that I work for him. Just go up to his door and knock.” She was almost pleading now.
If she didn’t show up the first day, she might as well kiss the job goodbye. And even if she wound up having the policeman escort her to Spader’s door, the producer still might hand her her walking papers. No one wanted to knowingly work around trouble.