Behind The Curtain (The Velvet Series Book 1) Read online

  I mean, no, actually, it was just for the critics, but somehow that was worse. Because Allan had come to an agreement with the theatre that if the critical reviews fell in line with his opinion on my take on his play, they would pull it and start again from scratch. So my entire vision depended on how this unfolded. No pressure.

  The people who ran the theatre had managed to talk Allen down from straight firing me on the spot which was something, but as it stood now if the critical reviews weren’t good then they would take this play away from me and start again from scratch with someone new; Michelle and Luke had tried to make it clear that they would stage a walk-out if I got pulled from the project, but they had pointed out that their contracts tied them to whoever was working on the play. So it would be just me, out the door, knowing that everything I’d worked so hard to put across was lost forever.

  No wonder I was standing there backstage chewing on my nails like I was trying to get down to the bone. I don’t think anyone blamed me. It was times like this that I would find my mind drifting back to that lovely, stable finance job I’d had up until a few years ago, the one that never would have fired me because one guy through a tantrum. The one that supported me and paid me well and left my manicure intact.

  “How are you guys doing, anywyay?” I turned to Michelle, hoping at least that she would be able to deliver some good news. “How’s it all looking backstage?”

  “So far, uh…”She trailed off. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that this kind of chaos is really normal for a first night performance?”

  “No, it really wouldn’t,” I groaned, tipping my head back and closing my eyes. “Jesus. How bad is it?”

  “Not bad,” she assured me. “Just one of the lighting boards is playing up-”

  “Fuck me,” I muttered as I darted out of the conversation. She would understand. There was no room for niceties or even straight decency these days, not when there was so much on the line. I knew that the last thing she wanted was to give up another couple months of her schedule to do this play all over again, even if she would still have a job if I got kicked to the curb.

  I sprinted down to the tech room and noted that a few people had started to file into the room – I didn’t recognise any of them but that was probably for the best. If I knew the actual publications they wrote for I likely would have passed out in a panic knowing that it was my play they were about to come and see. These write-ups would appear in the Post, the Times, the Chronicle, all of the major papers, and if it turned out that Ardew had been right and may play was a steaming pile of garbage then my career would be all but over. In one night. No pressure, no pressure.

  I arrived at the tech room and opened the door, panting slightly. Matthew and Reeder looked up from the desk at me expectantly.

  “Everything alright?” I asked. “Michelle mentioned that you might have been having a few problems with the-”

  “Nope, everything’s good,” Matthew assured me. “Just a little hitch but we’ve got it all under control now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Certain,” Reeder replied, and they exchanged a look. I caught sight of myself in the reflective glass opposite them and realized that my hair was all but standing on end and my eyes were wild and wide. I looked completely fucking crazy. Well, at least for once, the inside matched the outside.

  I made my way back upstage, the nervous buzz beginning to grow as the audience started to file in to the room. We were a matter of minutes away from kicking all this off and all I could focus on was not passing out with fear. I checked in on everyone’s make-up and costumes and they all looked good to me, so I headed behind the curtain to find something else to stress out about there.

  “Michelle, where’s Luke?” I asked her, scanning around in the hopes of coming across my leading man. He was in the first scene – hell, he was the first scene – and I wanted him precisely where I could see him. If he wasn’t standing in front of me in the next ten seconds, I would reach through time and space to get to him and make sure that he was.

  “Dressing room,” she replied, and my heart twisted up again. I knew precisely the one that she was talking about. It had to be the same dressing room that we’d hooked up in a week or so before. I hurried in that direction, hoping that he hadn’t gotten cold feet, hoping that he was still ready to go out there.

  My mind was racing as I made my way towards him, as fast as my legs would carry me. We hadn’t spoken about what had happened between us that day. In all honesty, I hadn’t wanted to. I had been so wildly busy, so focused on making sure that this play came to the stage with as little stress as possible, that I had hardly had time to think of anything but that. I had gone home every night with the stacks of notes I’d made about the work we’d done that day and had completely lost myself in the them, forgetting everything that existed out of the four walls of that theatre. I still found myself fluttering when I thought of him, thought of the way he had looked at me and felt inside me when we had given in to what we wanted so badly, but I hadn’t been able to spare the brainspace to look at what had happened between us in any more depth. I just couldn’t. He had thrown me off my game before and I wasn’t going to let him do that again, even if I could tell from the way that he looked at me that there was something between us, something impossibly real against all this drama.

  I opened the door and there he was; my hunch had been right, and he was sitting staring at himself in the mirror. His make-up was on and he looked a little overdone in the bright lights of this room, but I knew he would look perfect up on stage. We had gone over and over it enough times that I could be sure.

  “Hey,” I greeted him, closing the door behind me. He glanced over at my reflection in the mirror and offered me a smile. It was about the first time I’d seen him without that big, swaggering cockiness that seemed to follow him wherever he went.

  “Hey,” He returned my greeting, and then turned around to face me. “Time to start, right?”

  “Yeah, almost,” I lingered there with him, when it was just the two of us, for a second or two longer. It had been so long since I let last let myself be alone with him and there was something so sweet about these stolen moments of quiet between us. In the crash and bang on the theatre world, finding silence was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do.

  “Are you okay?” He asked, looking up at me, and it was the same expression on his face then as the last time we’d been in here. Not that he was putting the moves on me, no, that would have been too crass. It was the look he’d given me when he told me that he would take the play himself and stage it with me at the helm, because that’s just how much he believed in me. It still stood as one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to me, and I bit my lip as I looked at him now, wondering if he’d meant it or if it had been some slick ploy to get me to fuck him once more.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I glanced away from him, scolding myself into remembering that this wasn’t the time for dawdling thoughts.

  “You know I’d still do it, right?” He grinned at me as he got to his feet.

  “Do what?”

  “Put this thing on myself,” He shrugged. “Buy me and Michelle out of the contracts and go stage it somewhere…oh, I don’t know, somewhere a little more tropical.”

  “Like?” I found myself playing along, despite the time-crunch.

  “Let’s say France,” he suggested. “They like all this arsty-fartsy stuff, right?”

  “You’re about to walk out on stage to perform in front of critics for the first time and you’re in here calling the play artsy-farsty?” I couldn’t help but giggle. “You want me to land you in a big pile of trouble?”

  “Maybe I do,” He grinned, taking a step towards me and making my heart sink with excitement. He touched my arm lightly and I knew what was coming, even though I also knew that now had to be the worst time to even think about it.
/>   I leaned up to kiss him, despite the make-up, despite the moment despite all of it; I just wanted to hand myself over to him and this and us. When I pulled back, there was a furrow in his brow, like I had thrown him off with that motion.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked softly, and he looked down at me with an expression that I couldn’t figure out the meaning of.

  “I should be getting out there,” he replied gruffly, turning his head from mine as though he didn’t trust just his eyes to break contact with me.

  “Luke,” I touched his face desperately, and he returned his gaze to me. His eyes were glazed over, covering up whatever it was inside him that he didn’t want me to see.

  “Can I just ask you one thing before you go out there?” I murmured. He nodded.

  “Make it quick.”

  “Was this…” I struggled to find the words. Fuck. This was why I was the director and not the playwright.

  “Was this thing with us, was it real?” I asked. I knew I had to get the question out of my mind before I could go out there and do my thing tonight. I had to know one way or the other. I had to know if the way he was with me was as much as a performance as what he would be doing out there on stage that night.

  “What do you mean?” He frowned at me. I wasn’t phrasing it right. I shook my head, aware that we were running short of time.

  “I mean, when we hooked up and everything,” I went on, as quickly as I could. “Was it just sex? Was it just because you couldn’t have me so you went after me?”

  He looked down at me, not saying a word, and his silence seemed to fill the room top to bottom, choking me, drowning me, so I kept talking.

  “Was this just because of the play?” I continued, sounding more and more desperate with every question. “Was it just because we were working together all the time? Do you actually have feelings for me?”

  That last questions was the only one that I really wanted him to answer, and it seemed to catch him off-guard as much as it did me. I blinked up at him, waiting for a response, but he didn’t seem to have one.

  My heart was pounding and I was all too aware of the time ticking down, and knew that I couldn’t have picked a worse time to bring all of this up. I just had to know. It had been plaguing me, ever since all that I felt after our second hook-up, that there was something here between us that was somehow more than what I’d felt before. It was more than just animal attraction. There was depth to it, shadowed corners, and I had to know that he felt the same way too or else I’d be throwing myself after something that didn’t exist and there was no way I was going down that path again.

  He didn’t reply. Not then. He took my face in his hands, leaned down to kiss me, and planted his mouth on mine. I grabbed his wrists, like I was trying to keep him in place and make sure that he couldn’t get out of here, but he pulled back, let go, and gave me a long, long look. And with that, he headed in the direction of the door and the stage and left me back here wondering what the hell had just happened between us.

  Chapter Ten

  I looked in the mirror, flipping my bangs from one side to the other and back again. I should really have gotten them cut by now, but I had been so busy the last week that I hadn’t had the time.

  But I hadn’t been busy looking for a new job, thank fuck – no, the critical reviews had all been good to great and I was able to actually stay on and continue to direct the play. I knew it was much to the chagrin of Ardew, but even he had sent me a bunch of flowers on the day that all of the reviews had hit the papers. They’d hadn’t all been adulatory, but they had all found something in my take on his words that they had never seen before and I felt like that was a win in and of itself.

  So, with the critical performances done with, I had given everyone some time away from the material so they would all be fresh when they came to it the next week to open to the public. I still couldn’t believe that this was really happening, that I was going to be showing off my little play in front of the entire world later that night. There were quite a few big names in the crowd, Hollywood producer types, who might have been interested in me in they liked what they saw this evening. But I was getting ahead of myself. For now, the main goal was to get on this pair of false lashes without gluing my eyes shut, and make it to the pre-performance party on time. It seemed a little silly to me to throw a party before the show had even been on – what if everyone there ended up hating it? – but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance for a nice bottle of champagne and some booze to take the edge of my nerves.

  I’d be seeing Luke tonight, too, for the first time since that kiss we had shared backstage before the critical performance. I mean, I had seen him on-stage after that, but it was the last time we’d really spoken to each other between hissed directives as he came on and off stage. I didn’t even know where he was right now – likely out on some yacht somewhere, just making it back into the city in time to turn up for his performance. I knew that it shouldn’t have bothered me and that he would do a good job anyway, but it made me bristle to think of him out there enjoying the high life when we were all stuck back in the city.

  And it made me bristle even more to think of the women who might be with him. I knew I had no right to get jealous about him being out with other women but that sure as hell wasn’t going to stop me – it wasn’t like I could logic away this little part of me that wanted to be near him and wanted me to be the only one near him, because otherwise I would have done it already. I had been keeping an eye on the tabloids to make sure he didn’t do anything that might overwhelm his presence in the play in the news cycle, but he didn’t turn up once, aside from a couple of pre-recorded and written interviews going live in the lead-up to the first night of open shows. But if he wasn’t out travelling the world, away from the city, then why was he doing such a pointed job at keeping me at arm’s length?

  I knew that I shouldn’t let it get to me but he had never given me an answer to that question that I had asked him – well, in all fairness, there were a lot of questions that I’d dumped on him all at once with every little warning indeed, but I still wanted answers. I knew that whatever it was between us all this time had been a mess, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel anything for him, didn’t mean that I didn’t want him to up and acknowledge the fact that this was real. So much of our relationship had sprung from us pretending to be people that we weren’t, from our first hook-up when were on that stage to the night schmoozing the financier on the town. It felt as though our dressing-room encounter had been the first one that had been purely, utterly us, and it had left an indelible mark on me that I just couldn’t find a way to shake off.

  But he clearly had. I hadn’t heard a thing from him since he’d snuck out of the theatre right after the critical performance was over, as though he was avoiding me. Most of the cast had agreed to an informal meeting with me when the papers came out, and the bunch of us crowded into a booth at a coffee shop, his absence conspicuous. So where the fuck had he gotten to? And did he have an answer for me yet?

  I forced myself to look away from the mirror and go find something to wear. I had splashed out in a beautiful new dress for the occasion, the kind of thing that my mother would have gasped at the price of – a purple velvet sheath, the kind that clung to my body in all the right places while giving me space to breath. I loved it, and, as I pulled it over my body, I couldn’t help but wonder if Luke would like the way I looked in it too.

  I scolded myself at once. What if he was there with another woman? What then? I would have to pull myself together and be a big girl about it and now make a scene. After all, I had been the one to shut things down between us all those times. I had been shooting him mixed signals from the start and if he wanted to move on now, then I wouldn’t have blamed him. I just prayed he was as hard-nosed as that.

  As I checked myself out in the mirror, making sure that I was all put-together for my big night, ther
e was a buzz at the door. I frowned. The taxi was here already? I hadn’t called it to arrive for another ten minutes, assuming that it would take a minor miracle to get me looking acceptable for an event as fancy as the one I was headed to. I headed over to the buzzer and pressed the button, ready to apologise and let them know that they’d be waiting a while. But, to my utter shock, the voice that came out of the speaker wasn’t a taxi driver.

  “Holly?”

  “Luke,” I breathed, and buzzed him in at once. I stood there, next to the door, still in a pair of slippers under my fancy dress and hoping, stupidly, that I had managed to flip my bangs to the right side this time around. A moment or two later, there was a knock on my door, and I heaved in one long deep breath and then pulled it open.

  “Holy shit,” I blurted out as soon as I saw him standing there. “It’s you.”

  “Were you expecting another Luke?” He tried to joke, and I just blinked up at him for a moment. Having been away from him for a few days, I had almost forgotten what a movie star he was. Those eyes, that jawline, his smile – it was enough to get me literally weak at the knees. I planted a hand on my doorframe in the hopes that my legs wouldn’t actually give out from underneath me, and looked up at him expectantly.

  “So, what the hell are you doing here?” I asked, trying to keep the hurt that had been curdling in my stomach the last few days out of my voice. I had thought so much about him and now he was here, standing in front of me, I couldn’t think of anything to say or do.

  He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose; he was wearing another one of those beautiful suits that he seem to have dozens off, this one a pale grey pinstripe that just begged to be pulled right off of him.

  “Can I come in?” He finally managed, and I nodded, stepping aside so that he could get into my apartment. He brushed past me, and I caught a whiff of his aftershave and practically swooned on the spot. All these little details about him that I had successfully put to the back of my mind were coming back and I couldn’t fight them any longer.