Keeper of the Shadows - By Alexandra Sokoloff Page 0,50
slightly “—getting somewhere.”
I was. I did, she thought with a little thrill. “He wants to see me tomorrow.” She still couldn’t believe her luck. “I guess Darius talked to him after all,” she mused, and then looked down at the cement slab at their feet. “Unless...”
“Unless what?”
She laughed a little. “It’s silly, but Merlin, our house ghost, says that often ghosts can most easily be called at significant places. I know DJ isn’t a ghost, but...maybe it works for the living, too. Or the undead. I was standing here, thinking about the three of them, and DJ just appeared.”
Mick looked down at the slab with a strange expression on his face. “It’s not silly,” he said.
“It was a little like being haunted,” she confessed. “He’s not just Other, he’s so much bigger than life. They all were,” she added, looking down at the signatures and handprints and footprints at their feet.
“For all the good it did them,” he said tightly. “Immortal at sixteen—and dead. That’s no life.”
She was surprised at his depth of feeling. Then again, he had devoted his life to helping Others, pretty much the definition of passion.
She had a question forming in her mind, but then suddenly she spotted Travis Branson in the crowd. “Look.” She touched Mick’s arm and nodded toward the director. In his mid-forties, lean and handsome, he had that restless, intensely focused energy that she associated with film directors, along with a were’s usual profusion of facial hair, trimmed neatly into a Van Dyke beard.
She murmured to Mick, “You know everything about everyone. Tell me something about Branson.”
He glanced down at her, then over at Branson. “Werewolf, as you know. He wrote the script of Otherworld when he was only in his late twenties and held out to direct it. It was his debut, obviously a smash, and after that he didn’t write his own movies anymore.”
She watched the director expounding to a circle of young men, all of whom had the hungry, slightly desperate look of aspiring actors and filmmakers.
“It’s unusual, isn’t it? You don’t usually see weres as directors.”
Mick smiled slightly. “Very unusual. They don’t tend to have the focus.”
In the background, the swing band launched into one of Barrie’s favorite jazz standards, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” She glanced out over the dance floor. As usual at a Hollywood party, there were very few couples out on the floor; there was too much schmoozing to be done for anyone to waste their time dancing. And no one knows how to dance anymore, she thought.
She refocused on the problem at hand. “What else do you know about him?” she prodded Mick.
“Apparently he had a huge cocaine problem while they were filming Otherworld. But he’s cleaned himself up since then.” Then he said abruptly, “Enough business. I love this tune.” And suddenly she was in his arms and they were on the floor, dancing.
Her memory hadn’t exaggerated one bit; he really could dance.
Barrie was such a control freak in her real life that no one would believe the secret pleasure she got out of just giving herself over to a partner who knew what he was doing. And Mick did know. He led her and figured out what she liked to do, then did more of it. They found a perfect rhythm, coming together and pushing apart in a sexy, sensual tandem. He was like an anchor, strong and lithe as he swirled her and spun her and lifted her, and every touch was like a promise of things to come.
He really was perfect, just perfect.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered.
He even did a mock Fred Astaire tap break as the music changed. And as the song finished he swept her off her feet and dipped her expertly over his muscular thigh, to delighted applause from the onlookers around them.
As he set Barrie slowly back on her feet, his hands lingering on her waist, she was flushed and speechless.
He laughed at her expression and took her hand. “Come on, let’s walk.”
* * *
It was a beautiful Hollywood night, warm, with a dry Santa Ana breeze that rustled through the fronds of the palm trees and made the neon of the street shimmer in the air, and they walked along the glittering sidewalk sprinkled with the bronze and terrazzo stars of radio, TV, film and music personalities.
Mick strolled along with his coat thrown casually over his shoulder, very GQ, and his hand firmly around hers.