Page 45 of His Girl Hollywood

“Oh God, no,” he retorted before he could catch himself. “Not that kind of help. I’d rather wrestle an alligator.”

She gave him a look of bemusement, her eyebrows knit together in a way he suddenly found to be the most adorable thing he’d ever seen. “That hardly seems chivalrous.”

He scoffed. “Why? Like I said, she’s my dance partner. There’s no law that says I have to like her. No clause in my contract that insists I make love to her.”

Arlene’s bemusement passed into downright befuddlement. “But don’t you, aren’t you… Every story in the papers is about how deeply in love with each other you are.”

Oh hell.That was why Arlene reacted violently every time Eleanor was mentioned? He’d thought Arlene’s dislike of Eleanor stemmed from her concerns that Eleanor was distracting him from the picture. Not…whatever this was. Did he dare call it jealousy?

For so long, he’d let Frankie peddle nonsense about Don and Eleanor to the papers without thinking twice. He didn’t dare get close to anyone outside their mobbed-up circle, so what did he care if Frankie fed the press stories of their phony relationship,photographs of them out together at nightclubs, tales of their wild nights on the town? Honestly, most days he forgot that he was supposed to be in a long-term relationship with Eleanor Lester. But it had been years since there had been a remote possibility anyone he actually cared about might believe the charade. If it wasn’t another symptom of Frankie’s total and complete control, he would laugh. Imagine, thinking Don Lamont was gaga for Eleanor Lester. It was absurd.

“No, Arlene, I’m not. Eleanor and I are not in love with each other.” Arlene worried her lip between her teeth, and he was seized with the sudden desire to smooth it with his mouth. “We barely even like each other. That’s all an act.”

She looked dazed at the news. As if something had knocked her upside the head. “You’re not… It’s not… It’s an act,” she murmured in astonishment. “But you, you were out with her the other night—at the Clover Club. You told me yourself.”

“Because our manager booked us a gig there. We didn’t have much choice.” He realized now how it must have looked to Arlene. What she must’ve thought when Eleanor had been waiting in his dressing room that day on set. He’d assumed Arlene had picked up on the fact that there was no love lost between him and Eleanor. But why would she have? And why did she even care? Until Friday night, he’d barely been able to get a civil word from Arlene that wasn’t a piece of direction. “Arlene, Eleanor and I—we’re not together. We’ve never been together.”

She nodded, still putting the pieces together in her mind. She spoke slowly, more to herself than to him. “But the pictures…and your career. She’s your muse. She’s your partner. She makes you better.”

Her cheeks were still pink, though whether it was from embarrassment, the lingering effect of the breathlessness of their spinacross the yard, or something else he couldn’t say. All he knew was that standing there in the purple dusk of the evening, tendrils of her hair springing around her face, mussed from their dance, with wonderment and uncertainty mingling on her face, she looked positively irresistible. He couldn’t believe what a monumental idiot he’d been. It was Arlene. It had always been Arlene. He simply didn’t work without her. “No.”

“No?”

“No, Eleanor doesn’t make me better. The only person, the onlywomanI’m better with is you, Arlene. I’d forgotten, but that’s always been true.”

She bit her lip, and it filled him with a rush of want. “Lena,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Call me Lena, Don. Please.”

He met her eyes and was surprised to find pure lust there. “Okay” was all he said before her lips were on his. He was startled at first, but then he met her kiss for kiss, sliding his hands along her jaw and tilting her head to get purchase on her mouth. He ran his tongue along the seam of her lips and smiled against her face as a little sigh escaped her. When she opened for him, he sucked at her bottom lip before sliding his tongue into her.

She wrapped her arms around him, grasping at his back as if she were a woman dying of thirst and he was her desert oasis. He sank more deeply into the kiss and everything vanished—the yard, the memories, Mabel and her scarred face, the reminders of how he’d let Arlene and her entire family down. The only thing that mattered was her, soft and pliant beneath his mouth, her small whimpers as he kissed and sucked, sending jolts of desire straight down his spine. He broke away, his fingers still tangled in her hair, and began dotting her face with kisses. This face he knew almost as well as his own.

He’d thought there was nothing more she could do to surprise him. Inviting him here tonight, kissing him… She had already caught him off guard in so many ways. But then she kissed his neck and pressed her cheek to his and breathlessly asked, “Come home with me?”

It wasn’t so much a question as a prayer, one he was all too happy to answer. He should say no. Some part of him knew that. That if he truly cared for her, he’d say no. Keep her safe at any cost. But their eyes met and he could’ve made love to her right then and there in the yard, as intoxicated as he was by the haze of desire in her eyes, the disheveled pouf of her hair, and the pink blush of want in her cheeks.

“Yes.” He kissed her fiercely on the mouth. “Yes, Lena, whatever you want.”

“You,” she murmured in between kisses along the curve of his jaw. “All I’ve ever really wanted is you.”

Chapter 17

Arlene had spent the entire drive home in her tiny Chevy wondering if she’d made a horrible mistake. She and Don—flushed in a way that she was certain made it immediately evident what they’d been up to in the yard—had made their excuses to her mother, citing an early call time on set tomorrow. They’d both raced to their cars, breathless to get their hands on each other again as soon as possible.

But as she’d made the quiet drive through oil fields and orange groves back to her little bungalow in the middle of the city, doubts had crept in. She had told herself from the beginning that this couldn’t happen. That her old feelings for Don could not be given an inch. There was too much at stake. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t forget that kiss on set. She’d been overwhelmed by it at dinner tonight—and then the way he’d been all night, charming her mother, reminiscing about their childhood, creating something exciting and new together. It had cast a spell over her. And when he’d told her in the backyard that Eleanor meant nothing to him. That she was the only girl who made him better. She’d melted, hearing words she had always wanted him to say. Something had possessed her and she’d kissed him without thought, needing to grab the way his words made her feel and hold on to it. In that moment, she’d been seventeen again and twenty-eight at the sametime. In love with her best friend, but woman enough to do something about it.

Joan had long teased her for her strange blend of pragmatism and hopeless romanticism. Arlene’s ability to keep her head in a crisis was eternally at war with her enduring belief in love. But she thought she’d conquered this, accepted that Don would be forever the one that got away. Somehow, though, he’d danced and kick-stepped his way through the walls she’d so carefully tried to erect around her heart. If she was honest with herself, those walls had been easy to build. Without him in her life, she had no one to yearn for, no one to dream about. But with him back, flesh and blood before her, it had become increasingly difficult to resist the tug of her heart as it beat in patterns she’d hewn as a girl.

She knew it was dangerous. Not just for her career, but for her life beyond it too. He’d broken her heart once before without even knowing he’d done it. Could she risk letting him break it again? On the other hand, could she give up the chance to finally have him in all the ways she’d always dreamed? He’d shown her that he wasn’t the callous Broadway star she thought he was. There was something more complicated about his absence from all of their lives. She wanted to know the details of those complications, unearth every secret he held, learn the intricacies of each of the days of the ten years of his life she had missed.

A knock at the door of her bungalow shook her from her thoughts. She’d sped home so caught in the turmoil of her mind that she’d been shocked to look down and see the dial on the speedometer pointing far past her normally cautious limit.

She looked around the room. Her tidy little home wasn’t much to look at. A small living room with a fireplace and a white stucco hearth. A basket of her knitting, which she hadn’t touched since production began, was tucked in the corner. She’d been in themiddle of making Bill a scarf to wear on cold autumn mornings out on the boat. He’d need it come October.

The only decorations on her mantel were photographs—one of her and her brother in the backyard, a simple picture of her father on his boat looking across the horizon, and one of Don with a glint of determination in his eye that she had snapped the morning he left for New York. She contemplated hiding it or at least turning it facedown, but the knock at the door grew more persistent. “Coming,” she yelped.

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