Page 25 of Saving Mr. Bell

I shook my head. “I think I liked you better when you were drunk.”

“No, you didn’t. No one likes me when I’m drunk.”

So why do it?The question hovered on the tip of my tongue, but I pulled back from asking it. I had a feeling we’d get to that when we got to the piano. “You’re right. I don’t like you better drunk.”

Rudolf won the next round, propping his chin on his hands and leaning forward as I removed my T-shirt. “Nice body,” he said as I pulled it over my head, “for a documentary maker.”

“Shut up!” My cheeks flamed as the scrutiny continued. I’d assumed the papers had done their usual hatchet job when describing Rudolf’s supposed promiscuity, but the man in front of me was a world away from the way he’d been at seventeen. But then, who didn’t still have an awful lot of growing up to do at that age? I know I had.

“You’re not shy, are you, Arlo?”

I gestured at the cards. “Are we playing or not?”

Rudolf waggled his eyebrows. “And now he can’t wait to get the rest of his clothes off. Or…” He left a deliberately long pause. “You can’t wait for me to get the rest of mine off. Which is it?”

“Neither.”

“Hmm…” He kept his gaze trained on my face as he dealt another hand. After blushing like a teenager, I had my poker face in hand, though. Which was handy, given we were playing poker. The problem was that come the end of this hand, one of us would strip to our underwear, and I couldn’t decide whether it would be worse if it was me or him.

Rudolf threw in two cards, raising an eyebrow at the two he picked up. Pleased, or a carefully orchestrated bluff? I threw in three cards, picking up the five of spades to go with the pair of fives I already had. The three of a kind left me in a strong position unless Rudolf had something better. I studied his face, but he wasn’t giving anything away. If only we weren’t in a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere, and I could rely on an interruption.

Rudolf looked up from his cards. “Why did my father pull the plug on the documentary?”

The abrupt change in subject matter had me reeling. “What?”

“You heard.”

I cast my mind back. A lot of water had passed under the bridge in the last six years. “He decided he wanted to restrict your public profile. That making you so accessible that early in your career would be counterproductive. The whole everyone loves a mystery thing.”

“Right.” Rudolf lay down his bet, and I matched it. “So, it wasn’t because he was concerned with how friendly we were getting when he still had illusions about me being straight?”

I froze. I’d always suspected that was the real reason, but it wasn’t the one I’d been given. “He told you that?”

“Of course not. He told me the same thing he told you, but you saw his face on the night when he came in and found us both laughing.”

He was talking about a night where Rudolf and I had holed up in a comfortable lounge room away from the rest of the crew and spent the night watching goofy comedy films about as far from the documentaries I made as it was possible to get. Jeremiah Bell had walked in, taken one look at us sitting close enough on the sofa that we touched, when there’d been plenty of room to avoid that happening, and laughing together, and hadn’t bothered to hide his displeasure. It wasn’t the first time we’dspent the evening alone together, but it was the first time anyone had witnessed our growing camaraderie. “Nothing would have happened.”

“Because I was eighteen?” Rudolf pulled a face. “Nearly eighteen.”

“That, and I was working, and it would have been hugely unprofessional of me.”

“But you wanted something to happen?”

My fingers tightened around the cards, and I had to force them to relax. Rudolf’s gaze was like a heat-seeking missile trained on my face as he waited for me to answer. “It was a long time ago.”

“So you don’t find me attractive?”

How was I supposed to answer that?“I’ve told you why I brought you here.”

“You did, and I believe you.”

“Good. Because it’s the truth.”

“But that doesn’t mean you don’t find me attractive. It’s a simple enough question that only needs a yes or no answer.”

Simple? Right. For him, maybe. I should never have told him Bruno and I were done. I could have used my still-husband-in-a-legal-sense as a buffer. I met his gaze. “I’m not attracted to you,” I lied.

Rudolf shrugged. “See. That wasn’t so hard, was it? I can cope with a man not finding me attractive, you know.”

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