Page 46 of Blood Stone
Chapter Ten
Things were going well, which made Kate nervous.
She clutched her Solo cup, which was half-full of watery beer, and looked around the barn-like room her cast and crew had taken over for the night. It was one of those mysterious pockets of silence and solitude that sometimes happened, when no one was tugging at her sleeve either mentally or physically and she had five minutes alone with her thoughts.
After a week of being on set, she had already forgotten how good being alone was.
The barn was called The Ranch and was one of Los Imperalis’ two bars along the main – and only – street. There was a single set of traffic lights in the town and this was the only town for thirty miles. The set, currently, was ten miles away in the desert, while they were shooting the battle scenes and easing Sauvage into the role with some good old fashioned blood, guts and sword wielding. It gave him time to get his lines down for the rest of the script.
Los Imperalis was base camp for the shoot, which would last another four weeks here before heading back to her studio for indoor scenes. The indoor sets were being built at the studio while they were away, and part of her evenings was spent pouring over high resolution photos of progress to date.
But not tonight. They had logged one week of filming and tonight was celebrating the milestone, along with a party to thank the sponsors.
It galled her that Garrett got to be one of the good guys standing on the stage being hailed for his generosity. It riled her even more that his applause was discernably louder than anyone else’s as they were announced. Garrett was a celebrity in his own right. And after a week of being on set with everyone, he had made friends and influenced people enough that the applause actually seemed genuine.
“Asshole,” she whispered into her cup, as he waved off the applause and gave a little bow.
He was wearing jeans, just like everyone else on the set who wasn’t in costume. That had shocked her, right there, the first time she had spotted him moving amongst the organized hysteria of first day set up. If she had stopped to think about it beforehand, she would have assumed even Garrett would give up his thousand dollar suits for the California desert and the inelegant camping conditions everyone put up with.
But she hadn’t spared Garrett a thought that didn’t involve four letter words and body parts under extreme pressure. Even those had been rare, because the last eight days before driving down here had been frantic with preparations.
It didn’t help that Garrett had delivered on his side of the contract and more. Patrick Sauvage had turned up in her studio the very next day, along with Garrett and a tall man with black hair turning prematurely grey...or perhaps it was highlighted. It was sometimes hard to tell, these days. But the man had been wearing a variation of the universal uniform of security guards in the entertainment world: Black jeans, and a black tee-shirt with a V-neck. Black sneakers. The shirt was snug around his biceps, proving they were well developed, but not steroid-induced large. And he had heavy shoulders, too.
His eyes were arresting. Blue so blue it looked like it had been touched up by the best digital remix artist in the world. Except that Kate was looking right at him, and they were real enough. They made her think of Roman`s eyes, except the blue of this man`s eyes was even more pure than Roman`s. They were astonishing.
“This is...what was your name, sorry?” Garrett asked the man.
“David.” The man nodded at Kate. “Just pretend I’m not here.”
Sauvage scowled.
She put it together. This, then, was Sauvage’s nursemaid. The man stepped back, deliberately removing himself from the conversation.
Sauvage took a deep breath. “Right,” he said, giving her a smile that showed some effort. “What’s first?”
She had picked up the clipboard with the list of things they had to take care of as quickly as possible – costume fittings, hair and make-up, prosthetics, weaponry and more – and had slid into business, able to dismiss Garrett from her mind because matters had been so pressing.
But at the end of the meeting, Garrett had pushed the sleeve of his jacket aside to check his watch, then glanced at her. “Los Imperalis and the locations around it aren’t likely to have much in the way of Wi-Fi out there.” He pointed to her laptop sitting on the desk. “How will that hamstring you?”
“I haven’t looked into it yet,” she said. “My computer specialist who takes care of that stuff was one of the ones you had run out of the country.”
Garrett lifted a brow. “I’d apologize, but you used illegal labour in the first place. It gave me leverage. You might remember that in future.” He held up his hand as she opened her mouth to reply. “I have a man – he’s very good. He could make sure that, wherever you are, there’s a Wi-Fi hotspot working. One big enough and strong enough to support the entire cast and crew’s on-line needs.”
“He could do that in the middle of the desert?” Kate asked, trying not to be impressed.
“He could,” Garrett confirmed.
“That would be...useful,” she replied, struggling to avoid sounding too pathetically grateful. In fact, until Garrett had pointed it out, she had forgotten this essential but minor detail. It was administrative trivia on her radar, but one that could give her giant morale headaches on the set a few weeks in when everyone had been isolated for too long. Jose Avelar had simply taken care of that stuff for her.
Garrett had filled in quite a few holes in her preparations, she realized. True, they were holes he had helped create. But she wouldn’t have been location-ready in time if he hadn’t offered the people and resources he had ended up providing. Every time she had accepted his help or taken on another one of the people he “just happened to know,” her jaw had clenched tighter and her gut had twisted harder.
Her thoughts about Garrett, therefore, had not been at all kindly, when she spared him thought at all.
Adrian had seemed to be able to pluck the thoughts from her mind. Adrian...she had many spare moment thoughts about Adrian. If it hadn’t been for him, she suspected she would have gone into total nuclear meltdown by day three on the set.
He had seemed to know exactly when Garrett himself, or Garrett’s latest activity had pushed one too many of her buttons. He would pluck her pen, her computer or her cellphone – sometimes two or all of them at once – from her hands, and drag her somewhere moderately private, and drive her crazy with lust as he did things with her body she hadn’t been aware were possible. Sixty seconds in his arms or with his mouth on her flesh, and all thoughts about Garrett and the movie disappeared, drowned and washed away in the rising tide of need.
She hadn’t realized that Adrian would take his role as sex toy quite so seriously, but she had found out right after Garrett and Sauvage had left the first day after she had signed the deal.
