Millionaire Cowboy Seeks Wife. Terry Mclaughlin

do. It doesn’t take much to make me tear up these days, so don’t. Just don’t.”

      He tucked her thick, wavy black hair behind her ears and leaned in close. “What does Ken think about fatherhood?”

      “Not much.” Her lower lip trembled, and one tear escaped to slip along an extravagantly curved cheek. “He says he needs some time to think about the whole thing. And he moved out to do his thinking alone.”

      He brushed a thumb over her cheek and clamped down hard on the impulse to pound something, anything that could serve as a substitute for Nora’s selfish bastard of a husband. Speaking of bastards… “Does Van Gelder know?”

      “No.” She ran her hand down his shirt front. “I’ve got such rotten timing, Fitz. Ken, the film, everything.”

      He clasped her fingers in his and curled them against his heart to comfort them both. “Babies choose their own timing, from what I’ve heard.”

      She squeezed his hand. “I want to do this movie, Fitz. I’ve been waiting so long for a chance to work with you again. And I need to hitch a ride on a Kelleran vehicle right now, especially after my latest disaster limped straight to video. I just hope I—we can all get through it in one piece.”

      He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. “You know I’ll do what I can to help.”

      “I know.” She sniffed and smiled up at him. “I’m counting on you.”

      “Who else have you told?”

      “Sasha in wardrobe. Marlene in make-up.”

      “The first ones who’d guess.”

      “That’s what I figured.” She sucked in a deep breath. “They’re sworn to secrecy, of course, but you know how things are on a set.”

      He wished he could reassure her on this point, but she knew the score as well as he did.

      “Oh,” she said, “and I told Burke, because I figured you’d tell him eventually, anyway.”

      “You told Burke before you told me?”

      “Well, I wanted to tell you first.” She slipped her hand out of his to scrub at her lipstick smudge on his cheek. “But you were busy playing cowboy.”

      “Well, I’m here now.” He looped his arm around her shoulders and turned them both back toward her trailer.

      “Yes, you are,” she said, leaning her head against his chest with a sigh. “The Fleischners send their love, by the way, and Harry says if you don’t behave yourself, he’ll hunt you down and cut out your liver, since you don’t have a heart.”

      “I need to find some new friends.”

      She laughed and wrapped her arm around his waist. “You better just hold on tight to the ones you’ve got. No one else would want you.”

      They paused at the foot of her trailer steps. “Van Gelder’s fighting with the screenwriter again,” she said.

      “I heard a rumor to that effect.” He ground his teeth in frustration. The last thing Nora needed after a long day of travel was stress over last-minute script changes. “How many new pages do we have to learn?”

      “I haven’t looked yet.”

      “Well, let’s not look for a little while longer. Let’s find something cool to drink, put our feet up and have ourselves a nice visit. I’ll send Burke out to find something to eat, and we can have a rehearsal party over dinner.”

      “Oh,” she said with another sigh, “that sounds perfect.”

      Fitz helped her up the steps and opened her door while he treated himself to a string of silent curses over his multiplying problems: a shaky movie deal, a costar with a crumbling marriage and a secret pregnancy, a neurotic director with delusions of literary talent.

      What else could go wrong?

      Burke handed Fitz a cell phone the moment he stepped inside. “Greenberg wants to talk to you. Now.”

      Stupid question.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “EXCUSE ME, DARLIN’,” said Fitz.

      Nora waved him toward the back of her trailer. “I’ll get those drinks.”

      He stepped into her tiny bedroom and closed the door. “Howdy,” he said. “That’s Montanish for ‘What’s up, doc?’”

      “Did you read Barton’s script?”

      He tried not to muss Nora’s spread as he perched on the edge of her bed. “Hello, Myron. How are you? How’s the weather? Not as hot as it is here, I bet. I could—”

      “Cut the crap, Kelleran.”

      “Sure. I can do that. But it’s so much fun to steal pieces of your valuable time.” He and his agent had scrambled their way up Tinseltown’s ladder of success in a snarling symbiosis, clawing each other bloody in the process. Harassing Greenberg when he was in cardiac-arrest mode was one of life’s small pleasures. “I read it.”

      “Tell me you’re going to do it.”

      “Can’t do that, Myron.”

      Fitz pulled the phone from his ear while his agent spewed a loud and violent stream of obscenities. “Kelleran!” a tinny, long distance Greenberg screamed at last. “Kelleran!”

      “I’m still here.”

      “What the hell’s the matter with you? You need to stretch as an actor. Everyone says so. You need to show the money in this town you can bring more than charm and good looks to a role. This is it, Kelleran—your ticket to an Oscar.”

      “The problem isn’t the role. It’s the scheduling.” He wanted to shoot The Virginian next summer, not some other film.

      Greenberg steamrolled over the objection. Time didn’t exist in the agent’s universe, not if it conflicted with the bottom line. “Do you know what a nomination would do to your asking price?”

      “Increase it to ridiculously unheard of levels?”

      Greenberg launched into another tirade about Montana and westerns and the idiots who wasted their time on them—nothing Fitz hadn’t heard a dozen times before. “Give Barton the stall treatment,” he said. “Tell him I’m interested in his project, but I need a little time to finesse my schedule.”

      “Are you interested?”

      Fitz hesitated long enough to keep his agent wriggling on the hook. Greenberg wasn’t the only one who knew how to play out a stall. “It’s an interesting script.”

      “I’m telling you, it’s your ticket to the number one slot.”

      “I thought I was already there.”

      “You think everyone else in this town is going to sit back and let you keep it?”

      One corner of Fitz’s mouth tipped up in a grin. So, he was number one. For the moment, at least. He hadn’t been paying attention to the dollars and the deals lately—a mistake for someone trying to finesse an executive producer for an optioned script. He’d have Burke make some calls tomorrow morning, bright and early, plant a few rumors in a few fertile spots.

      “You’re right,” he told Greenberg. “I’ll give it another look and get back to you.”

      “What is this? The ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you’ crap?”

      Fitz stood and placed his thumb over the disconnect button. “Why, yes, Myron. I believe it is.”

      ELLIE RESTED HER ELBOWS on the back porch railing after dinner and stole a moment simply to let herself be. Meadow grass and cinquefoil blazed like gold, banding rosy shreds of prairie smoke with the mauve of the foothills and the violet