Taking Chances (3 page)

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Tracking down his girlfriend’s killers?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The man’s got to be insane. I mean, I think it’s a great idea for a movie, but Colombia! Drug cartels! I guess he knows what he’s doing.’

‘I guess we have to hope so.’

‘Does anyone know about the movie yet? I mean apart from us.’

‘Just a select few. I’m not sure how hopeful Tom was about finding the killers, and if he doesn’t … Well, I guess we deal with that if it happens. For now, setting it all in motion is taking up most of Michael’s time, while I get to play mom, mistress, movie mogul and misunderstood producer.’

Matty laughed. ‘Why misunderstood?’

‘It goes with the territory.’

‘I thought you were Head of Development?’

‘I’m that too. Jeez, do you think we could slow up a bit, I’m busting my buns here.’

‘That’s the point,’ Matty reminded her, slowing her pace.

They rounded another corner and began heading along a beautiful, maple-lined street full of multi-million dollar homes. The sun was already hot, and the perfume
of
exquisitely flowering gardens was filling the air.

‘So tell me,’ Matty said, watching a stretch limousine drive by, ‘how does life feel when it gets to be perfect?’

Ellen laughed. ‘Scary as hell,’ she confessed.

Matty’s eyebrows went up. ‘So you’re prepared to admit it’s perfect?’ she challenged.

‘It’s good, but believe me, it’s a long way from perfect.’

‘Well, I’ve got to tell you, it looks pretty much that way from where I’m standing. Michael’s crazy about you …’

‘… and I’m crazy about him. But I don’t think we should ever take anything for granted.’

‘You’re right, we shouldn’t, but you’ve got to agree, you’ve got a lot more than most.’

Ellen shot her a look. ‘Maybe I have,’ she said sharply, ‘but if you think I’m going to apologize for it just because you didn’t meet anyone since you and Gene split up, forget it.’

They marched on in silence for a while, both wondering where the tension had suddenly sprung from, until finally they glanced at each other and started to laugh.

‘If you had any idea what a knife-edge I was on half the time,’ Ellen said. ‘You know what Michael’s like. He can be pretty volatile at times – and Robbie’s much the same,’ she added, referring to Michael’s five-year-old son.

‘But you’re all totally besotted with each other, so if you ask me the knife-edge is of your own making. Did you talk to Michael yet about me playing the part of Rachel Carmedi?’

Ellen grimaced. ‘I mentioned it,’ she admitted.

‘And he hated the idea.’

‘No. He just said that when the time comes we should be going for big star names.’

‘Isn’t the time already here? I mean, if you get some
development
money you’ll be wanting to attach a star right away, won’t you?’

‘Yeah. But I think the plan is to create a much bigger part for whoever’s playing Tom Chambers than for his girlfriend.’

‘I thought the story was about her. After all, she was the one who was kidnapped and murdered.’

‘But men are bigger box office,’ Ellen reminded her, ‘and this is going to be World Wide’s first major feature, so Michael wants to play it as safe as he can. Which sounds like a pretty dumb thing to say when Tom Chambers is down there somewhere in Colombia very likely about to get his head blown off.’

A few minutes later they jogged up to Matty’s luxurious, Spanish-style apartment complex, where Ellen went to collect her car keys from the security guard she’d left them with.

‘OK, I’ll be by around three thirty to pick you up,’ she promised, giving Matty a hug. ‘It’s going to be a crazy day, so wish me luck.’

‘You don’t need any more,’ Matty told her grudgingly.

Ellen cast a meaningful look over her shoulder, then, reversing her car out of its spot, she headed off towards the Hollywood Hills.

Much later that day, after dropping Matty at the airport, Ellen made a quick stop at the grocery store, then deciding not to go back to the chaos in the office, she called Michael to let him know she was on her way home.

With its Mulholland Drive address, elegant Spanish-style architecture, stunning views of the San Fernando valley and glorious mountains beyond, the house she and Michael shared in the Hollywood Hills was without question one of LA’s more desirable residences. And since it could boast a spectacular swimmer’s pool with spa, Japanese gazebo, five bedrooms, four bathrooms,
gourmet
kitchen, separate guest or maid’s apartment and marble floors throughout, it was currently worth somewhere in the region of two million dollars. That was a good half a million more than Michael had paid for it just over six months ago – a staggering increase in value by anyone’s standards, but that was the way real estate was going right now.

After dumping the groceries in the kitchen, she turned up the air-conditioning and went to find Michael. He was in the study, his head buried in the results of a recent survey they’d commissioned.

‘This is amazing,’ he said, sliding a hand absently along her thigh as she stooped to kiss him on the head. ‘Do you realize that three out of five people surveyed actually remember who Rachel Carmedi is, and one point five out of the remaining two caught on as soon as the Colombian kidnap and murder was mentioned?’ He looked up. ‘Can you believe that? Something that happened over three years ago, and more than three-quarters of the nation didn’t even need prompting into remembering who she was.’

Cupping his face in her hands, Ellen kissed him lingeringly on the mouth. She knew she was biased, but with his wonderful thick black hair, dark blue eyes and exquisitely defined features, he really was devastatingly attractive. And since they’d only been living together for just over six months, the incredible passion and excitement of their relationship had yet to shift down a few gears, which was fine by them both.

‘If you’d been here at the time you’d have seen for yourself that it was pretty big news,’ she told him, walking over to her desk to check on her messages. ‘And what I want to know is how you get one point five of a person?’

Michael’s eyes still showed the effects of her kiss as he laughed. ‘This was well worth the money,’ he said, indicating the survey. ‘Whose idea was it?’

Ellen leaned forward to switch on her computer. ‘Mine,’ she airily responded.

Michael eyed her sceptically, and waited until she started to grin.

‘OK, it was Rufus’s,’ she confessed, referring to one of their lawyers. ‘So, aren’t you going to ask me how the move’s coming along?’

‘How’s the move coming along?’

‘Not bad. We just need to know which office you want.’

‘Oh, I guess the one next to yours,’ he answered, distractedly.

‘Not Ted’s?’

He looked at her, and waggled his eyebrows. ‘No, not Ted’s,’ he said.

Laughing, Ellen clicked on to her e-mail.

Ted Forgon was the majority shareholder of World Wide Entertainment, which would have made him president of the new company, had Michael not very neatly seized the position for himself by using the exact same tactics Forgon had so ruthlessly subjected his many rivals to over the years.

Blackmail. It was an ugly word, and an even uglier business. But threatening to reveal Forgon’s affair with an underage girl was the only way Michael had been able to regain control of his London agency, and the burgeoning new production company, World Wide, when Sandy Paull had gone behind his back and done a deal with Forgon that had come very close to wiping Michael off the face of the entertainment world.

Michael was fully aware that Forgon was now biding his time, waiting for the statute of limitations to expire on his crime, in order to avoid prosecution. Were Michael able to raise the capital, he’d already have taken advantage of Forgon’s weakened position to buy the man out of World Wide completely. But since he’d already put up just about everything he owned as
security
against his colossal loans – his share of McCann Paull, the London agency; his penthouse apartment in Battersea, and a small, private villa in the Caribbean – he simply didn’t have the means, or the collateral, right now to force Forgon out.

Turning to his computer he called up the latest investment reports from World Wide’s offices in New York, London and Sydney. He had yet to inform the company’s other shareholders of his intention to sink over 80 per cent of their resources into developing Tom Chambers’s script – that was a piece of news he felt it would be more prudent to deliver when he had managed to gain a similar stake from some major Hollywood investors.

When finally he looked up again Ellen was watching him, so she saw his eyes go to the phone that was sitting apart from the others on his desk. It was the private line he’d had installed just over a week ago, for the sole use of Tom Chambers. There was an individual answering machine attached to the phone too, but lately neither the line nor the machine was getting anywhere near as much use as Michael would have liked.

Forcing a smile, Michael said, ‘The hell-raiser should be home any minute.’

Ellen shook her head. ‘He called at lunch-time to ask if he could go to Jeremy’s right after school. He’ll be back around seven.’

Michael looked at his watch, then reached for another of his phones as it started to ring.

‘Michael McCann,’ he said into the receiver. ‘Oh, hi Sandy,’ he answered, glancing at his watch, then at Ellen. ‘It’s got to be midnight over there, are you still at the office?’

Not much wanting to listen while he spoke to Sandy Paull, Ellen put in a call to Maggie, the personal assistant she and Michael shared.

A few minutes later Michael ended his call and got up from his desk.

‘Everything OK?’ Ellen asked.

He nodded, then opening the double doors that closed them off from the rest of the house, he walked across the huge, white-carpeted sitting-room where sumptuous pale linen-covered sofas, glass- and marquetry- topped coffee-tables and an eclectic assortment of pottery, paintings and sculptures faced on to the sunny patio and pool.

Knowing where he was heading Ellen put down the phone and got up to follow him. By the time she joined him at the wet bar, which was in a cosy sunken niche between the kitchen and the den, he’d poured himself a very large neat Scotch and was sitting on a bar stool gazing at the mirrored shelves of bottles.

‘It’s been four days now,’ he said as Ellen helped herself to a drink too. ‘Something’s got to be wrong.’

Though Ellen had yet to meet Tom Chambers personally, she knew that a unique kind of friendship had developed between the two men during the time they had been together in Rio, trying to rescue Michael’s son Robbie, and younger brother Cavan, from a ruthless gang of kidnappers. Since that time, Michael had made several trips to Washington where Chambers generally based himself whenever he was in the States, and now both men were totally committed to making the three-year-old murder of Chambers’s girlfriend, and the failure ever to bring anyone to justice, the subject of World Wide’s first major movie.

‘I shouldn’t have agreed to him going back there,’ Michael said.

‘It was his decision,’ Ellen responded.

‘Then I should have tried to stop him. But what do I do instead? I tell him if he can get the names of those who did it, there’ll be no way they can escape justice once Hollywood immortalizes them on film.’

‘You told him that to stop him from killing them,’ Ellen reminded him firmly. ‘You knew, when he told
you
he was going back, that there was a chance he was going after revenge, so you offered him another means of achieving it. Now for God’s sake stop blaming yourself here. You did what you thought was best, and if anything’s happened to him, we’d be sure to know.’

He sighed and pressed his fingers to his eyes. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I guess it just seems crazy, us going to all this trouble, when we don’t even know if he’s going to come back in one piece.’ His laugh was grim. ‘Of course, if he doesn’t, it’ll make the movie an even hotter property than it already is, two American journalists going down at the hands of a Colombian drug cartel, and lovers at that.’

‘You see, there’s a bright side to everything,’ Ellen responded, and he couldn’t help but laugh at the blackness of her humour.

Turning to look at her he felt his tension starting slowly to ebb. She was a truly beautiful woman, in every imaginable way, and sometimes he wondered if he’d really known what love was before he met her. He guessed he had, for Robbie’s mother, Michelle, had damned near broken his heart when she’d left, but that seemed such a long time ago now, and as much as he had loved Michelle, he just couldn’t remember feeling the way he did now.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ellen asked.

Though his eyes started to dance he didn’t answer right away. Instead he tried to imagine what the past six months must have been like for her, being thrown in the deep end of a relationship, motherhood and fresh career. If they’d been living together before he’d got custody of Robbie the relationship and motherhood package might have been easier for her to deal with; or if he’d got the company going sooner she’d at least have had some time to adjust from being an agent to a producer. As it was, it had all happened at once, and though she was never backward in asserting herself or her opinions, she had
never
once complained about the way he had so completely and cavalierly turned her entire life upside down. Nor, despite the heavy load of their upcoming commitments, was she averse to the idea of providing a brother or sister for Robbie.

‘Will you marry me?’ he said.

Ellen laughed. ‘Is there something about that particular question that you like?’ she teased. ‘I mean this has got to be the sixteenth time you’ve asked me, not that I’m counting, you understand.’

‘We keep talking about it, I just think we should do it,’ he said, lifting a hand to touch her hair. ‘And what I like about the question is the way you answer.’

She frowned, trying to recall the way she’d answered in the past. Then her eyes started to shine. ‘You don’t have to bribe me into satisfying your insatiable sexual needs,’ she told him.