Soft Focus Read online

  Just like that, all her good intentions went out the window. The outrage, anger, and raw hurt that she thought she had successfully suppressed suddenly threatened to erupt like lava through ice. She had to fight to keep her voice from shaking.

  “No, you do not do stuff like that all the time, Jack. I did some checking after I found out who you really are.”

  “Who I really am?” He gave her a derisive look. “You make it sound like I’ve got a secret identity.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it amounted to. As I said, I did some research and I discovered that the Galloway deal was definitely not your usual kind of job. You went after that company like a shark. Don’t you dare sit there and tell me it wasn’t personal.”

  “It was business.”

  “You destroyed Galloway. A lot of people got hurt in that takeover, including the nice old lady who had given them all jobs in her firm.”

  “People lose jobs in a takeover,” he said, still doggedly patient. “It’s a fact of life. Look, I know that Camille Galloway was an old Aurora Fund client, and I know that your brother-in-law worked for her. I’m sorry about that. It was just one of those things.”

  “It wasn’t just one of those things. Camille Galloway was more than just another client. She was an old and very good friend of the family. She used to feed me cookies and milk when I was a kid. She gave my brother-in-law, Merrick, a job when he needed one badly.”

  “You make her sound like Saint Camille.”

  “She was a very nice old lady who had worked hard all of her life to build something to leave to her only son, Garth. When you ripped her life’s work to shreds, you tore the heart out of her. And I mean that almost literally. In case you don’t know it, Camille died of a heart attack a few months after you savaged her company.”

  “I know.” His voice was low and grim.

  She clutched her glass very tightly. “What happened at Galloway was personal and it was damned scary.”

  “Scary? That does it.” He leaned forward abruptly, folding his arms on the table. “You know what? You’re right about what happened at Galloway. It was personal. I did go after the company.”

  “I knew it.” But there was no satisfaction in the confirmation, she discovered. If anything, she only felt more glum.

  “I went to Morgan, told him I could give him his competition on a silver platter, and he agreed to hire me to handle the takeover.”

  “Why? What did Camille Galloway ever do to you?”

  “Listen up, Pollyanna. You think I’m a shark? Sweet, kindly, Mrs. Galloway could have given me lessons.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Five years ago she ripped off a nineteen-year-old kid who happened to have developed a brand-new and extremely clever software program. It was designed to make very sophisticated financial projections based on very limited data. Within one year of application, Galloway’s profits nearly doubled. The kid never saw a penny more than the measly five thousand dollars Camille Galloway paid him for the software. I wanted her to pay for ripping off the kid, and I made sure she did. That’s what the Galloway deal was all about.”

  Something in his tone gave her pause. Jack was dead serious. “Can you prove that she ripped off this kid?”

  “Nope. The contract she got him to sign was one hundred percent legal. Couldn’t take her to court. I approached her, asked her to set up a royalty or licensing agreement with the kid. She laughed in my face.” Jack shrugged. “So I destroyed her company.”

  A chill went through her, all the way to her toes. “Where did you get your facts? How do you happen to know this so-called kid you say Galloway cheated, and why do you care that he got ripped off in the first place?”

  “The kid was my half brother Larry.”

  She absorbed that in stunned silence while she searched his eyes for the truth. After a while, she slumped back in her chair. “Your brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The one you told me about? The one who pulled up the information on Dawson Holland and the other people involved in Fast Company?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She stared at him. “You brought down an entire company for the sake of revenge?”

  “I prefer to think of it as justice.”

  “I’ll bet you do. Sounds a heck of a lot more civilized, doesn’t it?”

  “Part of my deal with Morgan was a licensing contract with Larry on the software. He now gets royalties.”

  “I see.” She took a fortifying sip of wine. “It was a family thing.”

  Jack looked slightly taken aback. Then he frowned. “I guess you could say that.”

  “And it was personal.”

  “Yes, it was personal.”

  She remembered what he had said about going after Tyler Page, even if it turned out to be too late to retrieve Soft Focus. “Words like revenge and reputation figure rather strongly in your vocabulary, don’t they?”

  He said nothing; just looked at her.

  She sat forward again. “You knew who I was when you came to me for the funding for Excalibur, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I knew who you were. You were the head of the Aurora Fund.”

  “Don’t try to slide around this. I meant that you knew the Fund had connections to Camille Galloway and that I was highly unlikely to provide financial backing to the . . . the . . . ” Unable to summon a suitable epithet, she waved a hand.

  “Egg-sucking SOB?” Jack supplied helpfully.

  “To the person who had destroyed my former client and family friend.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table once and then exhaled slowly. “I make it a point to research the people I do business with. I knew that Galloway had once been one of your Fund’s clients. I knew there was a personal as well as a professional relationship between your aunt and Camille Galloway. I didn’t know your brother-in-law worked there, though. Does that count?”

  “Don’t you dare try to make a joke out of this. The point is that you knew all about the Fund’s connection to Galloway but you never bothered to bring up the subject, did you?”

  “It had no bearing on our deal,” he said quietly.

  “You can tell yourself that, if it makes you feel any better. But don’t waste your time trying to convince me. The truth is, you didn’t tell me who you were because you knew that if I found out that you were the consultant who engineered the takeover of Galloway, I would never have agreed to sign a contract with you. Admit it.”

  “Like I said, what happened at Galloway had nothing to do with us.”

  “How would you have felt if you had been in my shoes and discovered that I had omitted a few piddling little details concerning the destruction of one of your former clients?”

  “Elizabeth—”

  “Don’t bother. We both know the answer.” She smiled grimly. “You know something, Jack? Maybe I could be convinced that you felt you had a right to even the score with Galloway because of what happened to your brother. I’ve got family, too. I understand how your sense of loyalty to Larry could make you do something that dramatic. And I accept the fact that you didn’t know that your actions cost my brother-in-law another job—”

  “Another job?”

  “Never mind. The point is, maybe I could have been talked into making some allowance for the fact that you were bent on avenging your brother, although I could never approve of the way you went about it.”

  He raised his eyebrows in mockingly polite encouragement. “But?”

  She hated it when he gave her that superior, all-knowing look. “But you can’t expect me to ignore the fact that you didn’t tell me that you were the man behind the Galloway takeover before you asked me to back your plans at Excalibur.”

  “You mean before we went to bed together, don’t you?” He looked at her. “That’s what you can’t get past. The fact that we had sex before you found out I was behind the Galloway deal.”

  She lifted her chin. “That was a factor, yes.�
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  He contemplated her in silence for a while.

  “Know what I think?” he finally asked.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think this is just about me. I think you’re equally pissed at yourself. Maybe even more than you are at me.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You’re mad at yourself because you think you got suckered. You think I used sex to get what I wanted from you, and you blame yourself because you think you fell for a line.” He turned one hand, palm up. “You feel like a fool. So naturally, you blame me. Simple psychology.”

  She stared at him in openmouthed amazement. “When did you take up the study of psychology?”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about what went wrong between us. Six whole months, to be exact.”

  She felt as if she’d just been blindsided. “I’m surprised you bothered to try to analyze our relationship.”

  “We didn’t have a relationship. We had a very short-lived affair.”

  “A one-night stand.”

  “Could have been an affair,” he said. “You’re the one who ended it after one night.”

  “Because I found out who you were. Lord only knows how long things would have gone on if Hayden Shaw hadn’t told me—” She broke off abruptly, but it was too late. The damage was done.

  “Figures.” Jack just nodded once, as if she had confirmed something he’d already concluded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you who told you that I was the consultant behind the Galloway deal. Had to be Hayden.”

  “Don’t blame the messenger.”

  “I’ll blame whoever I damn well want to blame.” He turned his attention to the menu. “Let’s order and then let’s change the subject. This has turned out to be one of those conversations I wish I’d never started.”

  She picked up her menu and opened it with a snap. “Nothing like clearing the air to improve interpersonal communications.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I always say, too.” He looked at her over the top of the menu. “Just one more thing before we put this topic to bed. So to speak.”

  She eyed him warily. “What now?”

  “I would like to state for the record that I do not now, nor have I ever, sucked an egg.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  “WOW. VICTORIA BELLAMY LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE she does on that poster of Fast Company.” Elizabeth sounded awed.

  Jack was surprised. The thought of Elizabeth being starstruck was almost funny. He followed her gaze across the room and spotted Victoria.

  The blonde moved between clusters of guests with the languid elegance of a mermaid gliding among small schools of dull, ordinary fish. It was eleven o’clock and the large house was thronged, but it was easy to keep track of Victoria in the crowd. For one thing, she was one of the few who weren’t wearing black. She was dressed in a pale, ice-blue, liquid satin dress with a low, draped neckline that could have come straight out of a late-1940s couturier’s salon. Her platinum hair fell in a series of waves that framed her fine-boned features. Her mouth was full and heavy with lipstick. Her lashes were weighted down with mascara. Diamonds glittered in her ears and around her throat.

  “So she looks like she does on the poster.” He paused, taking a closer look. “Except that I don’t think she’s wearing a gun tonight. What did you expect?”

  He took stock of the crowd as he spoke. The glass-walled room in which they stood was crammed with people. It looked like everyone who was anyone at the film festival was here tonight. Dawson Holland obviously was a player in this backwater niche of the film industry.

  The decor was simple. It consisted largely of huge movie posters—most of which were black-and-white scenes from Fast Company—hung from the ceiling. The majority of the strikingly lit shots featured Victoria Bellamy. There was a lot of cute, clever-looking food around, and a bar had been set up near the entrance to the deck. When he had picked up the drinks earlier, Jack had noticed that the labels being poured were all first class.

  “I don’t know.” Elizabeth paused, frowning slightly, as though trying to sort out her thoughts. “I guess I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so beautiful or so glamorous in person. This isn’t Hollywood, after all. But she looks like she really could be a star.”

  “The fact that she looks like a star doesn’t mean that she can act.”

  “That’s true,” Elizabeth admitted.

  Jack leaned a little closer to her under the pretext of reaching for a handful of nuts. He was very conscious of her standing next to him. He caught the faint whiff of a spice-and-flower-scented perfume and felt his insides tighten.

  When she had come downstairs earlier dressed in a sexy little slip of a dress, her hair caught up in an elegant twist, he had wanted to break something, anything to relieve the frustration. Sharing the house with her for a week was going to be hard. Maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done. Stay focused, he thought. Get the job done.

  “Look at the way heads turn when she walks through the room,” Elizabeth said.

  Jack glanced back at Victoria, who had stopped to talk to a thin, intense young man with short, curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses. “She’s beautiful. Beautiful people get looked at. Fact of life.”

  “You don’t appear to be as impressed as most of the other men in this room,” Elizabeth mused.

  “I’m impressed.” He munched nuts. “But I’m not interested.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Big difference.”

  Elizabeth eyed him thoughtfully. “Explain.”

  He stopped chewing nuts while he grappled with that.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said eventually. “All I can tell you is that she looks great but she also looks like she knows she looks great. Whatever she’s got doesn’t translate into sexy. Not for me, at any rate.”

  “Hmm.”

  He groped for another way to explain. “She looks cold. Like she’s got ice water in—” He stopped in midsentence.

  Elizabeth’s smile could have frozen a tropical sea. “You were saying something about Victoria Bellamy looking cold, I believe. Would you care to elaborate on that point?”

  “Don’t think so.” He seized another handful of nuts.

  “Would you describe her as an ice princess, the way you did me?” Elizabeth assumed an expression of gentle concentration, as if trying to clarify a point. “Or would that be overstating the case? After all, you don’t really know the woman that well. It might be too soon to categorize her as an ice princess.”

  “Damn.” Why did this kind of thing always happen to him whenever he tried to conduct a civilized conversation with her? he wondered glumly.

  “Tell me, Jack, do you think the problem is that there really are a lot of ice princesses in the world? Or is it just something about you that affects women that way?”

  “We’re here for a reason,” he said very evenly. “Maybe we better get to work.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Damn right.” He took her arm and steered her toward another buffet table. “We’ll work the room the same way we did at that charity function the other night.”

  “It would be too much to expect Page to show up here at the party, wouldn’t it?”

  “Given my luck lately, yes. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. From what I can tell, Page loved the idea of being in the film business and everything that went with it. Being here tonight might be important to him.”

  “If you spot him, you might want to make sure I don’t strangle him,” Elizabeth said.

  THE WRITER SAID his name was Spencer West, and Elizabeth could tell immediately that he’d had one too many tequila sunrises.

  “High concept,” he announced, slurring the second c in concept. “That’s what it’s all about. You gotta have high concept or you’re dead in Hollywood.”

  “I see.” Elizabeth did her best to infuse acute interest and admiration i
nto her voice.

  Spencer was very slender and painfully intense. He had curly hair, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. His unconstructed linen jacket hung from his thin, slightly hunched shoulders. He seemed nice enough, she thought. But after an hour of trying to cultivate conversations of this nature with people who were total strangers, her patience was starting to shred.

  “You gotta be able to state the whole concept in a single sentence.” Spencer gulped more of his tequila sunrise. “One goddamned lousy little sentence.”

  “Sort of like an advertising slogan.”

  “Exactly.” He looked morosely pleased at her perception.

  “Must be tough.”

  “Hollywood scriptwriting is for morons who don’t have any vision and who don’t care that everything they do is going to get turned over to some committee to rewrite. I’ve got vision. That’s why I do independent stuff.”

  “What was your vision for Fast Company?”

  Spencer paused for dramatic effect. “ ‘Once you start running in fast company, you can’t stop.’ It became the tag line for the film.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “An unhappy ending, I take it?”

  Spencer frowned. “A realistic ending.”

  “Right. Realistic. There must be a lot of pressure on a scriptwriter like yourself.”

  “Awesome pressure.”

  “I imagine everyone involved with a film has an idea or two he or she wants to contribute,” Elizabeth said delicately.

  Spencer snorted in disgust. “More than an idea or two. You wouldn’t believe what I went through with the script for Fast Company. Everyone tried to get into the act. Shit, I had to completely rewrite the female lead for Vicky.”

  “Vicky?”

  Spencer gave her a quizzical scowl. “Vicky Bellamy. Dawson’s wife.”

  “Oh, sure. Vicky.” Elizabeth smiled brightly. “Why did you have to rewrite the part?”

  Spencer gave her a look that told her she had just asked either an incredibly stupid or an astonishingly naive question.