“Diva II”

The caterers had hired extra waiters and a bartender. The florist had delivered arrangements in cream and white. The caviar was iced and the champagne chilled to a perfect forty-five degrees. The band was a jazz quartet with a regular engagement and a pending record deal.

Each of the hundred invitations had been accepted. Every single one.

The men wore black tie and were defined by their silhouettes: tall, short, lean, pot-bellied. The women wore varying shades of pale, mostly in silk, many in satin, none in anything brighter than beige.

Except one.

The new bride wore screaming red.

She circulated on the arm of her matinee idol husband, acting the part of hostess at someone else’s party. The true hostess let her, and why not? She was charming, beautiful, and absolutely unwitting.

This was going to be good.

When Eleanor arrived at the appointed hour, she found the party in full swing. She understood exactly what was happening as soon as the scarlet dress popped from the neutral tableau. Before she could react, Mavis broke from the crowd, bustling to greet her with exaggerated fervour

“Ellie, darling, I was afraid you weren’t coming!”

She smiled and produced the gilt-edged card from her clutch. Her Hollywood hostess feigned a blanch.

“Oh, dear, how did you miss the note that we’d changed the time?”

Ellie was tempted to ask what note, but that would be playing along. Instead, she widened her smile and leaned in for the kissy-kissy exchange.

“You look fabulous,” she was told.

“You’re too kind,” she replied, though she knew precisely how she looked and “fabulous” was an understatement.

She was immediately swarmed by penguin suits eager to engage her. She enjoyed the attention openly, keeping to the perimeter of the ballroom. Batting her lashes and giggling was not her style; she expected men to hold her gaze and use grownup words in conversation. Flattery amused but seldom swayed her. Only once had she released her grip and fallen heedlessly into his arms.

Sly looks and catty whispers trailed her to the dance floor, where she indulged an old flame in a foxtrot. “Dane is here,” he warned.

Ellie continued to smile. “Of course he is.”

She would have sensed him among the shrewd eyes and shark teeth, even if the bloodstain gown had not seized her attention on arrival. She also noticed that, no matter where she went, the distance never closed between them.

She wondered how fast his heart was beating.

He looked no different. Handsome as ever, I must admit. Perhaps more so, since he was permitted to mature in this fantasy world of youth and filtered beauty. A square jaw and bedroom eyes were enduring commodities, guaranteed to improve with experience.

She wondered if he enjoyed his new role. Poppy was an ingénue struggling to be taken seriously, but marrying one of Hollywood’s most desirable leading men had not given her career the boost she hoped it would. Though Dane might encourage her, he wouldn’t exert his influence on her behalf. Eleanor had been responsible for her own success whether she was cast alongside him or not.

She felt an ominous flicker when she caught him looking her way. Neither overt nor surreptitious on either side, their eyes simply met. Ellie held her ground until Poppy put herself firmly in his way, then she accepted more champagne.

They had rivalled some studio couples and eclipsed others during a decade where Dane had grown more handsome and Eleanor had simply grown old. The miscarriage had been blamed for their split, but Ellie had been relieved in the end. Dane had left the press to her, and she had left them to their own devices. They had printed what sold instead of the truth, mostly because no one had known the truth, and Ellie was content to keep it so. Dane had certainly not contested her, not with his dreamboat reputation at stake.

She had spent his Caribbean honeymoon in the mountains, pondering her reaction over hot buttered rum and flirting with her ski instructor to see if he would bite. Her agent had tracked her to the lodge to offer his support, at which she had introduced him to Jean-Pierre. A mistake, in retrospect. Bernie had steered the teenaged Ellie into stardom just shy of legend; to think she might have fooled him at forty with a European lover was a sign of how badly she had erred.

The drive back to Beverley Hills had been a pensive one. She had almost declined the invitation waiting in her mail. Mavis Golding’s parties were celestial affairs attended by everyone who was anyone; inviting Ellie to this one meant that either she was still bankable or she was being set up. The latter notion had rankled for being more likely. Eleanor Bond might have suffered a blow from her own stupidity, but she would be damned before she let anyone in Tinseltown see it.

It did not occur to her that Dane would feel it, too. Or Poppy. The girl wasn’t at fault for being anything but insecure; that she stuck like flypaper to her husband’s side had less to do with his past than it did with proving herself deserving of her prize. Ellie almost felt sorry for her.

The party sparkled around them, the guests circling like planets orbiting the sun, everyone vying for a clear view of the imminent solar flare. Ellie paced herself through the thickening anticipation. She loved cocktail parties, had even thrown the one where Dane had met his future wife though matchmaking had not been her motive. She simply loved martinis and music and dressing up for real. She had actually laughed about it with the unknown starlet who had come as someone else’s date, about borrowing her mother’s mink and sloughing around her bedroom in oversized pumps. Poppy had been in awe the whole time, unable to believe that she, a small-town kid from the American Midwest, had been welcomed into such stellar company. Ellie had liked her. Deep down, she still liked her—or would do, once their rivalry lost its public appeal. The kid had bought the script casting Eleanor as her mortal enemy and the press did love a catfight.

“You look great.”

“I know.” She sipped from her goblet, her eyes gleaming over the rim at the unlikeliest of friends: Vera Casper, the sharpest nib in the gossip business. “You can quote me on that,” she added, in case the question arose.

“Are you avoiding Dane?”

“Does it look like I’m avoiding Dane?”

“Only to anyone who knows you really well.”

“Then you don’t know me as well as you thought you did. I had no idea that he was going to be here.”

Vera gave her the smirk. “You dressed like that to dance with Morty Golding?”

“I haven’t danced with him yet. I think Mavis is suspicious.”

“Every woman at this party is suspicious. We got that way when you showed up in black velvet Dior.”

Ellie laughed. “I wanted to have some fun.”

“And you hadn’t the slightest idea at all that Dane would be here?”

“I suppose it would have been naïve to be completely trusting.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

Ellie shrugged. “It’s not worth the ink, but that’s my opinion. Where did you get the turban? The feather’s a bit cheeky, don’t you think?”

“The mark of my trade,” the columnist agreed.

“Bird of prey,” a warm familiar voice drawled, so close to Ellie’s ear that she felt his breath on her bare shoulder. Her heart skipped, stuttered, then stopped.

Vera was thrilled. “Good evening, Mr. Seward. Where’s the Mrs?”

“Powdering her nose,” Dane replied, easily. He shook his head in blatant awe at Eleanor. “You never fail to take the room just by walking into it.”

“Just the room?” Vera inquired, since Ellie was dumbstruck and temporarily out of character.

“Get lost, Vee.” His hand closed on Ellie’s arm, long fingers firm against her skin. “Let’s take a walk.”

She found her voice on the terrace, though it sounded like a stranger’s, low and strangled in her throat. “Everyone saw us come out here. You couldn’t wait for Poppy to finish powdering her nose?”

“I want to kiss you so badly that I sent her off to do it.”

“For God’s sake, Dane.”

“Why did you do it, Ellie? I’d have forgiven you. I have forgiven you.”

“You’ve also married another woman.”

“I wanted to marry—”

She put a hand over his mouth. As she realized her mistake, before she could retract it, he caught her by the wrist and kissed her open palm. Her heart rebounded with a thud that shook her ribs. His eyes had closed, but it was almost worse than looking into them. She remembered watching him as he slept, comparing him, as she had compared everyone except her ski instructor, to Alfred.

Jean-Pierre had been compared to Dane.

The inevitable kiss was worthy of a silver screen reunion. Worthy of an Oscar if she had been acting, though she needed less skill to make it convincing than she did to break it. Even then, she stayed in his arms, limp and gasping from more than the effect of his unrelenting desire. She wanted to cry, but a femme fatale shed no tears. She shut her eyes instead, to reclaim a moment in time, and the terrace, the party, and Dane’s wife dissolved into a future altered to exclude them.

He spoke softly above her head. “They want us back together, El.”

She knew. Bernie had mentioned it. Good actors on their own, together they were great, and studio revenues had suffered for their break up. Dane was more concerned with the numbers, but Ellie was not stupid—and neither was the audience. “Too much has changed,” she said. “You should think about doing a comedy with Poppy.”

He answered too sharply. “I’m not interested in a husband-and-wife duo.”

“Then you shouldn’t have gotten her pregnant.”

An awkward silence fell, made more awkward by Eleanor gently extricating herself from his forgotten embrace.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair.”

Dane remained stonily silent. He was better with drama when the lines were written for him; that was why he and Ellie had been such a powerful pairing. Off screen, he had proposed to marry her despite the baby rather than because of it, proving his loyalty to a woman who had been unsure of her feelings until it was too late.

At least with Poppy, he was doing right by his own child.

Ellie moved to rejoin the party. Dane grabbed her arm, spun and yanked her against his chest. “Why?” he demanded, shifting his grip to her wrists and shaking her as he spoke. “You still haven’t told me why!”

She tried to keep her voice steady. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“You had plenty of time in other places. This is it, Ellie. You tell me now, here, why you did what you did, or I’ll—” He stopped abruptly, before he blurted the truth.

Ellie said it for him. “Or you’ll hate me forever? You’re already there.”

He released her with a shove. “Damn you, Eleanor. This isn’t a scene from Black Widow. You loved me, I know you loved me, so why did you do it?”

She was quiet for a moment, then she looked straight into his eyes. “I wanted to.” When he said nothing, she cracked a rueful smile. “You knew something then that I know now, and now it’s too late. You’re married to someone else and I am comparing every one of my lovers to you. Congratulations. You’ve replaced a dead man in my heart.” She turned once more toward the party.

Poppy stood on the terrace, a shock of red in a black-and-white photograph. How much she had seen and what she may have heard was anyone’s guess, but Eleanor only froze for a heartbeat. In that beat, she glimpsed her own dream in the girl’s unblemished features, and it wasn’t the dream of stardom in a shallow pool or immortality on celluloid. It was the plain, pure dream of love and a family, the dream that had died long ago, when Alfred was killed.

She paused by the bride on her way indoors, standing shoulder to shoulder in opposite directions. “Be kind to him, Poppy,” she said, softly. “He’s a good man.”

“What are you going to do?” Poppy asked.

People were watching through the windows, waiting for the explosion. Eleanor Bond squared her shoulders, lifted her head, and summoned her sultry, movie star smile. What was she going to do?

She was going on.