A Holiday Fling Read Free Page A

This near the winter solstice, days were short and nights were long. Very long, when one slept alone.
    When had she begun to tire of glamour? Not during the first flush of success. She’d been giddily happy and made a fool of herself more than once. She had even believed men who said they loved her when what they really meant was that they wanted to bed her. There had been some good times, but usually she would care too much, and be left weeping.
    Critically she studied her reflection in the darkened window. For an actress who was past her prime, she still looked rather well. A little rounder than her American counterparts, who tended to look like stick drawings, but few men minded that.
    Though she had learned early that a pretty girl could usually get what she wanted, her no-nonsense mother made sure little Jenny didn’t let that go to her head. Her looks were a gift in the genetic lottery for which she was grateful, but couldn’t claim credit.
    Talent was also a gift, source uncertain since everyone else in her family was normal. The only thing she could take personal credit for was the bloody hard work she’d put into her career, and the tenacity to keep going despite the chronic rejections that were part of a working actor’s life.
    "Do you think Greg and I might end up going to bed together? That would be rather nice."
    Plato closed his golden eyes, bored. A bit of routine surgery in his youth had left him uninterested in gender politics.
    Jenny drew heavy curtains against the encroaching night and crossed to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. She hadn’t really been joking when she said that her "fair white body" was negotiable. Greg’s shock at her words was a little unflattering. Most men would have bantered with her, testing to see if she was serious, but Greg—Greg was different.
    The American movie they’d worked on had been a disaster—her first and last foray into Hollywood. He had been a second assistant camera operator, while she was a nervous ingénue making her first feature film. The script was weak, the director was a bellowing sadist, and the leading lady hated sharing the screen with another female who was younger and prettier.
    Jenny could have survived that, but she hadn’t been able to handle the loss of a boyfriend she had hoped to marry. She had thought their relationship was rock solid, until the tabloids started running pictures of him and the French actress with whom he was having a torrid affair. The swine had been too much a coward to tell Jenny that he was tired of her, so he let the journalists do it for him.
    About the best thing that could be said of the experience was that her movie role called for her to cry a lot. That she had managed handily.
    No, the best thing about that movie had been Greg. His sympathy and kindness had been achingly welcome at a time when she had been desperate for comfort.
    Later she’d felt guilty about using him to assuage the worst of her pain, but at the time she welcomed his lack of demands. He’d given her exactly what she wanted, with no strings attached.
    Just as their movie ended, she had received a heaven-sent BBC offer. Though she and Greg had planned to spend a quiet week at the beach to recover from the filming, instead he had cheerfully taken her to the airport and sent her off with a parting kiss and his best wishes.
    She flew home swearing never to return to Hollywood, and she hadn’t. English show business had been much kinder to her.
    The Christmas cards they exchanged always contained scrawled personal notes promising to get together when they were both in the same city and not too busy to socialize, but it never happened. Whenever she got his card—always a stunning photograph that he had taken himself—she would smile and wonder what might have happened if they had met when she wasn’t suffering a broken heart. Greg was smart and funny and nice, with a rock solid steadiness that was increasingly attractive as the years—and the