Once in a Blue Moon Read Free

tender feelings were easily hurt, and she could hold on to the pain for much longer than Isabelle would have thought possible. It would never do for her to know that she had a father alive and well, a father who had run out on them before he even knew about her. Worse yet would be for her to know it and see him pull away from her now. No, Jenny must not know. But that would be easy.
    There was a rap on her door, and Isabelle’s head came up with a snap. Her heart began to pound. For one crazy moment she thought it was Michael, coming after her to talk to her. But then Tish Klegman’s voice sounded in the hall. “Miss Gray? You start shooting again in fifteen minutes.”
    “Oh.” Isabelle pulled herself into the present with difficulty. “Yes. Of—of course. What scene?”
    “Three. You and Paul and Phil, in the restaurant.”
    “Oh, yes.” It was the scene they had been rehearsing when Danny and Carol had waltzed into practice with their new acquisition.
    Isabelle glanced around her, looking for the script. All her lines seemed to have flown from her head in the last few minutes. It took her a moment to recall that she must have left the script out on the set. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. She had to pull herself together. She couldn’t go back out there in this frazzled condition.
    Isabelle checked her image in the mirror, straightening her clothes, tidying her hair, smoothing away a smudge of mascara beneath her eye. Callie would refresh her makeup right before they shot, of course, but she needed the confidence of looking perfect when she walked onto the soundstage. No one must suspect that Michael Traynor’s arrival had upset her.
    Isabelle stood up, drawing another deep breath. Then she opened the door and marched out into the hallway, head high, a faint smile on her lips as she strode along the hall and onto the soundstage.
    “Isabelle,” the director said, smiling. “Great. Now maybe we can get back down to business. Need to run through it again?”
    Isabelle smiled, picking up her script and glancing down the page. “No, I’m fine, Lyle. Let’s go ahead and shoot.”
    * * *
    It was a long two hours later when Isabelle finally left the soundstage. She walked tiredly back to her dressing room to remove her makeup and change clothes. Despite her confident assurance to the director, she had had difficulty with the scene, blowing her lines three times in a row before she got them right. Her nerves had infected the others, with the result that the two scenes they filmed had taken them much longer than normal. She was going to have to retain control of herself better than that, Isabelle thought in disgust as she kicked off her spike heels and wriggled her toes in relief.
    “Feet hurting?” a sympathetic voice said as Amanda from Wardrobe stuck her head in the door.
    Isabelle cast her a wry smile. “As usual. The worst thing about playing a silver-plated bitch is the stiletto heels I have to wear. Come on in. I’ll have the suit off in a sec.”
    Amanda came farther into the room, closing the door behind her, and picked up Isabelle’s shoes from the floor. Then she took down a hanger and hung up the skirt and jacket of the elegant business suit that Isabelle had pulled off and handed to her.
    “I saw the new hunk,” Amanda said jokingly and fanned herself with an imaginary fan.
    “Mmm,” Isabelle replied noncommittally. Now she understood why Amanda personally had come to retrieve her outfit for Wardrobe. A middle-aged woman with short graying hair and no makeup, Amanda looked more like a librarian than someone in charge of glitzy costumes, but she had razor-sharp taste in clothes and loved to indulge it with the studio’s money. She was equally fond of gossip and could usually be found at the center of any studio rumors.
    “Word has it that you know him,” she went on when Isabelle said nothing to relieve her curiosity.
    “Briefly, a long time ago,” Isabelle replied casually,