Wild Honey Read Free Page A

find a phone booth, and call a taxi.
    Staring at a gruesome crack in the ceiling, her fingers splayed against her face, Sasha heard the door open behind her. “Oh, thank God,” she said, whirling around, totally unprepared for the sight of the man who entered the room.
    Swaying slightly with the unspent momentum of her turn, she stared at him like a starstruck autograph-seeker, sure that tall and devastatingly handsome as he was, he must be some kind of movie star.
    Ironically Sasha didn’t care much for actors, especially tall and devastatingly handsome actors. But this one had eyes like ice crystals backlit by a sheer blue sky. His dark eyebrows accented the coldest, palest gaze she’d ever seen. His hair was dark, too, a devil’s aura, and the sensual twist to his full mouth stirred Sasha’s imagination...and her heartbeat.
    It was a mouth a woman couldn’t look at without wondering what it would feel like on hers. It was a face of startling shadings and cruel contrasts. And Sasha McCleod, a woman not easily awed, was riveted.
    “The Brownings couldn’t have been much good,” he said, “or they would have prepared you for cold readings.”
    So this was her inquisitor, she realized.
    “The Brownings are geniuses, both of them,” she said. “The reading was my fault. I was...upset.”
    He shifted his weight, cocked his head slightly, studying her. “And this is your style, to be upset?”
    If the year were 1945, he could be a World War II resistance fighter, she thought, reacting to the image that flashed through her mind. A French resistance fighter. He had on worn jeans, a black turtleneck that electrified the ice blue of his eyes, and a battered leather bomber jacket. A vague recollection burned through Sasha’s vision. No, he wasn’t a movie star or a reincarnated resistance fighter, but she had seen him before...somewhere.
    “Turn your head to the right,” he said, his thumb pressed against his lower lip thoughtfully.
    She did it automatically, but a cord within her tightened. Sasha harbored a fierce dislike of anything resembling an order. After a lifetime of the colonel’s benign authoritarianism, she’d nurtured a grudging respect for, and a smoldering resentment of authority.
    “A determined chin,” he observed, his voice detached but not exactly indifferent. “Now the left.”
    She resisted instinctively, met his wintry stare, and turned her head to the left. “What’s this all about,” she asked. “Why am I here?”
    “Look at me now, yes, smile at me,” he said, ignoring her questions. “A smile, ” he directed quietly, “not a death grimace. You have a good mouth, nicely shaped. Yes, yes, that’s it, a smile. Now take a full turn and walk away from me.”
    Turning, Sasha realized she didn’t like the man’s methods. Good mouth indeed. He was manipulating her, conning her like some gullible, simpering actress. Beyond that he was several notches too cool. Self-assured was the word that came to mind—ruthlessly self-assured.
    “Turn back. Stop, stop there.” His eyes flashed like sunlight bouncing off glass. “Now...untie that thing.”
    “What?” Sasha’s fingers froze on the zippered bodice of her leotard. “Why?”
    “It’s a sexy picture.” He shrugged, folded his arms. “I need a sexy actress.”
    A nerve sparked in Sasha’s hand. She felt her heart pounding, felt heat crawling up her neck. He’d caught her off guard, and it wasn’t just his request that alarmed her. She’d suddenly remembered who he was. Marc-André Renaud, the expatriate French film director the entertainment columnists were fond of bashing. They’d labeled him autocratic and difficult. If she remembered correctly, he’d hit a studio vice-president two years before and had been blacklisted.
    He was infamous for other things as well, she recalled, such as his scorchingly sensual film noir style.
    The plastic zipper tab of the leotard cut into the soft flesh of Sasha’s thumb and