“It’s your job to know or to make me edgy?”she teased.
His expression grew wolfish.“Both.In the appropriate times.”
He led her to the set and into the elevator, where he wrapped both arms around her from behind.She leaned into his strength.
“More light on the left side,” Antonio called out.“Let’s see the close-up of Marissa’s face.”
She held still while they made the adjustments.
“We are ready to roll.”A cameraman’s assistant hit the slates with the digitized scene and take number.“Cameras...and…” Antonio pointed at them, “Action.”
They ran the scene.Joel brought his arm around her waist, the knife at her throat.They wrestled in the choreographed fight scene they had rehearsed the night before.The one that had ended with him on top of her, tickling until she squealed “mercy.”
Electricity ran between them.Every touch made her want more, every line he spoke in his deep, resonant voice made her quiver.They finished the scene too soon for her taste and a silence fell over the set after Antonio yelled, “cut.”
“Nice work,” Joel murmured, helping her up.
Antonio was walking over with a strange glint in his eye.
She resisted the urge to shrink back against Joel.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“What?”
“The chemistry here.”He waved a finger back and forth between her and Joel.“That was totally different.I want more of it.I want…” he looked into space.“We’re going to re-shoot the warehouse scene.I want that energy, that—” he grasped air in both his fists, shaking them, “connection.In fact,” he said, thrusting one finger in the air, “we should add a scene.Get me the screenwriter—no, nevermind, I will write it.”He stared into space.“An evening scene.In the hotel lobby.He is having a drink, and she enters in a tight, red dress and sits down across from him.He orders her a drink.She won’t take it, but she drinks his instead.Cut scene.”He closes his fist.“Next scene, in the hotel room, they are fucking like cats—you know what I mean?Wrestling, pinning each other down, biting.Can you do that?”
She tipped her head back to look at Joel, and found him focused on her, as usual.He winked.“I’m pretty sure we can.”
Antonio went straightto the new scene.When he got excited about an idea in his head, there was no slowing him down.He barked at the costume department until they produced the red cocktail dress and altered it on the spot to hug Marissa’s tight little body like a glove.
She played the hotel bar encounter perfectly: sultry glances, pouty lips.He wanted to screw her for real.Filming sex scenes was notoriously awkward.Even if he did feel like getting naked with a co-star, they had twenty-five other people standing around watching.
The next scene happened in a hotel room, which Antonio found on another movie’s set.There were all kinds of phone calls and red tape, but when he insisted, he got his way.
“Okay, now give it all to me,” he said, looking at Marissa.“Walk in, take your clothes off, piece by piece, and attack your man.Or vice versa.I don’t care.You two figure it out while we get set up.”
He turned to Marissa, thinking she might need coaxing or cheerleading, but she grinned at him with a sparkle in her eye.His heart did a double-beat.This was the Marissa from New Mexico.The one who loved what she did.The Marissa he had wanted on his movie.
He grasped her hair in his fist and pulled her head back.“I’m going to fuck you for real under those covers, little girl,” he growled in a voice only she could hear.
Someone near them whooped.
“Get that on film,” Antonio ordered, pointing to one of the grips.
“Camera’s rolling,” the grip said.
He released her hair and her head snapped up.In a flash she leapt at him, her legs snapping around his waist, her hands on either side of his head.She used his ears to tug his head back and bent to kiss him, her tongue sweeping over the seam of his lips, licking inside.
He returned the kiss, walking forward until her back met a wall.Pinning her between his body and the plaster, he grasped her wrists and pinioned them over her head.He held her in place and lowered his head until his mouth found her breast.He bit and she cried out, a sexy, wanton sound.
The sound of running footsteps and whispers alerted him that all the cameras were on now, getting different angles of the same shot.
He buried his face in her cleavage, yanking down the neckline of the red dress far enough to reveal a white lacy bra.He used his teeth on the lingerie.A camera moved in close and low.He lowered her so he could get her clothes off and she lunged for him, tearing open his shirt with enough force to pop the buttons.
He ripped her dress off over her head.
She reached for his pants and came up holding his stage knife, the tip pointed at his throat.“On the bed,” she said.
