It was still a few minutes before the dawn would actually break.
Stephanie was glad that Arturo had told her that she couldn"t possibly expect to meet with her cast until the afternoon.
She had no idea why, but she"d slept later than she"d imagined possible. Of course, there was the natural adjustment caused by jet lag, but still...
She"d slept the night through, haunted by the strangest dreams.
At one point, she had awakened, certain that someone was in the room with her. She hadn"t had nightmares-on the contrary, the dreams had left her again with a surreal sense of the world being well. More than well. She had the most absurd notion of being stroked throughout the night, touched, almost sensually bathed by the air beyond.
The thought made her flush uneasily, and remind herself that she hadn"t been a lone female all that long, and that erotic imaginings were ridiculous.
She felt an odd sense of discomfort as well. Somewhere in the deep fog of sleep, she had felt as if she were home again, and Grant was there, staring at her. After the image, she had felt the strangest surge of fear, as if she should rise and lock the windows, but she didn"t have the energy to do so.
Jet lag could do very strange things.
Ironically, after having arrived to find no one present for the first meeting of the group, she came in that afternoon to discover that she was the last to make it into the club.
"Hi! You must be Stephanie, our director!"
The first of her cast to greet her was a small, pretty woman with dark eyes, dark hair, who looked as if she could be a native- except that her English had no foreign accent. If anything, she had the slight tw.a.n.g of a Midwesterner.
The woman extended her hand, smiling, showing a mouthful of pearly whites. "I"m Lena Miro. Delighted to meet you."
"Lena, hi."
"This is Suzette Croix," Lena said, turning to the woman at her side. Suzette was Lena"s ant.i.thesis-her eyes were a light green, almost a lime, and her hair was a soft blond.
"h.e.l.lo," Suzette said. She smiled as well, but she seemed warier, giving Stephanie a grave surveillance.
"Suzette, hi."
Again she shook hands.
"Have you met the boys?" Suzette asked. "How silly of me, you just walked in. Slept late, huh? That first day after crossing the Atlantic is always a killer. Anyway, this is Drew"-she pointed out a very tall, slim fellow with red hair who was waiting to meet Stephanie-"and this is Doug Wharton." Doug was a little shorter than Drew, with brown hair, coffee-colored eyes, and a quick grin.
"We"re really sorry about last night," Drew said, shaking her hand. "Who would have ever imagined that a broken hose would take "til morning?""But the girls were stuck, too," Doug reminded them all.
"Yes," Suzette said, and shivered.
"Oh, it was really rather exciting!" Lena argued.
"Exciting! Ugh!" Suzette said, shaking her head as she looked at Stephanie. "I hated it! They"re still unearthing bones, and rather than just crate them up, they dust them off where they lie, they sift through the dirt... and the campsite was just a few feet away.
After all those years... there"s still hair and flesh and pieces of clothing and-trust me! It"s just-ugh!"
"I found it very exciting," Lena argued.
"I think she found the archeologists exciting," Suzette said dryly.
"Hey, okay, so there was the one guy-"
"Oh, yeah!" Suzette said. "What a digger he was."
"You"re into an archeologist?" Drew demanded. "Oh, come, please! The fellows who were in here from the dig the other night were downright... pathetic. So studious! Beady-eyed, scruffy."
"No, no, no, no!" Lena said, smiling at Stephanie. "Think Indiana Jones with this guy, except, not really. He"s here through some kind of volunteer amateur program sponsored by National Geographic. Hey, in real life, he"s an actor, or a director," Lena told them. "That"s what the guide told me. He works someplace in the Midwest."
Stephanie felt a trickle of unease, then decided she was jumping to conclusions. Just because Grant Peterson had an obsession with ancient Egypt and spent most of his time watching the Discovery Channel, there was no reason to a.s.sume that he had taken time away from the Park Street Players to dig up ruins in Southern Italy. That would be too ironic.
"Gorgeous guy, that"s for certain," Suzette murmured. She wrinkled her face. "Absolutely into the dig, though. Lena tried to flirt away, and he wasn"t anything more than courteous."
"Remember his name?" Stephanie asked, trying to sound casual.
"No, because we didn"t actually meet; he was on one side of the marked-off area, and we were on the other," Lena explained.
"Then, at night... well, I guess he didn"t come back to the campsite until it was really late."
"Until Lena gave up waiting for him," Suzette said dryly. "I have to admit... well, he was intriguing, no matter what his background or nationality. Abs like steel."
"Hey, you know what? We don"t want to hear about this guy," Doug said. "We"ve seen plenty of beautiful Italian babes since we"ve been in the country, but they sure weren"t around where we were stuck last night! Where we were, the whole town closed up, and the little pensione where we had to stay didn"t even have television-or good magazines."
"Yeah, imagine that, Doug wanting to read," Drew said.
"I don"t think he wanted to read," Lena said, smiling. "He"s really fond of picture books."
"Eh! You spent the day staring at some guy"s abs!" Doug ribbed her.
"Well, last night is over-the good and the bad of it-and we"re together now," Stephanie said firmly. Could this guy be Grant? That would be far too... bizarre. The American population was somewhere around three billion. Surely, lots of that number were into archeology and travel!And if it was Grant?
She was a professional. And she was running this show. And she hadn"t seen a single archeologist yet-there was no reason she should!
She cleared her throat. "I"m glad you"re all here. Except that, we"re still missing two of our group?" She looked at all of them.
Arturo, who had been sitting idly at the back table, spoke up, "Clay Barton is on his way now. His plane from Rome to Naples was delayed."
"I see," Stephanie murmured. Perhaps he should have started traveling earlier, since he"d been due yesterday. "What about Gema Harris?"
At first, no one spoke.
Then, uneasily, Lena said, "I went by her place to get her on my way in. I thought she"d left already because there was no answer."
"Did you go in?" Doug asked.
"Of course I didn"t go in!" Lena said. "I knocked and rang the little buzzer, and she didn"t answer."
"Was her door locked?" Drew asked.
"I don"t know. I didn"t try it," Lena said.
"Might she have overslept?" Stephanie asked.
"I can go back," Lena said.
"No, we"re still missing Clay, too, but the four of you are here. We"ll get started," Stephanie said. "Arturo-would you mind sending someone to look for Gema?"
From the back of the cafe, he nodded and rose.
"She was talking about going to Rome," Drew murmured. Stephanie stared at him sharply and he shrugged. "She... well, you haven"t met her yet. She"s apparently the type who likes a little more action than we have around here. Nice girl, really. I think.
But she"s... I don"t know. She"s in a hurry. She made some comment the other day about the fact that it was unlikely that Hollywood was going to discover her here."
"So she would have just taken off without resigning?" Stephanie said.
Doug rubbed his chin. "I don"t think so."
"Well, Arturo will see if he can find her," Stephanie said. "I was told that everyone had received our improv "bible." Is that correct?" Her question was answered by nods, and the four went about, picking up their notebooks where they"d been left on tables around the room. Suzette pointed out the coffeepot and cups, and Stephanie helped herself before the group gathered around one of the cafe tables. "Let"s just make sure we"re all going in the same direction. There are seven loose outlines, allowing us to change the script around every day with one extra, since we"re going to be black on Monday nights. The cafe becomes the World Traveler"s Club-Suzette, you"re the maid-"
"Great. With her background, she"s a French maid," Drew observed.
"No, we"re going to go with some stereotypes and work with others. She"s going to be the American maid," Stephanie said."I can actually speak French, though," Suzette said. "My dad"s from Nice," she explained.
"There"s a terrific bit for your character," Stephanie pointed out. "You can be the American maid who always tries to pretend that she"s the French maid."
"Cool," Suzette agreed.
"But she"s s.e.xy and wears a short skirt, right?" Drew asked.
Stephanie smiled. "Well, we can play off that, too. She has a great skirt, but some really silly stockings. We"ll all see the costumes soon. Drew-you"re the want-to-be guy. You"re president of the club, but most of your adventures are made up, and you can add to the outrageous lines of your stories at any time, okay?"
"I like it. Horn-rimmed gla.s.ses?"
"You bet. c.o.ke-bottle lenses," Stephanie a.s.sured him.
"Lena, you"re Drew"s cohort in the area of creativity-the only reason you"re back in Southern Italy is a family connection, but you like to pretend that you"ve been to the farthest reaches of the earth. You"re the one down on everyone else"s antics, dying for a little more s.e.x in your own life."
"Wow! It"s my real life story!" Lena said, and the others laughed. She might have been afraid that she was getting too much agreement and sympathy, because she quickly added, "Hey, my family is in the Milano area, and I"m not really down on fun, and my s.e.x life has gone along just swimmingly, okay? And hey, be nice to me. I"m the only one in this crowd who does speak fluent Italian."
"I"ll be as nice as you can imagine! And you can ask me for help anytime you feel that the s.e.x life is a disaster," Doug offered.
"So I can feel that it"s really hit rock bottom?" Lena teased.
"Ouch! I feel like... well, like my character," he said, grinning at Stephanie dryly.
"That"s right. Poor Doug is to be known as Poindexter. A brilliant scholar, but a nerd in the worst degree. The others can"t imagine that you even got into the club. They"re jealous as well, though, because your exploits are all real. When Gema shows up, she"s the vamp. She really has been everywhere, and what she misses is a real home. Her efforts for an actual love life have basically sucked, and the rest of you try to help her retain dignity. Literally, at times, pulling her away from the guys in the audience she uses for her little schticks."
She stopped speaking, looking up as Arturo returned to the back of the cafe. She arched a brow to him.
He shook his head.
"Well, so far, Gema is a no-show," she murmured.
"And Clay," Drew reminded her, frowning.
"He"ll be here soon-we know that," Stephanie said. "Let"s go ahead and read through the outlines, see how they sound, bounce ideas back and forth with one another."
The four were a good group; Stephanie acted as both still-missing Gema and just-not-present Clay, and she was more pleased as the minutes ticked by. Her cast appeared to be excellent natural comedians, quick to see how to milk any idea. She reminded them several times that they were to play with their audience, and, as they moved into the fifth scenario, they reminded her.
"So," Drew said when they had finished with the next to the last scene, "Clay Barton gets to have all the real fun, huh?" "Yes, and no," Stephanie agreed, idly drawing a line with her pencil and smiling as she answered him. "He"s the swaggerer. He has been around, but he hasn"t really got any money, and when his conquests don"t work out, he tries to pretend that they have."
"So... he is supposed to be the good-looking one, huh?" Doug said with a sigh.
"Hopefully, a team like this works so well that after we get going, we"ll switch roles around as well as scenarios," Stephanie told him. "No one gets stale, and anyone can fill in for anyone else. Normally, we"d have a few more cast members, but since we"re just starting out with this, we"re forming the company. Of course, it would help if we had the full group." Arturo had been sitting at the back of the cafe. She looked over, and didn"t see him. Maybe he"d gone in search of Gema again.
As she stared toward the table, the outside door opened.
There was a man there. For a moment, he seemed to block out the sun. Despite herself, Stephanie felt a sense of unease streak down her spine. It was as if he were there, a presence that all but swept away daylight. Then, he might have been a shadow, a trick of the light.
She blinked, and he was walking through the aisle of tables to reach them.
He was, beyond a doubt, a striking individual. Tall-six-three, maybe-a shade shorter than Drew. His hair was very dark, and, as he drew closer, she saw that he had very unusual eyes-maybe brown, or hazel, but a strange shade of such colors, seeming both yellow and red. His features were strong and cla.s.sical. He definitely had a continental look, smooth and sleek, and wore jeans and a polo shirt as if he were in a tux. He smiled as he reached the table, swinging a leather backpack around and setting it on the table, ready to reach in for his copy of the "bible" and notes. "I"m really sorry. Transportation takes some doing these days. I"m Clay Barton."
They all just stared at him.
His smiled deepened. "Clay Barton. I"m expected. I was bounced off a plane yesterday. I"m really sorry-I can see that you"ve been working."
Lena looked across the table at Stephanie. "Type-casting, or what?"
"I hope not," Clay said, grinning ever more deeply as he pulled up a chair. "My character is supposed to be something of a braggart and a jerk."
Stephanie reached out a hand to him at last. The touch of his fingers caused a jerk in her own. She tried to hide the feeling.
"Stephanie Cahill, and hi, I"m your director. The rest of the cast... Drew Cunningham, our very tall redhead, Doug Wharton is there..."
Clay leaned forward, shaking hands around the table.
"Doug Wharton, not a redhead, and not quite so tall," Doug introduced himself with a grin.
"Suzette Croix," Suzette said, still staring.
"And this is Lena Miro," Stephanie finished out.
"Hi to all of you, and it"s a pleasure, and once again, I"m sorry," Clay said.
"It"s all right-we"ve been settling in, playing with ideas, and apparently, you had no choice," Stephanie said. "But we start on Friday night. We were working our last outline, so we"ll go forward, and you can hop in when we work with the room and blocking once we"ve finished with the read-throughs.""Great," he said, but then frowned. "Thought it was a cast of six."
"It is. We have a missing member," Doug explained.