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with all the livestock, she returned to her own yard to find another table being set up.
    “No, no. Not in the shade," Lynette Harwell was saying to three young men who were trying to get the table placed to her satisfaction.
    Jane was fascinated by the sight of the movie star. Though Jane knew Harwell to be her own age, she looked like a slip of a girl in her old-fashioned costume and blond hair done in an artfully disarranged braided coronet. Even the slight smudges of makeup soot on her face were placed so as to emphasize her enormous blue eyes and high cheekbones. She looked absolutely stunning and not quite real.
    Jane had always imagined that unearthly beauty of some stars was a camera illusion and that in the flesh, they would look like normal people, but this was obviously wrong. Lynette Harwell was awesomely beautiful. Jane edged closer to the group surrounding her, a group including an adoring Mike Jeffry, and she was pleased to see that there were faint lines of age in the star's gorgeous face — tiny lines radiating at the corners of her eyes, a hint of the softness that precedes crepeyness on her throat, and the merest suggestion of the onset of a sagging chin. But these signs of aging only added character to the astounding beauty rather than detracting from it. Still, when you got close to her, it was clear that she was forty, not twenty — as her role demanded she look.
    And as Jane gawked at her, Lynette turned to Mike and whispered something to him with an intimate smile that chilled Jane to the core, especially when she saw Mike's reaction. He grinned, looked at his feet, and all but scuffed his toe in the grass in pleased embarrassment.
    She's playing mind games with MY child,
Jane thought furiously. That her "child" was eighteen and had always been remarkably self-sufficient made no difference. She'd have felt the same if he'd been a fifty-year-old "Captain of Industry."
    “Yes, just there is perfect," Lynette was saying, sweeping forward to take her place at the table. Like Queen Victoria, she didn't look back to see if a chair was in place, she just sat down, confident that someone had taken care of it. Which they had.
    “I'll get your lunch," Mike said. "What would you like? The menu on the catering truck said prime rib or grilled shrimp."
    “No, no! I will get Miss Harwell's luncheon tray!" Olive Longabach said. She'd just caught up with them and was breathless and disconcerted by having lost sight of her charge, however briefly. "I know what she likes."
    “Olive, dear, there's no need. Mike can do it," Lynette said, positively
twinkling
at Mike. But Olive looked as if she'd been stabbed in the heart and Lynette relented. "Oh, very well, Olive. Mike will stay here with me, won't you, dear?" She gestured for him to sit beside her.
    Jane snatched up her lawn chair and plunked it and herself down at the table before anyone could stop her. "How do you do, Miss Harwell. I'm Jane Jeffry. Mike's mother.”
    Lynette glanced at Jane for a fraction of a second, but didn't acknowledge her except with a slight compression of her lips. It was an unfortunate expression.
    It showed up the "drawstring" wrinkles just starting around her mouth. Then she turned away. "Roberto, darling! Sit here with me! And George! Here!”
    It was said in that soft, sexy voice, but it was an order just the same.
    “May I join you, too?" Jake had approached just behind the director and the male lead. He was "technical" rather than "talent" but was apparently highly enough placed to horn in without violating the rules.
    “Of course, Jake." A monarch granting a favor. "Why don't you go get your lunch, Mom?" Mike asked in a tone that verged on hostility.
    Sensing that her place would disappear if she did, Jane said, "Thanks, Mike. But I'm not hungry. I'll just sit here.”
    Mike stared at her as if to make her feel guilty for spoiling his lunch with Lynette. But, since that was exactly what she meant to do, Jane held her