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his head to the woman’s naked breast. The camera caught his fingers
tightening, then relaxing, and then followed as they trailed down a curved
waist and across a smooth, flat navel.
    Ryker took a long draught of his beer, feeling a
tightening in his groin as he watched the screen. An image of the woman who
made the film flashed across his mind, with her full lips and guarded green
eyes. He wondered idly whether she entertained partners with the same abandon
as the woman on the TV. Hard to believe, given what he’d seen, but perhaps that
was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was the contradiction she
seemed to embody.
    “Let me love you, darling. I’ve been waiting so long.”
    The camera cut from the man’s face, focused and intent, to
the woman’s, her mouth a perfect “O” of surprise and pleasure. “Is it true,
then? Do you love me?” she asked softly.
    Ryker sighed. He simply didn’t understand why people had
to take a perfectly good sex scene and muck it up with a lot of fake I love
yous , and soulful looks. Yet this was precisely what Gunther wanted him to
do—what he insisted was necessary to get into the hearts of his audience.
    “Let me show you how much,” the man said, bending over her
soft flesh.
    An image struck him then, a pair of full lips bending over
him, licking and sucking, while green eyes watched from above. He pictured the
photograph he’d seen in Alix’s hand and wondered how many couples had she
watched. He’d never considered himself a voyeur, but imagining her watching them created a hum of sexual tension that had accompanied him for days
now, every time he pictured her, long hair catching fire in the sunlight, her
lips pursed.
    Watching.
    Waiting.
    Perhaps pleasuring herself while she watched, her long,
slender fingers tangling in her own dark curls.
    Ryker shifted in his seat, flicking off the movie as his
pants began to grow uncomfortably tight. He couldn’t be truly attracted to her.
That would be downright odd. Ryker Valentine didn’t have fantasies about
awkward, reclusive filmmakers who wore their jeans too short and their glasses
too big. He was frustrated and tired, turned on by a skillful director who
evidently knew a thing or two about arousing her audience.
    He ran his fingers through his hair and laughed ruefully.
Maybe Gunther was right. Maybe he could learn something from Alix Z.
    He turned back to the dog-eared script he carried
everywhere he went and focused on it while he wolfed down part of his salad.
Lately it seemed that Salva’s Revenge was destined for disaster. Just
last week he’d realized that some of the film they shot on location had been
overexposed. All of the actors’ faces looked pale and lifeless, and he’d have
to rework the scene so they could do it again on a sound stage. That would take
at least another day or two and who knew how many thousands of additional
dollars.
    He scowled at the script. He had a lot of work in front of
him, and since he’d told the actors they had a six a.m. call, he had to finish
it tonight.
    The ringing of the phone startled him out of his reverie.
The caller ID showed it was his sister, Maria.
    “Shouldn’t you be studying?” he said in greeting. Maria was
in a nursing program and complained at every opportunity about how difficult
her classes were.
    “Not anymore. I decided to quit.”
    Ryker sighed, setting down the script. “No you didn’t. You
decided to quit last week. And the week before that. You can’t decide it
again.”
    “This time I mean it.”
    He heard the sound of a child crying in the background.
“What’s going on? Is Fifi sick?”
    Though at twenty Maria seemed little more than a child
herself, she had a one-year-old daughter to juggle along with nursing school.
The father had disappeared at the first word that there would be a baby.
Fiercely independent, Maria was raising Felicity on her own.
    “No. She’s just grumpy. Doesn’t want to go to sleep. I
don’t know if