to hear what he had to say after that. “There’s nothing wrong with offering an opinion—unless, of course, you’re delivering a scathing review on one of my movies. Then all bets are off.”
“Has anyone ever done that?” she asked incredulously. Then, in case he didn’t understand what she was asking, she repeated his words. “Given a scathing review about one of your movies?”
He didn’t have to think hard. He remembered the movie, the reviewer, what the person had said and when. Why was it that the good reviews all faded into the background, but the one or two reviews that panned his movie felt as if they had been burned right into his heart?
“Once or twice,” he answered, keeping his reply deliberately vague. The reviews hadn’t exactly been scathing, but they had been far from good.
“Well, they were crazy,” she pronounced. “You make wonderful movies.”
He laughed at her extraserious expression. “You don’t have to say that,” he told her. “You already have the job.”
“I’m not saying it because I want this job, I’m saying it because I really like your movies,” she insisted. “They make me feel good.”
“Well, that was their intention,” he said, carrying the conversation far further than he had ever intended. He rarely discussed his movies this way. He spent a lot of time on the mechanics of the movie rather than the gut reaction to it. The latter was something he felt would take care of itself. It was just up to him to set the scene.
“Do you get airsick?”
Lukkas’s question came at her without warning.
As she had been doing for more than a week, Yohanna had driven to the producer’s Newport Beach house.
She’d turned up bright and early, ready to put in another long day setting the man’s professional life in order. He was bringing another project to life, and that involved an incredible amount of details that all needed to be attended to. Every day was a new learning experience for her.
She could hardly wait to get started every morning.
When she’d rung Lukkas’s doorbell and he’d opened the door, she had offered up a cheerful, “Good morning.”
Rather than return the greeting or say a simple hello, Lukkas had caught her off guard by asking if she’d ever experienced airsickness.
Stunned, Yohanna looked at him for a moment, then replied with a touch of vagueness, “Not that I know of. Why?”
“Good,” he pronounced. “Because we’re taking a little trip today.”
She hung on to the word little.
“Anyplace in particular?” she asked when the producer didn’t volunteer a destination.
He grinned in a way that made him almost impossibly sexy to her.
“Of course there’s someplace in particular.” He led the way back to his office. She saw his briefcase on his desk. It was open and he’d obviously been packing it when she’d rung the doorbell. “How many people you know fly around aimlessly?”
“Never conducted a survey on that.” She watched him tuck a tablet into the briefcase, putting it between a sea of papers. “Do I get to ask where we’re going?”
Lukkas paused, appearing as if he was trying to remember something. “You can always ask,” he told her, sounding preoccupied.
“Let me rephrase that,” she said out loud. “If I ask you where we’re going, will you tell me?”
“I guess I’ll have to.” He closed his briefcase and flipped the locks into place. “Otherwise, it might be construed as kidnapping.”
“As long as I’m on the clock, I don’t think it can be called kidnapping.” He walked out of his office. She fell into step beside him. “Not unless you tie me up,” she put in as an afterthought.
The description made him laugh. Lukkas shook his head. “Did you talk like this at your last job?”
“Oddly enough,” she answered, amused, “the topic of kidnapping never came up.”
He speared her a long, penetrating look as he armed his security system and closed the door behind them. “So you didn’t talk?”
“I didn’t say that.” She waited as he aimed the remote on his key chain at his car. All four locks flipped open. She got in on her side.
He tossed his briefcase onto the seat behind him, then got in behind the steering wheel. “You ever consider running for elective office? You’ve got all the evasion maneuvers down pat.” Starting up his silver-blue BMW, he commented, “I’ll say one thing about you. You’ve certainly got your wits about you. I like that.”
She assumed that the first part of his comment was somehow tied to his query about whether or not she had any political aspirations. She couldn’t think of anything she would have rather done less than that. Besides, the life she had jumped into, feetfirst, was getting more and more interesting by the minute.
“Then you won’t mind telling me where we’re flying off to.” It wasn’t a question but an assumption.
“Don’t you like mysteries?” Lukkas asked, playing this out a little longer.
“Just to read, not when I’m in them,” she told him honestly. “I like knowing. Everything,” Yohanna elaborated.
“Does that mean you don’t like surprises?” he asked.
Thinking of the way the so-called “layoff” had been sprung on her, there was only one way for her to answer that question. “Only for other people.”
“A life without surprises.” He rolled the idea over in his head as he squeaked through a yellow light that was already beginning to turn red. “Where’s the fun in that?” Lukkas spared her a quick glance. “You do like to have fun, don’t you, Hanna?” he asked.
Finding herself being interviewed for a job by Lukkas Spader had been one giant surprise, but if she said so, he might mistakenly think she was flirting with him. There was no way she was going to allow her attraction to the man get in the way of her working for him.
“Lots of fun to be gotten without resorting to surprises,” she pointed out.
On the freeway for all of four minutes, he took the off-ramp that promised to lead him to the airfield he needed.
“If you say so,” he replied. “You like Arizona?”
Another question out of the blue. And then she remembered. He’d said something about his new project, a Western, being on location in Arizona. Was that where they were going?
Her stomach began to tighten up.
“I really can’t say,” she answered truthfully.
“And why is that?”
“I’ve never been to Arizona,” she told him. He probably thought she was some sort of semirecluse. She hadn’t been anywhere outside of a rather small area while he, she knew, was an international traveler, going wherever the movie took him.
“Well, Hanna, we are about to remedy that,” Lukkas proclaimed.
Her eyes widened just a shade. “We’re going to Arizona?” she asked, doing her best to hide her nervousness.
“That would be the natural assumption to make from what I’d just said, yes.”
Traffic had gotten a little thicker. He was forced to go just at the speed limit rather than above it.
He hadn’t mentioned anything about going on location to her yesterday.