Belinda had dragged Fleur to all of Jake Koranda’s pictures, and Fleur had hated every one of them. He was always shooting someone in the head, knifing him in the belly, or terrorizing a woman. And he seemed to enjoy it! Now she had to work with him, and she knew from her agent exactly how dead set he’d been against casting her. Part of her couldn’t exactly blame him. No matter what Belinda believed, Fleur was no actress.

“Stop worrying,” Belinda said, whenever Fleur tried to talk to her about it. “The minute he sees you, he’ll fall in love.”

Fleur couldn’t imagine that happening.

The white stretch limousine the studio had sent to pick her up at LAX delivered her to the two-story Spanish-style Beverly Hills house Belinda had rented for them. It was early May, unseasonably cold when she’d left New York, but warm and sunny in Southern California. When she’d come over from France three years ago, she’d never imagined her life taking such a strange direction. She tried to be grateful, but lately that had been hard.

A housekeeper who looked like she was at least a hundred years old let her into a foyer with white walls, dark beams, a wrought-iron chandelier, and a terra-cotta floor. Fleur took the suitcases away from her when she started to carry them upstairs. She chose a back bedroom that looked down over the pool and left the master bedroom for Belinda. The house seemed even larger than the photos. With six bedrooms, four decks, and a couple of Jacuzzis, it had more space than two people needed, something she’d made the mistake of mentioning to Alexi during one of their phone conversations that substituted for visits.

“In Southern California, lack of ostentation is vulgar,” he’d said. “Follow your mother’s lead, and you will be a wonderful success.”

She’d let the dig pass. The problems between Alexi and Belinda were too complicated for her to solve, especially since she’d never been able to understand why two people who hated each other so much didn’t get a divorce. She kicked off her shoes and gazed around the room with its warm wooden pieces and earth-toned fabrics. A collection of Mexican crosses hanging on the wall gave her a pang of homesickness for the nuns. Never once had she imagined making this particular trip alone.

She sat on the side of the bed and called New York. “Are you feeling any better?” she asked when Belinda answered.

“I’m miserable. And humiliated. How can a woman my age get chicken pox?” Belinda blew her nose. “My baby is going to star in the most talked-about film of the year, and here I am stuck in New York with this ridiculous disease. If I get scars…”

“You’ll be fine in a week or so.”

“I’m not coming out there until I look my best. I want them to see what they passed up all those years ago.” Another nose blow. “Call me the moment you meet him. Don’t worry about the time difference.”

Fleur didn’t have to ask whom Belinda was talking about. She braced herself, and-sure enough…

“My baby’s going to be doing love scenes with Jake Koranda.”

“If you say that one more time, I’m going to throw up.”

Belinda managed a laugh through her misery. “Lucky, lucky, baby.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

But Belinda had beaten her to it.

Fleur walked over to the window and gazed down at the pool. She’d started to hate modeling, another thing Belinda would never understand. And she definitely didn’t want to be an actress. But since she had no idea what she wanted to do instead, she could hardly complain. She had gobs of money, a fabulous career, and a great part in a prestigious film. She was the luckiest girl in the world, and she was going to stop acting like a spoiled brat. So what if she never felt completely comfortable in front of the camera? She did a darned good job of faking it, and that’s exactly what she’d do with this movie. She’d fake it.

She changed into shorts, twisted her hair on top of her head, and carried the script of Sunday Morning Eclipse out to the patio. She settled into one of the cushioned chaises along with a glass of fresh orange juice and gazed down at the script.

Jake Koranda was playing Matt, the lead, a soldier returning home to Iowa from Vietnam. Matt is tortured by memories of a My Lai-type massacre he witnessed. When he gets home, he finds his wife pregnant with another man’s child and his brother caught up in a local scandal. Matt is drawn to Lizzie, his wife’s kid sister, who’s grown up in his absence. Fleur was playing Lizzie. She thumbed to the script notes.

Untouched by the smell of napalm and the corruption in Matt’s own family, Lizzie makes Matt feel innocent again.

The two of them get into a playful argument over the best place to find a great hamburger, and after a traumatic scene with his wife, Matt takes Lizzie on a week-long odyssey through Iowa in search of an old-fashioned root beer stand. The root beer stand served as both a tragic and comic symbol of the country’s lost innocence. At the end of the journey, Matt discovers that Lizzie is neither as guileless nor as virginal as she acts.

Despite the movie’s cynical view of women, Fleur liked the script a lot better than the Bird Dog Caliber pictures. But even after two months of acting lessons, she didn’t see how she’d ever play a character as complex as Lizzie. She wished she was doing some kind of romantic comedy.

At least she wouldn’t have to do the movie’s nude love scene. This was the only battle with Belinda that she’d won. Her mother said Fleur was being a prude and that her attitude was hypocritical after all the swimsuit ads she’d done, but swimsuits were swimsuits, and naked was naked. Fleur wouldn’t budge.

She’d always refused to pose nude, even for the world’s most respected photographers. Belinda said it was because she was still a virgin, but that wasn’t it. Fleur had to keep some part of herself private.

The housekeeper interrupted and told her she needed to look outside. Fleur went to the front door. In the center of the driveway sat a shiny new red Porsche topped with a giant silver bow.

She raced to the phone and caught Alexi just as he was getting ready for bed. “It’s beautiful,” she cried. “I’m going to be scared to death to drive it.”

“Nonsense. It is you who control the car, chérie, not the other way around.”

“I’ve got the wrong number. I want to speak with the man who’s invested a fortune trying to find the Bugatti Royale that spent the war in the sewers of Paris.”

“That, my dear, is different.”

Fleur smiled. They chatted for a few minutes, then she rushed outside to drive her new car. She wished she could thank Alexi in person, but he’d never come back to see her.

Some of her pleasure in the gift faded. She’d become a pawn in the battle between her parents, and she hated that. But as important as her new relationship was with her father, and as much as she appreciated this beautiful car, her first loyalty would always be with Belinda.

The next morning, she drove the Porsche through the studio gates to the soundstage where Sunday Morning Eclipse was shooting. Fleur Savagar was too scared to show up on the set herself, so she’d sent the Glitter Baby instead. As she’d gotten dressed, she’d taken extra care with her makeup and pulled her hair away from her face with a set of enameled combs so that it fell long and straight down her back. Her peony-colored Sonia Rykiel body sweater complemented a pair of strappy lizard sandals with three-inch heels. Jake Koranda was tall, but those heels should just about even them out.

She found the parking lot the guard had directed her to. The toast she’d eaten for breakfast clumped in her stomach. Although filming on Sunday Morning Eclipse had been under way for several weeks, she didn’t have to report for another few days, but she’d decided that checking things out before she had to go in front of the camera would build her confidence. So far, it wasn’t working.

This was silly. She’d made television commercials, so she understood the process. She knew how to hit her marks and take direction. But her anxiety refused to ease. Belinda should have been the movie star. Not her.

The guard had phoned ahead, and Dick Spano, the producer, met her inside the soundstage door. “Fleur, sweetheart! It’s good to see you.” He welcomed her with a cheek kiss and an admiring look at the leggy expanse that the body sweater put on display. Fleur had liked Spano when they’d met in New York, especially when she’d found out how much he loved horses. He led her toward a pair of heavy doors. “They’re getting ready to shoot. I’ll take you in.”

Fleur recognized the brightly lit set on the soundstage as the kitchen of Matt’s house in Iowa. Standing in the middle of it, she saw Johnny Guy Kelly deep in conversation with Lynn David, the tiny, auburn-haired actress who was playing Matt’s wife, DeeDee. Dick Spano gestured Fleur toward a canvas director’s chair. She resisted the urge to peek at the back and see if her name was stenciled there.

“You ready, Jako?”

Jake Koranda stepped out of the shadows.

The first thing Fleur noticed was his impossible mouth, soft and sulky as a baby’s. But that was the only thing baby-like about him. His walk was loose-jointed with a rolling, slouch-shouldered gait that made him look more like a range-weary cowboy than a playwright-movie star. His straight brown hair had been cut shorter than he wore it in the Caliber pictures, making him look both taller and thinner than his screen image. Offscreen, she decided, he didn’t look any friendlier than he did onscreen.

Thanks to Belinda, Fleur knew more about him than she wanted to. Although he was notoriously reticent with the press and seldom gave interviews, certain facts had emerged. He’d been born John Joseph Koranda and raised in the worst part of Cleveland, Ohio, by a mother who cleaned houses during the day and offices at night. He had a juvenile police record. Petty theft, shoplifting, hot-wiring a car when he was thirteen. When reporters tried to get him to open up about how he’d turned his life around, he referred to a college athletic scholarship. “Just a punk who got lucky with a basketball,” he said. He refused to talk about why he’d left college during his sophomore year, his short-lived marriage, or his military service in Vietnam. He said his life was his own.