Starstruck by Anne McAllister Page A

just what she needed, Liv decided when she dropped her purse into her desk drawer and faced the reality of another day’s work. It would put him into proper perspective and eradicate all those fleeting images of boyish grins and tired eyes and, heaven help her, those warm and teasing lips that had plagued her all the way to work. She sat down and prepared to get to work, to exorcise his ghostly presence and reduce him to a neat ten-inch story.
    She had almost succeeded when Frances puffed breathlessly into the office, flung her ever-present knitting onto her desk and demanded, “Tell all, Liv. Is he every bit as gorgeous in person as on the screen?”
    “Oh, definitely,” Liv said coolly, with much more disinterest than she actually felt. “Here.” She ripped the sheet out of the typewriter. “You can be the first on your block to know.”
    Frances snatched the paper and eased her substantial form into her chair, her eyes never leaving the paper in front of her. When she finished it, she looked up and pushed her glasses higher on her nose. “Ve r y cagey,” she said. “Very noncommital. Now, tell me, what’s he reall y like?”
    “Honestly, Frances,” Liv grinned, pleased that she’d done what she had set out to do, which was to say nothing scandalous or titillating at all, “he’s really like that.” He was, too. She had tried to present his sincerity,, his commitment to the cause of peace, and not just concentrate on his sexual escapades or his fabulous body or even his acting and directing ability. She did, however, pay lip service to his charm.
    “I’m sure he is,” Frances said. ‘“Boyish, charmin g, sincere,’—oh, definitely. But —” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“did he make a pass at you?”
    “What?” Trust Frances not to beat around the bush. “Of course not!” she lied. She was certainly not going to mention that humiliating shower-and-shave offer.
    “Why not?” Now it was Frances who sounded offended. “You’re young and pretty, and he’s definitely as sexy as they come.”
    He was that, Liv thought. “Perhaps I’m just not his type.”
    Frances looked at her as though she’d forgot her mind when she came to work that morning. “All right,” she said on a note of faked injury, “if that’s the way you want it, don’t tell me, then.”
    Liv grinned. “Oh, no you don’t, you old fraud. You’re not going to coerce me into telling you anything that way. You read everything important in my story. Really. We had a nice chat. I drove him to the speech. He spoke. That was that. But I will admit, he was better than I expected.” Further than that she was not prepared to go. There was no telling what Frances’s busily embroidering mind could make out of their dinner and Joe’s night on her couch.
    “If you say so,” Frances said reluctantly, but she still gave Liv the occasional suspicious glance while she b u sied herself setting up the weekly TV section.
    “I do,” Liv told her flatly, and hoped that that was the end of it. She put her story on Marv’s desk well before ten and gathered up her things so that she could drive over to the university and do a story on the string quartet which had come to give a recital and conduct a workshop. It was routine and yet pleasurable, moving about, talking to interesting people, getting a little sun in the process. Soothing, Liv thought, Just what I need after the tumult of last night's interview.
    “Off again?” Frances queried.
    “I’ll be over at the music department at the university,” Liv said, “if anyone needs me.” The kids, she meant.
    “Like Joe Harrington?”
    Liv rolled her eyes. “Of course,” she said airily because Frances had Joe Harrington on the brain. Then a sudden impish grin crossed her face. “If he calls, tell him he still owes me twenty-six more,” she told Frances, laughing.
    Frances’s jaw dropped. “Twenty-six what?”
    “He’ll know,” Liv replied, breezing