One Night With You by Candace Schuler Read Free Book Online Page B

usual tripe about who was sleeping with whom and what names were on their way up or down. She had been more or less out of touch for—what?—almost four months now. Four months was a long time in the movie business. Anything could have happened. She sat up and reached for the phone.
    "Sherry-Netherland Hotel," announced the voice on the other end of the telephone wire. "May I help you?"
    "Eldin Prince, please." Desi twisted the telephone cord nervously. "I don't know his room number."
    Teddie poked his head around the bedroom door while she was on hold. "I've put Stephanie down for her nap," he said, and backed out as Desi silently mouthed her thanks.
    "I'm sorry. Mr. Prince's room doesn't answer. May I take a message?"
    "Yes, please. Tell him Desi...." She paused, glancing down at her watch. It was almost two-thirty, which made it almost five-thirty on the east coast. "Could you page the bar for me, please?" she asked the operator. Eldin never missed the cocktail hour. It was, he said frequently, the most civilized part of the day.
    "Damn you, Eldin," she swore without heat when he came on the line. "How could you leave a message like—"
    "Ah, Desi, luv," he interrupted smoothly. "How nice to hear your lovely voice. How's our little mother doing?"
    "I'm doing just fine, thanks. Eldin—"
    "And the baby? He's well?"
    "She. Yes, Stephanie's fine, too. Now what does this message—"
    "She. Yes, of course. How forgetful of me. You did send me a picture, didn't you?" he rambled on. He knew she was dying to know about this big new project of his. "Couldn't tell much from a photograph, though," he continued. "All eyes and no hair to speak of. Could have been a boy, if you ask me."
    "Well, I didn't ask you," she retorted, stung by his last remark. Stephanie was very obviously a girl. "And she does, too, have hair. It's red."
    "Another redhead for the world. How nice," he said with a sigh, and Desi could almost see his clipped gray mustache quiver as he did it. "Stephanie did you say her name was? Rather an unusual name, that. Goes well with Weston, though. Good theatrical sound to it."
    Something in his voice changed, alerting her. Stephanie wasn't an unusual name at all and he knew it. Eldin was fishing for something.
    "I imagine that's why you picked it?" His voice rose on the last word, making it a question.
    "I picked it because I like it," she said, shrugging carelessly as if he could see her through the telephone wires. "No special reason."
    There was a special reason, though. Stephen was Jake's middle name. She had looked it up. Jacob Stephen Lancing, the father of her child. It had seemed a safe way, at the time, of forging a link, however small and invisible, between father and child. But now she wasn't so sure. Eldin was not the first person who had tried to make something significant out of Stephanie's name.
    Teddie and Larry had openly speculated about every man named Stephen that they, or she, knew even remotely. And Court had hinted about a boy named Steve that she had dated once in high school, wondering out loud whether she'd seen him lately.
    Everyone, it seemed, was trying to figure out who her baby's father was.
    Well, let them try , she thought rebelliously, fire in her big blue eyes. She wasn't telling.
    "About this big job, Eldin," she tried again to change the subject, "what—"
    "They're making a movie out of Devil's Lady ." He announced it in a whisper, as if he didn't want anyone else to overhear them.
    Desi lowered her voice automatically. " Devil's Lady ? But that's..." Words failed her. Devil's Lady had been a blockbusting bestseller, a first novel by an unknown author. A stereotypical, grandmotherly little lady of eighty-odd years, as it turned out, who had written the most torrid bestseller of the year. Every major studio was after the movie rights, but so far as Desi knew Dorothea Heller wasn't selling.
    Desi had seen her just last week on the "Late Show." A proud and proper-looking woman, the kind