But instead, Leah could hardly concentrate, because she kept looking at Michael across the way standing with the other T.A. guys, or laughing and smiling at some women, wondering why he hadn’t tried to talk to her or at least try and apologize since they had come down off the mountain, as she had begun to think of it.
He should have at least had the courtesy to explain it all to her. She had spent a harrowing night and day in the company of an international terrorist—perhaps not a very good one, but a terrorist nonetheless—and she deserved an explanation. If the roles had been reversed, and she had been in Michael’s shoes, she would have at least apologized to him for his having suffered through it. And she definitely would have owned up to the issues between them, but nooo, Michael did nothing like that. Quite the contrary—he seemed to be avoiding her. Avoiding her! As if she was the problem. It infuriated her—she’d been through the greatest trauma of her life, no thanks to him, and he was treating her like she had the plague.
Damn him. Damn Michael J. Raney anyway!
She was so infuriated that when the director yelled Places for the first take, she scarcely heard him, and therefore, missed her cue, started late, and ended up crashing into one of the Serious Actresses and muffing the stunt. Even worse, the Serious Actress took great offense to it and managed to elbow Leah in the ribs hard enough to knock her down before Harry called cut.
The T.A. guys trotted out to have a chat with the women who didn’t get their stunts exactly right, and lucky her, it was Michael who appeared at Leah’s side, his big hand on her elbow, pulling her up.
“Okay,” he said, all businesslike, as if they had never been anything more than a trainer with his soccer mom trainee, “you remember the drills we did in boot camp? You want to do a one, two, and then a big leap to time the contact just right.”
“I know,” Leah said, shaking his hand off her elbow.
“Good. Then you ought to get it this take. No problem, right?”
“Yes. I will get it right,” she said sharply.
Michael looked at her, his expression maddeningly calm and infuriatingly kind.
“Is there anything else?” she asked, her voice dripping with ice.
“Not unless you have a question,” he said as the director yelled for everyone to take her place.
“Nope. No questions. It’s all pretty clear to me,” she said, nodding emphatically.
“Great,” he said, and turned on his heel and walked off. Just like that. Just like nothing had happened.
Leah was still fuming when the second take was set into action, and took two huge enviable Superman strides. So huge, in fact, that she almost overran her target, colliding with the Serious Actress who had elbowed her, and spinning the woman around and into the bushes exactly as she was supposed to do. Perhaps a little too forcefully, but correctly nonetheless. When the director yelled cut, Leah high-fived Jamie and did a rooster strut off the battlefield.
By the end of the day, they had the first battle scene in the can. And Leah had not required any more instruction from the Extreme Bachelor, which was a good thing, as he and Nicole were sitting under the awning yucking it up.
This was it, she figured. He was done with her, moving on to the next conquest—not that anyone working this film thought that Nicole was any sort of conquest. But it was just exactly what she’d feared before the Adolfo–Juan Carlo thing, that he would eventually move on to the next woman, because that is what Extreme Bachelors do for a living.
“Good,” she muttered to herself. “Good riddance.” She stalked off in the direction of Trudy, who she knew would have something fun planned to take her mind off the extreme bastard.
Trudy did have something fun planned: an outing to Wal-Mart.
FORTUNATELY the shooting schedule was so intense that the next few days flew by, and Leah had very few opportunities to even see Michael. Most of the time he was holed up with the T.A. guys, making last-minute changes to the stunt choreography. But sometimes she’d catch him talking to another woman, always in a deep conversation that made him smile beautifully, and that made the skin around his eyes crease in the way she loved.
But it wasn’t until the last day of filming for her that she actually ran into him—literally, as it turned out. The director told them to take ten, and Leah was jogging back to the catering tent when she turned to shout at Trudy to keep her paint gun. That was when she collided with Michael, who had stepped into her path. He caught her by the arms and set her back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, straightening her camouflage jacket. “Sorry.”
“No problem. So listen, we were watching the last take, and we think you need to adjust a little to the left,” he said, pointing to a line of fake trees. “What we want is for you to run and hit dirt right in front of that stand of trees, do the tuck and roll, and come up firing at Mary.”
“Mary,” she said.
“Right. Skinny brunette.”
“I know who Mary is.”