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Nodding, Jared said, “He thinks it’s still too summery for the place to look spooky. Wants that Halloween feel for the show.”
Considering it was only early September, and the days still warmed up to nearly eighty degrees, that was going to be a trick. After Mick said so, Jared continued. “Right. So, to get that autumn look, he decides to paint the tree in the backyard.”
Mick’s jaw dropped. “I get the feeling you’re not talking about a nice watercolor landscape for over your mantel.”
“No.” Jared shook his head. “Gwen came home yesterday and found the tech guys on ladders, spray painting individual leaves yellow and orange.”
Mick raised a hand to his eyes, shaking his head in disbelief. Where else but Hollywood?
“I thought Gwen was going to shoot them. She was furious.”
Gwen was a sweet, beautiful little blonde, but Mick knew from experience that she could be ferocious when protecting someone—orsomething—she cared about. “What happened?”
“Your Caro came to the rescue and smoothed everything out.”
“She’s not Caro. Caro’s pancake syrup.”
“No, Caro’s what you use in pecan pie.”
Mick rolled his eyes. “How the hell do you know that?”
“I like pecan pie,” Jared explained with a shrug. “Hildy makes a very good one.”
Mick ignored the pie reference and went back to Jared’s other ridiculous comment about “his” Caro. “And she’s not mine.”
“Hildy?”
The twinkle in his cousin’s eye said he knew full well who Mick meant. Jared was a wicked tease in his own right. He just preferred to be all serene and conservative while doing it.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
“Only back to the inn, which will soon be accommodating the cast of this insane television program. I can live without being there to see their inglorious arrival.”
The arrival of the cast. Hmm…he wondered how Caroline was going to deal with a bunch of nonacting actors, all hungry for the big cash prize and their shot at fame.
“Funny,” he said as he rose from his desk, “for the first time, it sounds like something that interests me. I think I’ll go up there and check things out.”
CARO HAD NEARLY reached her breaking point and the cast forKilling Time in a Small Townhadn’t even arrived yet.
Between an impossible director, a flamboyant, arrogant, hard-to-please show host, techies incapable of independent thought, an aloof lead camera operator and her own personal hell of living in the same house as Mick Winchester, she felt on the verge of a meltdown. Only Charlie, the on-site tech director, had even tried to be cooperative. Of course, that was because he was a tired old guy who was close to retirement and just didn’t care to argue anymore. But nice was nice. She’d take it.
Overall, things sucked. She’d had one of those back-of-the-head faint headaches for almost two days now and no amount of caffeine or aspirin was making it go away.
“You look like you need a drink.”
Caro glanced up from her cluttered desk inside the cramped on-site production trailer and saw Hildy Compton. The old woman’s outrageous outfit—screaming pink leggings, knee-high boots, and a filmy peasant blouse—gave Caro her first smile of the day. “It’s only 11:00a.m.,” she replied. “But thanks for the thought.”
Hildy shrugged and shut the door to the trailer. “I once knew a Joe who kept a bottle of moonshine in his bathroom to brush his teeth every morning. Said it stuck to them all day and he could lick it when he needed a jolt.”
Caro had already become accustomed to Hildy’s frequent reminiscences about her gangster gal past.
“That Mr. Watson needs more than a drink. He needs estrogen,” Hildy said with a harrumph. “That man’s got some wild mood swings for a fella that old.”
Caro smiled faintly, somehow feeling a little better because of the outrageous old lady. She was right. The director—with whom she’d never before worked and hoped never to again—had had a serious case of PMS ever since Caro had ordered the crew to stop painting leaves on the trees and putting cheap, fake-looking spiderwebs in every room of the inn.
After shoving a stack of folders out of the way, Hildy settled onto the tiny love seat. “So how are you getting along living with that rascal Mick Winchester?”
“Rascal? I don’t know what you mean.”
