Starstruck by Rachel Shukert Page B

herself, shaking her head.
You’ve got Diana Chesterfield on the brain
.
    “Look out below!”
    Before she could figure out where the shout was coming from, a heavy black telephone came flying out a second-story window, narrowly missing her head as it shattered on the pavement with a deafening crash. On the balcony, just above the silver lettering over the doorway that spelled out
Writers’ Building
, stood a young man, his arm still poised in midair. “Notes, Howard?” the young man shouted, with a mixture of equal parts fury and glee, down at the broken phone. “That’s what I think of your goddamn notes, you
prick
!”
    Even if he hadn’t nearly killed her with a flying telephone, Margaret would have thought he was an extraordinarily curious-looking fellow. His frayed sweater, thick and navy blue, like the kind that sailors wore, hung loosely on his slight frame. Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Margaret thought his eyes were an inky, bottomless black.
    Running his hands through his unruly stack of black hair, he flashed a malevolent grin in Margaret’s direction. “Hang that up for me, will ya, sweetheart?”
    Still in shock, Margaret half lunged toward the splintered receiver when she heard a breathy coo from behind her. “Harry,darling, you
really
must learn to assert yourself if you want to get
anywhere
in Hollywood.”
    The young man, Harry, grinned in response. Margaret couldn’t catch a glimpse of the girl’s face as she slipped past her and up the stairs toward the young man; she saw only a curtain of gleaming red hair sweeping her shoulders and, clad in a tight-fitting black skirt, a backside that Margaret could tell was rather spectacular, even from her limited experience. No sooner had the girl reached the young man than he swept her into a passionate embrace, pressing his body against hers and gazing into her still-hidden face as though she were the only woman in the world.
    Then he swept her into his waiting office and shut the door.
    Now, that
, Margaret thought,
is Hollywood
.

“W hat was
that
all about?” Amanda giggled, when they came up for air.
    Harry Gordon raked his hands down her back, his lips still pressed warmly against the soft skin of her neck. “Oh, that. I think you know.”
    Amanda giggled. “Not
us
, silly. I mean, I don’t know if you noticed, but you just hurled a phone off a balcony. You almost killed that poor terrified blond girl.”
    “Oh,
that
.” Harry pulled away from her, frowning. As he put his thick glasses back on, Amanda studied his face. It wasn’t that Harry was exactly handsome. With his too-crooked nose and too-wild hair, nobody would ever confuse him with a matinee idol. But every time Amanda saw him, she thought she noticed something she’d never seen before. How the third finger on his right hand had a permanently ink-stained callus fromlong hours with the fountain pen. How the tiny mole under his left eye seemed to make it sparkle more brightly than the right. She could look at him forever. “That was just my troglodyte producer.” Harry scowled. “If only we’d done a face-to-face. I could have given him the old defenestration, otherwise known as the Coney Island Special. Solve all my problems in one fell swoop.”
    “What’s he giving you grief about this time?”
    “The Chesterfield picture,” Harry groaned. “
The Nine Days’ Queen
. He’s read the latest draft, and he thinks it’s too depressing when Lady Jane Grey is beheaded for treason. Wants to know if I can have her and the husband make a run for it in the end, or better yet, figure out some way she gets to be Queen of England after all. You know, slap a happy ending on it. Make it peppy.” Harry shook his head in disbelief. “ ‘Can you make it peppier?’ He actually
said
that.”
    “Well … can you?”
    “No, Amanda, I can’t,” Harry replied testily. “You see,
The Nine Days’ Queen
happens to be based on actual historical events, events that I have been