"They didn't make him finish the picture first?"

Gabby rolled her eyes. "Like I said, it was last-minute. And besides, it seems he's got some clause in his contract that says he can take off whenever he gets a live gig in a theater of a specific size. Addendum 'Music Comes First.' " She snorted. "G.o.d only knows how he swung that. I never could. He's never even been in a picture before." She shook her head furiously, her dark brown curls bobbing from side to side. "d.a.m.n men! They let each other do whatever they want. Meantime, if I gain so much as a pound over my contract weight, the studio is fully within its rights to tar and feather me and ride me down the middle of North Crescent on a rail."

Margo gave Gabby's arm a squeeze, although inside she was dying of jealousy. G.o.d, what I wouldn't give to have a picture to worry about. "I'm sure he'll be back soon."

"Yeah. He better be." Lifting her big brown eyes back to Margo's, Gabby gave a strange little laugh. "Anyway, in the meantime, here I am, your friendly real estate know-nothing. Honestly, Margo, I don't know the first thing about houses, or architects, or what you're supposed to look for, or what it's all supposed to cost. If it's got a roof and an indoor toilet, it all seems fine to me."

Margo laughed. "You should go live with Dane, then. The two of you will get along just fine."

"Don't go putting ideas in my head." Gabby looked at her carefully. "Still, it's too bad he couldn't come today. I mean, it's going to be his house too, isn't it?"

Theoretically. "Well, like I said, he's not too particular about this sort of thing," she said airily, waving her hands as though to swat away Gabby's questions before they were even asked. "And besides, he's got reshoots on that Western picture they loaned him to Metro for, and wardrobe for the mountaineering thing he's supposed to start right after the honeymoon. And with the wedding next week already, he's just got so much to do." She bit her lip. "I know he'd have come if he could." Right?

"Right," Gabby said, as though she could hear Margo's thoughts. "I'm sure."

They had finally reached the end of the corridor. Miss Perkins unlocked a pair of immense walnut doors. "Voila," she said. "The master suite."

Suite? More like a wing. Growing up in Pasadena, and now moving among the upper echelons of Hollywood, Margo had seen more than her fair share of lavish homes, but she'd never seen private quarters quite like this. Miss Perkins led them through a series of rooms that, judging from the dark wood finishes and rich, aromatic leather covering the walls, seemed meant for the man of the house: a sitting room, a library with a full bar built into the rolltop desk, a circular dressing room with an old-fashioned bellpull for the valet and a custom-built suit rack that rotated mechanically at the touch of a b.u.t.ton.

"Yeah, it's nice," Gabby said as Miss Perkins was showing them the breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean that was visible even from the gentleman's bed, "but I don't see the point of separate bedrooms. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, you know what I mean?"

Margo understood, even without Gabby's knowing wink, but the second they exited what Miss Perkins kept ostentatiously referring to as "the master's quarters" and entered "the mistress's," the separation made perfect sense.

The main bedroom was, quite simply, the most elegant, most feminine, most downright beautiful room Margo had ever seen. The gently curved walls were papered a gorgeous shade of robin's-egg blue, embossed with delicately drawn fronds in silver and pale gold. The round bed, covered in tufted lavender satin, was set against an iridescent headboard made to look like an open oyster sh.e.l.l. The chandelier-if you could call something of its splendor by so mundane a word-was made of thousands of ropes of gleaming pearls that stretched across the ceiling like a canopy. Unlike the hard reflective dazzle of crystals, the pearls seemed to absorb the light, casting a rosy, dreamlike glow over the entire room. Margo imagined lying in bed in the half darkness, looking up at them through heavy-lidded eyes as Dane lay beside her, took her in his arms, kissed her. ...

"Drat!" Miss Perkins exclaimed, her composure rattled by the stubborn lock on an adjoining door. "The boudoir is right through here, but I don't seem to have the right key."

"It's okay," Margo said, almost relieved to be shaken out of a daydream that she had no business dreaming in public. "I don't need to see it."

"Oh, believe me, you do. If you think this bedroom is to die for, just wait until you see the bath. The right key has to be around here someplace. You don't mind if I go and make a phone call, do you?"

"Not at all."

Miss Perkins bustled out of the room, the plush carpeting mercifully m.u.f.fling the click of her heels. Gabby sidled up alongside Margo, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. "You were thinking about getting Dane in here, weren't you?"

"What?" Margo felt her face flush. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, Margie, come on. You can't fool me. I saw the look on your face right now, looking at that bed. You can't wait to see how that gorgeous husband-to-be of yours looks in it."

Giggling, Gabby flopped down on the satin comforter. She sounds like her old self, Margo thought. It was at times like this, when Gabby reverted to the funny, bubbly, instantly confiding girl who had made her feel so at home in her first lonely weeks at the studio, that Margo remembered why they had become friends in the first place. Before the Charles Darwin survival-of-the-fittest dogfight that was life on the Olympus lot had divided them.

Well, I guess she can afford to be nice now. Gabby's star was on the rise, and Margo's, which last year had blazed bright enough to blind, was beginning to fade. She'll be Gabby Preston and win her own Oscars. I'll be Mrs. Dane Forrest and get to stand around and look at his. Somehow, it didn't seem like a very fair trade.

"Believe me, I don't blame you," Gabby continued, curling her knees to her chest. "It's so amazing, isn't it? I mean, once you do it once, you just want to do it all the time. To be perfectly honest, I don't see how anyone gets anything else done."

"Gabby Preston." A realization woefully late in coming began to creep over Margo. "You don't mean ..."

Gabby wore the satisfied grin of a cat that had just licked up every last drop of the cream. If she were wearing any b.u.t.tons, she'd burst them. "Eddie," she breathed, wrapping her arms tightly around her chest, her eyes shining. "Eddie and me. We did it. I went all the way with Eddie."

Of course, Margo thought irritably. Of course she did. I'm not stupid. Why am I always so slow on the uptake?

"Wow," Margo said, with almost exactly the same inflection with which she had acknowledged the dubious splendor of the Egyptian ballroom. Gingerly, she sat down beside Gabby on the oyster bed. "Wow."

" 'Wow'? Is that all?" Gabby was practically jumping out of her skin with excitement. "Don't you want to hear how it was?"

"It seems like you want to tell me."

"Of course I do!" Gabby squealed, s.n.a.t.c.hing up a sh.e.l.l-shaped pillow and clutching it to her chest. "Telling's the best part. Well"-she grinned sheepishly-"maybe not quite the best part. But a good part."

Margo smiled weakly. "Then I guess you better tell me."

"Well, it was all very spontaneous. Unplanned. I mean, I planned it"-Gabby wrinkled her pert nose prettily-"but not like this. I mean, I'd imagined I'd surprise him. I'd book some fancy suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel-"

"Not the Chateau?"

"Nah, something about that place makes me feel dirty." Gabby shivered. "Like you could murder someone and the chambermaids would just scoop the body into the incinerator, no questions asked. Besides, Larry Julius has practically the entire lobby staff on his payroll. All those newsreels about those men in the trench coats spying on everybody in Germany? Jeez Louise, they oughta hire him."

"I don't think Hitler pays quite as well as Leo Karp," Margo said tersely. It seemed churlish to point out that Larry lacked the specific, should one say, ethnic qualities the n.a.z.i regime required in their minions.

"Well, anyway, I prefer the Beverly Hills. It's cla.s.sier. So I had it all planned, how it would happen. I mean, since Eddie seemed like he was never going to make the first move. I thought I'd rent myself one of those fancy suites by the pool, maybe even a bungalow. Then I'd call him up and invite him to a drinks party, something that seemed like an occasion, so he'd be dressed up and looking nice. And then, when he got there, whoops! There's n.o.body else there. Like that trick Diana Chesterfield pulled in that picture she made for Metro, with Robert Montgomery-"

"Move Over, Darling," Margo replied instantly.

"Yes! Where she invites him to her room at the Plaza and gives him a gla.s.s of champagne and says, 'Oh, I'm terribly sorry. ... ' "

" 'The party is just you and me,' " Margo finished along with Gabby, mimicking Diana's breathy murmur. G.o.d! She and her old friend Doris had seen Move Over, Darling at least four times during the two weeks it had played the Pasadena Rialto, and then sat at the soda fountain practicing talking with drinking straws clamped between their teeth, the way Diana did with her tortoisesh.e.l.l cigarette holder in the picture.

"And now she's in your wedding," Gabby said, as though once again she could read Margo's mind. "Funny how life works, isn't it?"

"Keep telling me about Eddie," Margo said, eager to change the subject. "You said he's in New York for a gig?"

"If you can call playing the Palace a gig," Gabby said proudly. "It's kind of like calling that diamond mine on your finger a ring. But like I said, it happened all of a sudden. It was Friday night. He was supposed to pick me up at Jimmy's bungalow at the Chateau to take me out, but he showed up at my house instead, hours early, and said it was important. He had to see me."

Her eyes took on a dreamy, faraway look. "He was supposed to catch the train that night, see, and he just couldn't go without saying goodbye. Well, Viola pitched a fit, as you can imagine. Gave me that whole over-my-dead-body, not-while-you're-under-my-roof song-and-dance. Mothers!" She rolled her eyes. "Can't live with 'em, can't be born without 'em. But she got it back this time, and good. Maybe it's these new pills I'm taking, or maybe it was having Eddie there. Maybe it was divine inspiration, who knows? But I told her as long as I'm paying, she's under my roof, and from now on, I'm going to do whatever I want and go wherever I want with whoever I want. And if she doesn't like it, then she can just go and find some other little singing and dancing meal ticket to exploit."

"Wow," Margo said dumbly once again. I wonder what'll happen when Mr. Karp gets wind of that.

"Wow's right," Gabby said with a proud nod. "So Eddie and I beat it, and we went for a drive in the Hills. He pulled over into this secluded spot, and that's when he told me how he was going to New York, and he'd be gone for a month at least, and well"-she looked up with a naughty grin-"I guessed I'd better give him something to remember me by."

"Gabby!" Margo's hand flew to cover her open mouth. "You mean ... right in the car?"

"Yeah, like I said, it wasn't exactly what I'd been imagining. But still, it was awfully romantic in its way." Gabby's eyes were dreamy again. "We were up so high, n.o.body could see us, but we could see the whole city spread out in front of us. Like we were up in heaven or something. We were in a grove of cypress trees that smelled so good, and there was a cool breeze coming through the windows. Besides," she added quickly, recovering from her brief, uncharacteristic lapse into poetry, "Eddie's got one of those huge new model Lincolns. The backseat is practically as big as a double bed."

"Yes," Margo said, "but didn't it make an awful mess?"

Gabby frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well, with, you know, the blood, or ..." Margo trailed off.

"There wasn't any blood."

"There wasn't?"

"No. But I wasn't really expecting there to be. Amanda says it's a myth, about the bleeding. She says hardly anyone does."

"Well, I guess she would know."

Gabby shrugged. "It's not just Amanda. Pretty much everybody says that."

"Everybody?"

"Well, Dr. Lipkin, at least. I went to him a while back to see about getting fitted for one of those-whaddaya call it-that thing you can use-"

"A pessary," Margo said quietly, her cheeks burning with embarra.s.sment. She might have recovered from most of the psychological injuries inflicted on her by the Orange Grove Academy for Young Ladies, but the scars never throbbed so hard than when she was discussing matters like this. If only this were a real oyster sh.e.l.l, she thought, I could push Gabby out and slam the whole thing shut. It seemed a more attractive alternative to the usual wanting to crawl into a hole to die.

"A pessary?" Gabby shook her hand. "No, I don't think that's right. Isn't that some kind of weird Australian bird?"

"You're thinking of a ca.s.sowary."

"Oh. Well, whatever it's called, he wouldn't let me have one. Said he didn't think it was moral for a girl in my situation, and I didn't want to press, for fear he'd go and blab the whole thing to Karp. But you have to have an examination, and he told me not to worry. That when the time came-when I got married, that is"-Gabby scoffed-"that it wouldn't hurt a bit." Her eyes glinted bitterly. "Remind me to thank that monster Tully Toynbee the next time I see him, will ya? Turns out he was good for something after all."

"What?" Margo asked mystified.

"All that dance rehearsal," Gabby said knowingly. "It makes things ... you know, stretch down there."

"Oh. I see."

"Maybe you should have tried it," Gabby said cheerfully. "But I guess it's too late now."

"Too late?"

"Well, did you bleed an awful lot your first time with Dane? I mean, I'm a.s.suming it was with Dane."

"Oh." Margo said again, paying very close attention to the complicated curlicues she was tracing on the bedspread with her finger. "I guess I ... I don't remember."

"Don't remember?" Gabby cried. "How is that possible? The whole thing was pretty d.a.m.n memorable, if you ask me. Unless you were really, really drunk. Or ..." Suddenly, she clapped her hands over her mouth.

"Or what?"

"Oh my G.o.d. Oh my G.o.d. You haven't, have you?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

"You haven't done it yet." Gabby's eyes, always as wide as saucers, seemed to have grown to the size of dinner plates. "You and Dane haven't done it. You're still a virgin."

"No!" Margo exclaimed. "We have! Only ... I mean ... we just ..."

Gabby leaned forward. "You just what?"

If it was possible to die of embarra.s.sment, I'd be dead already, Margo reasoned, although she took significantly less comfort than one might have expected from this demonstrably true fact. "We did. At least, I think we did. Sort of. But it didn't ... it didn't go very well."

That was all it took. If there was one thing Margo knew about Gabby Preston, it was that she took to the scent of trouble like a bloodhound on a trail. "What does that mean? Can't Dane ..."

"No, no, Dane is just fine in that ... in that department." Margo sighed. Did she really want to talk about this with Gabby? Did it matter? The door was open, and Gabby was going to charge through it whether she invited her in or not. "It's just ... well, we tried one time, and it was just so hard, and it hurt so much ... I guess I've just been too scared to do it again."

"Margo," Gabby said urgently, grabbing her arms. "You have to."

"I know." Margo looked back down at the bedspread, tracing her initials with her index finger. M.F.: Margaret Frobisher, her real name. She wiped them away as though the flat of her hand were a chalkboard eraser. "I know. But it's just ... well, I didn't think it would be like that. That it would hurt that much. I mean, I don't know if it even really happened. If I'm still a virgin or not. Dane says ..."

"What does Dane say?"

"Never mind." Margo colored. "It's just ... I didn't think it was supposed to be like that, Gabby. What if there ... what if there's something wrong with me?"

"You're going to go to Dr. Lipkin first thing in the morning," Gabby said firmly, "and you're going to have an examination. You're getting married, so it doesn't matter what he tells Karp. He'll take care of whatever it is. He can give you pills for the pain, muscle relaxants, whatever, so you won't feel a thing. Or sometimes ..." She bit her lip. "Sometimes they can do sort of a little surgery, I guess. Right there, right in the office. There was this girl, Thelma, who had a tap act back when I was playing the Chicago Theater. She was awful young, maybe sixteen, seventeen, and she was going out with this wiseguy, one of those old bootlegger types. Well, it turned out she had kinda the same problem you have, I guess, and believe me, those Sicilian guys from the Outfit aren't inclined to be quite as understanding as someone like Dane Forrest. So she went to this doctor on the South Side, and he did a little bit of something in his office, I don't know what, and voila! The next time I saw her she was wearing a silver fox, and she said the whole thing took fifteen minutes and hurt about as much as a paper cut."

"Really? And what happened to her?"

"Oh, last I heard she wound up dead," Gabby said airily. "Two bullets through the head in a car trunk. But that's what happens when you get mixed up with guys like that; it's nothing you have to worry about, Margo. The point is, you have to get this taken care of, and quick. Otherwise, Dane is going to start looking for comfort elsewhere, if he hasn't already."

"Dane is just fine," Margo said hotly. "There's plenty of things you can do that aren't ... that aren't that."

"But it all comes down to that, doesn't it?" Gabby asked. She sounded almost sad. "You've got to be realistic. You can barely expect a man like Dane to be faithful as it is. Don't look at me like that, you know it's true. What's he filming now, some Western?" Margo nodded. "Well, no matter how much he loves you-and I'm not saying he doesn't-every morning when he gets onto the set there's about a hundred gorgeous dames in saloon girl outfits who would give their eyeteeth to lure him behind a piece of scenery for a coupla sweaty minutes. And that's just the extras. When it comes to the leading ladies, that's a whole other ball of wax. You can't be in every picture with him. And the thing about pretending to be madly in love with someone five days a week, eight hours a day is that it can start to feel awfully close to the real deal."

And I know that better than anyone. Margo shivered, remembering her first screen test, when Dane's unexpected appearance had saved her from certain disaster as surely as if he'd ridden in on a white horse. The corny love scene they'd played had felt so real, the trite dialogue so imbued with genuine emotion, that it had cast a spell over her that lingered to this day. It was the moment Dane had gone from an untouchable idol with his picture hanging on her wall to a real living, breathing man she knew she had to have. I can't lose him, she thought. Not now. "So what do you think I should do?"

"I just told you," Gabby said. "Get it worked out." She shook her head from side to side, her dark ringlets bobbing prettily against her flushed cheeks. "I have to tell you, Margie, I'm still kind of in shock. I mean, everyone knows you'd been practically living together till the studio put the kibosh on it. I figured you must have been doing it all over the place."

"Gabby." There was something eating away at Margo, something she had to know. "If I ask you something, will you promise to tell me the absolute truth?"

"Sure. If I can."

I guess that has to be good enough. Margo steeled herself with a deep breath. "Was there anything to that gossip item about Dane and Amanda? Do you honestly think there's anything between them?"

Gabby leaned back against one of the sh.e.l.l-shaped pillows, looking thoughtful. "No," she said finally. "I don't think there is. They're old friends, I know that. And Amanda's never said anything to me, but I can't promise there isn't some history there. Two people who look like they do, how can there not be? But now? No. Besides, that girl is still so hung up on Harry Gordon it's almost funny. When she was staying with Viola and me, she used to lock herself in her bedroom every night and cry herself to sleep. I know she may look like bad news, but believe me, Amanda Farraday is a one-man woman." She chewed her lip. "I'd keep an eye out for Diana Chesterfield, though."

It was all Margo could do not to make her whole body recoil at the thought. "Why do you say that?"

"Oh, I don't think she's after him, exactly. In fact, there was always something a little fishy about that love affair, if you ask me. A little too perfect, you know what I mean?"

Oh boy, do I. "I guess so."

"But she did seem to make herself awfully comfortable at the bridal shop," Gabby continued. "It's like she's the first runner-up at the Miss America pageant. If for some reason you are unable to fulfill your duties ..."

"No," Margo said. "Dane would never. Not after everything that's happened." And not least, she thought, because Diana is his sister.

"If you say so. Maybe you should talk to her, though."

"About what?"