Momentarily starstruck, she returned his smile. “Yes. And you’re Jeremy Kane. I’ve been a fan of yours since I was a teenager.”
And then, realizing how her words had sounded, she blushed and stammered, “Not that you’re that much older than I am, of course. I mean, you were very young yourself when you got started.”
Still holding her hand, Jeremy laughed. “I assure you, I took no offense. It’s always a pleasure for me to meet someone who enjoys my work.”
Blake cleared his throat and managed somehow to insert himself between Jeremy and Tara, breaking off their handshake. “How’s the family, Jer?”
Jeremy’s expression was openly speculative as he looked from Blake to Tara and back again. “Gwen and the children are quite well, thank you. They’ll be joining me on tour late next week, when school lets out for the summer.”
“How old are the kids now?”
“Harry is six and Beatrice just turned four. Would you like to see a recent photograph?”
“I would,” Tara said.
Jeremy smiled, waved his fingers, and magically produced a wallet-sized photograph, which he gravely offered to her. She couldn’t help wondering if he always kept it up his sleeve, or wherever it was he’d produced it from.
Smiling in delight at the illusion, she looked at the photograph of Jeremy’s family. Though Jeremy was known for surrounding himself with gorgeous redheads in his act, the woman he’d married had brown hair, a face that was more pretty than classically beautiful, and a smile that looked serene and perhaps a bit shy. The children had inherited their father’s more striking looks, both of them having his dark hair and dark blue eyes. The mischief in the boy’s face and the echoing glimmer in his little sister’s beaming smile made Tara suspect that Jeremy’s wife had her hands full.
“A very nice-looking family,” Tara said as she returned the photograph,
Jeremy looked at it for a moment with love and pride visible in his expression, and then his fingers waved and the photograph vanished. “Perhaps you’ll meet them someday. You would like my wife, I think.”
“I’m sure I would.”
“Jeremy.” A heavily pregnant, auburn-haired woman who might have been a year or two older than Tara appeared from backstage and approached them with a cellular telephone in her hand. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you need to take this call. It’s Mortie.”
Jeremy nodded. “Noelle, you know Blake, of course, and this is his friend, Tara.
Noelle is my personal assistant,” he added by way of explanation for Tara’s benefit. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to make this quick.”
Blake looked at his watch as Jeremy moved away. “Stephanie should be here soon to help you learn what Jeremy wants you to do in the act,” he told Tara. “I have to leave now. I’m meeting someone.”
“We’ll take good care of her, Blake,” Noelle said in her musical voice. “Tara, let me introduce you to Paula and Monica, who are working as Jeremy’s stage assistants on this tour.”
Tara hesitated, looking at Blake. “You’ll be careful?”
He leaned over to kiss her, not seeming to care whether anyone was watching. “I’ll be careful,” he promised. “Have fun, sweetheart. But not too much,” he added with a ferocious scowl in Jeremy’s direction.
Noelle tucked her hand companionably beneath Tara’s arm. “My, my,” she murmured, sounding quite amused as she looked in the direction in which Blake had disappeared. “I’ve known Blake for a long time, and I was beginning to think I would never see that look in his eyes.”
“Er—what look?”
“The one I saw when you were smiling at Jeremy,” Noelle replied with a chuckle. “Blake has most definitely taken the fall—and it’s about time.”
WHEN BLAKE walked back into the theater a few hours later, he found that Tara had been cut neatly in half. Her head was laughing inside a box while her feet wiggled furiously in another box some seven feet away.
“Jeremy,” Blake said with a heavy sigh. “Why is it that every time I leave someone in your safekeeping, you feel compelled to slice’n’dice them?”
Tara giggled, turning her apparently severed head to smile broadly in Blake’s direction. “Look at me, Blake. I’m doing magic!”
“Well, to be more precise, you’re having magic done to you,” Blake said with a chuckle. “You were planning to put her back together, weren’t you, Jer?”
Jeremy smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”
He waved his hand and Paula and Monica, the two redheads currently on tour with him, efficiently brought the two halves of the box back together. With a few dramatic gestures and ceremonies, they lifted the lid and Tara popped out.
“Arms up, Tara,” Jeremy prompted. “The way I showed you before.”