Second Chance - 02 - When Dreams Cross Page 12

  “It’s great!” the woman said, straightening her pink headband over her unruly curls. “Wait until he sees it.”

  “He hasn’t seen it?” The anger that she deliberately kept from her voice was apparent in the color rising to her tanned cheeks.

  “No,” Madeline said nonchalantly. “He’s watching one of the Leica reels. You know, checking to make sure the pencil drawings match well with the sound track before they’re inked and—”

  “I know what a Leica reel is,” Andi interrupted.

  Madeline set the statue down and shrugged. “Well, I’ve been taking care of his mail today, trying to help him get caught up on some of the important stuff.”

  “And that includes opening his gifts?”

  “I didn’t know it was personal,” Madeline said, her voice beginning to edge with “sue me” irritation. “It didn’t even have a card.”

  Andi picked up the statue, turned it upside down, and thrust it toward Madeline. “Wrapped gifts are usually personal. And it doesn’t need a card. It’s engraved.”

  Madeline seemed undaunted by the personal touch. Taking it again, with no regard for keeping her fingerprints from smudging it, she read aloud. “‘To Justin, for victories without wars. You win, I win … Love, Andi.’ That’s nice,” she said mildly, handing the statue back to Andi and leaning against Justin’s desk. “Sorry. Guess I goofed. I didn’t know.” The genuinely apologetic look in her eyes softened Andi’s anger a little.

  Andi nodded in reluctant acceptance of the apology and set the figure back down. “So,” she said, pushing back a wisp of hair that had feathered out of her chignon and seeking a new direction for the conversation. “Did you enjoy New York?”

  “It was great,” Madeline enthused. “My first time. I went to the School of Visual Arts and found some new animators who are coming next week to start working with us. And then last night we went everywhere.” Her shoulders rose dreamily with the last word.

  “Celebrating?”

  “Yeah,” Madeline sighed. “Justin took me out to eat at The Russian Tea Room, and then we went to hear some great music—”

  “Where were the others?” Andi cut in, realizing as she spoke that her voice was peppered with jealousy, an emotion she hated worse than any other.

  Madeline crossed her arms defensively and narrowed her eyes at the floor. “We couldn’t find them. Later we learned that Nathan went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle for a special prayer service they were having. And Gene was with one of the new animators.”

  Andi swallowed the knot constricting her throat and tried to think rationally. It wasn’t a surprise. She had known Justin was taking Madeline with him and she had known why. But coming to terms with their involvement was going to take time. It was hard to fight when her opponent didn’t consider her a threat, she thought miserably. Either Madeline was naive or didn’t care that Andi and Justin had spent so much time together before New York. But Andi couldn’t accept it so easily. Though there had been no declarations of love, no kiss, not even many touches except when she’d been distraught. Justin had done nothing that a brother wouldn’t have done. She was the stupid one for reading so much into it.

  Before she could give it more thought, she heard Justin coming through the outside offices, answering questions on his way in and giving mild commands to the employees who scurried efficiently around him. An aura of self-confidence and success radiated from him, though the light blue shirt and tan slacks he wore gave a casual effect to his unself-conscious style. His eyes sparkled with reeling thoughts, but when he stepped into the office and saw Andi, the shutters closed visibly over them, and his cool hello left her feeling shunned and alone.

  “Hi,” she said. When Madeline didn’t make a move to leave, Andi glanced uncomfortably at her, then dragged her eyes back to Justin. “I came to congratulate you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, a cool smile lighting his eyes a degree.

  Clearing her throat, Madeline grinned awkwardly and backed out of the office. “I have work to do. I’ll see you folks later.”

  The obvious way she left the two of them alone bewildered Andi, and she watched her leave in amazement. Was she so secure with Justin that she trusted him completely? The idea was disheartening, for it had been her experience that self-confidence was the best defense against adversity. And if that was the case here, Andi was distressingly unarmed. It might be easier to deal with, Andi thought with chagrin, if she could make herself dislike the woman. But despite her efforts, she couldn’t manage to do even that. “How was your trip?” she asked finally.

  “Great,” Justin said, setting down the papers he held and shuffling them absently on his desk. “Gave me plenty of time to think.”

  From the deliberate way he tried to ignore her, Andi had no doubts that she had been the subject of those thoughts. “Me too,” she said in a hoarse voice, then cleared her throat. “I’ve realized I was a little … short with you before you left, and I shouldn’t have been.”

  “It’s okay,” Justin said, bringing his vacant eyes up to hers. “I won’t let it affect our business relationship.”

  The tone of his voice ranked somewhere between sarcasm and sincerity, and not prepared for such a comment, Andi couldn’t answer. There seemed nothing more to say as they held each other’s gaze across the room. Finally Justin looked down at his desk again.

  “What’s this?” he asked, noticing the small, polished statue on his desk. He picked it up and examined the smooth golden lines of his star character.

  “A gift,” Andi said carefully, waiting for some sign of pleasure in his eyes, but there was none. “I’m afraid Madeline got to it first.”

  At the mention of the dark-haired beauty, Justin broke out in a grin. “Never leave a wrapped gift around Madeline. She can’t stand the suspense, and she’ll find some excuse to open it every time. She’s the same way with secrets, I’m afraid. But she means well.” As he spoke, he unbuttoned his cuffs and began rolling his sleeves up corded forearms, shifting the statue from one hand to the other. “What is it? Solid gold?”

  Andi nodded proudly. It had cost a fortune, but it would be worth it if he would just flash her that smile that would tell her he forgave her for her outburst before his trip.

  A muscle rippled in his jaw. “I’ll pay you back for it,” he said, setting it down. “We can afford to decorate our own offices now.”

  A suffocating lump formed in Andi’s throat and her smile faded. “I don’t want you to pay me back, Justin. It was a gift.”

  “I don’t want your gifts,” he parried, lowering himself into his chair. Then, as if catching his bitterness, he set the kangaroo down and raked a hand through his dark hair.

  “It was for your staff,” she lied quickly, desperate to keep all painful inflections from her voice. “From my staff. I’ll be sure and tell them you appreciate it.”

  The words seemed to change things, yet he studied her with suspicion. “Oh. I thought … Well, in that case I accept. For my staff. I’ll be certain to thank your people for it myself.”

  “Don’t bother,” Andi said, lowering to one of his chairs and crossing her arms, as if somehow that would protect her from any more blows. “It was really no big deal.”

  Justin picked up the statue again, seeming to fondle it with deeper appreciation now that he knew it was impersonal. As he turned it over in his hands, Andi prayed that he wouldn’t see the inscription. Maybe he would never see it. Silently, she lashed herself for making the foolish move, wishing that just this once she had not been so impetuous. “If you have time, I’d like to touch base with you about a few things,” she said, hoping to distract him.

  He set the kangaroo down and leaned back in his seat, bringing his frosted eyes back to hers. “All right,” he said.

  Andi propped her elbows on her knees, desperately trying to relax. “I kept B.J. pretty busy while you were gone. We got a good bit of work done on the designs for the automated figures, and I talked to him about some possible
changes in your settings if you got the network contract. He seemed to like my ideas.”

  Justin bit the inside of his cheek and drummed his fingers on his desk. “I haven’t had time to talk to him much since I’ve been here today. I’ve been in meetings all morning. You mind filling me in?”

  Andi nodded. “I’d like for you to move your characters from the farm setting where you have them to a sort of Promised Land-type setting for both the feature film and the television segments. Your segments could have to do with areas of the park. The Noah’s Ark area, or Jonah’s Ride, or Jacob’s Ladder, or Canaan.”

  Justin leaned back and laid his palms down on his desk. “Andi, I’ve been considering ways to bring Promised Land into my cartoons. But I am the animator. I’m the one who comes up with the ideas. Not you.”

  “Fine,” Andi clipped. “Then talk to me about them. We’re in this together, Justin.”

  Justin tapped the tips of his fingers together, a frown buckling his brows. “I kind of liked the idea of reworking some of your rides so that they fit more into my farm theme. I can’t exactly see Ned the nearsighted farmer trekking up Mt. Sinai.”

  Her feigned composure shattered like crystal. “You want to rework my rides? Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Not to any great extent,” he said, stemming further objections with his hands. “We wouldn’t reverse any of the progress already made on them. But since most of them aren’t finished yet, there’s plenty of room for improvement on the original plans.”

  “Improvement? I have some of the best creative minds in the world helping plan my park. It would be easier to change the cartoons.”

  “Forget it,” Justin snapped. “If it doesn’t fit my story line, I won’t even consider it.”

  “That isn’t what B.J. said,” Andi flung back. “He and the others have already come up with ideas for the stories.”

  Justin dropped his hands with a loud thud. “Who gave you the right to give assignments to my staff? I don’t like being undermined. I’m the animation director here, not B.J. They’re my characters, and I make the decisions.”

  Andi’s voice flared louder than she expected. “You gave me the right when you told me that B.J. could make decisions for you while you were gone.”

  Justin sprang out of his chair and slammed it back against his desk. “I didn’t know you’d go behind my back and try to rewrite the scripts for me. There’s timing to consider, and the possibilities for gags, and the potential for a different story each week without overdoing the same old things. You think just because you dreamed up Promised Land that you can come in here and do the same thing with my cartoons? Forget it! I’d rather let you sue me!”

  Andi stood up and cast a murderous stare at the man across the desk. “I might just have to do that if you don’t stop attacking me every time I approach you with an idea! There are decisions that have to be made immediately. Like how to handle the advertising for the park. Are your characters going to be associated with that or not? And the cartoon that coincides with our opening. Since I’m paying for that, I expect to be in on the planning stages. That’s how I work, Justin! Like it or not. And we can make it as easy or as difficult as we want to. But as long as we keep butting heads, neither of us will make any headway, and we’ll have to give up on this merger as a bad idea.”

  Justin sucked in a dramatic breath. “Do you think there’s really hope of that?”

  For lack of anything else to lash out at, Andi knocked her chair over with a crash and pointed a shaking finger at him. “There’s always hope,” she seethed. “But if I were you I’d think about it for a while! And when you think you’re ready to sit down and discuss this reasonably without blowing a fuse every time you disagree with me, then you know where to find me!”

  The door slammed behind her, leaving Justin fuming with impotent rage. After a moment, he stepped out into the open area of his offices and thundered out Madeline’s name, ordering her to gather his senior animators for a conference. “I’ll come up with some ideas all right,” he mumbled, jerking the chair off the floor and setting it upright with a clatter. “But I won’t need Andi Sherman to help me do it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was past midnight when the exhausted animators convinced Justin to sleep on the ideas they’d formulated. Gene was stretched catatonically across the table that was cluttered and stacked with discarded drawings, and B.J. sat humped over the drafting table in the corner of Justin’s office. Madeline, the only one still awake, had gone to check on some of the things the engineers needed to know about the robot designs before morning. Nathan was half asleep sitting on the floor, his head leaned back against the wall, a mountain of crumpled paper covering the carpet around him. But Justin still paced in front of his desk, studying the drawings laid out across it, searching them for flaws.

  Perfect, he thought, adrenaline rushing through his blood, making it even more unbelievable to him that the others could have dropped out on him like this. They’d found a way to incorporate all the different themes of Andi’s park into his stories, and the kickoff cartoon on ABC that would coincide with the park’s opening would be an international invitation to Promised Land. He’d discovered a way to have the characters still live on their eventful farm, but instead of making Ned simply a nearsighted farmer bumbling around his own farm, they would send him through time warps in which he experienced real biblical stories in his klutzy, slapstick way, getting him into trouble from which his farm animals had to rescue him. Khaki Kangaroo would be his sidekick, stirring up more trouble and getting them into the thick of all of the greatest events of the Bible. Their travels could take them to other countries, leading to adventures related to Promised Land’s “Hands Across the Sea” area; or other planets, relating to the “He Also Made the Stars” portion; or to oceans, associating the cartoons with the Jonah and Nineveh sections of the park. The adventures were limitless, and the basic gags and story lines would require very little alteration, since the villainous troll would be swept into the travels with them in each episode, representing the ever-present Satan tugging them toward his own ways. The potential for evangelism was limitless, and he could even see parents watching the cartoons with their children and learning growth principles about their own walk with Christ. Principles he would do well to learn himself, he mused.

  Biting his victorious smile, Justin began to stack the drawings. “You guys go on home,” he said absently as he slid them into an envelope. “I’m going to put these on Andi’s secretary’s desk. She’ll hit her with them first thing tomorrow.” Caught in his thoughts and exuberance, he didn’t realize as he hurried across the floor that not one of the animators had stirred.

  Andi sat with her bare feet curled under her on her office sofa, studying her father’s Bible that lay open in her lap. She had done it again. She had let her pride drive her, had forgotten all the regrets and apologies … Once again, she had allowed them to become enemies.

  She’d knocked off work hours ago, since she didn’t have the heart for it, and had decided to spend some time in prayer. She had wept and confessed it all to God—all the jealousy and pride, all the lies and games she had played with Justin, all the bad feelings and bitterness, all the sorrow and hopelessness.

  And she had confessed that she still hadn’t gotten into step with Christ, even though she had seen that it was the problem. She had put her work before him, and she had let her obsessions with Justin distract her.

  So now she had gone back to the Bible, the only source from which she could get real strength, the only place she could go for real advice. As she read, a peace came over her. God had forgiven her. It wasn’t too late to get things right.

  She could have taken the Bible home to read, but she had decided to do it here.

  She wasn’t tired, and lately she’d avoided her apartment until she was too exhausted to think. Life had been disturbingly empty since her father’s death and Justin’s trip to New York. There had been no directio
n for her, no place to go after hours. She missed her father desperately, as well as the bland hospital food and her quiet friendships with the nurses and doctors who had attended him. She missed the few days she had spent with Justin, the supportive smiles, the gentle touches. And she knew she would never know those things again.

  A shadow in the area outside her office startled her, and she sat up, alarmed, as the dark shape of a man came into view.

  “We’re suffering from the same disease,” Justin mumbled in a gravelly voice, making her exhale in relief as he stepped into her yellow circle of light. In a weary stance, he leaned his wrist against the doorjamb over his head and set the hand with the envelope on his hip, but his eyes were bright and wide-awake.

  “What disease is that?” she asked, trying to stop the smile creeping across her face as she sensed gratefully that he had put the morning’s fight behind him.

  “Workaholism.” Stepping inside, he plopped down on the opposite end of the sofa and threw his arm across the back. “I didn’t think it was possible that anyone else could be working this late, and here you are.”

  Andi sighed and set her Bible on the cushions between them. “I just can’t seem to turn off my mind and go home. Is it that way for you?”

  “You know it is,” he whispered, raking his hand through his hair, his blue eyes beginning to smile in answer. His eyes swept over her, and her hand gravitated self-consciously to her hair. It was still up, but stray wisps had eased out of their pins and feathered around her neck and face in slight disarray.

  Their eyes locked for a long, quiet moment, and finally Justin tore his eyes from her and looked down at the envelope he’d brought. “I’ve been working on this,” he said in his lazy baritone. “I think we’ve come up with something you’ll like, but it can wait until morning if you’re too tired. I was just coming to leave it on your secretary’s desk.”

  As if she’d just been tempted with a gift, her smile grew with anticipation, and she leaned forward to get it.