Read Online Starstruck by Anne McAllister - Free Book Online Page B

until two days ago. Next thing you know I'll be reading movie magazines, she thought as she scorched her good ivory blouse and decided that she’d better stop ironing before she burned the house down.
    It was a delayed reaction to being exposed to a celebrity, she decided. But that was absurd because she’d met former President Carter, Robert Redford and Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the course of her work, too, and none of them had caused her to forget the sevens multiplication table or bu rn her blouse.
    “Phone, Mom,” Ben hollered.
    “Is this the old woman in the shoe?” Joe’s voice asked when she answered.
    “You!”
    “You were expecting maybe Warren Beatty?”
    “I was expecting the termite exterminator,” she said, heart aflutter.
    “Disappointed?”
    “Not very,” she admitted. “He has at least as many children as I do.”
    “God save us,” she heard Joe mutter.
    “What do you want?”
    “To talk to you.”
    “About what?”
    “That’s what I like about you. You’re so direct, so straightforward.” He was grinning, she could tell. “What did you do today?” he asked.
    Burned a blouse, tied my typewriter ribbon in knots, thought of you, ruined Stephen’s math homework, spelled “through” five different ways in one seve n-inch story, thought of you… “Not much,” she said. “Is that why you called?”
    “Partly. And partly to tell you the weather in Hawaii is rotten, the surf stinks, the girls are ugly—”
    “And you just wanted me to know that?” Liv felt laughter rising within her.
    “Sure,” he said simply. “Tell me about Noel’s ball game. Did he get a hit?”
    She was more than a little surprised that he even knew about it, and said so.
    “Of course I know. Remember, we talked about it at dinner, over the chicken-and-rice casserole.”
    Liv remembered kisses at dinner and little else, but she stammered, “Oh, yes, er, well, his team did win. He got a triple, I think.”
    “You think ?” Joe sounded horrified. “Don’t you know? Ah, well—” his tone turned philosophical “—my mother never knew how well I did either. Or when I struck out.”
    Liv thought that Joe Harrington’s even having a mother was novel. She hadn’t considered him as a part of a family, somehow. It made him seem far too human. “So what did you do today?” she asked brightly, keeping such thoughts at bay.
    He told her about a marvelous reception at the airport in Oahu and about the fabulous luncheon he had attended.
    “I thought you never ate,” she said. “I thought you gave the speeches while other people ate.”
    “I’m learning to survive on flattery and the smell of food alone,” he told her. “I’ll be nothing but skin and bones by the time you see me again.”
    With a blonde on your arm, in some weekly gossip magazine, Liv thought with a grimness that surprised even her. “Poor guy,” she commiserated. “Want me to send you a care package?”
    “Only if you’re in it.”
    “Joe!” But she knew he was only teasing, and anyway, the threat no longer existed. He was thousands of miles away and her chances of seeing him again, other than in two-dimensional black and white or living color, were virtually nil.
    “Tim’s banging on the door,” he said then, and she heard him put his hand over the receiver and shout, “Come in.” Then he said. “I have to go. I’ll call again.” And he was gone.
    She never did figure out what the purpose of the call was. But it effectively brightened her mood for the rest of the evening. She hummed her way through folding the laundry and even managed to be pleasant to Tom when he called to say there was absolutely no way he could take Noel and Ben waterskiing that weekend as he had promised.
    Joe’s calls kept coming. Not always in the evening. At odd moments throughout the day or night the phone would ring and it would be Joe. They would talk for fifteen or twenty minutes—usually just the banter of good friends—sharing what