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see it.”
    He swiveled his head to capture her gaze, and her diaphragm seized so hard, she went light-headed. A baptism of liquid fire washed over her skin as his hard brown eyes roamed across her face.
    “What do they do?” he asked and she would have sworn he didn’t move, but suddenly, they were a breath apart. About to kiss.
    “What does what do?” she whispered, afraid to shift, afraid to exhale, afraid to think.
    “My eyes. When I’m talking about a film. What happens?”
    “Oh. Um.” Simple language escaped her. All she could concentrate on was the fiery, clamping need twisting through her abdomen. She ached to lean into the space between them, to lose all sense of time in the raw pressure of his lips on hers.
    That mystical connection beckoned, laden with promise.
    A car horn startled her and she jerked. Backward, not forward, breaking her gaze. She scrambled to pick up the threads of conversation. “Um, they light up. Your skin holds everything inside but the passion builds and builds and the only place it can escape is through your eyes.”
    He shifted smoothly, drove out of the parking lot and merged onto the freeway. Obviously unaffected. She’d overreacted to the almost kiss. That, or he spent his day fending off forward women and took it in stride.
    His face implacable now, he said, “You have an active imagination. I approach film as an art, but it’s also critical to stay detached. Too much emotional investment leads to sloppy structure.”
    “Nice try. But you can’t will it away, Lord Ravenwood.”
    “I’m sorry, what?”
    “Lord Ravenwood,” she said with an airy wave. “He’s the duke in Embrace the Rogue, the finest book about romance ever written. He hides from his emotions, too.”
    “Really.” Sarcasm oozed from his clipped response. “That’s what you think I do? Hide?”
    “Yeah. I bought your line about not believing in fairy tales, but I see now that it’s not true. That’s not your actual problem.” The angel on her shoulder screamed at her to shut up. This couldn’t lead to anything other than disappointment and grief when he went back to Hollywood. But he was lying to himself. She couldn’t sit idly by while he coasted through life, completely isolated, when it was obvious he yearned to cross that chasm with the gas pedal to the floorboard.
    “Since you’ve got me all figured out, what’s my actual problem?”
    This amazingly sensual man seemed content with a bloodless Hollywood-style engagement to someone he didn’t love, and, if she’d correctly interpreted his careful response, had no intention of marrying—all to secure the right backers for his film.
    He needed to be shown what a mistake he was about to make. He needed VJ to set him free from his self-imposed prison. If he’d given any indication of having a real relationship with Kyla, she’d have backed off. But he’d done the exact opposite. Deliberately, she was convinced.
    “You want desperately to believe. You’re just too afraid.”
    The devil on her other shoulder whispered, Time for stage three.

Five
    P erfect. Instead of carefully steering around VJ’s fanciful ideas, he’d driven her to psychoanalyze him. Incorrectly.
    Kris laughed, but it sounded hollow. “I’m not afraid of fiction. That’s why I’m a filmmaker, to create fictional worlds. But fiction is not reality. Real life’s tough. You get knocked down a lot and each time, it’s harder to pick yourself up.”
    The dark shadow across VJ’s cheek taunted him from his peripheral vision. Of course she knew the realities of life and didn’t need to be preached to about them.
    VJ was a rare woman, determined to reach for her destiny instead of waiting around for it to find her. He admired that.
    And, she’d easily pulled him out of his bout of brooding. Some of Kyla’s best off-screen performances included temper tantrums about his moods. VJ was a force to be reckoned with.
    “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “Do