Read Online Vamparazzi by Laura Resnick - Free Book Online Page B

eye. I don’t think the bruise will show up at all.”
    I paused to say, “Good,” then returned to breathing and vocalizing while I repeatedly bent over, stretched, and rolled up slowly, warming up my spine—and ignoring the way the wires of my push-up corset poked and squeezed me.
    After a few minutes, Leischneudel asked, “Any word yet on when Thack is coming to see the show?”
    I decided I was prepared enough, and I slumped into a chair. “No.”
    He winced at my dispirited tone. “Sorry I asked.” Leischneudel’s agent was quitting the business, and I had promised to introduce him to mine, Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name, I suspected—but then, doesn’t everyone come to the Big Apple to reinvent himself?).
    â€œSix weeks we’ve been running,” I said, “and Thack still hasn’t come, and still prevaricates when I ask what night to hold a seat for him. In fact, this week, he hasn’t even returned my calls.” I sighed and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
    Knowing what I was thinking, Leischneudel said, “He’s not planning to dump you.”
    â€œOf course he is,” I said morosely. “What else would explain this? Thack is conscientious. He always watches his clients working. It’s part of his job, and he takes it seriously.”
    â€œMaybe he’s really busy and just hasn’t had time—”
    â€œSix weeks, Leischneudel! Something’s wrong. We’re closing in two weeks, I don’t have another job lined up, I haven’t had an audition for anything . . . He’s barely even spoken to me since I got this part!”
    â€œYou got this part,” he pointed out, “and your reviews are excellent.”
    â€œWhen they bother to mention me,” I grumbled.
    This show was a vehicle for Daemon; the reviews mostly focused on him. After that, Leischneudel got the most attention, since the male roles were better developed than the female roles in The Vampyre —following the pattern of Polidori’s story.
    Leischneudel persisted in his doomed effort to cheer me up. “And you were great in that episode of The Dirty Thirty that aired a few weeks ago. Didn’t you tell me Thack said so, too?”
    â€œHe didn’t say ‘great.’ He said I ‘did very well.’ Talk about being damned with faint praise.”
    â€œEsther.”
    â€œBesides, the size of my role in D-Thirty got reduced after Nolan’s heart attack, so it wasn’t as good a part as we’d originally thought it would be.”
    The paycheck had been as much money as originally expected, though, thank God. In addition to the usual bills, I’d had to replace my bed and paint my bedroom after my mattress had spontaneously burst into flames one night in August. While I was on the bed. With Lopez.
    There’s nothing like unexpected conflagration to ruin a moment of passion.
    At the time, I thought the spontaneous combustion of my bed was an attack on me by an evil sorcerer in Harlem. Since then, though, I’d begun to suspect ...
    Don’t think about Lopez , I reminded myself. Don’t.
    I welcomed Leischneudel’s intrusion on that distracting train of thought when he said, “It was still a good role, Esther.”
    â€œYeah, but . . .” I shrugged.
    The Dirty Thirty was the latest spin-off series in the Crime and Punishment empire of prestigious police television dramas. I’d been cast in a meaty guest role for one episode. My scenes were all with Michael Nolan, one of the lead actors on the show, and he’d had a heart attack while filming the episode. Nolan wouldn’t be able to work for quite some time, and when they wrote his character out of the remaining scenes of that episode, they wound up writing me out, too. So my character had less screen time than I’d hoped.
    On the other hand, this was at least better than the scenario my mother