was putting on."
"Easy, eh?" She laughed. "How many times have you eaten those words?"
"Too many."
"I believe it." She slowed the car and pulled onto the shoulder, braking to a full stop. "Here we are."
When she switched off the engine, the silence hit him. Frowning, John looked around. They were high in the Hollywood Hills, the sprawling city of Los Angeles far below, veiled by a layer of smog that turned the sun into a hazy ball of fire.
"Don't forget the sack." She climbed out of the car and slammed the door, a jarring sound in the silence.
John crawled out of the low-slung car without opening the passenger door, vaulting over it, then reaching back for the sack with the fries and coffee.
When he turned, he saw her standing a few feet away, her hands hidden in the slash pockets of her white dress, her legs braced slightly apart, the wind playing with the hem of her swinging skirt. With a twist of her shoulders, she looked back at him--the sun, the sky, and the city behind her. She suddenly seemed incredibly beautiful.
"Good. You remembered the sack." She turned and crossed the road, walking to the other side.
"I did." He took a step after her, then stopped, his focus widening to take in the row of towering letters. The Hollywood sign. He nearly laughed in amazement. He'd seen it thousands of times, so many he'd stopped noticing it.
At a distance, it looked big and white and inviolate. This close he saw the dirt and the gouges and the graffiti.
"A bit tawdry, isn't it?" Kit observed with a faintly puckish smile. "More Hollywood reality, right?"
"Right." Smiling, he followed her as she picked her way around a few rocks to the base of a fifty-foot-high L.
"Hollywood isn't a place anyway.
It's a state of mind." She took the sack from him and handed back one of the containers of coffee, then brushed away the surface dirt on the letter and sat down, stretching her legs out full length and crossing them at the ankles, the hem of her dress barely brushing the ground.
"Do you know this is the first time I've ever been up here?" John peeled off the plastic lid on his coffee.
"The road's closed a lot. Probably to keep the kids from coming up here to party." She took a sip of her coffee and announced, "The same as the commissary's--bitter and black."
She set the coffee container on a nearby rock and tore open a packet of salt for the fries. "I've actually learned to like the taste of it."
"Do you come up here a lot?"
"Whenever I get homesick for heights and I don't have the time or the gas money--or both--
to drive up to Big Bear. Some days you can see a lot from here--downtown Los Angeles, that round building down there is Capitol Records near Hollywood and Vine, Century City."
She studied the view a minute longer, then dumped the salt packet and coffee lid into the paper sack, using it for a trash bag.
"What makes you homesick for heights?"
"I'm a Colorado girl. I grew up on a ranch outside of Aspen."
"Really? I have a place there."
"Let me guess--in Starwood," Kit said, unable to picture him in one of the West End's fashionable Victorian mansions. Despite the aristocratic leanness of his features, there was nothing of the poet about him. There was too much strength in his face for that. She doubted that the frills and ornate bric-a-brac of the Victorian period would appeal to him. He needed a setting that was bold, sleek, and contemporary--like a lavishly modern house in Starwood.
"Naturally." He smiled, confirming it.
"Naturally." She grinned back. She liked it when he smiled like that, relaxed and easy, without that aloof detachment that so often tinged his expressions. But he looked relaxed and easy, she noticed, his sun-streaked hair a little rumpled from the convertible ride, the sleeves of his Armani shirt rolled back, showing the corded muscles in his tanned forearms. "Want some fries?" she offered when he reached for a cigarette.
"No thanks." He shook his head and lit the cigarette, then watched