Sea Kissed, A Crane Series Romance: Crane Series Read Online Free PDF Page A

airport, leaning against the credenza and staring at her.
    “Simple. You need to keep his attention so you can train him. He likes the party-girl type. He thinks you are one. So why not keep dressing that way? It’s not difficult and frankly, it would do you a lot of good to dress like a woman in her twenties instead of a matron of a correctional institute.”
    “I’m not that bad!”
    “A middle-aged matron.”
    Lise gasped. “I can’t think about this right now. I have to get our schedule arranged for tomorrow. Here are the scripts for the TV spots. Can you make sure there are enough copies before you go?”
    “Sure.”
    “Thanks.” She sighed. “He may be a great surfer, but I sure hope he can act.”
    “You should do some acting, too,” Sonia said as she picked up the script. “Start acting like a woman in the prime of her life.”
     

Chapter 4
    “There are three things a man likes Down Under,” Steve said into the camera, “a warm woman, a cold beer, and a Crane Board flying over the ocean. And a real man likes them at the same time.”
    “Okay. And now you wink at the camera,” Lise said, in as carefree a tone as she could manage.
    What she really wanted to do was throw her head down on the boardroom table and wail. Right after that she was going to have to send her resume out, because based on this reading, her career was over. There was a pause that had so much weight to it she could feel her shoulders slump.
    “You want me to wink at the camera?”
    “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “It’s in the script.”
    Steve Jackson had been pretty easygoing at first, but instead of improving, his delivery was growing more wooden. In the last four takes in front of their in-house video set-up, he hadn’t winked once. He glared at her, clearly trying to get some message across that she wasn’t receiving. She glared right back, wondering why she couldn’t have gone into medicine like her parents wanted. Surely blood and gore and broken bones couldn’t be any more difficult to deal with than temperamental models who couldn’t act worth a damn. Well, he was messing this up so badly, there was no way they could call today a success, and she didn’t have the energy to go through it again. She rose, stiffly.
    “Why don’t we take a break?” She smiled at the camera crew, at the script writer, at Sonia, and even at Steve.
    “Steve, let’s you and I rehearse this a bit more before we put it on film.”
    He didn’t even answer, merely nodded in a curt manner she found both rude and high-handed. He was gold, she reminded herself, as her stomach threatened to burn right through the front of her clothes. Jen adored him. Jen believed in him. It was Lise’s job to get him up to speed. Once everyone but she and Steve had left, she closed the door. She grabbed the back of her neck and squeezed, almost yelping in pain.
    “Okay,” she said, “let’s try it again.”
    “What’s the matter with your neck?” he asked in that voice that seemed to resonate from the floor beneath her feet and travel through her bones. Why the hell couldn’t he talk with that intimate timbre when the camera was turned on?
    “I’m a little tense,” she said with a tight smile. In fact, she was so tense she wasn’t sure she’d ever turn her head again.
    “I’m a bit tense myself,” he admitted.
    All right. This was good. He was admitting he wasn’t doing a great job. Excellent. Yelling at him would be counterproductive. She remembered all this from her communications course at Berkeley. She just hadn’t realized when learning all those theoretical notions of communications that she might be intellectually pleased that a spokesperson admitted he was performing badly at the same time she might want to stuff his stubborn head up his ass. Breathe, she reminded herself, but she felt as though her lungs were welded shut.
    “Is there anything I could do to make you a little less tense?” she asked sweetly,