Infamous by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

she hadn’t been able to resist looking back at him, too. What
was
it about this guy?
    He was smart, he was funny, he was handsome, and he didn’t hide the fact that he found her attractive.
    “Hey, if you want to borrow it,” he called after her, “I’ve got a spare shirt in my bag. It’s the blue gym bag with my name on it, in the extras tent. Help yourself.”
    Plus, he was generous and kind.
    “Bless you,” Alison said. “Thank you.”
    He smiled. “My pleasure.” And he ducked his head again as if afraid to let her see how happy it was making him—his being able to help her this way.
    It was, quite frankly, unbelievably sexy, and as he looked at her again, she turned and ran.
    June 24, 1898
    Dear Diary
,
    He wants a child
.
    What in God’s name would he do with a child?
    This is why he was so very angry when I first arrived. And here I’d thought he’d realized that I had lied. But I was wrong. My punishment came not from my pretending to be in the family way to keep him from harming me, but from what he sees as my failure—my “losing” the babe through miscarriage
.
    The doctor fears him, and although I am still sorely battered from my “accident,” he says I am finally well enough to conceive
.
    And I am lost, with no way out
.
    For I would never, ever, willingly bring a child into his world. Not to save myself a brutal beating, or even to prevent my certain death
.
    But I see it coming. I see my future
.
    And I am in despair
.

C
hapter
S
ix
    After the endless hours of setup and preparation, the sequence took maybe forty-five seconds.
    Henry Logan filmed the same shot three different times, although it was only during the first take that the camera caught the exact instant of the sunrise.
    The actors playing the miner’s widow and children had gone back into town, but the crew was busy all over again, setting up another scene that took place here at the mine entrance—a daytime scene in which Silas Quinn came looking for Kid Gallagher.
    Trace Marcus had arrived—his Jeep was allowed all the way up to the entrance. He was in the small tent that was being used by whoever needed it—the same tent that Alison had gone into, to dig A.J.’s shirt out of his bag.
    Henry Logan had gone into the tent, too, and Alison knew he was warning the actor about the mine shaft. The scene they were about to film ended with Silas going into the mine to search for Gallagher.
    She may not have received the memo about the snakes, but she
had
gotten the very clear warning about the decaying old mines. The warning was not just for this one, but for the entire area. Most of the old structures were in poor condition and in very real danger of cave-in or collapse. Some still contained caches of explosives—decaying TNT that was extremely volatile and dangerous. Henry was reminding Trace to go no more than a few feet inside, even though this minedidn’t plunge straight down into the earth. It actually ran along the hill line, close to the surface for quite some distance and thus was deemed relatively safe.
    Relatively, because the rock and earth walls were shored up by timber that was long rotted.
    It was hard to imagine Trace taking any kind of risk and actually going too far into the mine, but actors could be funny that way, in the heat of the moment.
    All of the interior shots of the mine were going to be filmed on a soundstage, back in California, after the weather in Jubilation got too hot.
    “Need to stick around?”
    Alison turned to see A.J. standing behind her, his bag in hand.
    “Or can I offer you a ride back into town?” he asked.
    “Oh,” she said. “No. Thanks. I’m, um, almost done. But not quite. I don’t want to make you wait.”
    “I don’t mind,” he said.
    “But, see, I can’t tell you absolutely if it’s going to be five minutes or three hours,” Alison admitted. She lowered her voice. “I have to approve Silas’s costume, but in order for me to do that, he’s got to come out of