I tucked the folder under my arm and smiled at the couple. “Congratulations on your new home. If you have any questions, call me—I know the builder personally.” I slid my card to them. “Enjoy. And congratulations on your baby, too.”
They thanked me, and insisted on hugging me, walking to the door with me.
Titus paused, standing halfway in his truck, pointing at Jeremy. “Oh, I almost forgot—the movers will be at your place Monday at nine. They’ll do everything, all you gotta do is move your personal valuables and yourselves. You’ll be settled in by Tuesday morning.” He grinned. “Also, another truck is coming here Monday afternoon—they’re gonna take away your shitty-ass thrift store bullshit furniture and replace it all with new. It’s a big house, gotta fill it with something, might as well be nice stuff. Anything you don’t like, they’ll bring you something you do.”
Jeremy sighed. “Any other surprises?”
“Um?” Titus pretended to think. “Not that I know of. I’ll let you know.”
They just shook their heads, still looking stunned at what had just happened. I got into my car and headed for the title company office to drop off the paperwork, Titus’s huge red truck behind me.
And I wondered what I was going to do now.
Rich, gorgeous, talented, hung like a horse, incredible at sex, easy to talk to and be around…and he did stuff like this?
Gah, how’s a girl supposed to retain her hard-won emotional frigidity?
Not liking this guy just got a lot fucking harder.
6
And I was tipsy.
Tacos at the Santa Monica food truck had led to chips and guac and Dos Equis at a pier-side cafe. Which had led to us being outside under a big red umbrella for the past two hours, our table now littered with empty bottles, our laughter raucous and wild. We were trading war stories, him of his crazy life as a rock star, me as…well, me. Spoiled rotten, the daughter of spoiled rotten parents who let me run amok and do whatever I wanted, funding my every whim without a word or blink…or a hug, or rules, or structure, or anything. It made for some fun stories, at least.
Finally, Titus paid the bill and we continued our wandering, rabbit-trail conversation while strolling the Santa Monica pier.
The funny stories faded, and I felt him revving up for a serious question.
“So, boarding school in Europe,” he said. “Was that, like, year-round?”
“Well, I came back for summers…usually. There was the year I turned sixteen, I spent that summer in Greece with my friend and her family—she was the daughter of the Greek president at the time, so I spent most of that summer at the presidential palace in Athens.” I thought back. “And, junior and senior year both I spent in Spain, as a guest of the princess.”
He made a face. “So that business about the princess was true?”
I laughed. “Oh sure. That was actually in reference to a different princess. The school I went to is where pretty much all the royal children from across Europe and most of the world went, along with the kids of anyone with the right wealth and connections.”
“Damn. That must have been interesting.”
I cackled. “Interesting, yeah. That’s one word for it. Also applicable: neglect, and abandonment. For me, at least.”
He seemed unsurprised by this. “The others too, I’m guessing.”
“Well, some yes, some no. I went home for the summers with my friends because even though they got shipped off to boarding school same as me, when they went home, there was at least a pretense of familial love and affection.”
His eyes were sad for me. “Not so much for you, huh?”
I snorted. “Yeah, no. I was a nuisance at best, mostly. They bought me whatever I wanted as a kind of apology for not giving a shit. And then once I was older, it more like, could you maybe just go live on your own? We’re busy. Here, have fifty thousand dollars a month. Not enough? Try a hundred thousand a month.”
He blinked. “Jesus shits.”
I laughed. “That was when I was twelve. My spending allowance by the time I was seventeen was roughly equivalent to that of a third-world country. It’s honestly embarrassing.” I sighed, waved a hand. “If I was home, I was in the way. They’d have swinger parties, these big crazy orgies where people would just be fucking in the hallways and in the pool and every bedroom, in the kitchen, just trading around, everyone fucking everyone else, with my parents presiding over it all like they were a god and goddess at a bacchanalia in their honor. It was gross. They have no dignity whatsofuckingever.”
“Then why did they even have you?” He winced. “Shit, I’m sorry, that sounded—”
“No, it’s true. I wondered it myself. I don’t think they meant to, if you want to know the truth.” I snorted a derisive laugh. “I asked Mom, once, and she just laughed at me and walked away. I’m not sure my dad is my father, if you know what I mean. I don’t look like him, and knowing what went on at those parties, it could have been literally anyone. There’s no way to know, and they’re not telling. I’ve stopped wondering. It doesn’t matter, honestly. He raised me, sort of. By which I mean, I raised myself and he funded my existence. So if the man who accidentally donated his sperm to my mother is the man who I call Dad, if it’s someone else, it just doesn’t matter.”
“That’s rough,” he said.
“Could have been worse.” I gestured at him. “You said your dad used to hurt you. That sounds worse, to me.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t great. He’d go on benders every couple weeks and anyone who was in the room with him would pay for it. Then he’d feel bad and try to go dry and he’d be miserable and ignore me. And in the meantime, Mom was just…she was a colossal bitch, verbally abusive, emotionally manipulative, all that. Just to balance out Dad knocking us all around. She and my dad hated each other, but they came from this old-world tradition where you just don’t divorce no matter what.”
“What kind of old world?” I asked.
“They’re both first-generation Americans—Dad’s Italian, and Mom is Albanian. I guess when Grandpa, my dad’s dad—came over, he got a dictionary and figured out the translation of his name and changed it to the English word—Bright. Used to be ‘Chiaro’ or something like that.”
“And where did they come up with the name Titus from?”
He laughed at the question. “Mom. Back when they had me, Mom was into going to church, hoping it would help out with my dad’s drinking issues, and I guess she just liked the name Titus, from the book at the end of the Bible.”
“So what you’re saying is, Titus Bright is your real, actual name?”
He snorted. “Sure is.” He dug his wallet out of his back pocket and tugged his license out and showed it to me. “You know I must like you if I’m showing my license, which has my middle names on it—most embarrassing middle names ever.”
“Giuseppe Adnan?” I asked, reading. “Your name is Titus Giuseppe Adnan Bright?”
“Sure is.”
“Nothing embarrassing about that. Giuseppe a perfectly common and ordinary Italian last name. Adnan I’m not familiar with.”
“My dad’s father was Giuseppe, my mom’s dad was Adnan. It’s Albanian.” A shrug. “It’s not embarrassing, but it’s not rock star.”
I laughed at that. “Well, one could argue that since you’re a rock star, it is therefore by definition, rock star.”
“You have a point.”
We walked in silence. “It’s amazing, what you did today.”
“Nah.” He paused at a bench, glanced at it, at the ocean, and sat down. “I have a plan to give away everything I’ve got, eventually. I’ve got it all planned out—all the charities and everything. I mean…” He paused, swallowed. “Assuming there’s no one else to give it to, you know? Like, I couldn’t possibly spend it all in my lifetime even if I tried, and I’m not inclined to try.”
I heard a lot he wasn’t saying. I didn’t ask about any of it. I liked him enough as it was, and that was bad, because I wasn
’t about to let myself go falling for anyone. You had to have a heart in order to fall for someone, and I was fairly certain I didn’t. I’d never felt anything to tell me the opposite, except for where the girls were concerned, and that was different.
“So you’re gonna give it all away like Warren Buffet, huh?”
He laughed. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Not going to give it to your family?”
“If by family you mean the people I was born into, hell no. I did my part by them, I got no interest in anything else. I don’t talk to ’em, I don’t see ’em, nothin’.”
“What about your brother?”
“Nope.” He waved a hand. “He’s an ungrateful bastard. Had the gall, after I fixed his disaster of a fuckin’ life, to ask me for a car, for another handout, for more and more, like I owed it to him. He never did shit for me except make my life hell. He led the charge in teasing me, bullying me at school, all that. I know I’m all big rock star guy now, but back then I was a skinny dweeb who played the violin and listened to weird music. Tommy was my only friend, and Bright Bones was originally just us fucking around in his garage. We didn’t even have a name for ourselves. This guy drove by on a motorcycle one day, heard us, and asked us to play at his bar. He was like, you guys are eighteen, right? We were like, fuck yeah, because we weren’t. And then when we got there, he was like, you’re twenty-one, right? And we were like fuck yeah, because free beer. And that’s how Bright Bones started. Playing at a closing set at a biker bar at sixteen.”
“I always thought that story was apocryphal or whatever.”
“I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
“It means…told as true even if no one is sure if it really is.”
“Oh. No, it’s true. We were sixteen, not thirteen like some of the stories say, and we didn’t get brought into the back room after our first set by prostitutes.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I heard that too. That one I assumed was true.”
He grinned. “Nah. They weren’t prostitutes, just horny biker chicks.”
I cackled. “So it is true!”
“Hell yeah. Lost my virginity that day, and I was hooked on the rock star life from then on.”
“I can see why.”
“Free booze, nobody asking how old you are, people jamming out to your music, girls flashing their tits at you and begging you to screw them in the back of wherever, all the drugs you could ever want and then some, and then when we signed with the label, fuckin’ buckets of money? Hell yeah. Of course looking back, it was way too much way too soon, but as a kid, you don’t think that. You just roll with it.”
“I mean, obviously. Who in their right mind would say no to that? Especially when it got you away from a home life that sucked?”
“Right. The label got us a tour bus and suddenly we were traveling the country, and eventually the world. Me and Tommy, poor little redneck bastards from fuckin’ Shitsville Kentucky? It was glorious.”
“Kentucky? I always heard Chicago.”
“Nah, that’s just where we blew up first. We were from Kentucky. Outside Louisville. For whatever reason, when we first started touring in a shitty old van, Chicago was our big spot, where we developed a following. It was our home base for years, so we always said we were from Chicago, because we were both embarrassed about being from Kentucky, dumb vain bastards that we were.”
“You get embarrassed about weird things, Titus.”
“Image is everything, to a rock star. Especially when you’re twenty, twenty-three or whatever and the whole world hangs on every word, every picture.”
I sighed. “I may not be famous, but I do understand image being everything. I understand that on a visceral level.”
“Explain, if you would.”
I kicked off my Louboutins and hooked them in my fingers, strode into the sand toward the water’s edge, stopping when the water licked at my toes and arches. I felt Titus beside me.
“It’s that kind of a thing for you, huh?” He was holding his flip-flops in one hand, digging a hole in the sand with his toes. “You don’t have to answer—you can tell me to go to hell.”
I shook my head, staring at my feet and watching as ocean foam swirled around my toes. “It’s…embarrassing, and hard to talk about.”
“Dude, I get it.”
“I know you do, dude,” I said, teasing him with a look. “That’s why I guess I’m willing to talk about it with you—because I guess you’d really get it.” I paused a moment, then two, gathering my thoughts. “My mom, I think I mentioned at some point, was—is—from a family that goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood, like from the silent film days. My great-grandfather was one of the first silent film directors, and my great-grandmother one of the first actresses. Octavius Miller and Darlene Oldfield—look them up, sometime.”
Titus chuckled. “No, I know them. Who doesn’t?”
“Right. So then my grandfather, Albert Phineas Miller, he was a writer, director, actor, producer, all that.”
“No shit. Everyone knows him. One of the greats from the Golden Era.”
I nodded. “And an insufferable bastard, truth be told. Everyone hated working with him, but he was a genius. And he married my grandmother, Amelia Loop, when she was eighteen and he was forty-nine.” I held up a finger. “There is a point to all this Hollywood history, I promise—it’s not just me being snooty and name-droppy about my ancestry. So Albert and Amelia had several kids, most notably my mother, Elise Miller. You probably know her.”
“For sure.” He gave me a grimacing grin. “I had a poster of her taped to the inside wall of our van.”
“The one from In With The New? Where she’s wearing the tiny white bikini and holding the gun? Yeah, every teenage boy of a certain age had that poster.”
“I guess I didn’t realize that was your mother. You said she was Hollywood royalty, but…”
“Yeah. She married the director of that movie, In With The New—Calum Crane—when she was twenty, and they had a son, my half brother, Davy Crane.”
“You have a half brother?”
“Had. He died of a brain tumor when I was four. I never really knew him. That broke them up, Calum and my mom. She divorced him, quit acting, moved to Paris, and studied art. By which I mean became a wino and spent my grandparents’ money.” I sighed, waving a hand. “There’s a through line in all of this that I haven’t mentioned yet. Famous parents who were children of famous parents, and so on for three generations—everything was scrutinized. Image was everything. By the time Mom moved back to LA, got back into acting, and met my dad, she’d been the subject of so much tabloid speculation, had been affiliated in some way or another with dozens of different men. Her mom, my grandmother, had been the same. And as my grandmother got older, she went to increasingly nutty lengths to stay relevant, to stay beautiful. My grandfather obviously ended up with a series of mistresses who were increasingly younger as he got older. But Grandma Amelia? She had to do crazy stuff, surgeries and crazy diets and all that to stay young and beautiful looking. She did a Playboy centerfold at fifty-eight, to prove she was still sexy. Mom did that Caligula remake a few years ago, at sixty-one, where she appeared fully nude, full-frontal, the whole thing.” I shook my head. “So what does that mean for me? Image is everything. It was drilled into my head that my value to them, to anyone, was in my appearance. My appeal—my sex appeal. Mom told me, when I was thirteen and we were having her version of the birds and the bees talk, that unless I was sexy and stayed sexy, I’d never amount to anything.”
“She said that you? That you’d never amount to anything if you weren’t sexy.”
I nodded. “Sure did. My value as a woman is in my sex appeal—that was the lesson of my life. The driving factor behind everything.” I swallowed hard. “I did do some modeling when I was young. Overseas, for European magazines.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. No one knew about this, since it hadn’t gotten American media publicity; if I went to Europe, h
owever, I’d still get recognized now and then.
He eyed me. “When you say modeling. Something tells me you’re not talking about dresses.”
I laughed. “No, not dresses. Not nude, like it wasn’t some Euro version of Playboy, but I wasn’t clothed either, not all the way. I’d reached full maturity, breast-wise, by seventeen, and…I needed attention. I’m psychoanalyzing myself retrospectively, you understand. But I got an offer from an agent to do some modeling, and I figured it was obvious. My whole family did stuff like that. I’d seen Grandma Amelia’s centerfold, and most of Mom’s early roles had been scantily clad at best. So it was kind of a duh that I’d get approached to model, and it wasn’t at all surprising that they’d ask me to pose topless. Over there, nudity isn’t as big of a deal as it is here. But still, it leads into everything.”
“At seventeen?”
I nodded. “They thought I was eighteen. Or, assumed, conveniently, and didn’t bother asking for confirmation.” I considered. “I did twenty-some shoots, in varying degrees of nudity for a variety of magazines.”
“Clearly, that didn’t lead to acting or better modeling gigs.”
“Clearly. What it led to was…me feeling like that was the only way I could leverage my looks for attention. Which led to using my looks for attention and relevance in other ways, from a very young age. It’s all I’d seen, all I’d ever had modeled for me. And it worked. I was popular in school. I got invited to all the best parties, got invited on expensive vacations with famous kids of famous parents. There were no rules. I was given as much alcohol as I could drink and left to wander the streets of Milan and Paris and Prague and Rome and Athens and Lisbon and Madrid with my friends, and unlimited credit. Sounds like every teenager’s dream, right? I thought so. Like, this is the fuckin’ life, man. But you know what came with it? The men at the parties. The princes and dukes, the sons of CEOs and prime ministers, and the CEOs and prime ministers themselves more than a few times, who assumed, correctly, that they could ply me alcohol and cocaine and get me to perform for them. Take off my shirt and dance for them. Wander around the party in nothing but my underwear, carrying around a ten-thousand-dollar bottle of eighty-year-old champagne, dancing with men twice my age.” I dug my toes deeper into the wet sand. “And that meant, obviously, being taken into the bathroom and guest rooms for other performances. Willingly, but drunk and high—willingly, because these were the richest and best and most famous men on the planet. It was actors, rock stars, producers, princes, all that. I was their plaything, because I was young and sexy and nubile and had been told all my life that I had no other role and no other value in life but as the plaything of wealthy men.”
Laurel's Bright Idea (Billionaire Baby Club Book 3) Page 10