by Cecilia Gray
“Nice shout-out from the director,” he said as she approached. He whisked up a glass of apple cider from the table beside him and held it out to her.
She accepted it and took a heavy sip, then blurted, “I wanted to thank you for everything and say that I’m going to miss you, but if you want to, maybe, trade emails or something, but you don’t have to, I’m just saying that I have…with others… Why are you smiling like that?”
“You’re going to miss me, huh?”
She punched his arm. “Don’t tease me!”
“I just mean it’s going to be hard to miss me when you’re going to be living in my house for a week.”
Kat’s glass fell to the desert floor with a thud and tipped over, spilling out its carbonated contents. “What did you say?”
Henry glanced down at the overturned glass. “I’m pretty sure you heard what I said. Didn’t Josh tell you?”
“Josh said we were going to LA for post-production,” she said between her teeth.
“Yeah, and I live in LA. He figured he’d crash with me since his family is out of town. Where did you think you were staying?”
Kat pressed her hand to her breastbone and took a few breaths. “I just assumed… Was this always the plan?”
Henry nodded. “You really didn’t know?”
Kat practically hyperventilated. She was going to be living in Henry Trenton’s home, which was Tom Trenton’s home. It was too much. “I have to tell my mom.”
Then she wished she could time travel back three seconds and slap herself before she admitted that to Henry.
But he only laughed. “She’s welcome to call my dad if it will make her feel better.”
“There are maybe four people in the world who don’t know who your dad is, and my mom is one of them,” Kat said.
“I’d love to meet her.”
Kat paused. What was she supposed to make of statements like that coming out of Henry’s relaxed, smiling face beneath the brim of his panama hat?
“I guess I’ll have to settle for you meeting my dad, instead,” Henry said. “Since it’s Christmas and all.”
The holidays with Tom Trenton and his family. It was a Christmas miracle that Kat didn’t faint.
Chapter Six
Kat tried to force herself to stop staring at Henry through the rearview mirror as he napped in the backseat of Josh’s convertible. Unfortunately, there was nothing else to look at. Darkness had fallen long ago and all she’d seen for a while were headlights and brake lights.
Henry had fallen asleep an hour ago, almost the second they’d left Bande. His head tilted to one side and his lips parted slightly. No hat—just a T-shirt and jeans.
He jerked awake as Josh yanked the steering wheel to take a sharp exit.
“Why are we stopping?” Kat asked. The exit offered little more than a rinky-dink gas station with most likely questionable bathroom facilities.
“Because it’s my car, and I’ll stop if I want to.”
Kat glanced at Josh, who had been testy since the wrap party even though she’d been more than on top of her game. She’d had their bags packed and stowed in the trunk of the car before he’d even said his last good-bye. She’d prepared to-go containers of coffee for all of them. She even had directions to Henry’s house preprogrammed into Josh’s GPS. She’d spent, in her mind, very little time actually squealing around the trailer about how she had, in her hands, Henry Trenton’s home address.
But Josh was determined to be in a bad mood. He parked the car and slammed the door extra hard as he stomped out.
Henry stretched in the backseat and yawned loudly. “Are we there yet?”
Kat smiled at his reflection. “I don’t know—are we?”
Henry leaned over the console between the seats and placed his hand by her shoulder. He peered out the windshield. “Maybe another hour? Depending on traffic. Have you ever been to LA?”
“This will be my first time.”
“LA is all about traffic.”
Henry tilted his head just as she leaned toward him. She felt a charge at how close he was, how she could smell the clean scent of his shampoo and see every last lash framing his dark eyes.
“What is your house like?” she asked nervously.
“The usual.” Henry climbed over the console and settled into the driver’s seat. “Four-story mansion. Fountain in the circular driveway. Pool with a grotto and Playboy bunnies. Just what you’d expect.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you teasing me?”
He feigned an innocent look.
She grabbed her magazine out of her bag and shook it at him. “You can laugh all you want, but the truth is, some actors do have crazy glamorous homes and some actors do live scandalous lives.”
“And some people are the Pope,” Henry said. “But so few it’s not even worth mentioning.”
“You can’t pretend your life is normal. Your dad is Tom Trenton. Like it or not, most people aren’t Tom Trenton’s son.”
“My dad is more boring than you think,” he promised. “Look at your mom, your life. You were saying she’s some rock hound who found a way to discover oil? That is amazing. Your mom is the kind of person studios make movies about. My dad’s just the guy who plays them.”
His words sank in and settled somewhere warm in her chest, and her face broke into a wide grin. “I’m going to tell her you said that.”
“Do.”
They were both startled by a knock on Henry’s window. He spun around and rolled the window down at Josh’s urging.
Josh’s gaze flicked back and forth between Henry and Kat. He dropped his keys in Henry’s lap and jumped in the back.
* * *
It was pitch black when they arrived, but the streets in the gated community in Beverly Hills were lined with lanterns illuminating the sidewalks. Henry parked in a two-car driveway in front of a large, two-story Spanish-style house at the end of a court. Even though they’d come through two pairs of security gates, the house itself was no more ostentatious than the surrounding homes. From what Fanny had told her, even some of her classmates at the Jane Austen Academy lived more lavishly.
Kat got out of the car and grabbed the bags from the trunk, but then Henry came around and took them from her.
“I got it,” she said.
“Let the woman earn her keep,” Josh suggested as he kicked his door closed.
“You’re both my guests now, and hosts carry the bags.” Henry hefted one over his shoulder, set the other on its rollers, and carried them to his front door. He entered a code into the keypad, and the front door clicked open. Lights automatically switched on in the foyer. He turned back and kicked off his shoes.
“Welcome to Casa Trenton.”
Kat took note of the neat lines of shoes in the foyer and untied her canvas sneakers to join them. Inside was all high ceilings, hardwood floors, and stainless steel appliances. The sunken living room had a fireplace lined with stockings and a large noble fir tucked into the corner, strung with Italian glass globes.
“It’s like someone professionally decorated it,” Kat murmured.
“Someone did,” Henry admitted as he set down the bags. “Usually my mom and I decorate it, but I was on set and mom has a project in Paris…” He cleared his throat, then gestured for them to follow him into the kitchen. “Kat, your bedroom is on this floor.”
She followed Henry to a room adjacent to the kitchen. She set her bag on the quilt of the four-poster bed, and her eyes were immediately drawn to the black-framed vintage movie posters.
“Brando signed this?” she said. She traced the glass over the A in Apocalypse Now.
“We always joke that I can sell it to pay for college if I don’t make it in acting.”
“I can’t believe you keep this in a guest room.”
“You should see the posters in my room.” Henry grinned, and her pulse kicked up a notch. “Oh, but you can’t. Sorry.”
“Why not?”
He rubbed the ba
ck of his neck. “Dad’s house rules. No girls upstairs with us unless he’s home. He said he promised your mom. Guess she doesn’t know about you and Josh sharing a trailer.”
“Oh, uh, no. Not that anything happened. Or ever would.”
He smiled broadly.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. I just…I mean I figured. But it’s nice to hear you say it. Anyway, lemme take Josh upstairs. I’ll be right back.”
As she watched him leave, she made a mental note to tell her mom how incredibly mortified she was at Tom Trenton’s “promise.” Being told she couldn’t see Henry’s room made her want to see the inside all the more. She bet it was clean—just like his trailer. She texted her mom that she’d arrived and made quick work of unpacking.
Besides the movie posters, the room didn’t have anything in it that screamed movie star. Plain white furniture. Clean sheets. A little picture window that looked out to a white brick shed in the backyard, hidden behind flowering vines and shrubbery. She made her way back to the living room and waited impatiently until she heard the boys thundering down the stairs.
“Kat, come on.” Henry beckoned for her as head for the kitchen’s back door. “This is the coolest part.”
She jumped off the couch and followed them to the little white brick shed—only she could see now that it was a full cottage.
“It’s real,” Josh said, pressing his nose up to a window. “Not just gossip mag trash.”
“Very real,” Henry said. He fished a pair of keys from his front pocket and unlocked the door. They walked inside a small room with hangers and hangers of clothes, a few dressed mannequins encased in glass, and walls lined from floor to ceiling with all kinds of hats.
Baseball caps, berets, fedoras, top hats, caps, beanies, and more.
“Whoa.” Josh made a beeline for the wall and palmed a red fez with black tassels. He set it on his head and then checked himself out in the oval full-length mirror in the center of the room. Henry put on a white fedora with black-ribbon trim and tried out a moonwalk, and Josh joined him, smiling for the first time since their arrival.
Kat slowly walked up to one of the mannequins and pressed her nose to the glass. The white, plastic, faceless figure was dressed in a blue skirt with a zipper up the front and a halter top.
“Why does this look familiar?” She laid her hand on the glass as if she could bring it closer.
“That’s one of Jane Russell’s signature outfits,” Henry said as he switched out his fedora for a pirate’s hat.
Kat suddenly recognized the other mannequin’s outfit as Marilyn Monroe’s infamous white dress and the third wore Elizabeth Taylor’s dress from her first Oscar appearance. “Are these your mom’s?” she asked.
“My dad’s,” Henry said, swapping his hat for a wrapped turban this time.
Kat went to the hanging rack and examined more outfits. A few newer dresses caught her eye. There was something Whitney Houston had worn to the GRAMMYs. “These aren’t all old…” Kat swallowed dread. “This collection…it’s not just old clothes. It’s clothes that belonged to dead actresses.”
Henry nodded grimly, unwrapping the turban. “It’s a thing of his.”
Kat shivered and ran her hands up and down her arms to ward off the goose bumps.
“That’s pretty sick, right?” Josh said as he walked between the glass cases of mannequins with their flat, plastic faces and stubby arms. “I heard he has an Esther Williams swimsuit.”
“That one’s not true,” Henry said.
Josh shot her a look. “See? Can’t believe everything you read.”
“Why does he do this?” Kat asked. For some reason she was hit with this image of a creepy guy keeping a museum of her clothes after she died.
“It’s always been a thing of his—I don’t know. But it’s how he met my mom,” Henry said, fingering a rack of army costumes. “She’s a museum curator, and she helped him curate this collection.”
“But the hats…” Kat’s voice trailed off.
“All mine,” Henry assured her. “None from dead people.” He spun and plucked a Yankees baseball cap off the wall and tossed it to Josh, who caught it and faked a swing of an imaginary bat. As the two goofed around, Kat walked over to a window to get some air. Her mom’s rock collection was looking completely sane by comparison.
“Doesn’t open,” Henry said as he pretended to round the mannequins as bases. “Museum quality, remember. Climate controlled.”
Kat leaned her forehead against the cold window and told herself it was no big deal. Tom Trenton was an actor, and he collected Hollywood memorabilia. Most memorabilia was owned by dead people at some point, she reasoned. Still, there was something creepy about it all.
She winced as a beam of light shone in her face. A car had pulled into the driveway—a red Tesla. She craned her neck to watch as the car parked. The passenger door opened—and blonde bombshell Scarlett Hill stepped out.
Kat’s jaw dropped. “Is your dad doing a movie with Scarlett Hill?” she asked. She could have sworn if he was she would have read about it.
Scarlett Hill was young, in her twenties, and infamous for a series of femme fatale roles that had dubbed her America’s answer to the French film siren. Kat watched as Tom finally emerged from the car wearing his trademark black leather jacket and aviator shades—although why he needed sunglasses in the dark made no sense to her.
But Tom Trenton pulled off his glasses when he saw Josh’s sports car.
“Scarlett Hill?” Henry asked.
Kat turned around just as he pushed off the floor, and Josh took off the baseball cap and set it back on the wall.
“What made you think of her?”
“Well, because…” Kat turned back to the window. Tom and Scarlett had already gone. “She’s here with your dad.”
Henry walked over to join her at the window. “I don’t see her.”
“They both just got out of his car and walked into the house.”
“My dad? And Scarlett Hill?”
“Yeah, I just saw them,” Kat said.
Henry’s jaw tightened, and a second later, he dashed for the door. Kat and Josh followed Henry back into the house through the kitchen door.
Kat gasped at the sight of Tom Trenton—alone—pouring himself a glass of water.
Being in a kitchen with Tom Trenton was strangely surreal. On one hand, he was a guy drinking a glass of water. On the other, he was Tom Trenton. Every inch of his face was familiar, from his bushy eyebrows to the bulb nose and the cleft in his chin. Kat noted he seemed a little less perfect than his airbrushed screen persona. Dark spots dotted his skin and wrinkles formed under his eyes when he smiled.
But she was starstruck all the same.
“You’re early.” Tom set down his glass of water and grinned—the same full grin millions of women fawned over in dozens of movies. “I thought your flight didn’t get in for an hour.”
“We decided to drive since Josh had his car,” Henry said.
Tom enveloped Henry in a hug. “Where were you guys just now?” he asked lightly.
“I was showing them the costume hut. Kat thought she saw you with someone.” Henry pulled away and looked at his father questioningly.
Tom’s brown eyes, eerily identical to Henry’s but somehow colder, shifted to Kat, and she felt its chill. “Did you, now?”
“Well, yes, but…” she tripped over her tongue. “I thought I saw…a woman get out of the car with you.”
Tom crinkled his brows and pursed his lips. “It’s just me. Sorry to disappoint you.” He cut to Henry. “Are you going to introduce me?”
Henry stood quietly for a moment as he studied his father, but he seemed to come to a decision and turned and gestured to Josh. “Dad, this is Josh Wickham.”
“I know your work.” Tom shook Josh’s hand as though they were equals.
“It’s an honor, Mr. Trenton,” Josh said with a gravitas Kat had never seen from him before. “Your performance i
n Undertow was a defining moment for me and how I approach my acting. Inspirational, really.”
“I appreciate that, son.” Tom gently extricated his hand from Josh’s enthusiastic handshake and turned his attention to Kat. “Who is this lovely lady with the active imagination?”
Henry smiled as he set his hand on Kat’s shoulder. “This is Kat Morley. You’ll know her work one day, too.”
“Henry, don’t,” Kat whispered, a little mortified.
“My son has an eye for talent,” Tom said. “It’s a pleasure. I’m sure Henry explained we spoke with your mother, and she had some rules about conduct in the house befitting lovely ladies?”
“Yes, sir,” Kat said, stifling the urge to ask where the other lovely lady had gone. Because she was positive she hadn’t conjured up any woman in her mind, much less Scarlett Hill.
Chapter Seven
Kat stared at the handwritten list by her bedside in disbelief. Apparently, despite all the rules governing “lovely ladies” Josh was allowed to roam freely into her bedroom while she slept.
Dinner rez for 4 at Nobu.
New suit—Bloomingdale’s has measurements.
Xmas gift for my agent—wrapped.
She checked her phone—no messages. He could have at least given her the courtesy of texting the to-do list instead. She crumpled the note in her fist and jumped out of bed in her lilac tank top and pajama pants to confront him. It was one thing to leave her notes when he had to walk by her to get out of the trailer. It was another to go down a flight of stairs, open a door, and come into her bedroom.
Between the shed of dead people’s clothes and Tom Trenton’s creepy lies, she couldn’t stand the thought of Josh looming over her while she slept.
She burst into the kitchen, running straight into Tom Trenton, who sipped coffee as he stood at the kitchen counter. He looked up from an issue of Variety as he saw her and set down the coffee mug.
“Good morning, Kat. Would you like breakfast? Henry set aside eggs and bacon for you.” He gestured to the stove behind him, his leather jacket creasing with every movement.