Taking Hollywood

by Shari King

  ‘What the . . . ?’

  ‘Davie, you’re getting slow.’

  The voice came from Greer Ness, the head of the law firm that had looked after Davie’s interests since he was a fledgling star clutching an Oscar that was way out of his league.

  Greer was the epitome of the term ‘Masters of the Universe’. Early sixties, distinguished grey hair, impeccably cut and swept back, a torso that came with the shoulders of a linebacker, courtesy of a lifetime of working out and the complement of good tailoring.

  ‘Not slow, just generous. Don’t wanna make an old man feel bad.’

  Greer laughed. But of course he would. A lot of money over a lot of years earned a few notches on the sycophant scale, even for a lawyer of Greer’s standing. Several Macallans didn’t obscure the sad truth that if Davie’s life was going tits-up, the one person who would benefit would be the guy with the broad shoulders who would take his generous cut while attempting to minimize the damage.

  ‘You OK, buddy?’

  ‘Dandy. Drink?’

  ‘No, you’re fine. The car’s waiting.’

  ‘Am I being billed for it?’

  ‘You are.’

  As Greer grinned, Davie realized that if he squinted, Greer looked like the better-built brother of Michael Douglas. The thought, as well as the conversation, amused him.

  ‘Then make it quick.’

  ‘Jenny.’

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘Correct. Glad you’re up to speed. There’s a problem.’

  ‘The fact that she’s probably right now sitting on the face of another chick?’

  ‘If only that was the only problem,’ Greer said, his demeanour solemn for the first time.

  ‘OK, I’ll play along. What could be worse than that right now?’

  ‘She’s divorcing you, Davie.’

  Well, there was a statement to end the banter.

  ‘What? No way. She’s not, man. I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but you’re wrong. Look, we’re not perfect and there’s a few issues, but she told me tonight she’s sticking around.’

  ‘She isn’t, Davie. My source is impeccable. She’s serving papers on Friday.’

  For a moment the information stunned him into silence, until the confusion won out.

  ‘Friday? But why . . . ?’

  ‘Because your actual anniversary falls on Thursday.’

  The realization was brutal. How could he not have realized? Ten years. California divorce laws aside, their prenup was on a sliding scale, ultimately allocating her $10 million should their marriage last more than 10 years. It made no differentiation if it was twenty-five years or ten years and one day.

  She was playing him for money. Well, hello, New Low Point.

  ‘I’m sorry for bringing this to you now, buddy, but I just got a call with a heads-up and we don’t have time to waste here. What do you want me to do, Davie?’

  Davie drained the glass and set it on the bar. ‘File on Wednesday. Late. So she doesn’t find out until Thursday.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s done. You gonna be OK here? I can drop you or call you a cab?’

  Davie shook his head. Right now, the last place he wanted to go was home. Top of his to-do list, he decided, was to head to the Sunset Marquis, call a number he knew on the way there and then spend the night with the six accommodating but expensive women who would be waiting there for him. He might even charge the bill to that bitch Darcy.

  ‘A gin and tonic, please.’

  For a moment the voice flitted around in his brain before Davie realized what was unusual about it. Glasgow. Shit, how many drinks had he put away?

  He glanced to his right to see the owner of the voice claim the seat at the end of the bar.

  ‘Hey. There’s an accent I haven’t heard for a long time.

  Glasgow, right?’

  Many years in LA had given his voice a transatlantic twang, but suddenly his accent transformed to pure west coast Scotland.

  ‘Yep. I’m originally from Ayr, but I moved to Glasgow a few years ago,’ she replied, flicking back one sleek sheet of auburn hair.

  ‘Well, of all the bars . . .’ Corny, but hey, he was a half- wasted, soon-to-be-divorced, hot mess.

  As the barman placed her drink in front of her, she thanked him, then took a sip, making no effort whatsoever to continue the conversation.

  He liked that. Even in his current category of holy fuck- up, a girl on her own in a bar at night would normally be giving him her best come-on. Not a hooker, then. No wedding ring, so not waiting for her husband. And she was wearing black tailored trousers, stiletto ankle boots and a green shirt, buttoned above the tits. Too conservatively dressed to be on reality TV.

  ‘Where in Glasgow?’

  ‘City centre. Park Circus.’

  Davie remembered it. On the couple of times he’d been back to Glasgow in the early days, he’d stayed in the new Hilton, right on the edge of the M8 motorway, looking over to the west of the city and the Park area, famed for its stunning crescents of nineteenth-century townhouses. Back then, that was where the power people lived: lawyers, politicians, people who were successful in theatre and arts. He presumed that hadn’t changed much, despite the fact that this chick didn’t obviously fit into any of those categories.

  ‘So what are you doing in LA?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just, ugh, boring stuff. Work. Don’t remind me.’

  ‘OK, well, I won’t remind you about work if you don’t remind me that I’m having a shit day. So, pleased to meet you, Park Circus.’ He leaned towards her, battling to keep his balance. ‘I’m Davie.’

  Her smile was real cute as she returned the introduction.

  ‘I’m Sarah. Pleased to meet you.’

  37.

  ‘Every Breath You Take’ – the Police

  Mirren watched her sleeping girl, watched the rise and fall of her chest, watched her eyes twitch as a dream or a nightmare took control of her reflexes.

  Chloe’s hair felt soft and silky to the touch as Mirren stroked it back from her face. When Chloe was a little girl, Mirren would come home late from work and sit on her bed, sometimes for hours, just listening to her breathe. How had she gone from that angelic little creature to this angry young woman who created such chaos and pain? When exactly had Mirren lost her baby and gained an addict? And why had Chloe decided that the person she hated most on this earth was her mother?

  Night after sleepless night told her that there were too many answers. And none that had an easy fix. The rebellion had started in Chloe’s early teens, with demands for sleep-overs, late nights, money and an eighteen-year-old boyfriend who was given too much freedom, too much money and too much access to everything LA had to offer.

  And then Jordan Lang had come along, that piece of scum who’d inherited his father’s drive and used it for nothing but getting hooked up and high.

  Even before she’d taken care of that situation, Chloe’s obsession with him had worried her.

  She’d seen it before. The waiting by the phone for him to ring. The jumping to attention when he demanded it. The submission to his every whim and demand. He clicked his fingers, Chloe jumped. And Mirren wasn’t going to let that continue. Her daughter was better than that. Way, way better.

  She’d had to find a way to stop it and she had. Any mother would have done what she’d done, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they?

  Chloe stirred, shivered, and Mirren pulled her thick cashmere blanket up a little higher and tucked it around her daughter’s shoulders.

  Keeping her here had been the right thing to do. She owed whoever had sent Chloe home a sincere thank you. The limo driver had drawn up to the gates of the Colony, asked security to alert Mirren and then handed over her daughter without waiting to make formal introductions. Whoever was behind it had her gratitude. She also owed Judge Hamilton a huge thanks for taking the time to hear her lawyers’ appeal in private, and g
iving them a seventy-two-hour reprieve before taking her back to Life Reborn.

  Not that much progress had been made since she came home. Chloe had been alternating between sleeping and screaming since she got here, and the doctor and nurse that Mirren had installed in the next room were struggling to get any kind of balance or clarity. But at least Mirren knew where she was, knew that she didn’t have to worry about her fleeing the clinic and ending up stoned, jailed or worse.

  How many times were they going to go through this? And how many times was Mirren going to wonder at the irony that she could buy almost anything on earth that she wanted, use her power, influence and cash to make almost anything happen, but she couldn’t fix her daughter?

  When she left Chloe’s room, she knocked on the next door, alerting the nurse that she was leaving. My God, how things changed. She’d grown up in a tiny terraced house that was the same square footage as her closet, yet her daughter was growing up in a home where she had her own self-contained wing, with a small kitchen, lounge and two guest rooms, which currently hosted medical professionals called in to look after the eighteen-year-old who had everything but a contented soul.

  Mirren’s bare feet padded against the marble floor as she headed for the kitchen. There, she put the kettle on the stove and prepared a teapot. It was a habit from her youth that had never died. A pot of tea, two teabags, left to stew until it was just the right colour, before being poured and then diluted with milk. None of this herbal tea nonsense.

  The only concession she made was that she no longer took two sugars. She’d learned when she arrived here that sugar was on the toxicity horror list somewhere between crack and high-grade plutonium.

  Her drink was fully prepared before she even acknowledged Jack, sitting at the table in the corner of the room. The kitchen turret had been a feature she’d added on after they bought the house from the estate of a writer who had made his money in the early studio days and invested it in the early 1940s, when he bought a plot owned by Rhoda May Rindge, who was reluctantly selling off land along her magnificent beachfront. Decades later, Mirren liked to think it had brought him comfort, when he died alone but happy, sitting on a chair on his deck, looking out over the ocean.

  If that bore no resemblance to the reality of how it happened, she didn’t want to know.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, sliding into one end of the huge semi- circular booth.

  ‘Hey. How is she?’

  ‘Sleeping.’

  Jack looked like he should be doing the same. His pallor was grey, and there were thick black circles under his eyes. His pale blue T-shirt was an old one Mirren recognized from his days playing football in the garden with Logan. The thought made her smile, even though their silence went on for just a few moments past comfortable.

  ‘Have you found out how she got home yet?’

  Mirren shook her head. ‘No. The car service wouldn’t say who hired them. And she was so wasted, I doubt if she even knows. Does it matter?’

  Jack contemplated the bottle of vitamin water in front of him. He’d started drinking that just a few months ago. Around the same time as the trendy clothes crept in and the manscaping started, all of it deodorized by a strong whiff of Eau de Midlife Crisis.

  ‘Guess not. Just want to make sure she didn’t come to any harm. Y’know . . .’

  The pain was etched all over his face and suddenly Mirren had an inkling as to what was going on with him. It was all too much. All of it. The wife who was working long hours making movies, the son who became an overnight sensation and was now on the road for most of the year, but most of all, the daughter whom he couldn’t help, the one who was putting herself in danger and rebelling against them with such ferocity it split her heart in two. Chloe had always been Jack’s little girl, the princess who would run to him the moment he came home, whose face lit up when he entered the room. The last time he saw her, she spat in his face.

  The leap from being deserted by a young adult he adored to having an affair with a young woman of almost the same age wasn’t one that required a stunt team. A psychologist would have a field day with him. Lou would tell her it was all shit, but Mirren couldn’t help feeling there was something to it.

  And now, as he sat there looking haunted by guilt and fear, her heart melted just a little. He wasn’t the type of guy to cope with this kind of emotional trauma. How long had he been falling apart, and why had she never noticed?

  She reached out and put her hand over his.

  ‘It’ll be OK, Jack. We’ll keep getting her the help that she needs and sooner or later it’ll sink in.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘All we can do is hope.’

  ‘And what about us, Mir? Any hope left for us?’

  She took a moment to answer, determined not to seem glib or insincere.

  ‘I think so. I think there has to be.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. You know that, don’t you?’

  It seemed uncharitable to point out that he hadn’t looked particularly repentant when his girlfriend was straddling him in a bath only a few nights ago.

  He moved over to her side of the cream leather booth and lifted his hand to the side of her face, traced a line down her cheek with his index finger. Mirren fought an almost overwhelming urge to slap it away. She didn’t want him touching her, feeling her, putting hands on her after they’d been…

  She shuddered.

  ‘It’s OK, honey. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mir. Forgive me. Please forgive me.’

  He’d pulled her head towards his chest and he was stroking her hair, whispering her name.

  A hand cupped under her chin and raised her lips to his and he kissed her: soft, tender, like she was made of glass and he was terrified that she would break.

  She desperately wanted to pull away, but wasn’t this a test? Hadn’t she told him to come home, to try to make it work? If she was going to keep punishing him, this would never work. She had to try. Had to find a way to move on.

  ‘I want you, baby. Oh God, Mirren, I need you.’

  Is that what he said to her? Did he whisper that before he fucked her? Before Mercedes took his dick in her mouth? He stood up and pulled her towards him, then lifted her up so that her legs went round his waist like they’d done a thousand times before. They moved as one to the island in the middle of the room. There, he sat her on the edge of the marble.

  ‘The door, Jack, lock the door.’

  In two strides he’d done as she asked, and then he was back, gently pushing her body backwards until she was lying against the cold stone, then easing down her yoga pants.

  ‘You are so fucking beautiful.’

  Mirren squeezed her eyes tight shut, blocking out the voice, forcing her mind to take her somewhere else.

  Still gently, slowly, he pushed her legs apart and then went down, placing butterfly kisses along the inside of her thighs, licking, teasing, until the urge to fight left her and she started to welcome the sensation.

  His tongue flicked against her clit, then pulled back to circle it, then flick, then circle . . . His hands kneading her inner thighs now, while hers went under her vest until they reached her nipples and she replicated the movements down below.

  God, she’d missed this. Missed the feeling of lips, skin, of being turned on . . . but this was different. She didn’t want to do this with him.

  With one last moment of suction on her clitoris, Jack pulled back, and she squinted her eyes open to see him stretch up and undo his zip.

  The urge to resist was back now, excruciating dread at the thought of his cock going inside her, the same cock that had entered someone else only a few days ago. She couldn’t. Just couldn’t. She didn’t want it near her, not touching her, not spilling its juices into her body. The thought repulsed her, fighting with the delicious sensations that still lingered.

  ‘No, Jack,’ she whispered. ‘Not tonight. Not that.’

  His horrified expression told her that he instantly got it, yet the dick in his
hand remained hard and uncompromising. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t. It wasn’t the right time.

  But if she didn’t, what would happen? Would he leave? Go back to Mercedes? Leave her children to deal with a divorce? Hadn’t Chloe already been through enough?

  And yet . . .

  She couldn’t even contemplate making love. Right now, it was gone. Dead. But she had to try, had to make him think she was into him, could be his wife again. In every way.

  There was only one way to do this. It couldn’t be Jack.

  Had to be someone else.

  And there had only ever been one other.

  Suddenly her body was here, but her head was somewhere else. With someone else.

  ‘Watch me, Jack. Watch . . .’

  Again, he understood. It was a game they used to play when they were younger, after Logan, when they hadn’t got around to sorting out birth control but wanted to be careful not to add a new addition to the family.

  Jack took a step back, his hand undulating now, pulling his cock, the end of it engorged and desperate to get to work. Eyes still closed, Mirren felt between her legs, her fingertips moving past the narrow strip of pubic hair, slipping inside, finding the nub that had already been teased and tenderized. She began to massage it, her muscles responding by sending bolts of tingling tightness to her ass and stomach.

  She heard a groan as Jack, standing a foot or so back, watched every stroke, listened to every moan, his jerking becoming faster now, more demanding.

  Closing her eyes for the last time, Mirren concentrated on her own pleasure, on her body, on the feeling, on the scene that was in her head, the voice that went with it, the one that wasn’t quite real but was saying everything she wanted to hear. The voice from more than twenty years ago.

  ‘You’re beautiful. Gorgeous. Incredible. I’ve waited for this for so long. So, so long.’

  He was looking at her now with eyes that pierced her heart, making it race, making her nipples even harder and kicking off a wave of ecstasy that started deep inside her and was now spreading, permeating every hot, tight inch of her body.