Once outside, on the sidewalk, Macfadyen planted a big kiss on my lips. More in the way of a thank-you than foreplay. No need to rush that part, after all.
“This should make tomorrow’s scenes all that much more fun,” Sir Gareth said.
“Scenes?”
“We’re doing a movie. Liam and I are the villains.” He glanced at me through narrowed eyes. “Easier to spot the bad guys if they have English accents. Anyhow. This is his first big movie and he’s acting the total prick.”
“He’ll learn, I take it?”
Sir Gareth shook his head. “No matter how big you get, it ends. It always ends. It’s not a pretty process, but it’s a predictable one.”
“You don’t seem gleeful about it.”
“Oh, I’m not. I am gleeful about getting out of there, however.”
“My pleasure.”
A block from the King’s Head, he pulled out a ring of keys and pressed a button, which unlocked the doors on the blood-red Mercedes two-seater roadster, low and curvy and gorgeous, that I was standing next to. His car. Oh, yes, this was definitely the right man to have left with.
Sir Gareth had stopped a few feet from the car, keys in hand, and he was staring off into space. I walked over to him, and he appeared not to notice I was there.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m a complete fool, aren’t I?” he said quietly. “I didn’t notice what was going on.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I simply wonder if I’ve become the old man I used to make fun of.”
Time to snap him out of this. I needed him here and now and ready to do anything I asked. “I have a story that can top yours. My husband left me during a Las Vegas magic act. And we weren’t in the audience, we were on-stage.”
That startled him enough out of his reverie to look at me for a few seconds. Then he burst into laughter. A deep, true laugh, not one for the stage. “I apologize,” he said after he managed to calm himself down. “That’s not funny.”
“You’re right. It’s not funny. It’s completely hilarious.”
He laughed again. “Yes, I’d have to say it is.”
I grabbed his hand and led him over to the car. He opened the passenger door for me.
“A gentleman.”
“Not really.” He winked at me.
It was my turn to laugh as I got into the car. It was clean and nice and smelled like new leather and a lot of money. I wanted to sink into the passenger seat and never, ever come up for air. It was more comfortable than the futon I’d ditched in Las Vegas. Hell, it was more comfortable than any bed I’d been on a very long time.
I gripped the armrests. “I think I need to marry this car.”
He got behind the wheel. “This car is a total slut and will break your heart every chance it gets.”
“Where are we going, Sir Gareth?”
“Gary,” he said immediately as he slammed his door shut. “It’s Gary.”
“You don’t like Gareth.”
“I don’t like how everyone insists on calling me Sir. And they do it here more than anywhere.”
Gary—seemed very odd calling a man like him Gary—said he lived in Pacific Palisades, which was north of Santa Monica and likewise bordered on the Pacific Ocean. “Very ritzy,” he drawled. “I don’t have one of those compounds, like everyone else seems to. It’s a regular house.”
Regular house, my arse. The regular houses in Pacific Palisades were large and professionally landscaped. The amazing estates were up the hill. And he lived up the hill.
We drove up to a giant wrought-iron gate, complete with intricate curlicues and evenly-spaced pikes. Gary pressed a button on his sun visor and the gates swung open, allowing us to continue up a long, windy private drive, which ended in a courtyard paved with bricks in concentric circles. A giant fountain stood in the center of it, splashing away over spotlights installed in the base. He drove around the fountain to park in the four-car garage, which he opened with another button on the visor.
Beyond the courtyard stood a gigantic two-story house that seemed to go on forever. The outside was layered with pink stone and the roof topped with Spanish tiles. The style referred to as Mediterranean. And sometimes as Tuscan. Tuscany is a wonderful region of Italy, very beautiful, filled with romantic farmhouses and delectable Italian men. Stevie and I lived in the attic of one of those farmhouses for two years, ten miles outside Florence. I did housework and chores for the little old lady, and every so often I took Stevie into Florence so she could look at the art while I looked at the men. Tuscan architecture has as much to do with the surrounding land and hills as it does with the terra cotta or the red tiles. It looks wrong plopped down in the middle of another culture.
The house, the gardens, the fountains, and surrounding garden were arranged so perfectly, giving a surreal quality to the estate. Or, if not surreal, theatrical. Like living life on a stage set. So maybe Tuscan was the exact right style for it.
The door to the garage opened, but we didn’t drive in. I turned to look at Gary, whose hand was still on the button built into his visor, and he was staring straight ahead. His breathing had sped up and his face was flushed. I hoped he wasn’t having a heart attack. That could wait until after.
“This is a bad idea,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I can’t have you here.” His voice had gotten very tight, enunciating each syllable.
I put my hand on his arm and he yanked it away. “Gary, what’s going on?”
He glared at me and then roared, “I made a mistake.” This was a man who had a voice designed to be heard clearly on the last balcony. My ears rang and he blinked, as though he needed to get a handle on himself. “A mistake,” he said in an almost whisper, a kind of apology. “Listen, I’ll drive you back to Santa Monica. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking—”
I leaned over and turned off the car. He glared at me. “Shhh,” I said quietly.
He shook his head. “I don’t want—”
“Shhh,” I said, as I stroked his arm rhythmically. Eventually, I switched to a mantra of, “Calm and easy.”
We sat like that for a long time, in the car outside his garage. I made reassuring noises and continued to rub his arm. His breathing started as rapid and shallow but slowed down, matching the pace set by my hand. It was a trick that had worked wonders with Stevie many times. I’m good with panic attacks.
It took well over half an hour. I thought the skin on the palm of my hand might rub off before he’d get back to normal.
I stopped when he lifted his arm out of my touch and covered his face with his hands. Then he dropped his hands in his lap and cleared his throat, but he wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know what came over me.” His voice was just a shade higher than it had been. He was lying. That was okay. Whatever had happened—the panic attack or whatever—embarrassed him that much.
“This isn’t about you…You’re a very lovely woman…” Gary was having trouble finding the words. It’s so much easier when people give them to you, I guess.
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked.
He nodded, still looking at the garage instead of at me.
“Would you like me to stay tonight anyhow?” I asked. “So you don’t have to be alone?”
He shook his head and finally glanced at me. “No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” He chuckled, as though that were the understatement of the year. “I’m not going to be very good company for the rest of the night.” He turned the car back on. “Where are you staying?”
“I still need to take care of that,” I said as morosely as I could without laying it on too thick.
He looked at me as he moved the car out of park. Instead of turning around to head back to the front gates, however, he drove around the far side of the estate, on the gravel access road.
“What are you doing?�
�� I asked.
We came to a small two-story pink house, a tiny replica of the main house. Small in comparison to the main house, of course. Large by most mortals’ experience.
“That’s my guesthouse,” he said.
I looked at the house. Then at him.
“You could stay there,” he said. “No one’s using it at the moment.”
We’d gone from a possible one-night stand to some kind of panic episode to this. Who was this man?
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“The least I could do,” he said.
I turned away from him to look at the house again. And then smiled. I wiped the smile off my face before I looked back at him again.
“Oh, thank you,” I said.
CHAPTER FOUR
GARY DROVE ME back to Santa Monica. I told him I had to run a few errands, like getting some groceries for that big empty fridge in the guesthouse before I came back. I also had to get my sister, of course, but I didn’t mention that part.
When I got back to the King’s Head, Liam and Rachelle were gone and Stevie was still at the table where I’d left her. Her glass of milk was finished and my beer was still sitting on the other side of the table. The bag with the candies on it was still clutched in her hand.
“Need to use the loo?” I asked.
She nodded rapidly.
“Come on.” I put money on the table for a tip and then took my sister by the hand. “I have a place for us to stay tonight. I’ll tell you about it when you’re done.”
Stevie’s eyebrows knitted a few times as she tried to phrase her next question. Something like, And how did you arrange that? But Stevie, for all her high IQ, chooses to live in a world of an eight-year-old. An extremely sheltered eight-year-old. And much of that is my fault.
I held my hands up in surrender. “He simply offered the house. That’s all there is. Honestly. Can we go?”
“Sir Gareth Macfadyen?”
“The one and only.”
The movie lover in her came out, intrigued and nervous. Her mouth made an O, and then she popped up to follow me to the car.
I crumpled up the parking ticket I found under the windshield and threw it in the backseat of the car.
While we bought dinner, Stevie told me what she’d found out about Penelope Gurevich while waiting for me. Penelope had been a child star from age four to age twelve, and then spent her adolescence getting awkwardness out of the way to become a stunning twenty-five year old, on her first series (a nighttime soap) as an adult, and starting to get a lot of press. She was featured in articles in People, Us, In Style, and Elle, and that was this month alone. She had a dog named Buddy and a cat named Pookums. She had lived in Sherman Oaks but had moved “over the hill” to be closer to the water. She was estranged from her mother, with whom she used to live. She wanted to do movies.
“The same story, over and over,” she told me.
Celebrity journalism at its finest. I wondered about this Anne da Silva character Colin had hooked up with.
As we drove to Gary’s house, Stevie stared out the window at the wide panorama view of the California coast. “Wow,” she said. “It’s so very beautiful.”
Gary had given me a remote control for the gate and the keys to the guesthouse. The access road around the estate allowed us to bypass the main house altogether. Which was fine by me, since I had neglected to mention Stevie’s existence to our host.
Stevie waited at the back of the house while I walked around inside, closing the drapes that faced the main house. Once inside, she floated through the house. First she studied the kitchen, of course. It was larger than the usual postage stamp, with a full array of appliances and a breakfast nook. We had a living room that didn’t double as a bedroom. The living room had a sofa and love seat set in blue-and-white stripes—boring, but as far as I could tell, never used. The whole place had the distinct smell of dust and stale air. It hadn’t been opened in quite a while.
Stevie opened the window in the dining area. “An entire house sitting here unused?”
She must not remember the estate in Berkshire, I thought. Stevie’s memory is excellent, but she can block things out if she wants. I opened one of the front windows to get some cross-ventilation before dropping the drapes over it again. Then I headed to the stairs. “Come on, let’s see up here.”
The upstairs: two bedrooms, two bathrooms. Stevie’s wide eyes told me she was thinking along the same lines I was. We’d lucked into unbelievable luxury.
Ah, how one’s standards change over time.
“Which room do you want?” I asked her.
Stevie stood in the hallway between the two rooms, looking from the pale yellow of one to the green and silver stripes of the other. “I want to stay with you.”
“But that’s it, Stevie! You don’t have to! Isn’t that marvelous?”
Her small oval face tilted up toward me. “Please?”
It was too much to ask her to adjust so soon to being able to spread our wings. That was my special talent, not hers. We wouldn’t be here long and it might be crueler for her to get used to sleeping in her own room before we had to cram into a closet again. “Okay,” I said.
She smiled so wide I thought her cheeks might split.
I went out to the car to get our bag. By the time I came back, she’d set up her computer. “Colin has it.”
On the computer screen was a picture of my bracelet on a messy countertop. Where had he taken that photo? I wondered. I didn’t remember a countertop like that in his apartment. “Anything else?”
“He says he’ll be ready for you at about eleven tonight.” Before I could ask, she added: “It’s six now.”
We ate dinner and I passed out on the sofa in the living room for two hours. Stevie shook me awake. “Let’s go over the map and familiarize you with the general layout of the city.”
“Show me,” I said. Despite my eyesight, I’m not very good at reading street signs. Or anything else, but street signs in particular. I have to memorize maps the hard way to learn a place.
She pulled out the Thomas Guide. We began with a little lesson on Los Angeles geography and the layout of the main streets on the Westside. The curve of the Basin, which made roads that had been more or less laid in a southwest-northeast line (Wilshire, Santa Monica) turn due east-west. The main streets that ran through to the ocean. The boulevards and freeways. Where Beverly Hills was in relation to West Hollywood or Brentwood or Pacific Palisades, where Gary’s house was.
I could go back to Colin’s apartment the exact way I’d driven to Santa Monica. But I had other choices.
Hell, if I could memorize how to navigate Paris, Los Angeles should be a snap. I nodded.
Just as I kissed the top of her head, the phone rang. Stevie glanced at it. “It’s Colin.”
“He’s going to try to weasel out of meeting.” I grabbed the phone. “I’m on my way, keep your trousers on. For once.”
There was a long pause. “Oh God, Dru. Things have turned to shite here. I’ve definitely fucked up this time. I need your help.” He sounded like hell. Something terrible must have happened since we first talked.
I was not only incredulous at his request, I went ahead and let him hear it. “You want me to help you? I want one thing from you. My bracelet for your briefcase. Then we’re done.”
He kept talking. “I’ve walked right into a massive shitstorm with Penelope. Jesus. She’s just left here. I don’t know what to do.”
I was so busy remembering Penelope was the actress in those photos I almost missed him adding: “And you’re in it, too. I was trying to help her. It’s all a bloody mess.”
“I’m in what, Colin?” I said.
“Jesus, Dru. Blackmail. Get over here, would you? She’s accusing me of blackmailing her. Us of blackmailing her. I don’t even know how your name came up.”
My name? For what? “How the bloody hell am I involved with this?”
The startled look on Stevie’s face was my first
clue that I’d started shouting.
“I’ll explain everything. Hurry. I need your help.”
“You need my help?”
“You’re the best at fixing problems.”
Oh, that was me, all right. Ms. Fixer. “I’ll be there. Don’t expect me to be nice about it.”
I considered throwing the phone at the wall. Why in the hell had I ever gotten involved with this man? Oh yes, that’s right, he paid me to. When Stevie and I arrived in Las Vegas, we were dead broke and I thought Stevie was going to need some kind of massive therapeutic intervention, because she was repeating herself, losing her train of thought, having nightmares. When Colin offered me ten thousand for a simple marriage ceremony, of course I said yes. As it turned out, hibernating for six months in a dinky, featureless Las Vegas box worked some kind of magic. I never did find her that therapist.
Depending on what Colin had gotten me involved with, I might be the one in desperate need of a professional head-straightener.
My sister was looking at me over the edge of her knees, her hair draping the sides of her face. She started rocking back and forth, holding herself in a tiny ball. “What happened?” she whispered.
I told her.
She closed her eyes and rocked a little harder. “What do you think he did?”
I went straight from fear into fury. I had no idea what the hell Colin had been doing, but I was supposed to figure a way out of it for him, just as I’d figured out how to revamp his show and I’d figured out a way to turn the middle of the act from the draggy bit it had been into one of the highlights by doing my mind-reading act. “Hell if I know. Again.”
Sometimes I get so damned tired of figuring things out for everyone else.
Stevie saw something on my face she didn’t like. “Dru, don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I snapped.
She tucked her chin back into her knees. “Don’t do whatever you’re thinking about doing.”
I knew what she was saying, of course. How could I not? She knew better than anyone what could happen when my temper gets the best of me.
You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Page 5