by Wendy Wax
“What did you say?” Nicole drew herself up to her full height.
“I think you heard me,” he said as the door opened and several people tumbled out. None of them looked over twenty-five and there wasn’t a less-than-model-caliber face or body among them.
The door stayed open as the rest of the waiting invitation holders were allowed in, and Nicole, Madeline, Avery, and Deirdre were treated to a view of the massive living room and its sweep of glass and windows overlooking the ocean.
“Oh my God,” Avery said. “I think that couple over there is having sex!”
They followed Avery’s gaze to a chaise on which a male was stretched out, a drunken smile on his face. The girl was on her knees and had her face buried between his legs.
“Jesus,” Madeline said.
Even Nicole, who’d been to more than a few wild Hollywood parties, did a double take.
None of them could take their eyes off the private act being performed in the public place and so they missed the doormen snapping to attention.
Kyra’s gasped “Oh my God. What are you doing here?” brought them out of their shocked stupor. They turned to see Kyra and Daniel Deranian, who had a possessive arm around her waist, stepping up behind them.
Kyra didn’t look at all glad to see them. But Daniel Deranian’s famous smile suffused his famous face and his dark eyes sparkled with fun. “Hello, ladies,” he said as if he were thrilled to see them. “You’re just in time. It looks like the party’s just getting started.”
The doormen were slack-jawed with surprise. Nicole couldn’t resist reaching out a finger, placing it under the beefiest doorman’s chin, and closing his mouth for him. “I guess we’ll take our granny panties on inside now,” she said as they were swept into the party in Daniel Deranian’s wake.
Inside, Maddie leaned toward them, raising her voice to be heard over the music, which had cranked up when Deranian entered. “I don’t care how fancy this place looks. Don’t touch anything and try not to sit down,” she cautioned, looking pointedly at another couple who were grinding away at each other in a corner. “Did anybody happen to bring Handi Wipes?”
Chapter Twenty-six
As it turned out, Handi Wipes were just one of the things they should have brought to the party with them. Disguises would have been helpful. A little more discretion and a lot less champagne might have also been better. What had started as a mission to keep Kyra out of Daniel Deranian’s clutches had turned into something else entirely.
No one jumped out of bed the next morning to work or for anything except to gulp down aspirin and crawl back to bed. Kyra, who’d been too angry the night before to drink anywhere near as much as the rest of them, got up to nurse Dustin and was the first one to spot the photographers camped out on the sidewalk outside.
“Great,” Kyra said, not bothering to keep her voice down in the slightest, though this was the first time she’d spoken to Maddie since she’d first spotted her and the others trying to talk their way into Deranian’s party. “It looks like we’ve got company. The paparazzi are knee-deep out there.”
Madeline tried to burrow more deeply under the covers. Her head throbbed and the sunlight streaming in through the windows hurt her eyes. The sound of Kyra’s fingers on the keyboard of her laptop sounded like claps of thunder.
“And wait until you see the pictures on the Internet,” Kyra said. “It’s amazing how much better and crisper the shots from camera phones are nowadays than they used to be.”
“Shit.” Nicole dragged into the room and lowered herself down on the edge of the bed.
Avery and Deirdre trailed in behind her.
“Somebody needs to go to the pool house and get coffee,” Deirdre said.
“Don’t look at me,” Kyra replied. “They’ve got telephoto lenses aimed all over this place.”
Maddie squeezed her eyes tighter. She did not want to wake up and face this day.
“Crap.” Avery went into the sunroom and cranked the blind open a few notches. “I think I recognize some of those guys from last night.”
Maddie pulled back the covers and sat up, propping her back against the wall.
“They were on the sidewalk outside the hotel when Daniel and his bodyguards helped us into the minivan,” Avery continued.
Nikki groaned. “I knew I’d get caught in that beige-mobile sooner or later. Good thing I don’t have any clients left to lose.”
“Was that your plan all along?” Kyra aimed the question at Maddie, her tone brittle. “To humiliate me and then get so drunk that I’d have to drive you home?”
Maddie wouldn’t have called it a plan. It had just sort of worked out that way. Like overprotective parents trying to prevent an overweight child from overeating by scarfing down all the fattening things in the house, they’d gone to the party to make sure that Kyra didn’t do anything foolish and then foolishly overindulged themselves. At the moment Maddie’s mind was moving far too slowly to understand their behavior, let alone respond to a question composed of multiple parts.
“It was that bartender,” Avery said. “The one Daniel assigned to us. The one he told he’d fire if he ever saw our glasses empty.”
“Seriously,” Nicole added. “I carried my glass into the bathroom one time and he tried to follow me in with the bottle of Taittinger.”
Dustin stood in his playpen/crib and peered out over the edge at them while Kyra’s fingers pounded on the laptop. An emphatic keystroke and the printer chugged into action.
She waved the page in front of them. “Here you all are dancing on that tabletop together,” Kyra said. “The caption reads, ‘Do Over stars attend Deranian private party. Or are they the entertainment?’” She read it carefully, emphasizing each word before handing it to Avery to pass around the room.
“Oh, and this one’s really special, too,” Kyra continued. “It’s a shot of the two doormen/bodyguards looking on with the caption Deranian bodyguards say reality-TV stars ‘partied their asses off!’”
There was a collective groan. Maddie’s eyelids fluttered briefly shut. She was pathetically grateful that the granny panties thought to cover those asses had not been mentioned.
On the nightstand Maddie’s cell phone rang. Before she could reach for the mute button to stop the noise, Kyra swooped closer to look at the screen. “It’s for you, Mom,” she said more loudly than necessary as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, Dad,” she said at what might have been the top of her lungs. “Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, hold on a sec.”
“Here you go,” Kyra said, more cheerful now that the opportunity to torture her mother had presented itself. She handed the phone to Maddie, who slowly raised it to her ear.
She didn’t speak, because there was no opportunity to get a word in before Steve began to berate her. “I can’t believe you’d put yourself in that sort of position,” he huffed. “As if the whole pilot episode wasn’t already humiliating enough. What’s Kyra doing with that asshole again? And what were you doing there”—he paused, then read the same caption Kyra just had—“‘partying your asses off’?” There was a beat of silence, far too brief for Maddie to formulate a response. “How can you condone her seeing him?”
“I don’t condone it. That’s why we—” Madeline began, but Steve cut her off.
“You’re going to have to do a better job of supervision down there, Maddie. I won’t have—”
The blood that had begun to roil in her veins reached her brain and jerked her fully awake. Steve barely responded to her phone calls, but he apparently had time to call and chastise her.
“You’re welcome to come down here and supervise her yourself if you’re not satisfied with the job I’m doing,” Madeline snapped, for once not caring who heard her.
“You know that’s not possible,” he said. “But you have to—”
“I’m not interested in hearing what you think I have to do.” She lowered her voice as everyone else fell silent.
Throwing her legs over the side
of the bed, she stood and moved out of the room and onto the upstairs landing, barely listening to his litany of complaints.
Through the porthole window she could make out the crowd of photographers down on the sidewalk. Max, who was wearing his dressing gown and pajamas and held the morning newspaper, appeared to be doing a routine of some kind. Which meant the photographers were getting not only a juicy story but some stand-up comedy as well.
“Look, Maddie,” Steve continued to rant. “You’re going to have to be more careful. Kyra doesn’t need to be around that troublemaker. And neither do you! And I certainly don’t see how this is good for Dustin. God knows what Andrew’s up to.”
Maddie paced the landing, telling herself to calm down, but the unfairness of Steve’s attack made it impossible. She’d had more than enough. She was finished taking whatever he felt like dishing out and it was time he understood that.
“You look,” she cut him off. “I’m doing the best I can here. Kyra’s an adult and there’s only so far I can intervene. Things would be a hell of a lot better if you were willing to talk things out with me in advance instead of only calling me to criticize later.”
Out on the sidewalk, Max took a bow and Maddie imagined she could hear the whir of camera motor drives. Troy and Anthony stepped out onto the driveway and pointed their equipment over Max’s shoulder toward the paparazzi. The paparazzi pointed theirs back.
Steve was still on the offensive. Madeline forced herself to tune back in and was immediately sorry that she had.
“Are you actually accusing me of leaving you alone in Atlanta and treating you like a second-class citizen?” she asked in amazement.
“Well, you are there taking care of everyone else even though I asked you not to, while I’m—”
“—full of shit.”
“What did you say?” The shock in his voice was almost comical.
“I said you’re full of shit.” Maddie said this slowly, relishing each word.
There was a silence, meant, she knew, to give her a chance to apologize. That was not going to happen. Not this time.
“Listen, Steve,” she said, a new resolve building inside her. “I’ve gotta go. I’m out of time and, frankly, patience.”
She did not have to listen to his complaints unless she chose to. In fact, she didn’t have to listen to him at all.
“When you’re ready to ‘sac up’”—she intentionally used one of Andrew’s favorite, and grossest, expressions—“and treat me with a little respect and courtesy I’m all ears. Until then, I don’t think we really have all that much to talk about.”
She punctuated this last comment with a healthy dose of dial tone.
It was noon by the time they’d dressed and devised a means of crossing the pool deck to the pool house without exposing themselves to the photographers’ long lenses any more than was necessary. Avery was glad that it was Sunday, though she had no real hope that the horde outside the gates would be gone by the next morning when they needed to get back to work.
Tension in the pool house was thick. The Lifetime crew had set up just inside the door to film their skulking entrance. Only Andrew, who’d just awoken, Dustin, who was pretty much always happy, and Max, who had apparently gotten a healthy round of applause from his sidewalk audience, seemed unconcerned with the barbarians at the gate.
Troy’s camera followed their preparations for what would serve as breakfast, with lots of shots that Avery could tell were far too close up. When he’d shot them in every unflattering way possible, Troy set his camera down.
“Lisa Hogan called me this morning,” he said to Kyra. “She’s royally pissed off that I didn’t have footage of you and Deranian and the rest of the cast at the party last night. She wanted to know why everyone else in the world seemed to have photos and video but me.”
He waited for a response, but Kyra looked past him as she busied herself opening a jar of baby food and putting a bib around Dustin’s neck.
The rest of them tried to stay out of the conversation, but the space was too small to pretend not to register Kyra’s lack of response.
“So what? It’s just too bad for me?” Troy demanded, his tone incredulous. “I sit on video of Daniel Deranian dressed up as a woman because you ask me to—video that would have impressed my boss and possibly earned me thousands of dollars on the side—and then you go out and perform for the cameras without any warning whatsoever?”
The cameraman practically quivered with anger as Kyra spooned the baby food into Dustin’s mouth.
When no one else spoke, Kyra finally said, “I just went to a party. I’m not the one who put on a camera-worthy show.”
Avery glanced at Madeline’s face, which was tight. Her gaze was focused on her grandson. Even Max seemed inordinately preoccupied with the baby food Kyra was practically shoveling into Dustin’s mouth.
“So your mother and the others would have been at that party even if you hadn’t gone?” Troy prodded.
Madeline’s mouth opened and then closed as if she’d thought better of whatever she’d been about to say.
“And what are you doing fooling around with that self-centered asshole anyway?” Troy asked. “Don’t you have any self-respect?”
Avery was kind of glad that someone was giving Kyra the talking-to she needed, but listening in was distinctly uncomfortable.
Kyra’s head shot up. She stopped shoveling baby food. “You are so over the line it’s not even funny,” she said, standing and turning to face him. “Last night was a big screwup from every point of view. But you can take that up with my mother and her merry band, not me.”
Troy snorted with derision. “You like to pretend you’re an adult, but you sure as hell don’t act like one,” he chided.
“And you do?” Kyra scoffed right back. “I’m getting really tired of this.” She fisted her hands on her hips and glared at him. “You’ve been in my face since the day we met. What is it with you?”
“Like you don’t know,” Troy ground out.
“I don’t know,” Kyra snapped. “Maybe it’s time you enlightened me.”
Avery stole a look at Madeline, who was removing the baby’s bib and wiping his face with it.
Max speared the baby’s attention with a silent disappearing-quarter trick. The baby’s laughter struck an oddly normal counterpoint to the words Kyra and Troy were flinging at each other.
“Oh, forget it,” Troy said with an angry shake of his head. “But I will tell you one thing. I’ve looked the other way to try to protect Dustin from the wrong kind of exposure and because you asked me to. But that’s over.”
“Is that right?” Kyra’s tone remained belligerent, but her face was ashen.
“That’s right.” Troy took another step toward Kyra so that she was forced to look up at him. “You tell your boyfriend that if he shows up here again, he better be wearing a disguise I damned well can’t see through. Because Daniel Deranian’s free pass is over.”
The tick in Troy’s cheek grew more pronounced as he struggled visibly to get himself under control. “And so is yours.”
By the end of the week, Nicole felt like a laboratory rat, trapped and surrounded. The slave driver known as Avery Lawford had cracked the whip and put them back to work, but every movement was observed and in many cases reported. Unwilling to jog through the mass of photographers who still littered the sidewalk, Nikki had barely exercised, and her temper, like the others’, had frayed. At the moment she was clinging to Giraldi’s promise of a sunset boat ride, which would include just the two of them and no audience. She glanced down at her watch. Only eleven hours to go.
Max and Andrew had been posted at the gate to verify the credentials of all workmen and subcontractors, while Troy and Anthony roamed freely shooting inside the house and out. Kyra and her camera moved as well, but she focused primarily on the interiors and kept her face behind the camera when she ventured outside. She didn’t respond to the photographers’ clamorings to “look this way” and “jus
t give us one clean shot!”
When she passed near Troy, they aimed their cameras at each other, but they didn’t speak.
Mario arrived with his nephew, Giuseppe, shaking his head and muttering about the photographer who’d asked to be added to Mario’s crew and another who’d offered a camera and a thousand dollars for anything Mario managed to capture on it.
His muttering lapsed in and out of Italian as he presented Madeline with a pan of homemade baked ziti then began to unpack his tools. “Look at my hands,” he said. “They’re shaking. I don’t know how those barbarians could think I would allow them to get anywhere near you. They are pazzi—crazy!” He spoke as if to everyone, but his gaze remained on Madeline.
None of them could miss Madeline’s blush.
A short time later Mario and Giuseppe were on their hands and knees regrouting and filling in the Moroccan tile. The window people arrived with a sizable crew and Deirdre pressed everyone into service. The only thing Nikki heard more often than Deirdre’s voice was the ringing of Deirdre’s phone.
Nicole’s phone rang too, far more often than she would have liked. Each time she fished it out of her pants pocket and saw Amherst’s phone number, she muted her ringer, let the call go to voice mail, and promptly deleted the message without listening. It figured that the man who’d played so hard to get when she’d been pursuing him as a client refused to disappear now that she wanted nothing to do with him. Despite the bright sunlight streaming in through The Millicent’s openings and the pandemonium created by the people around her, she shivered at the memory of the empty mansion and its owner’s equally empty stare.
Madeline carried the baby into the living room and joined Nicole, turning her back to the windows in an effort to keep Dustin out of camera range. Avery hurried in, her baggy shorts and T-shirt covered in grime. Standing next to the immaculately groomed Deirdre, they looked like a magazine’s “before” and “after.”
“I can’t stand all of those people camped out here,” Avery said. “Every time I look up I see some camera lens aimed our way.”