by C. D. Reiss
Cara was out of the frame. I was relieved.
“Fuck this. Tracey Shim got busted doing lines at the Thelonius Room.”
“And she hasn’t had a magazine cover since,” Ken interjected.
I handed the iPad back, but Ken didn’t take it.
“Read it.”
I froze. Michael took the tablet and read from it.
“And The Father of the Year Award Goes to . . . Literally Anyone but Brad Sinclair.” Michael paused, looked for my reaction, and continued. “His press release has him so graciously taking a strange child in, but instead of devoting himself to the foundling, he retains his playboy ways. Just last night, he was photographed amid a stunning constellation of alcohol and string bikinis. Where is the baby? Right in the same house with the nannies, of course. To make the whole situation more deliciously complex, there are actually two nannies. One’s a classic Hollywood daddy-jumper, vaulting from Josh Trudeau’s bed to Brad Sinclair’s House of Debauch. The other is fresh as a daisy. She’s managed to not have a single printable scandal in her entire career. Let’s see how long that lasts, shall we?”
He put the tablet down. “There’s more. But you get the idea.”
“This?” Ken said, “I can’t fix this for you. If people think you’re partying in the house, they’re going to start wondering why Child Protective Services isn’t at your door.”
“Let them wonder. I don’t care,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. Nope, just heard Cara’s voice telling me how hard it was. How I had to pick a god damn lane or get off the highway.
She’d never said that exactly. But when I said it to myself it was in her voice.
“Is this where I talk?” Michael asked Ken.
“Go ahead. Talk your little heart out. But fix him.” There was a knock at the office door, and the shadow of Ken’s executive assistant appeared through the frosted glass.
“I’m sorry I personally offended you,” I snapped, because screw Ken and his busy little life with the kids his wife took care of 24-7.
“Nothing’s personal. Do you understand? As far as I go, I don’t have a personal to get offended about.” He pointed to Michael, then me, while looking at my friend. “I have to take a call. Fix him.”
He left with the phone to his ear as if he’d already moved on. The glass door clanged then clicked.
“And I’m stuck in the office with Dudley Do-Right,” I said, flopping onto the couch. “You gonna lecture me, I’m right here.”
“Isn’t Dudley Do-Right before your time?”
“My mother used to say that. Was he a real guy?”
“I have no idea.” He shook his watch down until it was below his cuff, then checked it. “Listen. I don’t care about your image.”
“Good.”
“Or your career. If no one hires you anymore, you can just move back to Arkansas. Your parents would be glad to have you.”
“I’m not moving back.”
“I know. It was just a worst-case scenario. For you. Your daughter’s living her worst-case scenario.”
“Dude, give me a break. She has everything a kid could want.”
“I promise you, she doesn’t care.”
“You know what?” I stood up. I’d had enough and he hadn’t even started. “Six foster kids a few months ago doesn’t make you an expert. Not by a sight. It makes you crazier than a shithouse rat.”
“Maybe, but—”
“No. No but. I worked my whole life so I could do what I want. Then I get here, and I gotta slice out weeks between pictures. There’s no life of leisure. It’s a lie. You make it, and you don’t get to do what you want. You get to work like a plow horse. You knew this. You weren’t surprised. Your dad, your mom, your second cousin on your mother’s side . . . you all knew. Well, I didn’t. I worked to get out and I get here and it’s more work. I can’t breathe, Mike. I can’t breathe, and now I have to be a daddy? What the . . . what the fuck?”
“What do you want me to tell you?” His fingers tented between his spread knees.
“Tell me I can have a life.”
“You can have a life. But not the one you planned.”
How many parents did a guy need? Did I hit a hive of them or something? I felt as if I was being swarmed by people telling me what to do.
“That’s what you came down the hill to tell me?”
“Give or take. And that you need to slow it down. This is big. It’s not method. You’re not prepping for a part. This is it. This is all you get.”
Fuck this. Fuck this till Tuesday. Fuck everything about this.
“No pressure, right?” I grumbled and started for the door. I was being a brat. I knew it, but I felt like a justified brat who had plenty to be bratty about.
“And the nanny?” Michael called out just as I got to the door. My heart froze like Blomer Lake in January. Solid ice. Ready to crack if it was touched.
“How did you know?”
“Everyone knows.” He looked at me as if I were a mint leaf short of a julep. Maybe I was. Maybe I was losing my fucking mind. I almost asked him why. I almost got angry because it sounded as if he was going to insult Cara.
But he was Michael Greydon. He didn’t insult people. It was beneath him.
“I want her and I’m keeping her, Mike. I just haven’t figured out how. And don’t try to talk me out of it.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. She has this way. I want to do right by her, and then I want . . .”
To make her scream my name.
To fuck her so hard she’s sore for days.
I couldn’t say it. I was raised better than that. Weird enough to be thinking that way. I’d gotten rid of the southern gentleman bullshit and learned to live and fuck and party the LA way. No rules. I loved that life. I earned it.
“She did this thing to me,” I said more to myself than Mike. “She makes me want to burn the house down. I don’t know what it is.”
I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t get the sight of her just before I’d kissed her out of my head.
“Well, I guess we know what Josh saw in her,” Michael said.
“Josh who?” I must have sounded enraged, because my blood reacted. Fuck him. Whoever he was. Fuck him.
“Josh who?” If Michael’s look was a guide, I was stupid as well as crazy. “Trudeau. Who did you think?”
I laughed, shaking off the adrenaline.
“Right. Never mind.”
“What’s going on?”
“The other nanny. Not the one Josh had an affair with. Not Blakely. Cara. I want her and it shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t help being an asshole and just taking what I want because it’s there. I don’t care what they think of me. But I care what they think of her.”
He didn’t answer. He just leaned back on the couch.
“Can you stop looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re a doctor and I’m the patient.”
“Tell me about your mother,” he said with a distinct Freudian lilt.
Fine. If I was going to be an emotional ass I was going to be an emotional ass.
“So, you know the time at Strasberg? When we were doing the game with the golf ball?”
“No.”
“You douche. Yes, you do. There were six of us. Britt too. And we passed the ball between us. Every time we got it we had to tell a truth about the person we passed it to. Right? And I passed to you and I said you were a Hollywood prince who had it easy and you got mad, so you threw it back hard and said I was a golden boy because I had all the talent and didn’t have to work at it. I sent it back to you and said you were going to waste your life worrying about what everyone thought about you. Then you sent it back and said the truth about Brad Sinclair—he’s worried everyone will know that he cares what people think so he makes sure everyone thinks the worst. Remember that?”
“Trevor took the ball away after that, right?”
“Yeah. But you were right. I
was too, because you were a fucking prince.”
“I still am.”
“Thank you for admitting it. And right now? Sitting here in Ken’s office, I want to be you. I want a reputation I can be proud of. I want to look at what I’ve built and say, ‘That’s mine,’ like it matters.”
“Having kids will do that to you.”
“Can you stop being a dick for a minute?”
“Fine. Let me get this straight. You want the nanny. But if you have the nanny, you’re going to have a shit reputation that you don’t really care about except you do, for the nanny’s sake. And you want to stop being the Hollywood party boy for your daughter. But if you start screwing her nanny, it’s going to screw with her?”
“Something like that.”
Michael stood up and fastened the top button of his jacket. Cary fucking Grant had nothing on the guy.
“I can tell you one thing.”
I stood up too.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t have small-town Arkansas problems anymore. You’re almost a Hollywood prince. But not quite.”
“Watch your back, buddy.”
“You gave me some advice once. You said to do what I wanted because it was what I wanted and not pretend it was something else. So, what do you want?”
The simplest question in the world. I wanted Cara’s body and her time. I wanted to be a good father and do good work. The parties and the clubs came in a distant tenth on the list. I’d done all that. There was nothing new about it.
What did I want?
“Everything,” I said. “All of it.”
CHAPTER 35
CARA
I didn’t know what to expect from Ray Heywood, but he couldn’t do anything worse than give me a hard time in front of everyone at Kate Martello’s.
I had a feeling it was going to work out all right. My Brad dream had come like clockwork, and I woke up not just turned on, but happy. He and I were a terrible match, but once I wasn’t Nicole’s nanny, I could at least prove to myself that these dreams and feelings were misguided. I was hungry for sex and affection. Not Brad Sinclair particularly.
Yes, once I wasn’t his daughter’s nanny, I could kiss him again, and it would be . . . sad.
I parked the car myself and crossed over to the back entrance of the restaurant.
Brad and I were going to have some kind of short-term fling that proved we were incompatible and then what? I’d fallen in love with Nicole.
Do not fall in love with the children.
I had a fantasy. Ray hired me back. I let Brad do all the things to my body he ever imagined.
But I didn’t have enough of an imagination to make the relationship permanent. So what happened to Nicole? I couldn’t be the first of many that drifted in and out of her life. I couldn’t break her heart.
The standard-issue dog pack of paparazzi hung out behind the velvet rope. They usually ignored me, which worked out perfectly, thank you.
I didn’t even look at them or look down when I passed. My mind was on Nicole, who I loved, and Brad, who was the worst kind of person in the nicest kind of package, berating myself for giving up one so I could have the other. I couldn’t see a way around it. Couldn’t see a way to have them both. Or even one without the other.
I approached the guy in the suit who let people in (or not) and was about to say my name when I heard it, loud and clear.
“Cara DuMont!”
I looked to the source of the call, and never found it, because it was drowned out by the entire dog pack calling my name and the uncomfortable sight of black lenses pointed in my direction.
“Miss DuMont!”
“Where did you get those shoes?”
“Where’s Brad Sinclair?”
“What did you say when he mooned you?”
“How was that kiss last night?”
I swallowed my heart and lungs in one gulp, but they lodged in my throat.
The kiss.
On the path to the pool house.
Of course someone had seen it, but I hadn’t seen anything on the web about it. No pictures had surfaced. Had I missed it? Who knew about it? Everyone? Insiders? The public? What were they saying? Was I a whore? Was I a curiosity? Who was I? I couldn’t hear, taste, feel anything outside the fracture in my sense of self.
“Miss DuMont,” the man with the dark suit said. I looked at him. Forties. Kind face. Tablet tucked in the crook of his arm.
“Yes.” I could barely get my voice past the organs stuck in my throat.
“This way.”
He led me through the doors, through the packed, loud room with the high ceilings. I recognized Fiona Drazen and Neville Rage without taking my eyes off the maître d’s back. I didn’t want to know if they were looking back at me.
Ray stood when he saw me. Next to him, Kendall smiled with her long, shiny hair and bangly earrings. The maître d’ held a chair out for me, and Ray sat after I did.
Kendall tucked her hair behind her right ear with her left hand. The stone in the engagement ring was the size of a lightbulb and twice as bright. She was my age. Taller. Richer. More sophisticated but not more worldly.
I didn’t know why I felt as if I had to compare myself to her. My name on the lips of a pack of paps had left me exposed to my vulnerabilities.
“Thank you for coming,” Ray said.
“I’m happy to. I’m sorry about what happened with Willow. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s fine—”
“We want you to know,” Kendall interrupted Ray, “that we don’t approve at all. She’s too young, for goodness’ sake.”
“She was supposed to be at volleyball practice.”
They jumped on each other’s sentences. It was kind of cute.
“And we spoke to the mother of the girl she was supposed to get a lift from.”
“The nanny was supposed to drive them home.”
“Never told us Willow wasn’t in the car.”
“Said it wasn’t her job.”
“And the woman we hired lost track completely.”
“And we thought you’d never do that.”
“Never.”
“Never, ever.”
They ran out of story. I let the end hang there. The waiter came and we ordered.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of these people. I’d come in hoping they’d offer me a job so I could leave Brad with another job ready, but sitting there, wondering what inconstant parenting had to do with Willow’s troubles, what they’d mean for Nicole, how much I wanted Brad, and what a fool I’d been to think we could keep it under wraps, I doubted everything. I was falling into the cracks between all the things I wanted.
“And Willow?” I asked. “She’s old enough to be held accountable.”
“Of course!” Ray said.
“I took her phone away for a week,” Kendall said with finality.
“Did she tell you to go fuck yourself?”
I even flinched from my filterless comment, but Ray laughed.
Kendall didn’t look amused.
“She’ll live,” Ray said. “My lovely bride-to-be might not.” He put his arm around Kendall, and she pushed him off playfully, but without any real humor. She was mad. Willow must have sparked quite a row. I could only imagine the screaming, and Jedi hiding in his room with his Legos.
“I think you’ll be fine,” I said. “I honestly . . . I don’t know what you want out of me. I’ve never gone to the press with any kid’s problem.”
“We were worried,” Kendall said.
“Not really,” Ray interrupted.
“You didn’t work for us when you saw her. The NDA didn’t cover incidents after we terminated you.”
“Oh, Kendie,” Ray said, exasperated. “You don’t get it.”
“Look, this is business, honey.”
“Yes and no. Mostly no.”
She flipped her wrist at him and her bracelets bangled.
“There’s money invo
lved,” Kendall insisted. “It’s business.”
“It’s more complicated—”
“You didn’t have her sign anything to earn the severance.”
“You guys are making me nuts,” I broke in. “Can we get to the point?”
Kendall leaned back and crossed her arms, her body language deferring the entire matter to her husband, who looked as if he now wanted to crawl under a rock and die.
“Just say whatever it is, Ray,” I said. “I won’t walk out. I’m hungry.”
Ray put his elbows on the table. His cuffs hiked to show off a thick gold bracelet I hadn’t seen before. It was no more than another stylish bauble, but it reminded me how much money and power he had. How many connections.
“Willow’s young, and her mistakes can follow her for a long time.”
“You know I’m not going to start calling people.”
“Maybe not now. But if something else happens and it goes public, people are going to come to you for background. She’s not covered with this incident. Legally, you could talk and we don’t want that.”
It was my turn to lean back and cross my arms. How many ways could I tell this guy I wasn’t going to hurt Willow?
“So,” he said, pulling an envelope from his inside pocket. “In here is an agreement to not disclose what happened and where you saw her. It’s the same NDA, give or take, as you signed when you were hired.”
I took the envelope. I could sign it just so these two could sleep at night. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to say anything anyway. I opened the envelope. Ray picked a pen out of his inside pocket.
“And if you sign it,” Kendall said, “it’s ten thousand for you.”
I didn’t know why I found that aggravating.
No. Once I froze in place with my hand out for the pen, I figured out why every hair on my body stood on end. The payoff implied I’d ever hold insider information about a child over that child’s head. It questioned the very basics of my integrity.
I closed the envelope.
“I don’t want your money,” I said, sliding the envelope to Ray. “And I’m not signing it. I’d never, ever hurt Willow. And thank you, but I’m not hungry anymore.”
I left, walking right out the back as if there wasn’t a pack of paparazzi waiting for me. I didn’t care. Maybe they were going to say I was storming out because Ray and I were having an affair. Sure. Why not? Let them see me. Let them think what they wanted.