by Morgan
Michelle looked at Shaunna, who shook her head as she reached out to hold the door. “You might not be done with your looping session by then.”
Thomas stepped forward to take over door holding duties from Shaunna. To do otherwise would have been ungentlemanly.
“Can you make it eight o’clock?” Michelle asked.
“We’ll talk then.” Thomas let go of the door. As the elevator closed, they could hear him dialing his phone and whistling something from Aladdin.
“He’s the best,” Shaunna commented. She meant it, but she was also curious to hear Michelle’s opinion.
Michelle nodded. “He is indeed.”
“Is he married?” Shaunna couldn’t help herself.
Michelle turned and looked at Shaunna knowingly. “No.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Sometimes.”
“Maybe you should be his girlfriend,” Shaunna suggested boldly. “He seems very fond of you.”
“He is very fond of me, and I’m very fond of him, and neither of us is interested in screwing that up.”
The actress turned her attention to the lighted display above the door, monitoring their rapid descent to the lobby. Shaunna wisely read Michelle’s action as the signal it was.
Case closed.
“We only have a few lines to replace from the picnic scene where the plane flew over and disrupted the shot, and about six pages of bridge dialogue,” Nathan told Michelle as she settled into the sound booth. “All your harness stuff and the control room stuff sounded great.”
Michelle used to hate ADR sessions. The thought of going into a sound booth and trying to reproduce her vocal acting performance seemed counterproductive. However, Nathan made the experience a revelation. He helped her realize that she could actually better her performance through inflection and articulation. He also reminded her that she now had more perspective on the character and could use that to her advantage.
She was encouraged to seize her second chance to alter the dynamics in her voice. The result was a more nuanced delivery while maintaining the right tone for the scene and the correct pacing.
“Okay,” Nathan told her after they completed his checklist with time to spare. “We’re all done. Thank you for another great performance.”
“You’re welcome.”
Nathan moved to a work table, leaning casually against it to stretch his taut muscles. Michelle joined him, and the two stood comfortably side by side. While their time together as professionals was winding down, a new friendship had developed as a result of the larger-than-life events that had taken place on-set.
“Are you going to wait around to see David?”
“Does he have some looping to do, too?”
“No. He’s taking me to meet a guy who has a car for sale.”
“The Teen Wolf van?”
Nathan’s eyes lit up with cheerful anticipation. “Yup. Wait, you know about that?”
Michelle nodded her head. “Mmm hmm. Shaunna told me.”
“Ah, how is Shaunna? She’s taking David and me up to see her father in a few weeks. He’s got a whole museum of muscle cars up there at his place.”
“He does. I’ve seen it. Shaunna’s doing well. She’s on her way here.” Michelle’s phone vibrated. “That’s her now.”
Shaunna walked into the recording studio a few moments later. David was a few steps behind her, and the two of them looked like they’d just shared a joke, or a secret.
“Hey, pal!” David declared as he shook Nathan’s hand. “You ready to go?”
“Let me just say goodbye to the lads.”
“When should we expect you back at the house?” Shaunna asked David.
“We’re just going to Hollywood,” he replied. “We could meet for dinner in town if you want to.”
“No, thanks,” Michelle said. “I’m going home to wait for my attorney to call.”
“What about dinner?” David looked at both of them with mild concern. He was pretty sure the women hadn’t eaten in hours.
“We’ll find something,” Shaunna assured him.
After the girls left, David drove Nathan to Hollywood. There were more size fourteen sequined platform boots in ten square blocks than there were chopsticks in China, and right in the middle of it all was his old apartment building.
When David had walked out of the old place on his way to Texas, he thought it was the last time he would ever see it. The reality that he could now buy the entire building nearly gave him vertigo when he looked up the stairwell.
The introductions went well, and the test drive went even better. As expected, Nathan overpaid for the car, but not by much, and when he tried to pay David the finder’s fee he’d promised, the actor politely declined.
When Shaunna and Michelle arrived back in Malibu after dinner, there was a man with salt and pepper hair standing by the gatehouse.
“Hey, Sly’s still here,” Michelle said.
The slight man had arrived at Michelle’s house that afternoon and changed the gate code, along with all the locks on the doors. He had a quiet awareness about him and was professional and prepared.
Michelle rolled down her window to punch the new code. “What’s up, Sly?”
“I was just speaking with Mr. Harper,” he answered. “I believe that he has secured your ex-husband’s agreement to keep his distance.” He tried not to let his mild disappointment show, as if he’d been hoping for the opportunity to confront the imbecile himself.
“Does that mean you’ll get to go home soon?” Shaunna asked. He’d been there since before they’d gone into the sound studio.
“Yes, Miss Noble. Mr. Harper told me to see you both safely inside before retiring for the evening.”
“Very well, sir.” Shaunna liked talking to Sly. It brought out the debutante in her.
The gate opened, and Michelle drove in. It closed behind her with a solid thunk, and when she parked and got out, she noticed that there were no photographers lurking across the street.
“I encouraged them to disperse,” Sly commented as he walked up the drive toward the women and his own car, a canary yellow Alfa Romeo.
“Is there anything you can’t do, Sly?” Michelle asked over her shoulder as she and Shaunna approached the front door.
Sly appeared to consider this under the low California moonlight that was the same color as the smooth little car he stood next to.
“I can’t sing.” With that, he nodded his head and climbed into the car, waiting to drive away until after the front door had closed behind the two women.
Michelle asked Shaunna if she wanted a drink and began searching for a bottle of Bailey’s Irish cream before hearing the answer.
Thomas’s call came about two cocktails later. They had both kicked off their shoes, and Shaunna was standing at the wide window counting boat lights on the horizon while Michelle leaned forward to retrieve her buzzing phone from the coffee table.
“Hello? Thomas!” Michelle’s voice was light and playful as she continued with a stream-of-consciousness greeting. “Thanks for sending Sly over. He’s a miracle worker! I showed him around before I went to my looping session, and it took him forever to accept a glass of lemonade, but he changed the gate code and the locks and even hooked up my Blu-ray player properly. Did you know that you have to have special cables to hook your HDTV to your Blu-ray? Otherwise, you won’t actually be seeing your movies in HD.”
She listened as he told her that he did know about VGA cables, but agreed that Sly was indeed a miracle worker.
“What exactly does he do for you?” Michelle asked, the drinks aiding her bluntness.
After a pause, Michelle responded, “Well, he was a complete gentleman, and it looked like he stepped right out of a Charles Dickens novel.”
Shaunna listened to Michelle’s side of the conversation as she strolled to the kitchen and refilled her drink.
“Oh really?” Michelle said after a long pause. “Well that doesn’t surprise me
. Sly’s very proper. Shaunna talked to him for a while and had to practically beg him to call her anything besides ma’am. In the end, I think she had to settle for ‘Miss Noble.’”
Michelle finally worked up the nerve to ask Thomas about how things went with Kyle’s attorneys and then listened for a very long time.
“So, he knows that we changed the locks, then?” she finally said, then listened some more. This pause was even longer than the first, and Shaunna marveled at how loud her swallows sounded in the hushed room.
“Apparently he had been squirreling things out of the house for months…Oh, just his stuff, shoes, suits, jewelry…Huh?…Art? No, he wouldn’t care about the art…Okay, I’ll check.”
Michelle put Thomas’s voice on speakerphone after asking his permission and waved Shaunna over to listen to the rest of his account.
“…They were like kittens after that. They guaranteed that Kyle wouldn’t go back to Malibu and staked a very pending, very public restraining order on it. They even went so far as to suggest that our future meetings take place in my office.”
“Is that a big deal?” Michelle asked. “Having the proceedings take place on your turf?”
“Oh yes,” Thomas answered quickly. “Especially in this case. It’ll be fun to show Kyle how much nicer my office building is than the circus tent his clowns hunker down in.”
“When do we meet?” she asked.
“They left it completely up to us.”
Michelle looked at Shaunna, who didn’t need to consult her calendar. “You have next Wednesday and Thursday completely free.”
“Let’s do it Wednesday morning. Say…around ten?”
“That’s fine with me,” Thomas replied.
“Do I need to bring anything?”
“Just check the art, like I said.”
Michelle looked at Shaunna. “Sure. Anything else?”
“Actually, there is one other thing.”
“What’s that?” Michelle’s stomach clenched; she knew things were going too smoothly.
“Sly discovered something at your house while you were gone, and we both agreed that I should be the one to discuss it with you.”
Both women wore twin expressions of worried curiosity.
“Go on,” Michelle invited while outwardly cringing.
“What do you know about your home surveillance system?”
“What surveillance system?” Michelle asked in a small voice.
Thomas didn’t hesitate. “That’s what I thought you were going to say.”
When David arrived an hour later, Shaunna grabbed him by the hand and led him quickly upstairs. He happily bounded up the steps, misinterpreting her intentions.
“Kyle had cameras in the house,” Shaunna blurted as soon as the door to her room was shut.
David’s eyes did all his reacting for him, first growing large with shock, then falling with dread.
“Thomas sent someone over to secure a few things for Michelle, and he found four cameras.”
“Did the guy find a tape too?” David asked hopefully.
“It doesn’t work like that. This system sends data to an offsite server that Kyle can probably access from his laptop.”
“Did Michelle know?”
“Not a thing. He could have been filming her for years.”
“Can’t her lawyer do anything?”
“Since the cameras have already been disabled, I didn’t bring it up to Thomas in front of Michelle. Unfortunately, this is still legally Kyle’s house, so I don’t know what Thomas could do, even if I told him about it. He is thinking about filing that restraining order though.”
“Really?”
“He thinks it will help down the road by establishing that Kyle is no longer in residence and has been legally trespassed.”
“Does he think that will work?”
“He does, but it’ll take time.”
“Where were the cameras?”
“One in the driveway, one out back by the pool, one in the master bedroom, and…” Shaunna hesitated and swallowed before finishing her sentence. “And one in the indoor pool. Where we were.”
David’s chest tightened, but all of his fear was for Shaunna. He knew what she was telling him and how devastated she must feel about it. But in his shock, he couldn’t help but state the obvious.
“So, Kyle has a sex tape of us.”
Shaunna nodded her head, the tears of embarrassment threatening to finally race down her cheeks.
“At least he doesn’t know he has it yet,” David supplied in an attempt to cheer her.
“What makes you say that?”
David remained silent for a few moments as he attempted to collect his thoughts. He didn’t want to answer Shaunna’s question with anything less than a reassuring response.
“If he had, it would be everywhere by now. Chances are he hasn’t even checked the footage yet. What we need to do is not tip him off…”
“The system has been disabled. It’s only a matter of time before he realizes that,” she informed him.
“In that case, at least everyone will know that I’m not with Michelle,” David half-joked.
Shaunna wasn’t interested in making light of the situation. She thought of what her father’s reaction would be, and that was enough to finally loosen the hold on her ever-mounting tears.
“I’ll be humiliated if it gets out, David,” she said quietly, “and your career will be over before it starts.”
“Sometimes sex tapes actually help people you know…” David was grasping at straws for her sake, but Shaunna was too pragmatic to cling to false hope.
“If Kyle leaks that footage, you’ll be nothing more than a punch line.” She approached him, circling her arms around his waist and resting her cheek against his chest.
David held her numbly. He wanted to comfort Shaunna, but in truth, he felt just as defeated as she did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
KYLE SET HIMSELF UP in one of the many overpriced and oversized rentals in Beverly Hills. He tried to get his new publicist, Heather, to take one of the bedroom suites for herself, but she constantly refused, each time more politely than the last.
He was served with a restraining order one week after his visit to Malibu, and his hand began to throb as he read the document. It was delivered by a court officer with a dozen photographers on his tail. This was a wicked and unexpected move, especially from Michelle, and Kyle was outraged to the point of having a tantrum. He stomped his foot hard enough to shake the chandelier and began shouting at Heather, who had gone pale. He was not going to rest until Michelle was ruined.
“You need to release a statement that says her little boyfriend talked her into this,” he told Heather when he’d calmed down enough to think strategy. “Make him look like a pussy, and I’ll look like the tough guy, like Colin Ferrell.”
“I don’t know, Kyle. That guy kind of grosses me out.”
Kyle could tell that Heather wasn’t on board with his PR angle. In his present mood, he found it to be a risky move on her part. By now, Heather should have known to approach all possible discord with him like a minefield laid by a chess master.
“It’ll be worth the trouble if it toughens up my image,” he said with surprising patience. He needed Heather to work the kind of magic Shaunna used to conjure on a weekly basis, and her gaze was becoming cold when he yelled at her.
She nodded her head, perhaps more savvy than she appeared. “I’ll get right on it.”
Heather’s press release didn’t blame David enough, and he made her rewrite it. The next draft actually complimented the young actor, and Kyle practically yanked her from her chair before sitting down to write his own statement. It was horrible, but he sent it off without even correcting the words underlined in red.
For the next week, he never failed to call Heather into his bedroom while he was in various stages of undress. From the hallway, she would take any new daily directives and retire to the shaded front porch where sh
e felt safest. Kyle saw to his own breakfast—a bowl of cereal—but all other meals were sent out for.
Kyle talked about Michelle and Shaunna constantly, and the elaborate ways in which he envisioned sabotaging their careers were stunningly vindictive. Heather played no part in any of his “off the record” bashing. This usually took place while he was floating in the pool with his phone and giving daily exclusives to someone he called “his journalist friend.”
The statements Heather made on his behalf were few, but always spoke highly of Michelle. Kyle took advantage of the excellent job she was doing by seeding the tabloids with things he would never say on the record.
Early in his professional relationship with Heather, Kyle determined that she was a good girl with a strong spine. She wouldn’t be doing any of his dirty work. At first, this realization left him irritated, and his inclination was to simply replace her. Shaunna had been a master at her job, and her experience was showing now. But Heather had come out to Texas the moment she was hired and spent several weeks tirelessly working for him there. He felt like he owed her a bit more time to see if her good reputation could somehow benefit him. That decision was paying off.
There were still some things he needed to accomplish, things Heather would refuse to do, but Kyle had been thinking of getting more help anyway. Other A-list celebrities had whole teams of people working for them, and that’s what Kyle wanted. He wanted to surround himself with more people, and then he wanted to watch as all his enemies were defeated by his army.
Shaunna’s home in Yorba Linda was a cute, cottage-style residence that looked rather small from the outside, but in reality was a large, low complex of stylish and comfortable rooms. Palm trees stood like sentries around her lawn, a perfect emerald shade thanks to a timed sprinkler system.
The plan was for everyone to meet at her house and then travel together to her father’s estate in Laurel Canyon. Nathan pulled up in his blue El Camino right on time. David and Michelle arrived together just as Shaunna was showing her first guest into the house. The duo greeted the newest arrivals on the flagstone path that led from the driveway to Shaunna’s front door.