Adored

by Tilly Bagshawe

  “Careful,” said the doctor, who was fighting back an irrational surge of jealousy, not least because Hunter was even better-looking than he was. “She’s got two fractured ribs, you shouldn’t squeeze her like that.”

  Hunter gave him a “we need some time alone” stare. He took the hint, and both doctor and nurse made themselves scarce, shutting the door behind them.

  “Sorry about the Navigator,” said Siena when they were alone. She was twirling a loose ringlet around her finger nervously, a sure sign that she was upset.

  “Oh, shut up, would you. I couldn’t care less about the stupid car,” said Hunter. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Am I?” Her lower lip was trembling. She looked completely lost. She held out her arms and clung to him, trying to make herself feel safe and loved and secure, but it wasn’t working. Much as she loved Hunter, she wasn’t a child anymore.

  It was Max’s arms she needed.

  “Have you . . .” She steeled herself to ask him. “Have you talked to Max yet? Is it true?”

  Hunter gazed out the window. Siena’s pain was palpable, and he couldn’t bear to be responsible for making it any worse. “You should talk to him, angel, not me,” he said.

  “Yes, well, he’s not here, is he?” she shot back angrily, pulling away from him and propping herself up in bed, wincing at the pain in her neck and chest as she moved.

  It was a flash of the old, fiery Siena, and it both cheered Hunter and alarmed him to see it now. Anger had always been her natural defense mechanism.

  “So I’m asking you,” she said. “Have you spoken to him, Hunter?” He nodded, still looking out the window rather than at her. “And?”

  “Siena, honey, what do you want me to say?” He was desperate not to have to be the one to confirm her worst fears. But there was no way around it. “Did it happen? Yes, it happened. And he hates himself for it, and he feels terrible about it. It was a stupid, stupid mistake.”

  “How long have you known?” she asked.

  Hunter sighed. He had known that question was coming. “I only found out today, sweetheart, I swear,” he said truthfully. “The police called me when it happened because the car’s registered in my name. I guess I’m your next of kin too, right?” Siena nodded. “They told me about the article, I called Max right away, and—”

  She held up her hand to stop him. She didn’t want to hear any more.

  “He had no idea about it,” Hunter went on despite her protestations. “That the girl had gone to the press, I mean. Honestly, Siena, I was mad at him too, but he sounded so terrible, he regrets it so much, and when he heard about your accident he was crazy, hysterical. He wanted to come and see you right away.”

  “How thoughtful of him,” said Siena bitterly.

  “But I told him not to risk it,” Hunter doggedly continued. “There are press everywhere. It was bad enough for me trying to get in.”

  She sat quietly and tried to collect her thoughts.

  So it was true.

  Max, the first and only man she had ever let herself love, had betrayed her. For all she knew, this Camille was just the tip of the iceberg, the one who had gone to the papers with her story. There were bound to have been others.

  How long had he been making a fool out of her? she wondered.

  She was ashamed of herself. How could she have been so stupid?

  For her entire life, it had always been her worst nightmare to end up like Grandma Minnie, disrespected and humiliated by a man she was too weak and too desperate to leave. Or like her mother, who may not have been cheated on but who had been hurt and abandoned emotionally by Pete for years, and yet chose to give up her own daughter rather than take a stand and leave the bastard.

  Siena had opened her heart to Max, allowed herself to become vulnerable. And what had happened?

  This.

  Pain, betrayal, public humiliation. She didn’t know who she hated more at that moment, Max or herself.

  She raised her hand to her face and felt the swelling around her eye. She must look like shit. So much for her next three weeks of auditions. There weren’t many casting agents around desperately seeking girls who looked like they’d just lost a bar brawl.

  Fucking, fucking Max.

  So he was sorry, was he? Well too fucking bad. She was through trying to change herself for him, trying to be Miss Soft and Feminine and Understanding, all because he was too insecure to deal with her fame and success.

  Max had made his choice. Now he could damn well live with it.

  “Ask the nurse to come in here, would you?” she said to Hunter after what seemed to him like an eternity of silence.

  He pressed the call bell, and Joyce appeared at the door moments later. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  “You can, yes,” said Siena. “I’d like a phone, please. And some release forms. I’ll be leaving in a couple of hours.”

  Joyce laughed. “You can’t do that, honey. Dr. Delaney will want to have you under observation for a couple more days at least.”

  “Then I’m afraid Dr. Delaney is going to be disappointed,” said Siena in a tone that left the flustered nurse in no doubt that she meant business.

  “Sweetheart, come on,” Hunter pleaded with her. “You nearly died today. And all this stuff with Max, it hasn’t sunk in yet. You guys will work it out, I know you will.”

  “I have no intention of working it out,” said Siena caustically. “And I’m not going to hang around here while those paparazzi vultures wait for me outside, either.”

  “Siena, please, you’re not thinking straight,” he insisted. “Stay here for a couple of nights. Then Ines and I can come and take you home.”

  “Home?” she said incredulously. “What home? You mean the beach house, with you and Max? After the way he’s just betrayed me? No, Hunter, no way.”

  Her voice was rising. She put a hand to one of her broken ribs—the shouting really hurt, but she couldn’t help herself. If she didn’t stay mad now, she was sure she’d crumple up and die from the pain.

  How could he do this to her?

  “I’m sorry, Hunter.” She forced herself to calm down. “But I’ve had enough. I need to get away, from Max, from L.A., from everyone. My bruises will heal just as well in a hotel as they will here. I need to go somewhere where I can shut everything out, where I can lose myself. Surely you can understand that?”

  Hunter looked stricken. He could understand, of course he could. He just didn’t like it. He wanted to help her, to make everything right again. He wanted her to turn to him in her time of trouble, not run away.

  He could have strangled Max for being so fucking stupid and selfish. What had he been thinking?

  “Where were you thinking of going?” he asked.

  She took his hand and gave him the first smile he had seen since he walked in. It was almost like looking at the old, pre-Max Siena: tough, determined, and wicked.

  “Where would I go to lose myself?” she said. The smile broadened into a grin. “Where else, baby?” And as she said it, she sounded so like Duke that it made him shiver.

  “Vegas.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  It was 108 degrees outside when Siena woke up in her penthouse suite at the Venetian the following morning. The sort of heat that had chauffeurs opening limousine doors with folded handkerchiefs so as not to burn their fingers, and children wilting like dying flowers, drained of every last ounce of energy as they wearily traipsed along behind their parents, their usual dreams of chocolate and McDonald’s replaced by an even more powerful longing for water, air-conditioning, and a place to sit down.

  High up in the palatial cool of her bedroom, Siena was unaware of the sweltering world outside her window. She woke up instead to a fleeting feeling of disorientation—where the hell was she?—followed by searing, throbbing, unbearable pain in her head and chest.

  Jesus Christ, that hurt.

  She let out a low groan and scrabbled for the painkillers beside h
er bed. “One with each meal, maximum four per twenty-four hours,” read the label.

  Siena swallowed three with a gulp of tepid water and slumped back onto her white linen pillows. What a mess. What a total fucking mess.

  In the end, once he’d realized that she wasn’t going to change her mind, Hunter had been very sweet and helpful yesterday, organizing her cloak-and-dagger exit from the hospital via one of the service exits to escape the baying press. Better still, he had called his longtime boss and admirer, Hugh Orchard, who had kindly allowed Siena to use his private jet to fly straight up to Vegas from a little-used airfield in Orange County.

  When she’d arrived in Vegas last night, the staff at the Venetian had been fantastic. Used to defending the privacy of such famous and reclusive guests as Michael Jackson and Madonna, they did a spectacular job of getting Siena checked in and settled, whisking her up to her suite in the classic Hollywood disguise of dark glasses and full-length fur, an operation that, despite her heartbreak and injuries, she had secretly rather enjoyed for all its clandestine glamour.

  Less enjoyable had been Max’s attempt to see and speak to her at the airstrip. Despite his promises, Hunter had been too softhearted to conceal her whereabouts from his distraught best friend, and Max had arrived at speed, his little Honda almost entirely obscured by a cloud of dust, just as she was boarding the plane.

  What happened next was already becoming a bit of a blur.

  She remembered him crying and pleading with her to forgive him, begging her not to go. And she remembered the look on his face, a combination of terror and fury, as Orchard’s security guys forcibly pulled him away from her and she climbed into the plane.

  She’d thought that she would cry, or at least feel something—anger for what he’d done, perhaps some compassion for his all too evident guilt, or even just the lingering force of her love for him.

  But she didn’t. Some merciful god seemed to have flipped off the switch that connected her to any deeper emotion at all. The worst she could say was that she felt numb.

  Christ, what she wouldn’t give to feel numb this morning!

  Maybe she had been a bit rash, checking herself out of hospital so soon. Her rib cage was so sore, it hurt to breathe in. Hopefully the drugs would start kicking in soon.

  Wincing again, she risked another, gentle stretch toward the bedside table and flicked on her cell phone. Predictably, her in-boxes for text and voice mail were both full. After deleting anything from numbers she didn’t recognize (bound to be press) and everything from Max, she started to scroll through the remainder.

  Three were from Hunter, all imploring her to call him, forgive Max, and come home soon. Siena wiped them out with an impatient jab of the thumb; she was not in a forgiving mood this morning. Two were from Marsha, also asking her to make contact. One was from Ines, predictably asserting that all men were bastards, California sucked, and why didn’t Siena move back home to New York where they could go back to partying together again. That one made Siena smile. Darling Ines. If only life were that simple. She scrolled through the list again, checking missed calls as well, just for good measure, but there was nothing from her parents or any of the rest of her family.

  Angrily, she snapped the phone shut and eased herself out of bed. Why the hell did she still care whether her parents called her or not?

  She didn’t turn on the TV, for fear that her face—or even worse Max’s or that slutty girl’s—might be on it. Instead she showered, changed into a stunning, clingingly low-cut silk jersey dress—her face might be battered, but at least her body would look great for the inevitable paparazzi—and began carefully applying makeup.

  She needed enough to restore the natural beauty of her cheeks and bone structure, while being careful not to conceal the bruises and cuts that the photographers were longing to see. It might put a hold on her auditions, but she was canny enough to appreciate that, if correctly presented, her swollen face could turn out to be a PR gold mine.

  What with trying to ease her arms into the dress without further damaging her ribs, and painstakingly ensuring that her makeup was done to perfection, it was almost noon before Siena was ready to emerge from her suite and face, she assumed, her public.

  She took one long, last look in the mirror before she opened the door. The dress, now that she’d finally gotten into it, was flawless, the perfect shade of blue-gray to highlight her fair skin and blue McMahon eyes. Her hair was swept loosely back from her face, so as not to hide any of the bruising around her eye and cheek, and she wore a demure pair of gray kitten heels. Low by Siena’s usual standards, they made her look younger and more vulnerable than her usual stilettos.

  At the last moment, she noticed she was still wearing the tiny antique silver cross on a chain that Max had given her in their first week together. She wondered why they hadn’t bothered to take it off her at the hospital, after the crash?

  Holding it between her thumb and forefinger, she looked at the worn, buckled Moroccan silver, rubbed to a fine sheen from age. She had loved that cross, because it was beautiful but simple and unpretentious, like Max, and because, like him, it had always seemed to protect her.

  For a few seconds, her cloak of numbness and anger slipped, and she felt the tears welling up in her eyes as she held it.

  She missed him so much. What was she even doing here on her own?

  But she swiftly pulled herself together and, winding the chain tightly around her fingers, she pulled hard, just once, so the necklace snapped around her neck. She looked at the coiled chain in her palm. Broken, just like her and Max. But she was determined not to cry, biting her lower lip for all she was worth.

  She couldn’t hold on to him, she mustn’t. She wouldn’t survive.

  She was going to throw the cross away, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it, so she slipped it into the miniature drawer of the bureau by the door. Perhaps one of the hotel maids would pocket it or sell it, and it could become someone else’s treasured possession? It seemed a shame to blame such a beautiful thing for the ugliness of what Max had done.

  With one last glance at her complexion, still proudly unstreaked by tears, she walked out of the door, leaving behind the sanctuary of her room and—though she didn’t know it—the last moments of peace she was to experience for quite some time.

  Sitting in the waiting room at McMahon Pictures, Claire was growing increasingly frantic. She was dressed in the same khaki skirt and T-shirt she’d had on yesterday. Her graying blond bob looked lank and disheveled and her usually healthy complexion seemed to have lost every last ounce of color.

  “How much longer, do you think?” she appealed to Tara, Pete’s poisonous PA, for the third time in as many minutes.

  “Mrs. McMahon.” The pinched-faced girl made little effort to conceal her annoyance, tapping her pen on the desk officiously, as though some vital work had been disturbed by Claire’s question. “Believe me, if I knew, I’d tell you.”

  Tara could imagine what Claire’s unexpected visit must be about. The story was all over the papers this morning, about Siena’s car crash and the boyfriend screwing around on her. Served her right, spoiled little bitch.

  Tara had always hated and, if truth be known, envied her boss’s daughter and had done everything in her limited power to encourage his estrangement from her. Although there had never been anything sexual between her and Pete, Tara enjoyed what she perceived as their closeness and the reflected glory it brought her as one of the great producer’s inner circle. As a result, she also resented Claire with an intensity that, had Claire ever bothered to notice it, she would have found unfathomable.

  Claire looked at her watch again and sighed. She was desperate to talk to Pete. He’d been away in Reno on business for the last two days, and they hadn’t yet had a chance to discuss what had happened face-to-face.

  It still seemed incredible to her that she, Siena’s own mother, knew nothing more than what she’d read in the papers, which all had wildly different a
nd speculative reports of yesterday’s events. Last night she’d been so frantic with worry that she’d even taken her courage in her hands and, praying that Pete didn’t find out, called the hospital herself. But since Siena carried a card naming Hunter as her next of kin and specifically requesting that any information regarding her health be released to him and him alone, Claire was unable to find out anything about her daughter’s condition.

  She was just about to try Pete’s cell phone again when he suddenly emerged from the elevator, looking tired and a little travel-weary after his flight but otherwise unperturbed.

  “Hello, honey,” he said, kissing Claire on the cheek and ushering her into his office, simultaneously signaling to Tara to bring them some coffee, much to her simmering fury. “What brings you here so early? I thought I was seeing you tonight?”

  Claire reached into her bag and, pulling out copies of this morning’s New York and L.A. Times, thrust them into his hand. Siena’s picture was on page four of the former and the front page of the latter.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen these,” she challenged him. They had spoken yesterday afternoon, but at that point nobody knew how serious the accident had been. “Look at that.” She gestured to a horrifying picture of the Navigator, smashed into smithereens. “That’s what she was driving, Pete. It says here it was Hunter’s car.”

  “Hmm,” said Pete, glancing momentarily at the picture before chucking both papers onto a chair in the corner. “Shame he wasn’t driving.”

  “Peter!” Claire was genuinely shocked. Even in his most rage-filled moments, she had never heard him suggest that he actually wanted Hunter dead.

  “The point is, what are we going to do? About Siena, I mean.” She looked at him in desperation.

  Slowly, calmly, he put his briefcase on the floor and sat down on the huge black leather sofa next to the window, gesturing for her to sit beside him.