April, Dani - Superstar (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (24 page)

The guys went silent for a minute. Chrissie just laid back into the pillows and watched the ceiling of the cheap motel room overhead. She couldn’t believe that she had just said what she had. Maybe she was making progress.

“Is that what you really want to do, Chrissie?” Scott asked her.

“Yes, it is.” She took a deep breath and went on. “I have a career to get back to. Ethan was right when he said every other girl in the world would want the same opportunities I have. I saw how that girl in the dressing room looked at me yesterday. Until I met you guys, I had never been around normal people in my whole life. I never knew how other people thought except for other celebrities like myself—”

“But, baby…” Brad tried to interrupt.

She put her finger back over his mouth. “Let me finish, baby,” she told him. “I’ve grown up more as a human being in the last three days than I had in the past twenty-one years. If I can’t make decisions in my life now, I’ll never be able to. Actually, I like being a superstar celebrity. I mean, who wouldn’t, after all? I really have been given a wonderful gift, and I don’t want to throw it all away. Only I want to have a career on my own terms—not someone else’s. If I make some mistakes, even if I fail, I’ll be okay with that because at least I’ll know that they were my decisions.”

“If that’s really what you want, Chrissie,” Scott told her, “you know we’ll do everything we can to support you.”

She reached over and placed a kiss on his lips. Then she turned into Brad’s arms and shared the same kiss with him. “You’ve already helped me, guys.” She smiled at both of them. “You’ve already given me what I needed. I’m still not certain I am strong enough to stand up to father and his people, but if I can’t, it won’t be your fault. It’ll be my fault.”

Brad sighed. “So then today we have a long drive to make to Hollywood?”

“Yes.” Chrissie giggled under the blankets. “I can hardly wait to show you guys around my house.”

“I can hardly wait to see your house,” Scott said, falling in with the plan.

“Me, too,” Brad seconded.

Chrissie felt the two rock-hard muscles poking her in the side under the blanket. “First, guys,” she said in a quiet voice. “I think we have some unfinished business to take care of right here in this bed.”

“Now what would that be?” Brad laughed.

She was held tightly in Scott’s arms, and Brad leaned in for the first kiss. Scott was already kissing down the back of her neck, making her feel all sorts of wonderful. Soon they had all three rolled out from under the blanket and were in a heap on top of the bed. Chrissie let out two screams as she climaxed.

* * * *

As the sun was rising that morning they climbed back into Ethan’s truck and left the motor inn motel. They were in northern Arizona and had started the westward course of their journey. Outside, the snow had started to thin out and the air, though still cold, was becoming drier.

“I was surprised to see you three this morning,” Ethan told them from the driver’s seat.

“What do you mean, man?” both of his brothers asked him.

“I know what he means,” Chrissie told them from the backseat. “He let us all stay together last night to see if we could talk each other into running away again.”

She reached up over Ethan’s seat and put her arms around his neck. “I think you’re beginning to know me better than my own family does,” he told her, and as always, his voice was serious.

“After what we’ve all been through in the last few days together, I know all of you pretty well.”

“And?” Ethan pressed her.

“And what?”

“Did my knuckleheaded brothers try and talk you into going away with them again?”

Chrissie looked back and forth between Brad and Scott. They both looked sheepish. “No, they didn’t,” she told Ethan. “But as gorgeous as they both are, I wanted to kidnap them and take them away so no other woman could ever find them but me.”

“Sure you did.” She knew Ethan could see right through her and knew she wasn’t telling him the whole truth. “Anyway, you decided to go back to your home and try and straighten out your life?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Good. I think you made the right decision.”

“I’m going to owe you guys a lot when this is finally over.”

“Don’t worry.” Ethan looked back over his shoulder at her. “We’ll send you the bill.”

Chrissie laughed and kissed the top of his head. “You’re silly.”

“Actually, I’m the only one in this truck who isn’t.”

The miles went by faster and faster, and the sun climbed high into the sky. Chrissie could feel a dread coming over because she knew that every mile brought her closer to her home and her inevitable showdown with her old way of life.

They stopped at a truck stop in the middle of the desert that afternoon and ate a greasy lunch of burgers and fries. Chrissie was still wearing her short, dark wig, chewing her gum, and wearing a profuse amount of the cheap perfume. She had all the guys laughing at her as she tried to make small talk with the waitress who served them. The young waitress didn’t have a clue that she was serving a superstar from Hollywood who even at that moment was headed back home. The guys got an even bigger kick out of Chrissie’s open flirtation with one of the fry-cook boys behind the counter. She had a knack for emerging into her character totally. All of the guys, even Ethan, told her she had their vote for best actress of the year.

As they approached closer to the city of Los Angeles, Chrissie became more nervous. She found her palms were sweating, and the cab of the truck grew uncomfortable. All three of the guys tried without success to engage her in conversation that afternoon. She started to withdraw into herself. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and motioned to a road sign indicating another truck stop was coming up in a few miles.

“Can we pull over there for just a minute please?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ethan told her. “We need to let the dogs out to do their business anyway.”

“We seem to have made pretty good time,” Brad said. He had been asleep and had just awoken and was looking out the window at the passing mile markers indicating their proximity to the city.

“Yes,” Scott replied. “I think we’ll be to Chrissie’s home in about two hours.” His voice sounded sad and distant to Chrissie.

Ethan pulled them off the highway onto the ramp leading to the truck stop area. When they reached the parking lot, he parked them far down toward the end so they would have room to run the three dogs.

Chrissie was the first to jump down from the truck. She leaned back in and pointed to the bag with her clothes in it. “Hand me that will you, Scott?” she asked him. “I want to change before I get home.”

“You don’t need a disguise anymore?”

“No. From this point on I’m Chrissie Murphy again.”

She took the bag from him and headed across the blacktop of the lot to the ladies’ restroom. She didn’t even worry about Peaches and Cream. She trusted the guys to take good care of them.

She found herself alone in the restroom and quickly removed the black wig and spit out her gum. She didn’t change into any of the dresses the guys had bought her the day before. After all, Chrissie Murphy couldn’t be seen in a dress purchased at the JCPenny in the mall, but she changed into the party dress she had worn out of her hotel room on the first night of her adventure. In a way, that dress had started it all. She remembered how much her father and Melinda had hated it.

She combed out her long, blonde hair in the mirror. Hiking up her feet, she attached her little party slippers over her toes and then straightened the shoulder straps of the expensive black dress she wore.

She looked into the stained and cracked mirror of the ladies’ room at the truck stop, and staring back at her was Chrissie Murphy—the superstar. She took a deep breath. Her brief adventure had now taken her full circle, and she was almost home.

When she stepped back out into the parking lot, a warm gust of wind hit her. She was back in southern California, and although cool since it was winter, it was fifty degrees warmer than the Rocky Mountains had been a couple of days before.

Ethan was the first to see her when she returned. “You’re back,” he said, and she knew he meant more by the comment than that she had returned from the restroom. He meant the superstar was back, and he was right.

“Take me home, Ethan,” she told him. “I’m ready now.”

Chapter Thirteen

Chrissie sat up front for the ride into Los Angeles. The skyscrapers in the heart of the city could be seen from the freeway. It was Friday afternoon, and rush-hour traffic had slowed their progress dramatically. Ethan was cursing at the other vehicles around him impeding their progress. Chrissie leaned back in her seat. She was used to traffic jams.

She looked out the window and to the north. Somewhere up in those hills was her house. Everything they were passing started to look familiar to her. She cracked the window to the truck and took a breath of fresh air and got a strong whiff of the Los Angeles smog. Yes, she had indeed come home.

“Give me directions to your place, Chrissie?” Ethan asked her before he got lost on the freeway system.

“Go north on the one-oh-one,” she told him, though she was hardly concentrating so many thoughts were whirling through her head at that moment. But she knew now that they had entered Los Angeles proper she could have driven to her house blindfolded. “Get off the one-oh-one at the Melrose exit and go west. From there I’m almost home.”

“You really know your way around out here, huh?”

“This is where I live.”

“Ever since we’ve met you, Chrissie, you’ve seemed lost. But you don’t seem lost anymore.”

“No,” Chrissie said and turned to look out the window at the passing palm trees. “I know exactly where I am now.”

When they started the drive down Melrose, everyone in the truck became quiet. Chrissie picked up her little dogs and held them both in her lap. She looked out the window and pointed out landmarks to the dogs.

“See, babies, Mommy almost has us back home again,” she cooed in their ears.

They began to pass more expensive real estate. The cars on the street with them became more exotic, all of them were late models, many of them foreign, and all were expensive. More palm trees shaded the road and cast long shadows in the setting late-afternoon sun.

Suddenly the secluded cabin in the Rocky Mountains seemed a million miles away and a part of another life. It seemed like it was a part of someone else’s life and not Chrissie Murphy’s life. This wealthy street they were coasting along now was a part of Chrissie Murphy’s life.

Now that she was here, she finally realized what it was she had been worried about all along. She had been worried that she would lose herself in the opulence of this fabulous life. Now, not even back to her house yet, she had already started losing herself to the lifestyle. She had tried so hard to break away, too, but the power of this place and the life it held for her was just so strong.

Ethan got lost several times on the unknown streets of Hollywood. Traffic was still bad and apparently much heavier than anything he was used to driving in. He let fly a series of colorful curses. Chrissie had to place her hand on his arm to calm him down.

“Turn down here, Ethan,” she instructed him. “My house is on the corner of the next block down.”

The residential section they were now driving through was filled with palm trees and tall privacy fences blocking the homes and their occupants from view by the outside world. A few of the homes had sports cars parked along the street running in front. A limousine had just pulled into the circle drive of another home. The street and pedestrian sidewalks were extremely wide, and a median covered with red rose flower beds ran down the center of the street. A jogger was out for a run headed north toward the larger and older homes of the next block.