Have to Have It (2 page)

“She likes you,” Kiley commented.

“She's sixteen, has a two-year-old daughter, and her ex-boyfriend is a banger. I don't have that much of a savior complex.”

She had had her baby at age fourteen, Kiley mused. That sort of thing happened in La Crosse too, of course. But still, it seemed shocking. Kiley had enough trouble just trying to be a good nanny. She couldn't imagine actually being a
mother.

“Anyway I'm busy tonight,” Jorge went on. “There's a rap slam at La Verdad. You'll be there training with one of the other waitresses.”

“How do you know I'll get the job?”

Jorge shrugged. “Not a problem. Don't worry, I'll be your bodyguard.”

Kiley laughed. “Have you always been this sweet?”

“Oh, my evil twin comes out now and then.”

Kiley was about to say how much she doubted that when her cell vibrated in her pocket. “Excuse me,” she told him, and dug it out. “Hello?”

“Kiley? It's Mom.”

Mom. Who sounded anxious as hell.

“Hi, Mom!” Kiley tried to sound as upbeat and perky as possible. “How's everything at home?”

“I didn't call you to talk about home, Kiley. I called to talk about you.”

Kiley swallowed hard. How much did her mom know? “Really?” she asked, hoping to buy herself some time.

“Don't play the innocent young lady. I raised you to be a lot of things, but a liar isn't one of them.”

Kiley flinched. This was bad. Very, very bad. Obviously, her mom knew everything.

Esme Castaneda

“Hello, Junior?”

Esme lay back on her bed in the Goldhagens' guesthouse, her cell pressed against her right ear. She'd barely slept, so many thoughts running into other thoughts that it was impossible to calm her mind. At first her dreams had been weird; then they'd turned scary. She dreamed that Junior had died. When she awoke in a cold sweat, she was crying … until she remembered that Junior was going to be fine, that the drive-by bullet had only wounded his shoulder. He would be released from County General that day, if there were no complications.

It's guilt that made me have that dream
, she thought. Guilt over being with Jonathan behind Junior's back.

She had Junior's hospital room number on some paper in her pocket. She dialed and got his extension.

“Yeah, baby?” His voice was strong, so much stronger than the night before when she'd visited him.

“How you doin'? You sounding better,
ese.
”

Funny, how easily she fell into the speech patterns of her youth, her barrio, when she talked to Junior. It was as if the girl who now lived in the guesthouse of a Bel Air estate had never left Echo Park.

“Hey, why wouldn't I be better?” Junior joked. “Lots of food, pretty nurses. The deputy mayor of L.A. had breakfast with me.” She heard him chuckle. “He said I'm some kinda hero for taking that nine-one-one call for the gangs. Shit, if people like him did right, ain't no need for no gangs.”

“You didn't tell him that!” she exclaimed.

“When you think I turned into a fool,
chica?”
he teased. She knew how he prided himself on being willing to take his ambulance to places that would make most paramedics—cops, too, for that matter—cringe. Whenever there was a gang shooting, or a horrific traffic accident in which kids were involved, or anything involving anyone identified as HIV-positive, Junior tried to be the first one on the scene.

“Anyway,
chica
, I'm good. Know the best part?”

“No. What?”

He chuckled. “Disability! I won't have to work until Christmas, I bet. Can fix up that Chevelle I bought from Victor, make it nice. Maybe you and me can go on a little trip. Las Vegas, maybe. Win us some major
dinero.”

“Maybe,” Esme told him, not wanting to commit to anything more.

“We talk about it later. I got a little
linda
nurse standing over my bed. Tell you what, I'll call you from my crib tonight, sound good?”

Esme nodded, even though Junior couldn't see. “Sounds good.”

“Later,
esa.
”

“'Sta luego.”

She hung up, nibbling anxiously on her bottom lip. She was so relieved that Junior was better. But once he was home, she couldn't put off telling him about Jonathan. Just the thought of it made her sick to her stomach. She wasn't the kind of girl to cheat on her man. In fact, it was the first time in her life she'd ever done such a thing. She'd tried to break it off with her employer's son because she hated being such a cliché: the poor brown girl who fell hopelessly in love with the rich gringo. Love. Was she really in love with Jonathan? Or was it just lust that would play itself out for both of them? How could she possibly know? It was maddening! Was she really willing to break Junior's heart when she wasn't sure?

The message was on Esme's voice mail when she came out of the shower, water drops plopping onto the burnished hardwood floor of the bedroom of her guesthouse on the enormous Bel Air estate that belonged to her bosses, Steven and Diane Goldhagen. She unwound her long, thick raven hair from one of the plush French terry towels the Goldhagens had thoughtfully provided for her bathroom, wrapped another towel around her curvy, ochre-skinned body, and pressed the message button.

“Esme, Diane.” Mrs. Goldhagen's voice was crisp and direct. “Please come up to the main house at ten-forty-five. Steven and I want to meet with you.”

That was it. No hello, no goodbye. In a way, Esme wasn't surprised. Diane and Steven were used to giving orders. Steven was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, the creator of a dozen or more classic television dramas over his storied career, including three that were currently on the air. Aggressively
casual, with a scruffy beard and the short haircut/baseball cap combo common to the balding Tinseltown elite, his usual jeans-and-T-shirt look belied a bank account that ventured high into nine figures. As for his wife, Diane, she was fifteen years younger, very thin, and quite pretty, with the sort of perfect blond hair that took tremendous upkeep at Raymond's salon to look as if it needed no upkeep at all.

The Goldhagens lived a life of opulence that Esme never could have imagined before she'd come to work for them. Their Bel Air home made the mansions she'd seen on TV look like bungalows in her old neighborhood of Echo Park. It had two guesthouses, a private tennis court, and a swimming pool, as well as a putting green. Their garage held eight vehicles—Steven had recently taken an interest in collecting sixties Chaparral race cars modified for street use, so there were three of those, plus a Hummer, a Lotus, a Beemer (Diane's chosen mode of transportation), an Audi (the car they usually asked Esme to drive), plus a new Prius that had been delivered only the day before. There was a driver on call from sunrise to three hours after sunset, though he generally was engaged with chauffeuring Steven from one production set to another.

Diane was Steven's second wife—they had met when she was a production assistant on one of his TV projects. According to Jonathan, Steven's son from his first marriage, Hollywood was full of couples like them. The town attracted great-looking women who married less-than-average-looking men whose money and success were more powerful aphrodisiacs than a perfect Kumamoto oyster. Now that Diane and Steven were married, she didn't work anymore, unless you counted her beauty upkeep (a full-time job in and of itself) or her charity
work, which ranged from holding honorary positions at the Arthritis Foundation and the Los Angeles Jewish Federation to organizing the charity banquet aboard the
Queen Mary
steamship that had been the culmination of the L.A. Fashion Bash, aka FAB—the trendy Los Angeles equivalent of New York's Fashion Week.

As Esme quickly towel-dried her hair, her stomach coiled into a tight knot of trepidation. Diane had caught her with Jonathan, in her guesthouse, which was strictly against the rules. The only saving grace, from Esme's point of view, was that they were not actually in bed. Since that was where she and Jonathan spent most of their time, she knew how easily this could have happened.

Well, there was no way out. She looked around the guesthouse. It had been built in the 1930s and featured huge exposed beams, beautiful hardwood floors, and many built-in California redwood fixtures. The furnishings were in keeping with the rustic theme—there was even a cast-iron stove in one corner of the living room for chilly winter nights. Outside was a classic veranda with two white wooden rocking chairs, two orange trees that shaded the parking area, and a basketball hoop. Esme wanted to make her mind into a camera and take it all in: the tranquility, the orange and freesia blossoms, whose scents wafted in from the garden outside her bedroom window. Because she realized there was a good-to-excellent chance that she was about to get fired.

Lydia Chandler

Lydia Chandler sat on the living room floor of her aunt's guesthouse, wearing nothing more than the tiniest pair of La Perla pale pink French silk bikini panties that had come in one of the many unannounced packages that were regularly delivered to the house as a way to entice her famous aunt to wear, use, or consume something, and hopefully have her mention said product on the air. She could see the bedroom mirror from where she was sitting, and she liked what she saw: long, choppy blond hair, a deep tan, celery-colored eyes (well, she couldn't see those in her reflection, but she knew they were there), and a thin, almost waifish figure.

Hot underwear was definitely not her aunt's thing; all the better for Lydia. She took a sip of yesterday's coffee that she'd reheated in the kitchen microwave and opened the old-fashioned black Moleskine notebook in which she'd started a
letter to her mother. She knew that her mom wouldn't get the letter until the next airdrop into the Amarakaire tribal village deep in the Amazon basin of South America, where her parents were currently medical missionaries and where Lydia herself had spent practically the entire last decade.

There really was no quicker way to communicate. Cell phone, e-mail, even telegraph—essentially impossible. There wasn't even a ham radio set. Outgoing mail had to be taken by skiff down the Rio Negro to start its journey to wherever. And the only time her mom could call was on her infrequent visits to Manaus, the nearest city large enough to have reliable phone service.

One good thing about her relationship with her mother, she thought as she wrote “Dear Mom”: she could tell her mom anything and never get judged for it. Well, maybe not quite everything. For example, she could tell her mother that she now had a boyfriend, Billy Martin, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the guy who played Clark Kent on that TV show
Smallville
, even though her mom had never seen
Smallville
since there was no TV in the rain forest. But she couldn't tell her that while she had been ready to have sex with Billy practically from the night she met him, Billy was a romantic who wanted to wait until they “got to know each other better.” Fact was, Lydia had been ready to join the ranks of the nonvirginal for years. However, all of those years had been spent living amongst nearly naked guys who had rotting brown teeth, were five feet tall, and carried spears.

Lydia nibbled on the end of her pen again. Maybe she
could
tell her mom how she felt about sex. It was possible; that was
how cool her mom was. She definitely didn't have that kind of relationship with her father, which made her appreciate her mother that much more.

From the moment her parents had ruined her life by trading in their very, very rich and privileged Houston existence for a grass hut and roast monkey for dinner, Lydia had wanted nothing more than to get back to America. Especially in the last year or so, when her fantasies had been filled with boyfriends and first kisses and exactly where those kisses might lead. She'd even threatened to swim back. Then her aunt Kat had offered her a lifeline—the chance to come to Beverly Hills and be the nanny to her two children. Kat lived with her longtime partner, Anya Kuriakova, another former tennis champion. Their love affair and subsequent marriage in Massachusetts had been sensational tabloid fodder, but after some Ama fertility rituals Lydia had observed, it all seemed rather quaint. Her aunt was gay. So what? All that really mattered to Lydia was that they lived in an actual zip code. That the zip code was 90210—Beverly Hills—was karmic icing on the cake.

She signed her name in a schoolgirly scrawl, probably because when she'd lived in the rain forest, she hadn't had a whole lot of practice. Then she realized that she had neither envelope nor stamps. Well, she'd just have to look up at the main house—it shouldn't be too hard. She hadn't seen Anya all morning. That might be a good thing, since undoubtedly Anya was still pissed off at her from the day before.

Lydia winced, recalling the confrontation. Ever since she'd arrived in paradise, she'd been raiding the moms' closets and drawers. There, she'd hit the mother lode: cashmere tank tops, heaps of candy-colored Juicy Couture sweat suits, several train cases brimming with Nars and Dior lip gloss palettes, dozens of Swarovski crystal-crusted bangles. They had way more stuff than they could ever use, and Lydia had shown up in Los Angeles with nothing more than the clothes on her back.

She had assumed that Anya was clueless to what was being borrowed. Turned out her aunt's partner had been keeping a detailed list, which she'd yanked from her purse quicker than a cobra strikes a river rat. Anya's plan (she'd informed Lydia with far too much relish) was to present this inventory to Kat when Kat returned from her business trip.

Whatever. Lydia felt certain she could make her aunt understand her plight. A girl couldn't walk around Los Angeles naked, after all. Not that it would have disturbed Lydia all that much
(except in the fashion sense—she adored designer clothes), since she was utterly comfy in her own skin.

But think of all the boys she'd get hot and bothered and then have to disappoint.

Hell. Kat would understand on a humanitarian basis alone.