Hollywood Sinners (40 page)

The Pink Lady, real name Amanda, was being interviewed by an overweight journalist with a beard that looked like he’d drawn it on himself. Nate stood alone, savouring the cameras’ undivided interest—at the end of the day, he guessed, even having a partner was enough of a compromise on that front.

Shortly after the premiere, Nate had abandoned the group that had made him famous and had gone it alone. Last Nate heard, The Hides had done a chain of shambolic gigs in Archway and were still playing songs that Nate himself had copyright on. It proved what he had known all along: that the band was a deadweight without him. Nate Reid was the magic.

He had gone on to release a solo single, which shot to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. He was indisputably the biggest rock star of the twenty-first century.

* * *

Marty King and Rita Clay took their seats together in the auditorium. Rita had turned a few heads already, and not just because she was on the arm of her rival agent. She was stunning in a floor-length plum-coloured gown that exposed her smooth black shoulders and complemented her cropped blonde hair. She looked beautiful.

Marty spotted Brock Wilde and nodded a greeting. Negotiations had started all over again—they had approached Chloe French with the contract earlier this month. He hoped Brock knew what he was in for with this. He wasn’t a power agent—yet—but he’d better be a fast learner.

They had been lucky with the Lana situation, real damn lucky. He felt for the poor girl, of course he did, but from Cole’s perspective it had worked out nice and neat. And, as he knew very well, his client liked neat things.

As the lights dimmed, Rita looked to Lana. She prayed her friend was OK. It would be difficult to get up in front of the crowd here if she did take the Award, with everyone knowing what she had gone through. It had been a horribly public ordeal. But Lana was strong. She was a fighter. And she would get through.

Rita, too, had been amazed at how things had developed after the premiere. Not just for Lana and Cole, but for her.

Over the course of dissolving the contract, across late-night phone calls and impromptu meetings, during heartfelt conversations over Lana’s tragedy, she and Marty had—surprising no one more than themselves—become close. She had never found this rotund white man attractive until then, when suddenly something like Vegas happened and everything got re-evaluated. Marty had shown compassion, sympathy and, above all, professionalism.

They had just recently emerged as a couple—LA’s top power agents united. Love worked mysteriously. For Rita and Marty, it just seemed to fit.

Marty took her hand. ‘I’m the luckiest guy here,’ he said, meaning it.

She smiled back at him. ‘Damn right you are.’

* * *

‘Daddy, you’ve got fat. You’re taking up half my seat.’

Bernstein eased back, satisfied. ‘I’ve always been fat, kitten. You ain’t gonna change that.’

Jessica made a face. ‘You could look better,’ she snapped, pulling out a diamond-encrusted compact mirror and admiring her own reflection. She was clad in an all-gold catsuit, accessorised by a wide seventies-style belt and giant hoop earrings. Not traditional Awards fare, but she liked to bring a bit of Vegas fun to a place like this. Especially since everyone seemed so serious. She’d only just got over what had happened herself—it had been a dreadful tragedy—but life moved on and you had to go with it.

Bernstein sighed. At least she wasn’t swearing. Those radically expensive elocution lessons must be paying off.

At first he had taken his younger daughter’s interest in the hotel industry with a great big bucket of salt, but in the aftermath of the
Eastern Sky
premiere she had proved herself to him time and time again. It was exactly the distraction he had needed. And it turned out Jessica was made for it: she was fearless in a pit-bull way; uncompromising and without mercy, a woman whose dick for business was as hard as any man’s. The family would love her.

As for his family, it was just the two of them now. Two Bernsteins against the world.

Shortly after the premiere, he and Christie Carmen had parted ways. He had walked in on her giving an enthusiastic blow job to one of the showgirls—obviously they weren’t vetting them too closely these days. Christie was out the next day. ‘I knew it all along,’ Jessica had said dismissively, though he suspected she hadn’t. Jessica and Christie had struck up a sort of friendship—Bernstein thought she was probably more upset by the split than he was.

But Elisabeth…

He experienced a wrench in his gut when he thought of the daughter he had lost. His heart ached when he remembered how their last words had been spoken in anger. He could not dwell on it.

Norr could he dwell on the son he would never have. Remembering St Louis, he balled his fists. Fate was cruel.

It was a time for renewed focus. Life moved on, and nobody knew it better than him.

* * *

A dozen rows back, Elisabeth Sabell sat cloaked in shadow. She had almost convinced herself not to come—for weeks she had just stared at the invitation, too ashamed to contemplate a public appearance—but in the end some faint recollection of what pride felt like had persuaded her.

Nobody here knows
, she kept telling herself, politely greeting acquaintances. Nobody except Frank Bernstein, and she had no intention of ever again speaking to him. His betrayal of her was beyond comprehension. He was nothing to her, she was nothing to him—they were strangers.

He wouldn’t have told Jessica, he wouldn’t have told anyone. She knew that because he had been her father and that was how he worked. Anything that risked compromising his reputation and it was as if it had never happened. For once, she was grateful. She thought about him now like one might remember someone who had died. But for her there wasn’t a hint of sadness at the loss of their relationship. She kept waiting for it to come but it didn’t. Perhaps, she’d reasoned in her darker moments, it was because the word ‘father’ simply meant nothing to her any more. How could it?

She was an orphan. More than that, she had been misled so tragically by those she’d put her faith in that it was as if she had never been born of two parents. That connection was irrelevant to her now, like not knowing if the fruit in her hand came from the tree or the vine, and not caring either way.

The past eight months had been nightmarish. No, that wasn’t fair: even her worse nightmares didn’t come close to the abomination of the truth. There were times Elisabeth tried to label what had happened, the cold shame and hot terror she had wrestled, the agony she had endured and the dread she knew, finally, would set hard in her body and never let her go. To find a word that captured her trauma would help her towards understanding, perhaps put some slim distance between her and It. But there wasn’t a word, not a single one in the whole of her vocabulary, that could even come close.

It had been a slow road. She could scarcely recall the night of the premiere, remembered the horrors of the letter and the way she had sobbed on it, ripped it, destroyed it, but after that was only a blur. Later, waking up in hospital, she pieced together what had happened. She’d been knocked down on the Strip by a jibbering tourist whose first time it was driving abroad and taken to the ER, where she’d remained unconscious for several days. On waking, the first face she’d seen had been Alberto Bellini’s. She would never forget as long as she lived the way he had looked at her.

They hadn’t spoken. She was too dazed, he too much in shock. But, anyway, there had been no need. There was nothing either could say that would mean anything or make any sense.

In his eyes was sadness, regret, disgust at himself—but most of all love. That was what broke her heart the most. He hadn’t known: it was as much of a horror for him.

It was goodbye. When Bellini turned, so slowly it was like a dream, and left the room, she knew she would not see him again. She guessed Bernstein had told him—at least he hadn’t left that extra luxury to her.

Last she’d heard Bellini was retired and living in Sicily.

She’d moved away to the coast, had holed up there for months. Several times she considered killing herself—she wasn’t dressing, eating, washing, there was nothing of her life left to live. Jessica had tried to come visit, couldn’t understand why her sister had closed off. Elisabeth told her that there had been a disagreement of such magnitude between her and Bernstein that she could no longer maintain contact. Perhaps in the future, when some of this rawness had healed, she would be able to contemplate renewing the relationship with the girl she had thought was her sister.

In the end, it had been Donatella who saved her. She’d been in touch with news that a producer friend was interested in signing Elisabeth to his label. The world continued turning—the planet over, people were getting on with their lives—and nobody, in spite of her paranoia, knew the crime she had committed. There was hiding, there was surviving, and there was somewhere in between: trying. Elisabeth Sabell was trying.

Every day had been a battle—first just to look in the mirror, then to leave the apartment, then to buy food, to eat it. Gradually, over the months that followed, she learned how to be herself again. Since the New Year she’d been working in LA with Felix Bentley, a friendly English guy with a smile that made her remember what happiness was. For the first time she was feeling a future opening up.

As the Best Actress nominations were announced, Elisabeth scanned the theatre for Lana Falcon—the only other person that night who had endured horrors beyond her wildest dreams. Tonight she was bound to the other woman in a shared knowledge: love, success, fame—none of it meant anything without truth.

Elisabeth hoped she was doing OK. She decided that after this was over she’d call her up, see if she wanted to meet for coffee. Life was for living, and you had to love the people you picked up along the way.

She crossed her fingers for Lana to take the Award.

* * *

Lana Falcon heard her nomination and closed her eyes. She listened to her scene played out and the sound of her own voice. It was like another person, a different Lana talking across the many months that divided that place and this. The voice no longer belonged to her. It belonged to before.

She could never go back and change what happened—and, in a strange way, she didn’t want to. That fateful night in Vegas had been the death of her. But it had also been the birth. It was a line, a closed door, a mark that said, No more. There was life to be lived, and she would not take a moment longer to live it. She owed it to the people who had not made it.

Lester came back that night to take what was precious to her. He had killed her baby and with it a part of her had died for ever. She missed the child more than she had ever thought possible, more than she had missed anyone, even though they had never met. Gratitude did not come close. The baby had given her courage and made her fearless, had provided the strength she needed to change her life, and those things would live on always in her heart.

She had not killed her brother back in Belleville. Neither of them had. It was horror and it was ecstasy, to know she was both guilty and innocent. Guilty for hiding away from a truth she was too afraid to face; innocent because she was not and never would be a murderer. Unlike him. It seemed Lester Fallon, a supposed fraudster known across the Midwest in a variety of guises but most commonly Nelson Price, finally got the fame and recognition he was desperate for.

Lana craved normal conversation. Save for Rita and Marty, nobody in LA seemed to know how to treat her. They eyed her sadly with a mixture of pity and unease, as though her misfortune might be contagious. The friends she had made as Cole Steel’s wife had gradually melted away—this sort of hardship didn’t happen to people like them: the protected; the rich; the stupid. It was a frightening, alien thing. Even Parker Troy, the father of her lost child, didn’t know what to say and so didn’t say anything at all.

She didn’t want to talk about the baby she had lost, or the intruder who had broken into her room that night. She didn’t want to talk about her near-rape, and the way he had knocked her out cold. She didn’t want to talk about waking up in a hospital bed and being told what had happened. She didn’t want to talk about the other death that night. The other death…

After it had happened she had gone away to Europe, moored on a yacht off the coast of Capri. She had stayed there for weeks, reading and drawing. She had found the nerve, after some correspondence, to telephone Arlene. Her voice was the same as she remembered and it shone a light in her time of darkness. They spoke about the baby Lana had lost. Lana felt sure she was a girl.

Amid the carnage of that night, a glimmer of hope had sprung.

On stage, the presenter slid a finger along the seal of the little gold envelope.

‘And the winner is…’

Next to her, Robert St Louis took her hand in his. He ran a thumb over hers.

She turned to him: her love, her life, the man she would adore the rest of her days. The same Robbie Lewis who had saved her soul.

The audience waited. Anticipation crackled round the theatre.

‘Lana Falcon!’

Applause came at her like a tidal wave. People were on their feet, wanting to show their support, wanting to be there at this, the first night of the rest of her life.

At the centre, two lovers stayed seated. Robert took Lana’s face in his hands.

‘Hey,’ he said, kissing her, ‘you know what I think? I think this is just the beginning.’

LETTER FROM VICTORIA

I’m thrilled that you chose to read
Hollywood Sinners
– and I hope you had as much fun as I did.

If you did enjoy it, I would be forever grateful if you’d consider writing a review on Amazon. I’d LOVE to hear what you thought, and it can also help other readers discover one of my books for the first time.

If you’d like to keep up-to-date with all my latest releases, just sign up at my website here:

www.victoriafox.net/sign-up

Finally, read on for more on
Wicked Ambition
and
Temptation Island
– if you liked
Hollywood Sinners
, then I think you’ll love these too.

Until next time!

Victoria x