Shooting Star (Beautiful Chaos)
Read Shooting Star (Beautiful Chaos) Online
Authors: Arianne Richmonde
Tags: #Romance, #Erotica, #Richmonde, #Arianne
Arianne Richmonde is the
USA TODAY
bestselling author of suspense novel
Stolen Grace,
and the contemporary romance Pearl Series–
Shades of Pearl, Shadows of Pearl, Shimmers of Pearl, Pearl,
and
Belle Pearl.
Arianne is an American author who was raised in both the US and Europe and now lives in France with her husband and coterie of animals. She used to be an actress and
Shooting Star
is inspired by her past career—she is a huge fan of TV, film, and theatre and loves nothing better than a great performance.
Thank you, Nelle, for keeping me going each day. And Dee, Gloria, Letty, Cheryl, and Paula. Paul my amazing formatter at BB eBooks – who has saved me from several meltdowns because he is always there for me. And to my incredible readers and fans. Always yours – you inspire me.
(A Beautiful Chaos book)
by
ARIANNE RICHMONDE
This is the first book in the Beautiful Chaos novella series:
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed, translated or publicly performed or used in any form without prior written permission of the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution, circulation or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible maybe liable in law accordingly.
Arianne Richmonde 2014
Copyright © Arianne Richmonde, 2014.
Kindle Edition
The right of Arianne Richmonde to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) 2000
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design © DonDesigns
Formatting by:
BB eBooks
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
T
HE FIRST THING EVERYBODY wanted to know about me (apart from who I was dating) was how the hell did a nineteen-year-old get (a) so rich and (b) so screwed-up? I asked myself the same thing, daily. When I glanced at myself in a passing mirror I’d say,
Hey Star, what happened? And when? When exactly was it that things got so . . . so chaotic?
And what, girl, are you going to do about it? I often wondered how I’d been so lucky, but I also took it all for granted. The way movie stars generally do when they feel fame is their birthright.
Still, I was no fool, every day I counted my lucky stars and knew that at any given click of God’s big fat thumb and index finger, all this could be taken away from me.
Not that I was some religious God freak. I could count the times I’d been to church on one hand. But when the chips were down I found myself making deals with God. And after I’d hit an all-time low at rehab, I promised God—the last night I was there, in fact—that I’d be a good girl if he could just procure that part for me. The role I’d had my eye on.
The role I was born to play: Skye in
Skye’s The Limit
.
Most people think that actors are super-confident. But no. We’re all terrified. Terrified that we’ll be out of a job. That the last big success was a fluke—that we’ll be discovered as phonies. And that someone more beautiful, more talented or more something-or-other will topple us from our pedestals. The truth is, we
are
fakes. All of us. That’s the nature of our job. We lie. We trick people into believing we are someone else. When we cry, sometimes it’s real and other times an act. And nobody can tell the difference. We’re so good at what we do that we even fool ourselves.
Especially ourselves.
We glimmer on the red carpet. We are glorious. Victorious—but we’re also walking time bombs. Waiting to detonate. Waiting for our secret to be revealed. The big secret being that
we’re no better than anybody else.
We get zits. We look like shit before Hair and Make-up gets their hands on us. People dump us. Hey, even Marilyn Monroe was treated like crap by various men.
Even goddam, luminescent, Marilyn freakin’ Monroe.
And although I wasn’t aware of it then, I was as vulnerable as Marilyn when I walked out of that clinic and stepped—in my Choos—into a velvet-carpeted limo, purring like a welcoming pussycat, waiting to take me away from the ugly world of imperfection, back to my cocoon of beautiful chaos, that shone so brilliantly on the outside—like a floating bubble that mirrored a cerulean-blue sky and the sun which glittered its golden rays—blinding all my fans.
That wonderful, hopeful May afternoon, I knew I was
back
.
Back to conquer Hollywood.
“Y
OU’RE NOT SERIOUS?” I asked, my jaw on the floor. “You’re joking?”
Brian carried on calmly chewing gum, the cloying aroma of Juicy Fruit wafting about his Porsche like air freshener. He sank deeper into his seat, his large body oozing with self-satisfied confidence, or what I suspected to be a little fart—although it could have been the new leather of the seat squeaking. “Jake,” he said, “you’ll thank me for this later.”
“There won’t be a ‘later,’ ” I shot back, my voice rising. “Because there’s no fucking way I’m having that . . . that . . . liability on legs in my movie!”
“She’s fresh out of rehab. She’s turned the page.”
“Yeah, for how long? Twenty-four hours? My leading lady needs to give the performance of a lifetime in
Skye’s The Limit
, not be snorting charlie in her dressing room. This is not some brainless blockbuster, Brian, this is
art
!”
“There’s nothing more artistic than the creation of money, Jake. She’s box office. Now, more than ever. You know how much airtime she gets? How many times a day she graces the news, or her photo’s in some magazine?”
“Yeah, but for all the wrong reasons. My answer is no. N-O. No.”
Brian picked the gum out from his rubbery lips and stuck it in a Kleenex. He smirked and said nothing. Then crunched the tissue in his fist like a boxer preparing for a punch. His jaw tightened. Little veins popped in his forehead like blue tributaries of a river. “You’ll work with her,” he said solemnly, the smirk now edging into a Robert de Niro sneer; the sneer Bob’s bad characters don when they’re about to do something crazy.