Temptation Road (4 page)

“Are you married, do you have someone?” The
words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“No, I have a little place in Santa Monica,
it’s not much, there’s a futon in the living room….”

Bryant returned looking weary, “I gotta go,
trouble in paradise, I’ll get a bite later. Are you two
finished?”

“Yeah,” he said, “hey Sarah, do you have room
for one more for a few days?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve got my nine
year old, my mother and my boyfriend fighting over the one TV in my
apartment as we speak. Sorry, kid. We’ll take her to Hope Center.
She’ll be good there for a couple of weeks, won’t you,
Mary-Reagan?”

“My name’s Rae,” she said.

“She has money for a motel,” McClure said, “I
was just asking. Let’s get back to the station, you can go home,
I’ll run her ID and then drive her wherever she needs to go.”

*

Rae fell in love with Sean McClure’s body, it
was incredibly muscled and hard and she could’ve run her hands over
it forever. They made love in his unmade bed the minute they walked
into his tiny house and it was not at all like the two high school
boys she’d known back home. He was romantic and tender which was
completely at odds with his solid, officer of the law looks. They
made love three times that night and he called in sick the next day
which he’d never done before.

Sean had never felt such intense heat from a
woman’s body as he did when he held Rae. He was obsessed with the
feel of her silken skin as his hands stroked her high, full breasts
then moved down to her narrow waist and across her flat belly then
under her to cup the small, round ass that fit perfectly in his
hands. He thought her unbelievably long legs were a miracle as they
wrapped around him, pulling him into her so that he was happily
lost.

When they finally abandoned the bed, he
called a fellow policeman with an old Toyota for sale and
negotiated a good price. She bought it and they cruised along the
boulevards of Los Angeles with Sean showing her all the landmarks
the city was famous for. They stopped to eat fried chicken and
waffles at Roscoe’s then drove back to his house, parked the car in
his driveway and tumbled into bed yet again.

It was all so easy from there, as if fate was
pushing her life along. No casting calls or sex on the director’s
couch. She stayed with Sean, made herself useful, cooked his meals,
and couldn’t keep her hands off him. She pulled his mouth to hers
each day as he walked through the door and he would carry her like
a child to the bed or they would crash onto the kitchen table or
crumple to the floor, ravenous for one another.

She drove around Los Angeles in the Toyota
while he was on duty, and she marveled at the mansions and the
multitudes of people, some exquisite, others hideous.

Sean and Rae played on the beach when he
wasn’t working or hiked in the surrounding hills, they camped
sometimes and swam in creeks laced with mossy boulders, the water
flowing down from the Sierra Nevada’s was cold as ice. He fished
and she cooked his catch over an open fire. She would pull him down
onto a bed of leaves and lying naked together they thought of
nothing more than what was happening in that very moment.

One night they went to Harvelle’s Blues Club
to hear some music and an elegantly dressed woman handed Rae a card
and insisted that she come to her hotel the next morning.

“It’s your destiny, my dear, that face will
be your fortune,” she cooed in a melodic foreign accent.

Sean made love to her that night with such
ferocity that she thought she would never walk again. As they lay
panting and sweat soaked he pulled her onto his huge chest and held
her like a baby.

“You’ll be gone soon,” he whispered, “don’t
forget me and remember that I’ll always rescue you whenever you
need it.”

She dressed in her nicest sundress and high
heeled sandals, Sean had gone to work without waking her. They had
made love again in the night, their hands lingering on each other’s
bodies as if to imprint the shape and feel, neither of them saying
a word other than their cries of release. Rae was meeting the
beautiful woman at the Beverly Hills Hotel and she nearly fell off
her platform sandals from nervousness. She kicked the ridiculous
shoes across the room and slipped into cowboy boots. She curled a
few strands of hair with a curling iron, ran her fingers through
the thick, walnut colored mass and let it fall loosely down her
back. She applied heavy mascara and pale pink lip gloss and when
she looked in the mirror, there was a wild young witch with a mane
of shining brown sun-streaked hair and enormously slanted and
dark-rimmed sea-green eyes.

Heads turned as she walked through the hotel
lobby and people whispered, but when the perfectly dressed woman
motioned to her from the bar there was complete silence. The
woman’s name was Alana DeLuca and her family’s centuries old
leather empire was launching a couture line and a signature perfume
that Rae would be the face of.

“I love your style, my darling. The boots,
the cheap dress with your incomparably beautiful face,
delightful!”

She told Rae not to bother to pack a bag, a
stylist would accompany them to New York for the photo shoot which
was months behind schedule. She had already set it in motion after
seeing Rae the night before. From there they would go on to Milan
where the corporate headquarters and Atelier were located. Alana
shortened Rae’s name from Mary-Reagan Hartford to Reagan Hart when
she became the embodiment of DeLuca. In the span three months
Reagan Hart became a worldwide
it
girl
, fame was
immediate and indescribably intoxicating. She never understood why
famous people bitched and moaned about being famous, she considered
it the best thing in the world, a pure and privileged high.

*

For two years she was never still, she
circled the world on the De Luca jet, wore DeLuca couture and
Alana’s jewels and carried purses that cost more than the average
American automobile. The world’s top designers sent her their
clothes to be photographed in and keep, along with ever more
dizzying offers to leave DeLuca and become their muse. She showed
the offers to Alana who would smile and kiss both her cheeks, raise
her salary and see to it that Rae’s mother had a bigger house, a
newer car, and endless world cruises which had become her
passion.

Rae was adored by the world and pampered by
the DeLuca International family. She stayed in Milan with Alana
when she wasn’t traveling, and Alana arranged for a private voice
coach to rid Rae of her hated drawl. Tutors arrived at the villa to
educate her about art and literature and any other subject that
piqued her interest.

Just before her twentieth birthday, Rae flew
to Madrid to shoot a new ad campaign for the DeLuca fragrance line.
She would be photographed with Spain’s most famous bullfighter who
was also an aspiring actor. Reagan’s hair had been lightened to a
caramel color and teased into a beautiful mess reminiscent of
Bridgette Bardot, her huge sea-green cat-like eyes were rimmed with
kohl black eye-shadow swept up at the corners and her lips were
stained dark pink and appeared bee-stung. She wore a deep-green
washed-silk mini-skirt that barely revealed the perfectly rounded
bottoms of her little ass. A matching fitted bustier pushed her
breasts up into pale crescents and reduced her narrow waist to
almost nothing. An emerald chocker circled her slender neck and
flesh colored stilettos showed off her spectacular long legs. The
Spaniard’s black hair was pulled into a low, sleek ponytail and his
eyes were as slanted as Rae’s but coal black and luminous. His
overtly masculine good looks combined with Rae’s chic, bombshell
femininity, appeared on billboards around the world and caused a
major surge in perfume sales. It also landed the actor his first
major film role and brought Rae firmly to the attention of
Hollywood’s hottest director.

*

Carlo Bianchi had directed three of the top
grossing movies of all time and he had done it in the last five
years. He, too, had risen to fame quickly and was drunk with power.
He’d become insatiable in his need to own all that glittered in the
world and Reagan was the most glittering woman of the day. To the
lovely Spanish style cottage she’d purchased in the Hollywood
Hills, he sent a Bentley convertible, a personal chef and an
American Express Centurion Card. An invitation to accompany him to
the Academy Awards followed.

They married secretly in Las Vegas six weeks
later and had a no-holds-barred wedding in Tuscany the following
summer. Carlo was attractive but not truly handsome, he was tall
and lean with thick dark hair and soft brown eyes. He worked out
with a personal trainer and looked younger than his forty five
years. His smile and his passion for life were irresistible, he had
that quality that televangelists and cult leaders possess, he
mesmerized all who knew him, Reagan included. Alana didn’t like him
from the beginning; she thought he was shady, that he had a secret.
She was certain that he was bi-sexual or a bigamist or had been in
some South American prison, she didn’t believe he was Italian.

Reagan moved into his palatial estate in
Malibu and even though they had sex fairly often they maintained
separate bedrooms. Carlo snored like a chainsaw and she required
the three bedrooms next to hers to be refitted as closets. Rae
continued to be the DeLuca girl and she was offered script after
script for small parts in movies and a role in a TV series that was
perfect for her.

Carlo intercepted them all and threw them
away, “you’re a face my love, a persona. Why tarnish your perfect
mystique with acting, you want to be like Madonna and be ridiculed?
You’ve never quite lost your Texas twang, what are you going to do,
remakes of Tennessee Williams plays forever more?”

She never saw it as holding her back, he was
a great director so he knew talent when he saw it. She was still
the face of DeLuca twelve years later and was considered one of the
ten most beautiful women in the world. She had been on the best
dressed list without interruption since Alana had taken control of
her wardrobe. Her face had graced the covers of fashion magazines
worldwide, articles had been written about her charmed life, wasn’t
that enough?

Carlo and Reagan wanted for nothing except,
perhaps, a child. He had three grown children from three earlier
marriages and he wasn’t close to any of them. The first five years
their lives together seemed magical and the next five were
heartbreaking for Rae as she got her period exactly on time each
and every month.

“Surely you don’t want to ruin your
magnificent body carrying a baby,” he would say, talking to Rae as
if she were a child. “You are as exquisite as any woman could
possibly be, there isn’t a single blemish on your skin. No, you
were not meant to have children, my sweet. If it were God’s will,
it would have already happened.”

On her thirtieth birthday she cried openly to
her gynecologist over her inability to become pregnant.

“Reagan, we have run every test known to
modern science over the last five years, the problem can’t possibly
be with you.”

“What are you saying?” she asked, drying her
eyes.

He handed her a card, “call my brother’s
office, he’s the best urologist on the west coast, your husband
should make an appointment.”

Carlo swore to her that he would see the
doctor, but he was leaving for the South Pacific to begin his next
film and would get around to it in a couple of months when he came
home on break.

*

Alana sent the jet for Reagan and her mother
and they joined her in Paris for fashion week and to celebrate
Rae’s birthday. She had also reserved a massive suite for them at
the Georges V and had the bedrooms filled with the latest DeLuca
fashions. Betsy, Rae’s mother, had attended junior college even
though she had warned Rae against it so many years before. She was
devoted to bettering herself and giving back to the community as
her daughter had given to her. She booted her last husband out as
soon as Rae returned to Texas as the DeLuca girl. Rae bought her
mother a spacious house in the lovely retirement community of Sun
City where Betsy soon became the reigning queen. Betsy quit smoking
and drinking, immersed herself in yoga and was mindful of her
health. She read voraciously and could discuss almost any topic
with anyone at any time.

“My baby girl made something of herself and I
owe it to you to be the kind of mother you won’t ever be ashamed
of,” she told Rae as she lay on the bed watching her try on
clothes. Her hair was silver and cut into a pageboy, it suited her,
there was nothing of the high school dropout barmaid about Betsy
any longer.

“You look so beautiful Mama, but your awfully
thin, are you taking care of yourself?”

“Honey, I’m old and you just don’t realize
it, I’ve got aches and pains and old lady mess that I’ve just
learned to live with.”

They dressed up for dinner in spectacular
attire from the DeLuca signature collection. Reagan wore a short,
sixties inspired sheath with leather boots that hugged her legs and
ended high up on her thighs just beneath the hem of the dress.
Alana had reservations that were nearly impossible to come by at
Rae’s favorite restaurant, Laperouse. The three women drank gallons
of champagne and nibbled impossibly delicious food and talked and
laughed and were the last to leave. They were Rae’s two mothers and
she felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have them.

In a cozy semi-circular booth in the hotel
bar they ordered more champagne and Alana proposed a toast.

“Here’s to our birthday girl, the daughter I
never had and a better one than I could ever have hoped for. And
here’s hoping that now that she is of a certain age she will toss
that fraud of a husband out on his ass and meet a kind and
beautiful man with a large penis and have a dozen babies!”