Unstoppable (Fierce) (35 page)

There had been a reason for that.

I couldn’t trust just anyone with what little good remained.

In fact, I could barely
mull over what had been done to me in the safest spot of all – between my own two ears. I couldn’t imagine reporting it to another person in a clinical setting, as if that would make the whole thing an easier load to carry.

We talked about the binge eating, and that had been hard enough. We talked about the abuses I suffered at the hands of Eddie, which had been more difficult still. Now he wanted me to tell him, in vivid detail, what Shane had done to me… to my body… to my spirit.

I couldn’t do it.

I shook my head. “I’m not ready to talk about Shane.”
Maybe not ever
, I added to myself. “It’s over. It’s in the past.” And that’s where I, for one, wanted to keep it.

Being face to face with the asshole just scant weeks before had been enough, thank you very much.

“I think the very fact that it scares you is reason enough to talk about it,” he reasoned. “Especially if it’s still driving self-destructive impulses.”

Self-destructive impulses?
What self-destructive impulses? Just because I could eat a whole cheesecake in one sitting, loaded with strawberry sauce and whip cream, or anything to ease those memories back into their hole with the cunning use of fat and sugar, was simply a coincidence.

The fact that I
wasn’t
stuffing my face to dull the ugly feelings I was experiencing indicated to me I was on the right track.

“Then let’s talk about Jace,” Dr. Challis said, switching tactics.

“Jace is wonderful,” I said at once. “He’s almost done with his first album. He’s planning another tour by the end of the year.”

“Will you go with him?”

I paused. “I want to.”

He was quick to pounce on my
hesitation. “But…?”

I shrugged. “I’m still getting over the last tour,” was all I could say.

“Let’s talk about that,” he said. “What was that tour like for you?”

“Considering I was married to Eddie the whole time, pretending to the world that I was someone I’m not, it was a chore. And it backfired anyway, because people are det
ermined to hate someone like me,” I said, thinking of the paparazzi group PING and the blogging king of pop culture, Miles O’Rourke, both of whom had had a field day over the drama that surrounded the struggling tour.

“What does that mean
… ‘someone like you?’”

I shrugged again. “You know. Not like Shelby. I’m not thin. I’m not beautiful. I’m an easy target.
The butt of the joke.”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“Of course not,” I snapped.

“Then why let it be your identifier?” he challenged.

“I didn’t label myself. These were the labels given to me.”

He eased back against his chair. “
Let’s say I had an open bottle of poison so toxic that if it merely touched your skin it could kill you. If I tried to hand this to you, would you take it?”

“Of course not,” I repeated.

“Then why accept the same poison from these other people?”

I sighed. He just didn’t get it.

He sat up and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees. “When people look at you, they don’t see you. They see a reflection of themselves, through their own prisms, for their own purposes. For some, this is a good thing. For Alicia,” he reminded me of the teenager I had honored at the
Fierce
finale, “you are a role model of everything she can become. For critics, you’re a reminder of what they can’t or won’t become. The labels people throw at you has less to do with you and more to do with their own limitations.”

“The only way they win is if I acc
ept them,” I repeated dutifully, thinking of Vanni Carnevale and his well-meaning advice. “Yeah, I know that in my head. And if the critics weren’t so loud, I could possibly convince my heart, too.”

“You’re a bright light,” he pointed out. “The brightest lights always attract the most bugs.”

I had to laugh. Dr. Challis was a good man with good humor, it was one of the reasons I decided to stay with him rather than insist upon a female therapist, like I originally wanted. I knew one day I’d have to dig deep and deal with the Shane stuff. I just wanted it to be on my timetable.

Today was not that day. Tomorrow didn’t look good either.

But as long as Dr. Challis didn’t push the subject, we’d be golden.

“So have you found anything new about your birth mother?”

I shook my head. “I’ve hit another dead end. Ancestry records only go so far with limited data, and since Daddy had no living relatives by the time I was born, it’s nearly impossible to track down information without going back to my moth… I mean, Marianne. God knows I don’t want to owe anything more to that bastard, Shane.” The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. I didn’t want to have to explain why I wouldn’t want to see either of these two people again in my life, even if it meant I couldn’t fill the holes in my family tree.

I’d do it alone or I wouldn’t do it at all. And that was just the way of it. I had hired a private investigator and I had done all the DNA tests. Time, and science, would have to take it from there.

Thankfully he let the topic drop our remaining twenty minutes together. Instead we talked about the possibility of my going on the road again with Jace, and more importantly – how I felt his skyrocketing popularity since the tour, even with the scandal of shacking up with a married woman.

He suddenly became the most
eligible man in music, despite having a significant other. I guess for many fans, I was a far less threatening obstacle than Shelby had been.

Best of all, I was proof he liked fat chicks. This was good news for every
“average” groupie daydreaming about getting her chance with a rock star. It suddenly vaulted Jace back into their league. And I knew this because I had scoped the Internet thoroughly since the tour, to ensure that his reputation hadn’t been tarnished by his affiliation with me.

Instead, his groupies zeroed in on Project Lay Jace. They figured if he was stuck with me, anything lower than a size 18/20 was an improvement.

They were, in fact, quite vocal about it.

Since Jace never read his own press, he was blissfully ignorant of it all. I inhaled it like it was covered in
whipped cream.

It was all I really could
gobble up, since I was back under Maggie’s wing. There were no opportunities to fill my self-loathing with cookies or soda, so I masochistically read anything and everything on Jace and me in cyberspace.

To say it was self-defeating was a bit of an understatement. There was a lot of commentary on Jace and me, and it had cast me as the villain in the scenario.
Where he became more desirable, I ended up shouldering much of the blame for my failed marriage, Shelby’s heart attack and the troubles we had had on the tour. So my sales stagnated where Jace’s skyrocketed. Thanks to my fairy godmother, Iris Kimble, I still had a lucrative clothing endorsement with the plus-sized store Tempestuous, so my celebrity still had value. She even landed me a voiceover gig for an animated feature to be filmed in the fall. But I knew it was going to be an uphill climb. I was going to have to work my ass off to ensure I could make a name for myself as an artist outside of
Fierce
.

Every time I thought I had “made it” I ended up having to essentially start over from scratch.

This made turning down my usual vices for comfort even more difficult. As I drove from Dr. Challis’s office on Wilshire toward the studios in Hollywood, I passed every single one of my favorite drive-thru temptations with great effort.

“
Tell me about Shane
.”

Can
I order a double-double with an extra large order of fries and a chocolate milkshake first? Therapy with food service – now
that
was a million dollar idea.

Just thinking about Shane left me feeling dirty. I could feel his hand in my hair as he pushed my head toward his lap. I could feel the calloused fingers as they slid up my bare leg, under my nightgown. My skin crawled so much it was as if he was right next to me in the car. I could feel those eyes on me, watching me, daring me to fight him.

I shook my head from such thoughts as I pulled into the studio parking lot. I had other things to do. That life was not mine anymore.

That
Jordi Hemphill was no longer. Someone new and powerful had taken her place.

Right?

I slung my handbag over one of the chairs as I entered the control room. I had nearly finished my album, there was only one track left to record and it featured one of Graham’s other top-selling artists, Griffin Slade, as the accompanying musician.

Griffin was known to the world as an accomplished guitarist as well as a philanthropist and an activist, and likewise had the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in show business. He was a perfectionist who drove everyone as hard as he drove himself, but in the end no one had anything really negative to say about the man – even the litany of women who littered his past.

He was one horny humanitarian. He had been linked with every starlet from his home country of Australia to the streets of Hollywood and the Great White Way. Every event that he went to, every red carpet he graced, he was linked arm in arm with someone whose name invariably ended up on a Hot 100 list somewhere.

They were almost always as famous as he was.
On rare occasions he would date an unknown who happened to win the Griffin Slade lottery for the night, but otherwise his world had been filled with those who understood the complexities of the celebrity life.

He
hand-picked women who were equally invested in the fame game. Nobody more famous than he was, mind you… just those who were famous enough.

But all of them, every single one, had the model good looks to be on his arm. Whereas Andy Foster Carnevale or I had bucked the system and snagged our rock stars by fitting outside the norm, only the finest, grade-A
celebutantes were good enough for Griffin.

One such starlet sat in the control room, one slender leg tucked under the other as she spun in one of the chairs, watching Griffin through the glass as he played his guitar for the opening solo.

She sipped on a tall iced coffee with a ton of whip cream on top. Where she’d put all those calories was a mystery.

I gained weight just looking at the damn thing.

I watched Griffin as his nimble fingers caressed the strings. His dark hair was spiked and tinged blond at the tips, which made him appear even younger than his 35 years. He was lost in his own world, much like Yael or Randy would be when they played. He felt each note in his soul as he made love to the music. It was so intimate I almost had to look away, and did so the very second his brown eyes opened to find me staring at him.

He indicated I should join him in the studio, and I was quick to comply.

One simply didn’t keep Griffin Slade waiting.

He had a smile for me as I closed the soundproof door. “How’s it going, Jordi?”

Even his speaking voice was melodic, and that Australian accent made it even more so. His eyes were also quite piercing as they looked into mine. It was so direct I looked away. I was still too raw from my afternoon with Dr. Challis, and some folks just made one feel naked.

Sadly, Griffin Slade was one of those people.

“Fine,” I said automatically. “Ready to do this thing?”

He flashed a flawless smile my direction.
“Just waiting on you, love.”

The kinder he was, the more nervous I got, though I couldn’t quite figure out why. He was exotic and important, but he was still just a man. I was
almost as famous as he was, certainly as infamous, so why did I feel like some nervous little backup singer all of a sudden?

I had sung with Vanni Carnevale, who was ten times more famous than Griffin, and
a hundred times more potent. He was just some bloke in faded jeans and an old concert T-shirt who happened to play the guitar well.

Somehow or another, I had left my own sense of value at the door.

No more therapy on work days
, I promised myself.

“
Tell me about Shane
,” I heard Dr. Challis repeat in my ear.

They set up the background music as I put on my head
phones to drown out the nagging, upsetting voices in my head. Instead I glanced down at the sheet music. It was a song that Jace and Vanni had helped me write, called “I’m Not Sorry.”

“
I’m not sorry that I want you, I know down deep you want me too. Let the world spin off its axis, I don’t care. Open your heart and you’ll find me there. I’m not sorry for all these things that I do, I know I was made to do them for you
.”

When I wrote the song, it was my own little “fuck you” to anyone left who had boo to say about my being with Jace. I wasn’t sorry I was with him, and anyone expecting an apology was in for a long wait.