Bombshell (Hollywood A-List #1)

by C. D. Reiss

  I’d never wanted a woman so badly in my life, and though she was definitely hot, my dick wasn’t even involved.

  I was going to have her. I needed her.

  Two weeks earlier I’d been twenty-four hours into the most epic party of my life. My house was upside down, populated with a few hundred friends and a dozen security guys.

  “Chill out, Gene,” I’d said over the music, walking away from him. No one walked away from Superagent Gene Testarossa. Except me. “This is the same runaround as that girl last March.”

  “The one who said you gave her herpes?”

  “Yeah. That one.”

  “You gave her herpes.”

  I spun on him. I poked at his Hugo Boss jacket with the beer bottle swinging between my thumb and the jabbing finger.

  “The other girl gave her herpes, and it was oral herpes. I was clean. I’m still clean.”

  He shook his fat, pink-gold watch until he could see the face.

  “Ken’s on his way,” he mumbled.

  Ken Braque. Damn. I couldn’t turn my back on my PR guy as easily as I turned my back on my agent.

  I walked out to the pool. Everyone was dressed for summer except Gene, who always looked like a Wall Street banker.

  “I have a month and a half off to do nothing but sit in this house and do what I want. I scheduled it. I made it happen. Moved heaven and earth. The mountain came to fucking Mohammed. And you’re crashing it with what? Who? A girl named Brenda? Brenda?”

  “Look. She died in a car accident two weeks ago and I came here as soon as I knew. Don’t give me a hard time. If you’re the father, you’re the father.”

  “I always use a condom.”

  “You sure?”

  “Because that’s something I’d forget?”

  “Six years ago? When you got that little horror movie and you were over the fucking moon because you were a nobody working in a crystal store? Yeah. You’d forget.”

  “This is serious,” a voice came from behind me. I spun around.

  “Ken!” I hugged him. When I signed with him I knew I’d made it as an actor. I had a career to spin. Boom. I partied harder that night than when I was nominated for an Oscar. Which was cool, but too surreal to drink over.

  “Can you put pants on?” he said. I was in a dress shirt with a towel around my waist. I had no recollection of how I’d gotten that way.

  “Hey, it’s a party. I don’t like feeling restrained. Crotches restrain me.”

  “You have a lot more to worry about than your pants.”

  “Is it this Brenda thing?”

  “Brenda isn’t a problem and she never was. This is deep and wide, Sinclair.”

  My agent was a douchebag, but my PR guy was the real deal. So when he walked back into my house, I followed.

  The party had drifted into all four bedrooms, living room, office, den, billiards room, and the whatever room that I never figured out what to do with. We ended up in the laundry room. I hadn’t even known I had a laundry room. Mom would be proud.

  Gene had shuffled in. Ken closed the doors, then leaned on the washer and crossed his arms.

  “Brenda Garcia. Remember anything about her?”

  The question wasn’t rhetorical. He was actually asking.

  “No.”

  “You worked with her at a crystal store.”

  “I remember the store.”

  “Fine.” He moved off the washer and stood on his own feet as if changing gears. “I’m not asking you to remember her or her daughter. It’s irrelevant. I’m sure she was on a brain cell you killed already.”

  “My brain is fine.”

  I sounded defensive. Too many beers or too few.

  “Right. Whatever. I don’t care. You know what I care about? I care about what people think of you.”

  I took a mouthful of beer. Outside, someone was thrown into the pool. A woman, judging from the squeals. He might care what people thought of me, but I sure didn’t.

  “Now,” Ken said. I listened to his voice, but not the words. What if I did have a kid? That made me a father. I’d played a father in Verity, but that was different than being a father. Right? I mean, that takes a ton of time, and time was one thing I didn’t have a hell of a lot of.

  “What were you saying?” I asked.

  Ken sighed and pulled a yellow four-by-six envelope out of the breast pocket of his jacket. He opened it by pinching the edges.

  “DMZ already found out by following the child protection agent into Gene’s office and sitting next to her in the waiting room.”

  “Not my fault,” Gene mumbled.

  Ken continued. “Then they sent a middle-aged female reporter into the CPS office to pose as Brenda Garcia’s aunt. Apropos of nothing. Because this is still real.”

  He took a picture out of the envelope.

  It was a school photo of a girl. Maybe five? Six? Four? Who the fuck even knew? What was the age of maximum cuteness? Because that was how old she was. She had brown hair and huge, dark brown eyes. Big smile surrounded by dimples. Nose like a bell pepper.

  I had blue eyes and light brown hair, but, despite that, the part of my brain that recognized faces calculated a visual equation and recognized hers. My mother’s eyes. My sister’s curls. My dad’s chin.

  Me. She looked exactly like me.

  “Oh. Shit,” I said. “No. Nononono. I wrap it up, Ken. You have to believe me.”

  “Okay, I don’t know when you’re going to get this through your head,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what the public believes. I have your clone, right here.” He held up the picture. The more I looked at it, the more it sunk in. She was mine. “And Ms. Garcia put your name on the birth certificate as the father.”

  “Fucking bitch.”

  “You will speak of her with respect from this moment on,” Ken roared. “First, because she’s dead, and people do not like it when you speak ill of the dead. Second, she bore you a daughter and hasn’t gone public. She was a single mom working behind a counter at the Coffee Chain. People are going to be on her side.”

  He was right. My mother raised me better than that. You don’t speak ill of the dead or insult a woman. You don’t give anyone a reason to think less of you. I tried to hear my mother’s voice in my head, but it was hard to hear without also tasting her biscuits and gravy. With corn. And butter. And the smell of barbecue. Yeah. Dad wouldn’t get mad at the messenger. Dad wouldn’t turn his back. Dad would be Mister C3. Cool, calm, collected.

  Okay. I was good. I had this.

  I had to just breathe in. Man up. Breathe out.

  “Where is she now?” I asked. “The kid.”

  “Her name is Nicole, and she’s in foster care. Now, here’s what you’re going to do before this explodes. One, you’re taking a DNA test. Two, if she’s not yours, you set her up a college fund anyway.”

  “What if she is mine?”

  “I light you a cigar and set you up with a staff. Because you’re not ditching her. It’s too late for that. You’re not ditching her, and you’re showing up in Thailand, on set for Bangkok Brotherhood like nothing happened.”

  “How’s he gonna—”

  Gene didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence before Ken interrupted.

  “He has no choice. If he bails on that shoot, he’s never going to work again. And he has a kid to support now.” He turned back to me. “Private school’s no joke. You need the money. Staff up. You can’t miss a single rehearsal or you’ll be back in Arkansas. It doesn’t matter how famous you think you are. You can disappear. And if you’re not on set in Thailand on schedule, you will disappear . . . Poof.” He kissed the tips of his fingers and spread them out.

  I didn’t want to disappear. Not back to Redfield. I’d worked too hard.

  “I got this.”

  Gene made a huffing noise that was long on disbelief and short on actual humor.

  “What, asshole?” I asked him.

  “You? Man. This is a fu
cking disaster. What are you going to do with a kid? You’re not even wearing pants.”

  “You,” I poked him in the chest, “need to have a little faith, my friend.”

  I brushed past him to walk out, taking a swig from my beer bottle. It tasted like piss. I stepped on a pair of panties. I had no idea who they belonged to.

  Shit. What the hell was I going to do? I traveled like Marco fucking Polo and worked like a dog. I partied like it was my job because my job didn’t leave me too much time to party. And I was going to add a kid to the mix? What the fuck was I going to do?

  Gene didn’t need to have a little faith.

  I did.

  I was going to have to fake it until I made it. Act like I thought dads should act. Do all the things until they came naturally. I didn’t know what the things were, but it wasn’t like I was inventing anything, right?

  The hot nanny in the bathroom had a gift, and I needed it.

  Nicole had cried when she met my friend Mike’s kids. She cried in my mother’s lap. Sobbed when Mom bought her the sneakers with the toes that lit up whenever she walked, ran, stepped, or jumped. She even cried in her sleep.

  I thought a little help was all I needed. Mike had given me the number at West Side Nannies. I held the card like a fucking magic sword, but I left there no better off than I had arrived.

  On the way out from the bathroom incident, an insane pack of paparazzi had found the back door where the limo was parked. And by insane, I mean they were more aggressive than I’d ever seen in my life. I swore their lives depended on getting a picture of Nicole. One of them held his camera in front of her and flashed it in her face. She cried. Of course she cried. I would have cried too. I grabbed for the camera and missed because my dad held me back. Good thing. I was just about ready to peel that guy’s skin off his skull.

  In the back of the limo, Nicole wouldn’t look at me. Too busy crying.

  The only time she’d stopped crying was for the hot nanny.

  My mom sat across from Dad and me with Nicole on her lap.

  “Hard to miss her with those shoes,” Dad grumbled.

  “They’re fine,” I said.

  “You tell her no, after what happened,” Mom huffed at Dad.

  “What do they want?” Nicole asked.

  “Just a picture,” Mom said, stroking her hair.

  “They want a broken face,” I said.

  “Hush!” Mom made her stern face.

  “I’m scared,” Nicole sobbed.

  I sat back in the seat and covered my face. I could smell the bathroom soap on my hands. Jesus Christ. Acting like I had this under control wasn’t working.

  “We should be home.” Dad laid down the law, pointing at me with his three-fingered hand. “She needs family. Not staff.”

  “We’ll do the interviews at the house from now on.” I moved my hands away. Nicole was looking at me as if trying to figure out who was in charge. Too bad I had no idea either. My act was falling apart from the inside out.

  “A man needs to raise his own children,” Dad declared. “You Hollywood types delegate the important things and attend the nonsense personally. Well, it’s—”

  “The circumstances, Milton.” The girl was limp in Mom’s arms, head on shoulder, watching Sunset Boulevard pass by. “They’re not normal.”

  “The hell they’re not.”

  “Don’t say a bad word,” Nicole said, tears slowing down to little sobs.

  Dad huffed and crossed his arms.

  “Is the lady coming home with us?” she asked, picking her head up as if her head was clear for the first time.

  “Which lady, sweetheart?” Kid talk still felt weird in my mouth.

  “The bathroom lady. With the black hair.”

  What was I supposed to tell her? For the first time since she’d come home with me, she wasn’t crying. She looked hopeful, like clouds parted at the mention of the bathroom lady or something.

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t say maybe. Say yes or no.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes or no! Yes yes yes!” she shouted, and I could feel the tears coming.

  “I’ll try—”

  “No maybe. Yes or no.”

  “Yes, okay? Yes.”

  Nicole nodded as if telling herself it was true. I’d said yes. Then she rested her head on my mother’s shoulder again.

  Next to me, my father covered his eyes and shook his head.

  CHAPTER 3

  CARA

  The morning after we met Brad Sinclair he was still embedded in my mind. I couldn’t get away from thinking about him in that bathroom doorway. He was a dude. A party animal. A fuckaround.

  “I don’t think I’m getting a callback,” Blakely said as we climbed a particularly dusty incline on Griffith Park. “I was ten minutes late.”

  “But you smelled nice.”

  She shook her head, swinging her ponytail back and forth.

  “Can’t film a smell. But the face?” She drew her hand over her face as if she were on the floor at the Los Angeles Auto Show. “This face is instantly recognizable as the woman stupid enough to fall for Josh Trudeau.”

  “Everyone forgot that.”

  I was lying. No one forgot it. She’d forever be the face of a nanny who fell for a daddy. Fresh from the supermarket headcap.

  “And I don’t think I got the Sinclair job either,” she said after swigging from her bottle. “Which, maybe it’s a good thing.”

  It had started getting hot earlier in the day, so Blakely and I wanted to finish the hike up the hill by nine a.m. The mountain sloped and curved up to Dante’s Peak, a copse of trees smoked out but not destroyed in the 2008 fires.

  “It’s kind of a disaster,” I said. “The surprise kid? Nothing good can come of it. You can tell he’s trying though.”

  “He has no choice.”

  “And what they say about him?” I said between gasps for oxygen, continuing as if I hadn’t heard her. “All true. It’s like so raw. The presence.”

  “I thought he was shorter.” Blakely sucked on her water bottle. Her blonde ponytail swung behind her. She looked gorgeous even after two miles uphill. My bangs were plastered to my forehead, and my eyes were wet from the dust.

  “Too good-looking to work for,” I said, getting out of the way of a woman in a tight leotard and her dog. “And straight. Too straight.”

  “I know. And inexperienced. He’d probably think he was entitled to it.”

  “Too risky. I pity the girl he hires.”

  I shook my head. Brad Sinclair was a tabloid headline waiting to happen.

  “I hope you get to pity me. I need the money.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t going to hire her. He’d get talked out of it by anyone who cared about his reputation. After her affair with Josh Trudeau she became the nanny equivalent of box office poison. The rumor mill never stopped churning.

  Raymond, my last boss, had cut me loose before the rumor mill had a chance to churn. We hadn’t done anything, but when he got engaged to Kendall, she wasted no time turning me into a problem. Executive powers came with the engagement ring. Her first order was that the other pretty woman in the house had to go. I was young and cute, and you don’t bring a time bomb into your home.

  And that’s exactly what a celebrity nanny is. Not only is she attractive but she’s great with the kids. She does all the things the dad associated with his normal upbringing, which is likely the upbringing he promised himself he was going to give his children.

  The nanny represents that failed promise. She kisses boo-boos, packs lunches, cooks what the children like, and sits to eat with them. His wife is usually in the business as well, and travels, works all hours, and manages a business team as well as the household team. She represents all the dad’s failures as a father, because she’s juggling everything but the children.

  There were plenty of men who didn’t fall for the high-priced, educated, young, beautiful nanny, but there were plenty who did. Yo
u could read all about them while your food was on the conveyor belt at the grocery store. It happened so often it was surprising when it didn’t.

  Despite Raymond’s numerous failings as a father and human being, he never hit on me. He never even looked at me cockeyed. I appreciated that, and as time went on I took it for granted. He was based in Los Angeles because he owned a conglomerate of internet and paper tabloids that fed off the very people he called friends. But because he wasn’t a celebrity himself, I could get him when the kids needed him, he respected what I did, and I loved Willow and Jedi.

  “You had such a sweet deal with Raymond Heywood,” Blakely said, voice rising and falling with her gait.

  “Yeah. I guess. But two gay bankers? This new family is even better. They aren’t interested in seducing women, they have no travel schedules, there are no paparazzi out front.”

  “Yeah. You lucked out.”

  She said it ruefully, and I understood why. She’d been caught with Josh Trudeau by his wife. Marsha Trudeau had recorded them from the bedroom closet and posted the video on YouTube. It was a mess. Blakely’s career came to an abrupt halt, but the damage to her heart was worse. She didn’t know he was a serial cheater. She’d confused a busy husband and wife with a failing marriage. She’d believed everything Josh had said and let herself fall in love. He was never going to leave his wife. They rarely do.

  She got an apartment and didn’t leave it for months.

  She worked as a dog walker and house sitter. She changed the name on her headshot to Sarah Colt and started over. Sometimes when she went on auditions she wasn’t recognized and got a callback. Sometimes it wasn’t that easy.

  I thought about her a lot, because what happened to her terrified me.

  I didn’t want it. Anything but that. People looking at a picture and deciding I was a whore. Strangers making a judgment about me. My blood turned to ice whenever I imagined it.

  “I heard Ray and Kendall went back to West Side and asked for a woman in her fifties.”

  When Ray Heywood let me go I moved in with Blakely. Her job prospects hadn’t improved, but she could do her own shopping and seemed to be moving on.

  “Menopausal women are the horniest,” Blakely said. “And West Side doesn’t do unattractive or older, sorry to say.”