CHAPTER 1
When a rapid-fire staccato of steps echoed through the foyer and Grace’s mother swept into the living room without knocking, Grace regretted giving her the security code to her Hollywood Hills home. Her mother’s habit of waltzing into Grace’s house unannounced really had to stop.
With the dramatic flair of a former actress, her mother flung a magazine onto the coffee table and stabbed the offending print with a manicured finger. “What is this?”
Sighing, Grace put down the script she’d been reading and sat up on the couch.
The magazine on the table was Tinseltown Talk, one of the trashiest celebrity gossip rags around. “Let me guess. Either it’s another photo of me picking up my dry cleaning without makeup, or I’m secretly pregnant with twins, suffering a mental breakdown after gaining two pounds, or having a torrid affair with Neil Patrick Harris.”
“Neil Patrick Harris is gay.” Her mother lowered her voice and added, “And so are you, apparently.”
“Uh, what?”
Her mother sank into an armchair and shoved the gossip rag across the table.
Grace picked it up and turned it around so she could read it.
The most prominent headline on the cover read in scarlet, two-inch-tall letters: Exposed! Grace Durand caught cheating on Nick! Secret GAY tryst! Below it, they had added in smaller letters: See a shocking photo of Grace and her LESBIAN lover only in this issue of Tinseltown Talk.
Grace snorted. Whatever photo they had was probably as fake as the breasts of some of her co-stars.
“I told you something like this would happen,” her mother said.
“Mom, this is bullshit. I’m not having a secret gay tryst.”
“I know. But if they’re already writing ridiculous things like this, can you imagine the headlines once they find out what’s really going on with you and Nick?”
Grace could, and that was why she hadn’t told anyone but her mother and her lawyer yet. She said nothing.
The silence in the living room was deafening.
Her mother leaned forward. Her gaze darted back and forth between Grace and the open French doors leading to the stone patio. “You aren’t…you know?” she asked, her voice lowered to a whisper.
“Gay?” Grace asked.
“Hush! You don’t want the neighbors to hear you.” Her mother’s gaze went to the French doors again, even though Grace’s home was perched on a hillside bluff high above the city, with no neighbors living nearby. “No, I mean, are you drinking again?”
Grace gritted her teeth. She hadn’t touched a drink since she’d been seventeen years old. She’d worked hard to live up to her mother’s expectations and to make up for the sins of her youth, but apparently, it wasn’t enough to make her mother trust her. “Why would you think that?”
Her mother waved at the magazine.
Frowning, Grace flipped through the gossip rag until she found the page with the headline about her “secret gay tryst.” She skimmed the article, noticing with amusement the exclamation points after almost every sentence, probably meant to let readers know they were reading something scandalous and exciting.
According to the article, Grace had been out partying after she’d wrapped up shooting her latest movie and had gotten drunk with her cast mates.
Grace huffed. Never going to happen. After spending fourteen hours a day, six days a week with her co-stars, she didn’t want to hang out with her colleagues, no matter how much Roberta, her publicist, urged her to.
Well, this probably wasn’t the kind of headline Roberta had been looking for. Being caught in a compromising situation with a fellow actress was not the way to promote a family-friendly movie about a heterosexual love story.
Grace searched the article to see which actress Tinseltown Talk was putting her in bed with.
Oh, shit. Jill.
Her gaze jumped to one of the pictures on the page. It was a little grainy and had apparently been taken with a telephoto lens. In the picture, she and Jill had their arms wrapped around each other while they swayed up the steps to Jill’s trailer. The caption beneath the photo said, Grace Durand and Jill Corrigan stumbling into bed for a drunken tryst.
“Would you excuse me for a minute?” Grace threw the magazine back on the table and reached for her cell phone. She walked past her mother as she scrolled through her contact list and dialed Jill’s number. Her mother’s disapproving stare drilled into her back, but she ignored it for once. This was more important than placating her mother. When Jill picked up, Grace stepped out onto the patio and closed the doors behind her.
“Hi, stranger,” Jill said. “Long time no hear. Are you busy writing your Oscar speech?”
Grace laughed. “Hardly.” They both knew the romantic comedies she usually starred in wouldn’t get her one of the coveted Academy Awards, but they had made her a household name, celebrated as a younger, hotter Meg Ryan. “How about you? How are you doing?”
“No Oscar speeches in my near future either, but otherwise, I’m fine,” Jill said.
“Good.” With her back to the house and her mother, Grace sank onto one of the lounge chairs next to the pool. “Listen, I’m not just calling to say hi. Have you, by any chance, seen the newest issue of Tinseltown Talk?”
“Can’t say that I have. I try to stay away from trash like that. So, who’s pregnant—you or me?”
“Neither,” Grace said. “At least I don’t think so. It would be pretty hard to become pregnant from a lesbian affair.”
Jill let out a wolf whistle that nearly pierced Grace’s eardrum and made her pull the phone away from her ear for a moment. “They seriously think the two of us are doing the horizontal mambo?”
“Yeah.” Morosely, Grace stared down at the skyline of LA beneath her.
“Well,” Jill said after a moment of silence, laughter in her voice. “I’m honored to be sleeping with the woman who has been voted one of the sexiest women alive, but please tell Nick not to kill me.” When Grace didn’t laugh, Jill sobered too. “What’s going on?”
“They photographed us going to your trailer, with our arms wrapped around each other. You have to be more careful.”
Jill sucked in an audible breath. “Damn. You didn’t tell them anything, did you?”
“No, of course not.” It hurt that Jill even had to ask.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you would…”
Grace sighed. “It’s all right.”
The irritating sound of fingernails tapping on glass interrupted her. When Grace turned, her mother stood on the other side of the doors, staring at her through the glass.
“I have to go,” Grace said into the phone. “Please take good care of yourself.”
“Will do. You too, okay?”
“I will.” Grace said good-bye and ended the call.
Her mother stepped onto the patio. “Who was that?” She gestured toward the phone.
“Jill.”
“Was that really necessary?” Her mother frowned as much as that was possible after her recent Botox injections.
Grace pocketed the phone and squeezed past her mother, back into the house. “You don’t think she deserves to know what the tabloids write about her?”
“Well, yes, but you have to think of yourself and your career first and foremost. You worked too hard to let rumors like that,” her mother waved in the direction of the magazine on the coffee table, “destroy everything.”
Before Grace could think of an answer, the phone in her pocket started to ring. Not sure if she should be relieved or annoyed at the interruption, she pulled it out and glanced at the display. “It’s George.”
“I know,” her mother said. “I called him as soon as I saw that article in Tinseltown Talk. We can’t have them write something like that about you.”
Grace suppressed a sigh. She was grateful for everything her mother did for her, but sometimes Katherine took her duties as Grace’s manager a bit too far, acting on her own instead of asking Grace what she wanted first. She swiped her finger across the screen to accept the call and lifted the cell phone to her ear. “Hi, George.”
Not bothering with a greeting, her agent asked, “Did you see the newest issue of Tinseltown Talk?”
Grace groaned. “Yes, I did. Mom just brought it to my attention. You know it’s not true, right?”
“Where are you?” he asked instead of answering her question.
That had to be the most-asked question since the invention of cell phones. “At home,” Grace said. “Trying to read scripts.”
“Can you meet me in Westwood in half an hour?” George asked.
“Westwood?” Grace wanted to go back to reading the script, not drive all over Los Angeles. “Why? What’s in Westwood?”
“Your new publicist.”
* * *
Lauren cursed herself for agreeing to the nine o’clock slot the reporter had suggested for the interview. It meant that she had to spend an hour crawling through rush-hour traffic on Sunset Boulevard instead of working through the two hundred e-mail messages in her in-box.
The light mist of LA’s infamous June Gloom coated her windshield, and she eyed the low-hanging clouds as she crept east. At least she had booked the photo op for Ben’s new album for this afternoon, when the fog would have burned off.
Just as she lifted the paper cup of black coffee to her mouth, a car crossed into her lane without signaling, forcing her to stomp on the brake to avoid a collision. Coffee dribbled down her chin and soaked her blouse.
Great. This day was getting better by the minute. Lauren hurled a curse at the reckless driver in front of her while putting the coffee into the cup holder and dabbing at her blouse.
Her cell phone rang through the car’s speakers.
She didn’t even have to look at the number on her dashboard display. She had gotten two calls in the last five minutes, both of them from Ben Harrison. She pressed a button on the steering wheel and accepted the call. “Hi, Ben,” she said in a pleasant, upbeat tone, forcing herself to be a professional and forget her shitty day. “Don’t worry. I’m almost there. We’re now going almost thirty miles an hour, which is practically a high-speed race here in LA.”
Ben didn’t laugh as he usually did when she made a quip like that. Only silence filtered through the line.
“Ben?”
“No, it’s Marlene.”
Of course. She should have expected it on a day like this. A call from Marlene Chandler, founder and president of Chandler & Troy Publicity Inc., usually meant one of their clients had gotten into trouble and Lauren was expected to handle the resulting PR nightmare.
“Sorry, boss,” Lauren said. “I thought it was Ben Harrison. He needs a lot of hand-holding.”
“I’ll let Judy know,” Marlene said.
“Judy?” Lauren frowned. Why did one of her colleagues need to know about Ben’s jitters?
“There’s been a change of plans. Judy will take over as Ben’s publicist.”
What the hell…? Was this supposed to be another punishment for the Tabby Jones disaster? “But Ben has an interview in half an hour, and he’ll be a nervous wreck if I’m not there to field questions.”
“Judy is already on her way.”
“And he’s got a photo op scheduled this afternoon.”
“Judy will handle that too,” Marlene said. “I need you in the office right away.”
It irked Lauren to hand over a client just like that, but she knew protests were futile. She made a quick right turn into Vine Street and headed toward Santa Monica Boulevard, which would take her to the CTP offices in Westwood.
“What happened?” Mentally, she went through her client roster, searching for the most likely up-to-their-necks-in-trouble candidates. Her money was on either Brittany posting R-rated photos of herself on Twitter again or Leroy being caught cheating on his wife with the au pair.
“We’ve got a new VIP client,” Marlene said.
Lauren braked at a red light and eyed the cement truck in front of her. With the kind of luck she was having today, being behind that thing made her a little nervous. “I thought Ben was VIP.”
“Well, if Ben is VIP, this new client is VVIP.”
Despite her curiosity, Lauren knew better than to ask who it was. They never discussed the names of their VIP clients on insecure cell phones. She’d have to wait until she got to the office to find out more.
“We need absolute discretion,” Marlene said, emphasizing every word.
In the PR business, the need for discretion went without saying. Having her boss remind her of it was unusual. When the light turned green, Lauren sped across the intersection and switched lanes, leaving the cement truck behind. She couldn’t wait to get to the office and find out what was going on.
* * *
Lauren pulled into her spot in the office’s underground parking garage and got out of her car. She waved at the security guard in his booth and marched past him to the employee elevator. A quick swipe of her ID card and the elevator doors slid apart.
When they opened again on the twelfth floor, the controlled chaos of a typical Monday morning in the PR business engulfed her. The phones were ringing; people were tapping away at their keyboards, and someone was humming a song that sounded like “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse. She weaved around the desks of hard-at-work publicists, careful not to collide with the interns running around, asking questions, and putting together press kits.
As she passed one of the desks, someone grabbed her arm.
Lauren turned.
Tina, one of the account executives on Lauren’s team, looked up at her with a desperate expression. She was on the phone and now pressed one hand against the receiver, covering it. “It’s Mark. He called me twice already because he wants to go on Ellen. Should we try to get him a spot?”
“God, no.” Lauren firmly shook her head. “Ellen is perfect for a witty client with a good sense of humor, but Mark is about as funny as going through a bout of norovirus with no toilet in sight.”
Still covering the phone, Tina chuckled before her expression switched back to panic. “You’re right, but I can’t tell him that. How do I talk him out of it? He thinks it’s a genius idea.”
Knowing Marlene was waiting for her, Lauren didn’t have time for long explanations. She waved at Tina. “Give me the phone.”
Tina handed it over with a sigh of relief.
“Hi, Mark. This is Lauren Pearce. How are you doing?”
The actor paused for a moment. “Oh, hi, Lauren. I’m fine. Did Tina tell you about my idea? I think it’ll really boost the DVD sales of my last movie.”
His last movie had been a laugh-out-loud comedy, and if his audience realized Mark was funny only if he had a script, they’d be disappointed. Few things were worse than disappointed fans. “Ellen is a great idea.”
Tina stared at her as if she’d grown a pair of green antennae.
“See?” Mark said. “I told Tina you’d think so too.”
“Yes, but the thing is, you don’t have enough movies out yet to secure the lead guest spot.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Mark was silent for a moment. “Doesn’t matter. The second guest spot is still great, right?”
“Depends on where you want your career to go,” Lauren said.
“What do you mean?”
Lauren grinned. She had him now. Like all of her clients, he, of course, wanted his career to go all the way to the top. “Well, if you always accept the second guest spot, people will begin to think of you as second-best. I really think it’s better to pass and hold out for the lead guest spot.”
“Oh.” Mark sounded like a little kid who’d just learned that Santa Claus didn’t exist. “I guess we should wait until I have a few more movies under my belt.”
“Definitely.” With any luck, Ellen would have done the Oprah thing and retired her talk show by then. “I’ll hand you back to Tina. I’m sure she can find you another great interview opportunity.” Preferably one with a reporter who would send them the questions beforehand so they could go over the best answers with Mark.
Tina took back the phone and mouthed, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Lauren nodded and walked past her in the direction of her office. She needed to change into a new blouse, one without coffee stains, before meeting with Marlene.
But luck wasn’t with her today. Marlene’s office door opened just as Lauren walked by. Marlene crooked one finger at her.
Sighing, Lauren changed course, feeling like a child being called to the principal’s office. She had always liked working for Marlene, but since she’d been taken off the Tabby Jones account, she wasn’t sure where she stood with her boss anymore. Reluctantly, she entered the corner office.
“Close the door, please,” Marlene said.
Lauren did.
Marlene rounded her large desk and sat in her executive chair. The black leather almost seemed to swallow her diminutive five-foot frame, but Lauren knew that appearances were deceiving when it came to Marlene Chandler. She might look like a fragile toy poodle, but she had the attitude of a pit bull. “Have a seat.”
Lauren walked past Marlene’s freshwater aquarium, peeking at the Siamese fighting fish, a male and his harem. Some of her colleagues said that the fish became aggressive whenever Marlene was in a bad mood. If that was true, Lauren wasn’t looking forward to the conversation with her boss, because the male flared his fins and gills.
Lauren slid onto the visitor’s chair in front of the desk and waited for what Marlene had to say, knowing better than to ask and hurry her along.
For long moments, Marlene sat there without saying anything, just studying Lauren. She raised a brow at the coffee stains on Lauren’s blouse.
Well, nothing she could do about them now. Lauren managed not to fidget under Marlene’s disapproving gaze.
Finally, Marlene returned her attention to Lauren’s face and leaned forward. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Grace Durand.”
“Who hasn’t?” She wasn’t too fond of the type of movies Durand starred in, but Lauren had to admit the woman was hot.
Marlene nodded. “Right. Well, her mother—who is also her manager—just fired her publicist and wants us to take over.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Lauren said. Unlike many other former child stars, who had become tabloid fodder, ending up in rehab, prison, or reality TV, Grace Durand had avoided any scandals so far. Other than attending the occasional red-carpet event with her husband, Nick Sinclair, the golden boy of action movies, she’d stayed out of the limelight and hadn’t created any PR nightmares for her publicist to clean up.
“That’s what you think,” Marlene said. “Her agent didn’t want to discuss it over the phone, but apparently, there’s been a recent development that needs to be nipped in the bud. You’ll find out the details when they get here.”
Lauren’s eyes widened. “You want me to take over as her publicist?”
Marlene nodded calmly. “Yes.”
If the other PR consultants found out that their firm was now representing Grace Durand, they would fight over the account like sharks over a piece of meat. Why was Marlene handing it to her? She couldn’t shed the feeling that she was being tested, and she didn’t like that feeling. In her eight years with Chandler & Troy, she had proven herself time and again. There had been talk of promoting her to account supervisor when she got back from touring with Crashing Guitars, the new, hip girl group. Instead, she was now back at square one.
“Do you feel up for it?” Marlene asked.
Lauren’s spine stiffened. “Of course.”
“Good. I scheduled a meeting with Ms. Durand, her agent, and her manager for ten.”
Lauren glanced at her watch. That would give her just enough time to change into a clean blouse and get herself another coffee. She had a feeling she’d need it.
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