Adored (18 page)
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND, JULY
1998
“God, he really is gorgeous, isn’t he?”
Janey passed the magazine back to Siena, who lay scowling on the library sofa in Janey’s parents’ house, her long legs draped nonchalantly over Patrick’s. Patrick was Janey’s older brother and Siena’s boyfriend of the moment.
“Hmm,” replied Siena, doing her best to sound bored as she looked at Hunter’s face smiling at her from the front of the June issue of
Hello!
All black hair and smoldering blue eyes. “I guess so.”
Janey Cash was a great school friend of Siena’s and had invited her to spend two weeks at her family’s tumbledown Georgian rectory in Yorkshire. The girls had taken their last A-level together ten days ago, and waved a joyous goodbye to St. Xavier’s. They were still recovering from the epic hangover that had followed a drunken week of post-exam celebrations, and Siena decided that two weeks in the peace of the Yorkshire countryside, watching TV and filling up on Mrs. Cash’s delicious sticky toffee pudding, was exactly what the doctor ordered. Of course, the fact that Patrick would be there too was just an added bonus.
She dropped the magazine, making sure Hunter’s face was floor side down. She was sick of seeing his picture everywhere, sick of all her friends telling her how gorgeous he was. Ever since he’d landed the role of Mike Palumbo in
Counselor,
the hottest new TV series since
Dynasty,
it was like she couldn’t escape him. The fact that she hadn’t laid eyes on him, or even spoken to him since she was ten years old, didn’t stop people from asking her endless questions, raking over her memories with razor blades.
What made it worse was that Hunter seemed to be living
her
dream, fulfilling
her
destiny. For as long as she could remember, Siena had wanted to be an actress. Although she knew you weren’t supposed to say it, what she longed for above everything else was to be famous. Not just Duke McMahon’s granddaughter or Pete McMahon’s little girl—she wanted serious, fuck-off fame, the real deal, in her own right. She wanted the whole world to love her, to have people scream out her name. To be adored, just like Duke had been adored. That was her dream.
She
was the one who should have had her face splashed all over the magazines, not Hunter. She knew she shouldn’t begrudge him his success, not after everything he’d been through. But it was so hard, being forced to watch him make a name for himself in Hollywood while she was stuck in England, being pushed into seven more grindingly dull years of medicine at Oxford. Just because her mom had given up medical school, and now both her parents wanted to live vicariously through her. She didn’t
want
to be a goddamn doctor!
Patrick picked up one of her bare feet in his hands and gave it a comforting squeeze. She smiled at him. He really was very sweet, and he seemed instinctively to understand that she found it painful to talk about Hunter, or any of her family for that matter. If only everyone else were so tactful.
After Duke died, her father had wasted no time in packing her off to boarding school. By the time she came home for her first long vacation at Christmas, Caroline and Hunter had moved out of Hancock Park into a modest apartment somewhere in Los Feliz. Siena had begged Pete to let her see Hunter, but he wouldn’t even give her an address so she could write. She’d pleaded to everyone, Minnie, Aunt Laurie, her mother, but out of either malice or fear, none of them would help her.
Once, when she was back in L.A. for the summer, she could have sworn she’d seen an envelope with Hunter’s handwriting on it at her dad’s office. He used the very rounded letters of a young girl, and finished his i’s with cartoonish circles rather than dots. You could almost smell the effort that went into his spelling and punctuation, poor lamb. But Tara, Pete’s vile, anorexic bitch of a PA, had snatched up the letter before Siena could take a closer look and locked it away in her confidential file.
When she’d asked Pete about it later, he told her that he kept the letter from her for her own protection.
“I’m not letting you read it because it would hurt you to read it,” he said. “Hunter has decided that he no longer wants to have any contact with our family. He’s almost seventeen now, and I think we have to respect his wishes.”
“But he doesn’t mean
me,
” Siena insisted. “He would never say he didn’t want to see me anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Siena,” said Pete brutally. “But he would, and he has. I think it’s best if we don’t speak about this again. Hunter has moved on and so must you.”
It was amazing to think that that awful conversation had been nearly seven years ago now. And that since then she and Hunter, who had once been so inseparable, had lost each other completely.
“Come on,” said Patrick, extricating himself from Siena’s limbs, getting up from the sofa and yawning dramatically. “I’m bored. Who’s up for a spot of corn jumping?”
“What on earth is corn jumping?” asked Siena, admiring the lean, defined muscles on his stomach as he stretched his arms above his head. For a rugby player, Patrick had a slim build, but she loved the smooth lines of his body and the way her own body seemed to bristle with excitement and arousal whenever he came near her.
She was not in love with him—Siena hadn’t the slightest intention of falling in love with anybody until she was at least thirty, and rich and famous enough to be happy with or without a man—but she had a genuine soft spot for Patrick. As well as being a complete angel, he was far more talented in bed than any of the other boys she’d been with.
“You’ve never been corn jumping?” asked Janey, taking her friend’s hand and pulling her up from her seat.
“Look, we’re not all local yokels, you know.” Siena laughed. “I have no idea what corn jumping is, but something tells me we don’t get to see a whole lot of it in Los Angeles.”
“You’re missing out, I can assure you,” said Patrick in the clipped British accent that reminded her so much of Max De Seville.
Not for the first time she wondered what had become of Max, her old rival, and whether he and Hunter were still in touch.
“Come on,” said Patrick. “Follow me.”
Siena followed Janey and Patrick as they skipped out into the stable yard, giggling and pushing each other like a couple of kids. It must be lovely, she thought wistfully, to have a family like Janey’s. Mr. and Mrs. Cash were both so cool and laid-back. They couldn’t give a shit whether Janey got into bloody Oxford. Not that she was likely to anyway. Poor Janey. Patrick seemed to have the lion’s share of brains and looks in that family.
The three of them clambered over the rotting old yard gate and ran across the paddock toward the three vast grain silos that marked the entrance to the farm. It was a glorious July day, and the sun beat down on the fields, its warmth intensifying the rich agricultural smells of hay and horses and cow shit that had once been so utterly alien to Siena, but now just smelled of England.
She could never live up here, she thought as she stumbled across the bumpy, irregular field. They were hundreds of miles away from the nearest decent blow-dry, let alone restaurant or club. The Coach and Horses in Farndale was about as close as people got to a good time in Yorkshire, as far as Siena could make out. But every now and then it did her good to come and stay with Janey, to soak up the clotted cream richness of the dale, sheltered beneath the barren, bleak expanse of the moor above. The landscape was breathtaking. It made her feel like Cathy, making wild love to Heathcliff, whenever she and Patrick sneaked off to the barn or the stables to fool around. It was another world.
“Move your ass, Siena!” Patrick shouted at her in his appalling attempt at an American accent as she jogged to catch up with them. “In here.”
Janey opened the door to the grain silo, and the pungent, overwhelming stench of the grain hit Siena in the face like a Mike Tyson punch.
“Omigod, it reeks!” she squealed, clasping her hand over her nose and mouth.
Inside, the silo was huge, like an aircraft hangar, with two enormous mounds of corn, perhaps eighty feet high, shimmering in their own golden dust beneath an industrial latticework of metal beams supporting an immense corrugated iron roof. On the wall to her left, Siena saw two endlessly long ladders bolted together, providing access to a narrow platform at the top of the larger corn pile.
Patrick looked first at the ladder, then at Siena, and nodded evilly.
“Oh no.” She shook her head, laughing, her thick dark curls spilling luxuriously over her INXS T-shirt, eyes flashing the same cobalt blue as her new 501 jeans. Patrick felt his groin stirring as he looked at her. “I am
not
going up there. Uh-uh, no way Jose, ain’t happenin’.”
“You sounded
so
like your grandfather when you said that,” said Janey idly, then immediately regretted it. Siena was even more touchy about the late, great Duke McMahon than she was about her divine uncle Hunter. For once, though, she seemed to take it in good humor.
“Thanks,” she smiled, then, turning to Patrick, “but I’m still not going up there.”
“Oh, don’t be such a wuss.” He pulled her toward him and pressed his own wide mouth against her tiny Betty Boop lips. She tasted of black-cherry lip balm. “That’s what corn jumping is. You climb all the way up there.” He pointed to the precarious-looking platform. “And then you jump down into the corn.”
“It’s
really
fun,” confirmed Janey, who was already at the foot of the ladder, preparing to climb.
“No way, I can’t,” persisted Siena.
“Why on earth not?” asked Patrick.
“I have a job for Ailsa Moran next week,” said Siena. “What if I bruise myself—I mean, what if I cut my face? I’m supposed to have a ‘sophisticated forties look,’ okay? They don’t want some scar-faced bungee jumper.”
Ailsa Moran was one of the hot up-and-coming young fashion designers on the London scene this year. Much to Siena’s surprise and delight, Moran had hired her to model some of the more retro pieces from her new collection for a shoot in the
Sunday Times Style Magazine,
the first real, paying modeling assignment she’d had since signing on with a small London agency over the Easter holidays.
“Oh well, excuse
me,
Little Miss Supermodel,” Patrick teased her, stroking her cheek affectionately.
Siena knew he felt uncomfortable about her modeling, although he tried hard to be supportive. He didn’t understand that she saw it as a way to get herself back to Hollywood, a stepping stone toward launching an acting career that didn’t involve her father or trading on her famous name. She had landed herself an agent and gotten the Moran job completely on her own, and she desperately wanted Patrick to be proud of her for that. Instead, he seemed to fear that the whole fashion scene and the superficial London crowd that went with it would pull her further and further away from him. Perhaps he was right.
“Fine,” he said, kissing her again. “You just stay here and be a wet blanket. But I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. Janey and I have some corn to jump.”
They both looked up as, with an almighty screech, Janey hurled herself from the rafters and landed with a soft thud in the corn below. Siena could hardly see her for dust as she slid down the side of the mound, whooping with adrenaline, her good-natured, ruddy face even more flushed than usual.
“Wow, that was
great
!” she said, scrambling to her feet and brushing the worst of the prickly corn dust off her yellow-stained jeans. “Come on, Claudia bloody Schiffer, don’t be so wet. Have a go.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, all right,” said Siena, shaking her head at her own childishness. She had to admit, it
did
look like fun. “Pat,” she yelled, racing over to the ladder. “Hold on, I’m coming up!”
By the time she’d joined him on the little platform, she was already beginning to regret her impulsiveness, and it had nothing to do with her budding modeling career.
“Fucking hell, it’s a long way down, isn’t it?” she said, biting her lip with nerves.
“To the ground, yes,” said Patrick. “To the corn, can’t be more than twenty or thirty feet, I reckon. You’ll be fine.”
“What if I miss it?” wailed Siena, taking another step back from the edge.
Patrick roared with laughter, his gentle hazel eyes disappearing into creases. “Darling, even you couldn’t miss
that.
It’s about the size of fucking Canada.”
Siena didn’t look remotely reassured.
“How about we jump together?” He looked her in the eye, inviting her to trust him, and even through her fear, she could feel herself melting.
What a sweetheart he was, her little Patricio. A sudden pang of guilt, for the few times she’d been unfaithful to him, stabbed briefly at her heart. She knew it was insecurity that propelled her into other boys’ beds; that she was driven by a desperate need to be loved and to have lifeboats in case her mother ship—Patrick—should sink. Having lost or been abandoned by everyone she had ever loved, she had learned the hard way never to put all her emotional eggs into one basket, however loyal and lovely that basket might be. Poor, darling Patrick, he deserved better.
“On three?” she said, reaching for his hand.
“On three.”
“One. Two.” Siena shut her eyes tight. “Three!”
With a stomach-splitting whoosh, she felt herself rushing through the air, clinging to the warm firm grip of Patrick’s hand until, what seemed like hours later but could only really have been a second or two, they hit the soft cushion of the corn below.
“We did it!” she spluttered euphorically through a mouthful of corn dust. “That was awesome!” She felt seven years old again, brave, excited, and triumphant. Soon she was on her feet, punching the air with her fists and running a victory lap around the mound of corn.
Patrick caught his sister’s eye and, nodding in Siena’s direction, raised one eyebrow at his screeching, circling girlfriend. She seemed to have gone completely barmy. “American,” he whispered, in explanation.
“Oh yes,” said Janey. “Very.”