Adored (19 page)
Later that night, after a delicious but enormous meal with Janey’s parents, followed by a never-ending game of charades, Siena had sneaked out of the spare bedroom, up the creaky spiral stairs to Patrick’s attic room.
Too stuffed with lemon cheesecake to even contemplate sex, she nestled her head against the smooth warmth of his chest and chattered away as he stroked and tickled her bare back.
“Your dad is hysterical,” she said. “Is he always that competitive?”
“Oh, always,” said Patrick. “Although charades does rather bring out the worst in him. Normally, Ma refuses to play, he’s so awful.”
“They’re very sweet, though, your parents,” she sighed wistfully. “They really seem to love each other, don’t they?”
Patrick thought about it. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes, I suppose they do. Why? Don’t your parents love each other?”
Siena gave a brittle grunt of derision. “Not so’s you’d notice.” She reached up and swept a loose tendril of hair back from her face, snuggling closer to his body. “My mom is just totally weak.”
Patrick could hear the bitterness in her voice and feel her body tensing.
“And my dad . . .”
“I know,” he said gently, “you don’t get on with him.”
“I don’t think he cares if I live or die, I really don’t,” said Siena blankly.
“Come on now. That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“I wish it were,” said Siena. “All he cares about is Oxford and medicine and my goddamn reading list. He just wants to be able to go to dinner parties with his Hollywood cronies and their surgically enhanced wives, and say, ‘My daughter’s a doctor, she goes to Oxford, she’s been educated with English ladies.’”
“What, like Janey you mean?” he teased her. “That’s considered a selling point?”
“You know what, screw him,” continued Siena, who was on a roll. “I’m not going. My modeling’s going great, although of course Dad doesn’t give a shit about
that.
He can shove his reading list up his ass.”
Her voice was rising, and Patrick was worried that his parents might hear them.
“He can shove Oxford up his ass!”
“That might be a bit painful,” he said, trying to defuse the situation. “All those dreaming spires look a bit on the sharp side to me.”
Siena didn’t smile.
“Sorry. Not funny.”
He sat up in bed and reached over for his Camel Lights. Lighting up, he took a long drag and offered it to Siena, who shook her head.
“Look,” he said, “you can’t just not go to Oxford. You’ve got a two-E offer, so it doesn’t even matter if you’ve plowed your A-levels.”
“Which I won’t have,” chipped in Siena arrogantly.
“Which you won’t have,” agreed Patrick. “Modeling.” He frowned. “It’s just such a waste. I mean, is that really what you want to be in life? A jumped-up clotheshorse?”
Siena gave him a withering look. “Don’t be fatuous,” she snapped. “I’ve told you, I’m going to be an actress, and modeling happens to be a very good way into that. My agent says if I do the Paris shows this year I could meet a whole bunch of casting directors. A lot of actresses break into the business that way.”
“Bollocks,” said Patrick, blowing smoke out of his nose like a rather unthreatening dragon. “Name one.”
“Cameron fucking Diaz, okay, asshole?” He looked blank. “The girl in
The Mask
?” Furious, she rolled out of his bed and started pulling on her worn striped pajama bottoms. Why couldn’t he be supportive about this? Why was he taking her dad’s side? “Marilyn fucking Monroe, ever heard of her?”
“I don’t think Marilyn got her big break at Paris fashion week, do you?”
“Right, smart-ass,” said Siena, who was really in a foul mood now. “But she was a model first, then an actress.
Model,
” she adopted a patronizing tone, as though explaining the alphabet to a four-year-old. “
Actress.
See? You just don’t like me modeling because it makes you insecure, thinking about all those guys out there who are gonna see my picture and lust after me.”
“That’s not true,” said Patrick, stung because he knew it was.
“You’d rather I was cooped up with a bunch of nerdy medical students at Oxford. That’d make you feel
much
better, wouldn’t it?”
She spat the words out with such vitriol that it scared him. How did they ever get into all this?
“You don’t care about me, about what I want,” continued Siena, blinded with rage. “You don’t care if I’m happy.” In her haste, she had done up her buttons wrong, and her irate, contorted little face looked comically incongruous above her lopsided pajama top. “You’re as bad as my fucking father. Well let me tell you something: I
am
going to make it as an actress. And when I do, it won’t be on the back of my name—my
father’s
goddamn name. It will be because I’ve made it on my own. Modelling’s just the start.”
“Siena,” said Patrick wearily, “I am nothing like your father.” Even in those ridiculous pajamas, screaming at him like a banshee, she still looked so sexy it hurt. “All I meant was that you shouldn’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” He made one last-ditch effort to calm her down. “There’s no point in missing out on Oxford just for the sake of annoying your dad. I just—look, I just find it hard to believe that modeling is what you really want to do, that’s all.” He patted the mattress beside him. “Come on, come back to bed.”
“Well it
is
what I want to do,” she barked defensively. “For now, anyway. Until I can get back to Hollywood, until my acting comes together. And as far as I’m concerned I’m not ‘missing out’ on anything. I hate Oxford. I hate England. If you knew anything about me at all you’d know I’ve been desperate to get out of this shitty, gray, rainy depressing hellhole for the last eight years. Modeling’s a way out, something that even my father can’t control, and I’m taking it. So if that makes you uncomfortable, then tough fucking tits!”
With a final defiant flick of her curls and a foundation-shaking slam of the door, she stomped back down the stairs to her own room.
Oh fuck, that was all she needed. Mr. Cash, looking like an older Sherlock Holmes in a dark green dressing gown and reading glasses, emerged from the bathroom just as Siena stepped onto the landing.
“Ah, Siena. Just saying good night to Pat, were you?” he asked her with a good-natured, conspiratorial wink.
He was such a lovely man, she thought, and so was his son. She didn’t know why she was always such a bitch to him.
“Yes, I was, er—” she floundered—“we were just talking about the future, actually.” She gestured upstairs. “You know, career plans. Moving on.”
Jeremy Cash looked at her thoughtfully. He could quite see why his son was crazy about her, but it was as plain as the nose on his face that a girl like Siena was not about to settle down with Patrick. The lad was headed for heartbreak, and Jeremy felt for him, but even so, he couldn’t quite bring himself to dislike his daughter’s feisty best friend.
Bending forward, he gave her a paternal kiss on the cheek. “Good night, my dear,” he said.
“Good night, Mr. C.,” Siena beamed back at him.
“Oh, and Siena?” he called after her as he opened the door to his own room. “Next time you and Patrick discuss your future, you might want to take a trifle longer buttoning up your pajamas afterward.”
Siena glanced down in horror at her top and blushed like an overripe tomato.
“Good night, young lady,” said Jeremy.
“I’m sorry, guys, that was my fault,” said Hunter. “Can we go again?”
The two cameramen rolled their eyes as they prepared for a fourth take, but neither of them could get really mad. It was so unlike Hunter to forget his lines, and he was such a down-to-earth, decent guy that all the crew liked and respected him. They were shooting the second season of
Counselor
on the back lot at Universal. Despite the show’s unexpected worldwide success, Hunter had failed to become the spoiled talent that most young actors transform into the moment they get their big break. So far, there’d been no demands for a massive pay hike, no celebrity tantrums, and no ego overload from the scores of hot-looking women who hung around the studio gates night after night, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, he hadn’t ever laid a groupie, and most of his evenings were spent at home, alone, poring over his script. Hell, he even bought the sound guys chocolate muffins from the Coffee Bean most mornings on his way into work. Hunter was the real deal, and the whole set adored him.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” he apologized, running his hand through his blue-black hair in frustration. “I thought I nailed this scene last night, but my mind keeps going blank.”
“Hey, c’mon, forget about it,” said Lanie Armstrong, his stunning blond costar, putting a comforting arm around his waist. Like the rest of the cast, Lanie had a thumping crush on her leading man. “We all have our off days. Why don’t you take five and we’ll go again.”
Hunter sank down dejectedly into a white canvas chair and flipped through the day’s script for the umpteenth time. Maybe he’d be able to concentrate if it weren’t so damn hot. As Mike Palumbo, hotshot attorney, he spent most of his day wearing a heavy dark gray wool suit and sweltering under the punishing glare of the studio lights. Sometimes he would sweat his way through three white Armani shirts in a single morning’s shooting. His only respite was the bedroom scenes with Lanie, when, to the delight of teenage girls the world over, he got to wander around in only a revealing pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts. But that just made him equally hot and bothered with embarrassment.
He tried to concentrate as the familiar lines blurred before his eyes. Man, he wished he didn’t find reading and memorizing so difficult. Ever since he was a little boy he’d been worse than useless at schoolwork, but it sure wasn’t for want of trying. He remembered how Pete used to make fun of him, back when their old man was still alive, looming over him whenever he was trying to study for a test, constantly telling him what a moron he was.
No, not a moron, a cretin. That’s what Pete used to call him, a cretin. Stupid pretentious fucking word.
In recent weeks, Hunter had been forced to spend a lot of time thinking about his older brother. His inability to concentrate this morning had more than a little to do with Pete’s unwelcome reappearance in his life.
If
Counselor
’s overwhelming success had come as a surprise to its young star, Hunter’s meteoric rise to prominence had been like a bullet in the heart for Pete.
Since Duke’s heart attack, Pete’s own career as a producer had blossomed. As the chief executive of McMahon Pictures Worldwide, he was now considered to be among the most influential deal makers in Hollywood. Regularly feted in the industry press, and a member of
Forbes
’ West Coast rich list, he had finally been able to move out of Duke’s long shadow and emerge into the sunlight of his own talent. He may not have his father’s looks, but Pete far outshone the old man when it came to business acumen. With a string of good investments in real estate and technology, as well as three of the four most profitable movies of the nineties to his name, Pete had increased the family fortune almost fivefold in the eight years since Duke’s death.
Until recently, Pete had rarely given Hunter or Caroline a second thought. Immediately after the reading of the will, Minnie had banished the pair of them to a decrepit low-rent apartment in Los Feliz, and Pete had been ruthless at severing all contact between Siena and Hunter.
He had lied to his daughter about Hunter’s requesting no more contact. In fact, his half brother had written hundreds of letters, begging to be allowed to see Siena. At first Pete had simply ignored them, but when they didn’t stop coming he’d been forced to write to Caroline, threatening to invoke some imaginary clause in Duke’s trust and rescind Hunter’s inheritance altogether if he didn’t stop harassing the family. Knowing that losing the money would mean nothing to Hunter in comparison to losing Siena, Caroline had told him that his letters were upsetting Siena, and that the child psychologist had said they were preventing her from moving on and settling into her new life.
Heartbroken, and with enormous reluctance, Hunter had agreed to let her go.
The last Pete had heard of them was a few years ago, when Hunter turned twenty-one and came into possession of his relatively meager trust. Under Minnie’s well-intentioned but inept stewardship—for all of her hatred of Caroline, Minnie was not callous enough to deliberately squander Hunter’s wealth—much of the original capital Duke had left the boy had been whittled away, but the remainder was enough for him to move out of Los Feliz and buy a little beach house in Santa Monica.
Caroline, Pete had heard on the grapevine, had long since returned to England, leaving her son to fend for himself. No doubt she was worming her way into somebody else’s family and fortune back in Blighty—
plus ça change
—but Pete didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, Caroline and Hunter had been erased from his life, and that was all that mattered.
Until
Counselor
.
Pete could still remember the sickening lurch he’d felt in his stomach the first time he saw his brother’s impossibly handsome face on the screen. As a grown man, Hunter looked painfully like Duke, except that in his dark business suit, with his proud, solid jaw and steady blue-eyed gaze, he radiated an integrity that the old man, for all his charisma, had never had.
Before Pete could catch his breath, it seemed, the world’s press were beating a path to Hunter’s door, clamoring for pictures and interviews with television’s new wunderkind. If he had to read one more motherfucking journalist going on about how “sexy, but refreshingly down-to-earth” his brother was, he was going to fucking implode.
Since Hunter was a TV actor, and of the lowbrow variety at that, there was in fact no reason why Pete’s path should have crossed his in any way. Pete moved in a very different league, and could certainly have afforded to be gracious about the kid’s fifteen minutes of fame. But just seeing his brother again, looking so happy and handsome and grateful, had reignited all of his latent resentment and hatred.
He wanted that boy to suffer, like he and Laurie and Minnie had suffered. And he was determined to do everything in his power to derail Hunter’s newfound success.
Leaving the script under his chair, Hunter got up and wandered over to the watercooler. Filling a plastic cup with ice-cold water, he gulped it down, hoping to clear his addled brain, but the liquid was so freezing it made his teeth ache. He put his hand to his jaw and winced.
“You okay?”
Hugh Orchard, the show’s chief producer, had wandered up behind him. Dressed in his trademark khaki knee-length pants and blue Harvard Business School sweatshirt, his newly wetted hair immaculately parted at the side, Hugh looked more like a Connecticut investment banker on a family picnic than the obsessive, workaholic, and famously homosexual king of network television that he actually was.
Orchard had an awesome drive—at fifty-six his ambition was still white-hot—and most of the great and the good of the TV world were more than a little afraid of him. Hunter had always liked him though. As long as you kept your head down and worked hard, he had always found him to be a fair and reasonable boss.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” said Hunter, flashing a disarmingly white-toothed smile at Hugh. “Water’s too cold, that’s all.”
Hugh suppressed a giant wave of arousal and tried manfully to tear his eyes away from that beautiful body and look the boy in the eye. He had been with his partner, Ryan, for almost twelve years now, but it wasn’t a crime to indulge in a little wishful thinking every now and then. Hunter tested his professionalism to the limits.
“I saw you were having some trouble with the scene back there,” he said, reaching for a cup himself. “Anything on your mind?”
Hunter blushed. He looked so adorable, Hugh could have eaten him alive.
“Not really.” He shook his head and looked down at his well-polished lawyer’s shoes. “Well, you know, just this situation with my brother.”
“I thought I told you not to worry about that, Hunter,” said Hugh, flicking the plastic lever on the watercooler and filling his own glass. “I’m not about to give in to blackmail from Pete McMahon, and neither is NBC. He can go jump in a lake, as far as I’m concerned.
I
pick the cast of my shows.
I
decide who stays and who goes. Got it?”
Hunter nodded miserably. It was an open secret on the set that Pete had threatened to withdraw McMahon Pictures’ funding for two of Hugh Orchard’s big-budget miniseries, both of which were due to debut on NBC the following spring, unless Hunter was replaced as
Counselor
’s male lead. He was very grateful to Hugh for sticking by him, but also embarrassed to have been the cause of so much aggravation. Thanks to Pete, he was now quite possibly going to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lost revenue and production delays.
“I’m just so sorry for all of this, you know?” he mumbled, nervously crushing his empty cup with his hand and not quite meeting his boss’s eye. “You must be sick to death of me and my dysfunctional family.”
Hugh laughed. “Dysfunctional? The McMahons? Now, that’s what I call an understatement. Are you kidding me? You guys are fucking psychotic!”
Hunter’s perfect features fractured into a grin. “Yeah, well,” he conceded, eyes still glued to the ground, “I guess we have our moments.”
“I’m serious, man,” continued Hugh, who suddenly looked it. “Look at me.” Reluctantly, Hunter looked up. “Don’t let this shit with Peter throw you. He’s not normal, okay? He’s psycho, totally whacked. You just get out there, learn those lines, and do what you do best, all right?”
“Yes, sir!” said Hunter, standing to attention and giving Hugh a mock salute before heading back to the set. Already he felt his spirits lifting a little. Hugh was right. He owed it to everyone to get past this thing with Pete and do the job he was paid to do.
“Don’t you ‘yes, sir’ me, Hunter McMahon!” Hugh yelled after him, unable to resist flirting just a little bit with the heavenly straight boy. “I don’t care if you
are People
magazine’s sexiest man of the year. You’re not too old for me to put you over my knee, you hear me?”
At home up in the Hollywood Hills, Claire McMahon emptied the foul-smelling contents of a tin of dog food into a plastic bowl and set it down on the polished maple of the kitchen floor.
“Zulu!” she called. “Here, boy!”
Within nanoseconds an excitable white ball of fluff had come hurtling into the room, its eyes almost completely invisible beneath its masses of unkempt fur, and hurled itself headfirst into the bowl, making appreciative snuffling noises.
Claire laughed. She adored the little bichon frise, whom she’d christened Zulu for a joke, because he was so impossibly fluffy and white. Pete always complained that the dog looked like a pom-pom that had accidentally gotten plugged into the mains. He pretended not to like him, but Claire had often spied him late at night in his study, surreptitiously feeding Zulu smoky bacon crisps.
Pouring herself a glass of Perrier, she wandered out onto the deck by the pool. It was early evening, her favorite time of the day. She loved to sit outside in the warm tranquillity of the fading light, drinking in the spectacular view of the canyon below.
She and Pete had bought the house in Siena’s second year at St. Xavier’s. Claire had had quite a fight on her hands with Minnie at the time, about moving out of Hancock Park, but things had worked out well for everybody in the end.
After so many years of stress and misery with Duke, Minnie discovered to her surprise that she really rather enjoyed living alone. She found it quite therapeutic, ripping out all Duke’s revolting cream shag carpeting and slowly, painstakingly redecorating every room in her own impeccable taste. For the first time in her life, she was enjoying some economic, as well as emotional, freedom, and it was wonderful to watch her blossoming as she gradually rediscovered her confidence and love of life. By the time Laurie moved to Atlanta two years later for a job at the university, Minnie was actually rather relieved to see her go.
The move had been wonderful for Claire, too. Both she and Pete had fallen in love with their sprawling new Nantucket Craftsman-style home, with its light, its privacy, and its incredible views. They could have afforded something far grander, with the ludicrous amounts of money Pete was making these days, but neither of them wanted to be rattling around on some huge estate—been there, done that.
Only Siena had never really felt at home in the new house, despite Claire’s best efforts to create a beautiful bedroom and bathroom for her, decorated in her favorite indigo blue.
“This isn’t home. It’ll never be home,” she’d announced flatly when Claire had excitedly shown it to her at the start of the summer holidays.
“But darling,” Claire said, crestfallen. “You’ve got all your favorite things in here from Hancock Park. Look, I even saved all of your old Mel Gibson posters.”
“I got bored with him,” said Siena harshly, looking at the walls and her mother’s efforts to please her with withering disdain. “Ages ago. You’d know that if you hadn’t packed me off to England like an unwanted parcel. And where’s my picture of Grandpa, the cowboy one?” Siena continued accusingly. “I suppose Dad got rid of it, did he?”
The bitterness in her voice stabbed at Claire’s heart like a razor. She knew Siena hated St. Xavier’s; that her resentment at being sent away to school had only made her
more
spoiled and
more
willful than ever and pushed her further away from both her parents than she had been when Duke was alive. But Pete point-blank refused to consider bringing her home.