Judith McNaught (7 page)

many times over through astute investments, and those investments were carefully guarded by a series of

complicated trusts and legalities that should protect most of his assets from Rachel. Zack's hand relaxed its death grip on the glass he was holding. He was under control now—he would survive this and go on.

He knew he could—and would. He knew it, because long ago, at the age of eighteen, he had faced a far more agonizing betrayal than Rachel's, and he had discovered that he possessed the capacity to walk away from anyone who betrayed him and never, ever look back.

24

Turning from the windows, he went into the bedroom, pulled Rachel's suitcases out of the closet, and

stuffed all her clothes into them, then he picked up the telephone beside the bed. "Send a bellman up to the Royal Suite," he told the switchboard operator.

When the bellman arrived a few minutes later, Zack thrust the cases with her clothing dangling out the sides at him. "Take these to Mr. Austin's suite."

At that moment, if Rachel had returned and begged him to take her back, if she'd been able to
prove
to him that she'd been drugged out of her mind and hadn't known what she was doing or saying, it would have been too late, even if he believed her.

Because she was already dead to him.

As dead to him as the grandmother he'd once loved and the sister and the brother. It had taken a concentrated effort to eradicate them from his heart and mind, but he'd done it.

Pulling his mind from recollections of last night, Zack sat down beneath a tree where he could see what

was going on without being observed himself.

Drawing his knee up, he rested his wrist against it and

watched Rachel walking into Tony Austin's trailer.

This morning's newscasts were filled with lurid details

of the scene in the suite and the fight that followed it, details that were undoubtedly provided by the hotel

guests who'd witnessed it. Now the press had descended on the area where they were shooting, and

Zack's security people had their hands full trying to keep them at the gate near the main road with promises of a statement later. Rachel and Tony had already given statements, but Zack had no intention of saying a single word to them. He was as icily indifferent to having the press at his "doorstep" as he was

to the news he'd gotten this morning that Rachel's attorneys had filed for divorce in Los Angeles. The only thing that was tearing at his control was the knowledge that he had to direct one remaining scene between Tony and Rachel before they could wrap tonight—a steamy, violently sensual scene—and he didn't know how he was going to stomach that, particularly with the entire crew looking on.

Once he got over that hurdle though, putting Rachel out of his life was going to be much easier than he'd thought last night, because, he admitted to himself, whatever he'd felt for her when they were married three years ago had vanished shortly afterward.

Since then, they'd been nothing but a sexual and social

convenience for each other. Without Rachel, his life was going to seem no emptier, no more meaningless or superficial than it had seemed for most of the past ten years.

Frowning at that thought, Zack watched a tiny insect make its arduous way up a blade of grass near his hip, and he wondered why his own life frequently seemed so frustratingly aimless to him, without important purpose or deep gratification. He hadn't always felt like this, though. Zack remembered…

When he arrived in Los Angeles in Charlie Murdock's truck, survival itself had been a challenge, and the

job he'd gotten on the loading docks at Empire Studios with Charlie's help had seemed like an enormous

triumph. A month later, a director who was shooting a low-budget picture on the back lot about a gang of inner-city thugs that terrorized a suburban high school decided he needed a few more faces in a crowd

scene, and he recruited Zack. The part required only that Zack lean against a brick wall, looking aloof and tough. The extra money he'd made that day had seemed like a boon. So had the director's announcement several days later when he sent for him: "Zack, my boy, you have something we call presence. The camera loves you. On film, you come across like a moody, modern-day James Dean, only you're taller and better-looking than he was. You stole that scene you were in just by standing there. If
25

you can act, I'll cast you in a Western we're going to start shooting. Oh—and you'll need to get a waiver from the union."

It wasn't the prospect of being in a movie that really excited Zack, it was the salary he was offered. So he got a waiver from SAG and learned to act.

Actually, acting hadn't been all that difficult for him.

For one thing, he'd been "acting" for years before he left his grandmother's house, pretending things didn't matter when they did; for another, he was totally dedicated to a goal: He was determined to prove to his grandmother and everyone else in Ridgemont that

he could survive on his own and prosper on a grand scale. To achieve that goal, he was prepared to do almost anything, no matter how much effort it required.

Ridgemont was a little city, and there'd been no doubt in Zack's mind that the details of his ignominious

departure were common knowledge within hours after he left his grandmother's house on foot. When his

first two movies were released, he went through every piece of fan mail, hoping that someone he used to

know would have recognized him. But if they did, they didn't bother to write.

For a while after that, he fantasized about returning to Ridgemont with enough money to buy Stanhope Industries and run it, but by the time he was twenty-five and had amassed enough money to buy the company, he'd also matured enough to realize that buying the whole goddamned city and everything in it

wouldn't change a thing. By then he'd already won an Oscar, gotten his degree from USC, been hailed as

a prodigy, and called a "Legend in the Making." He had his choice of starring roles, a fortune in the bank,

and a future virtually guaranteed to be even more spectacular.

He'd proven to everyone that Zachary Benedict could survive and prosper on the grandest of scales.

He

had nothing else to strive for, nothing left to prove, and the lack of both left him feeling strangely deflated

and empty.

Deprived of his former goals, Zack looked elsewhere for gratification. He built mansions, bought yachts, and drove race cars; he escorted beautiful women to glittering social functions, and then he took them to bed. He enjoyed their bodies and often their company, but he never took them seriously and they rarely

expected it. Zack had become a sexual trophy, sought after solely for the prestige of sleeping with him

and, in the case of actresses, coveted for the influence and connections he had. Like all the superstars

and sex symbols before him, he was also a victim of his own success: He could not step off an elevator or eat in a restaurant without being accosted by adoring fans; women shoved hotel room keys into his

hand and bribed clerks to let them into his suite.

Producers' wives invited him to their homes for weekend

parties and slipped out of their husbands' beds to climb into his.

Although he frequently availed himself of the banquet of sexual and social opportunities spread out before him, there was a part of him—his conscience or some latent streak of conventional Yankee morality—that was revolted by the promiscuity and superficiality, the junkies and sycophants and narcissists, everything that made Hollywood seem like a human sewer, a sewer that had been sanitized and deodorized to protect the public's sensibilities.

He woke up one morning and suddenly couldn't tolerate it any longer. He was tired of meaningless sex,

bored with loud parties, sick of neurotic actresses and ambitious starlets, and completely disgusted with

the life he'd been living.

He started looking for a different way to fill the void in his days, for a new challenge and a better reason to exist. Acting was no longer much challenge, so he turned his thoughts to directing instead. If he failed as a director, he'd be a very public flop, but even the risk of laying his reputation on the line had a
26

stimulating effect. The idea of directing a film, which had been hovering on the fringes of his consciousness long before that, became his new goal, and Zack pursued it with all the single-minded determination he'd devoted to achieving his others.

Empire's president, Irwin Levine, tried to talk him out

of it, he pleaded and reasoned and wheedled, but in the end he capitulated, as Zack had known he would.

The movie Levine gave him to direct was a low-budget thriller called
Nightmare
that had two leading roles, one for a nine-year-old child, another for a woman. For the role of the child, Empire insisted on Emily McDaniels, a former child star with Shirley Temple dimples who was almost thirteen but looked nine and was still under contract to them. Emily's career was already on the downslide; so was the career

of a glamorous blonde named Rachel Evans, who they cast in the other role. In her prior films, Rachel Evans had only minor parts, and none of them showed much acting ability.

Zack's studio had foisted both females off on him for the patently transparent reason that they wanted to teach him a lesson—that acting was his forte, not directing. The film was virtually guaranteed to barely

earn back its investment and, the studio executives hoped, simultaneously put an end to their most famous

star's desire to waste his moneymaking potential behind the cameras.

Zack had known all that, but it hadn't stopped him.

Before they went into production, he spent weeks looking at Rachel's and Emily's old films in his screening room at home, and he knew there were moments—brief moments—when Rachel Evans

actually showed some genuine talent. Moments when

Emily's "cuteness," which had faded with her adolescence, was replaced by a charming sweetness that

spoke to the camera because it was genuine.

Zack coaxed and dragged all of that and much more out of his two female leads during the eight weeks they were in production. His own determination to succeed transmitted itself to both of them, his sense of

timing and lighting had helped too, but mostly it was his intuitive knack of knowing how to use Emily and Rachel to their best advantage.

Rachel had been furious over his badgering and the endless numbers of takes he made her do for each scene, but when he showed her the first week's rushes, she'd looked at him with awe in her wide green

eyes and said softly, "Thank you, Zack. For the first time in my life, it actually looks as if I can really, really act."

"And it also looks as if I can really, really direct,"

he'd teased, but he was relieved and he let it show.

Rachel was amazed. "You mean you've had doubts about it? I thought you were totally sure of everything we've done!"

"Actually, I haven't had a peaceful night's sleep since we started shooting," Zack confessed. It was the first time in years he'd dared to admit to anyone that he had any misgivings about his work, but that day was special. He'd just seen proof that he had a talent for directing. Furthermore, that newly discovered talent was going to dramatically brighten the future of a winsome child named Emily McDaniels when the

critics saw her superb performance in
Nightmare.

Zack was so fond of Emily that working with her had

made him long for a child of his own. Watching the closeness and laughter she shared with her father, who stayed on the set to look after her, Zack had suddenly realized he wanted a family.
That
was what was missing from his life—a wife and children to share his successes, to laugh with and strive for.

Rachel and he celebrated that night with a late dinner served by his houseboy. The mood of shared candor that had begun earlier when they'd admitted their private doubts about their individual abilities led

to a relaxed intimacy that, on Zack's part, was as unprecedented as it was therapeutic. Seated in his living

27

room in Pacific Palisades in front of the two-story glass wall that looked out over the ocean, they talked for hours, but not about "the business," which came as a welcome change to Zack, who'd despaired of meeting an actress who could concentrate on anything else. They ended up in his bed where they further

indulged themselves with a night of highly pleasurable and inventive lovemaking. Rachel's passion seemed

genuine rather than a repayment for making her look good on film, and that pleased him, too. In fact, he was thoroughly contented with everything as they lay in his bed—the rushes, Rachel's sensuality, her intelligence, and her wit.

Beside him, she levered herself up on her elbows.

"Zack, what do you really want from life? I mean,
really
want?"

For a moment, he stayed silent, and then perhaps because he was weak from hours of intercourse or perhaps because he was sick of pretending that the life he'd carved for himself was exactly what he wanted, he answered with only a touch of derision,

"Little House on the Prairie."

"What? You mean, you want to star in a movie sequel to 'Little House on the Prairie'?"

"No, I mean I want to
live
it. The house doesn't have to be on the prairie, though. I've been thinking about a ranch in the mountains somewhere."

She burst out laughing. "A ranch! You hate horses and you despise cattle, everyone knows it. Tommy Newton told me so," she said, referring to
Nightmare's
fledgling assistant director. "He worked as a grip

on the first Western you made when you were a kid

—the one where Michelle Pfeiffer played your girlfriend." Smiling, she rubbed her finger across his lips. "What have you got against horses and cattle anyway?"

He gave her finger a playful nip and said, "They don't take direction worth a damn, and they stampede in