Not Wanted in Hollywood
Read Not Wanted in Hollywood Online
Authors: Leonie Gant
Copyright ©2015 Leonie Gant
All Rights Reserved
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This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter One
I felt the bed dip as I was in that pleasant
dreamlike state and felt lips brush against my forehead. I smiled
and heard an answering groan.
“I’ve got to go Trudie.”
I opened my eyes and looked into my idea of
heaven. Detective Jake Griffin and I had been together for four
blissful months, seeing each other whenever our busy careers
allowed us.
“
I’ll see you
tonight,” he said hopefully.
I shook my head regretfully. “I’ve got a late
one tonight. Alistair is still shooting and he wants me there.”
Griffin
looked annoyed. He didn’t like my latest client. I work for an
agency which specializes in placing staff with difficult employers.
You know, the kind of employers who rant at their staff because
their latte is not quite the right temperature. These people do not
keep staff for very long, because most people have a level at which
they won’t handle that kind of abuse. My specialty is keeping my
clients from self-destructing in front of the world.
My latest
client was Alistair Hopkins, a pretentious docu
mentary filmmaker who was considered impossible to work
with. A former employee had actually created a website which
documented the number of staff he went through and the reasons they
had quit. Reasons for quitting had included the cameraman who had
got himself lost in the African desert for three days. When he was
finally found after an exhaustive search, barely clinging to life,
Alistair screamed at him for not taking any footage of his fight
for survival. Then there was the personal assistant who had fainted
during one shoot from exhaustion after working for forty hours
straight with very little food. She had taken out a restraining
order against him. I had been called in by his manager, as a
temporary measure when disgruntled former employees started
targeting him both online and in real life. So far I’d worked for
him for a month and managed not to get damaged in any way. Alistair
said that I was the most efficient employee he had ever had. Of
course the fact he hadn’t almost killed me helped me to stay on his
good side.
“Be careful, and don’t let him talk you into
doing anything too crazy.”
“
I won’t,” I
smiled as I came up on my knees on the side of the bed. I, of
course, was neglecting to tell him that Alistair’s latest
documentary had been taking me into the seedy side of strip clubs
for the last two weeks, which is where I would be spending this
evening instead of with him.
He leaned down and kissed me gently. I put my
hands on his upper arms and pulled him towards me as I took the
kiss deeper. Griffin pulled away with a groan.
“
Do you know
how unfair it is that you do that to me just before I go to
work?”
“Just want you to remember what’s waiting for
you,” I grinned.
“Believe me I know and I think about it far
too much at work already, call me if you get home early and I’ll
come around.”
“
I will,” I
settled back in the bed. “Take care, I’ll see you
later.”
A look of hurt flashed through Griffin’s
green eyes but was covered up so fast I couldn’t swear I’d seen
it.
“
Bye,” he
clipped out and headed for the door.
I let out the breath I’d been holding when I
heard the front door close.
There was the
one dark spot in our relationship. A couple of months ago, in a
moment of high emotion I had told Griffin that I loved him. What
can I say? I did love him. He was everything that I had ever wanted
and I had fallen hard. I’m not one to hide my feelings and in my
defense he had just made me very happy, twice. Unfortunately he
didn’t exactly reply in a way that showed he reciprocated those
feelings. I understood. Despite my thinking he was pretty much
perfect, emotionally the man was a little stunted. His mother had
abandoned him and his dad when Griffin was just a baby. His father,
Lee, had brought him up. Their relationship was interesting. When I
was alone with him, Griffin could talk about anything. I would
spend time with his father, Lee, and you could not shut the guy up.
I put both of them in the same room and you could hear the crickets
chirping. They weren’t exactly an emotionally available family.
Understanding that and realizing the cat was out of the bag, I
continued for a while in the same vein. I didn’t say it all the
time, but I didn’t choke it back either, especially when he was
going to work. He was in the LAPD, and that was a dangerous job. My
parents had brought me up to live life well and always tell the
people you love that you love them, because you never know what the
future could bring. After about a month of this though, I realized
that I was throwing it out there and he hadn’t once sent it back.
My pride started taking a battering and I started wondering if
maybe I was in this alone. I stopped saying it, not because I
wanted to hurt him, just because I got tired of showing my heart
and having it ignored. Whenever I felt it now I choked it off and
that had created a little distance in the relationship. I didn’t
know how to deal with it. I’d kind of made a mess of things and I
didn’t know how to fix it. Every now and again I’d see a little
hurt expression flash over Griffin’s face and I felt terrible, but
I was stuck. Despite wanting to be with him I was taking back to
back jobs with long hours, trying to avoid the emotional quagmire I
seemed to have got myself into the middle of. I sighed as I got
ready for the day.
That morning
I had promised Griffin’s father that I would take him to pick up
his car from the mechanic. When I got to his house, the front door
was unlocked. Here was another difference between Griffin and I. He
would knock on the door and wait for his father to open it. Lee had
told me that if he wanted to keep me out he would lock the door. As
far as I was concerned, that was a perfectly acceptable way for
family to be around each other, so I just walked right on in. Some
days I thought I had a better relationship with Lee than his own
son did.
“
I hope
you’re up old man. I’ve got to go to work,” I yelled out as I
walked down the hallway. Seeing Lee in the kitchen I was surprised
at the strained look on his face. I was more surprised that he
wasn’t alone. This was probably one of the reasons why Griffin
didn’t just walk into his dad’s house.
“
Sorry,” I
apologized. “I probably should have knocked.”
“
That’s fine
sweetheart,” Lee said gently.
The woman sitting at Lee’s kitchen table
turned around and looked up at me. My breath caught sharply. I knew
those eyes. An hour ago those eyes had woken me up.
“
This is
Jake’s mother,” Lee said softly. “Angela, this is Trudie, Jake’s
girlfriend.”
So this was the heartless woman who walked
out on her baby boy and left him unable to tell me he loved me.
See, I’m not judgmental at all.
“
So you’re
seeing my son.” Angela raked her eyes up to the minimal effort pony
tail and down to my flat heeled sensible shoes, taking in the high
necked shirt and shapeless pants I was wearing. I could see I
hadn’t made a favorable first impression. Hey, I was with her. Even
I normally didn’t dress like this, but tonight I was working with a
filmmaker in a strip club. I needed to be looking as little like
the ladies on stage as I could. If that meant I looked like an
escapee from an Amish farm, then that was the way I was going.
Angela on the other hand had the kind of perfect beauty that only
came from great genetics and expensive upkeep.
“
Angela is
here because she wants to see Jake,” Lee said shortly.
Oh, that was
not going to work out well. Griffin did not deal well with mothers.
He never spoke about the fact that he had a mother. My petite mom
who lived on the other side of the world, scared him to death and
we are talking about a big burly cop. He refused to answer my phone
just in case it was my mother calling. He accidentally answered it
once and Mom went into her mama bear mode. I think it may have
scarred him for life. She isn’t all that fond of him because she
thinks he puts me in dangerous situations and that he blackmailed
me with deportation back to Australia once. That second part is
true which makes it worse. Unfortunately I get myself into
dangerous situations. I could see Lee was unhappy with the
situation as well.
I plastered on one of my plastic smiles that
I use for work, when some overindulged celebrity is screaming at me
for not reading their mind. “That’s nice.”
Lee’s features tightened and Angela just
stared as if there was something wrong with me.
“
I’ll come
back when we can talk,” Angela said shortly and got up and
left.
When the
front door slammed, both Lee and I winced.
“
Griffin’s
not going to take this well,” I warned Lee. “Why does she want to
see him now?”
“
I have no
idea.” Lee shook his head and started clearing the table of mugs. I
put a hand on his arm.
“
Are you
holding up okay?” I asked gently.
Lee slumped in a chair. “She walked out on me
thirty years ago, walked out on us. When I saw her at the door I
had trouble breathing. I don’t understand. I thought I was over it
ages ago.”
“
You loved
her once and she betrayed and deserted you.”
“
Don’t hold
back,” Lee said wryly.
“
You have to
remember that because if you don’t, your memory will start
forgetting the bad things she did and you’ll only remember the good
times.”
Lee looked at
me with surprise etched on his face.
“You
are the last person in this world that I would think would be
against love.”
“
I’m not
against love,” I said. “I’m against having your heart ripped out
and stomped on while somebody whistles a merry tune.”
“You really have an interesting way of
looking at the world.” Lee smiled fondly at me.
“You ready to go?” I asked.
“You going to tell me why you look like
you’re heading for a convent?”
“Not today.”
I was fully aware that if I told Lee about
the strip club assignment, Griffin would know in less than thirty
seconds. If I could help it, that was not going to happen.
Several hours
later I was reminded why I hadn’t told Griffin about my working at
this particular bar. When I had started working with Alastair at
‘Hammy’s Gentleman’s Club’ I had made the mistake of wearing my
normal personal assistant attire. Unfortunately
, some of the more regular clientele had assumed that I was
one of the new girls going for a sexy librarian look, and that I
would start the stripping at any moment if they waved enough cash
in my general direction. Since then, every day my dress had become
more and more conservative, until today’s fine effort, which I
personally thought should make me seem completely sexless to the
men that frequented this club. Unfortunately, as usual, it seemed
that I had severely underestimated a horny man’s capacity to spot a
pair of breasts, no matter how well hidden they were. Waiting at
the bar I had been cornered by one of the customers and as usual my
boss was nowhere to be seen. This shoot was seen as more of an
undercover documentary. The crew consisted of Alistair, myself and
a cameraman who seemed to end up in the stripper’s dressing room on
a regular basis. Most of the cameras were stationary and hidden
around the club. Alistair was famous for what he termed his covert
style filmmaking. To my way of thinking, this was fine when you
were dealing with crooked corporations and corrupt politicians. I
was having trouble with the reasoning for using it in a strip club.
I would have thought that the people who frequented places like
this would have an expectation of privacy. But no, Alastair was
always trying to push the envelope with his work. He was seen as a
radical filmmaker, willing to tackle subject matter that the rest
of the industry found slightly distasteful. The critics called him
brilliant. I had my own words to describe the man.