Taking the Lead (Secrets of a Rock Star #1) Page 15

  “Sure you won’t,” Dara said with a sigh. “Sakura, we’re done fitting you for now. Just don’t go far.”

  “We’ll stay right here. Axel brought this.” She pointed to the pizza box I’d set on a chair. “Want some?”

  Dara’s expression brightened. “God, yes. Axel, you’re a sweetheart.”

  Apparently the way to a fussy fetish fashion designer’s heart was through melted cheese.

  After we’d eaten, Dara and Diff went off to discuss tech requirements with the venue and Sakura and I talked. I told her all about the party at the Governor’s Mansion. Well, maybe not all, but pretty close to it. I wouldn’t have if she and Ricki weren’t so close.

  “What am I doing wrong? If I come on strong we go straight to D/s sex. If I don’t, she doesn’t even deign to notice I exist.”

  Sakura didn’t have a lot of advice to give me. “Maybe it’s not you,” she said. “Maybe it’s something she’s got to figure out for herself.”

  “Any idea what?”

  “No. But if I had to make a guess, maybe it’s not that easy to be the third generation of kinkster in a family that’s made a tradition of it?”

  “I suppose that’s possible.”

  Dara came and sat in the chair next to Sakura, while Diff sat down next to me. “Hey, Axel, question for you,” Dara said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “Nothing, why? Should I come see the fashion show?”

  She twirled the end of a jet-black lock of hair around her finger. “Well, we’re having a little bit of a problem, which is that our male model got the flu, and the thing we want to do, it takes a while to get into, so we can’t just grab one of the other guys off the runway.”

  “And you look like you’re probably a similar size to him,” Diff added.

  “You’re asking me if I’ll be in your show?”

  “It’ll be the hit of the night,” Diff said excitedly. “We’re the last in the show, and you’ll be like a finale. Plus, you know, your image.”

  “My image?” I asked. I knew what he was talking about: the album cover, the Details spread; this would be one more thing that said “edgy-sexy.” But I wanted to see what he would say.

  “We need a bad boy,” he said, and I swear he added a little flirty pout to it when he said it. “We need … you.”

  I grinned. He knew how to get me. “What do I have to do?”

  “We dress you, and when the time comes you walk,” Dara said. “Come with me and I’ll show you the route.”

  “One condition,” I said. “There’s music while the walking is going on, right? You have to use one of my band’s songs.”

  Sakura burst out laughing. “They already are! Christina made us promise to.”

  “Great! Oh, you know, I kind of promised her I wouldn’t do anything without her approving it first. But I’m sure she’ll agree, don’t you think? This is her organization’s fundraiser, after all.” There, I had just convinced myself my manager would agree. “Okay, it’s a deal. Show me where I’m going.”

  “Excellent. Welcome to the Dare 2B Diff crew,” Dara said. “I’ll show you the stage—”

  “How about you let me measure him first, so I can get started while you do that,” Diff said.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll come back and get him in a minute.”

  Diff hopped up then and asked me to step onto a small riser. “Off with this, rock star,” he said, flicking at my shirt.

  Gay men do this thing around me, trying to see if it’ll freak me out if they flirt.

  It doesn’t. “No problem.” I stripped to the waist and stood there, feeling glad I did that abs workout at Mal’s every day this week. “I can lose the pants, too, if you want, but fair warning, I’m not wearing anything under them.”

  “To quote George Takei, ‘oh my,’ ” Diff said. “Glad to know you’re not shy.”

  “It’s a rock star’s job not to be.” I wasn’t even joking.

  “Ahem.” He hesitated. “Just hitch ’em down a little so I can get your hip measurement.”

  Another woman, one of the models, came in and sat down at the makeup table, getting a nice eyeful of my torso before she turned her attention to touching up her mascara.

  When Diff was done measuring me, he left me and Sakura there for a bit. “You are too much,” Sakura said with a chuckle.

  “Too much what?”

  “I’ve never seen Diff blush like that before.”

  “You don’t think my abs are blush-worthy?” I asked, looking down at them as if to check.

  She whapped me on my bare belly. “Yep. Better put a shirt on before you make anyone faint.”

  The titters of the model sitting behind us made me glad someone knew we were joking.

  RICKI

  Monday morning hit hard. I was nearly late for a crucial meeting, then at the meeting I promised to turn a report in by lunchtime but then my phone would not stop ringing, and when it did colleagues were sticking their heads into my office to talk. The last thing I had time for was sex-life drama.

  But when I saw I had a text from Sakura, I closed my door and called her back immediately.

  “I’m being stupid, I know,” I said before she could start haranguing me, “but somehow knowing that isn’t keeping me from being stupid anyway.”

  “I wasn’t actually calling you about Axel,” she said with a laugh. “I was calling to find out if you’re bringing anyone besides Gwen to the fashion show.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I should give you one heads-up, then. Axel got roped into being a model.”

  “Roped into? Was that a pun?”

  “Or was it completely literal? You’ll find out at the show.”

  “Okay, but didn’t you just say you weren’t calling me about Axel?”

  “I’m only calling you a little bit about him.” That didn’t even make grammatical sense, but I knew what she meant.

  I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the clock. “I’m being stupid, though, aren’t I?”

  “If you mean it makes no sense for you to deny yourself the attention of a hot dude you want, then yes.”

  “But … I shouldn’t tempt myself.”

  “What are you, a nun? Ricki, you deserve all the love and pleasure and sex you can get. So he’s a rock star. So it’ll be tabloid fodder if the news gets out. So what? How about you actually see if you like each other in a non-sexual conversation before you even worry about that? How about you just get together and talk like mature adults?”

  “Does Axel Hawke do ‘mature adult’?”

  “Yes, he does. I know, I know, he’s better at ‘reckless playboy’ but …” There was a pause before she went on. “I have to ask one last time, is he really being a jerk to you? Are you afraid to be alone with him and you’re afraid to tell me?”

  “No.” That was the truth. The actual stupid truth. I couldn’t “blame” this on him being a pushy jerk who didn’t know how to take no for an answer. If anything, Axel Hawke was ridiculously good at picking up hints, and it seemed like the thing necessary to satisfy me was someone who would push just enough to get me past my own reluctance. Which made no sense. “No, it isn’t him. It’s me.”

  “Why don’t you just give him a chance, then? Talk. Find out if there’s something there besides chemistry, besides playboy.”

  “All right.” That sounded so reasonable. “But this week has started off crazy and it’s only going to get crazier. I’ll … I’ll have him over for tea on the weekend.”

  Tea, right. And then we could talk and maybe I could finally get the guts to explain why I couldn’t get into a BDSM relationship with him.

  I had just put my phone down and was waking up the computer from the screensaver when another text came in. This one was from Paul. My stomach clenched as I read the words: I got a tip that tomorrow’s Tinseltown Tab is going to be a concern.

  The Tinseltown Tab, or TTT as it was known, was a weekly
entertainment industry magazine that had once thrived on insider news and business columns. Nowadays, though, it was too often a platform for scandals and exposés. Tomorrow’s?

  The cover design leaked. Let me see if I can get a better shot of it and I’ll e-mail you, he replied. Give me an hour.

  All right, fine. I’d work for an hour. I shut off the phone and forced myself to concentrate on the report. Digging through spreadsheets was not the most thrilling occupation, but I felt it was one way to prove I didn’t get my MBA on my looks. I could number-crunch with the best of them. Analyzing demographic data and correlating it to revenue was an inexact science only because some of the ratings and reporting we had was spotty. I was surprised Blue Star wasn’t tracking audience and purchase data more carefully. Granted, we couldn’t tell if the person who bought a DVD at Target was a man or a woman, but I wondered if Target could. I made a note to myself to look into whether that information could be accessed or purchased.

  Meanwhile, the results I had looked almost skewed in my favor. Movies with more female characters had better return on investment than movies with fewer female characters. Could that really be right? I’d only done the analysis for two years. Would it hold up if I ran the numbers back ten years? Twenty? And would that even matter? The point was that right now women-friendly media seemed to mean earning power, but no one in the film industry wanted to believe it.

  I hit send to e-mail the compiled results to my boss, and then switched my phone on again. I checked my private account to see if Paul had sent anything.

  He had. The subject line read “TTT cover” and there was an attachment. While I waited for the attachment to open I fretted, expecting the worst. Would there be a photo of Axel carrying me off and a snarky headline? Or had someone at the party been enticed into snapping photos to expose the dungeon and the whole existence of the club?

  I was wrong. That wasn’t the worst thing that could be printed. There, in a tiny inset on the front cover, was a wallet-sized portrait photo of my mother and the headline: 20 Years Ago: We Remember Anna. An entire article was about my mother’s death. A “tragic accident” that I’d hoped everyone had forgotten.

  That’s what they’d told me as a child. Your mommy had an accident on the set. I had always accepted that explanation when I was younger. For a while I’d even fantasized that there was a special heaven where all the stars who had died on set or on stage went, and that she was there with Brandon Lee and Selena. The story I was told was that she had broken her neck in the rigging. I imagined she had fallen from a catwalk, I think.

  It wasn’t until I was much older—a rebellious teenager, I suppose—that I started to question the story. On the tenth anniversary of her death I pried at my father with questions. Some of it was curiosity; some of it was me being angry at him for being so absent. What movie were they filming? I asked. He said he didn’t remember. If my mother had given up her career as a model and actress to marry him, what was she doing on a movie set in the first place? She was there to visit him, he said. What were you doing there? He had consulted on the writing of a screenplay, he claimed.

  That was typical of my father. He didn’t write the screenplay, but he tried to make it sound as if his contribution to it had been even more important.

  The result of my questions, which had gotten more and more vehement until I drove him from the table, was that my father drank himself into a stupor. Well, truthfully, he might have done that anyway. The more important result was that after dinner Grandpa Cy asked me to come into his office.

  I knew this was something serious and grown-up if we were going to his office. Gwen and I were never allowed in there as children. And I knew I wasn’t in trouble. If he had planned to scold me, he would have done that right there at the dinner table. Plus he said, “I have some things to tell you.”

  I don’t remember why Gwen wasn’t at dinner that night. So it was me, alone, getting the invitation. I was fourteen and in high school and considered myself as smart as any adult and I craved being treated like one. So it was a big deal to me.

  Grandpa didn’t sit behind his desk. He went to a file cabinet, unlocked it, riffled through a series of folders and then pulled one out. Then he sat in a chair by the fireplace. I had never seen a fire lit in the fireplace: it was imposing Italianate tile with sculpted lion heads and a marble mantel. The whole purpose of it was, I think, to have a mantel to put his awards on. It was meant to look expensive and impressive, and it did.

  He motioned for me to pull the other wing-backed chair closer to him so he could show me the clippings in his lap. But first he said, “Ricki, I want you to know that there are some things that are, for lack of a better term, family secrets. That means secrets from the outside world. The only reason they’ve been kept from you so far is because you weren’t old enough to know them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean like the orgies you have in the basement?”

  He didn’t act shocked that I knew that or that I’d said that. He did frown slightly and ask, “And just how much about these orgies do you know?”

  I acted like the jaded, twenty-first-century teenager I was. “I know they happen. It’s not a big deal, Grandpa. Everybody has sex.”

  “All right. You do understand why it’s a secret, though, don’t you?”

  I recited like the schoolgirl I was: “Because the public’s attitudes about sex are messed up. And it could hurt our social standing and the family’s worth.” I couldn’t help adding, with a sigh, “Like Dad’s drinking isn’t already doing that?”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Cy said. “And you’re exactly right. Your father’s drinking is an embarrassment, not because of what people think about it, but because he’s proving himself to be a disgrace. You want to know more about your mother’s death. That’s natural. I want to be very clear with you, though, Rickanna”—he used my full name—“that there’s a difference between the truth, what people accept as the truth, and what people think or say. And all three can be damaging.”

  That sounded intriguing. Dangerous. And this was to do with my mother’s death?

  He still had not opened the folder. “In some ways it may be a small miracle that the press were not more interested in this than they were. Money and influence can only do so much. Tell me, Rickanna, if you were the police, and a young woman was killed in an accident on a movie set, would you investigate whether there was foul play involved?”

  My heart jumped into my throat. “There was foul play involved?”

  He held up his hand. “Remember what I said about there being a difference between the truth, the truth people can accept, and what people believe? One thing at a time.”

  I forced myself to think like a police detective. “Well, if there was evidence, I suppose.”

  “The coroner ruled the death was an accident, though.”

  “Does that hurt the case?”

  “It certainly doesn’t help it. Let’s back up. It’s possible no one living knows the full truth of what happened. I’ll answer some questions for you. The movie your father was a so-called consultant on was going to be called Hell Bent for Leather.”

  “Like a porn film?” I asked.

  “No no, more of an art film with a … sexy edge.” Cy cleared his throat. “The film never got made. The title of the film never even made it to the press because they were working under a fake title. They were also filming overseas. The Internet wasn’t such a big thing yet in nineteen ninety-five. Newspapers weren’t online yet. The gossip columnists didn’t have e-mail yet. We didn’t even all have cell phones yet. A friend of your father’s was the director. A jaunt to Italy to party and hang around a movie set was just the sort of thing your father liked to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” That certainly sounded like him.

  “So when an accident happened and your mother died, the foreign police looked into it a little, but not very deeply. Your parents weren’t considered famous enough in Italy to catch the interest of the
local tabloid press, and those who got slightly interested never found out what kind of accident it probably really was.”

  “ ‘Really was’?”

  Here he paused and looked around the room, but there was no help for him in explaining things to me. “You know what bondage is?”

  Having already played it off like orgies were no big deal to me, I of course said, “Yeah. Whips and chains, right?”

  “And ropes … and you get the idea.” He cleared his throat again and I got the feeling it wasn’t because he had post-nasal drip. “The thing we kept hidden was that the rigging wasn’t your typical theatrical rigging. It was an art film but the argument ‘it was art’ doesn’t make much of an excuse in the tabloids. Your mother’s accident may have involved, well, simulated rope bondage of some kind.”

  “Oh.” That got through my teenage armor. He stayed quiet while that sank in. I eventually said, in my most mature and grown-up voice, “I can see why you’d want that to be kept quiet.”

  He seemed relieved I understood. “Exactly. Even if everything was completely innocent, just for artistic effect, even if it wasn’t ‘real,’ if that got out, you know there would be all kinds of stories, including completely made up ones, just because people like sensationalizing anything that might have a hint of salaciousness. They don’t think of your mother as a real person with feelings. They’d turn her into a … a joke or an old wives’ tale.”

  He paused there and had to collect himself and I felt my eyes sting with sympathetic tears. My unflappable grandfather was flapped.

  “So that’s one reason we keep the story to just ‘she had an accident with some rigging.’ They couldn’t sensationalize it if people didn’t have such outdated attitudes. But they do, so we have to live with that. The other reason is God forbid somehow your father should get blamed for the accident. That would have really blown it into a scandal. Thankfully, the police didn’t pursue it and neither did anyone in the press.”

  This was all a lot to take in. I looked at the folder. “Okay, if neither of those stories got out, what’s in the folder?”

  “Every clipping that did appear. There aren’t many, but there are a few. If you’d like to read them, I’ll give them to you. But I wanted to answer your questions first.”