Max grinned. “Yeah, well. I guess I can afford it.”
He was back at Batcombe after an extended Christmas vacation and had decided on a whim to pop into the doctor’s office in the village while on one of his many solitary walks.
Having given Henry and Muffy a huge injection of cash with which to buy off the odious Ellis and reclaim the farm, he’d been the guest of honor at Christmas. The last of the trucks and the building equipment had gone by early December, and all that was left to remind them of the whole sorry nightmare was a muddy drive and a couple of big piles of bricks in the corner of the old farmyard.
“I’ll pay you back. I’ll make good every penny,” Henry had assured him, endlessly, although Max had no intention of letting him do any such thing.
“Pay me back for what? For giving you some money that I did nothing to earn and certainly don’t need? Behave yourself.”
“It’s not just some money, Max,” said Muffy, who was busily putting the last of the children’s presents around the Christmas tree. “It’s a bloody fortune.”
“Believe me,” he told them both, “I’m doing this as much for myself as for you. Manor Farm has always been like home to me. I’m as happy to be rid of that bastard as you are.”
Ellis, as it turned out, had proved a lot easier to buy off than they had feared. The golf course was already running behind schedule and way overbudget, and the bad feeling on-site after Gary’s ill-advised lunge at Muffy had caused him no end of trouble with his foreman. Along with most of the men, Ben McIntyre had developed a lot of sympathy for the Arkells and disapproved of the way his boss had maliciously taunted and harassed them for months on end.
“I want a damn sight more than I paid for it,” Gary had told Max gruffly when he first floated the idea of a buyback on the lease. “I’ve lost a small bleedin’ fortune on that place so far, and I’m sure as ’ell not leaving while I’m down on the deal.”
But despite his bravado, he’d agreed on a fair price. Now that the new section of the M40 was no longer being routed via Witney, Batcombe was no longer the ultra-desirable site it once had been. That, combined with the fact that he was clearly never going to get anywhere with Muffy, made him glad to be rid of the place.
Max knew he ought to have felt happy. Happy for Henry and Muff about the farm, happy at his own unexpected good fortune. He had never dreamed that Dark Hearts would make good in such spectacular style. And it wasn’t just the money he had to be thankful for. There was the opening of the play and his new life in New York to look forward to as well.
Plus, he was finally free of the stifling relationship with Freddie that had caused him such torments of guilt for so long. Darling Freddie, she had even sent him a Christmas card from France, full of kindness and without any bitterness or reproach, telling him all about her new life and friends back in Toulouse. Oh, to be so young and resilient, thought Max.
Christmas came and went, and he did his best to smile through it all and join in the festivities. But even the children could see something was wrong. Maddie had asked him one night at supper why he only smiled with his lips. “You’ve switched your eyes off,” as she put it; he’d had to leave the table and bolt upstairs to his room to cry.
Thanking the GP, he walked out of the office and into the cold drizzle of the village.
Perhaps things would improve when he got back to New York?
He trudged down the hill toward the farm, willing himself to believe that work and the nonstop, sleepless energy of the city might jolt him out of his stupor. Only three more days till he went back. Rehearsals started in earnest next week.
As he passed the village school, he took out of his coat pocket the piece of paper that the man had given him, with the name and number of a local psychiatrist and a depression helpline. He let a few stray droplets of rain fall on it, smudging the ink, before wadding it up into a tight ball and dropping it into the bin.
He didn’t need a psychiatrist.
He needed Siena.
It was New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, and Siena and Claire were enjoying a low-key celebratory dinner in Hancock Park, each wanting nothing more than the other’s company.
Hunter and Tiffany had gone to Colorado to see her parents and tell them about the baby. Siena wondered how they were going to take the news. She supposed that even the Wedans would have to bestow their blessing now that Tiffany and Hunter were starting a family together.
The evening had been so incredibly peaceful that both women were startled when the phone rang at eleven o’clock. Siena was in her pajamas, curled up with a book by the fire in the room that Duke used to call the den, while Claire was composing a letter to one of her college girlfriends.
“It’s probably just Aunt Laurie, getting confused with the time zones,” said Siena as her mother walked into the hallway to answer it. “Just say ‘Happy New Year’ now, so she doesn’t call back.”
Claire gave her daughter a reprimanding frown. Poor Laurie. She was harmless, really, although she could be a nuisance at times. She was with friends in New York tonight, so at least she wouldn’t be lonely.
Siena, who went straight back to her book and forgot all about the call, didn’t notice Claire replace the receiver, white-faced, and come back into the room. She started and turned around when she heard her mother speak.
“That was the hospital,” said Claire. “There was no time to call us, apparently. It all happened very quickly.”
“Oh, Mom.” She ran up to her shivering mother and hugged her tightly. “I’m so sorry.”
“So am I, my darling,” said Claire. One heavy, solitary tear rolled down her cheek and splashed down onto Siena’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for so many things.”
Pete’s funeral was small and private. Only Siena, Claire, Tiffany, Hunter, and Laurie attended.
Laurie wept openly and profusely. She and Pete had never been close, but she had never married, and he was the only other person in the world who had shared her childhood memories, as painful as they were.
Siena hadn’t seen her aunt since her early teens, but she was shocked at how badly she’d aged. She was only in her late fifties but looked twenty years older, with her completely gray hair worn in a severe bun that made her look like the granny from the Tweety Pie cartoons.
Claire’s grief was more dignified and controlled. Whatever regrets she may have had about her marriage and her choices, she kept them to herself. She knew that Pete had loved her, and she had loved him. In a strange sort of way, that was enough.
She had devoted so much of her past to the man she now saw buried beside his beloved mother in the old cemetery in Pasadena.
Her future was going to be for herself, and for her daughter.
A week or so after the funeral, a huge, very public memorial service was held at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Most of the luminaries from the movie business, past and present, were there to pay their respects to the man whom few of them had truly known and even fewer liked, but who had been as much a part of Hollywood as the famous sign itself.
Afterward, a number of people had come up to Siena, ostensibly to offer their condolences but really to check out for themselves the damage that, it was now an open secret in industry circles, Randall Stein had inflicted on her legendary looks. She was starting to get exhausted, and had signaled to Hunter that she was just about ready to go home when another gawper tapped her on the back of the shoulder.
“Look,” she said, swinging around. “I’m sorry, but it’s been a really long day for me. I—” She stopped and immediately smiled when she recognized Dierk Muller, her old director, the man who had given her her first break, and about whom she had once been so poisonously ungrateful in print. “Dierk!” She blushed. “What are you doing here? I didn’t know you knew my father.”
“I didn’t,” he said honestly. His clipped German accent was just as she remembered it. “I came here to see you.”
Siena’s face fell. “Look, I’m sorr
y for all those things I said about you, truly I am,” she stammered.
“About me being ‘second tier,’ you mean? Or are we talking about a different article?”
“Oh God,” she blurted out. “I really am sorry. But I’m not sure if I can deal with another telling off today. So if you’ve come here to tell me how selfish I’ve been, you don’t need to bother, I already know. My dad just died, I’m supposed to feel awful about that but I don’t, people keep coming up to me and staring at my face like I’m some kind of fucking circus freak. I just want to go home and die.”
When she looked up, she saw Dierk smiling at her.
“Well, that’s a shame,” he said brightly. “Because I actually came here—and I know it’s probably terribly inappropriate to intrude on your grief . . .” Siena shook her head and smiled at him reassuringly. “But I wanted you to come and do a screen test for my new project. It’s a bit off the wall, but I think the part would be perfect for you. I can messenger the script over to you in the morning, if you like.”
Screen test? She was so amazed, she stood there opening and closing her mouth wordlessly, like a wooden puppet.
“Well?” he said. “Are you interested or not?”
“I thought you hated me,” she mumbled.
“Did you?” Dierk seemed to find that amusing.
“What about my face? My eyes?” she said. “I have almost no vision in my right eye now, you know. I’m officially partially blind.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said, nodding slowly and thoughtfully. “But I don’t see that it matters so terribly much. You can see, can’t you?”
His confidence in her was infectious. If he could see past her scars and her damaged sight, perhaps other people would too, eventually. She could have reached up and kissed him.
“Look, Siena,” he said, taking her by the shoulders to drive his point home, a habit she remembered from torturous hours on The Prodigal Daughter. “I’m not interested in your face. I never was. I didn’t cast you last time because you were some great big model.”
“You didn’t?” She looked up at him hopefully.
“No,” he said, almost angrily. “I cast you because you have talent. Shitloads of it. It’s in your soul, and it’s in your blood. Whatever that psychopath Stein may have told you, you’ve always been more than a pretty face. So.” He released her shoulders and reverted to his usual even Germanic tone. “Do you want the script or not?”
“Yes,” said Siena, and she flashed him the smile that no amount of battering could extinguish. “Yes, I do. I want it. I want the script.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
EIGHT MONTHS LATER . . .
Tiffany ripped the flower out of her hair and threw up her hands in exasperation.
“Lennox, honey,” she moaned, “can you do this for me? I can’t seem to get the stupid thing centered.”
“You know your problem, don’t you?” said her old friend, sashaying over to her in his very expensive, tightly cut suit and deftly pinning the wayward white rose into place. “No feminine skills. No feminine skills at all.”
It was the morning of her wedding day, and she was sitting in Laurie’s old room at Hancock Park in a silk nightdress, practicing her hair for the afternoon.
The wedding wasn’t till three, and she’d hoped to sleep in, but unfortunately little Theo Wedan McMahon had had other ideas and had noisily demanded a feed at five A.M.
Any other day and Hunter would have given him his bottle, but of course it was bad luck to sleep together the night before your wedding, so he’d stayed at their place across town in Venice with Max, who’d flown in from England to act as best man. Not that Tiffany really minded. She enjoyed the early-morning feeds with her son, the feel of his tiny stroking fingers against her breast and the way he gazed directly up at her with his father’s beautiful deep blue eyes.
The baby had been born two months ago, and much to the disgust of her girlfriends, Tiffany had already regained her slim, willowy figure, although now she had the added bonus of truly enormous breasts. Hunter told her she had the face of an angel and the body of a porn star—but then again, he was probably slightly biased.
It was he who had pushed for them to get married so soon after Theo’s arrival. At first Tiffany had been opposed to a wedding. Neither of them was especially religious, and she was frightened that the whole thing would turn into another McMahon media circus.
But now that the day had arrived, she was pleased that she’d let him talk her into it. Claire had hired top-of-the-line security to protect their privacy as much as possible. But anyway, press or no press, she knew she shouldn’t let a few paparazzi stop her from becoming Mrs. Hunter McMahon. She did love him so utterly and completely.
“Hey there, the bride, can I help?”
Siena had snuck in and stood behind Lennox, admiring his handiwork.
She was looking so much better these days, thought Tiffany. Months of Claire’s delicious food had helped her regain her former curvaceous figure. Gone was the deathly pale, gaunt look she’d had when she’d first left Randall. Her hair had grown back to its full length, and this morning it tumbled long and loose down her back in gorgeous Pre-Raphaelite waves. The scar on the right side of her face remained, and her left cheekbone now sat permanently lower than her right. Her face was no longer perfect. But Tiffany, at least, felt that it had gained something for that, a more real, approachable beauty that somehow sat better with the happier, kinder, and more confident person Siena had become.
She had never regained sight in her right eye, although to look at her, you couldn’t tell. And Siena herself had come to terms with her damaged sight with such an easy grace, laughingly displaying a prominent “partially sighted” sticker on her Jeep, that people often forgot she had any disability at all.
This morning she was wearing faded jeans and an old shirt of Hunter’s, tied loosely under her breasts to reveal a smooth expanse of midriff. For the first time in her life, she was properly tanned after a week’s break surfing in Maui, and the brown glow of her skin added to her general aura of well-being.
“I think we’re okay here actually,” said Tiffany. “Lennox has things under control, don’t you, babe?”
“You better believe it,” he mumbled through a mouthful of hairpins.
“I’m so tired, though. Theo was up half the night, bawling his little head off.”
“You should have called me,” said Siena, swiping a tortoiseshell clip from the dressing table and pinning up her own hair in a loose bun. “I was up at four rereading that damn script. Dierk’s such a fucking slave driver. Theo could have kept me company.”
She was four months into filming on Muller’s new movie, and despite her frequent complaints, everyone could tell she was in seventh heaven about it. For all her braggadocio, in the past she had always been deeply insecure about her talent. Now, for the first time, she felt she was being genuinely valued as an actress, not just Randall’s girlfriend, Pete’s daughter, or a chip off the old Duke McMahon block. It was liberating.
“Hunter called earlier, by the way,” she said, a shadow falling across her face that Tiffany couldn’t help but notice. “He said he . . .” She paused. “He and Max were going for a run, so you weren’t to worry if you called and he wasn’t there.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks.”
Tiffany was fully aware what agony it was for Siena to be seeing Max again. Hunter had offered not to invite him if she thought she couldn’t cope with it, but Siena wouldn’t hear of such a thing. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she’d insisted. “It’s your wedding. You can’t possibly not invite Max. How could you even think of having another best man?”
But inside, Tiffany knew it was killing her. She had not inquired again about his life or his supposed girlfriend. Tiffany was not at all sure that Hunter had done the right thing by lying to Siena about that, but she had to admit that she did seem happier and more stable as a result. So perhaps it had been for the best?
As
far as Tiffany knew, Siena hadn’t heard about Max’s film deal and his newfound wealth, nor did she even know the name of his Broadway play. Today was bound to be difficult for her.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, swinging around on her chair, to Lennox’s annoyance, as the rose slipped out of place yet again. “About Max, I mean.”
“Oh, sure,” said Siena unconvincingly, waving her hand casually in an “it’s nothing” gesture. “You know, I’ve known Max since I was a little kid, don’t forget. It’s not such a big deal. And it’s not like we have to spend the whole evening together or anything. All I have to do is say hi to him, right? I mean, come on. How hard can it be?”
A few hours later, Hunter stood by the altar, shaking like a whippet.
Just when nobody thought he could get any handsomer, he’d gone and put on his tux for the wedding and outdone himself once again. He looked so divine, with the perfectly cut dark wool offsetting his olive skin and the brilliant blue of his eyes, it would be a miracle if anyone even noticed the bride.
“She said she wouldn’t do this,” he said in a panic to Max, who was standing beside him in his own, slightly more threadbare version of the formal dress theme. In an ancient morning coat of his father’s that had seen him through scores of rainy English weddings and that, despite its being a good two sizes too small for him, he considered lucky and therefore indispensable, he looked more like Hunter’s impoverished bodyguard than his best man. “She swore to me she wouldn’t make me wait. Where the fuck is she?”
“Mate.” Max laid a comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Just relax. She’s not late. It’s only five to three.” He turned and gave a small smile to a beautiful redheaded girl in the second row, who returned his smile and added a conspiratorial wink of encouragement.
“What’s her name again?” asked Hunter. Max had brought the girl with him from New York, but between all the last-minute organization for the wedding and his general state of heightened anxiety, Hunter had had little time to be sociable.