I came home. I’m not Elizabeth Taylor. I don’t exactly stop traffic.”
“Not dressed like that, you don’t.” Her mother sighed. “But when you try, when you do something with yourself, then you’re—” She turned to Maxim. “Did you see The Highwayman?”
Maxim nodded. “Yes. It was a foolish movie, but her beauty there, it was amazing. When she shot herself to warn her lover, the audience wept. Everyone. I swear this.”
Karla turned back to Lara. “You see? It’s all in the presentation.” She grabbed her purse off the sofa and began rummaging through it. “I know I have a lipstick somewhere.”
“Mom, please—”
Karla held out a small, elegant gold tube. “Here. It’s a coral, which is really my color, not yours, but it’ll be better than nothing.”
Lara’s jaw tightened, and she felt her heart beating in her ears. “I’m in my own house. Surely it’s safe to be ugly in my own house.”
“It’s not safe to be ugly anywhere,” Karla said firmly, clearly not catching the sarcasm in Lara’s voice. Karla never joked about beauty and grooming. They were a religion with her. “Not when you’re a star. Not when you’re Lara Lynmore.”
“I’m not Lara Lynmore, Mom. I’m Lara Gilbert. And I’m serious. We need to talk.”
“But—” For the first time, Karla’s lovely brown eyes registered an uncomfortable awareness. “Can’t it wait until after the redecorating?”
“No.” Lara gave Maxim a short, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, but it’s important.”
Karla bit her lower lip. “But— Wait, that’s right, I almost forgot, you need to call Sylvia. She has some scripts she wants you to look at. She thinks one of them may be the one.” She shrugged as if to say, oh, well, it can’t be helped. “I promised you’d call as soon as you got back.”
“Please, don’t keep brushing me off.” Lara touched her mother’s arm. Though they hadn’t talked about what came next, surely her mother had sensed something. Surely she knew that Kenny Boggs’s death had been a turning point.
“It is very important,” she repeated slowly.
Karla frowned. For a split second, Lara thought her mother looked frightened, but she blinked, and the illusion was gone. Irrationally, as if she hadn’t heard her daughter, Karla turned her back to Lara. She picked up a card full of fabric swatches and began to flip them with a jerky urgency.
“Nothing’s more important than calling your agent.” She didn’t look up, didn’t turn around. “Honestly, Lara, I’ve told you a million times, if you want to make it to the big time, you’re going to have to—”
“But I don’t.”
“What?”
“I don’t.” Lara hadn’t meant to break it this way, but apparently her mother’s instinctive defenses weren’t going to allow for a cushioned preparation. And the words were desperate, fighting to come out before guilt and fear and pity smothered them in her chest.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mom. I don’t.”
Karla still didn’t turn around, but her hands had frozen on the fabric swatches. When she spoke, her voice sounded tight. “Don’t what?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m quitting. I’m getting out.”
“You’re…you—”
The fabric fell to the carpet with a ruffling flutter of color. And then, with a soft exhale of the breath she must have been holding far too long, maybe for eight whole weeks, Karla Gilbert slid to the floor, too.
Maxim jumped, trying in vain to catch her, assuming the faint was genuine. The Twizzler lamp dropped from his hands. It must have been a delicate glass because, even though the carpet was soft and expensive, the lamp shattered into a hundred red pieces, which sprayed out like jagged icicles of blood.
The symbolism was a little heavy, Lara thought numbly. The best directors would eliminate it, judging it over the top.
But whatever it lacked in subtlety it made up for in drama. It definitely got its message across.
Lara Lynmore, the world’s most selfish, ungrateful daughter, had just broken her mother’s heart.
“SO, BRYCE, TELL US. What’s it like living in the haunted frat house?”
Bryce looked over at Claire McClintock, the dark-haired, sad-eyed beauty who had married his brother, Kieran. She was pregnant, very pregnant. All through dinner Kieran had fussed over her as if she were made of moonbeams.
“It’s okay,” Bryce said with a neutral smile. “A little raw, but it has the virtue of being free and unoccupied.” Abandoned for at least three years, the frat house had been part of his inheritance. He had laughed when he heard about it. Old Anderson McClintock really had owned the entire damn town, hadn’t he?
Bryce looked around the lovely blue dining room. “It’s definitely not as elegant as this place.”
He didn’t add that he was surprised to find the McClintock mansion decorated in such good taste. The last time he’d been here, the infamous Cindy, his father’s fifth and final wife, had been in charge of it for five-and-a-half whole months, which apparently had been enough to do some serious damage in the vulgarity department. Bryce wondered who was responsible for the new restraint. Had old Anderson tossed out Cindy’s excesses when he tossed out Cindy herself? Or was this the gentle Claire’s doing?
Bryce had no way of finding out, of course. He’d been gone for fourteen years. A lot of things happened in that much time. One of the things that had happened was Bryce had lost his right to ask questions.
In fact, even Kieran’s simple dinner invitation had come as a pretty serious shock. Back when they were kids, and Bryce had been forced by court order to spend the summers in Heyday, the two boys had hardly been close.
Bryce was four years older, and about a hundred years cockier. He had hated old Anderson, who had divorced Bryce’s mom to marry Kieran’s mother, and he hadn’t bothered to hide it.
He hadn’t hated Kieran, exactly. He’d actually felt kind of sorry for the kid, who had to live with Anderson all year round, and, after his own mother died, endure the string of bimbo wives, too. However, in Bryce’s older, wiser, estimation, Kieran had been an ass-kissing little dork. As he recalled, Bryce had made the poor kid’s summers pretty rocky.
And to top it off, old Anderson had died early this year, and in the will, Bryce, who by all rights should have been disinherited like the black sheep he was, had been left a full third of the McClintock estate.
Bryce could imagine how resentful Kieran must have been when he heard that news. The Sinner, who never went within a hundred miles of Heyday, inheriting equally with the Saint, who had stuck to the old man like a lapdog. Where was the justice in that?
But to Bryce’s surprise, when he arrived in Heyday a few days ago, after two months in the Bahamas trying to forget the whole Lara Lynmore/Kenny Boggs fiasco,
