opened the front door to him half an hour ago in nothing but a pair of Trashy Lingerie panties. Half an hour ago, Kevin was worried he might come before he got his pants off. Now, after being ordered into countless different positions, with Kendall berating him for his poor performance like a particularly ticked-off drill sergeant, all Kevin wanted was to be allowed to go home. That, and for Kendall Bryce not to tell his employer, Jack Messenger, what had happened this evening.
The worst part was that Jack had warned him, in so many words: ‘She’ll try anything in the book to get you off her case. If she wants drugs or a drink she’ll stop at nothing to get them. She’ll probably offer to sleep with you, and let me tell you, Mr Dacre, Kendall’s offers can be tough to refuse.’
‘I’ve worked with Charlie Sheen, Mr Messenger,’ Kevin had replied confidently. ‘If I can keep him clean, I’m pretty confident I can handle Kendall.’
Now Kevin Dacre knew better. Nobody ‘handled’ Kendall Bryce. She was a force of nature, as impossible to resist as a twister or a riptide. And she had him by the balls, literally as well as metaphorically. If Messenger heard about this – if anyone heard about it – Kevin’s career was finished.
At last, with a wild moan and arch of her back, Kendall climaxed. Kevin Dacre whimpered with relief. Easing himself out of her, he slumped down on the bed, exhausted.
‘I’ll order some pizza,’ Kendall announced cheerfully. ‘We can wash it down with a couple of bottles of Jack’s Mouton Rothschild, and then we can go again.’
Again? Kevin started hyperventilating. ‘Kendall, come on. This was fun but we both know it shouldn’t have happened. And we also both know I can’t let you drink.’
Kendall laughed loudly. ‘Let me? I like that. That’s a good one. Besides, it was coke I went to rehab for. I’m not an alcoholic.’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Kevin. ‘You’re an addict and you’re in recovery. No substances means no substances. You know that.’
Kendall’s eyes narrowed. ‘All I know is that you’re gonna break into the main house and raid Jack’s wine closet for me. Because if you don’t, you know I’m gonna pick up the phone and tell him about the great sex we just had.’
‘I thought you said the sex was terrible?’
Kendall looked at him pityingly ‘It was terrible, Kevin. I was trying to be kind. But you know what they say: practice makes perfect. Now, how about that drink?’
Kendall Bryce had first come to prominence in her teens as the breakout star of reality show, Hollywood High. Small but perfectly formed, her body had the exaggerated, pneumatic curves of a porn star. Her waist was waspishly narrow, her breasts cartoonish in both their size and gravity-defying perkiness, her butt was as high and tight as a male baller-ina’s. But it was Kendall’s face, a perfectly defined set of smooth planes illuminated by neon green cat’s eyes, as well as her attitude, that ensured her swift rise to fame. Kendall Bryce was brattish – certainly – and spoiled; Hollywood High was a show about movie-industry kids, so those two attributes were prerequisites. But Kendall could also be devastatingly funny. Her pithy put-downs of contemporaries rapidly became the stuff of legend and she was embraced as a sort of young, insanely hot Joan Rivers.
What Hollywood High failed to show was Kendall Bryce’s deep, searing insecurity, and the terrible loneliness of her home life. Kendall’s father was the producer Vernon Bryce. He divorced her mother when Kendall was twelve, and since then had laid eyes on his eldest daughter a grand total of three times. Two of those occasions were court appearances, for DUI and cocaine possession respectively. The third was for Kendall’s twenty-first birthday, when Vernon showed up for the cameras with a ribbon-wrapped pink Maserati complete with Ken 1 number plates, but was too busy to stay for dinner, insisting he had to rush back to his younger kids, Donny and Aiden, the twin boys he had with his new wife and whom he unashamedly adored.
Kendall’s mum Lorna was a sweet, pleasant woman, but she knew nothing about her daughter’s wild lifestyle, or if she did she was too weak to do anything about it. The truth was, Lorna Bryce was afraid of Kendall. Her younger children, Holly and Joe, were both so much easier to handle. They hadn’t been affected by Vernon’s abandonment the way that Kendall had. That was the problem. From babyhood, Kendall Bryce had always been a daddy’s girl.
Hiding her pain behind the twin masks of her extraordinary looks and her razor-sharp tongue, Kendall was determined to prove her worth to the father who had dumped her, and to the rest of the world. TV success was a start. But she wanted more than that. She wanted lasting, global superstardom. She wanted to walk on stage in packed stadiums all around the globe and hear people chanting her name.
No one was more surprised than Jack Messenger to discover that Kendall Bryce could sing. Her agent had practically laid siege to Jester’s LA office on Beverly Glen until Jack agreed to see her. Reality stars releasing records was really not Jester’s thing. Plus the Bryce girl had only just got out of jail for cocaine possession. Too much trouble by half. But Kendall’s agent was so persistent that Jack relented one Friday afternoon, and gave the kid five minutes. There was an upright piano in Jack’s office. He’d been an exceptional pianist in his youth and still found that playing calmed his nerves and cleared his head. He sat down and, rather meanly, started playing Christina Aguilera’s Genie in a Bottle, an astonishingly difficult song for an untrained vocalist. Kendall Bryce didn’t miss a beat. She opened her mouth and belted it out, pitch perfect and with the power and depth of a seasoned Gospel singer. Her voice ricocheted around Jack’s office like a sonic boom. After fifteen years in the music business it took a lot to surprise Jack Messenger. But Kendall Bryce had done it, in about two and a half bars.
That meeting was two years ago now. Since then, under Jester’s management, Kendall Bryce had gone on to become one of the best-known and biggest-selling female artists in America. But she had also had to submit her entire life to Jack Messenger’s control. He’d refused to sign her unless she quit cocaine and alcohol cold turkey, and underwent regular drug testing. She had to join a gym, stop going to nightclubs unless someone from Jester accompanied her, and agree to make no comments to the press whatsoever, unless Jack had personally authorized them. The one and only time she was caught breaking one of these rules (she was photographed drunk on an unauthorized trip to the Chateau Marmont) Jack had forced her to give up the lease on her apartment and move into his guesthouse in Brentwood until her second album was in the can. Needless to say, Kendall had bucked and chafed against such draconian restraints. But she put up with them for two reasons.
One was that she knew Jack Messenger could not only get her to the top but keep her there.
The other was that she was madly, passionately and utterly hopelessly in love with him.
Jack was everything that Kendall’s own father was not: decent, honest, loyal, kind and strict. He was tough on her because he cared, and though she fought against him tooth and nail, and was often so infuriated with him she wanted to cry or hit him or both, deep down she felt safe for the first time since she was eleven. Jack was also the first man who, maddeningly, appeared to be totally immune to Kendall’s celebrated physical charms. Since the age of fifteen, Kendall Bryce had been used to enslaving any and all men to her will – boys at school, teachers, producers on her show. In Jack Messenger, for the first time, she encountered indifference. Her initial reaction was to assume that he was either grieving too hard for his dead wife, or secretly gay. But, especially since moving onto his property, she’d been forced to abandon both these theories. Jack had a girlfriend, Elizabeth, an attractive, professional woman in her thirties who was about as far removed from Kendall as it was possible to be: discreet, together, undemanding. In short, a grown-up. Jack was never pictured
