beautiful home filled with beautiful things. She had more than any young woman had a right to and she knew how lucky she was, she really did.
‘So why am I not happy?’ she whispered into the dark night.
Chapter Three
Connie woke up with a start. There was somebody in her house and that somebody was shouting. Really, really loudly. She groaned and turned over, hiding her head under her duvet. Why oh why had she given her personal trainer a key to her house?
‘Up, up, up!’ he cried as he took the stairs two at a time. ‘Sleepyheads don’t get fit!’
‘I don’t want to get fit. Not this morning,’ she said to herself. ‘I want to sleeeeeeep!’
‘WAKE UP!’ he shouted as he entered the room – all six foot five of him.
‘I’m awake!’ Connie said.
‘I want twenty stomach crunches right now!’
Connie muttered something under her breath.
‘What was that, sweetie? You want to do fifty?’ he said with a naughty grin.
‘Go away, Danny!’ Connie said, sitting up in bed, her red hair tousled and tangled.
‘You don’t pay me to go away. You pay me to get your ass moving! Come on,’ he said, clapping a pair of enormous hands together.
Connie sighed. She loved Danny dearly. He was loyal and sweet and always made her laugh, but there were certain mornings when she wished he didn’t exist.
Ten minutes later and they were in the basement gymnasium and Connie was being put through her paces. It was a rude awakening and she really should have been used to it by now because Danny had been turning up three times a week for the past four years.
‘Your body is your business,’ she would silently chant to herself whilst pounding on the running machine. ‘You have to keep in shape,’ she’d repeat with each stretch on the rowing machine.
But if only her body was her business. The trouble was, everyone seemed to have something to say about her body. Her trainer, her agent, her publicist – to say nothing of the press who regularly snapped her from all angles and then ran headlines such as ‘Podgy Connie Piles on the Pounds’. The unhappy truth was that acting was about more than her ability to inhabit a role and convince an audience that her emotions were real. It was about how she looked both on screen and off and that pressure could sometimes be unbearable.
After ten minutes on the exercise bike, Connie hung her head.
‘Can we go running, Danny? I want to get some fresh air.’ She looked up and caught Danny’s eye. He didn’t look happy with the suggestion.
‘You know what happened last time.’
‘I know.’
‘We weren’t so much running as running away!’
Connie nodded, remembering the hoard of paps that had torn after them with their intrusively long lenses.
‘I wish I could run away,’ Connie said.
‘Aw, don’t say that!’ Danny said, his face wrinkling in dismay.
‘But I do. I want to go somewhere where I can just be me for a while without a telephoto lens poking at me or some journalist tearing me apart.’
‘I don’t think such a place exists,’ Danny said.
‘No,’ Connie said. ‘You’re probably right. But can’t we at least try to pretend?’
‘You want to go to the park?’
Connie nodded.
‘We’ll have to go in my car, then. Everybody knows yours.’
Connie grinned and grabbed her towel.
Danny’s black RV was parked in the driveway. ‘Get in the back and duck down,’ he said.
Connie climbed in the back of his car, buckled up and then laid her head down on the seat. She’d given Danny her remote control to open the wrought iron gates and, as usual, there was a group of paparazzi camping outside.
‘Don’t they have homes to go to?’ Danny asked as he hit the gas.
‘Apparently not,’ Connie said. ‘I thought about inviting them in for dinner one evening. I’d just come back from a charity gala and felt a bit lonely. It’s always odd to be surrounded by hundreds of people one minute and then to come back here and be totally alone.’
‘But you didn’t invite them in, did you?’ Danny asked, eyebrows raised.
‘No, of course not!’
Danny breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Okay, it’s safe to surface.’
Connie got up from the back seat and it was then that she noticed the newspaper on the seat beside her. She picked it up.
‘Oh, don’t bother reading that,’ Danny said a little too quickly. ‘There’s nothing in it.’
‘Danny, you’re a terrible liar,’ she said, opening the paper and staring in horror at the headline that greeted her on page three.
Connie Alone!
Stunning actress, Connie Gordon, one of the world’s most famous movie stars, attended last night’s ‘Cream of the Screen’ awards ceremony on her own. The 29-year-old actress recently broke up with fellow actor, Forrest Greaves, and it would seem that she’s not been lucky in love since …
Accompanying the story was a photograph of Connie from the red carpet but, instead of printing one of the hundreds of pictures they must have taken of Connie’s famous megawatt smile, they’d published one of her frowning. It must have been the millisecond that she’d caught her heels on her dress. There was also a photograph of the heavily-pregnant Candy with the caption: ‘Expecting great things – the woman Forrest Greaves left Connie for’.
‘Goddamn it!’ she cursed and then her eye caught something else. It was a quote from her mother.
‘“Connie is devastated,” Vanessa Gordon told us. “She’d already started planning the wedding with Forrest”.’
‘They’ve interviewed my mother!’ she shouted.
‘I told you not to read it!’ Danny said from the front seat.
‘Why do they do that? Why?’
‘To sell more papers, that’s all.’
Connie sighed. ‘Take me home,’ she said.
‘What? You don’t want to go running?’
She
