Grabbing a tissue from the box by the bed, he cleaned himself up and reached for the phone. It was midnight in LA, but the person he was calling was in Europe and would have been up for at least two hours. They picked up immediately. Just hearing their voice on the line gave Harry a thrill far stronger than the orgasm he’d just finished.
‘It’s me. Harry. Listen, I need to talk to you. Uh-uh, no, in person. How soon can you be on a plane?’
He hung up two minutes later, suffused with a feeling he hadn’t experienced in years: contentment. Dorian Rasmirez was shooting his Wuthering Heights remake somewhere in England. Everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he’d paid way over the odds for the Hudson kid and been left so broke he’d been forced to cast Sabrina Leon as his female lead. The details of the production itself were shrouded in secrecy. Some saw this as a deliberate attempt by Dorian to create mystique, to get everybody talking about his big ‘comeback’ movie. But Harry Greene saw it differently
He’s hiding from me, he thought, smugly. He’s running scared. And so he should be.
Harry Greene had a secret of his own.
He was about to blow Dorian Rasmirez out of the water.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sabrina awoke gripped with fear. A familiar fear: her bedroom door was rattling. It was him, Graham Cooper, the foster ‘brother’ who’d abused her as a kid back in Fresno, coming to ‘cuddle’ her, as he called it. Already she could smell the foul excitement on Graham’s breath, see his sallow, twenty-year-old cheeks flushing as he slipped under her bedclothes, telling her not to make a fuss, that he loved her, that she was lucky to have a roof over her head.
‘No!’ She sat up in bed, her heart thudding against her ribcage like a trapped animal. ‘Get out!’
‘Come on, Sabrina. It’s almost five. If you don’t get to wardrobe on time, Dorian’s gonna skin both of us alive.’
It took a few seconds for Viorel’s gravelly English voice to register. He wasn’t Graham Cooper. This wasn’t her childhood bedroom in Fresno. And she wasn’t a helpless, twelve-year-old nobody any more. She was Sabrina Leon, movie star, on the set of her latest film. And oh my god she was already late!
Pushing back the covers with a groan, Sabrina got up and walked to the window, opening the curtains. It was still dark outside, with only the faintest shards of dawn light pushing their way tentatively over the horizon. Sabrina’s room looked out over parkland at the rear of the house. In the half-light, she saw a family of deer sleepily getting to their feet beneath a sheltering oak, brushing against one another in the early morning mist. It looks so peaceful, Sabrina thought, with a pang. Like many people addicted to the thrills of city life, she wished she had the ability to switch off and enjoy nature without feeling so anxious all the time, as if life were somehow passing her by, leaving her behind in a trail of dust. I guess if you grew up somewhere like this, you’d learn how to do it. How to be at peace.
Tish Crewe had grown up here, of course. Maybe that was why she looked so annoyingly hearty? The girl positively radiated wholesome, rural goodness. Their paths had crossed for only a matter of minutes yesterday, but Sabrina had already taken a strong dislike to Loxley Hall’s mistress. Tish’s accent was so cut-glass it couldn’t possibly be genuine; besides which, Sabrina made it a rule never to trust a woman who didn’t wear any make-up. Look at me, they seemed to be saying, I’m so artless. Of course, Rasmirez had lapped it up. Sabrina could see at a glance how enamoured her director was of Tish Crewe, with her doe eyes and her cute kid and her whole motherly schtick. It was enough to make you want to throw up.
Dorian probably thinks she’s a lady. Unlike me.
Viorel Hudson seemed to like the girl too. Or maybe it was just the child he was interested in? Last night, when he’d shown Sabrina to her room, he’d been waxing lyrical about little Abel – how funny he was, and how smart. Sabrina’s own maternal instinct had been surgically removed years ago, along with her tonsils, but it was sexy to see a man being fatherly. At least, it was sexy when Viorel did it.
‘Are you up?’ Right on cue he stuck his head round the door. He looked revoltingly refreshed at such an early hour.
Sabrina stretched her arms into a long, cat-like yawn. ‘I’m up, I’m up,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll see you down there.’
The Wuthering Heights’ wardrobe and make-up departments consisted of two basic mobile-home-style trailers parked next to Loxley’s stable blocks. Along with the crew’s accommodation, catering vans, an editing suite and a temporary structure housing bathroom and laundry facilities, they made up what was known as the ‘Set Village’ – the hub of the production. Viorel was already in costume by the time Sabrina walked in. In a pair of high-waisted breeches, riding boots and a ruffled shirt, torn open at the chest, he ought to have looked quintessentially English. In fact, thanks to his dark colouring and three-day growth of beard, he looked more like a pirate who’d lost his cutlass.
Sabrina, by contrast, looked a thousand per cent LA in Victoria’s Secret pink pyjamas, a Juicy Couture silk puffa jacket and a pair of Ugg boots, her entire face hidden by a YSL leopard-print scarf. All that was visible above it were her eyes, puffy with tiredness and narrowed resentfully at the fact they were expected to be open at such an ungodly hour.
Viorel looked her up and down. ‘Well, well. If it isn’t Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Sabrina, but Vio could see the smile in her eyes. ‘Thanks for waking me. I think I slept through, like, six alarms.’
‘My pleasure.’ After all her tantrums and standoffishness in LA, he was delighted that Sabrina seemed to have decided to cease hostilities between them. Dorian had given her such a hard time at the read-through, and again yesterday, sending her bodyguards packing, she probably needed an ally. Given that they’d be spending the next three months of their lives together, day in, day out, both here and in Romania; and that the only other female company available was the brain-dead Lizzie Bayer or the lovely-but-off-limits Tish Crewe, this was a relief.
‘Excuse me, darling.’ Maureen, the fat, motherly wardrobe mistress shooed Viorel out of the way. From the back of the trailer she dragged out a wooden folding screen.
‘You can undress behind here,’ she told Sabrina. ‘Give you a bit of privacy.’
Sabrina’s outfit, an intricate blue-and-yellow embroidered crinoline with hooped skirts and multiple lace petticoats, had been laid across two chairs next to where Viorel was standing. It was huge, taking up a good half of the available space in the trailer.
‘That’s OK,’ said Sabrina, ‘I don’t need it. Just bring the dress over here and I’ll step into it.’ Viorel watched as Sabrina slipped off her coat, boots and pyjamas. In seconds she was standing in front of him in nothing but a minuscule pair of thong panties. Her hands covered her nipples, but everything else was visible – the large, firm, perfectly rounded breasts, the boyish bottom without a hint of cellulite that was as tanned and smooth as the rest of her, the perfectly flat stomach defined, Viorel suspected, by genetics rather than hours of crunches in a gym. She’s magnificent, he thought, and gloriously unselfconscious. Although who wouldn’t be, with a body like that?
In fact, Sabrina was entirely conscious of what she was doing, and delighted by the effect it seemed to be having on her co-star. She’d resented Viorel when they first met in LA, because he was getting five and a half million dollars for this movie and she was getting nothing, and because she feared he’d steal her attention, and perhaps even make a play for sole top billing on the credits. Certainly, he was ambitious enough to try it – he’s almost as hungry as I am – and might even get away with it. Ed Steiner had the spine of an amoeba when it came to defending her interests, and Rasmirez had plainly already decided which of his two lead actors he favoured.
But seeing him again yesterday, Sabrina decided she’d changed her mind about Viorel Hudson. Not only was he fully fuckable, but he seemed genuinely eager to be friends. He hadn’t needed to wake her up t
his morning. He could have let her sleep in and face Rasmirez’s legendary temper, but he didn’t. At this point in her life, Sabrina needed all the friends she could get. Plus, she thought happily, if he likes me now, just think how much more he’s going to like me once I take him to bed. She was going to need something to do in this sleepy little corner of England, especially now that Dorian had confiscated Enrique.
‘Here you are.’ Maureen and her assistant carried the enormous dress over to Sabrina, rolling down the bodice so that Sabrina could step into the hooped skirt. ‘Hop in there before you catch hypothermia.’
Sabrina did as she was asked. Reaching down to pull up the dress, she let go of her breasts, deliberately giving Viorel a full frontal view. ‘Oops.’ She looked him in the eye and smiled.
Vio smiled back. Careful, he thought. She’s delicious, but she’s trouble.
‘I’ll go and get us some coffee.’
‘And a bagel for me,’ said Sabrina, not breaking eye contact. ‘I’m staaaaarving.’
So am I, thought Viorel, his dick hardening at an alarming rate beneath his skintight breeches.
Make-up took forever. Even though it was only the two of them in this morning’s scene, and neither of them needed to be aged or scarred or otherwise transformed, the process seemed to drag on and on.
‘You want to run through it?’ asked Vio, closing his eyes as yet another shade of base was applied to his lids. ‘We may as well do a line check while we’re stuck here.’
Sabrina, who was still fruitlessly trying to bring her BlackBerry Pearl to life, was about to say ‘no’. They were very different actors. Viorel seemed to want constant reassurance and ad hoc rehearsals, whereas she preferred the adrenaline rush of jumping blind into the first take. But, in the interests of their newfound friendship, she relented.
‘OK,’ she said, wincing as her hair was pinned tightly into her bonnet. ‘Hit me.’
As they ran through the scene, Vio felt the tension he’d been carrying around since the read-through drain out of him like pus from a lanced boil. Sabrina had shown promise at the read-through, but she’d been flustered, no doubt by Dorian’s bullying, and the dynamic between the two of them had never fully gelled. This was Wuthering Heights. The love–hate relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff was not just the most important part of the movie. It was the movie. Viorel knew that Sabrina’s performance could make or break his own, and that her reputation for making scenes difficult for her opposing actors was horrific. So it was wonderful, miraculous to hear how far she’d come since that day in LA, how much she had to give him. Her voice, her attitude, that precarious combination of arrogance and naiveté – it was Brontë’s Cathy to a tee. Vio responded in kind, finding a depth to his Heathcliff that he knew he hadn’t reached before, that he knew he couldn’t reach without Sabrina to help him.
Sabrina was happy too, aware of the chemistry between them. So much rested on this job, she’d found it hard to think of it as anything other than that: a job, an ordeal that had to be gone through in order for her to win her life back. Now, for the first time in a long time, she remembered what it was she loved about acting. The escape. The release. The passion.
The door to the trailer flew open. Dorian Rasmirez loomed in the doorway with a face like fury, waving the morning copy of The Sun like a weapon.
‘What the fuck do you think you are playing at?’ he roared at Sabrina, so loudly she felt as if her hair were being blown back, the way it did when baddies yelled in a cartoon. Her pulse raced unpleasantly as the fear welled up within her, but outwardly she managed to keep her cool.
‘I take it that’s a rhetorical question?’
‘You fucking idiot,’ said Dorian, opening the paper to page four and shaking it in front of Sabrina’s nose. When she read the headline, her stomach lurched.
‘RACE ROW ACTRESS TELLS BRITAIN’S BLACKS TO F*** OFF.’
Beneath the bold, black lettering they’d run a picture of her at Heathrow yesterday looking glamorous and starry, walking beside a mountain of Louis Vuitton luggage. Her face was set in a hard, uncompromising attitude that Sabrina remembered as fear, but that in print looked horribly like arrogance.
‘Read it,’ commanded Dorian. ‘Read it out loud.’
Sabrina took a deep breath. ‘Controversial Hollywood actress Sabrina Leon, the woman at the centre of a bitter Hollywood dispute after branding African American director Tarik Tyler a “slave driver”, yesterday astonished Britons by making a second ugly slur, this time against our own black community. When asked by our reporter if she had any message for black people in Britain who may have been offended by her original remarks, Miss Leon, who is in this country to film a remake of the British classic Wuthering Heights, replied that they could “f*** off”.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Sabrina, lowering the paper. ‘I never said that.’ There was a silence you could have cut with a knife. Then she added, ‘I mean, I did tell the guy to fuck off. The reporter.’
‘Jesus.’ Dorian shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why? Why did you say anything?’
‘Because he was crowding me!’ said Sabrina. ‘The whole pack of them. It was intimidating.’ She looked to Viorel for support. ‘You know what it’s like, right? It’s frightening.’
Vio nodded, but Dorian was having none of it.
‘Read the copy, Sabrina. They’ve got quotes from a whole bunch of witnesses, all of whom apparently heard you insult the entire black population of this country.’
‘Well, the witnesses are lying!’ Sabrina shot back. ‘I was talking about him, the reporter. I told him to fuck off, not anybody else. Why would I? You think I want to reopen this can of worms? You know, if you hadn’t been so damn high-handed and sent them away, you could have asked my bodyguards. They were there. They’ll tell you.’
‘Oh, great,’ snarled Dorian. ‘And are they gonna tell the ten million people who read this over breakfast this morning?’ He snatched the paper back from her. ‘All you had to do was keep your mouth shut.’ Turning on his heel, he stormed back out, slamming the trailer door behind him so loudly that everyone jumped.
For a moment, Sabrina just stood there, stock-still. Vio saw the tears in her eyes, saw the struggle as she fought to contain them. Then, after a few seconds, she sat back down in the make-up chair, her face as blank and unreadable as an empty screen.
‘You OK?’ he asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said briskly. Turning to Maureen, she asked: ‘How much longer?’
‘Not long, lovie. Five minutes, tops.’
Chuck MacNamee knocked on the door. ‘Ready on set when you are, Mo.’
‘Come on,’ said Sabrina to Viorel. ‘Let’s finish reading through the scene. Your line, I think. From “Does it really matter, Catherine?”’
You’re a good little actress, thought Vio. But he could see how scared Sabrina was. He hoped Dorian would ease up a bit once they started filming.
Dorian didn’t.
The morning shoot was long and gruelling. It was a hot day, a good ten degrees warmer than it had been the day before, and by eleven Sabrina was roasting in her heavy meringue of a dress. But Rasmirez didn’t seem to care, keeping her standing for hours under the glare of the lights, refusing her a chance to sit down or grab a glass of water, and rolling his eyes when Sabrina insisted on a break after three straight hours on set.
‘Either I go to the bathroom, or I pee right here on the ground,’ she said defiantly.
‘Go,’ Dorian growled. ‘You have two minutes.’
‘Come on,’ said Viorel, once she was out of earshot. ‘Give her a break. My horse is getting better treatment.’
Dorian glanced across at Heathcliff’s skewbald pony, contentedly gorging itself on a bucket of oats behind camera two. ‘Yeah, well. Your horse hasn’t single-handedly alienated the entire British press.’
‘It’s her first day,’ said Vio.
‘And she’s already fucked up.’
‘It was a mistake.??
?
‘Yes it was. A big one. Look,’ said Dorian, sensing Vio’s disapproval, ‘she has to learn. Actions have consequences. Of course the press were hounding her. What did she expect? Of course they were pushing her, trying to get her to lose her temper. That’s what they do. But that’s all the more reason to keep a lid on it. If people are trying to trip her up, if they want to think the worst of her, she’s only herself to blame for that.’
Sabrina was coming back. Vio dropped his voice to a whisper.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But just ease up a little, OK? Let her finish the scene. She won’t be able to give much of a performance if she drops dead from heat exhaustion. And neither will I.’
At four o’clock they wrapped for the day. Dorian headed straight for his room. There were bound to be a thousand emails and voice messages wanting his response to Sabrina’s latest blunder, and he needed to get some sort of statement out there before tomorrow.
On his way back to the house, he bumped into Tish. She’d been out to a local theme park with Abel. When she saw Dorian she flashed him the kind of megawatt, grid-lighting smile that forced you to smile back yourself.
‘How was your first day of filming?’
‘Awful. But thanks for asking. How was Thomas the Train Land?’
‘Oh, you know. Hell on earth,’ shrugged Tish. ‘Abel enjoyed himself.’ She turned around to look for him, but he’d already scampered off somewhere. She hoped it was for a slice of cake with Mrs Drummond, and not to pester the actors or film crew. At breakfast this morning he’d already coloured three cards: one for Deborah Raynham, the camera girl who always gave him sweets, one for ‘Princess Sabrina’ and one for Viorel – a therizinosaurus.