Adored

  “I’m not letting you read it because it would hurt you to read it,” he said. “Hunter has decided that he no longer wants to have any contact with our family. He’s almost seventeen now, and I think we have to respect his wishes.”

  “But he doesn’t mean me,” Siena insisted. “He would never say he didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  “I’m sorry, Siena,” said Pete brutally. “But he would, and he has. I think it’s best if we don’t speak about this again. Hunter has moved on and so must you.”

  It was amazing to think that that awful conversation had been nearly seven years ago now. And that since then she and Hunter, who had once been so inseparable, had lost each other completely.

  “Come on,” said Patrick, extricating himself from Siena’s limbs, getting up from the sofa and yawning dramatically. “I’m bored. Who’s up for a spot of corn jumping?”

  “What on earth is corn jumping?” asked Siena, admiring the lean, defined muscles on his stomach as he stretched his arms above his head. For a rugby player, Patrick had a slim build, but she loved the smooth lines of his body and the way her own body seemed to bristle with excitement and arousal whenever he came near her.

  She was not in love with him—Siena hadn’t the slightest intention of falling in love with anybody until she was at least thirty, and rich and famous enough to be happy with or without a man—but she had a genuine soft spot for Patrick. As well as being a complete angel, he was far more talented in bed than any of the other boys she’d been with.

  “You’ve never been corn jumping?” asked Janey, taking her friend’s hand and pulling her up from her seat.

  “Look, we’re not all local yokels, you know.” Siena laughed. “I have no idea what corn jumping is, but something tells me we don’t get to see a whole lot of it in Los Angeles.”

  “You’re missing out, I can assure you,” said Patrick in the clipped British accent that reminded her so much of Max De Seville.

  Not for the first time she wondered what had become of Max, her old rival, and whether he and Hunter were still in touch.

  “Come on,” said Patrick. “Follow me.”

  Siena followed Janey and Patrick as they skipped out into the stable yard, giggling and pushing each other like a couple of kids. It must be lovely, she thought wistfully, to have a family like Janey’s. Mr. and Mrs. Cash were both so cool and laid-back. They couldn’t give a shit whether Janey got into bloody Oxford. Not that she was likely to anyway. Poor Janey. Patrick seemed to have the lion’s share of brains and looks in that family.

  The three of them clambered over the rotting old yard gate and ran across the paddock toward the three vast grain silos that marked the entrance to the farm. It was a glorious July day, and the sun beat down on the fields, its warmth intensifying the rich agricultural smells of hay and horses and cow shit that had once been so utterly alien to Siena, but now just smelled of England.

  She could never live up here, she thought as she stumbled across the bumpy, irregular field. They were hundreds of miles away from the nearest decent blow-dry, let alone restaurant or club. The Coach and Horses in Farndale was about as close as people got to a good time in Yorkshire, as far as Siena could make out. But every now and then it did her good to come and stay with Janey, to soak up the clotted cream richness of the dale, sheltered beneath the barren, bleak expanse of the moor above. The landscape was breathtaking. It made her feel like Cathy, making wild love to Heathcliff, whenever she and Patrick sneaked off to the barn or the stables to fool around. It was another world.

  “Move your ass, Siena!” Patrick shouted at her in his appalling attempt at an American accent as she jogged to catch up with them. “In here.”

  Janey opened the door to the grain silo, and the pungent, overwhelming stench of the grain hit Siena in the face like a Mike Tyson punch.

  “Omigod, it reeks!” she squealed, clasping her hand over her nose and mouth.

  Inside, the silo was huge, like an aircraft hangar, with two enormous mounds of corn, perhaps eighty feet high, shimmering in their own golden dust beneath an industrial latticework of metal beams supporting an immense corrugated iron roof. On the wall to her left, Siena saw two endlessly long ladders bolted together, providing access to a narrow platform at the top of the larger corn pile.

  Patrick looked first at the ladder, then at Siena, and nodded evilly.

  “Oh no.” She shook her head, laughing, her thick dark curls spilling luxuriously over her INXS T-shirt, eyes flashing the same cobalt blue as her new 501 jeans. Patrick felt his groin stirring as he looked at her. “I am not going up there. Uh-uh, no way Jose, ain’t happenin’.”

  “You sounded so like your grandfather when you said that,” said Janey idly, then immediately regretted it. Siena was even more touchy about the late, great Duke McMahon than she was about her divine uncle Hunter. For once, though, she seemed to take it in good humor.

  “Thanks,” she smiled, then, turning to Patrick, “but I’m still not going up there.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a wuss.” He pulled her toward him and pressed his own wide mouth against her tiny Betty Boop lips. She tasted of black-cherry lip balm. “That’s what corn jumping is. You climb all the way up there.” He pointed to the precarious-looking platform. “And then you jump down into the corn.”

  “It’s really fun,” confirmed Janey, who was already at the foot of the ladder, preparing to climb.

  “No way, I can’t,” persisted Siena.

  “Why on earth not?” asked Patrick.

  “I have a job for Ailsa Moran next week,” said Siena. “What if I bruise myself—I mean, what if I cut my face? I’m supposed to have a ‘sophisticated forties look,’ okay? They don’t want some scar-faced bungee jumper.”

  Ailsa Moran was one of the hot up-and-coming young fashion designers on the London scene this year. Much to Siena’s surprise and delight, Moran had hired her to model some of the more retro pieces from her new collection for a shoot in the Sunday Times Style Magazine, the first real, paying modeling assignment she’d had since signing on with a small London agency over the Easter holidays.

  “Oh well, excuse me, Little Miss Supermodel,” Patrick teased her, stroking her cheek affectionately.

  Siena knew he felt uncomfortable about her modeling, although he tried hard to be supportive. He didn’t understand that she saw it as a way to get herself back to Hollywood, a stepping stone toward launching an acting career that didn’t involve her father or trading on her famous name. She had landed herself an agent and gotten the Moran job completely on her own, and she desperately wanted Patrick to be proud of her for that. Instead, he seemed to fear that the whole fashion scene and the superficial London crowd that went with it would pull her further and further away from him. Perhaps he was right.

  “Fine,” he said, kissing her again. “You just stay here and be a wet blanket. But I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. Janey and I have some corn to jump.”

  They both looked up as, with an almighty screech, Janey hurled herself from the rafters and landed with a soft thud in the corn below. Siena could hardly see her for dust as she slid down the side of the mound, whooping with adrenaline, her good-natured, ruddy face even more flushed than usual.

  “Wow, that was great!” she said, scrambling to her feet and brushing the worst of the prickly corn dust off her yellow-stained jeans. “Come on, Claudia bloody Schiffer, don’t be so wet. Have a go.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, all right,” said Siena, shaking her head at her own childishness. She had to admit, it did look like fun. “Pat,” she yelled, racing over to the ladder. “Hold on, I’m coming up!”

  By the time she’d joined him on the little platform, she was already beginning to regret her impulsiveness, and it had nothing to do with her budding modeling career.

  “Fucking hell, it’s a long way down, isn’t it?” she said, biting her lip with nerves.

  “To the ground, yes,” said Patrick. “To the corn, can’t be mo
re than twenty or thirty feet, I reckon. You’ll be fine.”

  “What if I miss it?” wailed Siena, taking another step back from the edge.

  Patrick roared with laughter, his gentle hazel eyes disappearing into creases. “Darling, even you couldn’t miss that. It’s about the size of fucking Canada.”

  Siena didn’t look remotely reassured.

  “How about we jump together?” He looked her in the eye, inviting her to trust him, and even through her fear, she could feel herself melting.

  What a sweetheart he was, her little Patricio. A sudden pang of guilt, for the few times she’d been unfaithful to him, stabbed briefly at her heart. She knew it was insecurity that propelled her into other boys’ beds; that she was driven by a desperate need to be loved and to have lifeboats in case her mother ship—Patrick—should sink. Having lost or been abandoned by everyone she had ever loved, she had learned the hard way never to put all her emotional eggs into one basket, however loyal and lovely that basket might be. Poor, darling Patrick, he deserved better.

  “On three?” she said, reaching for his hand.

  “On three.”

  “One. Two.” Siena shut her eyes tight. “Three!”

  With a stomach-splitting whoosh, she felt herself rushing through the air, clinging to the warm firm grip of Patrick’s hand until, what seemed like hours later but could only really have been a second or two, they hit the soft cushion of the corn below.

  “We did it!” she spluttered euphorically through a mouthful of corn dust. “That was awesome!” She felt seven years old again, brave, excited, and triumphant. Soon she was on her feet, punching the air with her fists and running a victory lap around the mound of corn.

  Patrick caught his sister’s eye and, nodding in Siena’s direction, raised one eyebrow at his screeching, circling girlfriend. She seemed to have gone completely barmy. “American,” he whispered, in explanation.

  “Oh yes,” said Janey. “Very.”

  Later that night, after a delicious but enormous meal with Janey’s parents, followed by a never-ending game of charades, Siena had sneaked out of the spare bedroom, up the creaky spiral stairs to Patrick’s attic room.

  Too stuffed with lemon cheesecake to even contemplate sex, she nestled her head against the smooth warmth of his chest and chattered away as he stroked and tickled her bare back.

  “Your dad is hysterical,” she said. “Is he always that competitive?”

  “Oh, always,” said Patrick. “Although charades does rather bring out the worst in him. Normally, Ma refuses to play, he’s so awful.”

  “They’re very sweet, though, your parents,” she sighed wistfully. “They really seem to love each other, don’t they?”

  Patrick thought about it. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Yes, I suppose they do. Why? Don’t your parents love each other?”

  Siena gave a brittle grunt of derision. “Not so’s you’d notice.” She reached up and swept a loose tendril of hair back from her face, snuggling closer to his body. “My mom is just totally weak.”

  Patrick could hear the bitterness in her voice and feel her body tensing.

  “And my dad . . .”

  “I know,” he said gently, “you don’t get on with him.”

  “I don’t think he cares if I live or die, I really don’t,” said Siena blankly.

  “Come on now. That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  “I wish it were,” said Siena. “All he cares about is Oxford and medicine and my goddamn reading list. He just wants to be able to go to dinner parties with his Hollywood cronies and their surgically enhanced wives, and say, ‘My daughter’s a doctor, she goes to Oxford, she’s been educated with English ladies.’”

  “What, like Janey you mean?” he teased her. “That’s considered a selling point?”

  “You know what, screw him,” continued Siena, who was on a roll. “I’m not going. My modeling’s going great, although of course Dad doesn’t give a shit about that. He can shove his reading list up his ass.”

  Her voice was rising, and Patrick was worried that his parents might hear them.

  “He can shove Oxford up his ass!”

  “That might be a bit painful,” he said, trying to defuse the situation. “All those dreaming spires look a bit on the sharp side to me.”

  Siena didn’t smile.

  “Sorry. Not funny.”

  He sat up in bed and reached over for his Camel Lights. Lighting up, he took a long drag and offered it to Siena, who shook her head.

  “Look,” he said, “you can’t just not go to Oxford. You’ve got a two-E offer, so it doesn’t even matter if you’ve plowed your A-levels.”

  “Which I won’t have,” chipped in Siena arrogantly.

  “Which you won’t have,” agreed Patrick. “Modeling.” He frowned. “It’s just such a waste. I mean, is that really what you want to be in life? A jumped-up clotheshorse?”

  Siena gave him a withering look. “Don’t be fatuous,” she snapped. “I’ve told you, I’m going to be an actress, and modeling happens to be a very good way into that. My agent says if I do the Paris shows this year I could meet a whole bunch of casting directors. A lot of actresses break into the business that way.”

  “Bollocks,” said Patrick, blowing smoke out of his nose like a rather unthreatening dragon. “Name one.”

  “Cameron fucking Diaz, okay, asshole?” He looked blank. “The girl in The Mask?” Furious, she rolled out of his bed and started pulling on her worn striped pajama bottoms. Why couldn’t he be supportive about this? Why was he taking her dad’s side? “Marilyn fucking Monroe, ever heard of her?”

  “I don’t think Marilyn got her big break at Paris fashion week, do you?”

  “Right, smart-ass,” said Siena, who was really in a foul mood now. “But she was a model first, then an actress. Model,” she adopted a patronizing tone, as though explaining the alphabet to a four-year-old. “Actress. See? You just don’t like me modeling because it makes you insecure, thinking about all those guys out there who are gonna see my picture and lust after me.”

  “That’s not true,” said Patrick, stung because he knew it was.

  “You’d rather I was cooped up with a bunch of nerdy medical students at Oxford. That’d make you feel much better, wouldn’t it?”

  She spat the words out with such vitriol that it scared him. How did they ever get into all this?

  “You don’t care about me, about what I want,” continued Siena, blinded with rage. “You don’t care if I’m happy.” In her haste, she had done up her buttons wrong, and her irate, contorted little face looked comically incongruous above her lopsided pajama top. “You’re as bad as my fucking father. Well let me tell you something: I am going to make it as an actress. And when I do, it won’t be on the back of my name—my father’s goddamn name. It will be because I’ve made it on my own. Modelling’s just the start.”

  “Siena,” said Patrick wearily, “I am nothing like your father.” Even in those ridiculous pajamas, screaming at him like a banshee, she still looked so sexy it hurt. “All I meant was that you shouldn’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” He made one last-ditch effort to calm her down. “There’s no point in missing out on Oxford just for the sake of annoying your dad. I just—look, I just find it hard to believe that modeling is what you really want to do, that’s all.” He patted the mattress beside him. “Come on, come back to bed.”

  “Well it is what I want to do,” she barked defensively. “For now, anyway. Until I can get back to Hollywood, until my acting comes together. And as far as I’m concerned I’m not ‘missing out’ on anything. I hate Oxford. I hate England. If you knew anything about me at all you’d know I’ve been desperate to get out of this shitty, gray, rainy depressing hellhole for the last eight years. Modeling’s a way out, something that even my father can’t control, and I’m taking it. So if that makes you uncomfortable, then tough fucking tits!”

  With a final defiant flick of her curls and a fo
undation-shaking slam of the door, she stomped back down the stairs to her own room.

  Oh fuck, that was all she needed. Mr. Cash, looking like an older Sherlock Holmes in a dark green dressing gown and reading glasses, emerged from the bathroom just as Siena stepped onto the landing.

  “Ah, Siena. Just saying good night to Pat, were you?” he asked her with a good-natured, conspiratorial wink.

  He was such a lovely man, she thought, and so was his son. She didn’t know why she was always such a bitch to him.

  “Yes, I was, er—” she floundered—“we were just talking about the future, actually.” She gestured upstairs. “You know, career plans. Moving on.”

  Jeremy Cash looked at her thoughtfully. He could quite see why his son was crazy about her, but it was as plain as the nose on his face that a girl like Siena was not about to settle down with Patrick. The lad was headed for heartbreak, and Jeremy felt for him, but even so, he couldn’t quite bring himself to dislike his daughter’s feisty best friend.

  Bending forward, he gave her a paternal kiss on the cheek. “Good night, my dear,” he said.

  “Good night, Mr. C.,” Siena beamed back at him.

  “Oh, and Siena?” he called after her as he opened the door to his own room. “Next time you and Patrick discuss your future, you might want to take a trifle longer buttoning up your pajamas afterward.”

  Siena glanced down in horror at her top and blushed like an overripe tomato.

  “Good night, young lady,” said Jeremy.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “I’m sorry, guys, that was my fault,” said Hunter. “Can we go again?”

  The two cameramen rolled their eyes as they prepared for a fourth take, but neither of them could get really mad. It was so unlike Hunter to forget his lines, and he was such a down-to-earth, decent guy that all the crew liked and respected him. They were shooting the second season of Counselor on the back lot at Universal. Despite the show’s unexpected worldwide success, Hunter had failed to become the spoiled talent that most young actors transform into the moment they get their big break. So far, there’d been no demands for a massive pay hike, no celebrity tantrums, and no ego overload from the scores of hot-looking women who hung around the studio gates night after night, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, he hadn’t ever laid a groupie, and most of his evenings were spent at home, alone, poring over his script. Hell, he even bought the sound guys chocolate muffins from the Coffee Bean most mornings on his way into work. Hunter was the real deal, and the whole set adored him.