Adored

  While he signed their shirts and programs and dollar bills good-naturedly, scanning the road for Siena, his heart sank when he noticed a TV crew for the L.A. 9 News channel advancing toward him. There was no time to escape, so he made the best of it and smiled graciously as Emma Duval, the new and pneumatic face of the seven o’clock news, thrust her prominent double-D assets in his direction.

  “Hi, Hunter,” she said, as though they were old friends. She had interviewed him once before for about ten seconds and thought he was a total hottie. “Got time for a quick word?”

  “Very quick,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  Classic rookie mistake. He could have bitten his tongue off.

  “Oh, really? Who?” Emma tried to smile through a face full of Botox. It wasn’t a great success.

  “No one you know,” said Hunter quickly. “A friend.”

  “Well,” said Emma, with a look that let him know she had a pretty good idea who that “friend” might be, but wasn’t going to say so, “maybe just a few words then on this morning’s news about your stepmother’s death.”

  “She wasn’t really my stepmother,” he began to explain, but Emma had already signaled to her camera and sound guys and had thrust a microphone under his nose within seconds.

  “I’m here with Hunter McMahon, who’s about to head on in and cheer on those Dodgers!” She punched the air inanely before switching into serious mode. “Hunter, today’s been a sad day for you, with the news of the passing of Minnie McMahon. Can I ask you how you’re feeling?”

  “I’m, er, I’m fine, really,” he stammered, blinking against the spotlight that some wiseass had decided to shine right into his face. “I’m sorry for her family, my half sister, Laurie, and of course my brother as well. This must be a difficult time for them.”

  “Absolutely.” Emma nodded and took a shot at a sympathetic frown, only to be foiled again by her frozen brow. “Have you spoken to your brother—producer Pete McMahon,” she turned and explained to the camera, “at all since it happened?”

  Shit. How had he gotten into this? And where the hell was Siena?

  “No,” he said. “No, unfortunately, my brother and I are no longer in contact.”

  “Pete McMahon did in fact publicly disown you some years ago. That must have been painful.” The woman had all the tact of a stampeding elephant. Hunter didn’t respond. “Will you be attending your stepmother’s funeral?” Emma pressed on relentlessly.

  “Actually, she wasn’t my stepmother. She was my father’s wife, but . . .” He looked around despairingly for Siena. If only he had his ticket, he could bolt inside the stadium and escape. “To be honest, I feel a bit awkward discussing it. I’m very sorry for the family, but like I say, we really weren’t that close.”

  At that moment, as if by magic, every camera swung away from him, and an excited swarm of TV crews, reporters, and fans surged toward a black limousine behind him.

  Siena and Randall had arrived.

  “Siena! Siena! How do you feel?” the voices were yelling. “Have you spoken to your father, Siena? Will this clear the way for a family reconciliation?”

  Hunter watched, perplexed, as Siena emerged from the back of the car, hand in hand with Randall, and began moving through the crowd toward him, answering questions as she went but pointedly refusing to stop and sign autographs—another of Randall’s rules.

  If it hadn’t been for everybody screaming her name, he wasn’t at all sure he would have recognized her. First of all, she was dressed head to toe in black, in a fabulously tight-cut skirt and jacket, teamed with sky-high black stilettos and a full-length mink, which she wore open. She looked like a young, sexed-up Elizabeth Taylor in mourning.

  Oh my God, he thought, that’s it.

  She was wearing black in mourning.

  For Minnie?

  It all seemed a bit over the top. Even so, it still made him feel like a heartless jerk for turning up in jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt.

  “Hunter, Hunter, darling!” Siena called, fighting her way to his side. Even her voice sounded different, like it was put on. Randall followed behind her in a dark suit looking, Hunter thought, fat, bald, and old. “How are you?” She held out her arms to him.

  He held her, but it didn’t feel like her, more like an armful of fur. She kissed him on both cheeks and smiled warmly, but something about her still seemed odd. It might have been the thick coat of makeup she was wearing, presumably for the cameras’ benefit.

  “I’m fine, I’m good,” he assured her, wishing he could take her away from the TV crews so they could talk for real. “I started to think you weren’t coming.”

  “Oh, are we late?” Siena looked down at her Cartier watch affectedly, blinding him and everybody else within a twenty-foot radius with a dazzling flash of her diamond-encrusted strap.

  Hunter gave her a reproachful look.

  “Sorry,” she said, chastened. “It’s really Randall, not me. He’s always fussing with what I’m wearing, wanting to change everything at the last minute.” She squeezed Randall’s hand affectionately.

  “What are you wearing?” said Hunter, taking the three tickets silently proffered by Randall, and leading the way through the VIP barriers and into the stadium. “I mean, you look great. But what’s with all the black? This isn’t because of Minnie, is it?”

  For a split second, he thought he saw her flash him a naughty smile, the kind she used as a child when she’d been up to some new mischief or other. He knew Siena didn’t care for Minnie any more than he did.

  “She was Siena’s grandmother,” Randall chimed in, as if Hunter needed to have the relationship explained. “The news of her death came as quite a shock. And of course, it rakes up a lot of old memories, the pain of her parents’ abandonment, that sort of thing. Doesn’t it, darling? I’m sure you must feel the same.”

  Hunter was about to reply that he didn’t feel the same, and that he and Siena had each other and didn’t need the rest of the family, but was stopped in his tracks when he spun around to find Siena shamelessly hamming it up for the cameras, grasping his arm as if she were about to collapse with grief.

  “Come on, Hunter,” she whispered between shots. “You could try to look a little bit unhappy. I mean, we’re supposed to be in this together, aren’t we, ‘the poor outcast McMahon children, sticking together through the latest family tragedy.’”

  She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handkerchief to dry her imaginary tears. It was only then that the penny dropped.

  She was using him.

  Using him and Minnie’s death as a cheap publicity stunt. As if she needed any more publicity.

  He felt revolted. Grabbing her by the arm, he pulled her sharply away from the prying cameras. Randall moved forward to follow them, but Hunter glared at him so viciously that he hung back.

  “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” he snarled at Siena.

  “What do you mean? Let go of my arm, you’re hurting me,” she said indignantly.

  “Good,” said Hunter. “Now you know what it feels like.”

  Siena was so stunned she was actually speechless.

  “Did he put you up to this? Huh? Was it Stein’s idea?”

  “What?” She sounded frightened. She had never known Hunter to lose his temper with her like this. “I don’t know what you mean. What idea?”

  “This.” He pulled at her coat and her jacket, snatching up her handkerchief in disgust. “These clothes, these fake tears over Minnie, asking me along as some kind of cheap prop. Turning up late, so I’d already have the cameras on me for your grand entrance with lover boy. Jesus, Siena, what’s happened to you? I didn’t love Minnie any more than you did, but don’t you think she deserves a bit more respect than this?”

  “No, I fucking don’t.” Siena was shaking. She couldn’t bear to have Hunter yelling at her, knowing that every word he said was true. She was so ashamed, she wished the ground would open u
p and swallow her, but some instinct urged her to come out fighting. “I don’t think she deserves any respect at all. She was a mean, vindictive old bitch who never gave a shit about me, or you.”

  “That’s crap, Siena.” For once Hunter was tired of listening to her bullshit. For the first time, he’d seen for himself the Machiavellian side to her character that Tiffany was always complaining about. And it was ugly. “Minnie cared for you. She adored you as a child. Everyone did.”

  “Yes, well, then I had to go and disappoint everyone by growing up, didn’t I?” said Siena bitterly.

  “Don’t kid yourself.” He wasn’t about to allow her to wallow in self-pity. “You haven’t grown up. Grown-up people don’t pull stunts like this. Even if you don’t care about Minnie, I’d have thought you’d at least have some respect for me.”

  “I do! I do respect you.” Siena looked stricken.

  Randall stepped forward and put a possessive arm around her shoulders. “Lighten up, man, you’re upsetting her,” he said.

  Hunter waved his arm impatiently as if swatting away a fly. This had to be said. “Well you have a funny way of showing it, Siena. I haven’t seen you for months. It’s all I can do to get your goddamn PA to return my calls these days.”

  “I’m sorry, Hunter,” Randall jumped in. “But you have to understand that Siena’s life has changed. She has a very busy schedule now, and a lot of people competing for her time. You can’t always expect to be at the front of the line.”

  “Fuck off.” Hunter turned on him. “No one’s talking to you.”

  Randall merely raised his eyebrow and gave a smug, patronizing little smile, as if to indicate that Hunter was too far beneath him to provoke any deeper response.

  “Then, today, you finally do call.” Hunter turned back to Siena. “And you know what? I was so happy to hear your voice. How naive and stupid is that?”

  “It isn’t stupid,” she pleaded. “Hunter, please. I was happy too. And I was upset this morning, truly. Not about Grandma, maybe. But seeing those pictures of my mom, you know, and the old house? I felt terrible. I wanted to see you so badly.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Hunter. He was looking at her with utter disdain, and the anger and disappointment in his voice were unmistakable. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth anymore, Siena. And you know what the irony is?” She stared at him in mute misery, clinging to Randall like a lifeboat. “When you stepped out of that car just now, I didn’t recognize you. But now? Now I can see it.”

  “See what?” she asked, trembling.

  “My father,” said Hunter, turning on his heel in disgust. “That’s who you are now, Siena. That’s what you’ve become. You’re exactly the same as Duke.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Max lay facedown on the bright pink mat on the floor and tried to clear his head as the Korean girl began expertly pummeling his back.

  He’d been coming to the same tiny massage parlor in Korea Town ever since he first moved to L.A. It was a bit of a schlep to get out here, but at twenty-five dollars for an hour-long pounding of the muscles—none of this farting around with lavender oil and wind chimes—it was well worth the effort.

  Since Siena had left him, his weekly visits to Sun Jhee had become something of a lifesaver. Even now, months after it all happened, his sleep patterns were still shot, so the massage provided him a rare opportunity to relax.

  “Breathing out,” the girl commanded as she pressed down on his lower back with her shoulder. Max felt a satisfying click of the spine. “Sitting badly,” she diagnosed.

  “Probably,” he groaned. “But I’m afraid poor posture is the least of my worries just now.”

  The girl continued pummeling. She obviously didn’t understand a word he said, which was good, since the last thing Max wanted was to waste an hour on small talk. He needed to think.

  He’d been worrying more and more about Siena in the last couple of days. Not that he didn’t think about her every day—the longing, the nightmares, and the dull ache of loss were still his constant companions. But ever since Hunter had that spectacular row with her at the Dodgers game, Max had started to look at things in a different, less selfish light.

  He knew he’d lost her. For all the love he still felt, Max wasn’t in denial. Every magazine, billboard, and TV news show screamed the message home to him, zooming in on her happy, confident face, climbing in and out of limos with Randall or waving nonchalantly to fans: She was gone.

  But recently, he’d found himself looking up from the depths of his own pain and starting to feel genuinely concerned for Siena’s welfare. It was the rift with Hunter that really did it.

  Max had known Hunter since they were little boys. He probably knew him better than anyone else on the planet, with the possible exception of Tiffany. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, he never would have believed that Hunter was capable of turning his back on Siena like this. For three weeks, he hadn’t even mentioned her name.

  Whatever had happened at that Dodgers game—and Hunter refused to go into details, so Max and Tiffany were left to piece events together as best they could—it had alienated him from her in a way that Max would once not have believed possible.

  He could arrive at only one conclusion: Randall Stein was poison.

  At first he had made heroic efforts to talk himself out of this point of view. He was jealous. He wasn’t being objective. He couldn’t bear for Siena to find happiness with someone else.

  But the more he saw the ways that Stein had changed her—and not just the makeup and the clothes but the whole diva persona—the more he was convinced that he was right.

  He could understand her refusal to speak to him, after what he’d done. But poor Ines had called him a few weeks ago in tears. Apparently, she’d left dozens of messages with Siena’s PA and at the house, none of them returned. It was practically the same story with Hunter. Before the Dodgers debacle, Siena had only seen him twice since her move to Malibu, both times for only a few snatched minutes on the set of her new film.

  Her public behavior, if anything, was even worse.

  Sure, Siena had always been spoiled and attention seeking. He blamed her parents for that. But she had a good heart, and Max knew that underneath all her histrionics, she was the most wonderful, loyal, and loving woman he had ever met.

  With Randall, that whole side of her personality seemed to be disappearing.

  She had started treating her fans with disdain, refusing to sign autographs, and reducing one poor little kid to tears by driving away from her own premiere for Daughter in a blacked-out limo without so much as a wave. She had given interviews, arrogantly dismissing Dierk Muller, the man who had gone out on a limb and given her her first break, as a second-tier director. And every week, new rumors emerged from the set of 1941, Randall’s big-budget epic in which she starred, of her excessive and outlandish demands for a bigger trailer, shorter hours, and a twenty-four-hour on-call masseuse.

  Max blamed himself for pushing her over the edge. If only he hadn’t been such a selfish, jealous, insecure jerk-off, none of this would be happening.

  But that only meant it was up to him to put things right. If Siena and Hunter weren’t speaking, things really had gotten serious. Somehow, he had to make her wake up to herself, before Stein destroyed her completely.

  About ten days later, on an unseasonably hot December day, Siena was pacing the drawing room at Randall’s estate, having a massive sense-of-humor failure.

  “I don’t fucking believe this!” she roared at Melanie, the hapless party organizer who was overseeing the evening’s events. “The theme is supposed to be winter wonderland. What sort of a winter wonderland is it going to be without snow?”

  It was three in the afternoon, but Siena was still in the red silk kimono she’d gotten up in. She’d been awake since seven, manically trying to finalize the details for Randall’s annual pre-Christmas party, and she hadn’t yet had a moment to get dressed.

  Ev
erybody who was anybody in Hollywood—except her parents, of course—would be pulling up to the gates in four hours’ time, and now this Muppet of a girl seemed to be telling her that the snow machine had given up the ghost, with the rose garden only half covered. The whole thing was a fucking nightmare.

  “Sometimes when the temperature outside rises above seventy,” Melanie unwisely started to explain, “the machine just sort of shuts down.”

  Melanie had a long nose, a slight build, and a nervous disposition that gave her the air of a terrified vole. She was not good in a crisis.

  “Well you’d better just ‘sort of’ wake it up. Or get ahold of another one,” said Siena murderously. “Because if that garden doesn’t look like Antarctica within the next forty-five minutes, I’m going to sue you for more money than even I can imagine. Are we clear?”

  “Absolutely, Miss McMahon, we’ll get things under control.” The terrified girl scuttled away.

  “In forty-five minutes!” Siena yelled after her retreating back.

  She sank down onto the huge William Morris-print couch, utterly exhausted.

  Fucking Randall.

  He’d disappeared off to play golf with Jamie Silfen early this morning, and Siena hadn’t seen him since. She wondered how on earth he’d pulled off a party this size successfully in previous years, before she came along to do all the work. Then she realized he’d probably had a string of live-in girlfriends on past Christmases, all more than willing to play at being Mrs. Randall Stein for the evening.

  The thought made her feel even more pissed. Why did she put herself through it?

  She heaved herself reluctantly to her feet. This was no time to be lying around. It would soon be time to start getting ready, and she still had a million and one things to do before Randall got back.

  Wandering into the dining room, she admired the spectacular, festive table. Snow machines aside, Melanie had done a fantastic job. Intertwined stems of holly and ivy hung in looped wreaths around all four walls and across the ceiling, dripping at intervals with either bright red berries or tumbling bunches of white mistletoe. Every kind of Christmas delight littered the table, from pecan pies to chocolate Yule logs and imported Carlsbad plums. And in each corner of the room stood twenty-five-foot Christmas trees, decorated only in silver and white, with a delicate hand-painted wooden angel from Sweden perched on top of each one.