Adored

  Minnie was beyond exasperation. Not only had she had to put up with watching that little trollop Caroline trying to insinuate herself with all her old friends but now her hateful little brat had completely destroyed Minnie’s beautiful chocolate gâteau. Why couldn’t his slut of a mother ever control him?

  “Young man, you are in big trouble,” she whispered ominously at Hunter. “Just look at your face. That’s very, very naughty, isn’t it?”

  The little boy slunk back guiltily behind the tablecloth. Maybe if he shut his eyes very tightly, she’d disappear?

  “You come with me this instant,” said Minnie briskly, dragging him off in search of Caroline.

  She had seized his arm painfully tightly, and this, combined with the harshness of her tone, had frightened him. Wiping the chocolate goo on his sleeve, he began to cry, his fat lower lip trembling pitifully as she dragged him away.

  Caroline, as usual, was surrounded by a sycophantic crowd on the other side of the lawn, oblivious to her son’s wails. But Claire, who had always had a strong maternal instinct and felt sorry for the boy, caught sight of Minnie pulling him angrily up the steps to the house and hurried over to intervene.

  “Come on, Minnie.” She tried to keep her tone respectful. “You know he didn’t mean any harm. He’s only four for heaven’s sake.” Stooping down, she wiped away Hunter’s tears and the remains of the gâteau with her handkerchief and, prising his arm from her irate mother-in-law, scooped him into her arms.

  “How dare you undermine my authority?” said Minnie, glaring at her and further terrifying poor Hunter. She knew it wasn’t really the child’s fault, or Claire’s. It was Caroline she should be angry with. Even so, it was humiliating to be reprimanded by her son’s wife in front of so many people. And Minnie had had more than enough humiliation for one day. “That child is a disgrace!” she fumed. “He needs a little discipline, although Lord only knows how he’s ever going to get it in this madhouse.”

  Claire knew better than to argue, but she tightened her grip possessively around Hunter. She hated being in this position but somebody had to look out for the child. If it were possible, her husband resented his little half brother even more vehemently than Minnie did. He flew completely off the handle whenever he caught Claire defending the boy.

  Her heart pounded violently now as she stood on the steps with Hunter in her arms, terrified that Pete might see her and make a scene. Sensing her fear, and acutely aware of the tension coiled within her body, Hunter suddenly lost control of his bladder. A warm yellow stain began to spread slowly across Claire’s white muslin blouse.

  “I rest my case,” said Minnie contemptuously, before turning on her heel and descending the steps to rejoin the party.

  “Don’t you worry, sweetie,” Claire reassured the traumatized child, whose sodden legs remained wrapped tightly around her. “It was just an accident. Come on, let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we?”

  She hurried indoors with Hunter, anxious to get both him and herself changed into fresh clothes before Pete found them. Claire had grown to become quite frightened of her husband. More and more these days, Pete seemed to be overwhelmed by some nameless rage that she was powerless to placate. She had thought—well, hoped—that he might mellow once they had a child of their own. But five years of trying had proved painfully fruitless, and Claire felt instinctively that Pete blamed her for their reproductive failure, although there was nothing to suggest that the fault should lie on her side.

  It didn’t help that her father-in-law was so gung-ho about his own virility, showing Hunter off like some sort of fertility trophy, rubbing Pete’s nose in it at every opportunity.

  She smiled down at Hunter’s chubby body as he sat happily in the bath, squirting himself with bubble bath. How could Duke and Caroline ignore him the way they did? He was such a little angel.

  For her part, the longing for a child of her own had become scarcely bearable, a ceaseless drumbeat of yearning pounding away in her head day after day. How ironic, how cruel it was that Caroline, who hadn’t a shred of maternal feeling in her hard, toned little body, should have conceived so easily, while she, Claire, who would make such a natural, loving mother, seemed destined to remain childless.

  “There you go, sweetie.” She wrapped Hunter in a huge white towel and began rubbing him dry as he wriggled and squealed in delight. How wonderful to be four—the whole Minnie incident already seemed to be quite forgotten.

  “I wuv you,” he said, reaching his hands up around her neck and kissing her.

  “Oh, honey. I love you, too,” she said.

  After a lightning change, the pair of them reemerged into the sunshine. Claire looked beautiful but flustered in a pale yellow sundress. Hunter, already restored to his natural good humor, was beaming in a crisp white sailor suit, tightly clasping her hand.

  Pete pounced on them instantly.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I wanted to introduce you to Sheila Peterson, but the moment I turned around, you were gone.”

  Sheila Peterson was the wife of Anton Peterson, one of the most reclusive and successful studio bosses in Hollywood history. Pete had been trying for eighteen months to forge an alliance with the famously prickly Anton. The McMahon name still opened a lot of doors in the movie business, and Pete hoped to convince Peterson that he could bring a higher profile and touch of glamour to his thriving but still somewhat low-key business. Today was the first time he’d managed to get Anton and his wife to accept any sort of social invitation. The least Claire could do was to show him a little support.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. Hunter had a little accident, so I just ran in to clean him up.”

  The second the words were out of her mouth, she could have bitten her tongue off.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Claire.” Pete seized her by both shoulders and began to shake her hard. “You are not his mother, okay? When are you going to get that into your stupid head? He isn’t your child.”

  Suddenly he released her, giving a yelp of pain. The entire party turned to gawp at the scene. Hunter had sunk his teeth into Pete’s leg and was screaming at the top of his lungs: “Oo, stop it! Oo, stop hurtin’ Claire! Leave Claire ’lone!”

  “Excuse me.” Caroline, her face a picture of maternal concern, was pushing her way through the throng toward her son. “What on earth is going on?” she demanded in her best clipped, Mary Poppins voice, looking daggers at Pete. “What have you done to upset Hunter?”

  “What have I done?” Pete was spitting blood. “Your fucking out-of-control son just bit me. Take a look.”

  He hitched up the leg of his white linen pants. A deep purple bruise was already beginning to form around the livid red teeth marks that Hunter had left on his calf. Sheila Peterson winced. Pete looked at Caroline as though she were some particularly repulsive beetle that he was having difficulty in stamping on.

  “You know, Caroline,” he said quite calmly, “if you spent more time giving a shit about your kid, and less time dressing up like some dime-a-dozen hooker”—he ran his eyes insultingly up and down her body, lingering with distaste rather than lust on her barely contained breasts as they struggled for release from her red satin halter top—“then maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be such a little savage.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that!” said Caroline indignantly. It didn’t occur to her to take any offense on Hunter’s behalf. “Duke, did you hear how that bastard just spoke to me?” Everybody looked around for Duke, but he was nowhere to be seen. Hunter started to cry again.

  “On the contrary, Caroline,” said Pete, “I think you’ll find it’s your child who’s the bastard. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Claire and I would like to get back to the party.”

  “You do that,” Caroline snapped, wrenching Hunter’s hand from Claire’s, to the boy’s evident distress. “And perhaps in the future you’ll remember that he is my child, not yours.” She looked at Pete evilly. “Poor little Petey, still no luck on the ol
d baby front, eh? What seems to be the problem? Are your swimmers not quite up to it? Or can’t you get it up at all? That’s certainly not your father’s problem, so I don’t think it can be genetic, do you?”

  A couple of embarrassed titters rose from the crowd.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she addressed herself to Claire, deliberately turning her back on Pete, whose face had turned a livid puce with hatred and was clashing violently with his receding ginger hair, “I think I’ll go and get my son a tetanus shot. God knows what evil disease he may have picked up from your poisonous husband.”

  And with that she stalked off in search of Duke, her son jogging along reluctantly beside her.

  Pete made an effort to collect himself. If that bitch and her son had blown it for him with Peterson, he wasn’t going to let her forget it.

  “Okay, folks, show’s over.” He forced a smile and signaled to the DJ to resume the music. Supertramp came belting out across the lawn as the crowd once again broke off into little groups, all relishing this latest spectacular outburst of the McMahon feud. By Monday the story would be all over the papers. If only old Duke could have been there to witness it.

  Standing by his bedroom window, Duke clenched both hands around the model’s enormous breasts as he fucked her from behind, gazing down at the spectacle below. Watching Caroline get the better of Pete had excited him more than all the girl’s frenzied clenching and moaning, and he found himself coming hard as he thought about what he might do to her later, once all these fucking parasites had gone home. Why the hell did she insist on throwing so many parties, filling the house with these goddamn vacuous assholes? Caroline belonged to him—that was their deal—and he was growing increasingly tired of never having her to himself.

  Still, he thought complacently as he sent the starlet on her way, he couldn’t really complain. He’d had one hell of an anniversary party.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was a year to the day after Duke and Caroline’s party, and Pete didn’t think he had ever been so happy.

  Lying in postcoital bliss with Claire in the honeymoon suite at the Borgo San Felice in Siena, he felt like his life was, at last, starting to come together.

  “Mrs. McMahon, when was the last time I told you how beautiful you are?”

  Claire sighed happily and rolled over onto her stomach. “Gee, I don’t know, Pete,” she mocked him. “It must have been . . . what? . . . five minutes now?”

  He bent his head down and began kissing her spine, his lips brushing each vertebra with infinite tenderness. “Well, that is terrible,” he said between kisses. “I don’t know what I can have been thinking of for those five minutes. Because you really are”—he rolled her over gently and planted another kiss on her left nipple—“incredible.”

  Claire was three months pregnant. Just when Pete had begun to despair of ever fathering a child—for all his bluster and hostility toward his wife, he had long suspected that his sperm count might be less than spectacular, and blamed himself for their childlessness—it had finally happened. After so many months, years, of making ovulation charts, quitting smoking, wearing loose pants, after endless humiliating examinations by a stream of sympathetic but bewildered doctors, it had happened. Just like that.

  Pete knew he had not been the greatest of husbands to Claire in their six years together. Things had been so different when they met. A mutual friend had introduced them at some horrific party in the hills. Pete, as usual, was surrounded by a huge crowd of starlets and wannabes, all desperate to ingratiate themselves with the son of the one and only Duke McMahon. He had been on the point of making his excuses and heading home when a pale, shy-looking girl in the corner of the room caught his eye. She was being aggressively chatted up by Johnny Wright, a loathsome junior VP at Paramount.

  “Who is that?” he asked his friend Adam, nominally the host of the evening’s bash, although in fact he was only house-sitting and had paid for less than half of the booze being greedily consumed all around them.

  “Claire Bryant. Gorgeous, isn’t she? But don’t go getting any ideas.” He gave Pete a mock-stern look.

  “Why not?” Pete asked, knocking back most of his martini. “Don’t tell me she’s with Johnny. That guy is such an ass.”

  Adam shook his head. “No, God no. Look at her, she can’t stand the guy.”

  Claire had backed so far away from her admirer that her back was now pressed against the wall. She was trying to look at him, not wishing to seem impolite, but couldn’t help stealing frantic sideways glances, as if looking for some means of escape.

  “Well, what then?” said Pete. “Why shouldn’t I get any ideas? Not that I am getting any.”

  Adam laughed. “No, of course you aren’t! I just mean that she’s not like us, man. For one thing, she’s smart. She’s in her third year of medical school at UCLA. Two more years and you’re looking at Dr. Bryant.”

  “What on earth’s she doing here then?” asked Pete. “It’s hardly the sort of party for an academic girl.”

  Adam shrugged. “Danny brought her along, I think. Friend of the family or something. You should talk to her, though. I swear, it’s like she’s been living under a rock, she knows nothing about the business. Seriously, I don’t think she’d even know who your old man is.” Pete looked incredulous. “All she does is, like, read books and shit like that. She’s not from this planet, man.”

  “Yeah, well.” Pete glanced around at all the vacant, silicone-enhanced girls in the room. “I’m not so sure I like the women on this planet.” He downed the remnants of his drink and took his friend’s arm. “Introduce me, will you? She looks like she needs rescuing anyway.”

  They made their way over to her, battling through the throng, and Adam inserted himself in front of Johnny, much to Claire’s evident relief. “Claire, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” he said. “This is Petey McMahon.”

  “How do you do?” said the vision. “I’m Claire Bryant.”

  Close up she was even more beautiful. She was tall, almost as tall as Pete in her flat ballet pumps and, despite her air of fragility, quite statuesque. He was struck by her long, lean muscular arms and the womanly curve of her hips. She seemed simultaneously strong and in need of protection.

  She smiled at him with such genuine warmth, such femininity, that Pete felt instantly drawn toward her. He shook her hand. “Pete McMahon. A pleasure.”

  “He’s Duke McMahon’s son,” interjected the odious Johnny, on name-drop autopilot.

  “Oh,” said Claire, obviously baffled. “I’m sorry, do I know your father?”

  Adam winked at Pete. “Told you.”

  The two of them had hit it off immediately. They talked for hours. Pete had always adored his mother, but Minnie lacked the motherly softness that the lonely, angry little boy had always craved. Even in that very first conversation, Claire had listened to him, comforted him. She invited confidences and inspired total trust in a way that Pete found completely intoxicating.

  They began spending more and more time together. He felt he could tell her anything, and found that he became listless and withdrawn whenever he was away from her, as though he had lost his anchor and was suddenly floating out to sea. Importantly, Claire was the first and only woman who Pete knew for certain was not after either his name or his money. And God knew he was no Marlon Brando, so she sure wasn’t with him for his looks. For some inexplicable reason, she actually loved him for himself. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  Since their marriage, however, his gratitude for her love had gradually been replaced by a bitterness, a hatred of his father that consumed every ounce of his emotional energy. None of it was Claire’s fault. He knew that and cursed himself for the way he treated her, bullying her just as his father had always bullied his mother. But the rage inside him was like a cancer, and ever since Caroline had moved in, and even more so since Hunter was born, Pete had felt that cancer spread.

  Now, though, things would be different. Gazing down
at his wife’s naked, already swelling body, he felt almost overwhelmed with love for her and remorse at his own behavior. Now that Claire was pregnant, he could become the husband she had always deserved. And his new partnership with Peterson Studios would finally start to put him on the map as a producer, a success in his own right, not just good ol’ Duke McMahon’s son. Yeah, it was all coming together, all making sense at last.

  “Oh, Pete,” Claire murmured softly as he stroked her hair, “I really am so happy. With you, with the baby, with everything. I feel like we’ve been blessed. But don’t you wish we could just hide out in Italy forever, never go back to that house?”

  Pete felt the tears stinging the back of his eyes. She was so incredibly forgiving, so easily pleased. After all the pain he’d caused her, she was just happy to be here with him, grateful for one paltry week in Tuscany, their first vacation in over four years.

  “I know how you feel, honey.” He stroked her belly lovingly, wondering what he had ever done to deserve such an angel. “There’s something kinda magical about this place.”

  “Oh, there is!” said Claire, her eyes alight with enthusiasm. “Siena’s so incredible. The cathedral, the Piazza del Campo, the Palazzo Pubblico—my God, those frescoes, I’ve never seen anything like it. I never dreamed I would actually be here. And that it would all be so perfect, so like I expected, but at the same time even better than I expected. Sorry honey, I’m gushing.” She blushed sweetly. “But do you know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely,” said Pete, who had been bored rigid by the frescoes and the turgid tour of Siena’s famous Gothic cathedral, but was content simply to watch his wife blossoming and in her element. “But I’m afraid we really do have to go back. You know that, right?”

  She sighed, nestling closer. These few days in Siena had been like a dream, her unborn child the magic talisman that had somehow brought her husband back to her. And yet it had all been so sudden. She couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t going to change back just as suddenly into the withdrawn, aggressive figure she had come to know and dread.