Bad Boy Boss (6 page)

“You sent me up there with a guy who had my nipples hard before we got to Running Springs; mountains, what mountains?”

He laughed. “Heard you’re the new Mary, pretty big shoes to fill. But you certainly are pretty enough, and that’s saying a lot.”

“That’s what I’m finding out anyway.”

This was what was known as an A list party; in other words, the top people in the entertainment business. Which didn’t exactly work to my benefit. A list parties in Santa Barbara end up in the society section of every paper in the country, so if I wanted to remain hidden, it was going to take a little doing. Now Peter had done three one-man shows; two in LA and one in New York, so he wasn’t exactly an unknown. Rich people seem successful even if they aren’t very. Alex Baker, the artist son of Oscar winning actor Harrison Baker, drove a Jaguar, dressed expensively and was known to spend a good buck or two at better restaurants. So despite the fact that his entire artistic career was in the minus column economically, he was treated as if he were on a par with Picasso. Which meant gossip columnists, the occasional paparazzo and a lot of speculation as to who the girl on his arm was. Since he introduced me as his model, it was sort of assumed that I was a model, despite the fact that I had far too much T and A to be a successful one.

I got a surprise in the middle of the party when a man about our age walked up. “Can I get an introduction, Alex?” he said.

“Mary, meet Jeremy Sinclair: producer, director, occasional writer, and currently, if I’m not mistaken, producing a sitcom that we can’t see because I don’t have a TV or a cable subscription. Jeremy, this is Mary, my model.”

Jeremy shook my hand warmly and brushed his lips against my cheek. “Cash has been filling my ear with just how good an actress you are.”

I turned red. “You know what Cash produces?”

“I have some money in the theaters and networks,” he explained, ignoring my embarrassment. “In three weeks, we have to go back into production. I would like you to come down to Burbank in two weeks and read some stuff for us.”

“I think I’m done with what Cash does,” I said.

“It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Not that I’m knocking what Cash does, but this is for mainstream TV. It’s a minor, somewhat recurring part, and you have the look for it.”

“I’ve never really acted in the mainstream world before.”

“I have a good eye for this stuff… obviously, or I wouldn’t be in the successful position I’m in. And I think you’d be great switching over to network TV. Just give it a shot. If I’m wrong and you don’t like it or if the camera doesn’t like you, no harm done, right? But I’m very rarely wrong.”

“I don’t have a union card or anything,”

“We’ll fix that up, not to worry.”

“And I’m sort of under contract for the next fifteen weeks; I’d have to ask.”

“What do you say, Alex?”

“I’ll bring her down the hill; just set us up with an appointment before we leave. I have a book to deliver, just like you have a show. So we have to coordinate things.”

“I’ll make a few calls and get back to you before you leave.”

“No hurry, we’re staying the night.”

When Jeremy left, Peter turned to me. “You did want to audition didn’t you?”

“I’m not really an actress. I mean I don’t know anything about it.”

“You know more than most. Most women aren’t beautiful; you are, and you can talk. From what I have seen – and I have been raised around it – an actress is, for the most part, a beautiful woman who can at least mumble what she’s told to. The rest is what a press agent does.”

I just hugged his arm; I was really a fish out of water. An X-lister at an A list party, acting? About all I knew was to pull my punches and make it look like I wasn’t. What was Cash thinking?

Peter showed me through the house… mansion, whatever. I was puzzled by the fact that on a very ornate mantelpiece, over a very ornate fireplace, there were two Oscars.

“I didn’t know your father had won two Oscars.”

“He didn’t,” Peter answered. “The first one is Mom’s; she’s a screenwriter. It’s been there since Reagan was president. She won it the year they moved out here, before I was born. Dad just caught up with her last year. For a long time, he never thought he would. He was never a leading man; just that, over the years he became a respected character actor and caught an iconic role. The irony was that it was Mom’s screenplay, and she didn’t win.”

The place had two staircases so I guess it had ‘wings’ which would tend to support the ‘mansion’ rather than the ‘house’ designation. Peter took me upstairs to our rooms. I had a room and he had a room. A door connected them and they each had their own bathroom. Both had a beautiful view of the ocean and the day was clear enough to catch a glimpse of the Channel Islands, at least Santa Cruz which was the biggest and closest to Santa Barbara.

“We mess up one bed, then sleep in the other, right?” I said. “You are not even vaguely contemplating leaving me alone tonight, are you?”

In answer, he pushed me down on the bed. He got his hand under my bra and was kissing me. I was really too scared right then to get hot, and he seemed to know that when my nipples didn’t react to his touch as they normally did.

“At night,” he said, “the sound of the ocean fills these rooms. It’s very romantic, and I can’t wait to have you in my arms to share that with. No one is going to leave you alone, here, or anywhere else I can think of. You’re done with alone; now we do together.”

“What about LA?”

“The audition?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll stay in the Glendale house. It’s not as big as this, but it’s close to Hollywood, Burbank and the studios. It’s up in the Verdugo Hills; if it weren’t for the smog, it’d have a great view.”

“So you’re planning on staying with me.”

“I’m planning on staying with you forever, but I can’t help much with the acting. I’m no good at it, you see. This was decided when I did two pilots for television and, in both cases, my scenes were reshot with another child actor because I was terrible. Cameras and I don’t like each other. And yes, they did cast me in a stage play in High School, right here in Santa Barbara. I embarrassed my sister so badly she publicly disowned me right in the center of the cafeteria, and that was for the dress rehearsal, an understudy did it for the public.”

“In other words, you’re a terrible liar, even when it’s expected you can’t do it acceptably. That’s a good thing to know.”

Jeremy caught us at the bottom of the stairs with a letter he had printed out from an email. It sort of introduced me to whoever at Warner Brothers needed to read it and said I was expected at a certain place and time and that Alex Baker would be with me.

Next he introduced me to his sisters, both were rather exotic-looking women; well, WASP father, Jewish mother, and like their mother, they took care of themselves physically. Frankly, they were just the fifty-second time I felt both out-classed and embarrassed, and it was just the beginning of the afternoon. Just the dress on either one cost more than I’d earned my entire life.

If I were disposed to drinking I’d have crawled into a bottle and stayed there. I was feeling so out of place and scared, I just clung to Peter’s arm. I smiled whenever I started to blush, which must have given everyone the impression that I was a very happy person, always smiling like that.

Cash hung around with us most of the afternoon. From what I could gather, they were thrown together often while growing up. Cash’s dad, who was Harrison’s brother, owned three Ford dealerships on the California coast, plus the house/mansion next door. I guess it really helps careers along when your great-grandfather happens to dig up a pool of oil. By contrast, if my great-grandfather ever dug anything, it was probably a sewer, which might explain my feelings of total inadequacy all that afternoon and evening.

Cash, it seemed, had just latched onto another company, this one out of Northridge doing some fairly good BDSM. He wanted to get them involved in a project to remake
The Story of O
, with better quality production values. He certainly had the contacts to get a hold of a chateau, and had already talked Carrie into reading the book.

Since I had read the book, I figured that my two cents might be worth something. “Some of that stuff has to hurt, Cash; does Carrie know that? And getting your snatch pierced is sort of permanent.”

“Digital nowadays,” he said. “You can do about anything.”

“And a fifty-year-old book is going to stand up?”

“Hey, it makes
Fifty Shades of Grey
look like a nursery rhyme.”

“So does most of De Sade, but you don’t see Spielberg running to make a movie of
Justine
.”

“You’ve read this?” Peter asked and I turned a scarlet so deep, my best smile couldn’t cover it.

“I went through a phase,” I said. “And no, I didn’t finish
Fifty Shades
… it wasn’t on a par.
O
was by far the best, probably because a woman wrote it.”

“How sexist,” chuckled Cash. “And you didn’t know she knew this?”

“She was so much better than that when it came to practical application.”

I looked like a stop sign with a smile painted on it for a while.

The party trailed off as the sun went down. We ended up in the living room with his parents, sisters and brothers-in-law. I mean, talk about intimidated, two captains of industry, their wives, two Oscar winners and their son, and a little girl from Reseda with some minor expertise in faking a catfight.

“Jeremy mentioned he wanted you to audition for his show,” Harrison directed at me.

“Yes,” I responded. “I'm really flattered, but I don’t think I’ll do that well. I really don’t know how.”

“Cash disagrees; he says you are very good at holding a character.”

“That’s not hard really,” I said. “The things I’ve done are just two dimensional; you’re the heroine – the baby face, it’s called – or the villainess, which is called the heel, and you cheat.”

“So it’s pro wrestling?”

“Not on that level. We do get into some choreography; a few set routines, more to keep from getting hurt than anything else. It’s a simple character, like as a face, I’m sweet Little Lisa; as a heel I’m Terrible Tara.”

“You hardly look like Terrible Tara,” said Sarah, Peter’s older sister.

“Actions speak louder than looks, I guess. Tara always starts a match by sneaking up behind her opponent before the bell rings, and uses at least one ‘foreign object’ in the course of the ‘match.’ Lisa starts by getting attacked from behind and gets a ‘foreign object’ or two conked off her head before the match ends.”

“A couple of the best actors I know are professional wrestlers,” said Harrison. “They perfect characters so well that – especially with a live audience, but through TV as well – they create whole love and hate relationships with an audience. That’s all acting is really: creating a relationship with your audience. When you read the character, you decide whether she’s sweet Little Lisa or Terrible Tara, and hold that persona in your mind as you read the lines. If you keep doing it, you develop a bunch of characters until you get to be me with a background of a few hundred characters to step into and out of like you do Lisa and Tara. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve got a leg up on most young actresses; you have actually experienced it, changed your persona and followed it out. Most of them haven’t; they’re just playing themselves and hoping to catch on.”

“Even something as simple as I’ve done?”

“It is simple,” said Harrison. “Lisa is a sweet little girl the guys want to protect and cuddle; Tara is a hellcat they want to fight to get into. It’s simple; you just convey which one to the audience. Cash says you’re his biggest draw because you seem to be able to do it.”

“If I ever do it again, Cash and I are going to have a little talk about compensation.”

“I don’t really think you’re going to do it again,” Rachel said, “so I doubt the question will come up.”

I put the peignoir on. The situation just called for me to wear something, anything. Peter pushed me down on the bed and took it off. Then he did the perfect thing: nothing. He lay against my back, holding me over my breast and stomach and not moving, just being there for me. He seemed to know that all this had frightened me badly and I needed to be a little girl, safe and warm in his arms. We lay there, awake, it seemed like half the night, although it probably wasn’t all that long. I couldn’t sleep and if he hadn’t been holding me, I would probably be up and pacing. I could feel that he was hard against my tush.

“Time to switch beds,” I said and led him into the other room.

I got us up on our sides pulled him into me and hooked his leg to hold him tight. Then I started to cry.

I don’t think it bewildered him; I had just disarmed him before I started. I had his arms pinned in my embrace. One leg under him the other hooked by mine, and me, crying into the space between his neck and shoulder. Plus, he was inside and since I wasn’t moving, his arms were pinned; he was just stuck there.

Well, I did get to cry myself out and was pretty much all cried out by the time I let him go and proceeded to try and make him cum, which, not at all surprisingly, took no time at all.