So stealing my scripts wasn’t enough for you, eh? Or turning my writers against me? Oh no. You have to take my wife from me too? My wife!
What stung the most was that Dorian’s own marriage remained a Hollywood paragon. Of course, everyone knew Rasmirez’s wife was a slut, a middle-aged, over-the-hill TV actress who fucked everything with a pulse under thirty in a sad attempt to keep her husband’s attention. Yet Dorian stood by her, besotted, proclaiming his cuckolded love for her from the rooftops. Harry Greene wanted to destroy Dorian Rasmirez’s marriage, to take away his wife the way that Dorian had taken away Angelica. But the Rasmirezes remained tighter than ever, a fact that ate away at Harry like a flesh-rotting virus.
He’d tried to numb the pain by hurting Dorian professionally, using his immense influence with studios, distributors and the media to damage his rival’s movies. Harry liked to think that by deliberately moving the release date of the most recent
Fraternity
film so that it coincided with Rasmirez’s dull and worthy war flick, he’d put the final nail in the coffin of
Sixteen Nights.
‘He’ll be lucky if it runs for fourteen nights,’ Harry told a reporter from
Variety
, in a quote that made headlines across the industry – and turned out to be an accurate prophecy. The film bombed. But the satisfaction it gave Harry to know that Rasmirez had lost money was fleeting. Money could always be replaced. A marriage, on the other hand, once destroyed was destroyed forever.
On the screen in front of him, two girls were giving each other head. One was black, the other Asian. Both were perfect physical specimens, narrow-hipped and boyish, the way Harry liked them, but with outlandishly large, round breasts stuck to their ribs like two soccer balls. Every couple of seconds they looked up from each other’s pussies and stared into the camera, while Harry whispered obscenities at them. As always it was the look in their eyes that made him come. So desperate, so wholly under his control. Harry Greene liked things being under his control. It made him feel that life was as it should be.
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.
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 this 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.