‘Trust you’ve been happy with your stay?’
‘Hell, yeah.’ Jax whipped a pair of shades from the pocket of his shirt and slipped them on. ‘I’m windin’ it down, man, takin’ it easy.’
Reuben wondered if he could palm Jax off on JB, or even Rebecca, while he had the chance to gather himself, maybe get a shot of brandy, try to stop thinking about the
disaster of a morning he’d had. He just couldn’t shake the fear. Those words, they were too close to home.
I’m one of them …
There was no way. Not now. It couldn’t all come crashing down tonight.
‘Jeez! It’s hot.’ Jax raised his arms and sniffed both armpits in succession. It brought to mind a dog spraying a tree. ‘Fresh,’ he informed his entourage, all of whom nodded enthusiastically. ‘Hey, Roob, we was hopin’ for a grand tour before things kick off.’
Inwardly, Reuben groaned. This was the last thing he needed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get rid of Jax. Honest to Christ, the number of celebrity asses he’d had to wipe over the last thirty years! Wasn’t he a celebrity himself? Who was wiping his goddamn ass?
He smiled. ‘Of course, I’d be delighted.’
Discreet as a shadow, Margaret Jensen slipped back inside the mansion. That was the beauty of being a nobody. You never got noticed.
Mr V wouldn’t be pleased at the Jax interruption. She had surmised he was upset, though about what she couldn’t fathom. There was only one person who knew about the plan and he wasn’t due for another hour. No, it had to be a different concern: one that had her boss disappearing into meetings with JB and prowling the place like a hunted man …
Her sole priority was getting him on to that boat, him and all the rich, arrogant devils that had set the island’s great misfortune in motion. For her vengeance wasn’t just about Mr V. She was taking revenge for all of womankind, for mothers everywhere. On top of her private injustice
was a wider one: the vile enterprise she had watched unfold from the start. She’d experienced it first-hand, what it meant to be one of the mothers, lied to and exploited and cheated out of the most important thing there was, because Mr V told them one thing, he made out as if it were
humanitarian
, a kind of gruesome
charity
, when in fact he pocketed every dime himself. No wonder he was the rich bastard he was today. Stealing off the blind and stupid, couples who’d cough up any amount to protect their precious reputations, sleeping soundly at night as they imagined the women they were …
helping
. Margaret shuddered at the word. Those women had received no help. She’d been lucky, permitted to stay in the boy’s life because Mr V had decided he wanted an heir to his empire, and this one was as good as any.
Lucky
. She didn’t feel it.
Would Hollywood’s elite have time to figure out what was happening? Would they have seconds to regret, to repent? Or would death come in a bright hot flash?
Margaret busied herself, laying out a Moreau couture suit for Mr V to change into when he returned from the tour with Jax. Minutes with the Olympic idol had been plenty enough for her. She’d met many famous faces in her time, but he had to be one of the most delusional. Who did he imagine he was, some sort of deity? He’d barely deigned to glance her way; his radar didn’t pick her up: she wasn’t rich or celebrated, and she wasn’t young or especially attractive. It was a universally known fact that Jax liked women. One of her colleagues at the island’s Reef Spa had told her he was, in fact, being treated here for sex addiction. Never mind this rest and relaxation foil, the donkey simply couldn’t keep it buckled. Oh, Cacatra saw it
all. Only last month the spa had treated a global R&B star for his obsession with lifting heavy weights—at the height of his preoccupation he’d been attempting to lift anything he could get his hands on: tables displayed on a shop floor; strangers’ cars in the street … Never mind the weights at the gym, this guy wanted to lift the
machinery
. She’d heard how his therapist had been forced to nail office furniture to the floor in exasperation of them repeatedly being moved.
When all this was over, perhaps she’d write a book.
An edited one, naturally.
Margaret consulted the time. Once Enrique Marquez showed up, a little under an hour from now, she knew there would be no turning back. Not that she’d considered it, but of course there was a small, scared part of her that clamoured to call the whole thing off. All those people perishing, suffering in the water. And what next? Sharks? They were rife in this ocean, she knew. She had seen their black fins slicing through the water, quiet and deadly, too close to the shore for comfort. She imagined beautiful bodies torn limb from limb, designer gowns shredded and pampered skin bloated, the screams that would pierce the sky…
This was no time for conscience. The word didn’t exist out here, in any case. It belonged to a vocabulary that had been swallowed up long ago, drowned on the seabed, rusted as a wreck. Mr V had created a game without rules, without mercy, without pity—and forgotten he wasn’t the only one with a piece in play.
She had to go through with it. For Ralph, for her, for their future. For all the women in her position. For the ones who weren’t so lucky.
She’d waited a long time, too frightened, too weak, to
take action, believing Mr V to be the one with the power when, in fact, it was her. It had always been her.
At long last, Margaret Jensen was taking back what was hers.
On the opposite side of the island, in the villa where she spent most of her days, Rebecca Stuttgart watched her husband. She realised, with startling clarity, that she no longer hated him.
A long time she had hated JB Moreau, but not in the conventional sense. She had hated him because she adored him, had adored him from the moment they’d met, and yet through the course of their ten-year marriage she had been unable to make him feel the same way.
She observed his body in the pool below. Strong arms carving through the water, before a length, silent and still, beneath the surface, his shape fractured and fluid as a ribbon in air. He was a purposeful swimmer, fast and committed. Once, in a rare confidence, JB had told her that for months following the accident he had swum every morning. Miles and miles he would swim until his muscles gave in, then the same the next day, and the next, and the next after that. The sea became his obsession. It could not beat him.
Their courtship had been swift. JB had been twenty-three, she, a decade older. Her father had steered them into a union through a series of lunch invitations and industry parties. At the time Rebecca had turned a blind eye to the orchestrated romance. She had believed that despite her father’s machinations there was something real to pursue. There had been for her.
Moreau was the sexiest man she had ever known. He
exuded sex like musk. Good looks were one thing; charm was another. But sex. It was in his eyes, those shades of blue that changed like an ocean storm. It was his mouth. His skin. His scent, as cool and clean as snow.
But more than that, and the cement to her infatuation, was her husband’s wounded soul. Rebecca had trusted she could reach him: whatever he needed, she could give. She wanted to access a new part of the man she loved, a place left cold and quiet from years untouched. She felt she understood him in a way nobody else did: his indifferent parents, distant at best and neglectful at worst. How he had never been cared for as a child or received affection in its purest, selfless sense, how he had never been made to feel wanted or valued or cherished, how he’d been pushed to the background, a mistake, an oversight. Despite the nature of their meeting, she believed in time he would grow to feel for her what she did, and always would, for him.
At the start, he had made love to her as if it were their last living hour.
Make love …
She thought of the words differently these days. For that was what JB had been trying to do. The urgency she had mistaken for ardour was an attempt to break through, to feel, to
acquire
the thing that should have been given freely. To make love that had been missing from the start.
Rebecca backed away from the window. She could look no more.
Time had taught her one thing. JB Moreau was like winter, and no sun she could conjure would ever be warm enough.
Tomorrow, after Reuben’s party, Rebecca would leave this island for good. She had never wanted to follow him
here, but through the heady mists of her passion had tossed her scruples aside. Their marriage was over. JB treated her well, had shown her kindness in the past that even now it stung her heart to recall: when her father had died, the way he had held her tight and kissed her over and over till her body stopped shaking. But she knew he didn’t love her. She knew he had only entered the marriage because he didn’t believe there was anything more.
Was it any wonder they both sought refuge elsewhere? Rebecca, searching endlessly for fervour in another that could come close to matching her own, and JB for the thing in whose existence he doubted but nonetheless whose possibility he would chase to the ends of the earth.
She hadn’t been so reconciled when she’d first found out about the others. Maybe that was from where the lie had sprung. In any case, it did little to ease her conscience.
For years they had tried for a child of their own. In her mind it would be the switch in JB, the event that would change him. But Cacatra Island was poisoned in more ways than one. The child she had longed for had never arrived.
Terrified of losing him, grasping at ways to make him stay, Rebecca had blurted the fallacy: that it was he who was unable to conceive. She’d wanted to hurt him, make him see the result of his inability to love. And once the lie had been told, there was no way to unpick it. It was a vicious, evil mistruth—and tonight, finally, it would be revealed.
Hate that sprang from love was the very worst kind.
I’m one of them … The truth comes out …
Rebecca met her reflection in the closet mirror. She nodded, an assurance.
How could she have stayed silent, knowing what she did? And to whom, exactly, did she owe her allegiance?
The Spanish girl had been a shock, and like all shocks it had shifted the landscape. JB had sourced so many over the years but none had affected him as she did. At first, Rebecca had felt only disbelief at their working together—
after what he had meant her for
—but now she understood that Lori, and the secret she carried, was the only way out for any of them.
Once, Rebecca Stuttgart had been a powerful woman. Perhaps she still was. If knowledge was power, then she was mightier than them all.
Book Three
2010-11
29
Lori
Over the summer, with the launch of the new Valerie Girl and Mac’s latest sought-after cosmetics range, Lori Garcia became the most in-demand model on the fashion circuit. She graced billboards across the country, into Europe, out to Japan. Sexy, sultry, shy in her beauty—the market went crazy for her look. Each day was packed with photo shoots, magazine interviews, radio and TV appearances, red carpet events and lunches with the movers, shakers and heartbreakers of LA. Lori was growing into America’s sweetheart. In the eyes of the press, she could do no wrong. She’d been a poor, struggling Spanish girl from the wrong side of the tracks, rescued into a world of wealth and stardom by the guiding light that was La Lumière.
In many ways fame was how she’d imagined, in many ways it wasn’t. It was hard work. There were barely minutes to eat or sleep and her time was no longer hers. Little
was permanent: gigs came and went, countless hotel rooms a place to crash; friends were made and drifted away.
Her virginity became an enduring fascination. It was the combination of wide-eyed virtue and a glint that promised something more, and it was one of the first things Jacqueline Spark had raised when discussing publicity angles. She promised it would secure the fans’ devotion. It did. Lori became an example for young girls, not in a square, this-is-a-role-model-my-parents-think-I-should-have way, but in a way like an idolised older sister, a sharer of dreams and secrets. To guys she was irresistible, the suggestion that she was saving herself—just for them—in a celebrity world where innocence was a rare commodity.
But Lori wasn’t the innocent. She felt further from innocence than ever she had.
It wasn’t that she’d kissed a married man. That was part of it, of course—but it was more. It was that she had been forced to harden, to develop an exterior that was toughening by the day like the rind on a piece of soft fruit. To Lori’s nascent heart, the deceit she had suffered at the hands of JB Moreau was the most profound betrayal imaginable.
She thought back to that terrible lunch at La Côte with a cringing sort of ache. How his wife had approached the table, so elegant, so poised: secure in the knowledge that he was hers. Rebecca Stuttgart, daughter of the late Crawford Stuttgart, billionaire financier and owner of an American banking corporation, was, at forty-two, a decade older than her husband. She was ravishing in a classic, screen-siren way, with sleek, plum-coloured hair and pale, flawless skin, everything about her expensively immaculate, from her delicately drawn make-up to the gems that glinted on her wrists and fingers. Lori recognised her from the
Frontline event in Vegas, the solemn woman at JB’s right-hand side. How could she have been so blind?
It had taken every ounce of will to respond to his admission, like talking through mud.
‘I—I didn’t realise you were married.’
It became horribly clear why he’d blanked her. The married man found out.
Stupid stupid stupid!
Every taunt, every insult her sisters had ever thrown her way she now pitched at herself—for once, apposite.
Whore! Tramp! Slut!
She was furious with herself. JB had taken her for a ride and she had fallen for it. He was a cocksman, everyone said so: she understood now that he probably dropped in on legions of teenagers in the poorer parts of town, delivering his smooth come-ons, whatever he needed to, playing the hero, all for the sake of a kiss, maybe more. It was probably a turn-on for a man like him, knowing he could have anyone but choosing to slum it once in a while—bored with his wife’s attentions, looking for something a little rougher round the edges.