Betrayal (4 page)

She and Victor worked well together, and Tallie counted on both of them to keep her financial life in order. With Brigitte at the helm, it ran like a Swiss clock. Hunt always said he was envious of her and wished he had an assistant like Brigitte. She was even helpful to him too, and never minded assisting him with anything.

Tallie read the script changes on the way back to Palm Springs, and they had faxed several more to Brigitte at midnight the night before. She had brought those with her too, and Tallie went over all of it, while making copious notes. She wanted more changes when they got to the set, which did not surprise Brigitte. That was how she worked, vigilant about the tiniest detail.

“So what did you do last night?” she asked her assistant as they approached Palm Springs.

“Nothing much. Took a bath, read, answered some e-mails. I went to bed pretty early. I need my beauty sleep,” Brigitte said innocently. The one thing she never told Tallie about was the actors she got involved with on the set. Once in a while Tallie found out, and she didn’t say anything about it. She had a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude, and figured that it was one of the perks of Brigitte’s job,
if
that was what she wanted, and it seemed to be. Tallie didn’t think it was worth the trouble commenting on it since Brigitte’s on-set romances never lasted longer than the making of the film. It was fine with her, as long as she didn’t put Tallie in a compromising position of some kind, or promise favors she couldn’t deliver, but Brigitte was too smart for that, and never stepped over that line. So Tallie figured that whoever Brigitte slept with was none of her business. She looked a little too innocent to her employer and old friend as they drove along, and Tallie smiled, wondering who it was. Undoubtedly someone very young, one of the extras or young actors. That was always Brigitte’s style.

Tallie’s day on the set was as busy as the one before. Brigitte stuck around and brought her cold drinks and hot ones, and saw to it that she got something to eat. Otherwise Tallie never took the time, she was too impatient and had too much to do to stop for meals. It was the same reason why she didn’t bother to dress decently and comb her hair. Tallie was obsessed with her work, and hated anything that distracted her from it or took a moment of her time away.

Brigitte answered e-mails, and made several calls for her. She called Victor Carson and told him about the audit, and when she had nothing else to do, she sat and watched the action on the set. She often gave Tallie very valuable critiques. She had a great eye, and she always knew exactly the nuance and impact that Tallie was trying to get. Tallie respected her candid opinions much of the time. Brigitte had learned a lot about the business over the years.

It was another good day, and Tallie talked to Hunt when she
finished
work. He was on his way to a meeting at the Polo Lounge, and told her about what he’d done all day. He said he missed her, and after a few minutes they hung up. She liked that neither of them felt they had to be together all the time, like Siamese twins. They lived together but had their own lives, with joint projects as a common bond. But he never got antsy or jealous when she was away, and she didn’t worry about him. After four years they trusted each other and knew each other well.

Hunt was an entirely different kind of man from the ones she’d been involved with before, all of whom had eventually cheated on her. Her second husband had been the most glaring case of that, but the others hadn’t behaved much better. It was the kind of men she met in the film business. She liked the fact that Hunt was honest, true, and solid. He wasn’t as exciting as the other guys in some ways, but she wasn’t looking for excitement, she wanted a man she could love and trust. Otherwise, why bother? She had come to that conclusion a long time ago, and had learned it the hard way, after being burned too many times. He was essentially and profoundly a kind man. He mentioned to her before he hung up that everything had gone fine when he took her father for his tests, although he thought he was looking a little thin.

“I know. His housekeeper says he doesn’t eat enough,” Tallie said, sounding worried.

“I should go over and cook for him sometime,” he said thoughtfully.

“As though you have nothing else to do,” she said.

“I can make time. I love your dad, he’s a great guy. We had a good time today. I think he was a little nervous before we went. I
told
him all my new jokes, and he was fine by the time we got there.”

“Thank you for doing that,” she said, genuinely touched. These were the things that made her love Hunt, and there were a lot of them. He was an extremely thoughtful person, and he had always been equally good to Max. The two of them got along very well. Max had been fourteen when Tallie started dating him, and after a little initial resistance, she had relaxed. And by the time Hunt moved in a year later, it seemed like a natural evolution to all of them, even Tallie’s father, who was a little more old-fashioned about things like that. He called Hunt his “son in love.”

Tallie settled in at the hotel in Palm Springs that night. She was happy that things were going well on the film. None of the usual nightmares had happened, like problems with insurance, investors, actors who got sick or tried to break their contracts, hated each other, or got injured on the set. Those things didn’t happen to her often, but when they did, it was a mess. Tallie always tried to avoid problems by hiring actors with reputations for being reliable, and getting all the kinks in their contracts worked out beforehand. Hunt was brilliant at handling those details, which was why their joint productions were such a success. She loved working with him. He was the best producer she’d ever had. And Tallie drove herself hard, was tireless in her efforts to get the best performance possible out of each actor, and the best writers and scripts she could. She deserved the remarkable reputation she had.

And she was content relaxing at the hotel that night. She and Brigitte went for a swim at the pool, and Brigitte had arranged for a massage for Tallie in her room, which Tallie said afterward was
heavenly.
She suggested Brigitte get one too, which was a perk Brigitte thoroughly enjoyed. The lifestyle that Brigitte shared with Tallie, and benefited from because of her, suited her to perfection. Thanks to Tallie, she led a star’s life.

Victor Carson was staring at a mountain of papers, files, and spreadsheets on his desk. He had been Tallie’s financial adviser for fifteen years, and other than the details Brigitte handled, his firm did all the accounting for her. And when Brigitte called to tell him about the audit for the investor, he almost groaned aloud. It was a headache he just didn’t need. His life was complicated enough as it was. His own problems were precluding everything else. He didn’t know why they were requiring an independent audit. All he needed were a bunch of hostile auditors taking all his records and files apart and demanding explanations for them. Tallie’s affairs were in good order, but an audit would be incredibly time-consuming, even with someone else doing it, and possibly more so, if he had to explain everything to them. Normally, he and Brigitte handled everything and it was smooth as silk. He just didn’t have the time to spend on this, but there was no way he could say that to Hunt or Tallie. He was having personal problems, although he would never have admitted it to them. He now handled Hunt’s taxes as well as Brigitte’s. But right now, he had his hands full at home.

Women had always been Victor’s nemesis. His first wife had cost him a fortune in alimony and a settlement twenty years before when she discovered that he had a mistress, a beautiful Italian
model.
He left his wife for her and married her. He had had two children with his first wife, and had twins with the second. Two years later she adapted to the American ways he had taught her, left him for someone much younger than he was, and took him to the cleaners. She’d eventually gone to Paris, married someone there, and he hadn’t seen his twin daughters in eighteen years. They were strangers to him, and he had been paying child support for them until that year. Fortunately his two older children were now adults and employed, and their mother had remarried, but for several years he had been supporting two ex-wives and four children.

And more recently, some bad investments made by his own financial adviser had lost him a considerable amount of money. He took far better care of his clients than he did of his own affairs. And at sixty-two, he had fallen madly in love with a young aspiring actress, and married her after a sexually charged weekend in Las Vegas. He had promised to use all his connections in Hollywood to help launch her career, which had turned out to be not as easy as he’d thought. As it turned out, Brianna had no talent, her screen tests had been a disaster, and the only work she’d been able to get was as a bathing suit model at trade shows, which was not what she’d had in mind.

Victor had just turned sixty-five, Brianna was twenty-nine and threatening to divorce him if he didn’t make good on his promises to establish her career in either movies or TV. She was great in bed, but not on the screen. And she hadn’t slept with him in six months anyway. She spent all her time getting plastic surgery, shopping up and down Rodeo Drive, and demanding money from him. She had
threatened
to leave him only the week before, and he didn’t want her to. As impossible as she was, she was a breath of excitement and glamour in his otherwise dull life and he was crazy about her. She seemed like the perfect trophy wife to him. He loved going out with her on his arm, and watching other men look at him with envy, or so he thought. Anyone who had spent an evening with her would have pitied him instead. But he was besotted and didn’t want to lose her, whatever it took. And the truth was, with his recent financial losses, he couldn’t afford her anymore, and he didn’t want her to know. He could barely cover her shopping habit. She was constantly angry at him and demanding things, or trying to improve on body parts she had already had altered before. She had had her first set of implants redone, a tummy tuck, a buttock lift, and recently had liposuction on her thighs. But whatever it took to keep her, he was willing to pay the price. It was cheaper than alimony and a settlement. But he didn’t know where to get the money from anymore. He felt like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

He was much too busy juggling his own money to want to spend time on Tallie’s audit, which would be time-consuming. He had just promised to take Brianna to Europe, and if he reneged on that now, he was sure she’d leave him. She wanted to go to Brazil to check out a plastic surgeon there. His life had been a descent into hell for the past three years, and losing a large amount of money recently was putting his life and marriage at risk. There was no question in his mind that if Brianna knew, she’d leave him. Flat. His children would be happy if she did, but Victor would be devastated.

He left his office at eight o’clock that night and went home. Brianna was waiting for him, and the result of her day’s catch was still in shopping bags near the front door. He winced when he saw the familiar names. Dolce and Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli, Neiman’s, and Chanel. It was a full-time job for her, and as far as she was concerned, the only reason to be married to a man his age. Victor Carson was not an exciting man, and he looked older than his age. He wasn’t attractive, and Brianna was only interested in what he could do for her. He always meant to diet but never got around to it, and had never been to a gym in his life. And he had lost his hair in his early thirties. But he adored his beautiful young wife and was totally dazzled by her. Other men longed for expensive cars, or large blocks of real estate, or dreamed of success. All Victor ever wanted was a beautiful young woman in his bed. It had cost him two marriages and some very heavy debts so far, and he was well on his way to the same fate again. Unless he won the lottery, there was no way Brianna was going to stay with him.

“You’re late,” she said petulantly when he walked in.

“I had a lot to do today,” mostly trying to figure out how to pay her bills, but the upcoming audit for Tallie had caused him additional work. He had to get his assistants working on organizing her files.

“I want to go out to dinner,” she pouted at him. She had had her lips modeled on Angelina Jolie’s and had a fearsome pout.

He didn’t want to tell her he was exhausted and wanted a quiet evening at home. “Where did you have in mind?” He never denied her anything, and now wasn’t the time to start.

“Mr. Chow,” she said with a gleam in her eye. She loved seeing
the
stars who went there, and the paparazzi gathered outside. It was loud, trendy, expensive, and the food was very good. It was definitely the place to be and to be seen.

“All right. I’ll call and see if we can get a reservation,” he said quietly.

“I already did,” she said with a broad smile. “We have to be there in ten minutes. I invited Carla and John to join us.” They were her friends, not his, ordered the most expensive things on any menu, and fancy wines, and never reached for the check. And they were her age.

All of her friends expected him to be their sugar daddy, and so did she. His own friends had disappeared long since. The women he went out with, and now Brianna, made their wives uncomfortable. Victor felt they were just jealous. It never occurred to him that they thought he was a fool, and Brianna unbearable. She never talked about anything but plastic surgery and the gossip she read in movie magazines. He wasn’t looking forward to an evening of hearing about which Hollywood couple had broken up, who was sleeping with or cheating on whom, and whose facelift or new breasts looked the best. But it was the life he had chosen for himself, high-stakes marriage with a gold digger half his age. He never thought about it that way, although her insatiable appetite for his money had begun to frighten him. None of his clients had ever met his wife, although Brigitte had run into him at a nightclub one night and told Tallie she looked terrifying. She would never have expected somber, sedate, mousy Victor Carson to be married to someone like her. And he had looked proud when he introduced her to Brigitte, which was even worse. Brigitte thought he should
have
been embarrassed to be seen with her. She was expensively dressed, but it didn’t help. The obvious designer labels and flashy diamond necklace and ring didn’t alter the fact that she looked like someone he had rented for the night, not invested in for a lifetime. To Brigitte, Brianna looked like a colossal mistake.