Wicked Ambition (54 page)

‘I’ll buzz you when I land,’ said Turquoise. There was a knock at her trailer door and she said goodbye before going to answer it.

‘Hello,’ said Bronx, stepping inside with his lazy, sexy grin.

She returned it. Now nobody need ever find out about her past, unless she chose to tell. She had chosen one person, and that was the man she had fallen in love with. Bronx had always been there, he’d never wavered, never faltered, and she could trust him with her life.

During one long, painful weekend, Turquoise had told Bronx everything. She had bared it all, every detail, right from the start, and, amazingly, here he was. He was still here.

‘Don’t you know I’m working?’ she teased.

‘You’re always working. All work and no play makes Bronx a bored boy. Especially when you look so hot and your hair’s a mess.’

She had traded her confession for the most precious thing in the world.

Love.

Bronx looped his arms around her waist and steered her back into the trailer.

She giggled. ‘What are you going to do?’

Deeply, he kissed her. ‘Everything. Always.’

She kissed him back. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I can live with that.’

Kristin watched Turquoise on TV the following night, promoting her new single. The women had stayed close since Italy and were hoping to collaborate on a track in the New Year. She was happy to see her friend succeed.

She had travelled to New York for a meeting about the Bunny White ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ Foundation, an organisation for kids who felt lonely or unhappy or simply needed someone to talk to. The session had gone well and she had returned to her hotel brimming with ideas and inspirations. It was positive to be channelling her grief into a meaningful outcome. Not a minute passed when she didn’t think about Bunny and miss her horribly, but knowing her sister would have loved the foundation and what it stood for was some comfort. Hour by hour, day by day, she was getting there.

‘How can she be so…
on
it already? It’s like the Platinums didn’t affect her at all.’

Next to her, one arm behind his head as he relaxed on the bed with his ankles crossed, one sock sporting a hole, Joey Lombardi drank from a bottle of Coke and frowned at the screen. Joey was visiting his brother in NYC and he and Kristin had decided to hook up. When he’d suggested coming to her hotel she hadn’t known what to say.

‘She’s a professional,’ Kristin replied, with a shrug.

‘So are you, but you still took a break.’

‘That’s different. I wanted to.’

Since the Awards Kristin had shifted down a gear. These days she was focusing on behind-the-scenes projects that were less about fame and attention and more about making her feel as if she was achieving something worthwhile. She had hired a lawyer and finally broken free from Ramona, whose white-knuckle grip on her assets had at last been released.

Financial and career independence was priceless, and while she would never cut her mother totally loose—one absent daughter was enough—there was no reason for them to work together again. Ramona had played out the tantrum, refusing to speak to her until, in several months, she would no doubt come creeping back for a reflected splash of Kristin’s celebrity. In the meantime she had moved to Europe and begun dating a Danish body builder. Kristin had heard from a mutual acquaintance that Ramona had begun training herself, ever in pursuit of the career that would make her name. The competitive spirit never waned.

Joey stretched his arm out so it snaked behind her on the pillow. She pretended not to notice. The movement hitched up his T-shirt so she caught a flash of his olive-skinned stomach, a trail of fuzz running into his jeans.

‘Anyway, what about you?’ Kristin mumbled, embarrassed. She sat up and focused intently on her painted toe-nails. ‘I don’t see Fraternity reforming any time soon.’

He laughed. ‘No shit.’

‘You’re not sad?’

‘Sure. I’ll always be kinda sad. But it ended for a reason and now we just want to get on with the future. Brett’s writing
solo stuff. Doug’s signed a modelling contract. Luke’s taking a vacation with his girlfriend someplace…’

At least Luke wasn’t off with Ramona. Cringe! Kristin had blanked most of that night from her memory so at least was now spared the detail of her mother’s erroneous dalliance.

‘It’s cool,’ Joey finished. ‘I just want to see what else is out there. Maybe we’ll do a Greatest Of or get together further down the line, never say never and all that, but I’ve been in this game since forever and it’s not reality. I want to be…
normal
for a while.’

She could relate.

‘And Scotty?’ she asked.

Joey tensed. Neither of them wanted to talk about Scotty or the price he had paid at the Platinums…it was too sad. His first event on that scale and he had seemed so fixed, so
optimistic
when she’d spoken to him, only to have that tragedy waiting in the wings.

‘I don’t know. He wasn’t taking calls last time I tried.’

‘I think I’ll go see him,’ Kristin said.

‘I wouldn’t. Not yet. He needs time.’ Seeing her worried expression, Joey sat up next to her. ‘He’ll be OK. Really, he will.’

‘I thought I’d never get over hating Scotty, not after how he hurt me. But we were friends, you know? Best friends. It’s odd knowing that I still care about him.’

Joey took a strand of blonde from in front of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear.

‘Don’t you think it’s weird how sometimes we miss the most obvious things?’

She averted her gaze.

‘Just that you can be convinced for ages about how you feel,’ he murmured, ‘then one day you wake up and everything changes.’ He was looking straight at her.

Her heart quickened. ‘I guess…’

Joey didn’t take his hand away. He moved his fingers to her chin and lifted it.

‘C’mon,’ he said tentatively, ‘why d’you really think I’m here?’

His eyes were gorgeous, deep and brown. She thought how lovely his thick hair was, how kind his smile, how good he had always been to her, through it all. Joey Lombardi had never left her side and she had seen him as a constant friend, taken him for granted when maybe…just maybe, he was the guy she had always been searching for.

‘You’ve got to know how I feel about you,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve felt like this for years, watching you with Scotty and Jax and every guy who came along and got a piece of you because I was too slow and I didn’t tell you in time—’

She cut him off with a kiss, one gentler and softer than any she had known. It was the purest, sweetest kiss and she never wanted it to end.

When at last they parted he said, ‘I’ve waited a long time for that.’

Kristin fell into his arms. Finally, she had found her fairy-tale ending.

Scotty Valentine rested back in the bathtub and put his hand cautiously under the water. He felt for it, unable to become accustomed to the glaring absence, until his fingers came into contact with the smooth, yielding stump of his knee.
Where his calf, ankle and foot should have been, there was nothing. Just air. Just water.

He was lucky to have survived. Ivy Sewell had blasted his leg but it could just as easily have been his back or his chest, and then what?

While they hadn’t been able to save his leg, he had been spared his future.

Living was what mattered, living each day to the fullest and not caring what anybody thought, just being himself, whether that concerned his disability, his sexuality or anything else that people cared to criticise him for. Scotty chose to see those things as badges of his strength and was honoured to bear both with pride.

There was a tap at the door and Fenton put his head round.

‘Everything OK?’

Scotty smiled, gesturing for him to come in. He had moved into Fenton’s waterfront Nantucket home following his release from hospital. In the aftermath of the Platinums, the ex-lovers’ private drama had been rendered small fry, no longer worthy of precious column inches. Given the space and time to talk and reconnect, the men had worked through their issues and seen what it was they really wanted—and that was each other.

Fenton was Scotty’s ally, his companion and his lover. For a while he had lost his way, scared and confused, unable to separate his feelings about the relationship from the fear-fuelled pressure that had haunted him every waking hour.

Now, things were different. Fenton no longer held him on a pedestal. Scotty no longer let his anxieties dictate his treatment of the man who treasured him most. They no longer
had a working relationship; they had an intimate one built on confidence and affection.

‘Surprise,’ said Fenton, producing two flutes of champagne.

‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s our anniversary.’

‘It is?’ Scotty grinned. Fenton went to help him but he insisted on doing it himself, using the rail at the side of the tub while he became accustomed to the movement.

Fenton perched on the side. He touched his glass to Scotty’s.

‘Three months since we started over,’ he said.

Scotty leaned in for a kiss. ‘Three amazing months.’ Time in which Fenton had exceeded what he’d thought feasible of one human being’s capacity for another. His support and devotion were boundless. It was impossible to imagine feeling any closer than this.

He didn’t know how he would have done it without him. His boyfriend had been his pillar. This was where it began again. No more hiding away.

‘You’re brave,’ said Fenton.

‘I’ve had a brave man with me,’ he replied.

Fenton took his hand. The King of the Charts had resigned from the music industry and moved to Massachusetts to experience a quieter life. He enjoyed fishing, hiking and travelling to Rhode Island on weekends to visit friends, where he would cook good food and sit on the veranda smoking and watching the stars. After the cut and thrust of the pop industry it was a welcome change, and while he had misgivings about Scotty pursuing a solo career he didn’t discourage it. He had lived forty years in that world and the
way he saw it now—especially now, after the wreck of the Platinums—it was a ruthless place. Yes, Scotty might fail, he might crash and burn, he might live to regret it…but there was no regret worse than never having found out. Fenton could not be the one who had stood in his way.

His disability, instead of leaving him defeated, had spurred Scotty into action. Each day was seized as if it were the last. Scotty said he wanted to change the way homosexuality was addressed in the music industry, how it was represented to the market, and despite Fenton wanting to shake him and tell him it was never going to work, it was a crazy ambition, a part of him couldn’t help but admire it. The past year had taught him that despite his wealth of experience he really knew nothing of what life could throw your way, the surprises and twists that could change everything overnight.

All he knew for sure was that, together, they had found a kind of peace.

Scotty half laughed, half frowned. ‘What are you doing?’

The instant Fenton lowered to one knee and fumbled in his back pocket, he knew. From it, his ex-manager produced a plain silver band.

‘Scotty Valentine,’ Fenton asked, ‘will you marry me?’

From a couch in the middle of the dining room floor, the last remaining item of furniture in the near-vacant Angel Residence, Ava Bennett spat obscenities at a rerun of
True Match
.

‘Die, bitch!’ she heckled, chucking a hot dog at the screen, where it hit with a splat and dribbled mustard down the image. Despite it Turquoise’s performance shone through;
her beauty remained unsullied. Ava flew to her feet and slammed one of her husband’s baseball bats into it, sending the picture flying into a thousand shards of broken glass.

Whimpering, she dribbled to the floor.

Life had ended. She had lost it all.

It was hard not to take that literally when surrounded by blank walls and empty floors.

The once so sumptuous Angel mansion was now a shell. Following Cosmo’s death Ava had spiralled into depression, her only solace the refuge of junk food, and had ballooned to a size twenty in as many weeks. The parts had dried up. She was hunted by paparazzi, who would photograph her chowing on burgers and chips and looking enormous in slack pants, or without a bra, or guzzling a super-sized milkshake at her husband’s grave, where she would peer guiltily out from beneath a cap, unrecognisable as her former self.

Cosmo had left her in a pit of debt. His addiction to prostitutes—and to gambling, it transpired, and to drink, and to online sex chat rooms—had been worse than even she had suspected. Rather than the tens of millions she’d counted on, there had been a deficit.

That, coupled with Ava’s lack of work, meant she had been unable to stay above water. The bailiffs had taken everything.

Every day she was tormented by Cosmo’s abrupt demise. If only he had taken her advice and steered clear of that evil whore!

No. He’d been unable to resist. If he hadn’t gone to the Platinums that night, if he had only let it go, if he hadn’t got caught in the butchery that had robbed him of his life, he would still be here. But Cosmo would never have let Turquoise
take the last word; he would never have accepted the outcome of her revenge when his reputation languished so forlornly in the gutter. His humiliation had been insufferable. All those people witnessing his private kicks, it had been vile, a worse vengeance than he or Ava could ever have conjured in their wildest fantasies…and their fantasies got pretty wild.

Ava blubbed with fresh misery. To this day she couldn’t fathom how Turquoise had possessed the nerve to execute such a heinous, despicable deed.

She had packed a box of special belongings, private possessions to keep close by.

Ava went to them now and released the cardboard flap. She fed a hand in and removed the golden crown that Cosmo had worn that night on Crete.

It glimmered.

Ava put it on and faced the mirror, her face blotchy and red.

The fat, ugly, widowed, wicked queen.

She looked at her reflection and wept.

Slink Bullion was smoking a nine-inch cigar in his mansion Jacuzzi and watching a Turquoise video on his beach-shack entertainment system. There was one smokin’ hot honey. He decided to get in touch with her management about guesting on a vibe he was toying with. Seeing as he was a single man these days,
officially
single, who knew what they could share?