Tilly Bagshawe 3-book Bundle: Scandalous, Fame, Friends and Rivals

It was the Make-A-Wish ball that had prompted Theresa to sign up for the torturous Ashtanga class at Maha Yoga in Brentwood. She left the house that night feeling like a million dollars, then realized that, even at her best, she was still an appalling blubbery heifer compared to every other woman in Los Angeles. Her depression was compounded by a visit to Dr Yeardly’s office the following morning. Stanford Yeardly was the top fertility specialist in Beverly Hills and he’d spoken to Theresa sharply about what he called her ‘lifestyle choices’. She could hear his disapproving, headmasterly voice now as she contorted her limbs into the even more torturous plough pose.

‘I’m struggling to understand why anyone who’s serious about having a baby is still drinking,’ he looked down at his notes, ‘two to three units of alcohol a day, and taking zero exercise.’

Because they’re homesick, lonely and depressed, their husband’s too busy fucking around to come home at night and if it weren’t for the double gin and tonic at six o’clock, they’d probably have jumped out of a window two years ago? thought Theresa. Out loud she mumbled something about work pressure and promised to join a gym. Not that it mattered. Since starting yoga again four weeks ago, Theo hadn’t come near her sexually. Short of an immaculate conception, there would be no baby, however many early nights she had or wheatgrass shots she gagged on.

‘Hold on to that strength now as we move into plank pose.’

Theresa’s upper arms began to shake. She could feel a collective sneer from the limber, flat-bellied blondes all around her. It’s not just for a baby. It’s for Theo. And for me. If I don’t get a grip soon I’ll lose him.

Tomorrow morning Theo was leaving for a promotional tour in Asia. He’d be gone for almost three weeks, signing books, making public appearances, and trying to sell Dexter’s Universe’s third season to all the major networks in China and Singapore. To Theresa’s utter amazement and joy, he was also going to visit two orphanages in Singapore, having done a complete about-turn on the idea of adoption.

‘Maybe we should consider it,’ he said one morning at breakfast, out of the blue, pouring skimmed milk over a half bowl of Kashi GoLean cereal. Theresa almost choked on her bacon sandwich.

‘Really?’

‘Sure. Ed thinks I need to soften my image, particularly in the Far East. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go crazy and adopt an entire Benetton advertisement. But one kid … you could cope with one kid, couldn’t you?’

It wasn’t exactly the romantic outpouring of paternal love Theresa had fantasized about. But she still danced onto campus that morning. He wants a child! He wants a child with me! Surely, Theo wouldn’t have brought up adoption if he were contemplating divorce? It wasn’t too late after all.

The Asia tour was three weeks long. If she went on a properly hard-core, crash diet, laid off the booze and went to yoga every single day, Theresa reckoned she could lose a stone in that time and tone herself up. By the time Theo came home she’d be a new woman. He would have met an orphan child and fallen in love. Harry Meister’s words still rang in Theresa’s ears: ‘Get pregnant. Give them a family and they soon settle down.’ She couldn’t get pregnant. But she could give Theo a family. When he sees what a loving, devoted mother I’ll be, he’ll fall in love with me all over again.

Dita Andreas looked at the clock on her dashboard: 12.55 p.m. She should have been on set over an hour ago. Carl Sams, the director of Lies, Dita’s latest blockbuster, (not to mention her sometime lover) would be spitting teeth. But that was no bad thing. Recently, Carl seemed to have got it into his head that he was Dita’s boss. Dita checked her flawless make-up in the rear-view mirror of her vintage Aston Martin and thought, I’m the star of this picture. It’s about time somebody reminded Mr Sams of that fact.

Not that today was about Carl. Carl Sams was an afterthought. Even more of an afterthought than Brett Graham, Dita’s soon-to-be-ex-husband and the director of her last film, Heaven’s Gate. Note to self, thought Dita, stop sleeping with all your directors. Or at least stop marrying them. Dita’s passion for matrimony was proving to be one of her more expensive hobbies. Her divorce attorney, Lorna McIntyre, had become one of her closest friends. Lorna had told her in no uncertain terms that her divorce from Brett would be the most costly yet. ‘He’ll go for the house, Deets. You do realize that?’

‘I don’t care,’ Dita shrugged. ‘He can have it. All I want is my freedom.’

It was unlike her to be so devil-may-care, at least when it came to money. Born to working-class parents in Detroit, the youngest of four children and the only daughter, Dita Andreas knew what it meant to be poor. Sure, she had always had a roof over her head and food on the table. But there were never any luxuries in the Andreas household. No brand-name sneakers, no hired limos on prom night, no out-of-state vacations. No vacations at all. Dita’s parents were good people who worked their fingers to the bone to provide for their kids. Dita loved them, but did not understand their choices, especially her mother’s.

‘But you’re beautiful, Mom,’ Dita used to tell her, watching her mother brushing her hair before bed. ‘You could have married anyone. A millionaire or a rock star. You could have gotten out of here.’

It was true. With her Swedish blonde hair, endless legs and full, sensual mouth, Mimi Andreas had been the prettiest girl at every school she’d ever been to. She could easily have married or modelled her way out of Motor City. But Mimi was a romantic. One smile from Georgious Andreas, Dita’s charming car mechanic father, and it was all over.

‘Why would I want to marry a rock star, baby? Your dad’s worth a hundred Mick Jaggers to me. Besides, where you live is just geography. And you can’t measure happiness in dollars and cents. You’ll learn that as you get older, Dita.’

Dita hadn’t learned it. In fact she’d learned the opposite. Geography was important. Who wanted to waste their life in Detroit, a dying city full of factories and despair, whose very name sounded like a grind, when they could choose to live in Malibu or Bel Air or Beverly Hills? And why would anyone choose to love a poor man, when there were so many rich men out there to love? Too many, Dita sometimes thought. At fifteen Dita signed her first modelling contract, courtesy of a married, forty-two-year-old agency boss named Nick Capri. Nick Capri was obsessed with the young and (he thought) innocent Dita, moving her into an apartment downtown and eventually leaving his wife for her on Dita’s eighteenth birthday. By then Dita was already earning a seven-figure salary as the face of Lancôme’s teen make-up line. A few months later, Nick was showing her off to one of his Hollywood friends at a party, a producer named Mike Reynolds, and boasting about how incredible his teenage girlfriend was in bed. Dita celebrated her nineteenth birthday in Los Angeles, in Mike Reynolds’ bed. She got her first leading role in a movie the next morning and never looked back.

But as far as Dita Andreas had run from her past, there were pieces of it that she still carried with her. She would never forget what it felt like to be poor and anonymous. Unlike most of the leading box office actresses of her generation, Dita had no interest in making the occasional art-house movie, still less in taking a prestigious but low-paid role on Broadway. Not only did she never lower her fees on a movie, no matter how awesome the director, but she always clawed herself a piece of the action on merchandising as well, milking the studios she worked for every last possible cent. If Dita Andreas showed up at a party, or a club opening, the chances were she’d been paid to be there. Her avarice and business acumen were matched only by her extortionate spending. The girl who’d gone to grade school parties in Target jeans and K-Mart sneakers now dropped more on designer clothes in a week than her parents spent on food and rent in a year. Dita’s closet was full of Marc Jacobs originals and exquisite vintage Chanel pieces, still with their price tags attached. She spent not for the pleasure of owning things but for the thrill of buying them. With every purchase her craving intensified, like a junkie coming down after a hit.

As much as she spent on herself, Dita Andreas was notoriously mean when it came to spending on others: her staff, her friends, even her family. In the case of her latest divorce, however, she’d thrown caution to the wind. Brett could take whatever he wanted, just as long as he disappeared. All Dita cared about was being with Theo.

Theo Dexter was unlike any of Dita’s previous lovers. For one thing, he was a genius. Dita had always been more of a six-pack-abs and eight-figure-bank-balance girl than an IQ-whore, but Theo had it all: fame, looks, money and brains. I’m maturing, Dita thought with a smile. I’ve outgrown Brett and his shallow aspirations. Brett Graham wants to change Hollywood. Theodore Dexter wants to change the universe.

But it wasn’t only Theo’s intelligence that attracted her. It was his arrogance. In Theo Dexter, Dita Andreas had found something she had come to believe did not exist in nature: a human being more ambitious, more self-obsessed than she was. Dita was used to holding all the cards in her relationships and having the men in her life do all the running. Being with Theo made her realize how bored she’d become of being the goddess. For the first time in her life, she’d found a man who wasn’t prepared to jump when she said jump. Yes, Theo adored her, yes, he worshipped her. But when Dita asked him to come on vacation with her he’d point blank refused.

‘I’m a married man, Dita. I can’t just take off to Bermuda with you. What if we were photographed together?’

‘What if we were?’ Dita pouted. ‘Do you care about your miserable fat wife’s feelings more than mine? I need you.’

‘Too bad,’ Theo said brutally.

It was wonderful!

Dita quickly learned that it wasn’t spousal devotion that kept him true to tiresome Theresa. It was a pathological concern for his image, and what a scandalous affair and divorce might do to Dexter’s Universe’s ratings.

‘For heaven’s sake, darling,’ Dita complained. ‘Do you think you’re the first TV star to dump his wife? No one cares.’

‘Not in LA, they don’t. Perhaps not in America. But DU airs all over the world. It’s huge in Muslim countries. I’m not prepared to risk that, not when I don’t have to.’

Oh yeah? Well, now you do have to. I’m divorcing Brett and I’m going to tell the world I’m in love with you. Screw your precious image.

As much as Dita delighted in Theo’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude, and apparent nonchalance about their affair, she was not prepared to put up and shut up. She was tired of being his mistress. She wanted to be his wife. And what Dita Andreas wanted, Dita Andreas always got in the end.

Turning right off Sunset Boulevard through Bel Air’s ornate West Gate, Dita sped up Bellagio towards the Dexters’ mansion. Her plan was simple. She would walk into Theo’s office, rip his clothes off, fuck him like the superstar that she was until he was screaming for more, then tell him that she was leaving Brett and going public about their affair, whether he liked it or not. Together they would be a power couple unrivalled on the world stage.

I wonder if he’ll put up a fight? she thought, feeling a frisson of sexual excitement pulse between her legs. I do hope so.

Theresa looked at her face in the mirror and panicked.

‘But … it’s all blotchy! I look like a fourteen-year-old with hives!’

She’d booked herself in for a facial, the first of her life, in hopes of looking fresh-faced for Theo on the last night before his big trip. Instead she looked as if she’d been mugged.

The dermatologist at Allen Edwards looked as patronizing as she could through a face full of Fraxel. ‘It’s an oxygenating deep cleanse and peel, Mrs Dexter. You don’t see the results right away. Especially with older, neglected skin, there can be redness.’

Can be? There’s no ‘can be’ about it! My chin looks like a baboon’s backside.

‘It’ll calm down.’

‘When?’

‘Within a day or two. That’ll be two hundred and sixty dollars. Would you like to leave a gratuity?’

It was a ten-minute drive back to UCLA, where Theresa had a class to teach at two thirty. Home, and her minimal make-up supplies, were twenty minutes away. She looked at her watch: 1.15 p.m. Theo was supposed to meet her after class today. He had a list of things he needed her to do while he was away (‘Please try to remember, T. I really can’t keep doing everything’) and wanted to run through it with her, item by item. I can’t let him see me looking like this. She made a left at Barrington and headed up the hill towards Bel Air.

* * *

Theo lay on the floor of his home office, a vast, wood-panelled room that Theresa called the Beauty and the Beast library, because it looked like something out of a Disney cartoon, with his pants around his ankles. Above him, Dita Andreas’s magnificent breasts jiggled from side to side as she straddled him, arching her back and expertly moving herself up and down his cock. He was tempted to pinch himself. I’m fucking Dita Andreas. Dita Andreas! But he was too caught up in the moment to focus on anything but the wave of pleasure drowning him.

‘Tell me you love me!’ Dita commanded, clenching her muscles more tightly around his erection and reaching down to play with his asshole. Theo had had scores of lovers since he came to LA and learned a number of new and exciting party tricks. But no one came close to Dita. If she hadn’t been a world-famous movie star she would have made an astonishingly successful hooker. He groaned.

‘Christ, Dita. I’m coming!’

‘No!’ She stopped dead, releasing him. ‘Not till you tell me you love me.’

Reaching up, Theo pulled her head down to meet his own and kissed her full on the lips. ‘You know I love you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t stop.’

Theo was many things but he was not stupid. From the first time he laid eyes on her at the Make-A-Wish ball, surrounded by sycophants and hangers-on, he knew that he would have to differentiate himself from every other suitor if he wanted to have a shot at Dita Andreas. What he didn’t know was how easy that would be; that the key to Dita’s pussy, if not her heart, was as simple as putting himself first. If there was one thing Theo Dexter knew how to do, it was to put himself first.