Friends and Rivals

Joyce darted into the hallway, sobbing. Ivan, meanwhile, looked distinctly unruffled. He’d pulled up his pants and was busy smoothing down his hair and removing lipstick marks from his face and collar with a damp flannel.

Jack spoke first. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘I don’t know,’ drawled Ivan. ‘Am I?’

‘Anybody could have walked in!’

‘Indeed. But it had to be you who actually did, didn’t it Jack? You’re like an old housemaster, prowling the dorms looking for miscreants. And lo and behold, you found me.’ He held out his hand in mock supplication. ‘Go ahead, whip out your cane. I’m used to it.’

Jack’s stomach turned. ‘You think this is funny.’

‘Well, I don’t think it’s tragic, let’s put it that way,’ Ivan shot back. ‘OK, so I’ve been a naughty boy. But nobody knows, so there’s no harm done.’

‘No harm?’ Jack spluttered. ‘She’s a client!’

‘So?’

‘She’s a teenager!’

‘Only just,’ said Ivan, cleaning up the cocaine remnants before swigging from a bottle of mouthwash and spitting into the sink. ‘It’s my birthday. Joyce was my present. Oh for God’s sake, stop looking so thunderous. It was a one-off, all right? It won’t happen again. Jack. Jack!’

But Jack had stormed off down the corridor, ignoring Ivan’s shouts. The servants’ stairs were blocked by a kissing couple so he veered left, practically running down the grand main staircase, so eager was he to get out of there. Bloody fool. I should never have come tonight. So much for Ivan turning over a new leaf.

‘Oh, there you are.’

Jack was so caught up in his own thoughts that he almost knocked Catriona flying.

‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’ Her face fell. ‘We haven’t even had the fireworks yet. You must stay for those.’

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled awkwardly. ‘Something’s come up. I have to get back to London.’

Goddamn Ivan for implicating him in his bullshit. Now Jack was forced to stand here and lie to one of his oldest friends.

Catriona tried to be understanding. ‘Oh. Well, I suppose if you have to. Anyway, before you go, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll look out for Kendall when she comes over. As you know, lots of Ivan’s clients come up here to stay when they’re burned out or stressed or whatever. We’ve become quite the heartbreak hotel, haven’t we?’ she laughed. ‘I doubt even Miss Bryce can get into too much trouble in the bright lights of Widford on a Saturday night.’

‘Thank you. Really. That means a lot.’ Jack looked at Catriona, then hugged her tightly, squeezing as if he might never let her go. ‘You’re a good woman, Catriona Charles. Ivan doesn’t deserve you.’

Catriona smiled wryly. ‘He probably doesn’t deserve you either, Jack darling. I know he must be difficult to work with. But don’t give up on him. For my sake.’

Speeding back towards London half an hour later, Jack Messenger felt as depressed as he had in months. Every time it seemed as if Ivan might finally have turned a corner and developed some scruples, he went and did something so shatteringly stupid and selfish it beggared belief.

Jack wished he could give up on Ivan. But after fifteen years as partners in Jester, their lives and interests were irrevocably intertwined. Being in business with Ivan Charles was like walking through life with a bomb strapped to your chest. The unpredictability, the selfishness, all wrapped up in a lethally charming package.

Come to think of it, Ivan Charles had a lot in common with the other giant headache in Jack Messenger’s life. But, he reflected with relief, at least she was safely ensconced in his Brentwood guesthouse under the watchful eye of her twenty-four-hour sobriety coach.

Not even Kendall Bryce could get into too much trouble in those circumstances.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Harder! Oh my God, what is the problem? Why do you keep stopping?’

Kendall Bryce looked over her shoulder at her red-faced sobriety coach with withering disdain. Weren’t these sober health-freaks supposed to be fit? This guy screwed like a grandfather.

‘My electric toothbrush makes me come faster than this. Come on, Kevin. Do it!’

Kevin Dacre closed his eyes and tried to recapture any of the sexual excitement he’d felt when Kendall Bryce, the Kendall Bryce, had opened the front door to him half an hour ago in nothing but a pair of Trashy Lingerie panties. Half an hour ago, Kevin was worried he might come before he got his pants off. Now, after being ordered into countless different positions, with Kendall berating him for his poor performance like a particularly ticked-off drill sergeant, all Kevin wanted was to be allowed to go home. That, and for Kendall Bryce not to tell his employer, Jack Messenger, what had happened this evening.

The worst part was that Jack had warned him, in so many words: ‘She’ll try anything in the book to get you off her case. If she wants drugs or a drink she’ll stop at nothing to get them. She’ll probably offer to sleep with you, and let me tell you, Mr Dacre, Kendall’s offers can be tough to refuse.’

‘I’ve worked with Charlie Sheen, Mr Messenger,’ Kevin had replied confidently. ‘If I can keep him clean, I’m pretty confident I can handle Kendall.’

Now Kevin Dacre knew better. Nobody ‘handled’ Kendall Bryce. She was a force of nature, as impossible to resist as a twister or a riptide. And she had him by the balls, literally as well as metaphorically. If Messenger heard about this – if anyone heard about it – Kevin’s career was finished.

At last, with a wild moan and arch of her back, Kendall climaxed. Kevin Dacre whimpered with relief. Easing himself out of her, he slumped down on the bed, exhausted.

‘I’ll order some pizza,’ Kendall announced cheerfully. ‘We can wash it down with a couple of bottles of Jack’s Mouton Rothschild, and then we can go again.’

Again? Kevin started hyperventilating. ‘Kendall, come on. This was fun but we both know it shouldn’t have happened. And we also both know I can’t let you drink.’

Kendall laughed loudly. ‘Let me? I like that. That’s a good one. Besides, it was coke I went to rehab for. I’m not an alcoholic.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Kevin. ‘You’re an addict and you’re in recovery. No substances means no substances. You know that.’

Kendall’s eyes narrowed. ‘All I know is that you’re gonna break into the main house and raid Jack’s wine closet for me. Because if you don’t, you know I’m gonna pick up the phone and tell him about the great sex we just had.’

‘I thought you said the sex was terrible?’

Kendall looked at him pityingly ‘It was terrible, Kevin. I was trying to be kind. But you know what they say: practice makes perfect. Now, how about that drink?’

Kendall Bryce had first come to prominence in her teens as the breakout star of reality show, Hollywood High. Small but perfectly formed, her body had the exaggerated, pneumatic curves of a porn star. Her waist was waspishly narrow, her breasts cartoonish in both their size and gravity-defying perkiness, her butt was as high and tight as a male baller-ina’s. But it was Kendall’s face, a perfectly defined set of smooth planes illuminated by neon green cat’s eyes, as well as her attitude, that ensured her swift rise to fame. Kendall Bryce was brattish – certainly – and spoiled; Hollywood High was a show about movie-industry kids, so those two attributes were prerequisites. But Kendall could also be devastatingly funny. Her pithy put-downs of contemporaries rapidly became the stuff of legend and she was embraced as a sort of young, insanely hot Joan Rivers.

What Hollywood High failed to show was Kendall Bryce’s deep, searing insecurity, and the terrible loneliness of her home life. Kendall’s father was the producer Vernon Bryce. He divorced her mother when Kendall was twelve, and since then had laid eyes on his eldest daughter a grand total of three times. Two of those occasions were court appearances, for DUI and cocaine possession respectively. The third was for Kendall’s twenty-first birthday, when Vernon showed up for the cameras with a ribbon-wrapped pink Maserati complete with Ken 1 number plates, but was too busy to stay for dinner, insisting he had to rush back to his younger kids, Donny and Aiden, the twin boys he had with his new wife and whom he unashamedly adored.

Kendall’s mum Lorna was a sweet, pleasant woman, but she knew nothing about her daughter’s wild lifestyle, or if she did she was too weak to do anything about it. The truth was, Lorna Bryce was afraid of Kendall. Her younger children, Holly and Joe, were both so much easier to handle. They hadn’t been affected by Vernon’s abandonment the way that Kendall had. That was the problem. From babyhood, Kendall Bryce had always been a daddy’s girl.

Hiding her pain behind the twin masks of her extraordinary looks and her razor-sharp tongue, Kendall was determined to prove her worth to the father who had dumped her, and to the rest of the world. TV success was a start. But she wanted more than that. She wanted lasting, global superstardom. She wanted to walk on stage in packed stadiums all around the globe and hear people chanting her name.

No one was more surprised than Jack Messenger to discover that Kendall Bryce could sing. Her agent had practically laid siege to Jester’s LA office on Beverly Glen until Jack agreed to see her. Reality stars releasing records was really not Jester’s thing. Plus the Bryce girl had only just got out of jail for cocaine possession. Too much trouble by half. But Kendall’s agent was so persistent that Jack relented one Friday afternoon, and gave the kid five minutes. There was an upright piano in Jack’s office. He’d been an exceptional pianist in his youth and still found that playing calmed his nerves and cleared his head. He sat down and, rather meanly, started playing Christina Aguilera’s Genie in a Bottle, an astonishingly difficult song for an untrained vocalist. Kendall Bryce didn’t miss a beat. She opened her mouth and belted it out, pitch perfect and with the power and depth of a seasoned Gospel singer. Her voice ricocheted around Jack’s office like a sonic boom. After fifteen years in the music business it took a lot to surprise Jack Messenger. But Kendall Bryce had done it, in about two and a half bars.

That meeting was two years ago now. Since then, under Jester’s management, Kendall Bryce had gone on to become one of the best-known and biggest-selling female artists in America. But she had also had to submit her entire life to Jack Messenger’s control. He’d refused to sign her unless she quit cocaine and alcohol cold turkey, and underwent regular drug testing. She had to join a gym, stop going to nightclubs unless someone from Jester accompanied her, and agree to make no comments to the press whatsoever, unless Jack had personally authorized them. The one and only time she was caught breaking one of these rules (she was photographed drunk on an unauthorized trip to the Chateau Marmont) Jack had forced her to give up the lease on her apartment and move into his guesthouse in Brentwood until her second album was in the can. Needless to say, Kendall had bucked and chafed against such draconian restraints. But she put up with them for two reasons.

One was that she knew Jack Messenger could not only get her to the top but keep her there.

The other was that she was madly, passionately and utterly hopelessly in love with him.

Jack was everything that Kendall’s own father was not: decent, honest, loyal, kind and strict. He was tough on her because he cared, and though she fought against him tooth and nail, and was often so infuriated with him she wanted to cry or hit him or both, deep down she felt safe for the first time since she was eleven. Jack was also the first man who, maddeningly, appeared to be totally immune to Kendall’s celebrated physical charms. Since the age of fifteen, Kendall Bryce had been used to enslaving any and all men to her will – boys at school, teachers, producers on her show. In Jack Messenger, for the first time, she encountered indifference. Her initial reaction was to assume that he was either grieving too hard for his dead wife, or secretly gay. But, especially since moving onto his property, she’d been forced to abandon both these theories. Jack had a girlfriend, Elizabeth, an attractive, professional woman in her thirties who was about as far removed from Kendall as it was possible to be: discreet, together, undemanding. In short, a grown-up. Jack was never pictured with her in public, but Elizabeth seemed unfazed by this apparent lack of commitment. Nor did she complain about the fact that he still wore his wedding ring, and spent every Saturday afternoon without fail at his wife’s grave at Forest Lawn. If this was the sort of woman Jack was looking for, it was little wonder he failed to notice Kendall. But it still hurt.

As with her father, Kendall tried to get Jack’s attention by acting out, in particular bedding a string of Jester’s male acts to try to make him jealous. As with her father, the strategy failed miserably. In recent months things had hit an all-time low between the two of them. Consumed with longing and frustration and fury, Kendall had started drinking again. Two weeks ago she was breathalysed on Sunset and slapped with another DUI, her fourth. She was lucky to escape jail time. Jack, needless to say, was furious, refusing to allow her to fly with him to London for Ivan Charles’s party, an event he knew Kendall had been hugely excited about, and forcing her to stay home with a sobriety-coach-slash-jailer instead.