Tinseltown

Tinseltown
Victoria Fox

Dom Judd is the hottest man in Hollywood. He'll do anything to get out of being a sexy Santa in Hollywood’s famous Tinseltown parade…but can he persuade his brother to take the reins?Waitress Clare has just been dumped. Playing Rudolph is hardly going to help her single status - until she sees how drop-dead gorgeous Father Christmas is!Laney Allen has shot to fame, but hates the limelight - and it seems only Santa can help her overcome her stage-fright…As the snow falls and sleigh bells ring, whose Tinseltown dreams will come true?I hope this seasonal short story will make your Christmas merry and bright! Love, Victoria Fox xPraise for Victoria Fox‘Jackie Collins for the modern gal’ – GraziaFox is ‘giving Jackie Collins a run for her money’ – That’s Life‘Victoria Fox…puts the bonk back into bonkbuster!’ – Lovereading“a heady mix of corruption, glamour, lust and power…get your scandal fix here!” – Closer on Hollywood Sinners

Praise for Victoria Fox’s debut book Hollywood Sinners

‘This summer’s hottest novel. Hollywood Sinners … is giving Jackie Collins a run for her money’ That’s Life!

‘Sure to be a huge hit and perfect for the beach’ Sun

‘We should’ve seen the twists in this sinful bonkbuster coming, but two of the surprises were so shocking that we ended up startling the other commuters on the bus!’ Now

‘The heady mix of corruption, glamour, lust and power is guaranteed to keep you up late into the night. Get your scandal fix here!’ Closer

‘This debut novel is full of sex, glamour and divas!’ 4 stars Star

‘Scandalous. Glamorous. Sexy. Victoria Fox’s sassy, sparkling debut puts the bonk back into bonkbuster!’ Lovereading.co.uk

‘A juicy tale of glamour, corruption and ambition. A cracking read’ Jo Rees, author of Platinum

‘A glorious, sexy story of high-octane Hollywood intrigue – I loved it.’ Lulu Taylor, author of Heiresses and Beautiful Creatures

‘Just what the devil ordered – salacious secrets, illicit sex and wicked deception.’ J J Salem, author of The Strip and Tan Lines

‘For a trip to ultimate escapism, take the Jackie Collins freeway, turn left at Sexy Street, right at Scandal Boulevard. Your destination is Victoria Fox’s Hollywood’ dailyrecord.co.uk

About the Author

VICTORIA FOX lives in London, she was born in 1983 and grew up in Northamptonshire with her parents, sister and cat Thomas. At thirteen she went to boarding school in Bristol, where she learned what you can get up to when your parents aren’t around, liked English best and avoided Games lessons at all costs.

From there she went on to study English and Media at Sussex University, where she made her first attempt at writing a bonkbuster novel. It was titled The Hardest Part and was truly dreadful.

Victoria worked as an editor in publishing before leaving to write full-time. www.victoriafoxwrites.co.uk (http://www.victoriafox.net/)

Tinseltown

Victoria Fox

Chapter 1

Only two words, but they bothered him. Or maybe it was the question mark.

DOMINIC JUDD – HOT SHOT?

He ran a hand through his thick dark hair and stood for a moment, baffled, before angrily tossing the magazine to the floor and taking care to step squarely on it with a foot still wet from the shower. The page stuck and he lost his balance, forced to hop, undignified, while he peeled the offending publication from a water-wrinkled sole.

‘Hot shot?’ What the bloody hell did that mean? It wasn’t like he’d done a gun movie or a coffee commercial or something worthy of the pun, and Dom Judd was Eton-educated, for heaven’s sake – he ought to be able to work it out. Then again, maybe there wasn’t anything to work out. Maybe it was just a full-of-herself writer struggling for a headline, who thought if she whacked a question mark on the end it might encourage readers to think it wasn’t her missing the point, it was them. And it had to be a girl: if a lady wasn’t interested in fucking him, Dom had to assume she was against him.

At twenty-six, Dom Judd was experiencing the first flush of long-sought-after celebrity. This time last year, he’d been languishing on the set of a UK soap opera, the posh villain come to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting community of russet-cheeked farmers and barmaids in leopard-print. He’d been there too long and was approaching the hollow realisation that a life in soap was all he was cut out for: that forty-mile-an-hour, middle-lane limbo, OK but not great, famous but not celebrated … no, Dom had other ambitions. He wanted it hard and he wanted it fast, and if he kept to the childish notion that he’d be dead by the age of twenty-seven – because all idols worth their accolade died that young – then he only had a year left to do it in. But he was starting to change his mind about that.

Just as well, then, that he’d been auditioned – ‘on the off chance’, according to his agent – for what was going to become, over the next eight months, the biggest American sitcom since Friends. Dom was playing the English eccentric, the quirky one, who – in spite of his warm, dark eyes, mop of black hair and square jaw shaded with three-day stubble – was never considered a love interest because he was too, well, kooky (he hated that word). It was the posh accent, didn’t you know, it made everything sound ten times funnier. Things weren’t quite so platonic with his adoring public: since moving to LA, women flocked to Dom like bees to honey. He was young, rich and ubiquitous – it was all you needed.

Dom dressed swiftly, slumping on to the bed and sighing loudly in a gutless attempt to rouse the girl still sleeping there. He couldn’t remember her name. Julie? Julia? Didn’t matter. But she was pretty even in daylight, so he congratulated himself on a choice well made. Miraculous, given the amount he’d put away the night before.

‘Do you want a shower or anything?’ he asked when she opened her eyes. ‘I’ve got to get moving. My brother’ll be here in a sec.’

She reached for his bare chest, the colour of a strong cup of tea. ‘You got a brother?’

Hmm. He and Freddy were close, but they weren’t that close.

‘I’m serious.’ He chucked her the previous night’s lacy panties, formerly strewn across a stupid claw-footed armchair he’d purchased during a brief spell of imagining himself to be Jeremy Irons and which he now realised was ridiculous. ‘Move.’

The girl sat up with a pout, allowing her generous tits to come into frame. Dom gave one of them a quick, perfunctory squeeze, like someone testing the ripeness of a piece of fruit, and which managed, offensively, to signal both hello and goodbye. She muttered something under her breath and made a grand show of leaving, saying she felt sick and needed water or a lie-down or an aspirin – or, no doubt, a sense-restoring fuck – and it wasn’t till half an hour later that he managed to bundle her out the door of his apartment.

Was he living the dream? Course he was. Dom Judd was the name on everyone’s lips: he was at every party, every opening, every fundraiser, every premiere … The press recorded his every move, fascinated by his brooding good looks and impeccable accent. Admittedly, some were kinder than others. He picked up the discarded magazine, the ‘Hot Shot?’ grey and wrinkly now from having got damp, and stuffed it in the bin. He thought he might speak to his representative about taking legal action. He had no clue what that actually entailed, but it made him feel like he was firing from both balls and that was what mattered.

With California sun streaming in through the blinds, it was hard to believe December was only a week away. Dom grimaced, supposing he ought to return to London for Christmas, but the thought of his melancholic mother, who prefaced everything with a wheedling, ‘You’ll join me in a small one, won’t you?’ and which invariably led to her having to be scraped off the sofa hours later after several dozen ‘small ones’, and his ex-army father, who said little but whose sideways glances gave the impression that Dom’s career was a bad smell passing under his nose, was depressing. Christmas was always depressing.

Despite the warmth, Dom shuddered. Whatever Christmas at home might have in store, it surely couldn’t be worse than the joke awaiting him here.

That blasted Celebrity Parade! Why had he agreed to do it?

On cue, there was a knock at the door – a rat-a-tat, followed by a brief pause, then a final a-tat. It was the same code they’d used since Dom was ten and building a spacecraft in his room made of loo rolls and clothes pegs. It was a vessel only those with authorisation – namely his younger brother Freddy – were permitted to view.

Dom opened the door, scratched his belly and yawned. ‘Go on, then,’ he managed through what was shaping up to be a fucking awful headache. ‘Hit me with it.’

Freddy Judd, a fraction taller than Dom and with all the same good looks, just arranged slightly differently, entered the room, clocked the dishevelled bed, the empty bottles of beer, and tried to find a way of phrasing it that didn’t sound disastrous.

‘There’s no way out of it, mate, I’m sorry,’ he said at last, biting back a laugh because it wasn’t funny; it really wasn’t. ‘But it looks like Santa Claus is coming to town.’

The Celebrity Christmas Parade was an annual extravaganza that took place a week after Thanksgiving on the streets of downtown Hollywood. Hundreds of thousands came in the hope of catching a glimpse of the stars, gracing the procession atop floats and stages, in open-top vintage cars and sleighs dazzling with lights. It was a great promotional opportunity – if you were a daytime-TV D-lister or an actor on his way out the game. Not for the top dogs, the main players, the – Dom cringed – hot-shot-question-marks. Not for him.

‘I can’t believe I ever said yes to this stupid gig,’ he muttered darkly as Freddy found them a table outside Maracas. ‘It’s humiliating, fucking humiliating.’

Freddy attempted to stop a grin pulling free. It was an asset he had over Dom, because he had this pair of really cute dimples.

‘You said yes at a time when nothing else was coming up. You needed the—’

‘It wasn’t a question,’ snapped Dom bitterly, flipping open the menu.

Freddy nodded obediently. His appointment as Dom’s PA – a position he’d embraced in the purgatory of post-university job seeking – had dropped him right in at the deep end. Since Dom had made it big, priorities were shifting in seismic proportions.

‘All I’m saying is you’ll look bad if you back out. Seriously bad. I’ve tried to pull strings, but, bro, you’re Santa.’ He ordered a beer. ‘Do it for the kids.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Look, you’ve just got to put on a beard—’

‘And a fat suit.’