Tinseltown

If she was.

The Celebrity Parade. She would do it, even if Christmas killed her.

Chapter 3

That same afternoon, twenty-year-old Clare McCarthy was having sex with her boyfriend in a Bel Air mansion – the kitchen of a Bel Air mansion, to be exact.

‘How’s that feel, baby,’ Calvin Johnson rasped, ‘that feel good?’

It felt a bit uncomfortable, actually, leaning back against the brushed steel cabinets as Calvin ploughed into her, trying to prevent her head from slamming into them. Or maybe it was the background hum of the Sub-Zero refrigerator that was killing it.

‘Amazing,’ Clare breathed nevertheless. ‘You’re amazing.’

He lifted her, legs wrapped around his waist, a slight shape against his six feet of dark muscle. Physically, they couldn’t have been more different. Clare, with her lemon-blonde bob and big blue eyes; and Calvin, with his size and swagger and perfectly honed body, who had reminded her on sight of 50 Cent, only a bit more polished and with the ability to say his Fs.

‘You want it hard, baby,’ he panted, grabbing her tits and squeezing them together, taking a nipple between his lips and biting. ‘You want it hard, don’t you?’

With a little manoeuvring, he eased Clare on to the table and leaned her forward. Without warning, a picture popped into her head of his parents – rich, conservative types; the mother wore pearls – sitting down in the morning to eat their bacon and eggs. She grabbed the rim of the wood and concentrated on removing the image. But the more she concentrated, with Calvin going for it like a juggernaut to her rear, the more it lodged, like the persistent splinter she’d no doubt have on some part of her anatomy after this encounter. She began to think that the orgasm she’d been hoping for might turn out to go with more of a whimper than a bang.

Not so for her boyfriend. Locked on to the approaching fanfare of ejaculation, Calvin’s pace increased to something furious, in direct inverse correlation to the dwindling promise of hers. Clare gazed at a calendar attached to the opposite wall, with THANKSGIVING, GINA’s! scrawled across the previous week in black marker.

Afterwards, Calvin fixed them drinks and Clare spoke about the project she was working on in an effort to fill the silence. It usually went that way. Calvin wasn’t a great conversationalist, he was the quiet, thoughtful type – at least that’s what she had told herself in the beginning. Some of her friends had suggested that while he was hot he might not be that switched on, but Clare had decided some months ago that too much emphasis was put on intelligence anyway. Her ex-boyfriend had been smart and he’d been an asshole, so go figure.

She checked the time – an hour till she was due at Betty’s. Gathering her things, she took his hand and kissed his cheek. ‘Should I come round later?’

He made a face that suggested he’d rather she didn’t. ‘Nah, I got shit t’ do.’

She asked kindly, ‘You need help with anything?’