Bombshell (Hollywood A-List #1)(4)

“Look. She died in a car accident two weeks ago and I came here as soon as I knew. Don’t give me a hard time. If you’re the father, you’re the father.”

“I always use a condom.”

“You sure?”

“Because that’s something I’d forget?”

“Six years ago? When you got that little horror movie and you were over the f*cking moon because you were a nobody working in a crystal store? Yeah. You’d forget.”

“This is serious,” a voice came from behind me. I spun around.

“Ken!” I hugged him. When I signed with him I knew I’d made it as an actor. I had a career to spin. Boom. I partied harder that night than when I was nominated for an Oscar. Which was cool, but too surreal to drink over.

“Can you put pants on?” he said. I was in a dress shirt with a towel around my waist. I had no recollection of how I’d gotten that way.

“Hey, it’s a party. I don’t like feeling restrained. Crotches restrain me.”

“You have a lot more to worry about than your pants.”

“Is it this Brenda thing?”

“Brenda isn’t a problem and she never was. This is deep and wide, Sinclair.”

My agent was a douchebag, but my PR guy was the real deal. So when he walked back into my house, I followed.

The party had drifted into all four bedrooms, living room, office, den, billiards room, and the whatever room that I never figured out what to do with. We ended up in the laundry room. I hadn’t even known I had a laundry room. Mom would be proud.

Gene had shuffled in. Ken closed the doors, then leaned on the washer and crossed his arms.

“Brenda Garcia. Remember anything about her?”

The question wasn’t rhetorical. He was actually asking.

“No.”

“You worked with her at a crystal store.”

“I remember the store.”

“Fine.” He moved off the washer and stood on his own feet as if changing gears. “I’m not asking you to remember her or her daughter. It’s irrelevant. I’m sure she was on a brain cell you killed already.”

“My brain is fine.”

I sounded defensive. Too many beers or too few.

“Right. Whatever. I don’t care. You know what I care about? I care about what people think of you.”

I took a mouthful of beer. Outside, someone was thrown into the pool. A woman, judging from the squeals. He might care what people thought of me, but I sure didn’t.

“Now,” Ken said. I listened to his voice, but not the words. What if I did have a kid? That made me a father. I’d played a father in Verity, but that was different than being a father. Right? I mean, that takes a ton of time, and time was one thing I didn’t have a hell of a lot of.

“What were you saying?” I asked.

Ken sighed and pulled a yellow four-by-six envelope out of the breast pocket of his jacket. He opened it by pinching the edges.

“DMZ already found out by following the child protection agent into Gene’s office and sitting next to her in the waiting room.”

“Not my fault,” Gene mumbled.

Ken continued. “Then they sent a middle-aged female reporter into the CPS office to pose as Brenda Garcia’s aunt. Apropos of nothing. Because this is still real.”

He took a picture out of the envelope.

It was a school photo of a girl. Maybe five? Six? Four? Who the f*ck even knew? What was the age of maximum cuteness? Because that was how old she was. She had brown hair and huge, dark brown eyes. Big smile surrounded by dimples. Nose like a bell pepper.

I had blue eyes and light brown hair, but, despite that, the part of my brain that recognized faces calculated a visual equation and recognized hers. My mother’s eyes. My sister’s curls. My dad’s chin.

Me. She looked exactly like me.

“Oh. Shit,” I said. “No. Nononono. I wrap it up, Ken. You have to believe me.”

“Okay, I don’t know when you’re going to get this through your head,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what the public believes. I have your clone, right here.” He held up the picture. The more I looked at it, the more it sunk in. She was mine. “And Ms. Garcia put your name on the birth certificate as the father.”

“Fucking bitch.”

“You will speak of her with respect from this moment on,” Ken roared. “First, because she’s dead, and people do not like it when you speak ill of the dead. Second, she bore you a daughter and hasn’t gone public. She was a single mom working behind a counter at the Coffee Chain. People are going to be on her side.”

He was right. My mother raised me better than that. You don’t speak ill of the dead or insult a woman. You don’t give anyone a reason to think less of you. I tried to hear my mother’s voice in my head, but it was hard to hear without also tasting her biscuits and gravy. With corn. And butter. And the smell of barbecue. Yeah. Dad wouldn’t get mad at the messenger. Dad wouldn’t turn his back. Dad would be Mister C3. Cool, calm, collected.

Okay. I was good. I had this.

I had to just breathe in. Man up. Breathe out.

“Where is she now?” I asked. “The kid.”

“Her name is Nicole, and she’s in foster care. Now, here’s what you’re going to do before this explodes. One, you’re taking a DNA test. Two, if she’s not yours, you set her up a college fund anyway.”