One Wild Night (Hollywood Chronicles #1)(14)

Knowing Elle, it would be all kinds of good.

Silence echoed from the other end, and then Elle’s voice came on, almost incredulous. “You’re seriously calling me hooker right now?”

I paused. Frowned. Confused. “What?”

“Hello pot calling the kettle black. Who are you and what did you do with my best friend?”

A twist of unease tightened in my chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Tell me you didn’t sleep with Paxton Myles last night.”

I gasped, my head shaking as I took a step back. “How…how…?”

“Oh, God.” The words were low, coated with worry. “Kay…you don’t know.”

That twist of unease grew into a cyclone of anxiety. “You’re freaking me out. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

Elle hesitated, then said, “I’ll be right over.”

“Elle,” I begged.

The line went dead.

I glanced at my phone. I had a ton of missed calls from my mom and my sister, not to mention the slew of texts from the two of them. That anxiety churned and twisted when I saw I’d also missed a bunch texts from a few of my co-workers and acquaintances from the school where I worked.

People I rarely, if ever, spoke to outside of school.

Dread balled at the base of my throat, and I shuffled into my living room. The sheer drapes pulled across the arcadia door glowed like fire. It cast the rest of the room in warm blues and bright shadows.

I leaned over the back of the couch and reached for the remote I’d left sitting on the seat cushion. My hands were shaking like crazy when I clicked on the TV that had been set to mute. Pointing the remote, I changed the channel, because even though I didn’t want to believe it, I knew.

I knew.

Still, I wasn’t prepared.

I wasn’t prepared in the least.

There were pictures.

Pictures in a little square box that kept popping up above the reporter’s head. Playing out on a reel. Paxton on the red carpet, looking like a million bucks as he flashed that megawatt smile. Another of him with his friend Philip.

But it was the ones of me that hooked my breath on the lump at the base of my throat.

The first was one of me walking the red carpet, looking so out of place, like a timid, plain mouse who’d lost her way. The second was a fuzzy shot taken in the hall outside the women’s restroom in the hotel, my back pressed to the wall where Paxton Myles’ big body concealed mine.

The reporter’s mouth moved a million miles a minute as he waved his hands in excitement, even though I couldn’t hear what he said.

Even if the volume had been turned up, I’m still not sure I would have heard. Because a low buzz started to hum in my ears, obliterating all senses except for what my eyes were forced to see.

Because the first two weren’t what brought on the rush of horror.

No.

It was the ones of me outside Paxton’s Hollywood Hills mansion from this morning. Shots of me as I strode down the drive through the slots of the wrought iron fence, though they somehow made me appear as if I was limping, my shoulders slack with shame.

There were more of me climbing up and jumping over the gate.

They’d obviously been snatched from a distance. The pictures were cropped to bring me nearer and were a little grainy.

But that didn’t matter.

Because they were so utterly clear.

My hair was even worse than I’d imagined, a matted mess on one side and poofed up on the other, my dress twisted and wrinkled, black mascara smeared around my eyes.

Barefoot.

For some reason, that seemed the worst.

Nausea swelled.

I didn’t know why, but there was something about it that made me look used up. Cheap and trashy.

I glanced back where my heels had been abandoned on the floor just inside my front door, toppled in a messy pile.

Why the hell didn’t I put on those damned shoes?

What had I done?

My phone rang again.

Almost numb, I lifted it to see who was calling. My mother’s sweet face was smiling back at me.

Without a doubt, she wasn’t smiling right now.

What had I done?

Knees feeling wobbly and weak, I mindlessly moved around to the front of the couch and sank down onto the cushions. In horror, I sat there and watched in silence as the same thing played out over and over again on my television, different reporters piping in, giving their own salacious opinion.

My private life nothing less than entertainment.

What had I done?

I dropped my face into my hands. I didn’t even realize I was crying until my shoulders started to heave up and down.

How much time had passed before there was banging on my door, I didn’t know, but I jolted with the impatient rattle of the knob, a key shoved into the lock.

The door flew open and knocked into the wall.

Warily, I looked that way over the back of the couch.

Elle stood there in all her glory, holding a big paper sack to her chest, my best friend a blur where I watched her through bleary eyes.

“Holy shit, Kay Kay. What have I always said? If you’re going to do it, do it big. You sure as hell knocked it out of the park.”



Elle emerged from my small kitchen wielding two glasses of red wine. She passed one to me. “To taking life by the balls and making it your bitch.”