All That He Demands (The Billionaire's Seduction Part 3) (11 page)

I had always nurtured a secret pride that I wouldn’t be starstruck if I actually saw anybody famous. That I was immune to that sort of thing.

Turns out, not so much.

My jaw dropped open wider than a big-mouthed bass.

Although, in my defense, it could have just been the sheer
volume
of famous people in one place that got to me.

Yeah, that’s it. There was a critical mass of star power in the place, and it overwhelmed my normally worldly ways.

I like telling these little lies to myself to feel better afterwards.

Anyhow, I was gawking like a four-year-old at Disneyland.

Connor ribbed me gently. “Better close your mouth before something slips in there.”

I turned and narrowed my eyes at him. “Can’t you wait until we get back to the hotel room?”

He tipped back his head and laughed loudly.

Across the room, a little bald man in a tux and horn-rimmed glasses looked over – and
his
mouth dropped open once he saw Connor.

When I saw his reaction, I felt a little better about my own starstruck…ness.

The little bald man said something to the people he was with – which included an actor who had won an Academy Award a few years back – and hustled over to us.

“Oh my, this is a wonderful turn of events,” he beamed, and stuck out his hand to Connor. “Lewis Vonder. Welcome.”

I figured this must be the producer throwing the party. I didn’t know him or recognize him, but on the other hand, I didn’t know any producers except ones who were famous directors. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron…

They
weren’t anywhere to be seen, thank goodness, or my inner geek would have come out in a truly mortifying display.

Connor smiled tightly and shook his hand. “I’m Connor, and this is Lily – ”

“Oh, I know who you are, Mr. Templeton,” the man said slyly, then glanced at me with a cursory “Hello.”

Then he went back to Connor like he was drawn by a magnet. “If only I’d known you were in town, I would have invited you personally!”

“Javier beat you to it.”

The man frowned. “…Bardem?”

“The hairdresser,” I added helpfully.

“The… hairdresser?” the man asked, obviously lost.

“All the stars love him,” Connor said, as though
everybody
knew THAT.

Then he gently steered me around the producer.

Mr. Lewis Vonder wouldn’t give up, but trailed alongside us like a puppy dog. “Are you thinking of expanding into the movie business, Connor?”

“No, I’m just here for the free food,” Connor said as we walked through the hall towards the back of the house.

Lewis laughed like he had just heard the funniest     joke    EVER. “Hilarious! You’ll be a hit in Hollywood!”

Connor looked at him. “No, really… I’m just here for the free food. Javier said it was great.”

The producer frowned, like he wasn’t sure whether he was the butt of the joke or just talking to a cheap-ass, Howard Hughes-worthy eccentric. He
did
want to keep talking, though, and he pushed people out of the way as he tried to keep up. “Obviously you’re a busy man, so I’ll make this quick. I have a slate of three films, all with major stars attached – Cruise, Clooney, Pitt – and we’re looking for financing outside the studio system. We should talk, we could set up a meeting – ”

Connor pointed at him. “You know who you should talk to? Javier.”

“The hairdresser,” Lewis Vonder said glumly. He now realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the butt of the joke, didn’t
like
being the butt of the joke, but was willing to put up with it for the sake of $400 million in financing.

“Yes, just give Javier the details and he’ll pass them on to me. Maybe after that we can ask him to do our hair.”

Connor looked up at Lewis’s bald head.

“…well…
my hair.
Nice to meet you, Lewis,” Connor smiled, and then he walked through a doorway, his shoulder right next to the doorframe, forcing Lewis into the wall. Sort of like in action movies where two cars are racing side by side towards a tunnel, and one edges the other one out, and it explodes against the concrete wall.

Exactly like that.

But with a short, bald producer instead of a sports car.

We continued into the next room as poor Lewis Vonder looked on from the hallway.

“Well played, sir,” I whispered. Ordinarily, I might have felt sorry for the producer if he weren’t so…
ugh.

“Thank you.”

“Is it like that everywhere you go?”

“You have no idea. Energy industry, finance, tech, entertainment, it doesn’t matter… they’re all a bunch of sharks, and I’m the chum in the water.”

“You’re not the least bit interested, though?”

“What, in playing a Hollywood big shot? So I can foot the bill and Lewis Vonder can skim $30 million off the top in fees for ‘arranging the financing,’ then tell me we never made any profits when we gross half a billion in theaters? And
that’s
if we don’t flop? No thanks. Do you know that Hollywood is the only major industry in America where the accounting isn’t regulated by federal law?”

“I did not know that.”

“They keep four sets of accounting ledgers – one for the IRS, one to show the investors, one that ‘proves’ the movie is still in the red in case you’re the writer or any other poor bastard who agreed to backend profits instead of upfront money… and then the real books, which they keep locked in a safe and which never see the light of day.”

“Sounds like you’ve done your homework.”

“I have. I thought about getting into it as a hobby a few years back.”

“A hobby,” I said with equal parts disbelief and amusement.

He shrugged. “I don’t play golf.”

“I guess the answer was no, huh?”

“If I wanted to get into a business where you try to fuck everybody else for a buck, I’d go into porn.”

“What about creating something artistic?”

“I wouldn’t be creating anything artistic, I’d be footing the bill.”

“Well, you could still be part of making something people love.”

He stared off into the distance as though seriously pondering that – and then shook his head like
Naaah
. “I’d still go into porn.”

I leaned in close. “You’d be good at it.”

He chuckled, and his hand slipped down to my rear end. “You could be my costar.”

I slapped it away playfully. “You’re not
in
porn, remember.”

“Not yet… but we could get a camera, and go back to the hotel, and – ”

“NO.”

He laughed and hugged me closer.

We entered another room where two bartenders were mixing drinks at a full bar. I suppose Connor had just been playing the odds when he made the crack about being there for the food, but there was indeed a spread that would have made the Dubai Hotel jealous. Mildly, anyway. Displays of exotic fruits and tiny pastries, more decadent desserts than I had ever seen in my life, and a small army of waiters walking around offering people bacon-wrapped scallops, chunks of seared ahi, bits of filet mignon, and the usual hors d’oeuvres and canapés.

“You were right about the free food,” I marveled. “We should have skipped dinner and eaten here.”

“I liked eating with the person I had dinner with.” While I beamed, Conner turned around. I followed his gaze to the corner of the room, where Lewis Vonder smiled widely and toasted us with a glass of champagne. Connor gave a fake smile back and muttered between his teeth, “Here, not so much.”

“You afraid it’s like fairyland?”

He looked over at me. “Huh?”

I realized I’d been thinking out loud. “Never mind, that was just… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“Well, in fairytales, if you went into fairyland and ate or drank something, you got trapped there.”

“Whereas here, you wind up having dinner with a greedy troll and having to hear about his three-picture deal,” Connor said. He scanned the room. “Hold on, I see somebody I should say hello to. I’ll be right back.”

I felt a combination of emotions – fear that he was leaving me, suspicion why he wasn’t taking me along, and embarrassment that maybe he didn’t want to introduce me to anyone he knew.

Connor must have read my mind, because he smirked at me. “I’m trying to save you from listening to the tribe of trolls surrounding him.”

I blushed, and tried to cover it up. “I’d like to meet your friends.”

“They’re not my friends.
He
barely qualifies – he just gave me some good advice about getting into the motion picture industry.”

“Which was…?”

“Stay far, far away.”

“Where is he?”

“Over there,” Connor said, and pointed to a thin guy in a suit surrounded by a bunch of not-very-attractive men who were all sipping glasses of amber liquid and laughing. “Entertainment lawyers at his firm. Nobody famous, all pretty boring.”

“I don’t mind.”

He sighed. “You don’t realize what I’m doing, do you?”

“No, what?”

“You’re my ‘out.’ If they start hounding me about investing or boring me to tears, I’m pointing over at you and saying, ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, but I have to get back to my date.’”

Date.

I was his date.

I guess it was silly, but it made me to feel happy to hear him say it.

“Okay, then. As long as I can be your escape pod.”

“I’ll ask him if he knows anybody famous he can introduce you to.” Connor gave me a wink, then ambled off across the room.

I stood there and watched as Connor went over, broke in suavely, and shook the guy’s hand.

The skinny guy apparently introduced Connor by name, because all the lawyers’ mouths dropped open.

Then the glad-handing started.

Connor was dead-on about the feeding frenzy: they were the sharks, and he was the chum in the water.

I got bored watching them scramble over each other to kiss his heinie, so I started looking around the room.

There were half a dozen famous people in here, too, all surrounded by adoring circles. Either the famous people were talking and everybody else was hanging on their every word, or the famous person looked bored and annoyed as some pushy person tried to monopolize the conversation and impress them.

My geeky mind went into overdrive, and I started thinking about all the little groups as solar systems, with a star at the center and a bunch of orbiters circling around, smiling and laughing. Or, in the case of the annoying blabbermouths, annoying little dwarf stars trying to compete against a supernova.

And the room became the universe, with all these little solar systems going happily on their way…

…and here I was, alone, out in the middle of space, a comet that didn’t belong anywhere.

My entire life, I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged. Big whoop – everybody feels like that at one point or another, right? But it was true. I’d never had many friends growing up, just one or two close ones, and I somehow managed to lose them as elementary turned into junior high turned into high school turned into college. All except Anh… thank God for her.

But I never really fit into any cliques in high school. I wasn’t an athlete, or a cheerleader, or a rich kid, or an artist, or a brain, or a stoner. I was just… Lily. I had a boyfriend in high school, which was nice, but it was something I kind of fell into. Not something I chose because I really wanted it, but because it was better than the alternative, which was weekends alone. He asked me out, it was an awkward first date, he asked me out again, it was slightly less awkward the second time, we kissed, it was okay, and I gradually got used to him. A nice guy, but…

When college came and we went to different schools, I can’t say I was all that sad. Maybe a day or two, and then I got over it. I would have felt guilty about my lack of feelings for him, except he was probably even
less
sad than I was. His jackhole buddies talked all senior year about how easy girls were in college, and if you were in a frat, you got laid with a different chick every weekend. He ended up pledging his first semester, though I was secretly glad when a mutual acquaintance told me he could only make it into the nerd fraternity.

Sorry. TMI.

I guess I’m saying all this because, in that Hollywood Hills mansion, I’d never felt like more of an outsider. Here
most
of them were beautiful people – and if they weren’t, then they were at least rich and powerful. I suppose there are tens of thousands of people in Hollywood without a dollar in their pocket who talk a big game as they desperately try to claw their way up, but this wasn’t that kind of a party. To walk through that door, you had to have already
arrived
, at least at a certain level. The only reason I’d gotten in was because of Connor.

I
so
didn’t belong here.

“And who are you?” a woman’s voice asked.

I whirled around to see a gorgeous blonde, probably about my age, with upswept hair and a shimmering red dress that showed off her rather large boobs. If they were fake, her surgeon had done an incredibly good job at disguising it.

“Um… Lily Ross,” I said shyly. I felt like a little girl, and she was a va-va-voom Woman.

I was glad Connor wasn’t here to see her.

She was holding a champagne glass in the air, and she cocked her head slightly to the side as she looked me up and down. “And what do you do?”

“I’m a… a secretary.”

“Oh.”

Her voice was full of polite disdain. Besides being threatened by her, I started to actively dislike her.

“Why, what do you do?” I asked, more out of social habit than anything else.

One hand fluttered to her cleavage, and she looked
soooo
happy I’d asked. “I’m an award-winning photographer, but I just co-wrote a screenplay with a good friend of mine who writes for TV. His agent at CAA is taking it out next weekend. He thinks it could go for seven figures. It’s an a-maaaaazing romantic thriller, perfect for somebody like Reese Witherspoon or Natalie Portman. He says there might even be a bidding war. I’ve already started on my next one – what I really want to do is direct. Kathryn Bigelow was
such
an inspiration when she won for
The Hurt Locker,
don’t you think?”