Ocean Beach (35 page)

He shot a look over toward the other bodyguard and called over to him. “Hey, Jeff! Come get a load of this. I think we got a group of, what’s the word, geriatric party crashers!”

“Excuse me.” Deirdre stepped directly in front of the guy. She was small but elegant. The only tip-off to her irritation was the eyebrow that had practically arched up off her forehead. “But there’s no need to be insulting. Our friend told you that we were invited to this party. We all know Daniel. Her daughter is inside.”

“Don’t get your granny panties in a wad,” the beefiest one said as he crossed his ham-size arms across his gorilla chest.

A few of the people waiting behind the velvet rope tittered with amusement.

“What did you say?” Nicole drew herself up to her full height.

“I think you heard me,” he said as the door opened and several people tumbled out. None of them looked over twenty-five and there wasn’t a less-than-model-caliber face or body among them.

The door stayed open as the rest of the waiting invitation
holders were allowed in, and Nicole, Madeline, Avery, and Deirdre were treated to a view of the massive living room and its sweep of glass and windows overlooking the ocean.

“Oh my God,” Avery said. “I think that couple over there is having sex!”

They followed Avery’s gaze to a chaise on which a male was stretched out, a drunken smile on his face. The girl was on her knees and had her face buried between his legs.

“Jesus,” Madeline said.

Even Nicole, who’d been to more than a few wild Hollywood parties, did a double take.

None of them could take their eyes off the private act being performed in the public place and so they missed the doormen snapping to attention.

Kyra’s gasped “Oh my God. What are you doing here?” brought them out of their shocked stupor. They turned to see Kyra and Daniel Deranian, who had a possessive arm around her waist, stepping up behind them.

Kyra didn’t look at all glad to see them. But Daniel Deranian’s famous smile suffused his famous face and his dark eyes sparkled with fun. “Hello, ladies,” he said as if he were thrilled to see them. “You’re just in time. It looks like the party’s just getting started.”

The doormen were slack-jawed with surprise. Nicole couldn’t resist reaching out a finger, placing it under the beefiest doorman’s chin, and closing his mouth for him. “I guess we’ll take our granny panties on inside now,” she said as they were swept into the party in Daniel Deranian’s wake.

Inside, Maddie leaned toward them, raising her voice to be heard over the music, which had cranked up when
Deranian entered. “I don’t care how fancy this place looks. Don’t touch anything and try not to sit down,” she cautioned, looking pointedly at another couple who were grinding away at each other in a corner. “Did anybody happen to bring Handi Wipes?”

As it turned out, Handi Wipes were just one of the things they should have brought to the party with them. Disguises would have been helpful. A little more discretion and a lot less champagne might have also been better. What had started as a mission to keep Kyra out of Daniel Deranian’s clutches had turned into something else entirely.

No one jumped out of bed the next morning to work or for anything except to gulp down aspirin and crawl back to bed. Kyra, who’d been too angry the night before to drink anywhere near as much as the rest of them, got up to nurse Dustin and was the first one to spot the photographers camped out on the sidewalk outside.

“Great,” Kyra said, not bothering to keep her voice down in the slightest, though this was the first time she’d spoken to Maddie since she’d first spotted her and the others trying to talk their way into Deranian’s party. “It looks like we’ve got company. The paparazzi are knee-deep out there.”

Madeline tried to burrow more deeply under the covers. Her head throbbed and the sunlight streaming in through the windows hurt her eyes. The sound of Kyra’s fingers on the keyboard of her laptop sounded like claps of thunder.

“And wait until you see the pictures on the Internet,” Kyra said. “It’s amazing how much better and crisper the shots from camera phones are nowadays than they used to be.”

“Shit.” Nicole dragged into the room and lowered herself down on the edge of the bed.

Avery and Deirdre trailed in behind her.

“Somebody needs to go to the pool house and get coffee,” Deirdre said.

“Don’t look at me,” Kyra replied. “They’ve got telephoto lenses aimed all over this place.”

Maddie squeezed her eyes tighter. She did not want to wake up and face this day.

“Crap.” Avery went into the sunroom and cranked the blind open a few notches. “I think I recognize some of those guys from last night.”

Maddie pulled back the covers and sat up, propping her back against the wall.

“They were on the sidewalk outside the hotel when Daniel and his bodyguards helped us into the minivan,” Avery continued.

Nikki groaned. “I knew I’d get caught in that beige-mobile sooner or later. Good thing I don’t have any clients left to lose.”

“Was that your plan all along?” Kyra aimed the question at Maddie, her tone brittle. “To humiliate me and then get so drunk that I’d have to drive you home?”

Maddie wouldn’t have called it a plan. It had just sort of worked out that way. Like overprotective parents trying to prevent an overweight child from overeating by scarfing down all the fattening things in the house, they’d gone to the party to make sure that Kyra didn’t do anything foolish and then foolishly overindulged themselves. At the moment Maddie’s mind was moving far too slowly to understand their behavior, let alone respond to a question composed of multiple parts.

“It was that bartender,” Avery said. “The one Daniel assigned to us. The one he told he’d fire if he ever saw our glasses empty.”

“Seriously,” Nicole added. “I carried my glass into the bathroom one time and he tried to follow me in with the bottle of Taittinger.”

Dustin stood in his playpen/crib and peered out over the edge at them while Kyra’s fingers pounded on the laptop. An emphatic keystroke and the printer chugged into action.

She waved the page in front of them. “Here you all are dancing on that tabletop together,” Kyra said. “The caption reads, ‘
Do Over
stars attend Deranian private party. Or are they the entertainment?’” She read it carefully, emphasizing each word before handing it to Avery to pass around the room.

“Oh, and this one’s really special, too,” Kyra continued. “It’s a shot of the two doormen/bodyguards looking on with the caption
Deranian bodyguards say reality-TV stars ‘partied their asses off
!
’”

There was a collective groan. Maddie’s eyelids fluttered briefly shut. She was pathetically grateful that the granny panties thought to cover those asses had not been mentioned.

On the nightstand Maddie’s cell phone rang. Before she could reach for the mute button to stop the noise, Kyra swooped closer to look at the screen. “It’s for you, Mom,” she said more loudly than necessary as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, Dad,” she said at what might have been the top of her lungs. “Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, hold on a sec.”

“Here you go,” Kyra said, more cheerful now that the opportunity to torture her mother had presented itself. She handed the phone to Maddie, who slowly raised it to her ear.

She didn’t speak, because there was no opportunity to get a word in before Steve began to berate her. “I can’t believe you’d put yourself in that sort of position,” he huffed. “As if the whole pilot episode wasn’t already humiliating enough. What’s Kyra doing with that asshole again? And what were you doing there”—he paused, then read the same caption Kyra just had—“‘partying your asses off’?” There was a beat of silence, far too brief for Maddie to formulate a response. “How can you condone her seeing him?”

“I don’t condone it. That’s why we—” Madeline began, but Steve cut her off.

“You’re going to have to do a better job of supervision down there, Maddie. I won’t have—”

The blood that had begun to roil in her veins reached her brain and jerked her fully awake. Steve barely responded to her phone calls, but he apparently had time to call and chastise her.

“You’re welcome to come down here and supervise her yourself if you’re not satisfied with the job I’m doing,” Madeline snapped, for once not caring who heard her.

“You know that’s not possible,” he said. “But you have to—”

“I’m not interested in hearing what you think I have to do.” She lowered her voice as everyone else fell silent.

Throwing her legs over the side of the bed, she stood and moved out of the room and onto the upstairs landing, barely listening to his litany of complaints.

Through the porthole window she could make out the crowd of photographers down on the sidewalk. Max, who was wearing his dressing gown and pajamas and held the morning newspaper, appeared to be doing a routine of some kind. Which meant the photographers were getting not only a juicy story but some stand-up comedy as well.

“Look, Maddie,” Steve continued to rant. “You’re going to have to be more careful. Kyra doesn’t need to be around that troublemaker. And neither do you! And I certainly don’t see how this is good for Dustin. God knows what Andrew’s up to.”

Maddie paced the landing, telling herself to calm down, but the unfairness of Steve’s attack made it impossible. She’d had more than enough. She was finished taking whatever he felt like dishing out and it was time he understood that.

“
You
look,” she cut him off. “I’m doing the best I can here. Kyra’s an adult and there’s only so far I can intervene. Things would be a hell of a lot better if you were willing to talk things out with me in advance instead of only calling me to criticize later.”

Out on the sidewalk, Max took a bow and Maddie imagined she could hear the whir of camera motor drives. Troy and Anthony stepped out onto the driveway and pointed their equipment over Max’s shoulder toward the paparazzi. The paparazzi pointed theirs back.

Steve was still on the offensive. Madeline forced herself to tune back in and was immediately sorry that she had.

“Are you actually accusing me of leaving you alone in Atlanta and treating you like a second-class citizen?” she asked in amazement.

“Well, you
are
there taking care of everyone else even though I asked you not to, while I’m—”

“—full of shit.”

“What did you say?” The shock in his voice was almost comical.

“I said you’re full of shit.” Maddie said this slowly, relishing each word.

There was a silence, meant, she knew, to give her a chance to apologize. That was not going to happen. Not this time.

“Listen, Steve,” she said, a new resolve building inside her. “I’ve gotta go. I’m out of time and, frankly, patience.”

She did not have to listen to his complaints unless she chose to. In fact, she didn’t have to listen to him at all.

“When you’re ready to ‘sac up’”—she intentionally used one of Andrew’s favorite, and grossest, expressions—“and treat me with a little respect and courtesy I’m all ears. Until then, I don’t think we really have all that much to talk about.”

She punctuated this last comment with a healthy dose of dial tone.

It was noon by the time they’d dressed and devised a means of crossing the pool deck to the pool house without exposing themselves to the photographers’ long lenses any more than was necessary. Avery was glad that it was Sunday, though she had no real hope that the horde outside the gates
would be gone by the next morning when they needed to get back to work.

Tension in the pool house was thick. The Lifetime crew had set up just inside the door to film their skulking entrance. Only Andrew, who’d just awoken, Dustin, who was pretty much always happy, and Max, who had apparently gotten a healthy round of applause from his sidewalk audience, seemed unconcerned with the barbarians at the gate.

Troy’s camera followed their preparations for what would serve as breakfast, with lots of shots that Avery could tell were far too close up. When he’d shot them in every unflattering way possible, Troy set his camera down.

“Lisa Hogan called me this morning,” he said to Kyra. “She’s royally pissed off that I didn’t have footage of you and Deranian and the rest of the cast at the party last night. She wanted to know why everyone else in the world seemed to have photos and video but me.”

He waited for a response, but Kyra looked past him as she busied herself opening a jar of baby food and putting a bib around Dustin’s neck.

The rest of them tried to stay out of the conversation, but the space was too small to pretend not to register Kyra’s lack of response.

“So what? It’s just too bad for me?” Troy demanded, his tone incredulous. “I sit on video of Daniel Deranian dressed up as a woman because you ask me to—video that would have impressed my boss and possibly earned me thousands of dollars on the side—and then you go out and perform for the cameras without any warning whatsoever?”

The cameraman practically quivered with anger as Kyra spooned the baby food into Dustin’s mouth.

When no one else spoke, Kyra finally said, “I just went to a party. I’m not the one who put on a camera-worthy show.”