Craving Midnight Page 5

I pick it up. “Hello.” I tap the speaker button as Harrison instructed.

  “Ms. Drake?”

  “Yes.”

  “We just wanted to see how you’re feeling today.”

  “Who is this?”

  “A friend.” He chuckles. The voice sounds vaguely familiar.

  Harrison, who motions to everyone as they scramble around like little mice, distracts me. I’ve never seen people move so fast in my life. Then the line goes dead.

  “Fuck,” Harrison explodes. “Why didn’t you say something? It was him, wasn’t it? You should’ve kept talking.”

  “I didn’t know what to say. He freaked me out.” My voice sounds small even to my ears. Even he’s frightening me now, yelling at me like that.

  “If you get a call like that again, try to keep the guy on the line. Just keep talking. Talk about anything, the weather, your cat, I don’t care what. Just say something.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him. Would you want to talk to your rapist?”

  He blows out a long, frustrated breath. I know he’s trying to help catch the guy, but he doesn’t know what it was like. He can’t possibly know. I was violated and I don’t know by whom. It’s disgusting, but I still want to see their faces. I want to look in their eyes and ask them if they’re proud of what they’ve done. I also want to get back in the shower and scrub every inch of my skin until I’m raw and bleeding. Maybe then I’ll feel something again. Maybe the pain will lessen the numbness that’s invaded my brain cells.

  “What are you thinking?” Harrison asks.

  The vehemence that explodes out of me makes me step back, but I tell him.

  “Anger is better than feeling sorry for yourself,” Harrison says.

  I lose my temper again. “Just shut up for one damn minute. You think you know everything, but you don’t.” And I stomp out of the room. I need space ... need to breathe, to get away for a minute. My room isn’t far from his and I don’t stop until I get there.

  My chest heaves and my cheeks are wet with my tears. Standing in front of my room, I try unlocking the door but then I feel a presence behind me. I nearly scream.

  “It’s only me,” Harrison says.

  “Damn you!” I say, slapping at him like I would a bug. I hit anywhere I can, only I’m weak and ineffective, plus his hands lock around my wrists, bringing everything to a halt.

  There’s a slight upward curve to his mouth. Is he laughing at me? “You’re such a jerk, laughing at me like that.”

  “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the way you’re swatting at me. I’m not a mosquito.”

  “You motherfucker.” I try to pry my hands loose, but he has them in a death grip.

  Suddenly, I’m bawling my eyes out at the helplessness of this situation and it pisses me off. I don’t want to ask why me, but why the fuck me?

  Harrison takes the key from me and opens the door, leading me inside. Then he sits me down and stuffs a wad of tissue into my cupped hands. He’s not exactly the warm-and-fuzzy type, but right now, I don’t care. All I want to do is curl up in the bed and cry myself to sleep.

  Next thing I know, a glass of water is shoved into my hand. “Drink this.”

  I don’t have the strength to object.

  “I said drink, not nurse the damn thing.”

  Lifting my eyes, I ask, “Do you have to be such an asshole?”

  “Right now, I do. You’ve been drugged, you’re probably dehydrated, and you’ve eaten enough for a baby bird to barely eke by on. If you don’t fuel yourself, you’ll have more of these breakdowns and tomorrow will be shit.”

  Is he for real? I sniff, and then say, “Has it occurred to you that I’m dealing with a lot right now?”

  His voice softens. “Yes, and it’s only going to get worse over the next twenty-four hours. That’s why you need to drink and eat.”

  I swallow more of the liquid, but my belly rebels. “I’m nauseated. It’s hard to put anything in your stomach when you feel like it’s going to make a return appearance.”

  “It feels like that because you haven’t eaten.”

  “Oh, are you a doctor now too?”

  “No, I just happen to know you need this. Now drink.”

  I guzzle the damn water just to get him to shut up. Maybe I’ll puke it up all over his fancy suit. Unfortunately, I don’t.

  I shoot him a nasty look. “Satisfied?”

  “Yes. Now, tell me more about foster care.”

  I stiffen and look the other way. He won’t get that information out of me. “There’s nothing to tell other than I went and as soon as I turned eighteen, I got the hell out. End of story.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s more.”

  I pierce him with a glare. “Listen to me. I’ve bared enough to the public, no pun intended. I’m going to tell them a pack of lies, because you think it’s the best thing for me to do. But what I won’t do is open up my teenage life for them to dissect. You can yell, you can beg. I don’t give a fuck what you do, but that book stays closed.”

  A tiny muscle twitches on his cheek. He’s pissed, but too bad. My life is fucked anyway. If he salvages it, I’ll eat my own damn underwear. But I am adamant about not sharing that part of my life.

  “You obviously don’t give a fuck about that contract, then.”

  “Yes, I do. But what I give a bigger fuck about is everyone and their brother knowing things that should never be revealed. So thank you very much, but that book will remain closed. And please don’t bring this up again.”

  He rubs his jaw, his scruff scraping against his fingers.

  “How would you react if you were in my shoes?” I ask.

  He walks to the chair next to mine and takes a seat. His long legs stretch out in front of him, and then he crosses his ankles.

  “I would hate every second of it, but I would listen to the experts. It’s hard to eat a shit sandwich but sometimes you do what you gotta do.”

  Don’t I know that? How many times have I dined on shit in my life? Too many to count and from the looks of it, I’ll be living on it for who knows how long.

  Chapter 5

  Harrison

  She won’t back down. All I want is for her to hand us a tidbit, one tiny fucking morsel the public can latch onto and then they’ll love her forever. Because they’ll feel so damn sorry for her, they’ll want to cuddle her like a baby. But she wants nothing to do with it.

  I check the time and see it’s almost six. I’m meeting Prescott in an hour, so I’d better make this the greatest show on Earth.

  “You remember Marilyn Monroe?”

  She squints. “Seriously?”

  I ignore the question. “You remember how they found her?”

  “Dead?” Sarcasm isn’t her best trait. I love a little sass in a woman, but sarcasm hits me in all the wrong places. I bite my tongue.

  “Not just dead. Dead from a drug overdose.”

  “What about it?”

  “You remember all the conspiracy theories that everyone talked about?”

  She purses her full lips and says, “I think I recall something about them.” I want to tell her to cut the snark.

  “Like it was a Mafia hit because she was too close to JFK. Or someone high up in the government had her knocked off to keep her from running her mouth.”

  “So? What does that have to do with me? You think someone is trying to kill me?”

  “Not in the least. If they had wanted you dead, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. What I am saying is, Marilyn Monroe’s death evoked and still evokes so much sympathy in people, they still hang posters of her everywhere. That could be you, minus the dying part, of course.”

  Those intensely violet-hued irises search mine for answers, and it chills me. Midnight Drake is no shallow woman. I get the feeling she would rather stand there and be whipped to death than buckle under the pressure of a few insults. This is no little kitten waiting for the first person to come along to pet and feed her. Instead, here
sits a wounded tigress, willing to fight for her life. I just need to sharpen her claws because right now, they’re dull and hiding.

  “I am not at the mercy of my drug addiction, waiting for the first man to come along and rescue me, Mr. President.” She says it in the breathy tone Marilyn once used at a birthday party for JFK.

  “Never did I indicate you were. All I said was that it could be a great ploy to create a sympathetic response.”

  “Ugh,” she huffs, more to herself than me.

  “Let me reiterate. Many people saw you in a seriously compromising position on YouTube. It was uploaded from your phone. Who knows how many people saw it before it was pulled. You had a syringe full of heroin stuck in your vein. What more do you need to portray to the public that you are a train wreck? I know this is terrible, worse than anything you should have to go through, and I’m terribly sorry for that. But all I’m suggesting is you give the public what they already know, except tweak it a little. Tell them the why behind it.”

  She stands and paces. Again. “I’ve spent the last few years running from this. Avoiding it. Now you want me to revisit it.”

  “So that’s why you were a porn star. Makes perfect sense to me. And it will to them.”

  She tries to shove me but I grab her hand. “I won’t tell them that!”

  “I’m not asking you to,” I say.

  “Do you know how hard it is to earn an honest living?”

  “And the purity of the triple X–rated entertainment industry is the way to go, isn’t it?” I ask. It’s time to get tough with her. This is a part of my job I don’t particularly care for, but in order for me to really save her career, she needs to listen to my advice.

  She clamps her jaws together and says through them, “I needed the money so I answered an ad for a film role ...”

  “I know. And some dude said he could help ... and the next thing you know, you’re naked with a dick, balls deep in your mouth.”

  She licks her lips and swallows annnd … I get a fucking hard on. Okaaaay, Harrison, where the hell did that come from? I usually take a huge step back from my clients.

  “It wasn’t exactly like that,” she says.

  “But I’m close, aren’t I?”

  She shrugs. “What does it matter? You’re going to believe what you want to anyway.”

  “And you’re going to do what I tell you tomorrow or this whole deal is off, I leave, and you’re left to handle the vultures on your own.” We stare at one another before she gives me a slight nod.

  I click my fingers. “Foster care. Give it up.”

  After a long sigh, she says, “I was abused.”

  “I’m not surprised. Is that why you left?”

  “I ran away a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday.” She glances at her hands, which are in her lap now that she’s sitting back down.

  “So we add, you turned to drugs to escape the harsh reality of abuse from when you were in foster care. That’s it.”

  “What if he hears and comes after me?”

  “Who?”

  She blows out a breath. “The man who abused me.”

  “We’ll handle him.” What she doesn’t know is if anyone shows up to hurt her, we’ll bury the motherfucker. Not literally, but he won’t ever touch her again.

  Her eyes drop down, and then back up to mine. The way her hands tug on the hem of her sweater tells me she doesn’t believe me. That’s when I recognize it. Fear. Throughout all this—the waking up in a hotel room after she’d been drugged and raped, the potential loss of her career—I’ve never seen what’s lurking there until now. Raw, bone-chilling terror. What the fuck happened to her back then?

  I drop to one knee and take her hand, which is like a block of ice. “He won’t get near you. I promise. No names, no dates, just the words, I was abused. That’s it,” I say.

  Her voice shakes as she answers, “They’ll hound me for more information. And I don’t want to be that girl.”

  In a soft tone, I say, “You can be THE girl who rose above it and became the one who survived. Isn’t that what happened?”

  She nods slightly.

  “Look at me, Midnight.”

  Large, terror-filled eyes stare back at me. Gone is that sassy-mouthed woman who wanted to punch my face moments before. “I don’t know what happened, and it’s your business. All I need is to arouse the sympathy of your fans and would-be fans. This will do it.” I grab her other hand and add, “Let me do my job and make your name one of the top in Hollywood. Then maybe one day, you can help save others from the same fate. It’s up to you. This will give you the power to do anything you want.”

  She glances from our hands to my face, then back to our hands. I see her nod, only slightly at first. But soon, it must sink in and she finally says, “Okay. But all I’m saying is I was abused as a teenager. That’s how my drug use began.”

  “That’s perfect. I want those exact words. We’ll incorporate them in our media kit we send out to everyone, along with your videoed statement. Then we’ll fly you to Arizona on our way back to LA.”

  “Not Arizona. There has to be somewhere else I can go.”

  “It has the best reputation in the country.”

  “It’s too close to where I was raised. I need distance.”

  When I think about it, she’s right. Maybe that’s what’s adding to her anxiety over this.

  I call Leland and have him check around. When he texts me back, he tells me of a place in Malibu with excellent ratings that has an opening. Midnight seems more amenable to it, which I like because it won’t require an extra stop on the way home.

  I text him back and have him book her in.

  “You live in LA, so Malibu will be more convenient since it’s right there. Especially if they require any follow-up,” I say.

  “How am I going to pull this off?” she asks, worry lines creasing her forehead.

  “Aren’t you an actor?”

  “Yes, but I usually follow a script. I’m not a very good liar.”

  “You’ll have to improvise, then. This will be great for your career. But you’ll have a script to practice with.”

  “Improvising is a far cry from lying. I feel awful about lying.”

  Wait until she’s in this industry for a while. She’ll be changing her mind when lying becomes a daily occurrence to save her career. “Consider it a catharsis. The counselors will help you with any issues you may have too.”

  “Issues. Great. They’ll probably dig so deep, I’ll be stuck there for the rest of my life.”

  I laugh. “You sound like my two best friends.”

  “Why? Are they loaded with issues?”

  “You have no idea.” Which reminds me, I’m supposed to meet Prescott soon. “I hate to cut out on you, but I have a dinner meeting.”

  “No, go.”

  “I’ll have Emily drop by with some dinner and Leland’s first draft of your speech for tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “One other thing. We checked out Holt and he was clean. All of his phone records checked out. No calls were made to anyone unidentifiable. Your guy is good, so you don’t have to worry about him. See you in the morning.”

  I head back to my room and let them all know what happened. Then I leave to meet Prescott. He’s already waiting for me. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him and he’s looking a little shabby.

  “Dude.” We man hug. “What’s going on?”

  “The same old. So, Midnight Drake, huh?”

  “Yeah. What’s up with you?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “You don’t look like you’re on your usual Scotty game.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, man, I’m serious.”

  “Come on, Harry. Have you been talking to Weston?”

  I hold both hands in the air. “No. I swear. I know you like a brother. You should know that. What’s the deal here?”

  “Family shit. What else? Weston didn’t te
ll you?”

  “Nah, you know how he is.”

  He rolls his shoulders. “You remember what happened last Christmas, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, the step-cunt fucktastrophe, you mean.” His stepmother accused him at Christmas dinner of hitting on her, which was completely false. The opposite happened, and besides, Prescott hates the woman. His father ended up kicking him out during dinner and they’ve been at odds ever since.

  “Dad and I had another run-in at a company sponsored event and it got pretty nasty.”

  “You’re joking,” I say, leaning on the table.

  He laughs bitterly. “Granddad stepped in and diffused the situation. Work has been a bitch since.” He works at the family business with both his grandfather and father. Talk about awkward.

  “Dude, you should come to LA for a visit. Get away from here. Tap into some fresh, ya know?”

  The waiter shows up and hands us menus. We order appetizers and he leaves. I can’t decide what to get for my entree. The food here is amazing.

  “It’s a damn meal. If you can’t decide, order two,” Prescott says.

  “Do you ever do that?” I ask.

  “No, but you’re whining like a baby so I figured it would shut you up.”

  I laugh. “You’re such an asshole.”

  “It’s my middle name.”

  A server plunks a basket of bread on the table. I grab a slice and slather it with butter.

  We talk about more shit and then I ask him a question he doesn’t answer. “Well?” I prod.

  “What?” He downs the rest of his drink and flags the waiter over for another and while he’s here, we give him our dinner order.

  After the waiter’s gone, I aim my finger at my friend. “See? I was right. You’re not right. Something is fucking with you. Prescott Beckham is all about money and finance—except when he’s got his dick buried up to his balls in some woman. And right now, as far as I can tell”—I check under the table—“there’s not a woman in sight. So, what’s going on? Who is she?”

  He has the courtesy to wear a sheepish expression.

  “Okay, you’ll never guess who I ran into.”

  “Jesus, tell me already. I hate when people fucking do this.”