Beautiful Idols: Unrivaled Part 12

"No, man, just-thanks for the opportunity." He leaped from his seat and made for the door as Layla stared in confusion. Not understanding how she'd managed to survive another week. If Ira knew about the tequila, then clearly he knew her numbers were even worse than Ash's.

Whatever. She'd accept the reprieve for the gift that it was. Last night had marked her very last screwup.

A few minutes later, Tommy headed for the door as Layla rushed to catch up. "What was that about?" she asked.

He swung the door open, forcing her to shield her eyes from the glare. Sometimes the incessant brightness felt like an a.s.sault. The forced cheeriness of three hundred and thirty days of sun was downright annoying. She'd give anything for just one rainy day.

"That was about me saving you. Again."

Layla shrank under his piercing blue gaze. As much as she dreaded bringing it up, she needed him to know she considered their kiss a mistake she would never repeat.

"Tommy, about-" she started to explain, but he spoke right over her.

"Forget it. It'll be our little secret."

She stood awkwardly before him, wanting to believe it, not sure that she could.

"As for what happened in there-" He hooked a thumb toward the club. "I'll let you know when I'm ready to collect on the favor."

"Excuse me?" She ran after him. "I don't remember asking you to do that. I was ready to pay the price."

"Clearly." He shook his head. "You didn't even put up a fight. So I took a swing for you."

She was afraid of the answer, but forced herself to ask the question anyway. "Why?"

His gaze roamed hers, studying her for an uncomfortable moment before he finally conceded, "I have my reasons. And now, because of it, you have a second chance to decide what you really want out of life."

She watched him slide behind the wheel of his car, wanting to shout some nasty retort, knowing she should thank him instead, and settling on neither.

And now, she owed him. Great. She could only imagine what he'd ask in return.

TWENTY-TWO.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE.

"How did this happen?"

Madison sat in the pa.s.senger seat of a dark-green SUV, tugging at the brim of her worn baseball cap and staring out the windshield at a landscape marred by cargo ships, brightly colored rectangular containers, and tall working cranes. Everything about the meet was designed to go unnoticed. The car was ordinary. The San Pedro port was too busy for anyone to question them, and if they did, Paul had the credentials to make them go away. Then there was Paul himself and his utterly forgettable face. It was one of the things that made him so good at his job: no one ever remembered seeing him, and it was nearly impossible to describe him.

"You told me-no, correction, you a.s.sured me-that everything from my past was sealed, locked up tight, and safely stored in a deeply buried vault with no key."

He nodded, his pale eyes scanning the harbor. "I've recently come to think otherwise."

She sighed. Sank so low in her seat she could barely see past the dashboard. She had obligations, loads of press, a movie to promote, an impending breakup with Ryan that would inevitably become very public no matter how hard she tried to keep it under wraps. She didn't have time for problems. Not of this magnitude.

"How do you know it's not just another bogus attempt to extort me? You know how fame attracts opportunists." She studied him closely. The face that had once rescued her, changed her life in ways she could never repay, was now delivering the worst news he possibly could.

"This is different." He pressed his lips together until they practically disappeared, making her wonder who this moment was harder for, him or her. Paul prided himself on meticulous attention to detail. But if he really did slip, the life Madison had worked so hard to create would burn as quickly as her previous life had.

"How different?" She shifted in her seat, taking in his beige hair, beige skin, thin pale lips, un.o.btrusive nose, and a small set of milky brown eyes. He certainly lived up to his nickname, the Ghost. Though she mostly called him Paul.

Without a word he handed her a photo of herself as a very young girl.

Madison gripped it by its edges, making a careful study of the tangled hair, the dirt-smudged face, the blaze of defiance burning in those bright, determined eyes. A long-lost before picture in a life meticulously cultivated to consist entirely of afters.

Until now.

Her hands trembled, as she tried to remember who'd taken it-how old she might've been. Talk about a ghost. It'd been years since she'd seen that version of herself.

"I thought everything was burned in the fire." She turned to him.

It was the tragic explanation used to defend Madison's lack of baby pictures, or any other remnant of a life before her parents' death. The story had been fed to the press so many times it'd become almost mythical. An eight-year-old girl who managed to escape a terrible fire with barely a scar, only to rise from the ashes like a phoenix, reborn, wiped clean, delivered into the next glorious phase of her life.

She absently ran the edge of the photo against the scar on her forearm, remembering that day when she'd grabbed a piece of smoldering wood and held it to her own flesh while Paul looked on in astonishment. "It's to make it more believable," she'd said, knowing even back then she'd be playing a part from that moment on.

"Everything was burned." His tone was grim. It was probably the worst thing he could've said.

If someone had pictures of her, there was no telling what else they might have.

"There's no mistaking it's me." She looked at Paul. For the first time in a long time, she feared for her life.

He sighed, gripped the wheel tighter. "Here's what you're going to do."

She waited for the formula that would make it go away, willing to do anything to put an end to the nightmare.

"You're going to go about your life, and alert me to the first sign of anything unusual."

She turned on him. So incensed she thought she might spontaneously combust in her seat. "Nothing about my life is usual. I wouldn't even know how to recognize unusual."

"You know what I mean."

She frowned. Up to this point, she'd trusted him implicitly, but even the Ghost had his limits. "What I know is I'm not going to sit around and wait for this to destroy me."

She shook the picture in his face, and he plucked it from her fingertips. "Have I ever failed you?"

She studied him a good long time. "You just did."

He squinted, stared at the quilt of scars covering his knuckles. "If you're worried about people letting you down, you should take another look at your boyfriend."

She gazed out the window, watching a crane load a container onto a ship. Maybe she should crawl inside one of those large metal boxes, sail away to some exotic port, start a new life under a new ident.i.ty, and Madison Brooks would disappear off the face of the earth. She'd already played that card once, and it'd worked out far better than expected. But now, it was just another fantasy that would never be realized. There was nowhere to hide for someone as famous as her.

Or was there?

"Ryan's stepping out with a girl named Aster Amirpour." He reached into the backseat and handed over a fat dossier, detailing nearly everything about the poor dumb girl's life.

"I know all about it." Madison shrugged. Suddenly feeling sorry there wasn't a single person she could trust. "You're not the only one on my payroll," she said, reading the surprised look on his face.

She opened the door and started to head back to her car, when Paul called her by the name her parents had given her.

"Be careful out there."

She frowned, shaken by the sound of that name on his lips. "Just do your job and I won't have to," she said, slipping behind the wheel and driving away.

TWENTY-THREE.

SUICIDE BLONDE.

BEAUTIFUL IDOLS.

Heartbreaker So you know that beautiful, truly sensitive soul* we all fell for in last month's ten-hankie weeper? Turns out, he's an idiot. I know, I'm just as shocked as you. At this very moment I'm ripping his posters off my bedroom walls, and when I'm done burning the pillowcase with his face on it, I'm changing my Twitter icon back to a pic of my cat. Maybe after reading this, you'll consider doing the same.

In a recent interview with a splashy mag this blogger j'adores, this is how Prince Not-So-Charming described his idea of the perfect girl: "A girl who will watch you play video games for four hours, and then have incredible s.e.x with you-that's the girl you should date."

For those of you thrilled to just sit back and watch while your boy fiddles with his joystick for hours on end, I've got just the guy for you!

For the rest of us with a brain, standards, and a desire to play our own game, let's all take a vow to stop making dumb people famous, k?

*The first ten peeps who correctly guess the name of this week's h.o.r.n.y but clueless celebutard win a place on the guest list at Jewel this coming weekend. Spill it in the comments!

Layla frowned as she skimmed her post. The story was secondhand, gleaned from a fashion mag. Not the kind of writing she envisioned when she'd decided to strike out on her own. But how was she supposed to go after the celebrities who'd started frequenting Jewel? Now that she was writing for her own blog, she couldn't exactly trash them when she needed them to help her stay in the game.

As for the expose she promised Mateo-the sordid nightclub scene he'd warned her about proved to be nothing more than a bunch of kids, some famous, some not, all trying to enjoy their weekends and have a good time. Not exactly a crime.

Her phone chimed as Mateo's gorgeous face appeared on the screen.

"Y'almostdone?" He spoke so quickly the words ran together.

"Still working." She sipped her latte and scowled at her laptop.

"We need to be at the restaurant in twenty."

Layla squinted, having no idea what he was talking about.

"Valentina's birthday," he said, addressing her silence. "I guess you forgot."

She closed her eyes. Guilty as charged.

When she failed to confirm either way, he said, "You're still going, right?"

She sighed, hating what she was about to say. "You know I have to be at Jewel."

"What I know is you promised Valentina you'd go to her party."

Had she really done that? Probably. From the moment she'd gotten drunk and kissed Tommy, she'd agreed to almost everything having to do with Mateo or his family.

"That was back when I thought I was getting fired," she admitted.

"Well, you explain that to Valentina. She's going to be crushed."

Layla rolled her eyes. She was getting tired of his guilt trips. "Laying it on a little thick, don't you think? All her friends will be there-she won't even notice I'm missing."

"I'll notice. My mom will notice. And in case you haven't noticed, my sister idolizes you."

"Well, maybe that's her first mistake." Layla angrily crushed the sides of her still-half-full cup. She should apologize. Take it all back. But part of her was daring Mateo to call her on her c.r.a.p. She certainly deserved it for bailing on Valentina, never mind for the things he didn't know about.

"You know, you're only a couple weeks into this job and it's already happening-you're changing and you can't even see it."

She frowned. "Pretty sure the blog I just wrote proves I'm hardly the celebrity worshipper you accuse me of being."

"Maybe not, but you're so focused on that world, you're losing sight of the people who matter."

"That's not true, I . . ."

Her voice faded. Madison Brooks had just walked up to the counter and was placing her order.

She'd heard Madison worked out at a nearby gym and often dropped in for a post-workout caffeine hit. Luckily, Layla's decision to change her writing venue and hang around long enough to down three lattes had paid off. It was better than joining the gym and stalking her in a spin cla.s.s.

"I gotta go," she mumbled, ending the call as she stared at the back of Madison's head, knowing she had to act fast.

So far, no one had been able to secure her as a get, mostly because she was so hard to reach. But as Layla watched Madison wait for her order, minus the usual entourage, bodyguards, and overall fuss that usually surrounded her, there was a good chance Layla might change all of that.

She shoved her laptop into her bag and pushed away from the table, watching as the barista called, "Iced skinny latte for Della!" and handed the drink to Madison as though she had no idea who her customer was.

Clutching the drink in one hand, and her wallet and keys in the other, Madison struggled to shoulder the door open as Layla jumped in to help her.