Tinseltown

Praise for Victoria Fox’s debut book Hollywood Sinners

‘This summer’s hottest novel. Hollywood Sinners … is giving Jackie Collins a run for her money’ That’s Life!

‘Sure to be a huge hit and perfect for the beach’ Sun

‘We should’ve seen the twists in this sinful bonkbuster coming, but two of the surprises were so shocking that we ended up startling the other commuters on the bus!’ Now

‘The heady mix of corruption, glamour, lust and power is guaranteed to keep you up late into the night. Get your scandal fix here!’ Closer

‘This debut novel is full of sex, glamour and divas!’ 4 stars Star

‘Scandalous. Glamorous. Sexy. Victoria Fox’s sassy, sparkling debut puts the bonk back into bonkbuster!’ Lovereading.co.uk

‘A juicy tale of glamour, corruption and ambition. A cracking read’ Jo Rees, author of Platinum

‘A glorious, sexy story of high-octane Hollywood intrigue – I loved it.’ Lulu Taylor, author of Heiresses and Beautiful Creatures

‘Just what the devil ordered – salacious secrets, illicit sex and wicked deception.’ J J Salem, author of The Strip and Tan Lines

‘For a trip to ultimate escapism, take the Jackie Collins freeway, turn left at Sexy Street, right at Scandal Boulevard. Your destination is Victoria Fox’s Hollywood’ dailyrecord.co.uk

About the Author

VICTORIA FOX lives in London, she was born in 1983 and grew up in Northamptonshire with her parents, sister and cat Thomas. At thirteen she went to boarding school in Bristol, where she learned what you can get up to when your parents aren’t around, liked English best and avoided Games lessons at all costs.

From there she went on to study English and Media at Sussex University, where she made her first attempt at writing a bonkbuster novel. It was titled The Hardest Part and was truly dreadful.

Victoria worked as an editor in publishing before leaving to write full-time. www.victoriafoxwrites.co.uk

Tinseltown

Victoria Fox

Chapter 1

Only two words, but they bothered him. Or maybe it was the question mark.

DOMINIC JUDD – HOT SHOT?

He ran a hand through his thick dark hair and stood for a moment, baffled, before angrily tossing the magazine to the floor and taking care to step squarely on it with a foot still wet from the shower. The page stuck and he lost his balance, forced to hop, undignified, while he peeled the offending publication from a water-wrinkled sole.

‘Hot shot?’ What the bloody hell did that mean? It wasn’t like he’d done a gun movie or a coffee commercial or something worthy of the pun, and Dom Judd was Eton-educated, for heaven’s sake – he ought to be able to work it out. Then again, maybe there wasn’t anything to work out. Maybe it was just a full-of-herself writer struggling for a headline, who thought if she whacked a question mark on the end it might encourage readers to think it wasn’t her missing the point, it was them. And it had to be a girl: if a lady wasn’t interested in fucking him, Dom had to assume she was against him.

At twenty-six, Dom Judd was experiencing the first flush of long-sought-after celebrity. This time last year, he’d been languishing on the set of a UK soap opera, the posh villain come to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting community of russet-cheeked farmers and barmaids in leopard-print. He’d been there too long and was approaching the hollow realisation that a life in soap was all he was cut out for: that forty-mile-an-hour, middle-lane limbo, OK but not great, famous but not celebrated … no, Dom had other ambitions. He wanted it hard and he wanted it fast, and if he kept to the childish notion that he’d be dead by the age of twenty-seven – because all idols worth their accolade died that young – then he only had a year left to do it in. But he was starting to change his mind about that.

Just as well, then, that he’d been auditioned – ‘on the off chance’, according to his agent – for what was going to become, over the next eight months, the biggest American sitcom since Friends. Dom was playing the English eccentric, the quirky one, who – in spite of his warm, dark eyes, mop of black hair and square jaw shaded with three-day stubble – was never considered a love interest because he was too, well, kooky (he hated that word). It was the posh accent, didn’t you know, it made everything sound ten times funnier. Things weren’t quite so platonic with his adoring public: since moving to LA, women flocked to Dom like bees to honey. He was young, rich and ubiquitous – it was all you needed.

Dom dressed swiftly, slumping on to the bed and sighing loudly in a gutless attempt to rouse the girl still sleeping there. He couldn’t remember her name. Julie? Julia? Didn’t matter. But she was pretty even in daylight, so he congratulated himself on a choice well made. Miraculous, given the amount he’d put away the night before.

‘Do you want a shower or anything?’ he asked when she opened her eyes. ‘I’ve got to get moving. My brother’ll be here in a sec.’

She reached for his bare chest, the colour of a strong cup of tea. ‘You got a brother?’

Hmm. He and Freddy were close, but they weren’t that close.

‘I’m serious.’ He chucked her the previous night’s lacy panties, formerly strewn across a stupid claw-footed armchair he’d purchased during a brief spell of imagining himself to be Jeremy Irons and which he now realised was ridiculous. ‘Move.’

The girl sat up with a pout, allowing her generous tits to come into frame. Dom gave one of them a quick, perfunctory squeeze, like someone testing the ripeness of a piece of fruit, and which managed, offensively, to signal both hello and goodbye. She muttered something under her breath and made a grand show of leaving, saying she felt sick and needed water or a lie-down or an aspirin – or, no doubt, a sense-restoring fuck – and it wasn’t till half an hour later that he managed to bundle her out the door of his apartment.

Was he living the dream? Course he was. Dom Judd was the name on everyone’s lips: he was at every party, every opening, every fundraiser, every premiere … The press recorded his every move, fascinated by his brooding good looks and impeccable accent. Admittedly, some were kinder than others. He picked up the discarded magazine, the ‘Hot Shot?’ grey and wrinkly now from having got damp, and stuffed it in the bin. He thought he might speak to his representative about taking legal action. He had no clue what that actually entailed, but it made him feel like he was firing from both balls and that was what mattered.

With California sun streaming in through the blinds, it was hard to believe December was only a week away. Dom grimaced, supposing he ought to return to London for Christmas, but the thought of his melancholic mother, who prefaced everything with a wheedling, ‘You’ll join me in a small one, won’t you?’ and which invariably led to her having to be scraped off the sofa hours later after several dozen ‘small ones’, and his ex-army father, who said little but whose sideways glances gave the impression that Dom’s career was a bad smell passing under his nose, was depressing. Christmas was always depressing.

Despite the warmth, Dom shuddered. Whatever Christmas at home might have in store, it surely couldn’t be worse than the joke awaiting him here.

That blasted Celebrity Parade! Why had he agreed to do it?

On cue, there was a knock at the door – a rat-a-tat, followed by a brief pause, then a final a-tat. It was the same code they’d used since Dom was ten and building a spacecraft in his room made of loo rolls and clothes pegs. It was a vessel only those with authorisation – namely his younger brother Freddy – were permitted to view.

Dom opened the door, scratched his belly and yawned. ‘Go on, then,’ he managed through what was shaping up to be a fucking awful headache. ‘Hit me with it.’

Freddy Judd, a fraction taller than Dom and with all the same good looks, just arranged slightly differently, entered the room, clocked the dishevelled bed, the empty bottles of beer, and tried to find a way of phrasing it that didn’t sound disastrous.

‘There’s no way out of it, mate, I’m sorry,’ he said at last, biting back a laugh because it wasn’t funny; it really wasn’t. ‘But it looks like Santa Claus is coming to town.’

The Celebrity Christmas Parade was an annual extravaganza that took place a week after Thanksgiving on the streets of downtown Hollywood. Hundreds of thousands came in the hope of catching a glimpse of the stars, gracing the procession atop floats and stages, in open-top vintage cars and sleighs dazzling with lights. It was a great promotional opportunity – if you were a daytime-TV D-lister or an actor on his way out the game. Not for the top dogs, the main players, the – Dom cringed – hot-shot-question-marks. Not for him.

‘I can’t believe I ever said yes to this stupid gig,’ he muttered darkly as Freddy found them a table outside Maracas. ‘It’s humiliating, fucking humiliating.’

Freddy attempted to stop a grin pulling free. It was an asset he had over Dom, because he had this pair of really cute dimples.

‘You said yes at a time when nothing else was coming up. You needed the—’

‘It wasn’t a question,’ snapped Dom bitterly, flipping open the menu.

Freddy nodded obediently. His appointment as Dom’s PA – a position he’d embraced in the purgatory of post-university job seeking – had dropped him right in at the deep end. Since Dom had made it big, priorities were shifting in seismic proportions.

‘All I’m saying is you’ll look bad if you back out. Seriously bad. I’ve tried to pull strings, but, bro, you’re Santa.’ He ordered a beer. ‘Do it for the kids.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Look, you’ve just got to put on a beard—’

‘And a fat suit.’

‘I was forgetting the fat suit.’

‘Lucky you,’ Dom grumbled. ‘The whole thing’s so … Disney.’ He summoned a charm offensive for a passing troupe of girls in minuscule hot pants. ‘All right, ladies?’

Freddy watched as Dom signed autographs with a flourish, his good mood temporarily restored. Dom had always been the one who craved attention, while Freddy could think of little worse than having his every move monitored and scrutinised by the vulture-like media. But, despite their differences, he loved his brother and acknowledged that he’d taken the PA role because it was exciting and good money, but also because, if he hadn’t, he could see the future opening up with his brother drifting further and further off into a life he couldn’t understand, until eventually Freddy wouldn’t be able to see him at all.

‘So I’ve got to have the tykes clambering all over my lap as well, have I?’ Dom made a face once the girls had gone.

‘Not sure. I can find out.’

‘Promise them Lego and Barbies and all that bollocks.’

‘Maybe. It’s Bratz nowadays.’

‘Brats?’

‘Never mind.’

‘I bet they can’t believe their luck. Probably thought they’d be stuck with Mr Octogenarian Action-Movie-Reject for the fifth year running.’

It was true. The Parade’s organisers had hit the jackpot big-time. Dom had agreed to take on the role of Santa Claus, the main attraction of the star-spangled celebrations, Saint Nick plumply waving from a glitzy moving float, posing for photographs, chortling like one of the wind-up toys he bribed children with. He had said yes months before, when his star was fledgling, uncertain, a faint glimmer in a vast galaxy. The flipside of Dom’s desire to be famous was that he would agree to everything that guaranteed publicity, like a kind of Tourette’s, and then regret it afterwards. Today, riding high on the crest of newfound fame, wanting above all else to be taken seriously in his craft, the prospect of donning a fat suit and ho-ho-hoing his way through Hollywood was a fate worse than death.

Who could cancel Christmas? He couldn’t, not with the whole world watching.

Dom’s phone rang just as the food arrived. Grimacing, he picked up. Freddy stifled another comment when he saw his brother had ordered a chopped salad. A ‘chopped’ salad? As opposed to what, an entire lettuce and cucumber, maybe a tomato vine on the side? But Dom’s stormy glare told him to keep it shut.

‘Yes, yes, fine, OK.’ Dom rolled his eyes at the voice down the line, held the handset away from his face a moment and then did that immature but still quite effective thing of tucking his tongue inside his bottom lip and making a face like a fifteen-year-old.

By the time the call was over, Freddy was halfway through his burger. ‘Lex?’ he guessed. Lex Savage, silver-haired, silver-tongued PR guru, was Dom’s publicist.

‘Unfortunately.’ Dom popped a slice of avocado into his mouth while looking enviously at his brother’s plate. ‘I’ve got to start “behaving” now I’m Father-bullshitting-Christmas. At this rate the only bird I’ll be getting my teeth into’ll be the turkey.’

Freddy laughed. ‘Guess you’d better be a good boy this time of year. Or Santa might not come down your chimney.’

‘Santa can stick it up his own chimney.’

‘Nice.’

Dom began stabbing bad-temperedly at his salad. ‘The sooner this is done, Fred, the better. Let’s just get it over with, all right?’

Chapter 2

Around the corner, at Pierce Productions on Sunset, Laney Allen’s heart was beating so hard inside her ribcage that it hurt. She pictured it like a glossy red apple being thrown against a thin paper drum. She feared it was going to burst out and land with a wet squelch on her manager’s immaculate desk.

No, she begged inwardly, praying she had misheard. Please don’t ask me to do it. Please don’t.

‘The Celebrity Christmas Parade,’ Julian Pierce said again, annoyed at having to repeat himself. That was the problem with extending these talent competitions to ordinary people because ordinary people, invariably, were idiots. When they won, they were impossible to deal with. ‘You must have heard of it.’

‘Of course,’ Laney stammered.

‘You’ll be singing “White Christmas”.’ Julian gave her an efficient smile: before meeting the infamous record producer, known in the industry as the ‘Dream Machine’, Laney had never considered such a thing existed. She thought how straight and bright his teeth were, like sugar-coated mints. ‘Thought we’d keep it traditional. Everyone likes that one.’

Laney didn’t. She hated it. A cold shiver travelled down her spine.

She kept having to remind herself of all Julian had done for her to stop herself committing to what was rapidly becoming an aversion to him. It was his false altruism and his forced charm, and the way he pretended she had a say in any of this, asking her questions with full stops on the end and making out like he valued her opinion when she knew he’d be quite happy if she never dispensed an independent thought ever again. But if it wasn’t for him … what? Who was Laney Allen six months ago? She was nobody. A twenty-nine-year-old desk clerk perishing in a job she hated, a quiet yes-girl, a nodding puppet: sweet, timid Laney who’d do anything for you but whose niceness made her a sucker, a scapegoat, a soft touch. Now, finally, she had the chance to make things different. She was mad to complain.

But that wasn’t going to make this damned performance any easier.

Laney was fresh from winning America’s Next Sensation and had become, overnight, one of the country’s most adored celebrities. Being an everyday, unassuming champion, she eloquently captured the spirit of the show, and moreover she delivered a rarity: a performance that was all about the voice. No gimmicks, no innuendo, no winking to camera – just a beautiful, pure-as-driven-snow voice. It was, for many who voted, a happy antidote to young women raging half-naked through the charts singing about sucking the tip off a lollipop. The week since Laney’s victory had been one of back-to-back interviews and performances, the latter of which she’d got through fine because, somehow, when she was immersed in her favourite songs, she was a different woman. A stronger woman, the woman she wanted to be: poised and gifted and elegant and maybe, in the right light, even a bit beautiful. But as for the interviews and the publicity, she couldn’t bear it.

She had never expected to win, had never thought she’d get past the first round of auditions. The only ears to have properly heard her sing up to that point belonged to her sister Philippa and her Labrador, Bugsy, back home in Connecticut, whom she missed desperately. The dog, that was, not the sister. As the one who had steamrollered her into entering Sensation in the first place – ‘You’re pathetic, Laney. When are you going to do something with your life?’ – Philippa was on the phone to her five times a day, wanting to get a piece of the action, and if it wasn’t her it was the girls’ equally pushy mother. No, Laney chided herself: that was unkind. Philippa only wanted the best for her. It was just that some days she wished none of it had happened – not the show, not the winning and definitely not the public appearances. She’d prefer to go home and curl up with Bugsy and shut the blinds and wait until the whole thing had blown over.

Only now it was Christmas. And that meant …

‘You look pale,’ commented Julian, thinking the last thing he needed was another client breakdown on his watch – he had an executive meeting in ten. Plus Laney Allen was proving to be quite the cash cow. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I – I’m fine.’ She managed a smile. There was no way she could tell this man, this strange, polished man who claimed to be her friend but didn’t feel like one, how she felt about this time of year. She’d been naïve to imagine she could disappear, like she did every December, until Christmas was done.

‘Great.’ He clicked the nib of a pen in and out several times. ‘The Celebrity Christmas Parade is one of the biggest celebrations in Hollywood – it’s historic, a city tradition, something for the people. Perfect for your profile.’ The way he said ‘perfect’ brought to mind a cat licking cream off its whiskers. ‘OK?’

She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘OK.’

Laney Allen hated Christmas. Not in the way some people hate Christmas – the crowds, the cost, the endless carols or the way it starts in September – but in a way that had, for over twenty years, disabled her for several weeks over the festive period and left her unable to think of anything except how to avoid all associated with it.

Others embraced this time of year. They loved red noses blooming in the chill, cosy sweaters and roaring fires, friends and family gathering to celebrate. She could recognise the appeal, but only in the way someone with a phobia of air travel dreams of visiting a distant shore and understands they’ll never reach it. Many times she’d attempted to rationalise, tried to work out the root of her dread, but it was impossible. Every so often she’d catch a shadow, what she thought was a memory corroded by the sands of time, and stretch for it, only to have it slip away. It seemed Laney had been born like this and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Christmas was her private torture, her cross to bear.

It was a gauntlet of horrors. ‘Silent Night’ brought her out in a rash. Mistletoe made her flush hot and cold. The reindeer with their twisted thick antlers and their names like gunfire – Blitzen, Vixen, Dasher – prompted a panic attack. Waxy holly and bleeding berries. Sticky figgy pudding, dense and cloying. Turkeys with their innards ripped out and stuffed. Crackers exploding. Stockings like empty legs. Pine needles in the soft pads of her hands. Elves. And there, at the helm, the worst of the lot: Santa Claus. The mere sight of his chuckling pomposity was enough to make her vomit: his ruddy fleshy cheeks, the skewed combination of size and stealth as he tiptoed into children’s bedrooms and lurked at the feet of dreaming bodies, his heavy black boots tramping dark shapes in the snow… .

Of course it sounded ridiculous, this pathological fear, but that was what it was. In the past she had seen doctors, psychiatrists, you name it, in an attempt to get to the bottom of it. Nothing had helped. And so every November, like clockwork, Laney would quietly vanish.

Wearily she slipped her key into the hotel room door. She was staying downtown in a place organised by Pierce Productions, all glass and palm fronds and sunlight bouncing off polished floors, and no one could say they weren’t treating her like a princess. The past months didn’t seem real: she’d been on live TV every weekend, singing for millions, meeting her idols, wearing jewels worth more than any money she had ever known.

This was what triumph felt like … so why didn’t it feel better?

The room was gloomy. She’d been up at dawn for a radio interview and it had still been dark outside so she hadn’t opened the blinds. She pulled them now and, in the glass, met her reflection: dark hair curled softly to her shoulders, a full mouth and clear, pale skin. Her eyes, hazel in some lights and green in others, eyes that glittered when she sang, were sad.

It was only a song. Only singing, and singing was what she loved – whoever cared if she was surrounded by Christmas? It was just a thing, just an idea, just a word …

Pull yourself together, Laney, for goodness’ sake … It’s only Christmas …

Philippa’s voice shrilled through her mind. Any moment now, her sister would call and Laney would have to tell her what Julian had proposed, have to hear that silence as the understanding went between them that this ‘problem’ of Laney’s would finally have to be addressed, but neither of them would put a name to it, just leave it hanging, each second making her feel more like the pariah.

Philippa. Capable and confident, successful in her job as a real estate agent, the blonde shrimp who’d pushed her head-first down a slide when they were kids, knocking Laney’s front teeth so they turned grey. She was, at thirty-three, someone Laney found faintly terrifying. Philippa played squash. She holidayed with a woman called Hilary to five-star palaces in Mauritius. She ate steak rare. She turned up at their mother’s place on a Sunday in sherbet-coloured shorts and huge suspension sneakers, having baked a batch of iced brownies because she had ‘five minutes to spare’.

What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t be a freak all your life …

Laney backed away from the window, her own image dissolving till it was replaced by the parking lot outside.

This was her last chance. A chance for Laney Allen to show the world – show her sister, her mom, everyone back home – that she was stronger than they thought she was.

If she was.

The Celebrity Parade. She would do it, even if Christmas killed her.

Chapter 3

That same afternoon, twenty-year-old Clare McCarthy was having sex with her boyfriend in a Bel Air mansion – the kitchen of a Bel Air mansion, to be exact.

‘How’s that feel, baby,’ Calvin Johnson rasped, ‘that feel good?’

It felt a bit uncomfortable, actually, leaning back against the brushed steel cabinets as Calvin ploughed into her, trying to prevent her head from slamming into them. Or maybe it was the background hum of the Sub-Zero refrigerator that was killing it.