“Sounds like your dad got violent. Is that what I’m hearing without you actually saying it?”
He glanced at her. It was as if she read his mind. But he nodded because she deserved the truth. “Yeah. He was a class A son of a bitch.”
This time she stroked her hand down his thigh. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” She tipped her head against the seat rest. “Sounds like our dads needed a how-to pamphlet.” She snorted. “You’d think there would be some kind of test to pass before a person is allowed to bring kids into the world. I lost track of how often my father lied to me and let me down. All the times he’d said he’d be somewhere, and all the times I was left stranded or hoping to see him when I had a performance at school. Never stopped him from making promises he couldn’t keep. Never stopped him from lying about where he was or what he was doing.” She sighed. “He taught me one thing... I know exactly what I won’t put up with. No drugs. No fake promises. No violence. No lies.”
Chapter Eighteen
Carrie Ann came out of the audition and stepped into the bright California afternoon. The smile she’d left the office with disappeared from her face the second she turned her back. Those fuckers. Did they think she didn’t know what they thought of her? Did they think she couldn’t read their eyes and silent communication? Fuckers. She could kill every one of them in a second if she wanted to. She worked out. She took self-defense. She had an arsenal of weapons and knew how to break an arm in multiple places. How much different could it be to break a neck?
Carrie Ann jerked her car door open, settled into the seat and slammed the door shut. Fuckers, every one of them.
If Julie had been in town, she could’ve helped her prepare for the audition. But, no, Julie had run like a scared rabbit because someone was trying to kill her. What a pussy. Carrie Ann would never let someone scare her away from her home. Hell no. She’d fight to the death to keep what she’d worked so hard for.
Julie was pissing her off more and more. Everything came to her best friend without any effort on her part at all. Carrie Ann worked just as hard as Julie, but did the good scripts come to her agent? She just kept getting every indie script under the sun and hoped that one of them broke through. Unlike Julie, who had scripts and projects just waiting for her to sign on, Carrie Ann still had to audition for great parts and rarely got the ones she wanted. The most recent example being Ari Nepali’s latest film.
She never should’ve trusted Julie to help her get the part. It was all a bunch of lies, a bunch of bullshit. If Julie had really wanted to help her, she’d have backed out of the movie for good.
Carrie Ann slammed her palm against the steering wheel and pain shot through her hand and up her arm. She didn’t give a shit. Julie, fucking Julie, had stolen another part that should have been hers. How many more times was she going to live through something like this? How much was she supposed to take before something snapped? Carrie Ann wanted to roar, to hit something. Why was life so fucking unfair?
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Obsessing about Julie wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Carrie Ann glanced at her phone. Al still hadn’t called her. She was pretty sure she’d scared the hell out of him last night. Clearly the guy’d had very limited sack time with women.
Anyone could see he was a nerd. His short curly hair stuck out in odd directions. Those thick glasses covered intense, dark eyes. Even his stubble had grown in uneven, leaving little patches of skin soft and smooth. He cracked her up.
His fortune, however, was a serious matter.
Once she’d hit town, Leo Frost had avoided her like she carried an STD. Her plan to use him for some much needed PR sank like the Titanic. But Al was a different story. Nothing opened doors like money, and hooking up with a rich nerd could be just as valuable as hooking up with a Hollywood star.
She’d found plenty of Al Gateses when she’d Googled him, but