met her once,” he said quietly. “And it was a long time ago. I don’t know if she’s still alive. If she is, and still living where she lived then, there’s no way in hell you could find her.”
“Lost Hills, though, right?”
He shook his head. “It’s been twenty years at least. Somewhere in the Valley, that’s all I remember. But you can’t go wandering around looking for her. I mean it. Hey—” he glanced at the Peugeot “—why are you alone? And Jonquil doesn’t count.”
“I’m heading to the Mystic Café,” she said, “to meet Reggie Maxx.”
“Okay. I know Reggie. Once you’re with him, stay with him until one of your cousins gets back. Promise me.”
“Promise.” It was an easy promise to make. What Brodie didn’t need to know was that en route to the Mystic Café, she was going to make a stop. One that wouldn’t take more than an hour or two.
* * *
The problem was, no drive-on pass awaited Sailor at Metropole Studios.
“No,” the guard said. “Nothing for Gryffald, nothing from GAA, nothing from Darius Simonides. And sorry, but you’re holding up the line. You’ll have to make a U-turn. You can’t come onto the lot.”
She snarled under her breath. A drive-on pass was the gold standard, allowing a visitor a parking space inside the studio lot. For lesser mortals, including auditioning actors as low in the food chain as she was, there were walk-ons. With those, a visitor had to find her own parking and enter the lot on foot. Even then there was a guard gate to get past, which meant being on a confirmed appointment list and providing photo ID.
And now Darius wasn’t returning her calls, and at this point his assistants were as sick of hearing from her as she was of talking to them. She could hear the trained politeness in Joshua’s voice reaching its outer limits. No, Mr. Simonides hadn’t left instructions; no, Joshua had not arranged a pass of any sort for her at Metropole; yes, it was possible Mr. Simonides had forgotten his promise. Joshua couldn’t really say.
Sailor found a parking place two blocks from Metropole’s south entrance gate. In the shade. After a twenty-minute walk Jonquil was happy to return to the Peugeot and work some more on his beauty sleep. The sun was still hidden by clouds and thus not beating down on the car, so Sailor opened the sunroof, cracked the windows halfway to let air in and kissed him goodbye. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised him. On impulse, she left Alessande’s dagger in the car, too. She couldn’t say why, only that her sixth sense told her to, and when it was that strong, she listened.
As she walked toward Metropole, her thoughts turned to Declan. All morning she’d wondered how to avoid his calls, and now she wondered why he hadn’t called. It was starting to seem silly how angry she’d been at him....
Why hadn’t he called?
Surely he wanted to. You couldn’t fake what they’d done in bed, or resist thinking about it afterward and reliving it over and over. Of course Julio’s death had changed everything, but even so, Declan had to be thinking about her. Because she sure as hell couldn’t stop thinking about him. Lying with him in the most intimate conceivable way had been like a mating ritual. She and Declan were very different people. He was older and, by all social and economic standards, more powerful, but on a fundamental level they were equals. And having mated with him, there was no going back. That hour in his bed had changed her, changed her dreams. She had sometimes wondered if she was a woman whose primary passion was her art, a woman for whom romance would always be a distant second, one who would be happy with a succession of lovers kept in the background of her life. She now knew the answer: no.
Which was a problem.
Declan had felt it, too, the intensity of their coupling—she knew that. But maybe for him it happened all the time. He was notoriously, famously single, always linked to women, never staying with them, never living with them. Never marrying them. His spying on her wasn’t an expression of love but simple intelligence gathering, along with some control issues. She wasn’t angry about it, as she’d been last night, but she wasn’t fooling herself, either. It showed a lack of trust and a lack of honesty, both of which troubled her.
But why hadn’t he