Kendall’s mum Lorna was a sweet, pleasant woman, but she knew nothing about her daughter’s wild lifestyle, or if she did she was too weak to do anything about it. The truth was, Lorna Bryce was afraid of Kendall. Her younger children, Holly and Joe, were both so much easier to handle. They hadn’t been affected by Vernon’s abandonment the way that Kendall had. That was the problem. From babyhood, Kendall Bryce had always been a daddy’s girl.
Hiding her pain behind the twin masks of her extraordinary looks and her razor-sharp tongue, Kendall was determined to prove her worth to the father who had dumped her, and to the rest of the world. TV success was a start. But she wanted more than that. She wanted lasting, global superstardom. She wanted to walk on stage in packed stadiums all around the globe and hear people chanting her name.
No one was more surprised than Jack Messenger to discover that Kendall Bryce could sing. Her agent had practically laid siege to Jester’s LA office on Beverly Glen until Jack agreed to see her. Reality stars releasing records was really not Jester’s thing. Plus the Bryce girl had only just got out of jail for cocaine possession. Too much trouble by half. But Kendall’s agent was so persistent that Jack relented one Friday afternoon, and gave the kid five minutes. There was an upright piano in Jack’s office. He’d been an exceptional pianist in his youth and still found that playing calmed his nerves and cleared his head. He sat down and, rather meanly, started playing Christina Aguilera’s Genie in a Bottle, an astonishingly difficult song for an untrained vocalist. Kendall Bryce didn’t miss a beat. She opened her mouth and belted it out, pitch perfect and with the power and depth of a seasoned Gospel singer. Her voice ricocheted around Jack’s office like a sonic boom. After fifteen years in the music business it took a lot to surprise Jack Messenger. But Kendall Bryce had done it, in about two and a half bars.
That meeting was two years ago now. Since then, under Jester’s management, Kendall Bryce had gone on to become one of the best-known and biggest-selling female artists in America. But she had also had to submit her entire life to Jack Messenger’s control. He’d refused to sign her unless she quit cocaine and alcohol cold turkey, and underwent regular drug testing. She had to join a gym, stop going to nightclubs unless someone from Jester accompanied her, and agree to make no comments to the press whatsoever, unless Jack had personally authorized them. The one and only time she was caught breaking one of these rules (she was photographed drunk on an unauthorized trip to the Chateau Marmont) Jack had forced her to give up the lease on her apartment and move into his guesthouse in Brentwood until her second album was in the can. Needless to say, Kendall had bucked and chafed against such draconian restraints. But she put up with them for two reasons.
One was that she knew Jack Messenger could not only get her to the top but keep her there.
The other was that she was madly, passionately and utterly hopelessly in love with him.
Jack was everything that Kendall’s own father was not: decent, honest, loyal, kind and strict. He was tough on her because he cared, and though she fought against him tooth and nail, and was often so infuriated with him she wanted to cry or hit him or both, deep down she felt safe for the first time since she was eleven. Jack was also the first man who, maddeningly, appeared to be totally immune to Kendall’s celebrated physical charms. Since the age of fifteen, Kendall Bryce had been used to enslaving any and all men to her will – boys at school, teachers, producers on her show. In Jack Messenger, for the first time, she encountered indifference. Her initial reaction was to assume that he was either grieving too hard for his dead wife, or secretly gay. But, especially since moving onto his property, she’d been forced to abandon both these theories. Jack had a girlfriend, Elizabeth, an attractive, professional woman in her thirties who was about as far removed from Kendall as it was possible to be: discreet, together, undemanding. In short, a grown-up. Jack was never pictured with her in public, but Elizabeth seemed unfazed by this apparent lack of commitment. Nor did she complain about the fact that he still wore his wedding ring, and spent every Saturday afternoon without fail at his wife’s grave at Forest Lawn. If this was the sort of woman Jack was looking for, it was little wonder he failed to notice Kendall. But it still hurt.
As with her father, Kendall tried to get Jack’s attention by acting out, in particular bedding a string of Jester’s male acts to try to make him jealous. As with her father, the strategy failed miserably. In recent months things had hit an all-time low between the two of them. Consumed with longing and frustration and fury, Kendall had started drinking again. Two weeks ago she was breathalysed on Sunset and slapped with another DUI, her fourth. She was lucky to escape jail time. Jack, needless to say, was furious, refusing to allow her to fly with him to London for Ivan Charles’s party, an event he knew Kendall had been hugely excited about, and forcing her to stay home with a sobriety-coach-slash-jailer instead.
One day he’ll see what’s right under his nose, thought Kendall, bitterly. He’ll realize he loves me; that I’m the one who can help him get over Sonya. He’ll learn to love again. We’ll learn together.
Until that day, however, she wasn’t about to let Jack push her around. In a week’s time she’d be in London anyway, performing, and there was nothing he could do to stop her having the time of her life. Meanwhile, Kendall had no intention of joining a nunnery just to make Jack happy. Sex with her sobriety coach might not have been spectacular. But it was two fingers to Jack holier-than-thou Messenger. That alone made it worth it.
The next morning a perfect clear, blue-skied dawn broke over Los Angeles, just as Lex Abrahams was brewing his second pot of coffee on the stove. Lex rarely slept more than four or five hours a night and was always up before six. Years spent on the road as a photographer, flying from continent to continent at the whim of his famous, rock-star clients, had left him immune to jet lag and to exhaustion generally. Which was a good thing, as he now worked for Jack Whip-Cracker Messenger as Jester’s in-house photographer; a dream job as long as you didn’t mind insane hours, capricious artists and a pay packet that barely covered your rent and bills.
Happily, Lex didn’t. Photography was his life, music his business, and Jack Messenger one of the nicest, most decent men he had ever met. All in all, Lex Abrahams considered himself one of the luckiest twenty-eight-year-olds on the planet.
Especially this morning. This morning he got to see Kendall, to show her the first images from last week’s shoot for her new album cover. If Lex did say so himself, the pictures were awesome. For once in his life, he was actually going to impress Kendall Bryce. And, as Lex Abrahams knew perhaps better than anyone, that took some doing.
Pouring molasses-thick coffee into a red tin mug, into which he had heaped four spoons of sugar and a generous dash of Coffee-mate, Lex wandered out onto his patio. He loved it out here in the early mornings. It was a small space, basically just a gravel courtyard with a table, two chairs and a lone orange tree, but it was a sun-trap and it made his bijou one-bedroom apartment feel twice its actual size. At Kendall’s suggestion, Lex had recently screwed a vintage mirror to the rear patio wall, to make the garden look bigger. He peered at his reflection in it now, not out of vanity but because it was there, and saw what he always saw: a stocky, slightly too short Jewish man with dark curly hair, a long but not unattractive nose, and light-blue eyes that looked as if they’d been stolen from somebody else, somebody Swedish and blond … a surfer, maybe. If it weren’t for the eyes, Lex Abrahams would have been the most Jewish-looking Jew he knew. Ironically, given that he’d been raised in a totally non-religious household, wasn’t remotely kosher, and didn’t know the inside of a synagogue from a packet of peas. Still, as a photographer with a rare gift for capturing the idiosyncracies and beauty of the human face, Lex was glad he had ‘a look’. Occasionally he wished it were more the sort of look that girls like Kendall Bryce swooned over.