Sauntering over to the spot where he worked to strip down the contents of his bag now overflowing with purified water, Shannon figured she’d better follow his example and sort through the stuff she had to bring with her.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked, just because she hated pronounced silences.
Her mom had been either depressed or bored with her life for as long as Shannon could remember, and her silences had always meant trouble was brewing. Usually that she’d overstayed her welcome wherever her mom was filming and that Shannon would be on her way back home with a nanny before long. She’d worked damn hard to keep her mom too entertained to fall into the long silences and then send her away, but she’d had even less success as a daughter than as a serious actress.
“I tried to take a shortcut off Route 1 back in Insurgentes, where the interstate veers east before coming back west. But I stopped seeing signs a good five miles before we were run off the road.”
She recalled they hadn’t noticed any other vehicle besides the van once they’d left the main route, so even if they could scale the embankment they’d fallen down, it wouldn’t do much good to wait for traffic on a road that had looked more geared to ATVs than real cars. “So we can either backtrack to the highway or try to cut northeast and see if we can meet up with it ahead of us.”
She unzipped her biggest suitcase, the vintage trunk, one of her favorite pieces of luggage, and wondered how she would leave anything behind. Even though they couldn’t see any other signs of two-legged life right now, that didn’t mean looters wouldn’t crawl out from the bushes to make off with her stuff.
“Right.” Romero dug a knife out of a tool kit that had fallen out of his trunk, and stuffed it inside the bag he apparently planned to bring with him. “But if we backtrack, we know the phone won’t work for the whole trip. Whereas if we move forward, we at least have the possibility of finding some kind of cell coverage.”
Shannon glanced at her bridesmaid dress, her curling iron and her hot rollers. None of them would be helpful on a journey through the Mexican desert, but she couldn’t see herself leaving all of it behind either, especially as the dress was the single most expensive item in any of her suitcases. Romero’s trunk latch had broken when he forced it open, so they couldn’t lock it up again. Tugging out the pink garment, she rolled it up tight to pack in the medium-size carry-on bag.
“You’re not bringing that with you.” Romero seemed to be cutting the carpet out of the BMW, for no real purpose that she could see.
“Did I tell you what to pack?” The sun overhead went behind a cloud and she noticed for the first time the day turning overcast. The ugly birds that had been stalking them had taken off, but she didn’t know if that meant impending bad weather or that the carrion-eating rats with wings had gotten tired of waiting for them to die.
“No, but that’s because I have the greater good in mind instead of thinking about what to wear tomorrow.” The carpet he’d been sawing at flopped on the ground, the underside stiff and rubberized.
“I’m not wearing this dress tomorrow.” In fact, she’d never wear it again, since the first thing she had to do when she returned home, after feeding her dogs, was post the garment on eBay to try to make a little money back on the ridiculously expensive piece. “But it’s Vera Wang. I can’t bloody well leave it in the desert for thieves.”
Any woman of Shannon’s acquaintance—and most of the men, for that matter—would have understood. A vein in Romero’s temple throbbed so hard it looked like it might well explode.
How could he walk out on her without a fight, and yet a dress brought out the ferocious beast in him?
“I think thieves are the least of our problems. Put the dress back and take the rest of the water I couldn’t fit in my bag.” He exaggerated the articulation. Clearly, he thought she was a moron.
“You know I may not have all the right survival skills to make it in the Mexican desert.” It looked like a freaking desert to her, damn it. She tossed bottle after bottle of water on top of the Vera Wang as a compromise. “But I’ve lived in Hollywood on my own since I was fourteen, becoming an emancipated minor at sixteen after my guardian aunt spent all my mom’s fortune.” Not that her personal history wasn’t known by every Hollywood insider, outsider and tabloid, considering her mother’s fame. “That means I’ve been surviving for over a decade in a jaded jungle full of people who wanted to tear me down, or at the very least, expected me to turn into my druggie mom. And not only have I managed to have a successful career—” okay, so she’d fudged that part, but this was her rant “—I’ve also never been photographed naked, never threw up in a nightclub, never got in a fight with the paparazzi, and not once did I cave to addictions that spit people out by the dozens every day in Los Angeles. The mere fact of my existence speaks to my intelligence, don’t you think?”
When she had all the bottles of water in her bag, she zipped it up and stared at him, daring him to tell her what to do again.
“I hope you’ve got everything you need in there, since you don’t have an ounce of space left.” He glared meaningfully at her bulging bag.
She didn’t. She had to have her face cleanser and a few other toiletries. But she could stuff those in the side pouches, couldn’t she? She was about to fire off a sharp retort when she remembered the movie script. Even though the treatment was for some crummy indie film cashing in on her mother’s fame, her ass would be grass if someone else got their hands on the screenplay and leaked it.
“Crap.”
Romero was at least wise enough to go back to peeling the carpet out of the trunk instead of gloating. Maybe that was a benefit to being with a man who never argued. He didn’t jump down her throat when she messed up, either. Sighing, Shannon sank to her knees to retrieve the one item she couldn’t jam into some tiny side flap. The padded manila envelope contained the project that represented Shannon’s only offer to stay in Hollywood. Not that she was taking it.
From Ceily’s description, Shannon knew the movie was about her poor mother’s arrival in Tinseltown, and her rise to fame that had included nude spreads in a variety of men’s magazines and rumors that she’d used sex to get some of the industry’s juiciest roles. Later, she’d descended into drugs, alcohol and depression. Nothing the public hadn’t heard about before.
Baby Doll would be a movie about a woman’s use of sex to get her way—a theme Hollywood producers loved. But Shannon had managed to have a sixteen-year career without taking her clothes off or playing the sexpot. Her mother had been famous for both, blazing through Hollywood with studio directors and producers panting at her heels. Bridget Leigh had elevated sensuality to an art form.
No, Shannon didn’t want to do a movie focused on all the things she resented most about her mom, the things that took Bridget away from her daughter before they could fix their dysfunctional relationship. But the script couldn’t stay here, either. Vera Wang would have to go.
“Is that the proposal for the film about your mom?” Romero had set aside his knife and rolled up the carpet tightly with a bungee cord around it.
He stuffed the long roll into an elastic side strap on his overnight bag, which was more functional than label conscious. Romero had never been about high fashion or glitz, even in his days with bandmates who wore eyeliner like it was going out of style. Hence his decision to invest a few grand in a new brand of hiking boots to help give the fledgling company a PR boost. He liked to fish on the weekends and take a boat out to Catalina.
“Yes.” She hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was desperate enough even to consider this kind of film. Especially not a man she wanted to eat his heart out. “I’m probably not going to do this project, since I have a lot of other things in the works.”
Like a play so far off Broadway she’d probably be playing Staten Island.
“But it’s important