Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) by Suzanne Brockmann Read Free Book Online Page A

his
own
little win zipped up tight inside his pants and out of the equation.
    Problem was, Patty had a serious crush on Rob. Which meant that it was going to fall on him to keep his distance.
    God help them all.
    “You need to lighten up,” her brother told her now. “What is it
Variety
calls you?” He reached for a copy of the trade magazine that was out and open on her desk, and started to read the latest section that Patty had highlighted. “ ‘Never too serious, party-girl producer and screenwriter Mercedes Chadwick heats things up at the Paradise.…’ ” He looked at her over the top of the oversized page. “Who are you, you too serious she-bitch, and what have you done with my real sister, the party-girl producer?”
    Jane gave him the evil eye that she’d perfected back when she was six and he was four.
    It didn’t scare him as much anymore. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re freaked out by these e-mails—”
    “But I’m not,” Jane said. “I’m freaked out by the fact that the studio’s freaked out. I don’t need a bodyguard. Robbie, come on, it’s just a few Internet crazies who—”
    “Patty told me you got three hundred messages just today.”
    “No,” she scoffed. “Well, yeah, but it’s, like, three crazies, each sending a hundred e-mails.”
    “You’re certain of that?”
    “Yes,” she told him.
    Robin was silent, obviously not believing her.
    “Really,” she insisted. “How could this possibly be real?”
    More silence. “Who’s paying?” Robin finally asked.
    “For my lifetime of sin?” Jane responded. “I am, apparently.”
    He gave her a get-serious look—which was vaguely oxymoronic. Robin, telling someone else to get serious. “For this added security that HeartSong Studios wants to set up,” he clarified.
    “They are,” Jane said. Her budget for this film was already stretched thin. She was using her personal credit cards to pay for craft services. No way could she afford around-the-clock guards.
    “Then I don’t see what the big deal is,” Rob said.
    “You don’t understand,” Jane said. And he didn’t. Her brother, while not exactly simple, presented his true self to the world at all times. Well, except for lying to her about Patty.…
    Robin was a player and he didn’t try to hide it.
Too many women, too little time
—he’d said as much in his first interview with
Entertainment Weekly
. Consummate actor that he was, he came across as charming. The reporter—a woman, natch—portrayed him as boyishly honest about his inability to resist temptation, rather than selfish and spoiled.
    To be sure, his being spoiled was partly Jane’s fault. As his older sister—well, after she’d ended that phase where her every waking moment was devoted to tormenting her wimpy littlefreak of a half-brother—she’d bent over backwards to try to make life as easy as possible for him.
    It had been difficult growing up with their parents. Most weekends it was just Jane and Robin and their father’s housekeeper, who was replaced with an even higher frequency than the stepmom of the moment, and rarely spoke English.
    It was during one of those weekends that Jane first discovered that Robin’s entire life reeked of neglect. His mother was referred to by her own mother as “that drunken bitch,” so she probably shouldn’t have been too surprised.
    Somewhere down the line, just a few years before Robin’s mother died and he moved in full-time with their father, she stopped being his chief tormentor and became his champion. His protector. His ally.
    “What’s not to understand?” he asked her now. “HeartBeat wants to hire a couple of bodyguards for you. Use it. Spin it into something that’ll get us two, maybe three stories in the trades. If you do it right, maybe AP’ll pick it up.”
    “I don’t want a bodyguard following me around day and night.” Jane’s public persona, “Party Girl Producer Mercedes Chadwick,” was as much a fictional