Dark Angel 03: Broken Dream by Eden Maguire Read Free Book Online

Jack. They need you on set in fifteen.’
    ‘Tell them to go fuck themselves.’
    ‘You tell them.’ Charlie didn’t miss a beat. ‘You’re the one with the multimillion-dollar contract. See how they like it if you screw this up one more time.’
    Taking a step back, Jack smiled uneasily. ‘Don’t tell me my business. You and I both know they can’t make this movie without me.’
    Charlie gave an imperceptible shake of his head. ‘So take a shower,’ he insisted. Then he turned to his sister. ‘Hey, Gwen, why don’t you walk Tania and Orlando around the set,’ he told her, ‘while I straighten Jack out and take care of Natalia.’

    ‘Sorry about that,’ Gwen Speke told us at the steps to the boathouse. Across the lake the usual horde of Jack Kane fans still stood waiting for him to appear. ‘You caught him on a bad day.’
    ‘He has good ones?’ Orlando asked sceptically.
    ‘Oh yeah. Some days he can be totally charming. My brother swears he’s witnessed him go up to fans to sign autographs and kiss their babies.’
    ‘Sounds like you don’t believe it,’ I checked.
    ‘I haven’t seen it myself,’ she confessed. She bit her lip and considered something for a while. ‘Now that you’re out of Jack’s evil clutches, why not stick around and catch some filming?’
    ‘What about … ?’ Orlando jerked his thumb towards the Kane trailer.
    ‘Charlie will fix him, no problem. Anyway, Jack’s short-term memory is shot. By the time he makes it down those trailer steps, he’ll have forgotten you two exist.’
    We believed her and went with her for coffee in the catering trailer. The coffee was as bad as Natalia had said, but we soon warmed to Gwen, who told funny stories about the famous actors she’d worked on, giving us the gory lowdown on various cosmetic procedures until the Kane kids came running up to her.
    ‘More cookies!’ Phoebe pleaded.
    ‘More!’ little Charlie mouthed.
    But Adam, at five, wrecked their high hopes. ‘Mommy said just one,’ he told them sternly.
    Gwen spread her hands and pulled a face. ‘Sorry, kids.’
    So the little ones groaned and ran off again to pester a guy with a pair of headphones hung around his neck.
    ‘Poor kids – I know,’ Gwen confided as Adam drifted towards a window, pressed his nose against the cold surface and stared out over the frozen lake. ‘People think they have everything they want, but really they live inside a bubble. They can’t go anywhere, do things normal kids do. I’m not saying that Natalia isn’t a good mom,’ she added quickly. ‘And thank God for my brother – he’s her rock. She even named the baby after him.’
    Frowning, I secretly wondered how that had gone down with Jack.
    ‘Oh no!’ Gwen seemed to follow my train of thought and laughed as she protested. ‘That’s funny. Charlie and Natalia – no way! I mean, how weird would that be?’
    ‘For her to have an affair with a guy who’s the body double of her husband?’ Orlando caught our thread.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said, watching Phoebe run from the sound man to a girl with a clipboard and start the cookie thing over while Adam still stared out of the window. ‘Very weird.’
    But not impossible, I thought.

    Spending the rest of the afternoon with Gwen was fun. Together we watched Lucy Young, an assistant director, run through a scene with fifty or so extras. It was a thirty-second sequence inside the boathouse café, which ended with Jack’s character entering then getting into a brawl with an undercover cop, a role played by an actor named Rocky Seaton. We’d got close to Rocky when Gwen worked on him in the make-up trailer and found he didn’t live up to his tough screen image, sitting there reading Tolstoy and talking politics with anyone who would listen.
    He was good in his role though. When he walked on set and the lights came on, he transformed into a cold, calculating cop.
    ‘Cool!’ Orlando breathed as we watched Rocky narrow his eyes and alter