Shooting Star (Beautiful Chaos) by Arianne Richmonde Read Free Book Online Page A

meet a director, or us standing in line for some open cattle call where I’d have to sing and dance, or show them my tap dancing skills. Toothy-gum smile. Little knock knees. Long blond hair to my waist. Smiling and happy, even if I preferred to be playing soldiers with my brother or Doctors and Nurses in the trailer park with Mindy. No video games—we couldn’t afford them. We lived from commercial to commercial and it wasn’t until I was seven and got my first TV show that the money started properly rolling in.
    I wanted to please my mom—make her proud. And now I had that same feeling about Jake and I didn’t understand why. It wasn’t just the movie I cared about or doing a good job, but Jake himself. I was yearning to impress him. And at the same time, the Machiavellian devil in me was urging me to play little power games—just to see if I could get to him.
    I decided that staying with him in his house . . .
    Would be a whole lot of fun.

    “SO THIS IS FOR REAL?” Mindy said, and then she slurped up her strawberry, wheat-germ and banana smoothie through a straw even though there was nothing left at the bottom. Her round, fleshy cheeks always gave her an air of happiness, and her sparkly brown eyes—like a loyal puppy—made me feel that the world was right even when it wasn’t. Sure, she was overweight; some people would have called her “fat,” but she had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen, like an innocent angel from a Renaissance painting. Timeless beauty. I felt safe with her and one hundred percent accepted. We went back a long way Mindy and I, and she’d seen the worst of me but had still hung around all those years—never letting me down even when I’d been an ass. One of the few people I could trust because we’d known each other since we were four. When you’re famous you can never be sure who your real friends are—some people can do a very convincing act.
    We’d been shopping and were now hanging out on Santa Monica Pier, people-watching—at least trying to. For me it wasn’t so easy. I was wearing a huge purple hat, dark sunglasses—my signature long blond hair tucked inside a belted mackintosh that made me look like some detective from a pulp fiction crime novel. Except the hat was one of those oversized floppy ones so maybe I looked like something out of a 1980’s Jackie Collins ‘bonkbuster’—the kind my mom used to read. So far, only two people had recognized me but I kept my head down and kept on walking—no eye contact. One of my bodyguards walked ahead of us and another behind. Things had calmed way down since my arrest and three-night stint in jail, but having swarms of paparazzi trailing me could be terrifying and I didn’t want to get caught unawares.
    “He doesn’t want me to stay with him but the producers are insisting,” I told Mindy.
    “What about Janice, is she coming too?”
    “Good point. I guess not. I’ll need her though so maybe I should bring her along.”
    “No, no distractions,” Mindy said emphatically. “Jake Wild is a serial womanizer. He might be attracted to her.”
    “Over me ?”
    “You already said he wants to stay clear of you so yeah, he might go for Janice.”
    “Yeah, we can’t have that.”
    “Guys go crazy when women fool around with them and then don’t give a damn. Makes them nuts!” She grinned at me. “Serves them right most of the time—gives them a taste of their own medicine.” That was my signature behavior with guys. . . Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen and Mindy lived vicariously through me. She’d had her heart broken once and since then hadn’t dared trust a guy. If I treated someone badly it gave her a thrill as if her ex was getting direct punishment. “All men are the same,” she added. “Serves ‘em right to get their butts kicked once in a while.”
    My gaze wandered to the horizon where a sailboat was dipping into a golden sun—it reminded me of a painting by William Turner; the