Sakura snorted. "I should warn you. Grant's out there now."
"You mean he didn't get carted directly to the hospital due to alcohol poisoning?" I wondered if he had been kicked out of his uncle's own party already or if he'd skipped it. I shook my head. Cozying up to Grant Randolph was supposed to be a great business strategy. Sigh.
"Apparently not," she said. "He's telling people he ate a spoiled canapé at another party and once he puked it up he was fine."
"Liar, liar, pants on fire," I said resignedly. "Whatever. I hope he's sufficiently embarrassed that he avoids me for the rest of the night. Speaking of which-!"
Sakura raised an eyebrow at me.
"Axel Hawke!" I said, with an edge of exasperation in my voice.
"What about him?"
I gave him a new middle name and apparently that got the message across. "Axel. Fucking. Hawke."
Now her face got serious. "Oh shit. You fucked him."
"No. He fucked me. That's how it works, Sarah," I said airily with a dismissive wave of my hand. I checked my lipstick in the mirror and realized I hadn't put the right color on to match the vermillion dress. "So tonight I'm going to stay as far from Mr. Axel Hawke as possible, thank you."
She shrugged. "That's your choice. Darn. And you would have made such a cute couple, too. You didn't enjoy it?"
She was missing the point. "You know perfectly well why I can't have a relationship with someone like him."
"With a hot young dom?"
"With a celebrity bad boy." I hoped my cheeks hadn't flushed too much when she said "hot young dom." Just hearing the words practically sent me into a flashback.
She shrugged again, this time with eloquent disagreement in the tilt of her shoulders. "I think you'd do just fine, you know. No one expects you to take CTC's CEO chair at age twenty-four, Ricki. You could live a little."
Sakura really didn't understand, either. Well, she didn't have the pressures or the aspirations I did. "I'll be avoiding Mr. Celebrity Playboy from now on." I felt a pang of loss at that, but I knew the only way I was going to make my resolution stick was to avoid him. He was as tempting as an open box of chocolates.
"Suit yourself." Sarah was giving me a look like she suspected there was more to the story, but she wasn't going to grill me about it now. "What are you going to tell the press when they ask about tonight?"
"The truth. It was a publicity stunt gone wrong: he was supposed to grab you and I played along for the sake of the show."
"Uh-huh. Okay." She patted my knee. "Get through tonight's shindig and we'll talk again tomorrow, okay? Don't be a martyr about this, Ricki. If you're really shaken up, you need to talk to someone who understands."
I nodded. "All right."
I put on fresh lipstick and made her check that I didn't have any on my teeth. The party was my next hurdle.
* * *
Here's how the evening was supposed to go. I was supposed to shake the hands and kiss the cheeks of a lot of the rich and influential people in Hollywood. If I got lucky I'd also catch my boss in a good moment and get him thinking positively about what I wanted to do in film development. Other than that, the more boring the better. I did not need controversy. I did not need excitement. Let the excitement happen at the Capitol Records party.
I passed quickly through the kitchens, to give the house manager a chance to ask me any questions necessary, but they had it all under control. Mina, our head chef, gave me a brilliant smile but did not pause in her preparations beyond that one moment: I think she had a blowtorch in her hands at the time. My mind was too focused on maintaining my poise, what with my bare-shaven pussy lips rubbing each other the whole way toward the grand foyer.
I was just about to step out into the main foyer when a side door opened and, to my horror, out stumbled my father, half-blind from alcohol consumption. My heart sank. I had lost count of the number of times he had been to rehab and the equal number of times he had relapsed. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me each time he got worse, farther and farther from the clever, caring dad I'd known as a young child. Maybe it was just that the older I got the more I had to contend with his flaws.
"Ricki!" he exclaimed. "Ricki, Ricki, Ricki aww" He folded his arms around me in a loose yet stifling hug.
"Dad," I said. He was heavy and not holding up his weight. I desperately wanted to push him off but I was afraid he would hit his head if he fell. Dad, Dad, Dad, why do you do this to yourself? Why do you do it to me? "You don't look well."
"Nonsense! I'm perfectly fine. A little woozy from the long flight, you know, but I wouldn't miss being here on my little darlings' big night for the world!"
I wondered what planet he imagined he was on now and I edged toward the intercom on the wall. My father was a quiet, loving, generous man with a quick wit when he wasn't drinking. When he was drinking, he turned into a strange parody of himself, a surreal nightmare version that you couldn't talk to, couldn't reason with. As a child it had made me cry and ask for my "real" daddy. Now I was supposed to be a big girl, though. "Big night?" I echoed, as I finally got him to lean on the wall instead of on me.
"Yes, yes, of course! Your first time as hostesses! I know I haven't been to The Governor's Club in a long time, but I couldn't miss this."
Oh no. No no no. I realized then what he meant. Somehow my drunk-as-a-skunk father had decided that tonight wasn't the Grammy night party, it was the BDSM party Gwen and I were due to throw to inaugurate ourselves as the new heads of the secret, so-called "Governor's Club." A party that wasn't for another two weeks.
"And look at you!" He tried to run his fingers along the diamond choker but I sidestepped. "The spitting image of your mother!"
My dead mother. When he was sober he barely ever spoke of her at all, and I had quit trying to get him to. When he wasn't sober was no help, though: too often it ended in tears. There was no easy way to do this. No elegant face-saving way to humor him. I punched the emergency button on the intercom. "Dad," I said, trying to keep calm. "You really need to go lie down."
"Don't be silly!" he brayed, oblivious to the frozen look on my face and the tears starting to brim in my eyes. "I'll lie down when a bevy of bathing beauties beckon me to bed, perhaps, but-"
"Reeve, get up here," I barked into the intercom. "My father is-"
I saw two of our security team come hurrying up behind my father. One took hold of each arm. "Whoa, Mr. Hamilton," one of them said as he pulled my father off-balance with a slight wink in my direction.
"Oh, call me Richard, please. You make me sound like an old man," my father said.
"A bit unsteady on your feet at the moment, Richard?" the guard continued. "Let's go have a cup of coffee, all right?"
They pretty forcibly marched him toward the back of the house, but made jovial-sounding banter to him all the way.
Reeve appeared at my elbow as they were disappearing around the corner. "Sorry about that, Ms. Hamilton."
"That was close." I took a deep breath, looking up at the ceiling and letting my ruffled feathers settle back down. The evening had already been so emotionally complicated, to have Dad float in from Planet Tequila compounded it painfully. "He thinks tonight's party is … one of those parties. He was ready to go out there and ask who wanted a spanking!"
Reeve shook his head. "I'll try to keep someone on him tonight. Last thing we need is a scandal."
I'd say. I still needed to practice what I was going to say about Axel Hawke. Who I was reminded of again as I walked the rest of the way to the entryway.
Jamison was just showing a couple I recognized as longtime associates of my grandfather through the open parlor doors toward where the champagne was being poured.
"Your timing is perfect as always, Ms. Hamilton," Jamison said to me with a nod. His wavy black hair was slicked against his head, hiding his gray completely. At first I wasn't sure if he was secretly chiding me for being late, but no, he appeared to be sincere that I was right on time. I guess all the nonsense with Axel hadn't taken as long as I thought. "Security says several cars are on the way up the drive."
Well, good to know I did something right. I took a deep breath, clearing the incident with my father from my mind. Game face, Ricki, game face, I reminded myself and put on my best hostess smile. A steady stream of partygoers began to come in then, one car after another. I stayed in the foyer, greeting the parties as they came through. Kresley Palmer had brought his wife and his sister, who was a fashion designer but rarely spent time in Los Angeles. A small parade of my grandfather's former cronies.
But then came the man I was hoping to talk to, David Meyers, accompanying the stars of a recent rom-com. He introduced me to them, but I was much more interested in talking to him than to some A-list actors.
Meyers was in his mid-forties and always looked like he needed a bit of a haircut, his straight hair turning to curls behind his ears, his neatly trimmed beard showing one patch of gray. He shook my hand instead of kissing me on the cheek while his actors hurried over to the champagne fountain, the guy to goof around in front of it, the girl to giggle about it. "So glad you accepted the position with us, Ricki," he said. "It's Blue Star's gain and CTC's loss, so far as I'm concerned."