He's the One (16 page)

‘What did I do that was so wrong you would behave like this? I have always done everything for you, Brooke, tried to give you the best possible life. And then you go and do the one thing you know is completely unacceptable to me.’

Liberty’s tone was weary, resigned. The martyred one, which made Brooke feel horribly guilty.

‘I only had one pathetic drag of a joint! I don’t even like dope, I swear. I don’t know why you now assume I’m some kind of drug addict. Bryan’s parents were pissed with him and wanted to get us all into trouble, but it really wasn’t a big deal. It’s not like we were smoking crack or anything!’ Brooke felt it was totally unfair of her mom to over-react like this.

‘It’s not just about today. We had that talk the other week about your spending, but when I went up to your bedroom tonight I discovered a stash of designer bags and worked out you spent over five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars, Brooke! How do you explain that?’ Now Liberty was sounding less in control.

Okay, so that spending was a little excessive, but it had been necessary. ‘Well, I promise I won’t get anything else for a while. But I needed a new outfit for Christian’s party at the weekend.’ Brooke tried to claw back some moral high ground. ‘And anyway, you shouldn’t have been poking around in my room. It’s private. I wouldn’t dream of going poking around in yours.’

Liberty stared at her. ‘Have you taken on board at all how serious this is? Your over-the-top spending, your spoiled brat attitude, the drugs! It has got to stop, once and for all. You are grounded, young lady, for the next month. There is absolutely no way that you’re going to
Christian’s party. He’s clearly a very bad influence on you.’

No! She couldn’t have heard her mom correctly. She couldn’t miss Christian’s party! ‘You can’t do that! He’ll dump me if I don’t go!’

‘Well, he sounds like a keeper,’ Liberty said dryly. ‘And I
am
doing this, Brooke. You’ve had enough chances to improve and you’ve blown them all.’

For a moment she stood there, rooted to the spot in disbelief. Of all the arguments she had ever had with her mom, this was the worst. Brooke could see that there was absolutely nothing she could say that would change her mind. She sprinted out of the room and upstairs, not wanting to spend another second in the same room as Liberty, who was hell-bent on ruining her life.

Chapter 19

Liberty

Liberty heard her daughter slam her bedroom door shut, and put her head in her hands. She hated falling out with Brooke. Up until two years ago they had always been so close. She’d thought she had the perfect relationship with her daughter and felt that she could talk to her about anything. She’d almost felt a little smug when friends had told her about how obnoxious their teenage offspring were being. Brooke would never be like that, she would think to herself. And now here she was with a daughter who wouldn’t talk to her, who had taken drugs, who was most likely sleeping with her idiot of a boyfriend. On top of that she seemed to have become unbearably spoiled. Zac gave her a huge monthly allowance and a credit card and seemed to have no problem with Brooke going out and blowing it all on designer clothes, and yet she was only seventeen. What kind of a person would she become if she carried on like this?

Wearily Liberty got up and wandered through the vast open-plan living room with its views of the infinity
pool and ocean beyond. Only last month Zac had been interviewed by some magazine or other and they had photographed him in the house, where the journalist had raved about how beautiful and stylish it was. Liberty hated it. To her this place wasn’t a home; it was a show house, purely there to display her husband’s wealth and success. Everything in it was so perfectly designed. Press a button and the shutters came down, press another to dim the lights, press another to turn on the music centre or TV, press another to summon Rosa. Pity there wasn’t a button you could press to make you happy.

Liberty reached the kitchen, pulled open the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine – from Zac’s personal vineyard, where else? – and poured herself a large glass. She felt loneliness descend on her like a fog. She went outside and curled up on the sofa by the pool, looking out over the glittering lights of LA strung along the coast like jewels. She knew that she was envied by so many people who thought she had the perfect life, with the perfect husband, the perfect job, the perfect house, more money than she could ever possibly want. But none of those things mattered to her.

She didn’t want to be with Zac any more. She’d been putting on a brave face for the last five years, and it hadn’t been a happy marriage for a long time before that. The only thing she wanted to do was to be a good mother to Brooke and she didn’t know if that was even possible out here in LA, with the lifestyle her daughter had grown used to. As for love … well, Liberty had had her chance of that a long time ago and she didn’t think you got that kind of love twice.

After she’d moved to LA she had thrown herself into her new life. As he had promised, Zac had made
her into a star. Over the course of two years he had pursued her romantically, until finally she relented. Liberty had persuaded herself that she loved him, but looking back she never had. She had been seduced by the glamour of being with someone as powerful and charismatic as Zac Keller, a man who could open doors in her career and give her the security she craved. But it could never be enough. She’d often thought of Cory, yearned for him, dreamed of him, and then out of the blue five years ago he had come back into her life.

Liberty had been to an art exhibition organised by one of her friends and there he was, completely by chance. She hadn’t seen him for nine years, but the time apart fell away as they came face to face.

‘You still have the most mesmerising green eyes,’ he had told her. And he was as handsome as ever, but a man now, with broad shoulders and a muscular body. Same blue eyes, though, that seemed to see to the heart of her.

All night they had talked and talked, covering everything that had happened to them.

‘Why did you leave and not say anything?’ Cory asked her. ‘Do you have any idea what that did to me?’

‘But I did – I wrote you a letter where I explained everything, begging you to come out to LA with me.’

He frowned. ‘I never got a letter.’

‘Well, I definitely delivered it, by hand, so it can’t have got lost in the post.’

‘Zara must have kept it from me,’ he said. ‘She behaved really oddly after you’d gone.’ He shook his head. ‘You always said that you couldn’t trust her, I should have believed you. But why didn’t you call me once you were here? I didn’t know where you were, thought you must want never to see me again, so I didn’t dare ask your mum.’

‘Oh, Cory, and I thought the fact you never answered my letter meant
you
never wanted to see me again! I thought you must have gone to Thailand so I just worked as hard as I could and tried to forget you. I never did, though. I’ve tried to pretend it’s not true, but I’ve never stopped loving you.’

When they came out of the gallery, Ramon, Liberty’s driver and security guard, was waiting for her. Brooke was staying with friends and Zac was away filming. She felt reckless, giddy with love and desire for Cory, so when Ramon asked her where she wanted to go, she told him to drive them to Cory’s hotel.

When they woke up in the morning, still wrapped in each other’s arms, they knew that they had to be together.

‘Leave him,’ Cory told her. ‘I love you so much, Liberty, and I hate to think how unhappy you are with Zac. We have enough money. We could move down to San Francisco, I’ve got a house there, or we could go back to the UK. I’ve got a home there too.’

She couldn’t think of one reason to stay with her husband. For the next two days she made her arrangements but told no one except her friend Tandi, Kelly’s mom. The plan was that Liberty would fly down to San Francisco with Cory, get the house ready for her daughter and then fly back for Brooke.

But on the morning they were due to fly out together Cory didn’t meet her at LAX as they had arranged. Liberty stood there surrounded by suitcases, feeling hope fade away as the time drew closer and closer to their flight being called. She phoned Cory and his phone went straight to voicemail. Their flight was called and then boarded. It took off; still Liberty waited. In films people didn’t turn up because something terrible
had happened. She phoned up all the local hospitals, the police. Nothing. Had she misread everything? Was this Cory’s revenge on her for going to LA without him all those years ago?

She felt she had no other choice but to return to the Santa Monica house and unpack.

‘So what did you do while I was away?’ Zac asked her when he returned the following day.

‘Nothing much. I hung out by the pool. Had lunch with friends. Shopped.’ Had my heart broken all over again by my lover.

‘You look tired, I hope you didn’t overdo it with your friends.’

Was it her imagination or was there an edge to Zac’s voice, the way he’d said ‘friends’?

‘No.’

‘Good, because we start filming the new series next week and I need you to be at your very best.’

If she’d felt broken-hearted when she’d first come to LA, then Cory’s betrayal had nearly destroyed Liberty. Work and Brooke were the only things that saved her from going under. She later found out from Em, who had moved back to Brighton, that Cory had bought a house on the Sussex Downs. Two years later she heard that he’d got married. So it must have been revenge after all. She couldn’t believe that the warm, loving man she’d known could ever behave like that, but the evidence spoke for itself, and the faint hope she’d nursed that there was a good reason why he had abandoned her, died. She’d been so desperate and unhappy when she’d met Cory again that she’d taken everything he’d said at face value. After living with Zac in LA, she should have known that people rarely meant what they said.

She was still lost in thought when she heard footsteps.
Shit, it was Zac! She had been hoping he would be out all night, overseeing the edit.

‘Hey, why are you sitting out here in the dark?’

It was typical that he wanted to know why – he never seemed to switch off from directing, wanting to know her every move and motivation at all times. It was one of the many things about him that drove her mad. At the beginning of their relationship she had found it endearing; now she found it controlling, possessive.

He bent down and kissed her. She smelled coffee and gum. He got through so many cups during the day, and the gum was because he couldn’t smoke on set. He lit a cigarette now and inhaled deeply, even though he knew that Liberty hated him smoking near her. She had given up saying anything about it, though. There was no point. Zac always did exactly as he pleased. Funny that he wasn’t Brooke’s real father – she certainly took after him when it came to being selfish, and getting her own way.

Liberty shrugged, feeling a little light-headed after a glass of wine on an empty stomach. ‘I just felt like some air. I had an argument with Brooke.’

‘Again? I thought you guys were going to sort it out.’

It was always ‘you guys’ with him. He was a distant stepfather to Brooke, happy to hand out money but wanting little involvement in the nitty-gritty of actually raising a child.

‘I got a phone call from Wyatt. He caught a whole group of them smoking dope, Brooke included.’

‘Is that so bad?’ Zac replied. ‘Everyone has to experiment when they’re young. It’s only dope. Chill, it’s not a big deal.’

It was as if he was deliberately trying to undermine Liberty. He knew how strongly she disapproved of
drugs. This was his way of getting back at her because she was no longer the perfect wife to him. She was sure he must know that she didn’t love him any more but it was a subject they never discussed. They just carried on growing further and further apart and pretending that it wasn’t so, always pretending.

‘Well, she’s grounded for the next month. She has to learn a lesson from this. And I thought we’d agreed that you weren’t going to give her any more money? But she’s spent over five thousand dollars this week on an outfit for a party she’s not even allowed to go to now!’

Zac blew out a plume of cigarette smoke. ‘So I guess there’s going to be a great atmosphere in this house.’ He paused, then added under his breath, ‘No change there then.’

She looked at him. Most women found him stunningly attractive. He was tall, powerfully built, with jet black hair and strong chiselled features. With his looks Zac could have been an actor, save for the fact that he couldn’t act. He was over forty now and looked good for his age. He kept in shape with rigorous work-outs at the gym with his personal trainer, he watched what he ate, what he drank. Smoking was his only vice, and that was restricted to the house and his car as it was so difficult to find anywhere else to smoke in LA. He had it all, but nothing Liberty was interested in any more. She stood up and picked up her empty wineglass. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Let me guess,’ he muttered. ‘You’ve got a headache.’

‘I’m tired, and upset because of what’s going on with Brooke. So, yes, I’ve got a headache.’

Upstairs in her dressing room – always the place she retreated to if things were difficult between her and Zac – Liberty quickly got out her laptop and sent an
email off to Em.
What we’ve been talking about. I think it’s time. Expect us soon
. She clicked send then went to her sent mailbox and deleted the email, and just to be on the safe side set up a new password on her computer. She never knew for certain if Zac checked her emails as she had never caught him. But she strongly suspected he did. It would be just his kind of control-freak behaviour.

Chapter 20

Brooke

Brooke kicked off her crystal-studded Louboutins and then for good measure picked one up and flung it against the wall, not caring what happened to the insanely expensive shoe. She couldn’t believe that her mom had actually gone ahead with her threat and grounded her. Fuck that, and fuck everything and everyone! Why did her mom have to be such an uptight pain in the ass? Majorly on her case just because she had been caught smoking weed. Her mom should have been grateful it hadn’t been anything stronger – she should have seen what was going down in the bathroom at the last party Brooke went to, where there were lines of coke laid out by the black marble sink and someone was going around handing out tablets of
MDMA
as if they were Smarties.