The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

Faith had been telling me for years that everything was going to turn out fine if only I could be true to myself. Hiring Felicity was a step in the right direction, I thought. It was an example of being true to myself, because I was putting my needs first: I’d had the courage to hire her even though I didn’t know how I was going to pay her. And now here I was, shooting a movie with my ex-husband, of all people, tucked away in an extravagant over-water bungalow with a jaw-dropping view. (I’d had Felicity check the prices. They normally went for $4,000/night minimum.) So everything really was turning out better than fine.

Felicity had been walking Mary Elizabeth for a solid week when I asked her to dog sit at my house while I was out for the day. By that time, my little darling was deeply in love with her, and Faith had read my cards and confirmed she was good for me, so I felt comfortable letting her into my sanctuary.

I came home to find her perusing the wall of framed black-and-white stills from films I’d done. She was so sweet and interested that I would have felt guilty not answering her questions, and before long I was thumbing through my old photo books, sharing stories I hadn’t recounted in years while she hung on my every word. I’d had so many painful years that the memories of better times were often salt in my wounds and better to be avoided, but with Felicity lapping up the adventures of my former life like a kitten starved for milk, recollection suddenly became a salve.

The following week I asked her to dog sit again while I was out all day, and came home to both her and Mary Elizabeth on the kitchen floor licking Popsicles. It was an unseasonably sweltering day for May, and my air-conditioning wasn’t working. I’d told Felicity I was waiting on the AC guy to come out, but the reality was, it had been broken for two years. I needed a new compressor, which was going to cost eight thousand dollars I never seemed to have lying around.

My home was a rambling Tudor affair in the Hollywood Hills, shaded by oak trees planted the year it was built, in 1928. I’d bought it outright for my twenty-third birthday, so all I had to pay were the property taxes, but I could barely manage those anymore. The house badly needed to be painted, and I’d stopped filling the pool a few years ago, but besides that and the air-conditioning, it was in pretty good shape.

I’d only just been cast in The Siren the week prior and came in buoyed by a conversation with Jackson to find Felicity there on the tiled floor fingering an invitation to a charity thing.

“Please don’t kill me.” She grimaced.

I hadn’t been able to afford Botox at that particular moment, so I furrowed my brow. “Why?” I asked, alarmed.

She licked the Popsicle, taking her time before responding. “I kind of RSVP’d for us to this charity thing tonight.”

My jaw dropped. How could she? It was not her place.

“I didn’t mean to,” she promised. “They called the house phone to confirm whether you were coming, and you’d told me to answer it.”

“But…why did you say yes?”

“The lady was so nice, and she really seemed to want you to come. She said there’d be gift bags with that expensive face cream you were talking about the other day in them.”

I sat in a chair in shock and scooped Mary Elizabeth into my lap. “I don’t go to those things anymore.”

“I know the press has been cruel to you, but you’re different now, and they need to see that! If you start going out sometimes, people will realize how much you’ve grown. Public opinion changes. People’s memories are short.”

Maybe she was right. After all, I finally had something good to say when people asked what I was working on; I was once again relevant.

Before I knew it, we were playing dress-up in my closet like long-lost sisters. I may not have had cash, but I had clothes; my walk-in closet was just the start of it. The walls of my bedroom were lined with rolling racks, and I’d had a door put through to a guest room that was packed with more crowded rolling racks. Most of the clothes were at least a few years old, but they were all designer and half of them still had the tags on.

Felicity stripped off her sundress without an ounce of self-consciousness, strutting about in nothing but a yellow lace thong as she shimmied into dresses I hadn’t worn since I was her age, which I figured to be somewhere around twenty-three.

I tried not to stare, but her body was a work of art—tan and toned and curvy in all the right places without an ounce of cellulite anywhere. Her full breasts defied gravity. A nipple grazed my bare arm as she reached past me to pull a dress off the rack, and I caught a whiff of jasmine. I suddenly grew light-headed.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, fine,” I said, realizing I’d stopped breathing. “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

“Do you not like it?” she asked, worried. “I won’t wear it anymore.”

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I took the dress from her and rushed into the bathroom to change. When I returned, I noticed she’d spritzed herself with one of the perfumes from my shelf. I didn’t say anything, but I was glad.

The light was fading by the time Felicity and I stepped out of our black limo into the balmy night. I was a little embarrassed to be arriving in a limo, but it was surprisingly cheaper than a town car and less than half the rate of a Suburban.

A single flame of jealousy flickered as I watched Felicity slink up the walk to the massive Mediterranean mansion in my low-cut emerald dress, the photographers eyeing