Adulation Read Free Page A

dinner with them. Go see a Laker game, or whatever sport is playing right now.”
    “Maybe I will,” he said, almost believing it.
    “Where’s Charlene?” she asked.
    “Charlene’s in New York,” he said, deflated.
    “Oh.”
    “I miss you, El.”
    “Me too. I’ll see you soon, Dad.”
    Danny returned to his desk and downed the last of his cold coffee. He sat in front of his laptop, read the few lines of dialogue he’d written, and deleted all of them. Once again, the cursor winked at him coyly, in that same seductive, manipulative way as Charlene, like the sirens luring Odysseus and his fellow travelers to their doom. By the end of the day, sandwiched between phone-tagging his agent and back-to-back interviews to promote   Exposed , he’d completed the equivalent of two good minutes of a one-hour show.

    It was almost midnight when Danny pulled into the driveway of his home, a five-bedroom, six-bath newcolonial that was slumming it by most celebrity standards, and spotted an unfamiliar car in the spacewhere Charlene usually parked. The only light in the house visible from the outside came from the livingroom. It was set on a timer programmed to come on at eight p.m. Clenching his fists, he wished for aweapon—pepper spray, a Taser, something—as he made his way up the brick path and toward the door,suddenly grateful for Ella’s physical distance from the house.
    He turned the key and slowly opened the door.
    “Hello?” he called, his voice cracking on the second syllable.
    Silence.
    He crept from the foyer to the living room and into the kitchen, turning on lights along the way andwondering whether to start opening closet doors. The likelihood of there being an intruder was remote, hereasoned with himself—Danny lived just outside of LA in a gated community with other wealthy Hollywood personnel and roaming neighborhood rent-a-cops—not to mention he had a state-of-the-artsecurity system, although it was presently turned off (had he forgotten to set the alarm when he’d left forthe office this morning?). But no neighborhood was foolproof.
    “I know someone’s in here,” he called out, attempting to assert his voice in a more menacing way,as if that would somehow scare off the perp. He was about to extract one of the knives from the woodenblock on the kitchen counter when the intercom clicked on.
    “Upstairs.”
    Charlene.
    Danny breathed a sigh of relief followed by a huff as he left the kitchen and set the alarm beforebounding up the stairs, two at a time. He found her in his bedroom, leaning back on her elbows near theedge of the bed, wearing nothing but his Armani tuxedo shirt (the undone bow tie hanging lifelesslyaround her neck) and red stilettos. Her hair was pushed to one side and draped over her shoulder in bigcurls, her legs teasingly crossed. She had   posed   for him. Typical. Clichéd, even. Scripted. But damn, itgot him every time.
    The blood rushed from his head, straight down south.

He folded his arms and cocked his head slightly to one side. “I thought you had a benefit tonight.”
    “I left early. Blew off the press and everything. Convenient thing, this time difference.”
    Danny unbuttoned his shirt and took a few steps toward her. “That was very sweet of you.”
    “I knew you’d be sulking by yourself with Ella out of town.”
    “How did you know Ella was out of town?”
    Charlene frowned. “I listen to you when you talk, you know.”
    Danny took another step forward, his shirt completely off and his belt unbuckled. “You scared theshit out of me, you know. Try coming home after a long day and finding a strange car in your driveway.”
    “But then you wouldn’t have been surprised.” Charlene propped herself onto her knees and pulled Danny by the arm, and he flopped on the bed beside her. He was momentarily disappointed that she brokeher pose until she proceeded to coo “Happy Birthday” to him in his ear, Marilyn Monroe–style, her voicesoft and