Dangerous Games Read Free Page B

pretty crappy at the moment and that certainly wasn’t a reason to butt into hers.
    I was coming off my marijuana high and I knew I would make sense if I called so without thinking, I voice dialed my mother’s cell phone.
    She answered after a few rings. “Evie? Hello, my dear. Have you been kicked out of another university?”
    “Not yet,” I murmured in a sarcastic tone. “However, I did get the latest copy of  Society Magazine  and guess who is on the cover?”
    “It’s a terrible photo if you ask me. They caught us after I was finished filming for the day and we were leaving a restaurant here in Montreal. I sometimes hate the press,” she responded in her gorgeous husky voice which, had become huskier over the years due to her hidden cigarette habit.
    My mother had made it her life’s work of keeping a squeaky clean image. I suppose it had something to do with her being adopted by the woman who raised her and her genetic mother being Creole. She had that exotic-enough look though like Angelina Jolie, she just appeared to be a very beautiful white woman instead of mixed. Her stepmother and natural father were Irish and all her siblings were either dark-haired or blonde and alabaster-skinned with these gorgeous cornflower or blue-gray eyes and there she was: the odd one out with her gray-green eyes and peaches and cream skin with just a hint of olive.
    Cristal Englund Carter-Goldsmith, her agent, and Ruth Atwater, her publicist, did a very good job making sure that no one ever bothered to dig up anything less than kosher on my mother. As far as Wikipedia was concerned, she was the oldest child of Declan and Cleona McKenna, both first-generation Irish-American immigrants whose families had come to the States before they were born. She’d grown up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston, and gone to Catholic school her whole life.
    Like many of her generation of actresses, she didn’t have a big break per se. She basically had to work her way up and one day, she’d accepted a role in an independent film where she had to play an Irish woman trying to get justice for her son who had been murdered by the British Army in Belfast. Based on a true story, the film didn’t get much recognition but it did earn my mother an Academy Award nomination for best Actress. After an endorsement from Oprah, she actually won the award, beating out Nicole Kidman that year. Not only did she win the Academy Award but she also collected a Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG.
    That had the beginning of my mother’s illustrious career and it didn’t hurt she had begun dating one of the biggest action stars of his generation, my father, Rolf Sandstrom. Her career did nothing but climb and once they married, she was unstoppable. Somewhere in this history of my mother, I should have told you I was the love child of my parents for about eight years before they married.
    My first eight years were spent in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston, as the ward of my maternal grandparents. Although I’d tried my best to perfect a Californian accent after my parents decided I should live with them in L.A., my Boston accent still came back with a vengeance sometimes. It was even more prominent when I was unhappy or pissed off.
    I cleared my throat and said, “So, it’s true? I take it you’re serious about this guy then?”
    My mother, the great Athena—supposedly named after a Greek goddess but in actuality was my  real  maternal grandmother’s middle name—breathed on the other end of the phone. “Yes, Etienne is very special to me and I want you to meet him but only if you are going to respect my wishes. I won’t have you chasing him away.”
    “Come on, Mom, I’m nineteen. That would be completely silly and foolish of me. I want you to be happy too.”
    “You mean that?”
    “Yeah, Mom, I mean it,” I replied after an interminable silence.
    “I still thought you hated me. I mean, after everything