Fame Read Free Page A

his rearview mirror again and shrugged. He could use a little amusement. He turned into the Starbucks strip mall, but instead of stopping in front of the coffee shop, he parked near the Rite Aid, three doors down. He grabbed his baseball cap, slipped it low over his brow, and headed inside. There wasn’t another person in the store. Dayne dashed to the magazine rack and found the current editions of each of the four national gossip rags—the colorful, busy magazines that reported all manner of information regarding celebrities.
    Bloodsuckers, he and his friends called them.
    The old, white-haired man at the register didn’t recognize him. “That’ll be nine fifty-eight.” The guy hummed “Moon River” as he slipped the stack of magazines into a bag and handed it to Dayne. “Nice day, huh?”
    “Yeah, beautiful.” Dayne gave the man a ten-dollar bill, “June’s not usually this sunny.”
    “God’s smiling on the Dodgers.” The man winked. “Five wins in a row, I tell you.
    This is the year.”
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    “Could be.” Dayne grinned. He relished the moment. A sales clerk—probably a retiree—making casual conversation with him. Moments like this were sometimes all the normalcy he had anymore. “See you later.”
    “Yep.” The man shook his fist. “Go Dodgers.”
    Dayne walked outside, scanned the parking lot, and found the Volkswagen and the camera aimed straight at him. Then, with broad, dramatic gestures, he jerked one of the magazines from the bag and appeared to stare, shocked, at the cover. He covered his mouth and pretended to be absorbed in some scan dalous story.
    After a minute he saw a group of teenage girls headed his way. They hadn’t recognized him yet, but they would. He slipped the magazine back in the bag, saluted the photographer, and slid back into his SUV. The fun was over. Enough of the cameraman. He hit the Lock button on his key chain, made sure his windows were rolled up tight, then pulled into the Starbucks drive-thru lane.
    By the time he hit Pacific Coast Highway the double espresso was gone, and he’d forgotten about the photographer or whether the guy was still behind him. The girl from Bloomington. That’s all he could think about now. How was he going to find her without flying to Indiana? And how crazy was he to tell Mitch he could get her into the studio for a reading in a single week?
    Dayne passed the usual landmarks—the Malibu Surfer Motel and the Whole Foods Market. His home was just past that, sandwiched between others belonging to people in the enter tainment industry. A director and his singer wife on one side and an aging actress and her much younger husband on the other. Nice people. All drawn to the ocean, the watery view of endless calm and serenity.
    The picture of everything their lives lacked.
    Dayne took his bag of magazines inside and made himself an other cup of coffee.
    Black, no sugar. Then he slipped on a pair of 7
    sunglasses and went outside onto his second-story deck. No photographer could see him up here, not with the steep walls built around the deck’s edges. He sat down, just barely able to see over the edge out to the Pacific Ocean.
    One at a time he took out the magazines. Of the four, his face or name was on the cover of two. Dayne studied the first one: “Dayne Matthews: Hollywood’s Most Eligible Bachelor Hits the Party Scene.”
    “I did?” he muttered and turned to the article. There were many more photos on the two-page spread, each one showing him with a different woman. One he was kissing. One was a waitress and no matter what the photo showed, he wasn’t making moves on her. The bar had been loud, so he’d moved in a little closer when he ordered. Beneath that photo the caption read “Even barmaids are fair game.”
    “Nice.” Dayne frowned. What would the waitress think? She was only doing her job, and now she had her picture splashed all over grocery checkouts throughout the country.
    He flipped through the pages. There had