The Slow Rise of Clara Daniels Read online

  Clara smiled up at him and took his arm. Darren’s eyes shifted to her face, and he must have seen something of her thoughts there. For the first time since she’d known him, she felt fear run through him. He knew she saw him for what he was.

  Clara walked with her mother’s husband, clinging to his arm as she’d seen other women do to their male escorts. She broke away from him when they met her mother on the steps and leaned up to meet her mother’s kiss.

  Jessica’s lips were soft against her cheek. She ran her hand over her daughter’s hair, and Clara stared into her beautiful blue eyes. Not for the first time, she wished fervently that she could read her mother’s mind as she could everyone else’s. As it was, she felt as if she were the adult and Jessica, the child.

  “Take care of yourself, Clara.”

  “I always do, Mom.”

  Darren drew Jessica away then, and the guests surged around them as they went into the house, blocking her mother from her sight. Clara knew they would converge on the front porch to throw birdseed at the couple as they left. She could hear the laughter of the crowd from where she stood. She could feel that only some of their merriment and good wishes were false.

  Clara didn’t follow them. She sat on the marble steps, heedless of her scratchy skirt, and watched as the caterers began to clear away the reception food. The edges of the nearest tent flapped in the breeze, and she leaned into the wind that brought with it the scent of the desert. The sun was setting low over the sand beyond her mother’s lawn. Clara watched the light fade, swiping away the lone tear that slid down her cheek.

  4

  Malibu, 2019

  Clara leaned back on the divan in her living room. She sipped her cognac, watching the sun set over Malibu Bay. The pollution refracted the rays of the sun, so the colors were subdued in their brilliance as the red disk sank into the ocean.

  Her house was completely quiet except for the sound of the sea. Paolo and his mother had gone to their homes across town. Clara wouldn’t have people in the house at night. She liked to sleep without being awakened by other people’s dreams.

  She listened idly to the silence, letting it pool around her and cocoon her. She still hadn’t heard from her manager regarding the asshat she’d met earlier that day, but she wasn’t worried. Donna knew her job. The marketing VP would be pounding the streets by morning.

  Clara turned away from the sunset when she heard the soft chimes of her doorbell.

  No one ever rang her doorbell. Whenever someone came to see her, the guard called up from her neighborhood’s front gate. No one ever got in.

  She drew her filmy blouse around her as she rose. She wore an emerald green silk dress under it, with thin spaghetti straps clinging to her shoulders. Clara loved to hear the sound of silk whisper as she moved in the silence. All shades of silence were precious to her, because they were so rare.

  She moved slowly to the front door. Maybe Margherita had forgotten something.

  Clara fumbled with the locks and swung open the heavy mahogany door. The marketing VP stood on her porch. He was dressed in light chinos and a navy blue blazer. The suit from the office was gone. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She couldn’t hear his thoughts. He stood with her, a partner in the blessed silence.

  “Hello.” His voice was deep, and the sound of it soothed her as the sound of the sea did.

  He took off his glasses and quirked an eyebrow at her before letting his gaze slide down her body. His eyes lingered on her breasts before returning to her face. Clara laughed in spite of herself.

  “If you’ve come to beg for your job, you’ve started off badly.”

  He smiled. “I never beg.”

  His eyes were a deep cerulean blue. Clara wondered idly if he wore contact lenses to give them that particular hue, and then realized that he didn’t. That blue was real. He watched her in silence.

  “How did you get past the gate?”

  “I drove through it.”

  Clara spoke quietly, keeping her voice low. “Well, you can drive back through it.”

  She started to close the door, but he stepped forward and stopped her. To her surprise, she let him.

  “I’ll drive back through it after I come in for a drink, and we talk.”

  “We have nothing to say.”

  “I do.”

  He pushed past her, gently. She couldn’t believe his audacity. He stepped into her foyer and looked up at the skylight above his head. The stars were coming out in the dark blue sky, and when Clara looked up, too, she saw that the night sky was the exact shade of his eyes.

  Clara closed the door again and locked it. She leaned back against it, watching to see what he would do next.

  He stood still in the middle of her foyer and looked at her. “Maybe we should turn on a light.”

  She knew she should be angry. There was a security button hidden in the paneling of the door. All she had to do was touch it to bring the police and have this man thrown in jail. She didn’t touch it, though. Instead, she kept looking at him.

  Clara was surprised at herself. She wasn’t even annoyed. The VP watched her quietly, saying nothing, as if waiting for her to pass judgment. For some reason, Clara felt oddly safe with him, at ease in a way she never was with other people. There was an elusive quality to his confidence that reminded her of herself.

  Clara tried again to look into his mind. It wasn’t blank. It was a heavy door, locked against her.

  He smiled, and suddenly she remembered the last time she’d felt this at ease with another human being. It had been with her Aunt April, at noon on her twelfth birthday, the last time she’d ever seen her.

  Clara reminded herself how that meeting had ended, but for some reason she wasn’t troubled as she looked into his face. He seemed to be a kindred spirit. The idea that there was someone like her anywhere was an illusion, but it was a nice illusion. Clara decided to indulge herself in it, if only for one night.

  She forced herself to take her eyes off him and to walk past him into her living room. Her house was one story, one of its arms reaching back into her bedroom, the other into the huge kitchen, which she used only for parties. She knew Margherita had left something in the oven, though she had no idea what.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked him.

  “I am.”

  Clara led him back into the kitchen and turned on a light as they entered. She could feel his eyes on her as if his gaze were hands. She opened the oven and found a pot roast with new potatoes and baby carrots nestled next to it.

  Clara smiled and pulled it out of the oven. “I think my maid knew I was going to have company.”

  He said nothing but kept watching her as she moved around her kitchen. She found two plates after a little digging, and two wine glasses. She pulled a bottle of Bordeaux down from her wine rack and turned to find him standing beside her.

  He took it from her. “Let me.”

  “All right.”

  She dug around for a while longer and found a corkscrew, which she handed to him. He opened the wine and poured it while she watched. His hands were deft and never shook. She wondered if he had any idea who she was.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  He moved slowly across the kitchen and handed her a glass. “I do. But you don’t know me.”

  Clara took a sip, her eyes never leaving his. “Yes, I do. You’re the little prick I had fired today.”

  He laughed out loud, and she found herself smiling as she listened to him. He seemed genuinely amused. He sounded happy. Clara had never known anyone who was happy. She couldn’t read his thoughts to know if he was lying. He was a complete blank to her, except for his eyes.

  He took a knife and started slicing the roast. He put food on both the plates she’d found, precisely, as if he had served food all his life.

  He picked up his plate and glass. “Where should we eat?”

  “Here, I guess.” Clara gestured to the huge island in the center of the kitchen.

  It
s wooden top gleamed with polish. Two stools stood against it, and he sat down on one and started eating casually, as if he were in his mother’s kitchen. Clara looked around the room she almost never entered and started laughing.

  “I can’t believe I’m in here with you.”

  He looked up at her. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then eat.”

  No one had given her an order in years, but this man did it casually as he lifted his wine glass to his lips and drank. She watched him swallow and then lick his lips before he took another bite. She stood staring at him until he met her gaze.

  His voice was gentle. “Sit down and eat, Clara.”

  She pulled up the second stool and raised her fork to her mouth. The carrots were succulent with butter and some sort of pepper. She tasted the roast beef next, and it seemed to melt on her tongue. It was the best food she’d ever eaten, and she had eaten in the best restaurants in the world. Margherita was a wonderful cook, but Clara knew that wasn’t it. It was the company. She felt as if she had stepped out of her normal life and was in a separate space, someplace she’d never been before, a place of peace.

  She looked over at him. “What’s your name?”

  He raised his glass again and took another sip of wine. “I wondered when it would occur to you to ask that question.”

  “Well?”

  His blue eyes sparkled with laughter as he smiled at her. “My name is Fred.”

  Clara almost choked on a bite of potato. “Fred?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your name’s not Bruce or Steve or Lance or something like that?”

  He poured more wine into both of their glasses. “No. It’s Fred.”

  Clara started to laugh. She felt a deep belly laugh rise through her chest, and it came out of her mouth before she could stop it. She gripped the edge of the bar, convulsively, her knuckles turning white. She couldn’t hear herself think. All she could do was laugh.

  “Why is my name so funny?”

  She took a deep breath, trying to stop. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She hadn’t laughed so freely since she was a child, playing in the desert of Palm Springs, chasing her shadow across empty sands.

  She looked at the man sitting in her kitchen. He had finished his dinner and was watching her with no hint of fear or awkwardness. Clara sat staring back at him for a long time, until it occurred to her to speak.

  “I don’t know why it’s funny. I don’t know why you’re here. No one gets into my house uninvited.”

  “Yet here I am.”

  “Here you are.”

  His gaze didn’t waver from her face as he smiled at her. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Clara took a deep breath. She thought for a moment that she might start laughing again, but the danger had passed.

  “Of course, I do. We met in Bob’s office on your last day with Barnett Studios.”

  Fred let her jibe go without lifting an eyebrow. “No. We met before today.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  Fred’s stare didn’t leave her face. “You were seventeen. You were wearing a green dress that matched the color of your eyes. You were hunting men at Stan Hendrickson’s party. You bagged me.”

  Clara frowned, casting her mind back. She had been to so many parties when she’d first started her career, then had quickly discovered that Hollywood parties were always the same dramas played out by the same characters. She found that she got more done working with an up-and-coming executive named Bob Willoughby, so she had stopped going to parties.

  She didn’t remember ever seeing Fred at any of them.

  “Did you get a face lift or something?”

  It was Fred’s turn to laugh. He almost choked on his Bordeaux and he spluttered, setting his wine glass down.

  When he could speak, he wiped his eyes. “No, I’ve never had surgery. I was working for Stan as an intern at the time. I got paid nothing, but I got to sneak into his parties.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “About twenty-two.”

  Clara shook her head, dismissing the idea. “There’s no way I would have slept with someone so young. You had no pull.”

  “I don’t think pull was what you were looking for that night.”

  She narrowed her eyes, wishing she could see into his mind. She thought back on her early meanderings. There were a few nights when she had indulged herself in hunting men sexually simply for the pleasure of it. Maybe she had slept with him.

  “Did we go to your place or mine?” she asked.

  “Neither. We went into the guest bathroom on the third floor.”

  Clara laughed, beginning to relax. “Yeah, that sounds like me.”

  His face darkened, his blue eyes deepening to indigo.

  “So, you had a lot of lovers, I take it?”

  “I still do.”

  Clara watched him, surprised to see a muscle leap in his jaw. If she hadn’t known he was trying to manipulate her, she would have thought he was genuinely jealous.

  She watched him swallow and take a deep breath. He seemed to get a grip on himself in that moment, because his jaw unclenched and his eyes warmed.

  “Maybe that will change.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Fred’s eyes didn’t waver from her face. Clara felt as if they were deep pools of indigo that she could dive into and hide from the world. She frowned at the seductive thought. She wasn’t a woman who hid from anything.

  “Why did you shelve my project?”

  He straightened on his stool before he bent to pour her more wine. Clara stopped him by covering her wine glass with her hand. When she was with a stranger, two glasses were her limit.

  “Answer me.”

  Fred put the wine bottle down and looked into her eyes. Clara kept her mind focused on her question so she would not get distracted again by the luxury of having a normal conversation without hearing the other person’s thoughts, and so she wouldn’t lose her focus in the blue of his eyes.

  “Your project was in my way.”

  “How so?”

  Fred stood. “Do you really want to talk about this here?”

  Clara stood to face him. “Yes.”

  He sighed softly and pushed his hand through his thick black hair. “I’m moving into a new position of power at the studio. In order for that to happen, your film had to make way for another project. I’m sorry about that.”

  Fred met her gaze with simple honesty. Clara couldn’t remember the last time a man had been honest with her, besides Bob Willoughby. With Bob, she could see his honesty written in his thoughts. This man was still a blank. She had built her life trusting only what people thought, not what they said.

  “I can’t tell what you’re thinking.”

  “I know. You like it, don’t you?”

  Clara smiled at his audacity. “Yes.”

  He took her arm and steered her back into the main part of the house. The light from the kitchen spilled onto the plush carpet of the dark living room. Yachts on Malibu Bay could be seen bobbing outside the plate glass windows. His hand lingered on her arm, then slid to her waist.

  “I could have you fired,” she said.

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  His hand was warm on her back. She could feel it through the thin silk of her dress.

  “But you could make things difficult for me,” he said. “I’m asking you not to.”

  “Not get you fired?”

  She felt rather than saw him smile in the semi-dark.

  “No. I’m asking you not to complicate my deal. Let me shelve your project. I’ll make it up to you later.”

  “Oh, really? How?”

  He slid his hand up her back, his fingers caressing her shoulder blades through the gauze of her blouse.

  “I’ll be in a position to do you a favor in the future, if you ever need one.”

  “I don’t need favors.”

  Clara felt her breath come s
hort, and she had to force herself to concentrate on his words instead of his hands.

  “Well, do it as a favor to me, then.”

  She laughed low in her throat. “If you know who I am, you know that I never give out favors.”

  “Not for free.”

  Fred’s lips were soft at her temple. He kissed her, brushing her lips with a feather-light touch, waiting to see if she would object. He was giving her the opportunity to say no.

  Clara didn’t say no. She turned to him, brushing her lips against the edge of his jaw. He stood still for a long moment, letting her hands slide inside his jacket, up his back, to his shoulders. She brushed his lips lightly with hers, and then pulled away, waiting to see what he would do.

  “I’ve never made love with a screen goddess before.”

  She laughed low in her throat. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that.”

  His hands glided down her back, playing against her muscles. One palm moved up her arm to toy with the spaghetti strap of her dress.

  “I didn’t say I haven’t had an actress or two. Just never a goddess.”

  Clara laughed again, a deep belly laugh that shook her whole body.

  She leaned against him for support. “Don’t tell me you write screenplays, too.”

  She felt him smile against her hair as his lips brushed the top of her head.

  “Not yet.”

  He moved his hands over her shoulders, and her blouse dropped onto the floor at her feet. Her laughter died in her throat as he leaned down and covered her mouth with his. The touch of his lips was light at first, until she opened her lips under his. The taste of him made her sway on her feet, and she clutched his jacket. He drew her close and kept kissing her, running his hands over her shoulders until the straps of her dress slid away under his palms.

  “I want you.” Clara’s voice was hoarse in her own ears.

  She couldn’t remember making such an admission to any of her lovers. She must be losing her mind.

  Fred pulled her down onto the soft carpet that covered her living room floor, and for the next few minutes Clara forgot about her career, her movie, even that she couldn’t see into this man’s mind. She simply let herself enjoy the moment.