with anticipation.
‘Fantastic,’ she drawled. ‘If you’re really good at it, maybe I’ll give you that blow job after all.’
‘ Fuck ,’ Dan Drummond said devoutly, dropping to his knees and pulling her tights and knickers down as he went. ‘This is definitely the best fucking night of me life!’
Joe
J oe Jeffreys was on top of the world. His world: Hollywood. Which, if he’d wanted to, he could have ruled like a despotic emperor. He was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, he made tens of millions of dollars per picture, and if he threw his weight around, the reverberations would have been heard all round the planet.
But that wasn’t Joe’s style. Never had been, never would be. Everything had always come easily to him; he didn’t need to throw his weight around to get what he wanted, because what he wanted had always dropped into his lap before he’d even figured out what it might be. By seventeen, he’d already been drop-dead gorgeous, and he’d only improved with age. At six foot two, with linebacker shoulders, he was that rare breed of movie star, the kind who is even more physically imposing in person than he is onscreen. Not since Clint Eastwood had Hollywood seen such a hunk of a man. Blond and blue-eyed, tanned to a perfect even bronze, his corn-fed Midwestern handsomeness was dazzling.
Meeting Joe for the first time was as blinding as a visitation from a sun god: you blinked hard, overwhelmed, and fell instantly under the spell cast by his looks and his charm. It had been like that for the model scout who’d spotted him on Joe’s first-ever trip out of state – a family vacation to Disneyland – snapped a Polaroid of him, and signed him up then and there. It had been like that for the agent who’d seen him in a Gap ad on TV, flown him out to LA and got him a walk-on role in a movie as a hot bartender. And it had been like that for the casting director who’d cast him in an action movie as a tough young cop, his breakout role, the one that had precipitated him on his swift upward climb to his current status as the king of the blockbusters.
Joe had never taken an acting class in his life. He was a natural. Besides, Joe would be the first one to acknowledge that he wasn’t an actor: he was a movie star. That was his job. He was damn good at it. And he loved it and pretty much everything that came with it.
Joe was also damn good at being happy, a talent very few people are lucky enough to possess. Most of the time, he felt like the luckiest guy ever, and right then, having just hiked up LA’s spectacular Runyon Canyon, he couldn’t see a cloud in the sky. Literally or metaphorically. He stood at the top, hands on hips, surveying the dramatic, sun-kissed landscape, breathing in the smog with a happy smile on his face, his two Great Danes, Hengist and Horsa, bumping at his legs.
Below, at the bottom of the long steep hill, the bright sunlight gleamed off the lenses of the waiting paparazzi, eager for photographs of the godlike Joe Jeffreys, hot and sweaty from a bracing run. Even though Joe knew they couldn’t see him, not from the distance, he raised his hand and waved at them, a good-old-boy, friendly wave. Joe’d never had a beef with the paparazzi; they were just doing their job. Everyone had to make a living, after all.
Joe took off his baseball cap, ran one hand through his thick fair hair, and jammed the cap back on again. Much as he liked to feel the sun on his face, it was definitely ageing. Plus you had to worry about skin cancer now, and he hated when his dermatologist yelled at him. He took a long pull at his water bottle and squirted some into the open mouths of each of the Great Danes, who had sat down expectantly as soon as he untapped the bottle. They knew the routine; they got a drink when Joe did.
‘Right, guys,’ he said, hooking the bottle back onto his belt, ‘let’s sprint back down, drive home, crack a beer and watch the game, OK? Sound like a