Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page B

success. She loved working with him. He was the best producer she’d ever had. And Tallie drove herself hard, was tireless in her efforts to get the best performance possible out of each actor, and the best writers and scripts she could. She deserved the remarkable reputation she had.
    And she was content relaxing at the hotel that night. She and Brigitte went for a swim at the pool, and Brigitte had arranged for a massage for Tallie in her room, which Tallie said afterward was heavenly. She suggested Brigitte get one too, which was a perk Brigitte thoroughly enjoyed. The lifestyle that Brigitte shared with Tallie, and benefited from because of her, suited her to perfection. Thanks to Tallie, she led a star’s life.
    Victor Carson was staring at a mountain of papers, files, and spreadsheets on his desk. He had been Tallie’s financial adviser for fifteen years, and other than the details Brigitte handled, his firm did all the accounting for her. And when Brigitte called to tell him about the audit for the investor, he almost groaned aloud. It was a headache he just didn’t need. His life was complicated enough as it was. His own problems were precluding everything else. He didn’t know why they were requiring an independent audit. All he needed were a bunch of hostile auditors taking all his records and files apart and demanding explanations for them. Tallie’s affairs were in good order, but an audit would be incredibly time-consuming, even with someone else doing it, and possibly more so, if he had to explain everything to them. Normally, he and Brigitte handled everything and it was smooth as silk. He just didn’t have the time to spend on this, but there was no way he could say that to Hunt or Tallie. He was having personal problems, although he would never have admitted it to them. He now handled Hunt’s taxes as well as Brigitte’s. But right now, he had his hands full at home.
    Women had always been Victor’s nemesis. His first wife had cost him a fortune in alimony and a settlement twenty years before when she discovered that he had a mistress, a beautiful Italian model. He left his wife for her and married her. He had had two children with his first wife, and had twins with the second. Two years later she adapted to the American ways he had taught her, left him for someone much younger than he was, and took him to the cleaners. She’d eventually gone to Paris, married someone there, and he hadn’t seen his twin daughters in eighteen years. They were strangers to him, and he had been paying child support for them until that year. Fortunately his two older children were now adults and employed, and their mother had remarried, but for several years he had been supporting two ex-wives and four children.
    And more recently, some bad investments made by his own financial adviser had lost him a considerable amount of money. He took far better care of his clients than he did of his own affairs. And at sixty-two, he had fallen madly in love with a young aspiring actress, and married her after a sexually charged weekend in Las Vegas. He had promised to use all his connections in Hollywood to help launch her career, which had turned out to be not as easy as he’d thought. As it turned out, Brianna had no talent, her screen tests had been a disaster, and the only work she’d been able to get was as a bathing suit model at trade shows, which was not what she’d had in mind.
    Victor had just turned sixty-five, Brianna was twenty-nine and threatening to divorce him if he didn’t make good on his promises to establish her career in either movies or TV. She was great in bed, but not on the screen. And she hadn’t slept with him in six months anyway. She spent all her time getting plastic surgery, shopping up and down Rodeo Drive, and demanding money from him. She had threatened to leave him only the week before, and he didn’t want her to. As impossible as she was, she was a breath of excitement and glamour in his