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her apartment and move into his guesthouse in Brentwood until her second album was in the can. Needless to say, Kendall had bucked and chafed against such draconian restraints. But she put up with them for two reasons.
    One was that she knew Jack Messenger could not only get her to the top but keep her there.
    The other was that she was madly, passionately and utterly hopelessly in love with him.
    Jack was everything that Kendall’s own father was not: decent, honest, loyal, kind and strict. He was tough on her because he cared, and though she fought against him tooth and nail, and was often so infuriated with him she wanted to cry or hit him or both, deep down she felt safe for the first time since she was eleven. Jack was also the first man who, maddeningly, appeared to be totally immune to Kendall’s celebrated physical charms. Since the age of fifteen, Kendall Bryce had been used to enslaving any and all men to her will – boys at school, teachers, producers on her show. In Jack Messenger, for the first time, she encountered indifference. Her initial reaction was to assume that he was either grieving too hard for his dead wife, or secretly gay. But, especially since moving onto his property, she’d been forced to abandon both these theories. Jack had a girlfriend, Elizabeth, an attractive, professional woman in her thirties who was about as far removed from Kendall as it was possible to be: discreet, together, undemanding. In short, a grown-up. Jack was never pictured with her in public, but Elizabeth seemed unfazed by this apparent lack of commitment. Nor did she complain about the fact that he still wore his wedding ring, and spent every Saturday afternoon without fail at his wife’s grave at Forest Lawn. If this was the sort of woman Jack was looking for, it was little wonder he failed to notice Kendall. But it still hurt.
    As with her father, Kendall tried to get Jack’s attention by acting out, in particular bedding a string of Jester’s male acts to try to make him jealous. As with her father, the strategy failed miserably. In recent months things had hit an all-time low between the two of them. Consumed with longing and frustration and fury, Kendall had started drinking again. Two weeks ago she was breathalysed on Sunset and slapped with another DUI, her fourth. She was lucky to escape jail time. Jack, needless to say, was furious, refusing to allow her to fly with him to London for Ivan Charles’s party, an event he knew Kendall had been hugely excited about, and forcing her to stay home with a sobriety-coach-slash-jailer instead.
    One day he’ll see what’s right under his nose
, thought Kendall, bitterly.
He’ll realize he loves me; that I’m the one who can help him get over Sonya. He’ll learn to love again. We’ll learn together.
    Until that day, however, she wasn’t about to let Jack push her around. In a week’s time she’d be in London anyway, performing, and there was nothing he could do to stop her having the time of her life. Meanwhile, Kendall had no intention of joining a nunnery just to make Jack happy. Sex with her sobriety coach might not have been spectacular. But it was two fingers to Jack holier-than-thou Messenger. That alone made it worth it.
    The next morning a perfect clear, blue-skied dawn broke over Los Angeles, just as Lex Abrahams was brewing his second pot of coffee on the stove. Lex rarely slept more than four or five hours a night and was always up before six. Years spent on the road as a photographer, flying from continent to continent at the whim of his famous, rock-star clients, had left him immune to jet lag and to exhaustion generally. Which was a good thing, as he now worked for Jack Whip-Cracker Messenger as Jester’s in-house photographer; a dream job as long as you didn’t mind insane hours, capricious artists and a pay packet that barely covered your rent and bills.
    Happily, Lex didn’t.