The Perfect Audition Read Online Free PDF Page A

fans, Mandy, Leeza and her voice of self-doubt.
    Putting down the phone and without pausing she walked straight into the pool, sinking to the bottom where she stayed for a few minutes. Then she burst to the surface, her lungs swelling as she gasped in air.
    She floated for a while, watching a bird busy in the frangipani tree. Why did she feel so hesitant about Italy, she wondered. It was the best thing to happen to her since she had hired Mandy as her manager.
    She swam to the steps of the pool and stepped from the water, her clothes sticking to her as she padded inside the house, taking her phone with her. First call Leeza and then take a shower, she sighed.
    Nope, make that the other way around. If she called Leeza now she wouldn’t get to have a shower for hours.
    Being the daughter of a stage mother was harder than people realised, she thought.
    Especially when you didn’t even know if you liked what you did.

CHAPTER ONE
    Rose Nightingale walked into LAX, hiding behind large Dior sunglasses and ignoring the photographers that lurked at the international terminal, waiting for celebrities to come and go. They took their chance to harangue them, usually when they were holding travel-weary children and pushing a trolley full of luggage. It didn’t matter how fabulous you were, travel was travel and it was a bore.
    As Rose approached the United Lounge, she was greeted by a flight attendant who ushered her inside a door to the sanctity of the private space.
    ‘Hello, Ms Nightingale. May I have your passport, please?’
    Rose handed it over with a smile.
    ‘Can I offer you champagne and a light snack?’
    ‘No, thanks,’ said Rose as the attendant led her towards a private seating area.
    Rose’s phone rang and she answered it as she sat down in a corner of the lounge, ignoring the flickers of recognition from other travellers.
    ‘Slapper,’ said Rose, seeing Kelly’s name appear on her phone.
    ‘Tosser, you all ready for Italia?’ Kelly’s thick Northern accent came down the line and Rose smiled at the sound of her oldest friend’s voice.
    ‘All sorted, babe. You and Chris there already?’
    ‘Yeah, we got here two days ago. Shit, it’s gorgeous, Rosie. You’re gonna flip when you see your villa, I checked it out yesterday, although the housekeeper is like something out of central casting. “Super Nonna”, I call her.’
    Rose laughed. Kelly always had a way with words that summed up a person or a situation perfectly.
    Rose and Kelly were from different parts of England, both geographically and economically but these differences were never remarked upon or noticed even by each other. The only acknowledgements they made to their upbringings were their nicknames referencing people’s perceptions of them, Rose being an upper class girl and Kelly being from Yorkshire.
    Rose was the daughter of a successful novelist and a television writer. Her intellectual father had been nominated for the Pulitzer twice and her mother created and wrote a popular crime series for television. Rose moved amongst the society crowd at her private day school and her brief relationship with a minor European royal gave her enough social currency to be named the most eligible girl in England by
Tatler
magazine. Appearing on the cover in a dress handmade by Lacroix himself from fresh rose petals, the headline read ‘A Rose by any Other Name’. Rose could have then married well and faded away from fame with an occasional photo in the social pages of
Jennifer’s Diary
.
    But Rose was no wallflower or country wife and she decided on a more precarious road, successfully auditioning for acting school in London. She worked hard at the school to be more than just the beautiful girl, but never overcame the stigma of being close to perfect.
    It was the other women on her course who were the worst in their treatment of Rose. Deliberately excluding her from parties and events and even at one point calling a group meeting with her where they