Danielle Steel: Betrayal

She was alone for five years after that, and concentrated on her work and her daughter. She had no desire to try marriage again. And she’d been startled when she met Hunter Lloyd, a successful producer, and they started dating. There was nothing wrong with him, he wasn’t a cheater, a liar, or a drunk. He’d had his own bad experiences with two failed marriages that had cost him a fortune too. They had started dating four years before, and lived together for the last three. He had moved in with her after a year, and had given up his own house, a palatial home in Bel Air, to his last wife. And for both of them, the arrangement worked. Tallie and Hunt loved each other, Max loved him too, and he was great to her.

Hunt was a big, kind teddy bear of a man, and the picture Tallie was making was the second one she had produced with him. The first one had been a record-breaking box-office hit. Together they were even more successful than either of them had been alone. And Tallie was happier than she’d been in years. She didn’t want anything more than they had. Hunt Lloyd and the solid, quiet, stable relationship they shared were perfect for her. She was a modest person, despite her vast success, and liked leading a quiet life. She had no time to go out anyway, she was either shooting, preparing a film, or in post-production. There was rarely a time when she wasn’t working.

At twenty-one, after she had Max, Tallie had been “discovered” by a Hollywood agent, in a supermarket. He had gotten her a screen test and into a film. She had only done it for the memory of her mother, and because she knew what it would have meant to her. She did fine, and the film did well, but she had hated every minute as an actress. It wasn’t for her, nor anything that went with it. Much to her agent’s annoyance, she turned down all the offers she got after that, and there had been several. The camera had loved her looks, and with some coaching she had been a decent actress, but what she had fallen in love with was directing. It was what she wanted to learn, and when she went back to college after having Max, she enrolled in USC’s film school and applied herself. Her senior project had been a small low-budget film that she had made on a shoestring, financed with her father’s help, and it had become a cult film, The Truth About Men and Women . It was the start of her career as a director. She had never stopped or looked back since.

Her first few movies did well and got rave reviews, and they started making big money by the time she was in her late twenties. She had become a Hollywood legend and a huge success in her seventeen years as a director. She loved what she did. What she didn’t love, and never would, were all the trappings that went with it, the fame, the attention, the press, the premieres, all the opportunities to show off and be in the limelight. As far as she was concerned that was for actors, not for her, which was why she hadn’t wanted to be an actress and loved being a director, and contributing to each actor’s performance and interpretation of the script. After her one film as an actress, she could see what would happen to her if she pursued acting as a career, and she wanted none of it. Tallie was a worker, a creator, an artist. She was willing to work endlessly on everything she did, but not be a star. It was the one thing she didn’t want, and she was very clear about it.

She’d had to go out and buy a dress for her first Golden Globes when she was nominated; she didn’t own one. All she had were the clothes she worked in, which made her look like a homeless person most of the time. Tallie didn’t care. She was happy just the way she was, and Hunt loved her that way too. He was smoother and more worldly than she was, and more involved in the Hollywood scene, but it never went to his head, and he was always content to come home to Tallie, sprawled out on the floor or the couch, poring over scripts. And when she was on location, he joined her whenever he could. He was more of a businessman than someone involved in Hollywood. Pictures were big business to him, and it didn’t get much bigger than a film produced with and directed by Tallie Jones. And whether she bothered to comb her hair or not was immaterial to him.

They were near Palm Springs, in the location they had set up. She had a hotel room there for when she wanted to spend the night, but most nights she tried to get back to her house in L.A. to be with Hunt, if she didn’t have to work too late, or he came out to be with her.

Tallie wanted to look at some of the day’s takes, particularly the last one, before she left the set for the day. She had three pencils and a pen stuck in her hair as she made notes and answered e-mails, and she was just leaving her trailer to go look at the day’s rushes when a cloud of dust appeared on the road leading to the set, with a shiny silver Aston Martin causing it.

She squinted into the remaining sun as the sports car approached, spinning up a cloud of dust around it. The car came to a rapid halt near where Tallie stood, and she grinned as the driver got out. The woman emerging from the car was a spectacular-looking girl in a micromini skirt, with endless sexy legs, a striking figure, and a mane of blond hair. She looked rushed and windblown and like something in a movie as she climbed out of the car. She had an enormous turquoise bracelet on one wrist, diamond studs in her ears, and was wearing towering high heels.

“Shit, did I miss the last take of the day?” Brigitte, the beauty who owned the Aston Martin, looked annoyed, and Tallie grinned.

“It went great. You can watch the dailies with me. I was just going to look.” Brigitte looked relieved.

“The traffic was unbelievable. I got stuck for half an hour twice.” Brigitte looked every inch a star. In her platform stiletto sandals, she was taller than Tallie, her makeup was perfect, she never went out without it, and her outfit suited her to perfection, showed off her incredible body, and made her look irresistibly sexy. She was the opposite of Tallie in every way. Everything about her had been carefully thought out to catch the eye, as opposed to Tallie, who preferred to think of herself as invisible, and liked it that way. Her whole business was to show off others, not herself. Brigitte Parker loved the attention she got and had none of Tallie’s subtlety and shyness. The two women had similar looks, both tall, thin, and blond, but did entirely different things with the attributes nature had given them. Tallie hid them, and Brigitte shone a spotlight on them. Tallie honestly didn’t care how she looked and never thought about it. Brigitte put a lot of thought and effort into her dazzling appearance.

They were the same age, but Brigitte had knocked ten years off her looks, although Tallie had done so inadvertently too. By looking as though she dressed out of a rag bag, in high-topped Converse sneakers, torn jeans, and T-shirts, she looked like a kid. Brigitte had had her eyes done, was proud of her breast implants, got Botox shots regularly, collagen in her lips, and spent time every day at Hollywood’s most exclusive gym. She worked hard at how she looked, and the results were great. She was as beautiful as any star.

They had met at film school at USC seventeen years before. Brigitte had wanted desperately to be an actress, and was determined to learn everything about films she could. Everyone knew she was a debutante from San Francisco and didn’t have to work, but all she craved was an acting career. Like Tallie, she had lost her mother at an early age. Her father had remarried a much younger woman very quickly, and the prospect of dealing with her “evil stepmother” had driven Brigitte to L.A. Tallie had hired her to help her with her first independent film, while she was in school, and Brigitte had been so efficient, so organized, and such an enormous help to her that she had asked her to work on her next film too. Brigitte made all aspects of Tallie’s life easy, and she loved doing it. In the end, she had given up her dreams of becoming an actress, and had been Tallie’s assistant ever since. She was everything that Tallie didn’t want to be or do. Brigitte was the perfect front man, protected Tallie fiercely from the press, and shielded her from all she could. She liked to say that she would have taken a bullet for her. There was such a naïveté and simplicity about Tallie in some ways that she needed someone to run interference for her and protect her. Brigitte was Tallie’s representative in the world, and she thrived on every part of that, and she took all the tasks off Tallie’s hands that she could, which gave Tallie more time for her work, or to spend with her daughter. She was grateful for what Brigitte had done for her in the past seventeen years. It was an arrangement that worked perfectly for both of them, and met both their needs, and the time they had spent together had made them best friends. As hard as she worked, Tallie never had time to have many friends. Brigitte was always there, protecting and pampering her in every way she could, and she took great pride in what she did for her. No task was too difficult, too challenging, too time-consuming, or too menial for her.