Danielle Steel: Betrayal

© 2012

THE TWO MEN who lay parched in the blistering sun of the desert were so still they barely seemed alive. There had been shattering explosions in the distance earlier, and one of them was covered with blood. Although they had been enemies, one of them now held the other’s hand, as the lifeblood trickled from him. They looked at each other one last time, and then the injured man gave his last breath and died, just as there was the cracking sound of a gunshot nearby. The survivor of the pair looked wide-eyed and terrified as the man who had fired the gun appeared from behind them, seemingly out of nowhere, as though he had dropped from the sky like an avenging angel.

“Cut!… and print!” a voice rang out in the stillness, and within seconds, everything was action, a flock of men with cameras and equipment entered the scene, the dead man stood up as the blood ran down his neck, and a production assistant rushed up to him with a cold drink and he guzzled it gratefully. The man who had been holding his hand an instant before walked off the set to get something to eat as soon as he was told that they were finished shooting for the day.

Two dozen people were talking, shouting, and laughing, and a tall, thin blond woman in ragged cut-off denim shorts, high-top sneakers, and a torn man’s undershirt conferred with the camera crew with an enormous grin on her face. Despite her fair coloring, she had a deep honey tan from being outdoors, and a mass of long, uncombed blond hair piled up on her head. A moment later, she braided it into a disheveled pigtail, and helped herself to a bottle of icy water as someone passed them out. There was an enormous catering truck nearby, and a still photographer shot the actors as they left the set. Four of Hollywood’s biggest stars were in the film, which was always the case on her pictures. “It’s going to be the best scene in the movie,” the blond woman assured the head cameraman, as people came and went around them and checked with her, and the sound technician confirmed that he was happy with the scene too. Everything had gone smoothly. The Sand Man was going to be her best movie yet.

They were making her new film, sure to be an instant hit, like all the others Tallie Jones had made. Her films were box-office gold. She had been nominated for two Oscars and six Golden Globes. There were two Golden Globes on her desk, but no Oscars so far. And her pictures were an enormous success because she included both the kind of intense action men wanted in a film, just enough violence to suit their bloodlust without exploiting it excessively, and the sensitivity and emotional insights that made her films appealing to women. She offered the best of both worlds. Tallie had a Midas touch. At thirty-nine, she had been directing movies for seventeen years, and she hadn’t made a lemon yet.

There was already a smell of victory on the set, and Tallie looked happy as she walked to the trailer that was her office on location with her dog-eared copy of the script under her arm. It included all the changes that the screenwriters had made the night before. Tallie was always honing and fine-tuning, she was a perfectionist, and people who worked with her accused her of micro-managing, but it was worth it. She turned her BlackBerry on as she walked into the air-conditioned trailer, and saw that she had two messages from her daughter, who was a freshman in college at NYU in New York, studying pre-law. Maxine, or Max as they called her, had no interest whatsoever in a career in films, only the law. She wanted to be a lawyer like her grandfather, Tallie’s father, Sam Jones. He was Tallie and Max’s hero, and they were the only two women in his life. Tallie’s mother had died of leukemia when Tallie was in high school, and her father had been supportive of everything she did. Tallie had taken him to the Oscars with her as her escort, when she was nominated, and he was fiercely proud and protective of her.

It was Tallie’s mother who had made her fall in love with movies. She had taken her to every imaginable movie as a child, watched every classic with her, and was fascinated with films and actors herself. She had named Tallie Tallulah, after Tallulah Bank-head, who she thought was the most glamorous woman who had ever lived. Tallie had always hated her name, and shortened it to something she could live with, but she had loved every film she’d ever seen with her mother, who had wanted desperately to be an actress, and wanted her daughter to fulfill her dreams. She hadn’t lived to see Tallie’s career or the wonderful films she made. Tallie always hoped her mother would have loved them and been proud of her. Tallie’s mother had married her father at twenty-one, when he was already a successful lawyer at forty-five. It was his second marriage, but Tallie was his only child. He was eighty-five now, retired, and suffering from poor health. They called each other every day, and he loved hearing how it had gone on the set. She was his link to the outside world now, since he rarely got out anymore. Crippled with arthritis, it was just too hard.

Tallie’s marital career had been a checkered one, not surprisingly in the world she lived in, where unstable relationships and quick turnover were the norm. She always said that it was impossible to meet normal, decent guys in the film industry. Max’s father had been another story entirely. He was a cowboy from Montana she’d met at USC, and she’d gotten pregnant at twenty. She had dropped out of school for a year to have the baby, and her father had insisted they get married. They were both barely more than kids themselves, and by the time Max was six months old, her father had gone back to Montana, and they got divorced. Tallie had gone to see him a few times, to see if they could maintain the relationship, but their lives were totally different. Since then, he’d been on the rodeo circuit for twenty years, married a girl from Wyoming, and had three other kids. He sent Max a birthday card every year, a souvenir from the rodeo for Christmas, and Max had seen him four times in her life. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just had no connection to Max, and came from another world. He’d been a handsome boy, stunningly so at twenty, and Max was even more beautiful than her mother, a six-foot-tall blonde, long and lanky with sky blue eyes. Tallie’s eyes were green, and she was slightly shorter than her daughter. When they went out together, they made a striking pair, and looked more like sisters than mother and daughter.

Tallie’s only other foray into marriage had been with an actor in one of her films. She never got involved with actors on the set of her movies, but had made an exception for him. He had been a major heartthrob, a big British star, and had swept her off her feet. She was thirty and he was twenty-eight, and he had cheated on her very publicly six months later when he was on location on another film. The marriage had lasted eleven months, they only spent three months of it together, and it had cost her a million dollars when she wanted out. He drove a hard bargain, and she paid the price.