“It will,” I said, “but that’s okay. I agree—there are people here who need help.” If any security guardshadsurvived, the cops might already be headed to the house anyway.
Miller gave me a smile of relief, and I knew I’d made the right choice. “I’ll call from the lounge,” he said. “I don’t know where my cell is…”
“I’ll go,” I said, unwilling to let Miller wander around the place unguarded. I’d lost my own cell too in all the action, so I went through the foyer and into the lounge to use the landline. But a familiar smell hit me as soon as I entered, and when I came around the sofa, I drew up sharply, my gun rising automatically as I saw a figure lying there on the floor.
It was Miller’s father.
Miller’s verydeadfather, sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling, and his chest now a cavity—the effects of a close-up shotgun blast. We’d heard it while we were heading to Miller’s rooms…
After deserting his children, Edgar Beaumont must have run into Dizzy downstairs.
Thank GodI’doffered to call emergency services. I didn’t want Miller seeing something like this.
* * *
The cops took me in, of course, but I was out pretty quick thanks to a fast-talking lawyer who turned up unexpectedly. That mystery was solved when I walked back out of the station and saw Miller waiting for me in his blue convertible, top down.
“Thanks for the shark,” I told him, when he jumped out of the car and into my arms for a hug. “How areyoudoing?”
“Let’s get out of here,” was all he said.
Once I had Miller back safe in my tiny apartment, wrapped up in my arms in bed, we went over it all.
Anaïs Beaumont had scarpered before the sirens turned up, and none of us had mentioned her to the cops. Miller didn’t seem as cut up about his father as I thought he would be, and I worried that he was in shock about it. Still, it wasn’t like Edgar Beaumont had been a stellar parent.
Hell, my old man had been a contract killer, and still managed to love me better than Miller’s dad had loved him.
I kept that thought to myself.
Miller talked a lot about his sister, though, telling me what had gone down between them in the art room while I’d been dealing with Dizzy.
“She made contact with Roxy one last time before she decided she had to get out of LA. She told Roxy that she was going to reach out to me, since Roxy wouldn’t lift a finger. But Roxy said I wouldn’t help, that she’d told me about what Annie had done when we were kids, so that the only way for Annie to save her ass was to go on the run. Permanently.”
I took that in. Rochford hadreallywanted to get rid of Anaïs Beaumont. Pressure from her Bernardi beau? Or was it an act of friendship, knowing all too well how things would end if Anaïs kept making waves? “And…whatdidyour sister do that she was so afraid you’d find out?”
Miller began trembling, and for a moment I thought it was fear, or anguish, or plain old trauma, but when he turned over in my arms to look at me, I saw sheerragein his eyes.
“Remember I told you she used to help me out onCamelot? She’d run lines with me while I painted, and that helped me memorize things. But the scripts started changing so fast, I had trouble keeping up, and I started missing call times and….” He clenched his teeth. “I always blamed myself. I figured I was too fuckingstupidto read anything right, but—”
“Hey,” I said, giving him a quick kiss. “Don’t say things like that about yourself.”
“That’s what I thought at the time,” he said doggedly. “But as it turns out, that was all Annie. She’d get hold of draft sides and help me learntheminstead of the updated versions. She’d tell me the wrong call times, or she’d even fucking bribe someone on set to give me the wrong information…” He broke off, seething. “And shetotally fucking liedabout my Q rating.Shewas the one who told me that’s why I was getting dumped, and I—I just believed her. Because why would my sister, the one person whoseemedto be pushing for me to stay on the show—why would she lie? The reality was, my father and Craig Wyatt saw a chance to make Annie into the golden goose. She was ambitious in a way I wasn’t. She washungry. So when she told them that secretly I just wanted off the show, and that’s why I was slacking off, they believed her. LikeIbelieved her. God, I’m such anidiot—”
“Hey,” I said again, more sharply this time. “Your sister fooled a lot of fucking people. You wanted to think the best of her, and she used that against you. That’s not something to be ashamed of.She’sthe one who’s twisted, sweetheart.”
Miller chewed on his lip. “I don’t know about that, JJ. After she admitted everything, I told her that I’d makesureshe made it through the night alive just so she’d have to own her shit. That I’d tell every media outlet that would listen about how she’d been part of the burglary ring. That I’d make sure her career was over. For good. And then, well, you and Dizzy burst through the door, so I—”
“Gotyourselfin trouble,” I finished for him. “Next time, sweetheart, just let me handle it. Hm?”
“Please don’t tell me there’s going to be a next time,” he groaned.
I wanted to. I wanted to promise him that he would be safe from now on, that life would be nothing but joy and pleasure and passion, that all the bad things that had ever happened to him were all the bad things that ever would.
But I still had enemies to deal with.
“No next times,” I told Miller, kissing his forehead. “Once I clean up a few loose ends, we’ll get on the road.”
“Can’t wait,” he said, and gave a little cough. He’d been raspy all night after Dizzy’s attack.
