Forever Bound (The Forever Series, #4)
Deanna Roy
Chapter 1: Jenny
This face would be in all the tabloids tomorrow. It had to look good.
“I need something,” I told my friends Tina and Corabelle. They both sat on my bed giving me moral support as I put on makeup for this crazy important night.
Corabelle rose and stood behind me, her fingers lifting my soft pink dreadlocks. “You look beautiful,” she said.
“It’s not enough,” I said.
Maybe I needed more color. I dug through one of my drawers.
“Please tell me you’re not going Kardashian on us in front of all those photographers,” Tina said.
“Uggh, no,” I told her, pulling out a tube of emerald eyeliner. “I have to keep it classy for Frankie.”
Frankie was my movie director boyfriend. Well, pretend boyfriend. I had been his paid arm candy the past few months to attend premieres and industry parties. But now we were done. He’d fallen in love for real.
And not with me.
Not that it mattered. I didn’t love him either. We’d just been having fun. Platonic fun. Normally I didn’t do platonic, but Frankie had been an exception.
“You’re making yourself crazy,” Corabelle said as she adjusted a few stray locks over my ears. “It will be fine.”
I watched my friends via the mirror. Corabelle’s face was serious, her hands fiddling with my hair like she was solving a puzzle.
Tina flopped back on the bed and stared up at the cascades of colored silk draped from the ceiling. “Girl, this room looks like a Care Bear puked a rainbow,” she said.
I turned to her, realizing I might have overdone the decor. But Frankie had given me his credit card, and said my love of color made him happy. So I went nuts. The wallpaper shifted colors like a pastel waterfall. Even the makeup table with its movie-starlet surround of bulbs was a soft pink.
“Well, I can’t afford to change it now,” I said, and opened the glitter liner.
“He’s cutting you off now that he’s ditching you?” Tina asked.
“I gave up the credit line yesterday,” I said, adding an edge to the wings coming off my eyelids. The deep green liner matched my dress perfectly.
“These guys show no mercy,” Tina said.
“Part of the contract,” I said with a shrug.
Corabelle continued to smooth my pink dreadlocks. She couldn’t get enough of them. “These are really going to make you stand out,” she said.
“I hope so,” I said. “This is my last chance to get in the industry before I graduate and have to work someplace boring.”
“The photographers are going to love you,” Corabelle said. “It’s a big movie premiere. It will be a madhouse.”
She was right about that. And my public breakup with Frankie was going to turn some heads. Make some people dislike me. Sigh. But I couldn’t let anybody know the real deal. I had signed on the dotted line.
Tina hopped off the bed to stand with Corabelle. The three of us were a sight, me with my pink ’do, Corabelle and her long trailing black curls, and tiny impish Tina with her signature short pigtails.
“You are totally going to draw all the clicks, especially once they get a whiff of the scandal,” Tina said.
I pressed my hands to my cheeks. “The paparazzi are merciless. They LIVE for getting your bad side.”
“You don’t have a bad side,” Corabelle said gently.
I stared into the mirror, cursing my eyes for being such a dull gray. Half the reason I kept my hair pink was to make up for my boring eyes.
Tina shook her head. “I can’t believe you got into this mess.”
“It’s not a mess,” I said. “It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.” I dropped the liner back into the drawer and dug around for some lip gloss.
“You’re at the end of it, at least,” Tina said, sitting back down.
I picked up a sparkling tube and shook it. “Now I have to survive the fallout,” I said grimly. Tonight was going to be brutal.
“You will,” Corabelle said. “And you’ll be free to chase all the teaching assistants and doctors you want.” She smiled over at Tina.
“I had forgotten about all the hot docs at the hospital,” I said. I hadn’t, but they’d been out of reach since Frankie, so I’d pushed them from my mind.
“They don’t make good sugar daddies,” Tina said. “They’re workaholics.”
“Why did you go with dreadlocks?” Corabelle asked. She couldn’t stop playing with them.
I dotted my lips and tilted my head, watching the thick pink extensions sway against my bare shoulders. “It was my last hair appointment on the director’s dime,” I said. “I had to make it good.”
“I liked Frankie,” Corabelle said. “I hate that it has to end with such drama.”
I turned around in the chair to face her and Tina. “Thank you both for keeping the secret. Nobody was supposed to know, not even my friends.”