Page 36 of Such A Bad Girl

I didn’t have to worry about someone getting attached to me.

And maybe it worked both ways.

Chapter Eighteen

EVERLEIGH

“Five minutes, Everleigh!” The knock on my trailer door startled me out of the trance I’d been in for the last hour. Being on set was just a whole lot of waiting around, and today was no exception. I’d almost dozed off completely.

I’d sat in hair and makeup for two hours, spent another one in wardrobe, then waited another hour before I was called to set. All that time gave me way too many opportunities to get lost in my own thoughts. And to stare at my phone.

I’d been on the edge of my seat, waiting for a reply to the text Theo sent from my phone. But nothing had come yet. I still had no idea who was sending me these threats. It could be anyone, but once Theo had suggested it, the only person I could imagine being capable of something like this was my own mother.

I wouldn’t put it past her to try to burn my life down. She’d always insisted I wouldn’t have a career without her — never mind all the hard work I’d put into it. Just because she’d entered me in beauty pageants when I was a kid, she thought everything after that was her doing. And that she should be the one to reap the rewards from it all.

It was all bullshit, of course.

In reality, all she’d managed to do was to give me self-esteem issues at way-too-young of an age, and to expose me to dozens of predators and leeches along the way. All she’d cared about was fame and money. She’d pushed both West and me to unimaginable extremes just to live out her own unrealized dreams after she’d divorced our father.

It was sick, and twisted, and it took way too long for me to untangle myself from her.

The final straw was when she’d given an interview about me to some sleazy journalist hell-bent on digging up all the ugly dirt about our family.

I didn’t want to be known as a victim of my father’s sick perversions. I certainly didn’t want to be known as the crazy teenager that tried to burn her father’s house down, with him in it. I wasn’t strong enough in the beginning of my career to deal with all of that publicly, so I’d chosen to bury it as much as I could. I’d done my best to scrub as much of that information out of the public eye as I could. My PR firm nearly succeeded.

Then her interview upended all that work.

I was bombarded with interview and comment requests that made me deeply uncomfortable. When I found out she’d given them photographs of me with my father, I was sick. It took me a week to get out of bed, another week to leave my house. If it wasn’t for my friends and West, I may never have gone back to work. When I found out she’d been paid an obscene amount of money for those photos, I went no-contact with her and never looked back.

Could she really be the one behind the texts?

She’d hurt me so much already.

Why would she want to do even more damage?

Not for the first time, I was happy my job allowed me to delve into the character of someone else entirely and get lost.

Being Everleigh was really fucking hard lately.

I needed a big, long break.

Chapter Nineteen

THEO

Jill sat across from me near the dance floor, a margarita in front of her and a wide, welcoming smile spread across her face. Purple and silver lights reflecting from the disco balls played across her face, making her eyes sparkle as she leaned back into the tall, red leather booth.

“This place is amazing!” she shouted over the loud pumping music. The floors vibrated and the club was full of beautiful people mingling and dancing all around us.

I nodded in agreement, sipping my bourbon.

She leaned forward. “I did my research before I showed up tonight, Theo.”

“Research?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “I saw the articles about the murders. I didn’t realize West was your partner. I remember him from Westlake. You two were always close, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. I hated thinking about the murders. I wished like hell I could have done something to stop that shit. It went on for way too long, and the fact that it was all so close to home was hard to digest.

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