Page 12 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“Doesn’t Bradley have a long-term boyfriend?”
“Who do you think sent him the link?” Emmy glanced at her laptop at the same time my phone buzzed. “Ah, we have the names.”
We did. Time to work out who needed to suffer.
CHAPTER 5
Marc
“I truly apologise for this.”
Marc di Gregorio had found himself in many difficult situations—who could forget the horror of Velvet Jones emerging from his closet wearing nothing but leather underwear—but never before had he been shackled to a beautiful woman without a film crew present.
One minute, he’d been sitting on a folding chair in the sunshine, reading through the script with Serena; the next, armed men were running across the beach. When a kid with a rifle told him to put his hands up, he’d laughingly complied because it had to be a joke, didn’t it? A dumb prank. But then he’d seen the fear in Serena’s eyes as she searched for an escape route.
“Relax, they’re just messing around,” he’d tried to reassure her.
“Are you kidding? Dylan’s here, and he’s had a sense-of-humour bypass.”
“We’re dead serious,” the guy with the gun put in, but some of the gravitas was lost because the scarf across his face had slipped, and he looked about fifteen. And also vaguely familiar. One of the background performers? Even now, the kid seemed slightly starstruck.
“Didn’t you bring me coffee yesterday?”
“Uh, just walk to the beach, okay?”
They’d been shoved roughly along, bundled onto a boat crewed by more men with covered faces, then bound and blindfolded. Gunfire echoed in the background as they bounced over the waves, racing away from the set, away from Malati, away from everything they knew. Away from safety. The craft sped up, slowed down, circled around, and at one point, the engine turned off for a while. What were they waiting for? Were they lost? Voices came and went, some speaking English, some not. An unseen hand offered a bottle of water, and he drank greedily. That was a good sign, right? That they didn’t want him to die of thirst?
The blindfold was thin enough that Marc could discern light and dark, and the sun had already set when they arrived on another island. Arms pulled him from the boat. Water lapped around his knees and then his ankles as he stumbled over rocks and onto sand, and after a short walk, someone had manhandled him onto a chair.
Or womanhandled? He thought he’d caught a whiff of floral perfume at one point. Not the freesia and rose petals Serena favoured, but something sweeter. He didn’t go around sniffing Serena, you understand—that would be damn creepy, wouldn’t it? No, he’d been talking with Heath and Owen about the time an ex had hurled a bottle of Hugo Boss at him because she only wore Chanel. Was a man really supposed to know a date’s perfume preferences? Or was it the thought that counted? Turned out both men knew exactly which scents their women preferred, and Marc came to the slow realisation that he didn’t like any of the women he dated enough to care. That was the point when he’d decided to give dating a break.
Now he was a prisoner, and the only people who might truly worry were Kitty, Huck, and the few friends he’d made over the past year. Real friends. Friends who didn’t use you to climb the career ladder and then stab you in the back once they’d scrambled up a couple of rungs. Taking those baby steps away from Hollywood was the best move he’d made in the past decade.
Money couldn’t buy happiness.
It was a truth he hadn’t believed until he’d learned the lesson for himself.
Yes, financial security took a weight off your mind, but he knew so many miserable millionaires, most driven by the insatiable need for more, more, more. He’d quietly started giving his money away. A few thousand here, a few thousand there, mainly to small charities where it would make a real difference. Whenever he couldn’t sleep, he scrolled through JustFundIt and paid off a campaign so someone else could rest easy instead.
But he still had enough to pay a ransom.
“Look, if this is about money, tell me how much you want.”
Maybe money could buy freedom? Serena was trembling beside him, and he hated that.
Fingers picked at his blindfold, and he blinked as it was removed, although the light wasn’t too harsh. They were in a small room with rough wooden walls, more of a shack really, the space lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There wasn’t much furniture. Just the chairs they were sitting on, a table holding bottles of water and a rifle, and a video camera on a tripod.
“This isn’t about money.” The speaker snorted. An older man, judging by the salt-and-pepper hair and the creases at the corners of his eyes. A burgundy scarf covered the rest of his face. Had he been to Cuba to get the “Havana Good Time” T-shirt? Well-travelled or not, the polished British accent suggested he’d taken a significant wrong turn in life. “We want your voice.”
Huh? “You couldn’t have just emailed my agent?”
“We tried that. She ignored us. We even tried contacting you personally through more conventional channels.”
“More conventional channels?”
“We messaged you on BuzzHub.”
“I don’t run my own social media accounts.”
