Page 1 of Behind the Scenes

Chapter One

“Let me go!”

Alexis Marchand sat bolt upright in her bed and looked down at her arms where the man had held her tightly as she desperately tried to pull away. It had been a nightmare like the one the night before, but it felt more real this time. Like she should see red marks where his fingers pressed hard into the flesh.

But there was nothing there. It had all been in her mind.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. He wasn’t going to do this. He wasn’t going to ruin her life. She’d worked too damn hard to let some stranger take it all away from her.

Thankfully, none of her staff had heard her scream. She didn’t need them frantically rushing in and hovering over her like some broken bird.

She had screamed, right? Or had that been a part of the nightmare too? Jesus, she didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore.

Slowly, she lowered herself back down onto the bed. “I won’t let you take my life away from me. You aren’t going to win,” she whispered defiantly into the darkness of her room to the stranger who’d upended her world with one simple letter.

Closing her eyes, she silently swore he wouldn’t succeed.

***

Alexis stormed fromone room to the next in her Hollywood Hills mansion as everyone around her packed up every last thing she owned. That she had to leave the house of her dreams broke her heart and enraged her. One minute she wanted to curl up into a ball and cry, and then the next she wanted to throw pointy things at people’s heads.

This whole thing made her feel stabby. And when Alexis got in that mood, heaven help everyone around her. They didn’t call her a diva in the gossip rags for nothing.

Not that anything those hacks said was true in any real way. Yes, she had, on occasion, had what could be technically called temper tantrums. And yes, they had occurred in public once or twice. Or maybe a few times more.

And yes, she had been drunk a few times when those incidents occurred. But that didn’t make what they said about her right.

But that’s not who she really was. At least, it wasn’t who she wanted to be.

At the moment, though, what she really didn’t want to be was a woman forced to move from a home she loved to a new apartment in a city that felt foreign to her. She’d fallen in love with this house the moment she stepped foot inside the front door for the first time. The grand two-story foyer with the wrought-iron railed staircase that curved down from the second floor like something straight out of the movies had charmed her instantly, and she knew right then and there she wanted to own this gorgeous home. The fact that the rest of the property impressed everyone else in her entourage didn’t matter as much as the emotions that entrance made bubble up inside her.

And now because of some asshole, she had to abandon her dream home for something much smaller, she was sure, in a city she had no interest in even visiting.

New York.

Everyone could tell her how wonderful that city was until they were blue in the face. It didn’t matter. She had no desire to go live in any place called the Big Apple. Sure it had Broadway and there would be parties like there always had been in LA, but it wouldn’t be the same. She wouldn’t be near the beach, and half the year she’d be stuck under grey skies. And she’d have to get used to a real winter again!

Winter. Godforsaken winter.

Leaving the home she loved was bad enough, but moving to a place that had winter like she’d gone through growing up in Minnesota made her shoulders sag as depression set in once again. She already felt beaten down by all that had happened in the past couple months, and now this would be the final blow.

One of the moving men shuffled by her as she stood lost in her misery in the hallway. In his left hand, he swung a vase like he was carrying a baseball glove that had no worth at all.

Horrified, Alexis screamed, “Watch that vase! What the hell are you swinging it like that for?”

The man stopped dead and looked at her in shock that she’d yelled at him. What did he expect acting like that?

“That vase is priceless to me. No swinging. Carefully walk it into that room and ask the woman in there named Carla to make sure it gets packed with everything else from my bedroom. Got it?”

He nodded but said nothing, and Alexis didn’t know if he listened to a word she said. She’d never met him before that morning when he showed up with a dozen other men to pack up all her belongings. She hadn’t bothered to ask their names or even tried to differentiate between one or another of them.

She didn’t need to make friends with them. She just needed every one of them to not break the things that meant the world to her. The last thing Alexis needed was to move to New York and find boxes of broken valuables when she started unpacking there.

The mere thought of relocating made her think she might just not unpack at all. All she needed to do was stay there until they found the guy who’d been terrorizing her and then she could move back here to sunny California.

Problem solved. So no need to unpack. Assuming they found the son of a bitch who’d been sending her threatening letters. As long as he was out there walking around, she’d have to stay in New York.

Her assistant Carla walked out of the bedroom with the glass and crystal music box Alexis received for her last birthday from her father. He’d given her that gift right before he died.

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