A-List #8, The: Heart of Glass: An A-List Novel (A-List) Read online

  Cammie rubbed her chin. "It's mega-ugly. Notice that the house has a fat ass, just like Gibson. What a hoot. Wait till I tell my dad."

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  "It sounds like you and your dad are getting along better these days," Anna ventured.

  "Oh, believe me, Anna, I know my father is a sphincter. But he's an effective sphincter. He doesn't let anyone take advantage of him. In fact--"

  "Stop right there, you two!"

  An angry male voice bellowed over the loudspeakers on Gibson's deck. It was so sudden and so loud that Anna literally jumped. Immediately, two blinding spotlights were fixed on her and Cammie.

  "What the fuck?" Cammie exclaimed.

  Anna felt a shiver of fear. "Who is it?"

  "It's Gibson!"

  "You're on my property! Identify yourselves!" the crabby voice boomed out over the sand.

  Cammie cupped her hands and shouted up toward the house. "Turn off the spotlights!"

  Anna winced. Not a good way to win friends and influence people.

  "Identify yourselves!"

  "I'm Cammie Sheppard, daughter of your nearest and dearest friend, Clark. Now turn off the goddamn spotlight! You're blinding us!"

  There was silence, but the perfect circle of white light remained on them.

  "What an asshole," Cammie mumbled. "Let's just keep walking--screw him."

  "HOLD IT, DAUGHTER OF THE JACKASS OF

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  THE WESTERN WORLD!" The voice was twice as loud now. Anne literally had to cover her ears.

  Cammie whirled, irate. "You're the jackass! Stop screaming at us!"

  "Don't egg him on, Cammie," Anna urged worriedly. "Let's just get out of here and go back to Marty's house."

  "DON'T MOVE! DO NOT MAKE ANY SUDDEN MOVEMENTS!"

  Annie exchanged looks with Cammie. "Is he serious?

  Clearly, Cammie wasn't any more certain than she was, so they both just stood there. Not more than two minutes passed before they saw Gibson Wills himself charging down the stone steps at the back of his house, flanked by two uniformed Malibu police officers. His face, pulled so tight his skin was practically translucent under the spotlights, was alight with glee. As he approached them, Anna could see he wore black jeans and a simple white sweatshirt.

  "I'm having my annual Fourth of July party for the municipal employees of Malibu," Gibson told them, and then motioned to the two cops. "Thank God these two officers of the law arrived early. Gentlemen, these two young women are clearly trespassing on my property. Do your duty and arrest them."

  Cammie made a face of disbelief. "You can't possibly be serious, Gibson."

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  "Mr. Wills," Gibson corrected.

  "Gibson," Cammie said again, in a move that Anna knew would infuriate him. It was like Cammie couldn't resist.

  "Do it," Gibson ordered the cops.

  The shorter of the two policemen, who had the perfectly white Chiclet teeth of a twentysomething guy who had hoped to become a movie star before giving up and joining the men in blue, undipped a set of handcuffs from his belt and strode over to Cammie and Anna, who hadn't moved since Gibson's voice had first boomed out over the loudspeaker, and ordered them to hold their ground. "Ladies, happy Fourth of July. You are both under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of--"

  "We know, we know," Cammie declared, tossing her strawberry blond mane disdainfully. "We watch CSI. In fact, my father packages all three CS7s. Just get the flipping cuffs, okay?"

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  The First Felon I Ever Dated

  Cammie and her lawyer--a no-nonsense woman with aggressively short jet-black hair and a bone-thin physique, and wearing a magnificently tailored black Armani

  skirt-and-jacket combination--stepped into the brightly lit, windowless conference room where Anna and her own lawyer sat waiting at a long black conference table. "Carol Farrell," Cammie's attorney introduced herself quickly, and nodded in Cammie's direction. "Sit." She pointed to the cheap leatherette seat next to Anna.

  "Hello, Carol." Anna's attorney was Richard Lodge, courtly, portly, and white-haired. "Nice to see you again."

  "Can we can the chitchat and move this thing along?" Cammie asked them both, as she fell dramatically into the black pleather seat next to Anna. "I'm meeting Sam for facials and an ayurveda massage at A La Mer in an hour. I really don't have a lot of time."

  "That's why I'm here," Carol declared, as she leafed through some papers in her black briefcase. "To get you

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  out of here. This is the most ridiculous case I've ever heard of. Come on, Richard, we're going to talk with the DA and get this thing dismissed."

  Richard smiled and retrieved his own briefcase. "I couldn't agree more, Carol. Anna, relax. This shouldn't take very long."

  The two lawyers departed.

  "She's a bitch," Cammie announced. "I love that in an attorney." She took out a nail file and went to work on her left hand, despite the fact that she was allegedly on her way to a manicure.

  Meanwhile, Anna's hands were sweating and she felt a little sick to her stomach. She'd hardly slept at all the night before, visions of herself in cold, unforgiving handcuffs and behind bars seared into her brain.

  Perhaps they would have gotten off with a warning if Cammie hadn't insisted that Gibson and the cops who had arrested them were all "total idiots." Lesson one: Cops don't like to be called idiots. Go figure. In fact, the police had threatened to add the additional charge of resisting arrest as they loaded both girls into their black-and-white police cruiser. At the Malibu police station, they were dumped into a spartan, fluorescent-lit holding cell with a couple of fiftyish drunk women and three stunning young women from an escort service who tried to recruit Anna and Cammie with promises of "five hundred on a bad night, seven-fifty on a good one."

  Cammie took one of their business cards just for fun.

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  After an excruciating hour of mostly terse silence, they were issued a citation for misdemeanor trespassing and told to return to the courthouse the next morning at ten for their arraignment. Would they need court-appointed attorneys?

  Cammie had laughed at that one.

  Free to go, they'd immediately called Sam, but it turned out that Sam had already heard the news of their arrest and was outside in the waiting area. Sam and Cammie had continued with their evening excursion to the House of Blues, but Anna had called Caine to bow out of their clubbing plans. Caine had understood and said he'd phone her in the morning. Then she'd driven back to her father's place in Beverly Hills, never letting her Lexus get anywhere near the speed limit.

  What was strange, and somewhat reassuring, was her father's reaction. Jonathan Percy had been remarkably calm about the whole affair when Anna had recounted the story. After assuring Anna that it was highly unlikely that she'd be doing hard time at Vacaville for trespassing, he'd called Mr. Lodge, one of the lawyers he kept on retainer, and instructed him to meet Anna the next morning at the DA's office. "Don't worry, Anna," Jonathan had insisted. "It's going to be fine."

  "Have you ever been arrested, Dad?" she'd asked, after she'd gotten herself a bottle of Fiji water from her father's fridge.

  "No. Though I came close when I was at Yale. A bunch of us went streaking down Main Street in New

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  Haven the night before the homecoming game and got hauled in, but they let us go when they saw we'd written Harvard Sucks in black magic marker on our asses. You don't have to worry--you were trespassing. It's not like armed robbery."

  That was easy for him to say, Anna had surmised. She'd tossed and turned all night, had barely eaten any breakfast, and had carefully chosen clothes that she thought would make a good impression on a judge, were she to end up before one--a conservative knee-length navy skirt, a white blouse, and kitten-heeled navy sandals, topped off with her grandmother's pearls.

  'You're not worried about this at all?" Anna couldn't help asking. She actually h
ad a book in her Fendi bag-- the paperback of Everything Is Illuminated--but hadn't been able to do anything but watch Cammie give herself a manicure.

  "Please," Cammie scoffed. She'd been reapplying rose lip salve. "This is some asshole's vendetta, not an arrest." Cammie found some gum in her Louis Vuitton hobo bag and curled the stick into her mouth without offering any to Anna. "He called my father right afterward. To gloat."

  "Was your father upset?"

  "Only that I didn't have a gun to put Gibson out of his misery. What a pathetic loser. He thought he could show my dad and me how powerful he was. Trespassing. You gotta be kidding." She gave Anna a cool once-over. "You're dressed like a girl with no bodily

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  functions. Does Ben really get off on that prim-and-proper shit?"

  "Ben and I aren't exactly together anymore," Anna admitted cautiously. It had been a couple of weeks since Anna had told Ben that she needed time to think about their relationship--such as it was--and then had turned down Ben's graduation-night invitation in favor of an evening with Caine at a jazz club. The night had been fun. Really fun, in fact. There really didn't seem to be any point to hiding this from Cammie. In fact, Cammie probably knew already.

  "Really."

  Anna heard the interest in Cammie's voice. Well, maybe she didn't know. But Ben and Cammie had once been Ben-and-Cammie. He was, in fact, the only guy who had ever dumped Cammie Sheppard. Anna knew that part of Cammie wanted Ben back, if only to prove that she could win him over so that she could be the one to drop him. Anna knew she shouldn't care, but she did. Even the mere thought of Cammie with Ben added an extra knot to her already-nervous stomach.

  "Yes, really."

  "So what prompted you to--"

  The door opened, and the two high-powered attorneys walked back in, trailed by a movie-star-handsome man clad in an impeccable charcoal-colored Giorgio Baroni suit, crisp white shirt, and a red patterned tie. Anna automatically stood.

  Cammie didn't. Instead, she yawned.

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  The man in the Baroni suit held out his hand to them anyway. "Anna Percy? Camilla Sheppard? I'm Andrew Levitan, the DA who's been assigned to your case. I'm sorry, but we've got a bit of a situation here."

  "Andrew--I hope you don't mind that I call you Andrew--having the pregnancy test come back positive is a 'situation' to be terribly sorry about," Cammie declared. She still held her nail file in one hand. "This is just two cute girls walking over some has-been's semi-private sandbox. So do the right thing. Make the charges go away, I can go for my facial, and you people can go do . . . whatever it is you do."

  "Have a seat, Anna." Andrew motioned politely to the chairs at the conference table. "I'm confident we can work all this out to both of your satisfaction."

  Anna sat; Levitan and the lawyers did too. When Mr. Lodge flashed her the world's quickest thumbs-up, Anna felt a bit of relief. Maybe this was going to work out after all. Maybe the DA would drop the charges--

  "I'm afraid I can't drop the charges," Levitan told them. "I got the order from high up. This is one of those things where the complainant--Gibson--can make a lot of noise. But I do think your lawyers and I have worked a way out of this. If you girls are willing, I'd like to put you into a brief community service program. If you complete the program successfully, we can get this case dismissed in the interest of justice."

  Cammie leaned toward the handsome young DA, putting her impressive cleavage--the best that money

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  could buy--on serious display. "Andrew--that's your name, right? I choose what--or who--I do. 'Community service' isn't on my list."

  Andrew smiled gently. "This won't be anything like graffiti removal on the 405 freeway. You can thank your lawyers' powers of persuasion that I've got something else in mind."

  "I'll do it whatever it is," Anna insisted, and fixed her eyes on Levitan. This was no time to put up with Cammie's snarky behavior. If she wanted a police record, that was her problem. Cammie could go to trial for all Anna cared.

  "Actually, I think when you both hear what I have to say, you're going to be thanking me. You're not ordinary defendants. You're not going to do ordinary community service." Levitan leaned in close to them and smoothed his red power tie. "And the best part is, nobody is even going to know you're doing it."

  "Joe's Clams?" Anna asked, as Caine pulled his electric blue Ford F-150 pickup truck into the half-full parking lot. "We're going to Joe's Clams for dinner?"

  Caine laughed. "Best seafood in the Marina, in my humble opinion. You got a problem with that?"

  Anna hesitated. "No ... it's fine."

  "My brilliant powers of observation tell me you've been here before," Caine teased as he turned off the engine. "Let me guess. You've been here with what's-his-name?"

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  "Ben," Anna filled in. "Good guess. Yes. His father's yacht is docked near here. But it's really fine. The food is great. Especially the crab cakes."

  "His father's yacht. Huh. My father didn't have a yacht. He didn't even have a rowboat." Caine bounded out of the pickup, flashed around to Anna's side, and helped her step down to the pavement. Just as she had the first time she'd seen him, when he'd been sent by her father to rescue her after a fender-bender in a slightly dicey section of town, Anna was struck by how unlikely a young investment banker this guy was. His arms were covered in intricate tattoos, and he wore his dark chocolate hair short and spiky. There was stubble on his chin and a gold hoop in each ear. The only clue as to the nature of his work was the white button-down Brooks Brothers shirt he wore rolled up to his elbows, along with conservative woolen trousers and black cowboy boots. "He did have a canoe once. Great for fly-fishing."

  "I didn't mean anything by that." Caine had told her a little about his modest upbringing in the Pacific Northwest.

  Caine laughed and nudged his shoulder into hers. "Don't sweat it. Hey, did I mention you're the first felon I've ever dated? It's kinda hot."

  Anna laughed. Caine was six years older than her, and possessed a maturity and ease that she found refreshing. Plus, as far as Anna could tell, he was scrupulously honest, which was more than she could say for Ben. When she'd gotten tired of Ben hiding the

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  truth from her--the latest time had been during the week before graduation, when it turned out that an old girlfriend of Ben's from Princeton was basically stalking him

  --Caine had been right there.

  Yes, Ben had done his best to apologize, and Anna had found herself falling under his familiar spell. But she had resisted, and since graduation, she and Caine had seen each other quite a bit.

  Still, walking into Joe's Clams made her think about Ben. Their very first night together, when he'd abandoned her on the pier, and the only landmark she'd been able to remember was this clam shack. God, she'd been through so much with him....

  Anna pushed those thoughts aside as Caine ushered her to a corner table and ordered two Anchor Steams and a basket of fried oysters for them to share. The place was exactly as Anna had remembered, with a nautical theme, its warped wooden floor covered in peanut shells.

  "When the beers arrived, Caine lifted his bottle to Anna. "To my favorite felon."

  "Hopefully not for long."

  "So what's the deal on the community service, again? I wasn't really tracking in the middle of that traffic jam."

  Anna grinned. "The DA offered us this amazing deal--he basically said we should never have been arrested or charged, but now that it had happened, he had to follow through with something. Anyway, there's

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  this foundation he knows called New Visions, which does benefit work for at-risk girls and teens. They're doing a charity fashion show in a couple of weeks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Some sort of big fund-raiser. Cammie and I are supposed to help plan it."

  "Trust Anna Percy to get 'community service' planning a charity fashion show."

  "I know!" Anna exclaimed. She took a swallow of the beer--it was ice co
ld and delicious. "I mean, that's the kind of thing I might want to work on anyway. It actually sounds like fun."

  "There's this song my grandmother used to sing-- something about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," Caine commented, as he opened a package of crackers and ate one of them.

  "You didn't grow up rich. You told me last week your father runs a garage in Oregon. And yet you went into investment banking. Which means that if you follow in my father's footsteps--"

  "I'll eventually be joining the leisure class, playing golf in those nasty-ass pastel pants, and--God forbid, don't tell my father--voting Republican. Man, my life is gonna suck."

  Anna laughed and whacked his arm. "I don't think you have to change your essential self just because you make money."

  "And how would you know that, exactly, Anna Percy, since you've always been overprivileged?" Caine took another pull on his Anchor Steam.

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  Anna didn't like to think that her worldview was colored by her family's status, but how could it not be? She and Ben had talked about that once, she recalled. Ben felt that the more money his plastic surgeon hero of a father made, the more shallow and avaricious he became, and he wanted to be nothing like his dad. Of course, one of the things Ben didn't talk about was what exactly he wanted to do with his life. Yet didn't Ben take the luxuries in his life for granted? He'd taken her out on the yacht that very first night, and--

  "Yo, Anna, where'd you go?" Caine asked.

  Anna flushed and leaned forward. "Sorry."

  "Thinking about him, no doubt."

  "It's just that he was my first real. .. my only--"

  It felt too awkward to say out loud.

  "Got it," Caine replied quickly; it was clear from the look on his face that he really did.

  "Is there anyone in your past like that?" Anna asked. If they were talking about Ben, it was only fair for her to hear something about Caine's past. He hadn't volunteered much. "Or is that too personal a question?"

  "No, it's okay. There actually was someone, back at Stanford. A girl named Bernadette. We were snow-boarding buddies." Caine's voice got soft. "Funny. I haven't thought about her in a long time."

  "What happened? How long were you together?"