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‘Sure, you don’t need rainbows or crocks of gold to be happy,’ he’d tell her.

Her eyes blurring with tears, Shauna turned away from the window. In the taxi on the way here she’d steeled herself for whatever news it was her mother was keeping back, but now that she was here, surrounded by childhood memories, her resolve seemed to have left her. Rather than go downstairs, she stood looking around her at the little bedroom under the eaves. It seemed to have been left pretty much as it was when she was a child. Her old clothes were gone from the wardrobe and drawers, but the shelves were still crammed with her favourite novels and school exercise books. She opened a cupboard, and her eyes lit up when she saw her precious collection of Photoplay back issues. While other teenagers had pored over Jackie and Seventeen with their pages full of pin-ups like David Cassidy and David Soul, Shauna had invested her meagre pocket money in old editions of the cinema fan’s bible, preferring to lose herself in Hollywood gossip of days gone by. She reached out and teased a magazine from the pile, pausing to drink in the cover, unconsciously returning Grace Kelly’s all-American smile as it beamed out at her from a 1956 edition. She turned the yellowing, well-thumbed pages, and read again Grace’s ‘Untold Story’. It was as she remembered: no revelations, merely a well-trodden recap of Grace’s life up to the year of the issue, accompanied by a photo from High Society featuring Grace and Bing Crosby.

The Hollywood legend turned fairy-tale princess had been a lifelong obsession for Shauna. As a teenager, she’d hated her red hair and dreamed of being blonde and beautiful like Grace. It had taken years for Shauna to embrace her looks, despite Dan calling her his ‘pre-Raphaelite dryad’ and urging her to stop lightening her hair in an effort to be more like her idol. Ironically, it was after she reverted to her natural colour and pale complexion, realising that it set her apart from the perma-tans and facelifts of LA, that Dan betrayed her with another woman.

Shauna winced. She’d resolved not to keep torturing herself with memories of Dan. Instead, she steered her thoughts back to her idol, and the night they’d met. The memory was fixed in her mind, the graceful handshake, the charming smile. There was so much else she could never forget about that night, too. A promise. A caress. A dream that could never be real. ‘You’re like no one else, Shauna …’

If only Grace had lived and they’d had the chance to get to know each other. What advice would she have given to Shauna in her current situation? Smile and act like you don’t care, darling.

Good advice, but impossible to follow. Especially with her mother waiting downstairs to break the news she had come all this way to hear. Now that she was here, the prospect filled her with such dread that she wanted to run or hide, as if so long as the truth about her da’s condition remained unspoken, it wouldn’t be real and she could go on clinging to the memories of him as he used to be.

Shauna composed herself, readying herself to go back downstairs again, then reapplied her make-up, before closing the door on her old belongings and her youthful dreams.

The day they buried her father, the weather was a typical mixture of sunshine and rain – the classic Irish combination. Father Sean’s eulogy was good-humoured and intimate, as befitted a long-standing member of his flock. The church was packed with old friends and colleagues, local acquaintances and the usual random people who no one ever seemed to recognize but who turned up at every funeral in the parish, usually for the free tea and sandwiches afterwards.

Shauna’s mother clung to her, weeping as her husband was lowered into his grave, her brittle exterior gone for once. As she tried to find words to comfort her, Shauna felt like a child forced into the role of an adult, lost and uncertain, desperate for her strong and uncompromising mother to take the lead instead of looking to her.

At the graveside, Shauna had read from her father’s favourite poem, ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ by W. B. Yeats. Her voice faltered when she came to the line, ‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams’, her mind conjuring his musical voice reading it to her as a child. She drew on all her acting ability to get through it and prayed she was doing him justice. As a rainbow burst across the sky, she told herself it was a message from him that she was.

Shauna’s thoughts returned to the present with a jolt as the limousine left the freeway and turned into North Knoll Drive. Her penthouse apartment wasn’t in the showiest part of Beverly Hills, but she had bought it with her first pay cheque from her first Hollywood movie, Only the Brave. Her role as the wife of a paraplegic Vietnam vet had won her an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress and launched her career. Perhaps because of that, the apartment had sentimental value and she had insisted on keeping it on even after she and Dan moved into their sprawling beachfront mansion in Malibu. Though she’d justified it to Dan by pointing out it was more convenient for the studios, the truth was she liked having what Virginia Woolf would have called ‘a room of one’s own’, a sanctuary she could retreat to.

As she stepped out of the limo and into the lobby entrance, she immediately felt calmer, more composed. Yes, this was home now, and it was so good to be back.

Chapter 2

‘Shauna, you’re home!’

After eighteen hours’ jet-lagged sleep, Shauna had come out onto her balcony to escape the persistent flashing light of her answering machine. She’d barely had time to take in the view of the West Hollywood hills when a red open-top Cadillac pulled up outside with Roxy Lennon, her oldest and best friend, waving excitedly from the passenger seat. Within minutes, Roxy had sprinted up the stairs and was at the door.

Five foot eleven inches in her Jimmy Choo heels, Roxy towered over Shauna, who was barefoot and casual in Levis and a New York Yankees baseball jersey. While Shauna kept her make-up minimal, her friend as usual had opted for a more vampish look, her black spiky hair a masterpiece of through-a-hedge-backwards chic, thick black eyeliner to set off her brown eyes, her lips a gash of scarlet currently beaming with pleasure. Resplendent in red tartan trousers with a battered biker jacket, she cut a dramatic figure.

‘Shaunie!’ Sweeping her friend into her arms, Roxy hugged her long and hard, then stood back to subject her to a close inspection. When she spoke, her once broad Liverpool accent was softened with a transatlantic twang. ‘That bad, eh?’

Shauna’s shoulders sagged. ‘Thank God you’re here. I feel like I’ve been going mad.’

‘Oh, that’s crap, you’re the sanest person I know.’

‘Not any more. Who’s that in the Cadillac?’

Roxy winked playfully, took her by the hand and led her out onto the balcony. Below them, looking up from the driver’s seat was a handsome, olive-skinned young man who looked to be half Roxy’s age.

‘That’s Marco, isn’t he gorgeous!’

Marco responded with a friendly wave and Roxy blew him a kiss. ‘He was one of my models at Milan Fashion Week – doesn’t speak much English but can read a road map, if you know what I mean.’ She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

‘What happened to that young designer you were championing – the one you said adored you, and that you couldn’t live without?’

Roxy frowned. ‘Jason Turner? Got too big for his boots, wanted me to set him up with a new label. I might have been happy to oblige if I hadn’t caught him screwing one of the interns. I told him to move out, fuck off and set himself up with his own money.’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ Shauna could see that, beneath the bravado, Roxy’s feelings had been bruised.

Roxy waved her sympathy away. ‘Plenty more where he came from, and no chance of Marco doing the same thing – he’s got to go back to university in a couple of weeks, so we’re on a timer and making the most of it.’ Roxy grinned mischievously. ‘Anyway, enough about me. It’s time to talk. I need a drink?’

‘Dry martini?’

‘You know me so well.’

‘That’s what I call a proper welcome,’ Roxy said as they settled themselves into the Spanish colonial style chairs that looked out over the view. Plonking her stilettoes on the low table, she took a sip of the viscous clear liquid, fished out the olive and popped it in her mouth. ‘Divine. OK, spill.’