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“Goals,” she grumbled, and climbed out of bed to rummage through the drawers of the central-island dresser in her embarrassingly large walk-in closet full of fabulous clothes and designer shoes.
She didn’t have to rummage long. Her notebook was right where she’d put it a year ago today, in the back of a lingerie drawer beneath a blue silk La Perla corset she’d yet to wear. The pink spiral-bound notebook had glittery butterflies on the front. Stuck in the binding coil was a purple pen. The pen, which produced glittery metallic ink, was relatively new.
The notebook? A little tattered around the edges, with a lot of the glitter worn off the butterflies. Her mom had presented it to her the day she turned six.
Today, as she had every birthday since then, she took the notebook and the pen and returned to the bed. Sitting cross-legged on top of the covers, she pulled the pen from the coil and opened the notebook to the next empty page. Her objective: formulate three main goals to accomplish during her twenty-seventh year.
Frankly, she had zip on the goals front this year and she fully expected to squander a large amount of time staring at a blank page and trying not to think how uninspired she felt about life and work and just about everything else lately.
But then the weirdest thing happened.
Her pen seemed drawn to the page of its own accord and her three goals materialized as if by magic:
Lose virginity.
Retire from acting.
Get a life.
Whoa. Who knew? Apparently, this was a banner year. Up until this moment, she’d had no clue.
As she sat frowning at her totally unexpected annual objectives, she heard a faint sound downstairs.
Was the doorbell ringing?
Not that it mattered. Now and then an especially enthusiastic fan got past the front gate and made it to the door. Someone would answer, give the fan something with Madison’s autograph on it and call security to escort the trespasser back outside the gate.
Madison recommenced staring at her new, glittery goals and wondering why she wasn’t more upset at the very thought of turning her back on her mega-successful career. After all, it was a career she’d pursued with single-minded purpose since her first set of goals written down slowly and laboriously with her mom’s help in this very notebook on the day she turned six.
As for getting a life and dispensing with her V-card? Both of those made perfect sense. She would be thirty in no time at all. She needed a life and a sex life. She needed them yesterday, maybe sooner.
At the sound of a gentle tap on the outer door to the upstairs hallway, Madison glanced up. “Come on in!”
Ada, in a calf-length linen dress, her graying brown hair piled in a messy bun, bustled in through the sitting area. She marched to the bedside table and picked up the coffee tray. “You need to eat.”
“I will.” Madison chewed thoughtfully on her purple pen. “Soon. Did the doorbell ring?”
“Yes. Jonas Bravo is here.” Ada wore a bemused sort of frown.
Madison frowned, too. “Did you say Jonas Bravo?”
“That’s right.”
Madison had never met the man. But she did know of him. Everyone knew about Jonas Bravo. His family was Los Angeles royalty. He had billions—the paps even called him the Bravo Billionaire. And he was her neighbor, more or less. He lived with his beautiful wife and their children in an even bigger house than Madison’s, also in Bel Air, a world-famous house called Angel’s Crest. Jonas Bravo was not in the movie business, but he and his billions were involved in just about every other industry in LA. And he sometimes invested in films.
“Sorry.” Ada shrugged. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ve been reading the stories about him since I was old enough to get a copy of the National Enquirer and I was so surprised to see him on the security monitor when he buzzed the front gate that I told Sergei to let him in.” Sergei was on Madison’s security team. “Then, when he rang the doorbell, I just stepped back and ushered him inside. He asked to speak to with you, so I put him in the sitting room. I really do apologize, Mad. It was not my call. But I mean, he is the Jonas Bravo.”
“No. It’s okay, really.”
“He looks just like his pictures.”
