Behind the Scenes Read online

  BEHIND

  THE SCENES

  A Project Artemis Novel

  K.M. SCOTT

  ANINA COLLINS

  Behind The Scenes

  Alexis Marchand is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, loved by millions of fans around the globe. Her meteoric rise to fame has come with its fair share of heartache, but she’s remained strong, thanks to those closest to her and their unfailing support. Life as a movie star is good.

  Until one day a simple letter arrives and turns her world upside down. Now she lives in terror, afraid of that one fan who has taken it too far.

  Hunter McKary knows something of movie stars because of his time as a LAPD detective. He thought he left those days behind him, but when he’s sent to find out who’s stalking the beautiful blond actress the world adores, he grudgingly goes to New York, expecting to find a typical spoiled diva like those he met so many times before back in LA.

  The woman he finds isn’t anything like he expected, and a job he dreaded becomes something else entirely. But someone out there has different plans for Alexis.

  Behind The Scenes is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  2018 Copper Key Media, LLC

  Kobo Edition

  Copyright © 2018 Copper Key Media, LLC

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Published in the United States

  ISBN: 978-1-941594-87-2

  Book Cover design by Patricia Maia at Maya Teasers and Design

  Click on the covers below to learn more about the series:

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Book

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Authors

  Books by K.M. Scott

  Books by Gabrielle Bisset

  Books by Anina Collins

  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 from one 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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  And now Carla had gotten her fingerprints all over the top of the box, making Alexis furious.

  Swiveling her head, she looked for something pointy to throw but found nothing but packing boxes and bubble wrap. At this rate, she’d need a full roll of that stuff just to calm her nerves by the time this day was over.

  “I swear if that music box isn’t cleaned off of all your fingerprints by the time it’s carefully placed into the box, I’m going to have someone’s head!”

  Carla nodded and gave Alexis her best apologetic eyes. “I’m sorry. I won’t let it happen again. I know how much this means to you, Alexis. I took care of the vase that man brought me too. I swear I don’t know where Paul found these guys.”

  Knowing her assistant well enough, she recognized her sucking up for what it was, along with her attempt to divert her attention to the unknown moving men so her anger would be directed at them instead of Carla. Everyone thought Alexis wasn’t clever enough to figure out when they were playing her, but she knew.

  Even if she didn’t bother to show it.

  “Just take care of the music box and get those smudgy fingerprints off it,” she said as she walked away toward her bedroom to see how the packing had progressed so far in that room. “And get me a drink!”

  The fact that it was barely afternoon was beside the point. Some days, it didn’t matter what time it was.

  It was five o’clock somewhere anyway.

  Two steps into her bedroom, Alexis saw the woman packing up her clothes bunch a dress into a ball of fabric—very expensive fabric—and nearly lost her mind right there. Running up to her, she tore the dress from her hold.

  “Treat these dresses with care. They’re worth more than your life!”

  The woman stammered out an apology, but it fell on deaf ears. Alexis carefully laid the dress out on the bed and pointed at it. “Do you see that? This isn’t goddamned Wal-Mart. We do not ball up clothes here. Use a hanger for every one of my dresses and put them in garment bags, for God’s sake!”

  Frustrated, she stormed out and marched downstairs to her office to find some solitude. Maybe if she could get her head in the right space, she could handle this day.

  Lauren, her closest friend since childhood and the assistant she depended on more than any other, sat at her desk packing up scripts. Just seeing them being stuffed into boxes made leaving so much more real than she could face at that moment.

  She collapsed onto the white chaise lounge she’d just picked out for her favorite room in the house and sighed. “Be careful with those. I may never get another one. I’m going to want something to remember this life.”

  “Oh, Alexis, don’t say that,” Lauren said with sadness in her voice. “Your fans love you. It won’t matter where you live. You’re one of the hottest actresses in this town. You could live on Mars and it wouldn’t matter.”

  Throwing her arm over her eyes, Alexis wished Lauren could be right. She knew better, though. Out of sight meant out of mind. In the movie business, if you weren’t seen around town, you were viewed as a missing person.

  And very few actors could withstand being tagged as that. Unless you were one of those famous stars who appeared in a film every few years and had the luck of being seen as one of the greats, being out of the circuit of parties and events in Hollywood meant people forgot about you.

  “In this town. Those are the operative words, aren’t they?” she mumbled, turning toward the wall.

  As always, Lauren tried to cheer her up with supportive words that Alexis believed she really meant. Of all the people who surrounded her, she had never let her down. Lauren could be depended on when everyone else abandoned her. At least she had that to look forward to.

  Kneeling beside the chaise lounge, she touched Alexis on the shoulder. “Please don’t worry, Alexis. Everything will work out. I know it. Do you believe me?”

  She wanted to. She just couldn’t.

  Alexis rolled over and looked at her dearest friend in the world. In her blue eyes, she saw the sympathy she knew Lauren truly felt for her and what she was going through. Of all the people she’d met in the business, none could replace the friend she’d met in grade school back in Minnesota.

  Looking around the all-white room she’d had redecorated when she moved in, she sighed. “I’m going to miss this house so much. The new place is going to be like a shoebox, and don’t even get me started on how much I’m going to miss being able to look outside and see trees. Whatever anyone else thinks, this was paradise for me. Now, it’s all being taken away.”

  Lauren smiled and squeezed her hand in support. “It’s nearly three thousand square feet and a penthouse overlooking the city. Plus, I have to believe New York City has trees. It must. I’ve seen pictures and there were trees in them.”

  “Not like here,” Alexis sulked.

  “Maybe not, but once you choose some new furnishings and get the place exactly the way you like it, I think you’re going to love it as much as you love this house.”

  “It won’t be the same. I hate the city. It’s grey. That’s all I think of when I think of New York. Grey.”

  “Los Angeles is a city, you know,” she said with a smile.

  “Not like New York.”

  “Then you can get a place in the mountains that reminds you of Minnesota in the summer,” Lauren suggested.

  Nothing she said helped. Alexis jumped up and stormed across the room. “Why do I have to move at all? I love my home! I belong here.”

  Her assistant followed her and stopped in front of her as she began to pace. “We need to do whatever we can to keep you safe. Paul thinks this is best. Just give it a chance. Your safety is the only concern, Alexis.”

  Just because her manager thought moving from the place she loved to somewhere she had no interest in even flying over didn’t mean she should do that. He didn’t necessarily know best.

  But Alexis knew if she didn’t do as he suggested and if something happened to her, she’d never hear the end of it from him. “He better be right.”

  Lauren’s blue eyes filled with concern. “The police think that you moving might be a good idea too.”

  The police? Talk about people who didn’t give a damn.

  Yanking her hands away, Alexis marched over to sit behind her nearly empty desk. “What the hell do the police know? It’s been months since I started getting these damn letters from that maniac, and all they can say is it’s an obsessed fan and to increase my security. I’ve hired twice as many bodyguards and still those damn letters keep coming!”

  Ever the optimist, Lauren said, “But there hasn’t been an attack, which is more important than anything else.”

  “How could there be? I rarely go out anymore because of him.”

  “Or her,” her assistant said, correcting Alexis. “The police aren’t sure of the sex of the person doing this.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw on the end of the desk the picture of her and Jackson in the gold frame. They’d looked so happy then. The two of them had just spent all day on the beach in Mexico on the first day of their honeymoon, and they’d asked the bartender at the hotel to take their picture.
/>   Alexis sighed as she remembered that day. Jackson had been her knight in shining armor from the moment she met him. The director on her first picture, she fell in love with his talent before she fell in love with him as a man, but it didn’t matter. From the very moment they set eyes on each other, it felt like fate took over. It was only a matter of time before they were a couple, and less than a year later, they were married and frolicking on the beach like they didn’t have a care in the world. His career was taking off, and Alexis became Hollywood’s It Girl everyone wanted in their film.

  But as with every time she saw that picture, her mind traveled to another day. The day she found out he was cheating on her with another actress who was barely twenty years old. Twenty-four at the time, Alexis had married him three years earlier and foolishly believed she’d found the man she’d spend forever with.

  Closing her eyes, she remembered that reporter asking her if she knew her husband was with another woman as she began to walk the red carpet for the Golden Globes. All night she had to pretend to be happy as her world crumbled around her.

  And for what?

  Because her thirty-five year old husband was too much of a coward to tell her the truth before some goddamned reporter got to her. Nothing like finding out in front of the entire world that your husband’s on-location shoot for his latest movie wasn’t the only thing he’d been enjoying in New Zealand.

  Disgusted by the memory, she rolled her eyes. “No, it’s a man. I’m sure of that. No woman in the history of the world has ever been such a coward. Only a man would do this kind of thing to someone.”

  Three of her security detail walked past the office, and then she heard a box crash to the floor. Furious, she barked, “Does no one know how to be careful with anything in this house?”

  As she marched out to see how much damage they’d done, she snapped at Lauren, “Don’t bother with that picture of Jackson and me. It’s not coming with us to the new place.”