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You look green around the gills. Too raw for you? I guess you’re the fastidious type.’ Then she was snarling again. ‘Well, buster, you’d better grow out of that if you want to make it in Hollywood. You’re living in the gutter now, big guy. They may wear designer gear and have perfect teeth but they’re predators, every one of them. Of course, I didn’t know that when I was twelve years old. But my mother did and she let me walk into Buck’s office alone.’
    ‘But afterwards … when you told her …’ He caught the sardonic look she gave him. ‘You did tell her, didn’t you?’
    Clea had thrown back her head and laughed again. ‘She knew, dummy. She knew exactly what he was doing to me in there that day – but she was desperate for me to get that part. So she shut her eyes and went deaf while that old bastard screwed me. I started working on the film a month later – and what do you know? Six months later I was a star.’
    When Sebastian looked at her in horror and pity she had changed again, spun into one of her tantrums, which he was soon to recognise and even to predict. She shrieked, ‘Don’t you dare look at me as if I was something you’d found in the trash! I should never have told you, should I? Now you think I’m shop-soiled, huh? The engagement’s off, is it? No white wedding for me.’
    ‘Clea, my God, you don’t imagine I think it was your fault?’ he had stammered stupidly.
    ‘You don’t?’ She mimed amazement, meek gratitude, and even as he hated it, he admired the skill of the born actress. ‘Gee, are you sure? And all these years I’ve been thinking I was the one to blame. I thought I raped him, poor old Buck. I sat there in my frilly pink dress and white shoes, and forced that poor, weak old man to do those sick things to me.’
    He had known how badly he was handling it, fumbling uselessly for the right words. ‘Clea, God, what can I say? I’m sorry, so sorry it happened to you.’
    Her lovely face was ugly with rage. ‘Fuck you, mister. I wasn’t asking you to be sorry for me, I was just telling you what my life has been like. It started the way it was meant to go on. Men have screwed me, one way or another, from that day on. But I’ve survived. I’ve damned well survived. Buck Ronay’s been buried twenty years. He died in the back of his Rolls-Royce, having a quickie with a Beverly Hills teenage hooker.’
    He had heard that story – everyone told it, laughing, loving the idea of the father figure of the film industry dying that way. He had thought it funny too. Not now, though. Now he just felt sick.
    ‘Poetic justice, huh?’ Clea said, laughing harshly. ‘They cremated him in Beverly Hills. Pity they waited till he was dead. I didn’t go to his funeral. I wasn’t enough of a hypocrite. Everyone else went – there were huge crowds. Well, his two sons still have a lot of power. Afterwards they sprinkled his ashes over the Malibu coastline, from a plane. I watched them from my bungalow and laughed. I was still alive and a star, with more money than even I could spend, so to hell with Buck, in every sense of the goddamned word! If there’s one man in hell it’s bound to be Buck Ronay.’
    He had been breathless with admiration of her courage. He had taken her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re wonderful. I love you and I’d be deeply honoured if you’d marry me. What we just did wasn’t having sex, Clea, I was making love to you because I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.’
    Maybe she had meant to marry him all along. Had merely been showing him what he was really getting – not the icon of Hollywood, the great star, the goddess with the perfect body, but a woman who had been maimed yet was a survivor, with scars to prove it. She had told him the truth about herself, then waited to see if he would back off. Clea liked to set little tests for men, watch them jump through hoops for her. She manipulated everyone she met, but especially