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didn’t try to hide it.
Too many women, too little time
—he’d said as much in his first interview with
Entertainment Weekly.
Consummate actor that he was, he came across as charming. The reporter—a woman, natch—portrayed him as boyishly honest about his inability to resist temptation, rather than selfish and spoiled.
    To be sure, his being spoiled was partly Jane’s fault. As his older sister, she’d bent over backward to try to make life as easy as possible for him. Well, at least she had after she’d ended that phase where her every waking moment was devoted to tormenting her wimpy little freak of a half brother.
    It had been difficult growing up with their parents. Between her and Robin, they’d had three households—Jane and her mom’s, Robin and his mom’s, and their father’s, where they spent every other weekend with him and his wife du jour.
    Which meant that most of those weekends it was just Jane and Robin and their father’s housekeeper, who rarely spoke English and was replaced with an even greater frequency than the stepmom of the moment.
    It was during one of those weekends that Jane first discovered that Robin’s entire life reeked of neglect. His mother was referred to by her own mother as “that drunken bitch,” so she probably shouldn’t have been too surprised.
    Somewhere down the line, just a few years before Robin’s mother died and he moved in full-time with their father, Jane stopped being his chief tormentor and became his champion. His protector. His ally.
    “What’s not to understand?” he asked her now. “HeartBeat wants to hire a couple of bodyguards for you. Use it. Spin it into something that’ll get us two, maybe three stories in the trades. If you do it right, maybe AP’ll pick it up.”
    “I don’t want a bodyguard following me around day and night.” Jane’s public persona, “Party Girl Producer Mercedes Chadwick,” was as much a fictional character as any she’d ever created for one of her screenplays—the real-life gang in
American Hero
not included.
    For the first time in her career—a crazy, seven-year ride that had started with a freak hit when she was still in film school—Jane was making a movie based on fact.
    And was getting death threats because of it.
    “I don’t want to have to be the ‘Party Girl Producer’ here in my own home,” she told her brother. Her feet hurt just from the idea of wearing J. Mercedes Chadwick’s dangerously high heels 24/7. Which she would have to do. Because her bodyguards would be watching her—that was the whole point of their being there, right?
    And no way would she risk one of them giving an interview after the threat was over and done, saying, “Jane Chadwick? Yeah, the Mercedes thing is just BS. No one really calls her that. She’s actually very normal. Plain Jane, you know? Nothing special to look at without the trashy clothes and makeup. She works eighteen-hour days—which is deadly dull and boring, if you want to know the truth. And all those guys she allegedly dates? It’s all for show. The Party Girl Producer hasn’t had a private party in her bedroom for close to two years.”
    If HeartBeat Studios hired bodyguards, she’d have to lock herself in her suite of rooms every night.
    Patty knocked on the door, opening it a crack to peek in. “I’m sorry,” she reported. She started most of her conversations with an apology. It was a habit Jane intended to break her of long before
American Hero
was in the can. “They’ve set up a meeting here for four o’clock with the security firm they’ve hired—Troubleshooters Incorporated.”
    Jane closed her eyes at Patty’s verb tense. Hired. “No,” she said. “Tell them no. Leave off the thank-you this time and—”
    “I’m sorry”—Patty looked as if she were going to cry—“but the studio apparently called the FBI—”
    “What?”
    “—and the authorities are taking the threat seriously. They’re involved now.”
    “The FBI?”