Never Land by Kailin Gow Page A

Ta!”
                As she glided serenely out the door, I had to sit down to avoid fainting from sheer shock. What kind of crazy woman would believe that she could actually convince me to stop seeing Danny? The same woman who would turn up in a negligee at her stepson's apartment and beg him to take her back. I swallowed, hard. Roni wasn't just some calculating gold-digger – she was genuinely, earnestly in love with Danny. Obsessed even. And that made her not just threatening, but genuinely dangerous.
                I shuddered. Life with Danny was getting more complicated by the second.
     
    Chapter 12
     
                For at least ten minutes after Roni left the room, I stood still – unable to move. Shock had flooded through me. I was exhausted – worn out. What had just happened? My face still burned, my cheek stinging from where Veronica's hand had collided with my face. The sound of the slap still rang in my ears. I vaguely heard my cell phone ring, but it seemed like the sound was coming to me underwater – the ringtone a million miles away. I couldn't focus on the ringing of the phone; I couldn't focus on the frequent beeps on the intercom, telling me someone was trying to reach me. I couldn't focus on anything at all except for the enormity of what had just happened. I'd known that Danny's life was a strange one, that life as Clarence Blue's son would make anyone a little eccentric. But now it seemed that Danny's secrets were so much greater than anything I had ever known. I'd always thought my own life must seem bizarre to outsiders – our money, our fame, the way, at the height of my dad's fame, we snuck out through the back door with balaclavas over our faces to avoid the paparazzi whenever we went shopping – but at its core our family life had always been a traditional one. My dad had been kind, if sometimes stern; my mother had always been loving. She'd of course maintained her natural flirtatious personality even after marriage – I knew that she was flattered by the attention that, for example, Kyle paid her, and that she knew full well the extent of my friends' childhood crushes on her – but the idea of her ever cheating on my father, let alone with one of my friends, was utterly alien to me.
                But this woman seemed to be bound by no laws – either of society or of morality. In her eyes I had seen a conviction in her love, in her future with Danny, that bordered on the utterly unhinged. I put my fingers to the place that Veronica had slapped, wincing as I felt the bruised flesh, slightly swollen. Did people even slap one another, anymore? I'd only ever seen such a catty action in the old Hollywood films my dad and I used to watch on AMC when neither of us could sleep – black and white films with women with bleached-blonde hair and dark lipstick who traded barbed witticisms and fell victim to melodrama. But it seemed that Roni, with her natural air for the overly dramatic, believed that people actually did those things in real life. I grimaced, recalling some tabloid gossip from a few months ago about how Roni Taylor had planned to make a transition from modeling to film. Guess she's practicing for the part , I thought, trying to cheer myself up. But ridiculous or not, the slap had hurt, and my whole face burned from where her long red fingernails had left tiny marks.
                Still dazed, I walked across the room to the lavatory, soaking a washcloth with warm water and holding it to my face. A champagne bucket filled with ice still waited for me outside the room; I took some ice and wrapped it in the washcloth, wiping my face, wiping away the small traces of blood she'd left with her nails. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was an absolute wreck. My mascara had run down my cheeks from the crying; my eyes were red. I was sweaty, bruised, smeared – utterly beaten down. Was this the face that gorgeous, merciless Roni had seen