was true. With her Swedish blonde hair, endless legs and full, sensual mouth, Mimi Andreas had been the prettiest girl at every school she’d ever been to. She could easily have married or modelled her way out of Motor City. But Mimi was a romantic. One smile from Georgious Andreas, Dita’s charming car mechanic father, and it was all over.
‘Why would I want to marry a rock star, baby? Your dad’s worth a hundred Mick Jaggers to me. Besides, where you live is just geography. And you can’t measure happiness in dollars and cents. You’ll learn that as you get older, Dita.’
Dita hadn’t learned it. In fact she’d learned the opposite. Geography was important. Who wanted to waste their life in Detroit, a dying city full of factories and despair, whose very name sounded like a grind, when they could choose to live in Malibu or Bel Air or Beverly Hills? And why would anyone choose to love a poor man, when there were so many rich men out there to love? Too many, Dita sometimes thought. At fifteen Dita signed her first modelling contract, courtesy of a married, forty-two-year-old agency boss named Nick Capri. Nick Capri was obsessed with the young and (he thought) innocent Dita, moving her into an apartment downtown and eventually leaving his wife for her on Dita’s eighteenth birthday. By then Dita was already earning a seven-figure salary as the face of Lancôme’s teen make-up line. A few months later, Nick was showing her off to one of his Hollywood friends at a party, a producer named Mike Reynolds, and boasting about how incredible his teenage girlfriend was in bed. Dita celebrated her nineteenth birthday in Los Angeles, in Mike Reynolds’ bed. She got her first leading role in a movie the next morning and never looked back.
But as far as Dita Andreas had run from her past, there were pieces of it that she still carried with her. She would never forget what it felt like to be poor and anonymous. Unlike most of the leading box office actresses of her generation, Dita had no interest in making the occasional art-house movie, still less in taking a prestigious but low-paid role on Broadway. Not only did she never lower her fees on a movie, no matter how awesome the director, but she always clawed herself a piece of the action on merchandising as well, milking the studios she worked for every last possible cent. If Dita Andreas showed up at a party, or a club opening, the chances were she’d been paid to be there. Her avarice and business acumen were matched only by her extortionate spending. The girl who’d gone to grade school parties in Target jeans and K-Mart sneakers now dropped more on designer clothes in a week than her parents spent on food and rent in a year. Dita’s closet was full of Marc Jacobs originals and exquisite vintage Chanel pieces, still with their price tags attached. She spent not for the pleasure of owning things but for the thrill of buying them. With every purchase her craving intensified, like a junkie coming down after a hit.
As much as she spent on herself, Dita Andreas was notoriously mean when it came to spending on others: her staff, her friends, even her family. In the case of her latest divorce, however, she’d thrown caution to the wind. Brett could take whatever he wanted, just as long as he disappeared. All Dita cared about was being with Theo.
Theo Dexter was unlike any of Dita’s previous lovers. For one thing, he was a genius. Dita had always been more of a six-pack-abs and eight-figure-bank-balance girl than an IQ-whore, but Theo had it all: fame, looks, money and brains. I’m maturing, Dita thought with a smile. I’ve outgrown Brett and his shallow aspirations. Brett Graham wants to change Hollywood. Theodore Dexter wants to change the universe.
But it wasn’t only Theo’s intelligence that attracted her. It was his arrogance. In Theo Dexter, Dita Andreas had found something she had come to believe did not exist in nature: a human being more ambitious, more self-obsessed than she was. Dita was used to holding all the cards in her relationships and having the men in her life do all the running. Being with Theo made her realize how bored she’d become of being the goddess. For the first time in her life, she’d found a man who wasn’t prepared to jump when she said jump. Yes, Theo adored her, yes, he worshipped her. But when Dita asked him to come on vacation with her he’d point blank refused.
‘I’m a married man, Dita. I can’t just take off to Bermuda with you. What if we were photographed together?’
‘What if we were?’ Dita pouted. ‘Do you care about your miserable fat wife’s feelings more than mine? I need you.’
‘Too bad,’ Theo said brutally.
It was wonderful!
Dita quickly learned that it wasn’t spousal devotion that kept him true to tiresome Theresa. It was a pathological concern for his image, and what a scandalous affair and divorce might do to Dexter’s Universe’s ratings.
‘For heaven’s sake, darling,’ Dita complained. ‘Do you think you’re the first TV star to dump his wife? No one cares.’
‘Not in LA, they don’t. Perhaps not in America. But DU airs all over the world. It’s huge in Muslim countries. I’m not prepared to risk that, not when I don’t have to.’
Oh yeah? Well, now you do have to. I’m divorcing Brett and I’m going to tell the world I’m in love with you. Screw your precious image.
As much as Dita delighted in Theo’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude, and apparent nonchalance about their affair, she was not prepared to put up and shut up. She was tired of being his mistress. She wanted to be his wife. And what Dita Andreas wanted, Dita Andreas always got in the end.
Turning right off Sunset Boulevard through Bel Air’s ornate West Gate, Dita sped up Bellagio towards the Dexters’ mansion. Her plan was simple. She would walk into Theo’s office, rip his clothes off, fuck him like the superstar that she was until he was screaming for more, then tell him that she was leaving Brett and going public about their affair, whether he liked it or not. Together they would be a power couple unrivalled on the world stage.
I wonder if he’ll put up a fight? she thought, feeling a frisson of sexual excitement pulse between her legs. I do hope so.
Theresa looked at her face in the mirror and panicked.
‘But … it’s all blotchy! I look like a fourteen-year-old with hives!’
She’d booked herself in for a facial, the first of her life, in hopes of looking fresh-faced for Theo on the last night before his big trip. Instead she looked as if she’d been mugged.
The dermatologist at Allen Edwards looked as patronizing as she could through a face full of Fraxel. ‘It’s an oxygenating deep cleanse and peel, Mrs Dexter. You don’t see the results right away. Especially with older, neglected skin, there can be redness.’
Can be? There’s no ‘can be’ about it! My chin looks like a baboon’s backside.
‘It’ll calm down.’
‘When?’
‘Within a day or two. That’ll be two hundred and sixty dollars. Would you like to leave a gratuity?’
It was a ten-minute drive back to UCLA, where Theresa had a class to teach at two thirty. Home, and her minimal make-up supplies, were twenty minutes away. She looked at her watch: 1.15 p.m. Theo was supposed to meet her after class today. He had a list of things he needed her to do while he was away (‘Please try to remember, T. I really can’t keep doing everything’) and wanted to run through it with her, item by item. I can’t let him see me looking like this. She made a left at Barrington and headed up the hill towards Bel Air.
* * *
Theo lay on the floor of his home office, a vast, wood-panelled room that Theresa called the Beauty and the Beast library, because it looked like something out of a Disney cartoon, with his pants around his ankles. Above him, Dita Andreas’s magnificent breasts jiggled from side to side as she straddled him, arching her back and expertly moving herself up and down his cock. He was tempted to pinch himself. I’m fucking Dita Andreas. Dita Andreas! But he was too caught up in the moment to focus on anything but the wave of pleasure drowning him.
‘Tell me you love me!’ Dita commanded, clenching her muscles more tightly around his erection and reaching down to play with his