Tinseltown. Victoria Fox

      Chapter 1

      Only two words, but they bothered him. Or maybe it was the question mark.

      DOMINIC JUDD – HOT SHOT?

      He ran a hand through his thick dark hair and stood for a moment, baffled, before angrily tossing the magazine to the floor and taking care to step squarely on it with a foot still wet from the shower. The page stuck and he lost his balance, forced to hop, undignified, while he peeled the offending publication from a water-wrinkled sole.

      ‘Hot shot?’ What the bloody hell did that mean? It wasn’t like he’d done a gun movie or a coffee commercial or something worthy of the pun, and Dom Judd was Eton-educated, for heaven’s sake – he ought to be able to work it out. Then again, maybe there wasn’t anything to work out. Maybe it was just a full-of-herself writer struggling for a headline, who thought if she whacked a question mark on the end it might encourage readers to think it wasn’t her missing the point, it was them. And it had to be a girl: if a lady wasn’t interested in fucking him, Dom had to assume she was against him.

      At twenty-six, Dom Judd was experiencing the first flush of long-sought-after celebrity. This time last year, he’d been languishing on the set of a UK soap opera, the posh villain come to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting community of russet-cheeked farmers and barmaids in leopard-print. He’d been there too long and was approaching the hollow realisation that a life in soap was all he was cut out for: that forty-mile-an-hour, middle-lane limbo, OK but not great, famous but not celebrated … no, Dom had other ambitions. He wanted it hard and he wanted it fast, and if he kept to the childish notion that he’d be dead by the age of twenty-seven – because all idols worth their accolade died that young – then he only had a year left to do it in. But he was starting to change his mind about that.

      Just as well, then, that he’d been auditioned – ‘on the off chance’, according to his agent – for what was going to become, over the next eight months, the biggest American sitcom since Friends. Dom was playing the English eccentric, the quirky one, who – in spite of his warm, dark eyes, mop of black hair and square jaw shaded with three-day stubble – was never considered a love interest because he was too, well, kooky (he hated that word). It was the posh accent, didn’t you know, it made everything sound ten times funnier. Things weren’t quite so platonic with his adoring public: since moving to LA, women flocked to Dom like bees to honey. He was young, rich and ubiquitous – it was all you needed.

      Dom dressed swiftly, slumping on to the bed and sighing loudly in a gutless attempt to rouse the girl still sleeping there. He couldn’t remember her name. Julie? Julia? Didn’t matter. But she was pretty even in daylight, so he congratulated himself on a choice well made. Miraculous, given the amount he’d put away the night before.

      ‘Do you want a shower or anything?’ he asked when she opened her eyes. ‘I’ve got to get moving. My brother’ll be here in a sec.’

      She reached for his bare chest, the colour of a strong cup of tea. ‘You got a brother?’

      Hmm. He and Freddy were close, but they weren’t that close.

      ‘I’m serious.’ He chucked her the previous night’s lacy panties, formerly strewn across a stupid claw-footed armchair he’d purchased during a brief spell of imagining himself to be Jeremy Irons and which he now realised was ridiculous. ‘Move.’

      The girl sat up with a pout, allowing her generous tits to come into frame. Dom gave one of them a quick, perfunctory squeeze, like someone testing the ripeness of a piece of fruit, and which managed, offensively, to signal both hello and goodbye. She muttered something under her breath and made a grand show of leaving, saying she felt sick and needed water or a lie-down or an aspirin – or, no doubt, a sense-restoring fuck – and it wasn’t till half an hour later that he managed to bundle her out the door of his apartment.

      Was he living the dream? Course he was. Dom Judd was the name on everyone’s lips: he was at every party, every opening, every fundraiser, every premiere … The press recorded his every move, fascinated by his brooding good looks and impeccable accent. Admittedly, some were kinder than others. He picked up the discarded magazine, the ‘Hot Shot?’ grey and wrinkly now from having got damp, and stuffed it in the bin. He thought he might speak to his representative about taking legal action. He had no clue what that actually entailed, but it made him feel like he was firing from both balls and that was what mattered.

      With California sun streaming in through the blinds, it was hard to believe December was only a week away. Dom grimaced, supposing he ought to return to London for Christmas, but the thought of his melancholic mother, who prefaced everything with a wheedling, ‘You’ll join me in a small one, won’t you?’ and which invariably led to her having to be scraped off the sofa hours later after several dozen ‘small ones’, and his ex-army father, who said little but whose sideways glances gave the impression that Dom’s career was a bad smell passing under his nose, was depressing. Christmas was always depressing.

      Despite the warmth, Dom shuddered. Whatever Christmas at home might have in store, it surely couldn’t be worse than the joke awaiting him here.

      That blasted Celebrity Parade! Why had he agreed to do it?

      On cue, there was a knock at the door – a rat-a-tat, followed by a brief pause, then a final a-tat. It was the same code they’d used since