Not Wanted in Hollywood by Leonie Gant Page B

connect with him but she
didn’t care about him. Maybe I’m being a bit cynical but there is
something going on here and I don’t want to be caught out when it
all starts falling apart.”
    Monique looked at me thoughtfully. “So things
are better with you and your young man?” she queried.
    “ We haven’t
quite worked things out,” I said. “The situation with the mom kind
of takes precedence over everything else.”
    Monique smile. “It usually does.” Suddenly
she was all business again. “How is the situation with Alistair
going?”
    I grimaced.
“Same as usual I guess. He’s managing to alienate everybody around
him. Honestly if I had to place money on somebody being killed on
this job, it would have been him. I do know that he is taking
advantage of at least one of the girls.”
    “Advantage, how?” Monique asked.
    “The same advantage those kinds of men always
take. He’s holding the possibility of a dream just out of sight
until he gets what he wants and then he tosses her aside when he
has no need for her anymore.”
    Monique frowned. When she came to Hollywood
she had been a stunningly beautiful, innocent young girl and she
knew well how someone that naive could be chewed up and spat out by
the system.
    “ Keep an eye
on him,” she said. “If someone is out there killing lousy human
beings he probably features at the top of the list.” She suddenly
changed subject. “The bar owner’s death, is there any reason to
believe that you could be in any danger?”
    I scoffed at
the thought. There was a world of difference between Hammy and me.
“The only way that I am in any danger is if I walk in on someone
else being murdered,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve annoyed anyone
enough to get caught in the firing line.”

Chapter Twelve
    You know there are times when you make sweeping
statements and the universe decides that you really need to be
shown that you are, in no way, in charge of your fate. I really
should have known better than to assure Monique that I was
perfectly safe working at a strip club where somebody had already
been murdered, especially with my special talent of walking into
the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. That thought fleetingly went through my mind when only an
hour later I walked into the club to find Denise being held up by a
masked gunman. As I walked into the room I was so stunned that I
didn’t notice the gun being raised. I did however notice the pain
as the side of the gun connected with my face. The only thing I saw
was the shock in the gunman’s eyes. I felt pain ballooning across
my cheek and then all I saw as blackness.
    I heard my name being called and I willed my
eyelids to open, blinking against the harsh light.
    “Take it easy, you took quite a knock to the
head.”
    I blinked again and groaned. “Why are you the
one I always see when I’ve been knocked out?”
    Dominic gave me that confident grin of his.
“Most women are quite happy to wake up and find me watching over
them.”
    I’m sure they did. Dominic was that
intriguing mix of rich, powerful, handsome and dangerous. Some
women flocked to it. I bolted in the opposite direction. My mother
raised me with a very healthy sense of self preservation.
    “ I’m not
most women ,” I said as I tried to push
myself up.”
    “ That’s what
I find so fascinating about you,” Dominic said.
    Just what I needed. I sat up and waited for
the room to stop spinning.
    “What happened?” I lifted my hand to my head
to find the massive lump that I was sure had to be there.
    “ From what we
can tell, it looks like you walked in on a robbery,” said
Dominic.
    “What could they possibly be trying to
steal?” I asked. “It’s a strip club, not a bank. Unless you’re
looking for a lifetime supply of glitter there isn’t much of a
marketable commodity here.”
    Dominic shrugged. “I have my people looking
into it. Don’t worry, considering all the cameras in this building
I am sure that the