Page 41 of Duke
“Valentine Roth.”
I gaped. “You know Valentine Roth? He’s, like, one of the most mysterious people in the world. He lives this wild, mysterious, Phantom of the Opera sort of life. Everyone I know was always going to Manhattan hoping to be seen with him. He’s a seriously big deal.” I grabbed Duke’s arm. “What’s he like?”
Duke shrugged. “He’s a good dude. Rich as all fuck, but cool. Not stuck up. Just…he’s cool. I don’t know him very well personally, but my boss, Harris, he worked for Roth for years and Harris’s girlfriend is best friends with Valentine’s wife. We get invited out to the Roth’s private island down in the Caribbean for Christmas parties every year. Those parties, man…they’re nuts.”
Temple made a disgusted noise. “I can’t believe you know Valentine freaking Roth. Until he up and left Manhattan with that girl he obviously ended up marrying, he was the most eligible bachelor like, anywhere. I know some girls who managed to score a hook-up with him a long time ago, but they said he was…difficult. Not very nice, but hot and rough andamazingin bed.”
Duke shook his head at me. “Well I don’t know about any of that shit, but I can see it being true. Miss Roth…Kyrie, she sort of turned him around. Gave him something in life worth being nice about.” He laughed. “Aside from billions of dollars, I guess.”
I tipped my head to one side. “Well, I can say from experience that money really doesn’t always make people nice, or happy. I mean, having money is awesome, and I don’t mind admitting my worst fear—until all this happened, at least—is being poor. But money doesn’t make you happy. If that was true, I should be happier than I am.”
Duke’s gaze shot to mine, and I regretted that last admission. “You’re not happy?”
“That’s not necessarily what I meant.”
“Sounded like the truth, especially now that you’re trying to walk it back.”
I slid down in the seat, put my feet up on the dash, and stretched my skirt over my knees. “I’m not trying to walk it back, I’m just—” I groaned in irritation, and started over. “Look, I’m stupidly lucky, and I know it. I’m spoiled rotten. I’ve never had to do a day’s work in my life, and I could have gone on that way forever. I didn’t want to, though, I wanted something of my own. I’m not an actress like Mom, or a musician like Dad, so I had to use what I have, which was instant recognition. Everyone knows the Kennedys. Mom and Dad have been married for twenty years and together for twenty-five, which is absolutely unheard of for people in their stratosphere. We’re just…well, we’re the Kennedys. And as their oldest and their only daughter, I’ve always been…sort of…just famous for being me, I guess. So I capitalized on that. I pitched the idea of a show to my agent, and he went bananas, because it meant a shitload of money for him, of course. So, I made my own fortune on the show. Then I started a bunch of product lines, clothes, makeup, perfume, branded accessories, jewelry, girly things like that.
“I’m not famous for nothing, though, and it bugs the shit out of me when people say that. I work my ass off. I design all the products myself, and I find distributors and do commercials. I’m a multi-million dollar company all by myself, and it’s a full-time job running it all, which is something I do myself. That’s not to mention the need for a constant social media presence, the sponsored posts and whatever? It’s a lot. It takes a shitload of work maintaining a constant level of presence in our society, which, can I just say, is crazy hard because as a society we’re pretty much Captain Distracto. We’re always looking for the next new thing, the next new fad, the next new Instagram or YouTube celebrity, so remaining relevant is damn hard.”
Duke glanced at me, looking amused. “You’re avoiding my question, Fancy. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
I huffed. “I am not. I’m setting it up.” I glared at him. “Plus, you distracted me.”
“You mentioned some asshat named Lane?”
I lean my head back against the seat and sighed. “Yeah. When I was nineteen, I met an asshat named Lane. Only, I was young and naive and thinking with my hoo-ha, so I didn’t realize he was an asshat. He was hot, and he came from money. I thought that was a good thing, because I’d hoped it would mean he wouldn’t be interested in me for my parents’ money seeing as his were worth billions to my parents’ hundred and twenty mil or whatever it is.”
I thought back, warily letting my mind delve into the memories, and even more warily letting my frozen, walled-up heart feel some of the old pain. “He was hot, he was filthy rich, he was just…cool. He had a business degree from Stanford, and he was on track to inherit not just his father’s fortune, but also the reins of the company. He wasn’t just some lazy playboy, he was making tracks as a businessman in his own right, and he was only twenty…twenty-one, I think? Maybe twenty-two. It seemed like love. He wasn’t my first, but he was my first real boyfriend. I’d had enough friends lose their V-cards before me to know the first time wouldn’t be amazing, so I gave mine the year before, to a sexy asshole nobody at a party when I was half-drunk. It was…okay. A little ouchy, at first, but the asshole—James, I think his name was—he knew what he was doing. I don’t think I was his first virgin which, looking back, makes him even more of a dick, but whatever. It worked for me. Lost my virginity to some jackass I’d never see again and didn’t really care about. I cried a little the next day, felt a little buyer’s remorse or whatever you want to call it, but I don’t regret it now.
“I could claim honestly I wasn’t a virgin, but I was inexperienced enough that Lane could teach me. He liked that, I think. That I wasn’t a virgin, that he didn’t have to worry about that, but that I was so inexperienced he could show me how he liked things.”
“He sounds like a real winner,” Duke put in.
I shook my head. “Oh, just wait. It gets better.” I let out another breath, and kept going. “So things were fairly normal for the first year. We dated, we had a lot of sex, whatever. He’d take me to his family’s estates in Italy and Greece, we’d go to A-list parties in Manhattan or LA, it was classic rich assholes of Instagram bullshit. Lavish parties on mega-yachts, rolling up the PCH in his drop-top Rolls Royce— which, by the way, had crushed-diamond white paint, like several million dollars worth of actual diamonds crushed and mixed into the paint job. We’d fly to Antigua in his G6 on a whim.”
“Seems like you guys had it made.”
I nodded. “Everyone thought we did. Hell,Ithought we did. The tabloids followed us everywhere, called us theit-couple of the decade. That was when I really started to get media and social media attention on my own right, and not just for being my parents’ oldest kid. It seemed like everything was gorgeous and perfect. I was in love, and he loved me. We talked about it, said it to each other, and he’d even dropped hints about a wedding.”
“Hmmm, I wonder what could have possibly gone wrong?” Duke deadpanned.
“If you’re assuming he cheated on me, that’d be a smart assumption, but wrong.” Now came the hard part. “The first sign I should have broken up with him was when a sex tape of us got leaked.”
Duke glanced at me. “The motherfucker leaked a sex tape?” He sounded…pissed. “And youstayedwith him?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t immediately obvious it was him that leaked it. We’d taken the video with my phone, so the initial assumption was that I’d been hacked. I was devastated, of course. I mean, that wasprivate, right? I was livid, and mortified. My parents’ press team did spin and damage control, and I mean, it’s not like I’m the first celeb to have a tape leaked, but it still messed me up. And Lane played the understanding, supportive boyfriend to a T, in private and to the press. And that was kind of the second thing that should have been a warning sign. You have to understand that Lane’s dad isn’t high profile. Most people haven’t even heard of him, honestly, even though he’s one of the richest people in the country. And Lane, he was even less high profile. He was a young businessman, working his ass off to take over his dad’s company the hard way, earning it rather than just inheriting it. But he wasn’t famous. Unless you were part of the elite business world, you wouldn’t have heard of Lane Behr.
“So when the tape got leaked, I went into hiding. Natural enough, right? I didn’t have the show yet, didn’t have the brand to worry about, so I just kind of went into seclusion. Stopped going out, declined party invitations, refused to go on vacations, wouldn’t even leave my room for the most part., stayed off social media. Lane sort of took over for my parents, in terms of dealing with the press on my behalf. He’d spin things into positive stories, talk about how I was rebuilding myself, and reassessing my future in light of the leak, bullshit like that. He was good at it. I appreciated it, my parents appreciated it—”
“And Lane appreciated it, because it was the spark that set his star to rising?” Duke ventured.
I nodded. “Exactly. The media realized Lane was magnetic and photogenic and charming, and that he was this up-and-coming young businessman from an elite family—everything the press loves to shove down our throats. He played it cool, though. Didn’t immediately start grabbing all the attention he could. No, Lane is way more devious than that, thinks more long-term than that. He set himself up as my spokesperson, sort of, coaxed me into posting selfies now and then with pithy captions that made it seem like everything was great.”
I paused for a moment, wishing I could skip this part. “He was the reason I decided to pitch the show. It was his idea. I had to use the attention caused by the tape to my benefit. Turn it into something good for myself. People loved the little hints they’d been getting of my life—me and Lane at home, Lane with my parents on the deck at sunset, opening a bottle of wine, all that stuff. He was so fucking good at it. These cute, intriguing hints at our beautiful, perfect life. It was a great contrast to what we’d been posting before that, the extravagance, the lavishness, the drama and excitement. These were just little hints, and people wanted more. So he convinced me to put the embarrassment of the tape behind me, to embrace the attention. ‘Kim had a tape, and look how successful she is,’ right? So I pitched the show.
“We got it approved, the crews showed up and started filming, and then the first episode aired, and…Lane was a star. He was funny, he was in every scene, he was hot and rich and just…perfect, and everyone loved him. That whole first season was all about Lane. It solidified his status as a celebrity. Lane was the star ofTempleeven though it was my name on the title card, even though it was supposed to be about me.”