The Runaway Actress. Victoria Connelly

she’d asked for in the beginning but she’d made ten films in the last four years and she was exhausted.

      Kicking off her impossibly high heels, she sighed and pulled on a cool linen dressing gown before making her way to the kitchen. She needed wine: a nice big glass of something very expensive to take the edge off the evening.

      Opening her fridge, she was greeted by a positive jungle. Everything was green. It was the usual problem: a fridge full of food but absolutely nothing to eat. Connie groaned at the sight of it. It was all part of the latest LA diet but, however healthy it was, Connie couldn’t help wishing she could just sit down with a hamburger and fries like a regular person. But hadn’t her agent told her to watch her weight?

      ‘You’re piling it on again, Connie,’ he’d told her last week. ‘This industry doesn’t tolerate fat.’

      Fat! FAT? Connie had never been more than nine stone in her whole life and, at five foot eight, that was positively skeletal. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to live a normal life. To get up and not have to worry about what the papers were saying about you, to choose your food because it was what you wanted to eat, and not to be constantly told what you were going to be doing for the next year – the next decade.

      Grabbing the bottle of wine, Connie padded through to her living room, her feet sinking into the luxurious white carpet she’d chosen for the whole house. It was an enormous room that overlooked the vast swimming pool and gardens, and Connie had filled it with beautiful antiques, from the Regency mahogany sideboard to the satinwood table. A nineteenth-century chandelier hung from the centre of the room. It would have looked more at home in an English Georgian manor house rather than in her very modern Hollywood home but Connie had fallen in love with its sparkling teardrop crystals and insisted on having it.

      Her bedroom was the same. Reached by a Gone with the Wind staircase, the room was stuffed with the very finest money could buy because what else did she have to spend it on? There was a vast French rococo bed in antique gold, an enormous gilt mirror that bounced the light back from the balcony doors and an exquisite brass-inlaid secretaire in that she locked away all her personal documents.

      Finishing her wine and heading upstairs to her bedroom, she removed her dressing gown and realised that she was still wearing her diamond choker. She unfastened it and returned it to its blue velvet box. She’d bought it as a special gift to herself after she’d heard she’d been nominated for an Oscar. Most actresses hired their jewellery for Oscar night but Connie had wanted to wear something that was hers – something that she could keep. She remembered the gentlemen from the jewellers who had turned up at her house with a selection of necklaces for her to choose from. There had been an amazing egg-sized sapphire pendant, which had reminded Connie of the colour of the ocean. There was a square-cut emerald necklace, which had looked dazzlingly bright when she’d tried it on against her pale skin. Then there’d been the rubies – twelve blood-red stones nestling in a lace of sparkling diamonds. But, in the end, Connie had chosen the diamond choker. It was breathtaking in its simplicity and could be worn with so many of her gowns.

      Brushing her fingers over the stones, she closed the box and took it to the vault in the corner of the room. There, it joined a family of jewels from Connie’s favourite garnet earrings to platinum watches and rings set with every stone imaginable. There was even a diamond tiara in there. Connie had worn it just once.

      Taking a quick shower and smearing her face with the latest skin-tightening cream that promised to keep her looking like a nineteen-year-old, Connie slipped between the silky sheets of her bed, her head crashing onto the pale pillows. She felt as if she could sleep for a fortnight. Or for ever.

      Closing her eyes, she thought about her beautiful home filled with beautiful things. She had more than any young woman had a right to and she knew how lucky she was, she really did.

      ‘So why am I not happy?’ she whispered into the dark night.

      Chapter Three

      Connie woke up with a start. There was somebody in her house and that somebody was shouting. Really, really loudly. She groaned and turned over, hiding her head under her duvet. Why oh why had she given her personal trainer a key to her house?

      ‘Up, up, up!’ he cried as he took the stairs two at a time. ‘Sleepyheads don’t get fit!’

      ‘I don’t want to get fit. Not this morning,’ she said to herself. ‘I want to sleeeeeeep!’

      ‘WAKE UP!’ he shouted as he entered the room – all six foot five of him.

      ‘I’m awake!’ Connie said.

      ‘I want twenty stomach crunches right now!’

      Connie muttered something under her breath.

      ‘What was that, sweetie? You want to do fifty?’ he said with a naughty grin.

      ‘Go away, Danny!’ Connie said, sitting up in bed, her red hair tousled and tangled.

      ‘You don’t pay me to go away. You pay me to get your ass moving! Come on,’ he said, clapping a pair of enormous hands together.

      Connie sighed. She loved Danny dearly. He was loyal and sweet and always made her laugh, but there were certain mornings when she wished he didn’t exist.

      Ten minutes later and they were in the basement gymnasium and Connie was being put through her paces. It was a rude awakening and she really should have been used to it by now because Danny had been turning up three times a week for the past four years.

      ‘Your body is your business,’ she would silently chant to herself whilst pounding on the running machine. ‘You have to keep in shape,’ she’d repeat with each stretch on the rowing machine.

      But if only her body was her business. The trouble was, everyone seemed to have something to say about her body. Her trainer, her agent, her publicist – to say nothing of the press who regularly snapped her from all angles and then ran headlines such as ‘Podgy Connie Piles on the Pounds’. The unhappy truth was that acting was about more than her ability to inhabit a role and convince an audience that her emotions were real. It was about how she looked both on screen and off and that pressure could sometimes be unbearable.

      After ten minutes on the exercise bike, Connie hung her head.

      ‘Can we go running, Danny? I want to get some fresh air.’ She looked up and caught Danny’s eye. He didn’t look happy with the suggestion.

      ‘You know what happened last time.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘We weren’t so much running as running away!’

      Connie nodded, remembering the hoard of paps that had torn after them with their intrusively long lenses.

      ‘I wish I could run away,’ Connie said.

      ‘Aw, don’t say that!’ Danny said, his face wrinkling in dismay.

      ‘But I do. I want to go somewhere where I can just be me for a while without a telephoto lens poking at me or some journalist tearing me apart.’

      ‘I don’t think such a place exists,’ Danny said.

      ‘No,’ Connie said. ‘You’re probably right. But can’t we at least try to pretend?’

      ‘You want to go to the park?’

      Connie nodded.

      ‘We’ll have to go in my car, then. Everybody knows yours.’

      Connie grinned and grabbed her towel.

      Danny’s black RV was parked in the driveway. ‘Get in the back and duck down,’ he said.

      Connie climbed in the back of his car, buckled up and then laid her head down on the seat. She’d given Danny her remote control to open the wrought iron gates and, as usual, there was a group of paparazzi camping outside.