Harmony’s hands felt slick on the steering wheel. “Why does Mick have to live up this stupid canyon?” she muttered. There was the dark body of a car looming ahead. She tapped her brakes so the asshole tailgating her wouldn’t slam into her trunk as she slowed down and squeezed past the abandoned vehicle on the shoulder of the road. What kind of jerk leaves their vehicle with the body encroaching on the lane? And on the heels of that thought came another. Must have run out of gas. Didn’t have a choice. She suppressed a shiver and glanced down at her fuel gauge. She still had a third of a tank. Thank goodness. Harmony lived in horror of running out of gas. Had happened to her once driving home from a set in East LA. Scared the shit out of her. And ever since then she was diligent about not letting her tank get low.

She rounded the bend, and there were the granite pillars and wrought iron gates with the curlicue design Paul had described to her. Discreetly embedded in one of the pillars and lit with a lantern was the house number she’d been looking for. With a sigh of relief, she swung her car into Mick Talford’s driveway, the tailgating car roaring past, blasting its horn, as Harmony stopped before the elegant gates. Even with night having fallen, she could see that it was a beautiful property, tucked away and securely positioned behind a wall of hedges. She unrolled her window, punched the code into the keypad, then hit #, and the gates slowly swung open.

She drove past the gates and down the lushly landscaped driveway toward the sumptuous Spanish villa, which looked to have been built in the 1930s. She snorted. God forbid Mick settles for anything but the best. But as quickly as the thought arose, slightly acrid and bitter, she stuffed it down. “The man works like a dog,” she murmured. “Deserves a beautiful place.” And what about you? You work hard. She did. Damned hard. And what did she have to show for it? A furnished studio apartment with a Murphy bed and a kitchen the size of a small closet. Where’s your mansion?

She pulled up in front of Mick’s house and looked at her notes. The cat, Charlie, was in the apartment over the garage. Harmony exited her car and stretched the kinks out of her limbs. She hated driving in LA, dealing with the congestion, the crowded freeways, the smog. But driving the winding canyon roads was the worst, especially at night. The streets were badly lit, with hairpin turns that if you missed would send you over a ravine, plunging to your death. People drove way faster than was safe, arrogant assholes in their fancy cars, tailgating too close, revving their motors.