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Nicole Wilde’s life is one of sell-out gigs, bunking on tour buses, trashing hotels and partying with the band all night long. But she’s not in the band. She is a music journalist, paid to be the world’s greatest groupie– and she loves it!
Nicole has the party lifestyle – and the hangovers to prove it – but no one stops her in the supermarket on a bad hair day. Until she is papped in an incriminating position with recently married mega-star Dylan King of The Burnouts and the tabloids start hounding her. This isn’t so fun. Especially when her make-up is a mess and she hasn’t yet had a chance to clean her teeth.
Dylan accuses her of ruining his marriage. His handsome PR agent, Charles, calls her a tart. She has to take gorgeous Luke from Two For the Road to hospital after a drug incident. And she’s dropped her mobile phone in the bath! Too much celebrity lifestyle for one week? Time to slow down and take stock? Maybe for somebody else. But Nicole Wilde is going to come out fighting!
Don’t miss Portia MacIntosh’s linked novella Between a Rockstar and a Hard Place to see where Nicole started out!
Also available by Portia MacIntosh
Between a Rockstar and a Hard Place
How Not to be Starstruck
Portia MacIntosh
Copyright
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014
Copyright © Portia MacIntosh 2014
Portia MacIntosh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9781472094681
Version date: 2018-07-23
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Book List
Title Page
Copyright
Author Bio
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Endpages
About the Publisher
When she was fifteen years old, Portia MacIntosh fell in with a bad crowd…rockstars. After disappearing on tour and living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle for a few years, Portia landed a job in the music industry – but only so that she didn’t have to join the real world just yet.
Now in her twenties, Portia is ready to spill the beans on the things she has witnessed over the years. Well, kind of. If her famous friends knew that she was borrowing their lives to inspire her fiction, they would stop inviting her on tour and banish her from the inner circle. Then she really would have to rejoin the real world, and she’s still not ready for that.
Portia only started writing novels to share her secrets, but then she realised she actually quite liked writing – maybe even more than she likes living on a bus with a bunch of smelly boys – and has since tried her hand at writing about other things.
Check out Portia’s blog at: www.portiamacintosh.tumblr.com
Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PortiaMacIntosh
…and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/macintoshportia
Massive thanks to the lovely HQ Digital UK team – especially Lucy, Victoria and Jo.
Thank you to all my music industry friends – if you guys didn’t do half the hilarious/terrible/unbelievable things that you do, I wouldn’t have anywhere near as much material to work with.
A big thank you to my Gosling Girls - Megan, Kirsty, Victoria and Laura - and to all the wonderful people who read and reviewed Between a Rockstar and a Hard Place.
And finally, the biggest thank you of all to my family and my band boy. You put up with an awful lot and without you none of this would have been possible.
For my band boy
Chapter One
The Fairy Tale
I wonder who started the bloody ridiculous rumour that women can multi-task effortlessly. I’d love to know so that I can send them a photograph of me right now (obviously someone else would have to take it for me) epic-failing my way to the office.
It’s 11 a.m. on an exceptionally cold Monday morning and I’m late for work. Again, and as always. Currently dodging my way through the busy streets of Leeds, I’m desperately trying not to drop anything. In my right hand I have four take-away cups of coffee – in a holder obviously, I’m good but I’m not that good – my massive Mary Poppins-style handbag hooked on my left arm and my mobile phone in my left hand. It’s still in my hand because, as I was leaving Starbucks, I received a call from work and without a free hand to put my phone back in my bag, that’s where it’s going to have to stay.
Thankfully work is just around the corner from my flat, although I was supposed to be at the office by 10 a.m. Stopping at Starbucks has only made me even later but I’m hoping the coffees will score me some brownie points with the staff. If you can’t be on time, the least you can do is suck up to people.
Just one more road to cross and I’ll be there. Balancing on the edge of the curb in my silly yet beautiful shoes, I feel like the slightest breeze could knock me off my feet. As the green man appears, I step off the pavement with the rest of the sheep. Eyeballing the window of my office for angry faces, I make it half way across the road when something hits me – literally hits me. As I fall to the ground in what feels like super-slow, Matrix-esque motion (although it probably doesn’t look quite so graceful to the people around me), my impressive coffee-handbag-phone balancing act comes to an abrupt end. Landing flat on my back, right there in the middle of the road, I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. Was I hit by a bus? I can hear people fussing around me and the impatient blaring of car horns. They can piss off, I could be dead...although if I’m thinking that, chances are I’m probably still alive, right?
As I run my hands down my body to check for major injuries, I feel that my skirt is up around my waist. I have never been happier to be wearing such thick tights, God bless the crappy, cold weather we have up north.
There’s a strong smell of coffee coming from the double-digits’-worth of Starbucks puddle on the road next to me, which thankfully hasn’t trickled towards me, although I am tempted to roll over and lap it up.
Despite having the wind knocked out of me, I think I’m going to make it.
‘I am so sorry, let me help you up,’ I hear a deep, apologetic voice insist as a hand reaches for mine.
Flat on my back and in the middle of the road, with my skirt hitched up around my waist, I am in no position to be declining help, so I grab the stranger’s hand and let him yank me to my feet.
‘Here’s your phone, I hope it isn’t broken. Shit, there are a couple of scratches on it,’ the stranger informs me as he hands me my fairly battered-looking phone. My phone is noticeably scratched, but I don’t tell him that most of the damage probably occurred the time my phone took a tumble down the stairs, bashed against something in my handbag, magically escaped my grasp, etc. In fact, my phone has been dropped so many times it’s a miracle that it still works. I prod a button on the front with a very shaky finger and my trusty phone springs to life as usual. What a trooper. Only after making sure my phone is OK do I actually look the only person who stopped to help me in the eye. Ushering me back across the road (the side I don’t want to be on) is an absolutely gorgeous man. Shit, I can’t believe he saw me lying in the road like that. He’s wearing a very flashy suit and clutching a fat, important-looking file stuffed with papers. Oh, and he has one of my shoes tucked under his arm, which explains why I’m limping – I thought I’d snapped my ankle or something.
‘Thanks for helping me. I’m not sure what happened, I was crossing the road and—’ I stop mid-sentence. The truth is, I have no idea what happened.
The good-looking stranger sits me down on the nearest bench.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks me with a very concerned look on his face. He looks like every portrayal of Prince Charming I have ever seen in the movies, with an added (and well-used) gym membership thrown into the mix.
‘I’m OK, just a bit shaken up. Did you see what happened?’
‘Please, wait here,’ handsome stranger insists. ‘I have to get this file to someone in that building.’ He gestures towards the offices behind us with the fat file. ‘Just...don’t move. I’ll be back in five minutes, I’ll explain everything then. Get your breath back, OK?’
I nod my head and watch him dash into the building behind me, my shoe still tucked under his arm which means I couldn’t leave if I wanted to – not that wearing only one shoe concerns me, but just one of these particular shoes is worth more than most of my other pairs.
Whatever happened to me, I am so lucky that I landed on my bum because I think it broke my fall. I’ll never complain about the size of it again, I promise.
I check my phone again and then my bag to make sure nothing is damaged – or even more damaged than it was before I fell. Everything seems to be OK, and despite feeling a bit achy and a lot embarrassed, I think I’m OK too. The only things that suffered are the coffees – the poor coffees! It breaks my heart watching cars driving over the empty cups in the middle of the road.
‘Right, are you OK?’ the gorgeous stranger asks when he returns. ‘I feel like such a dickhead. I was in a bit of a rush, I completely knocked you off your feet.’
Ah, so that’s what happened.
‘No harm done. I’m fine,’ I assure him, although part of me is thinking I should be a bit pissed off – but who could be mad at that silky black hair and those perfect teeth? To be honest, I just want to get another coffee (for medicinal purposes) and get to work.
‘I feel terrible. Can I replace your drinks? It’s the least I can do. I’m Tom by the way.’ He offers me his hand for the second time, this time for me to shake.
‘I’m Nicole, nice to meet you. I think,’ I reply as I shake his hand. He has a tight, manly grip and I’m certain I’m blushing right now.
‘Nice to meet you too, Nicole. Let’s get those drinks.’
‘Honestly, it’s fine, I—’
‘Please?’ Tom flashes a smile that I can’t bring myself to say no to and so I give in, but not before he gets down on one knee and delicately places my shoe back on my foot. If the smile didn’t have me saying yes, then the Cinderella moment sealed the deal.
Soon enough I’m in Starbucks, again, only this time it’s much busier and we’re forced to wait for our order. We chat for a few minutes and it turns out that Tom works for a firm of solicitors not far from where I work and, despite the fact that he practically assaulted me, and the fact we’ve only known each other for about twenty minutes, we’re getting on really well.
As soon as the drinks are ready, we walk back towards our offices. This is the second longest time it has ever taken me to walk the short journey from my flat to where I work. My record was set a couple of months ago when I spied a sale at one of my favourite shops, or a ‘dental emergency’ as I explained it to my colleagues, bursting through the doors several hours late with lots of suspicious-looking carrier bags.
‘This is me,’ I say as we arrive at the revolving doors that lead to my office. ‘I’m sure I can handle it from here.’
‘I’m sure you can.’ He smiles that smile again. ‘I know this must seem a bit weird considering the circumstances, but I’d really like to see you again. I’ve already swept you off your feet.’
That’s the kind of cheesiness that would normally make me sick all over a man’s shoes, but being so gorgeous, even a line as lame as that sounds utterly charming as it leaves his lips.
‘Erm, knocked me off my feet,’ I correct him, and he laughs.
‘I’ll give you my card, give me a call if you want to go for a drink sometime.’
After thanking him again, I take the card and say goodbye. As soon as I am in the building and out of Tom’s line of sight, I toss the card into the nearest bin, because there’s no way I’m going to call him. Yes, he’s good-looking, charming, funny and has a really good job, but that’s just not my type. He may be any normal/sane girl’s type, but I’ve never been that normal. Or sane.
Anyway, I’m late for work. Better get a move on.
Chapter Two
The Rebel
My name is Nicole Wilde, and I don’t live in the ‘real world’. Well, that’s what my Great-aunt Dorothy is always telling me. Maybe she’s right. I guess I am kind of lucky with the way things have worked out.
As tacky as it sounds, I have always wanted to be a celebrity. When I was a little girl, as shy as I was, I wanted to be an actress, a singer, a dancer or a musician, and I tried my hand at each one – it turns out I was crap at all of them. My singing voice wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t amazing either, acting gave me the giggles, trying to make my hands do different things at the same times just wouldn’t happen no matter which instrument I tried to learn and as for dancing, well that’s pretty much just exercise, and who wants to do that for a living?
Fast forward a few years to my mid-teens. I rebelled. Black nails and make-up, rainbow-coloured hair, fishnet tights and ‘fuck my life’ T-shirts – that was me. However, like any scary-on-the-outside, good-girl-on-the-inside teenage faux rebel, music was my life. I might not have been able to make it, but I could certainly surround myself with it. No more of the cheesy 90s pop that I loved growing up, instead I started listening to proper bands that played proper instruments.
I would go to the local venue a few times a week and check out unsigned bands from all over the country, stopping by the quiet little Yorkshire town where I grew up just to have another leg of their little self-funded tours.
I would watch the bands and then hang out chatting afterwards, and hitting it off with the musicians was just something that came easily to me. Maybe this was down to the fact that – as my Great-Aunt Dot put it – my grungy, punky outfits were ‘suggestive’ and gave off ‘the wrong impression’, but I think it probably had more to do with the fact that we shared a love of music.
Hanging around with these unknown musicians gave me a taste for the music industry (and a passion for band boys) so I started following big name bands around, doing anything and everything to meet them, have my photo taken with them and ask them to sign my CD/T-shirt/body part. This only increased my desire to be famous and to surround myself with famous people – it was a case of befriending the unsigned bands, sitting back and waiting to see if any of them ‘made it’. Of all the friends I made back in those days, some quit their bands, cut their hair and got real jobs but others stuck with it – one of the bands I know is actually getting pretty big at the moment which is very exciting.
By the time I was eighteen, I was tagging along on tours – low budget, of course – sleeping in the back of vans and converted old buses. I’m not even embarrassed to say it, but by the time I’d finished school, unlike most of my other friends, I didn’t want to get a job or a house or a husband – I just wanted to have fun. So, after my A-levels I took a gap year and became a professional hanger-on and I just loved it. I also ditched the scary teen rebel look, trading in my brightly coloured ’do for sexy blonde highlights, and that’s when I became a slave to fashion, rather than dressing like an actual sex slave.
Sadly, everyone has to go home sometime, and one day I arrived at my parents’ house to find my mum and dad waiting for me, armed with a question: what are you going to do with your life? The truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I decided to go to university – because, as bad as it sounds, that would buy me three more years of messing around. I wasn’t some ambitious teen, packing my bags for uni with big dreams of becoming an architect or an artist or an astronaut, so the selection process was a little random. I decided to do journalism, because it sounded glamorous and could potentially involve celebrities. It turned out to be the best decision I have ever made because during my third year I got to go to ByteBanter for my work experience. To this day I don’t fully understand what the heck they do – they’re some kind of techy news website – but I enjoyed my time there and I really clicked with the editor, Eric Tucker, or ET as he’s known around the office. When I turned up on my first day it was like being transported to the future – or teleported to the future, as ET corrected me when I said this out loud. Everything was chrome and black leather, there were all kinds of machines making lots of noise, lights flickering like crazy and the desks were just a mass of gadgets – I had entered geek world, and it was everything I thought it would be. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t any female employees. I remember asking ET if any women worked there and he replied: ‘most of these guys haven’t ever spoken to a girl, let alone worked with one’.
They might not have realised it, but a lot of the guys working there were accidentally cool. They were rocking the geek-chic look – you know the one, braces, thick-framed glasses, bow ties – I’m fairly certain that if they walked into a branch of Topman, they would blend right in, not that any of them would ever go near Topman.
Most of them wouldn’t talk to me at first but some were friendly. They didn’t make me feel stupid for not understanding HTML or JavaScript (which, sadly, has nothing to do with coffee) and they could have easily put me in a corner sharpening pencils (I made a joke about this at the time, they don’t have pencils) but they didn’t. Instead they gave me things to write about like iPods and music download services and, unsurprisingly, I managed to write about my favourite thing: bands. To make a very long story very short, at the end of my time there ET was so impressed, and so happy that almost all of the office had at least spoken to a member of the opposite sex, that he offered me a job, starting as soon as I’d finished my degree. I didn’t think he meant it, but as soon as I graduated I gave him a call on the off-chance and, just like he said he would, he set me up with my own little department. Two rooms of their huge office were assigned to my project – a main office for my team and a little private office for me. The ByteBanter guys would build and maintain an online magazine for me, but I was in charge of everything else.
If the ByteBanter office was futuristic, the rooms they gave me to use were practically prehistoric. The decor reminded me of a film noir detective office – old wooden desks, proper filing cabinets, frosted glass on the doors and even a coat stand. Anything that wasn’t actually made of wood was a similar colour.
I managed to poach Jake – my favourite member of the ByteBanter team – to come and do the day-to-day techy stuff for me and recruited my best friend from uni, Emily, to help me with the writing and there you have it, that’s how I became editor of Starstruck, an online magazine.
Chapter Three
The Devil, The Succubus and The Rockstar
Pushing my way arse first through the ByteBanter double doors, I dodge my way through the desks to where my office is, saying my good mornings to the nerdy guys as I pass through – although I think that ship has sailed now.
I have a go at opening the Starstruck door with my forehead, with no luck, but thankfully someone at a nearby desk notices and helps me out.
‘I’m here, I’m here,’ I chant victoriously as I arrive with the new coffees intact.
‘Well, look what the cat dragged in!’ Emily teases.
‘I’m late, I know, but you wouldn’t believe what happened on the way over here,’ I begin to explain, handing out the drinks.
‘What could have possibly happened that would make the ten-minute walk from your flat to here take two hours? And is this a skinny latte?’ Vicky asks rather rudely, and yes, I am technically her boss.