Chapter 7
As Billie had predicted, Jason met Mickie one evening when she showed up at the apartment.
Jason had picked Billie up after work in his Jeep, they had gotten sushi and were going to eat in his kitchen.
Billie went to get some more of her textbooks she wanted to study, and Jason was with her when Mickie suddenly appeared like a vision.
She was surprised to see them, and immediately turned a sexy look toward Jason.
It wasn’t personal, Billie knew, it was just the way Mickie responded whenever she saw a male between the ages of thirteen and ninety-seven.
She couldn’t help it. It was how she was wired. Jason could sense that too.
“Sorry, I won’t stay long,” she said to Billie, curious who the man was.
He was nice-looking. She would text her about it later.
Billie was digging through a box of books when she walked in, and Jason was waiting for her, sprawled on the uncomfortable couch.
He stood up when Mickie walked in, as a reflex more than anything else, and she noticed how tall and well-built he was.
He looked like he worked out a lot, which was true.
Alex was leaner, thinner, less athletic, though he had a trainer twice a week, and he wasn’t as tall as Jason.
He was an entirely different style. Jason looked a little too wholesome for Mickie, which Billie knew too.
“I just came by to pick up my bikinis and beachwear,” she said to Billie.
“Alex is going to see a patient in Hawaii to do some treatments, and I’m going with him.
” She was starting to take the perks of his lifestyle for granted, expecting them as the norm, as though they were her due.
“Lucky you,” Billie said, and introduced Jason to her sister. She saw an odd look pass between them, of hostility and suspicion. It was fleeting and vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jason said pleasantly, trying to observe the usual norms of introduction to a family member of the person one was dating.
“Probably all bad,” Mickie said easily. “She lies,” she added, and disappeared into the bedroom, as Billie stacked up the books she was looking for.
Mickie was back five minutes later with two well-stuffed garbage bags and two valises.
The garbage bags were visibly full of hats to wear at the pool.
“Alex sees patients all over the place. We were in Palm Springs last weekend, and we’re going to see an actress he’s treating in Montecito.
” She was clearly trying to impress them and Jason took an immediate and profound dislike to her.
He had the feeling that she was trying to make Billie look and feel bad in front of her new man.
Mickie couldn’t help herself, she was a scorpion to her core and needed to sting someone in order to feel good about herself.
“It must be fun for you to tag along,” Jason said indifferently, reminding her subtly that she was just an add-on, not the main event.
She was there for decoration and not much else.
And he didn’t like the supercilious way she looked at Billie, who was worth a thousand of her sister, a million in his opinion.
He had a visceral reaction of dislike for Mickie, and she had excellent antennae and could sense it, and didn’t like him either.
“How did you two meet?” she asked, pretending to be interested and lingering for a moment to ask.
“At the pool here,” Billie said innocently. She knew her sister better than that, but she was out of practice dealing with her sister’s games. It had been a while.
“That’s nice for both of you, convenient,” Mickie said with a supercilious look.
She was the star now, and they were two poor inconsequential people far beneath her.
“Have fun, you two, see ya,” she said, and sailed out the door, juggling her suitcases and the garbage bags.
Feeling intentionally rude, Jason didn’t offer to help her.
She didn’t deserve it. The door banged behind her and Billie exchanged a look with him.
“I don’t like your sister,” he said in a tense tone. “I’m sorry to be so blunt. I don’t like the way she treats you, or the way she talks to you.”
“I don’t pay attention to it anymore,” Billie said quietly and stood up with her books in her arms. “She’s young, and she feels like hot stuff with her fancy doctor in Bel Air.
When that ends, she’ll just be one of the masses again.
” But there was a hard look in Mickie’s eyes that Jason found almost frightening.
There was ice in her veins. It was hard to believe that the two women were even related.
Billie locked the door behind them and he carried the books back to his apartment for her.
She was sleeping there every night now, and it was comforting to walk into his cozy, inviting apartment after the brief visit to her barren, ugly one.
Mickie’s behavior hadn’t shocked her as much as it did Jason.
Billie had seen her behave much worse at other times.
They had no fight with each other. Billie didn’t begrudge her the fun she was having, or her moment of stardom in the press on Alex’s arm.
She was happy for Mickie. Her dreams were coming true.
But Jason sensed something truly evil about her.
It made him nervous thinking of her anywhere near Billie.
As he had suspected, from what Billie said about her, and the photograph he’d seen of her in the paper, she was a woman without a heart, and possibly some seriously scary agendas.
In his mind she was using the fancy Bel Air doctor for her own purposes as much as he was using her as the face of his beauty center.
In Jason’s book, they deserved each other, two users exploiting each other.
He felt sorry for Billie being related to someone like her.
She deserved a lot better than that. She was a warm, kind, intelligent, honest woman.
He found it amazing that anyone as young as Mickie could already be so twisted and ambitious at such an early age.
Billie seemed like an innocent next to her.
Jason didn’t think that she fully saw her sister as evil, as he thought she potentially could be if it served her purposes.
And the very thought of it frightened him for Billie, and chilled him to the bone.
By August, two months after Alex had opened Bellissima, he was seeing ten or twelve patients a day.
They had people waiting two months for appointments to see him, and he was invited away by patients every weekend, to do treatments at their beach and country homes.
Many of them sent their planes to pick him up, and Mickie went everywhere with him.
She had met all his most important patients by then.
They were out almost every night, at all the best parties in L.A.
He had become the darling of the Hollywood set.
He was still running the beautiful ads in all the major magazines, and Mickie had been asked to do fashion shoots identifying her by name in Vogue and Vanity Fair.
She went to fewer go-sees now. Clients of her agency called and asked for her.
She was becoming a celebrity in her own right, which meant a lot to her.
It had always been one of her dreams, to be famous.
And it was starting to happen. She and Alex were frequently in the press.
Her before and after photos were in the Bellissima brochure.
His patients still marveled at the way she looked for her age, when he confidentially shared with them that she had just turned thirty-four, which he claimed was the best-kept secret in the world.
But he was telling them so they could evaluate how effective his work and secret formulas had been on her.
He still managed to keep an aura of secrecy around Bellissima, as it nestled in the rarefied atmosphere of Bel Air.
In August, as they came back from a weekend in Atherton, just outside San Francisco, at the home of the brightest young billionaire star of Silicon Valley, he and Mickie had frantic sex in the bathroom of the plane.
They were alone on the flight with the crew, and he asked Mickie to move in with him.
“You’re using your old apartment as a closet.
Why don’t you just move it all to my place, and give your sister the apartment?
You don’t need it.” Mickie hadn’t spent a night there in two months, and she loved the idea of fully living with him.
She knew that she had used her own particular brand of magic on him, and he was seriously addicted to her, and couldn’t go more than a dozen hours without having sex with her.
It had become a desperate need for him. They had sex at the parties they went to, in the homes of the patients they visited as guests, in stores and restaurants.
It had become a game to find the most unusual places and not get caught, and once his office staff left at night, they had sex in every possible position and place in the entire Bellissima Center.
Sex had become the most powerful tool Mickie had to control him, and what he loved most about her.
He couldn’t imagine his life without her, and his patients loved talking to her.
They thought her a lovely, very refined, sweet woman who calmed any fears they had before their treatments and sometimes stayed in the room to hold their hands.
She was useful to Alex in so many ways. And she knew exactly how to behave in each situation.
Discreet and demure in his office. And the most daring, outrageous, down-and-dirty hellion in his bed.