Free Starstruck by Lauren Conrad Page B

steal that necklace, isn’t it?” Trevor said coolly.
    Madison didn’t answer; she gazed out the window and pretended as if she hadn’t heard.
    Oh, Mad , he thought. You think feigning deafness is going to work? “I’ll tell you what I want,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “I want to show you talking about what really happened the morning after the premiere.”
    Madison crossed her arms and gazed at him, her blue eyes steely. “You know what happened. It’s all over the news. I’m pretty sure you can read.”
    Trevor leaned back again and put his hands behind his head. “Madison, please. I’m not dumb, and more importantly, you’re not dumb. What really happened? Where’s your father?”
    When Madison didn’t answer, Trevor gazed up to the ceiling. “Let’s see,” he said. “He had a psychotic break and he’s now at Beverly Hills Psychiatric, but you don’t want the world to know about your family’s history of mental illness so you’re covering it up. Or maybe he wasn’t really your father; he was just some actor you and Sophia found because you felt like your story line needed a little more meat. If so, kudos—that was awesome. You had us all going there. And here I was, thinking you can’t act! Or maybe …” Trevor leaned forward, staring directly into Madison’s eyes. “It’s really Charlie who took the necklace, and you, for some completely bizarre and incomprehensible reason, are taking the blame for him....”
    “You can make up stories all you want,” Madison said stiffly. “You already got me to humiliate myself on camera at Lost Paws. And if you were on top of your story arcs, you could keep doing it. I’m sure everyone would love to watch me get my comeuppance. But I’m not going to talk about it, all right?”
    “I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it all,” Trevor persisted. “I just want to know what happened. Where is Charlie, Madison? We can’t just pretend he never existed.”
    Madison crossed her arms over her chest. “He decided he didn’t like L.A. after all,” she said finally.
    Trevor knew that was far from the whole story, but at least for right now, the truth didn’t actually matter. “Well, you’re going to have to say that. On-camera. ‘Daddy went away for a while.’”
    Madison bit her lip. “Well, that’s true enough.”
    Was that the sparkle of a tear he saw in the corner of her eye? Trevor almost felt sorry for her.
    Almost.
    “Good,” he said. “You know your line, then. I’ll set up a place for you to deliver it.”

8
WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT LOVE?
    “Lost in love, then lost without you / lost in the city where I first found you …” Kate sang. Her eyes were closed in deep concentration, but then, feeling suddenly self-conscious, she opened them. The small red light of the PopTV camera was blinking in her peripheral vision. She let the rest of the line trail off. Where was she going with this song? She felt just as lost as the girl she sang about. And she was saying the word “lost” too much. Maybe it was time she invested in a thesaurus.
    Normally she would have leaned her guitar, Lucinda, against the couch and raided the pantry for Oreos, but with PopTV filming she didn’t think that was such a good idea. For one thing, it would make her look like she had absolutely no work ethic; for another, she’d end up with cookies in her teeth. And as Laurel had informed her, producers preferred that the girls avoid eating on camera (which was funny, considering half their scenes were shot in restaurants).
    Another one of Kate’s favorite procrastination strategies included cleaning her apartment, which at the moment needed it desperately. (In fact, there were so many clothes on the floor of her room that the other day the cameramen had been instructed to film above the floors.) But who would want to watch her picking up her dirty socks?
    She sighed and did a little finger-picking exercise that her first guitar