Epic (Fierce)

  EPIC

  A novel by

  By

  Ginger Voight

  ©2013, Ginger Voight

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Acknowledgements:

  This series of books is my most personal. Jordi’s journey isn’t that much different from my own, except that I was much, much older when I learned many of the lessons she had to experience within these books. In many ways, writing this book was my own “Fierce” journey, as I worked through all of these private struggles on a very public stage. I wrestled a lot of demons along the way, with varying degrees of success. In the end, I learned more from Jordi than I could have ever hoped to teach her.

  I could never have made it through any of it without my own colorful cast of amazing people. I found the quiet strength and supportive arms of Jace in my husband, Steven. I could confide anything fearlessly with my best friend, Jeff, who – like Corey – never let me half-ass my dreams. I had cheerleaders like Iris and Maggie in my own group of supportive friends Marie and Shirley, who have always helped elevate me from a life of mediocrity to grab for those stars I thought were out of reach. Like Diego, who you will meet in this book, my own sons keep me honest and never let me get away with anything.

  And to my own personal Griffin: thank you for all you’ve taught me in both the noise and the silence. I didn’t for a very long time, but I get it now. You are my master class in so many areas of my life without even meaning to be. Thanks for teaching me how to help others without losing myself in the process. <3

  Special thanks to Thessa Mari-Laj, a beta reader who has helped me craft some ah-may-zing scenes for my book, (including the last chapter of Mogul.) She challenged me to up my game when it came to Eddie’s ultimate payback, and I can truly say it wouldn’t have been Epic without her!

  Most of all, thanks to all the fans who took a chance to read this series. I know it wasn’t easy. But I hope, in the end, it was worth it.

  This book is dedicated to any girl who believes she has to change to be worthy.

  Know this and only this: YOU ARE ENOUGH.

  Dream big. Live large. Be fierce!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Los Angeles, California

  May 23, 2012

  “Tell me about Shane.”

  I bit at my fingernail, tearing off metallic polish in the process. This must be what shame tastes like, I thought with a perverse inward chuckle as I stared at the middle-aged man who issued the uncomfortable request. We sat in a non-threatening room decorated in muted, comforting hues, with affirmations on the wall and children’s books scattered across a table in the corner. It was a safe space, so there was no way he could ever understand how dangerous this simple directive was for me. This wasn’t just asking some random fact about my past; one I could emotionlessly dictate and analyze like some piece of arbitrary data. This was asking me to open a door I had slammed shut and bolted, packing nearly a hundred extra pounds of fat in front of it so that I would never – ever – have to face it.

  It evoked a name that, whenever it was spoken, rendered me that same terrified six-year-old, lying in a darkened room, naked from the waist down, whose innocence was repeatedly shattered with only the sliver of moonlight to bear witness. Worse, every time I spoke about this devil, he appeared. He didn’t even have to be in the same zip code and I could still feel his clammy hands on my skin, and see that hungry look in his eyes that threatened to chew me up and swallow me whole.

  “Don’t be scared, now. Big girls don’t get scared. Show Uncle Shane how much you love him.”

  Wisps of long-buried memories floated to the surface, so real it was if his breath was still warm and moist in my ear. Most days I could fake that it happened to someone else entirely, but not now – not when someone looked me in the eye and asked me what happened nearly fourteen years ago.

  This wasn’t just a question. It was a lasso that yanked me back in time until I was at my most helpless and vulnerable.

  And since the question was a threat to my personal comfort, anyone who posed it became a threat by default. Up until this point, Dr. Challis had been perfect. His gray-haired, milquetoast demeanor wasn’t threatening in the least, even with the way his studious blue eyes watched everything behind dark, horn-rimmed glasses. This grandfatherly man was as gentle as Mr. Rogers and as benign as a teddy bear. From the moment we met I knew I was in the hands of a consummate professional. So at my very first appointment three weeks before, I had laid it all bare on the questionnaire, listing everything that I thought a therapist could help me fix.

  I knew eventually I would have to tell this man, this kind and unsuspecting stranger, my deepest and darkest secret. His eyes would watch every emotion cross my face as I said, out loud, what that pig did to me, hoping my skin wouldn’t crawl right off of my bones in the process. Even though logically I knew that what Shane had done was not my fault, I still harbored the shame of these horrible sexual experiences. It had damned me in some way, sullied me… made me lesser than. These sick and perverted actions still involved my body, and parts of me that I shared with no other person aside from my love, Jace Riga.

  There had been a reason for that.

  I couldn’t trust just anyone with what little good remained.

  In fact, I could barely mull over what had been done to me in the safest spot of all – between my own two ears. I couldn’t imagine reporting it to another person in a clinical setting, as if that would make the whole thing an easier load to carry.

  We talked about the binge eating, and that had been hard enough. We talked about the abuses I suffered at the hands of Eddie, which had been more difficult still. Now he wanted me to tell him, in vivid detail, what Shane had done to me… to my body… to my spirit.

  Though I had fooled myself into thinking otherwise, I simply couldn’t do it.

  I shook my head. “I’m not ready to talk about Shane.” Maybe not ever, I added to myself. “It’s over. It’s in the past.” And that’s where I, for one, wanted to keep it.

  Being face to face with the asshole just scant weeks before had been enough, thank you very much.

  “I think the very fact that it scares you is reason enough to talk about it,” he reasoned. “Especially if it’s still driving self-destructive impulses.”

  Self-destructive impulses? What self-destructive impulses? Just because I could eat a whole cheesecake in one sitting, loaded with strawberry sauce and whip cream, to ease those memories back into their hole with the cunning use of fat and sugar, was simply a coincidence.

  The fact that I wasn’t stuffing my face to dull the ugly feelings I was experiencing indicated to me I was on the right track.

  “Then let’s talk about Jace,” Dr. Challis said, switching tactics.

  “Jace is wonderful,” I said at once. “He’s almost done with his first album. He’s planning another tour by the end of the year.”

  “Will you go with him?”

  I paused. “I want to.”

  He was quick to pounce on my hesitation. “But…?”

  I shrugged. “I’m still getting over the last tour,” was all I could say.

  “Let’s talk about that,” he said. “What was that tour like for you?”

  “Considering I was married to Eddie the whole time, pretending to the world that I was someone I’m not, it was a chore. And it backfired anyway, because people are determined to hate so
meone like me,” I said, thinking of the paparazzi group PING and the blogging king of pop culture, Miles O’Rourke, both of whom had had a field day over the drama that surrounded the struggling tour.

  “What does that mean, ‘someone like you?’”

  I shrugged again. “You know. Not like Shelby. I’m not thin. I’m not beautiful. I’m an easy target. The butt of the joke.”

  “Is that what you want to be?”

  “Of course not,” I snapped.

  “Then why let it be your identifier?” he challenged.

  “I didn’t label myself. These were the labels given to me.”

  He eased back against his chair. “Let’s say I had an open bottle of poison so toxic that if it merely touched your skin it could kill you. If I tried to hand this to you, would you take it?”

  “Of course not,” I repeated.

  “Then why accept the same poison from these other people?”

  I sighed. He just didn’t get it.

  He sat up and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees. “When people look at you, they don’t see you. They see a reflection of themselves, through their own prisms, for their own purposes. For some, this is a good thing. For Alicia,” he reminded me of the teenager I had honored at the Fierce finale, “you are a role model of everything she can become. For critics, you’re a reminder of what they can’t or won’t become. The labels people throw at you has less to do with you and more to do with their own limitations.”

  “The only way they win is if I accept them,” I repeated dutifully, thinking of Vanni Carnevale and his well-meaning advice. “Yeah, I know that in my head. And if the critics weren’t so loud, I could possibly convince my heart, too.”

  “You’re a bright light,” he pointed out. “The brightest lights always attract the most bugs.”

  I had to laugh. Dr. Challis was a good man with good humor. It was one of the reasons I decided to stay with him rather than insist upon a female therapist, like I originally wanted. I knew one day I’d have to dig deep and deal with the Shane stuff. I just wanted it to be on my timetable.

  Today was not that day. Tomorrow didn’t look good either.

  But as long as Dr. Challis didn’t push the subject, we’d be golden.

  “So have you found anything new about your birth mother?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve hit another dead end. Ancestry records only go so far with limited data, and since Daddy had no living relatives by the time I was born, it’s nearly impossible to track down information without going back to my moth… I mean, Marianne. God knows I don’t want to owe anything more to that bastard, Shane.” The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. I didn’t want to have to explain why I wouldn’t want to see either of these two people again in my life, even if it meant I couldn’t fill the holes in my family tree.

  I’d do it alone or I wouldn’t do it at all. And that was just the way of it. I had hired a private investigator and I had taken DNA tests. Time, and science, would have to take it from there.

  Thankfully he let the topic drop our remaining twenty minutes together. Instead we talked about the possibility of my going on the road again with Jace, and more importantly – how I felt his skyrocketing popularity since the tour, even with the scandal of shacking up with a married woman.

  He suddenly became the most eligible man in music, despite having a significant other. I guess for many fans, I was a far less threatening obstacle than Shelby had been.

  Best of all, I was proof he liked fat chicks. This was good news for every “average” groupie daydreaming about getting her chance with a rock star. It suddenly vaulted Jace back into their league. And I knew this because I had scoped the Internet thoroughly since the tour, to ensure that his reputation hadn’t been tarnished by his affiliation with me.

  Instead, his groupies zeroed in on Project Lay Jace. They figured if he was stuck with me, anything lower than a size 18/20 was an improvement.

  They were, in fact, quite vocal about it.

  Since Jace never read his own press, he was blissfully ignorant of it all. I inhaled it like it was covered in whipped cream.

  It was all I really could gobble up, since I was back under Maggie’s wing. There were no opportunities to fill my self-loathing with cookies or soda, so I masochistically read anything and everything on Jace and me in cyberspace.

  To say it was self-defeating was a bit of an understatement. There was a lot of commentary on Jace and me, and it had cast me as the villain in the scenario. Where he became more desirable, I ended up shouldering much of the blame for my failed marriage, Shelby’s heart attack and the troubles we had had on the tour. He was a hero for hooking up with the likes of me, so clearly tainted and undesirable, where I was a man-eating home-wrecker of a home I never wanted in the first place. So my sales stagnated where Jace’s skyrocketed. Thanks to my fairy godmother, Iris Kimble, I still had a lucrative clothing endorsement with the plus-sized store Tempestuous, so my celebrity still had value. She even landed me a voiceover gig for an animated feature to be filmed in late summer. But I knew it was going to be an uphill climb. I was going to have to work my ass off to ensure I could make a name for myself as an artist outside of Fierce.

  Every time I thought I had “made it” I ended up having to essentially start over from scratch.

  This made turning down my usual vices for comfort even more difficult. As I drove from Dr. Challis’s office on Wilshire toward the studios in Hollywood, I passed every single one of my favorite drive-thru temptations with great effort.

  “Tell me about Shane.”

  Can I order a double-double with an extra-large order of fries and a chocolate milkshake first? Therapy with food service – now that was a million dollar idea.

  Just thinking about Shane left me feeling dirty. I could feel his hand in my hair as he pushed my head toward his lap. I could feel the calloused fingers as they slid up my bare leg, under my nightgown. My skin crawled so much it was as if he was right next to me in the car. I could feel those eyes on me, watching me, daring me to fight him.

  I shook my head from such thoughts as I pulled into the studio parking lot. I had other things to do. That was not my life anymore.

  That Jordi Hemphill was no longer. Someone new and powerful had taken her place.

  Right?

  I slung my handbag over one of the chairs as I entered the control room. I had nearly finished my album, there was only one track left to record and it featured one of Graham’s other top-selling artists, Griffin Slade, as the accompanying musician.

  Griffin was known to the world as an accomplished guitarist as well as a philanthropist and an activist, and likewise had the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in show business. He was a perfectionist who drove everyone as hard as he drove himself, but in the end no one had anything really negative to say about the man – even the litany of women who littered his past.

  He was one horny humanitarian. He had been linked with every starlet from his home country of Australia to the streets of Hollywood and the Great White Way. Every event that he went to, every red carpet he graced, he was linked arm in arm with someone whose name invariably ended up on a Hot 100 list somewhere.

  They were almost always as famous as he was. On rare occasions he would date an unknown who happened to win the Griffin Slade lottery for the night, but otherwise his world had been filled with those who understood the complexities of the celebrity life.

  He hand-picked women who were equally invested in the fame game; nobody more famous than he was, mind you… just those who were famous enough.

  But all of them, every single one, had the model good looks to be on his arm. Whereas Andy Foster Carnevale or I had bucked the system and snagged our rock stars by fitting outside the norm, only the finest, grade-A celebutantes were good enough for Griffin.

  One such starlet sat in the control room, one slender leg tucked under the other as she spun in one of the chairs, watching Griffin through the gla
ss as he played his guitar for the opening solo.

  She sipped on a tall iced coffee with a ton of whip cream on top. I used to serve those drinks, and drink those drinks, way back when I was in complete denial how many calories were in the damn thing. Thanks to Maggie, I knew exactly how many calories were in them now. I had long since given up drinking away more than a quarter of my daily calorie limit on a coffee milkshake.

  Where this particular starlet put her extra calories was a mystery.

  I gained weight just looking at the damn thing.

  I watched Griffin as his nimble fingers caressed the strings. His dark hair was spiked and tinged blond at the tips, which made him appear even younger than his 35 years. He was lost in his own world, much like Yael or Randy would be when they played. He felt each note in his soul as he made love to the music. It was so intimate I almost had to look away, and did so the very second his brown eyes opened to find me staring at him.

  He indicated I should join him in the studio, and I was quick to comply.

  One simply didn’t keep Griffin Slade waiting.

  He had a smile for me as I closed the soundproof door. “How’s it going?”

  Even his speaking voice was melodic, and that Australian accent made it even more so. His eyes were also quite piercing as they looked into mine. It was so direct I looked away. I was still too raw from my afternoon with Dr. Challis, and some folks just made one feel naked.

  Sadly, Griffin Slade was one of those people.

  “Fine,” I said automatically. “Ready to do this thing?”

  He flashed a flawless smile my direction. “Just waiting on you, love.”

  The kinder he was, the more nervous I got, though I couldn’t quite figure out why. He was exotic and important, but he was still just a man. I was almost as famous as he was, certainly as infamous, so why did I feel like some nervous little backup singer all of a sudden?