Jeri spotted Freya on the corner, right where she had said she would be. She smiled as she turned her Jaguar to pull up beside her and leaned over to unlock the door.
The relief in Freya's face might have been comical under other circumstances. The girl looked tiny beside her outsized suitcase. Jeri watched as Freya stowed the luggage in the back seat before climbing into the passenger's seat.
"Thank you!" she gushed immediately. "It'll just be for one night, I promise."
Jeri put the car in gear. "Let's worry about that later. Right now let's get you home."
As they drove off into the LA night, heading back up toward Jeri's house in Malibu, she glanced sideways for a better look at Freya. She fought to keep the predatory smile from her face. Nineteen years old, head and shoulders shorter than Jeri herself. She had long blonde hair and blue eyes. A classic image of middle-American beauty with a generous does of wonderful naivetΓ©, like so many others Jeri had met over the years.
Freya would make a wonderful addition to Jeri's collection of slave girls.
Jeri was a talent agent and had met Freya two days earlier. The girl was two days off the bus from some hick town in the middle of nowhere. Her headshots had caught Jeri's attention, both Freya's doe-eyed undeniable beauty combined with an innocence Jeri knew would see her be eaten alive by the Hollywood machine.
It had been a general meeting. The girl was polite, friendly, wonderfully accommodating and had no idea what she was letting herself in for. Her story was the same one Jeri had heard hundreds of times before, a girl from a small town dreaming of life as a star. They had ended the meeting on good terms, Jeri had given her business card and told her to get in contact if she needed anything.
Then Jeri had conducted her background check and discovered certain facts about Freya. No mother, absentee alcoholic father, no siblings. A circle of friends she had left behind to come to LA to seek her fortune, but no-one who would come looking for her. And just from the simple questions, Jeri knew Freya was a docile sort who could take direction well. The perfect qualities for a potential slave girl, in other words.
She had looked back over Freya's headshots and smiled again. She was a truly beautiful girl.
Jeri couldn't wait to see her naked.
#
Freya hadn't known what to expect when Jeri had collected her. In truth she had been desperate. She had been in LA four weeks now, had met plenty of agents and done a short round of auditions. None of them had got anywhere, and Jeri had been the only one to show even a passing interest. No, she corrected, it had been more than that. Jeri had asked tons of questions of her, wanting to understand her family, her background, why she had come to LA and what she wanted to achieve.
She hadn't said it aloud but Freya knew Jeri had intuited the truth. That failure here would mean the end of everything. It would mean getting on a bus to her hometown and going back, admitting to everyone β including her dad β that she'd failed.
She could already imagine the sneer on his face. "
You're nothing special. What on Earth made you think
you
could be a star in Hollywood?"
Even thinking about it made Freya squirm. She had known that sneer her whole life. This had been her one chance to get away from it all. Now it was all that was waiting for her back home, and after stomping out of the house screaming at her father that he would never see her again, Freya didn't think she could bear to go back home and face it again.