Page 69 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
“Meanwhile,” I said, “I’m thinking of Bernie right now. Assuming he’s awake… which, really, he never fully is. I wonder if he has the faintest clue he’s been abducted and dragged across state lines just to make one of the most influential men on the planet jealous.”
“Takefaintest clueout of that, Bea. Bernie is authentic. Ryder never will be. And on that,la Contessais absolutely right. She understood everything: artists who rise too fast always end up doubting themselves. The masses cheer, but the masses are ignorant, hypocritical, deceitful. When has true quality ever pleased everyone? Deep down, they know it. So, even if they weren’t commercial at the start, the second they become icons… boom. They’re commercial. It’s mathematics.”
“All very interesting,” I replied, raising an eyebrow. “But Ryder is still about a million times better a musician than Bernie.”
“Oh Bea, you don’t get it! I’m talking psychology, not technique. This isn’t about truth or falsity — it’s about perception. Ryder is already half trapped in his own illusions.”
“Sure, sure…” I said with a crooked smile. “I can totally picture it: Ryder pouring out five-hundred-dollar champagne down the sink, then heading to 7-Eleven to buy the same cheap gin Bernie chugs.”
Tess pointed a theatrical finger at me, like a seerglimpsing beyond the veil. “If you could read what’s sneaking into his mind right now… you’d be breathless.”
Then she pointed to a line at the bottom of the letter.“I hope to offer you dinner, away from the spotlight, so I can tell you quietly about my new project.”
“See?” Tess lit up as if she’d just struck gold. “That’s not a dinner invitation. That’s a kneeling. That’s the official act of a prisoner begging the queen for clemency.”
“So,” I asked, “you’re going to accept?”
“This time, yes. But by the end of the night, he’ll realize the steepest price won’t be the bill at the restaurant — it’ll be the hours he has to spend without me.”
She began pacing the room, dictating the plan like a designer stitching the gown for her coronation. “I’ll look at him as if he’s a secret I already know. I’ll let him tell me something banal and turn it into tragedy. If he dares touch me, I’ll let it last exactly three heartbeats. Never more, never less. Three heartbeats, and he’ll have lost the war.”
She stood still for a moment, then let out a soft laugh, almost to herself. “You know whatla Contessaalso says? At the first meeting, don’t try to make him fall in love. Make him believe he already was, in another life, and has just found you again.”
“Aren’t you afraid of overdoing it?”
“Overdoing it?” she cut me off, arms wide open. “Darling, excess is my natural size. And when it comes to victory, there are no half portions.”
And right then I realized that, for Tess, Montana wasn’t a place at all: it was the final stroke of a siege she already knew she had won.
42
And so, there we were again on a private jet, Tess absentmindedly flipping through the in-flight menu as if she were long accustomed to choosing between vintage champagnes and tuna tartare at three in the afternoon, while Bernie slept diagonally across two seats, the seatbelt fastened around his ankle. I watched the scene, wondering at which point our lives had become indistinguishable from a three-act absurdist comedy.
Landing in Montana was a brutal return to reality. This time, the limousine took us up a dirt road to a mountain “cottage” so oversized that calling it a cottage felt like a crime: big enough to host a small international summit. Dark wood, sloped roof, multiple fireplaces, and thatluxury rusticvibe that makes you feel guilty just for breathing the air.
Outside the fence, a compact wall of paparazzi and gawkers moved like a pack of hungry wolves: cameras, long lenses, flashes primed and ready toexplode at the slightest flicker of movement. A gossip battalion with their fingers permanently on the trigger.
Tess saw them and lit up.
Not poetically. Chemically. Like a light bulb surging to full wattage.
“There they are,” she whispered, clutching her coat around herself like a thief studying the museum blueprints the night before the heist. “This weekend… I could close the game.”
I eyed her sideways. “By ‘close the game,’ you mean…?”
“I mean getthe shot. The definitive pose. The one that leaves no doubt. The one that makes you spit your cappuccino all over the morning paper.”
It was the same tone other people reserve for lines like“we’ve found the antidote”or“the spaceship is saved.”Except she was talking about flashbulbs, scandal headlines, and the supreme art of being seen at the exact second you want to be seen.
The driver, a man with the weary gaze of a war veteran, bypassed the main gate and slipped into a side driveway. He parked behind the cottage, strategically shielded from the paparazzi’s lightning storm.
As soon as we stepped out, Tess stretched, inhaled the crisp mountain air, and declared with the certainty of someone who sees the exit to thelabyrinth: “This is it. Perfect.”
I looked at her and realized that whatever she had planned, she had never been this close to tightening the net around Zane Ryder.
The rockstar wasn’t home. According to the driver, he was rehearsing for the next night’s concert. Which meant, for now, the entire mountain cottage was ours.
Naturally, Tess withdrew immediately to her room to prepare for dinner. “An incredibly luxurious restaurant,” the driver had said, with the same reverence as if he were announcing the Queen of England’s arrival. I had no doubt it would be a place with tablecloths pressed by laser beams and waiters trained to vanish into thin air after pouring your wine.
