Fame Read Online Free Page A

beach for cameramen. There were none. “Listen, Marc, you’ll have my support all the way.”
    “Thanks, man. That means a lot.” His tone grew softer. “Hey, 12
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    Dayne, I gotta go. One quick thing.” He paused. “What do you hear from Kelly Parker?”
    “Kelly?” Dayne returned to his chair and put his feet up on the railing of the balcony wall. “She never goes anywhere. The paparazzi are freaking her out.”
    “That’s what I thought. Tell her to call me, will you?” “Definitely.”
    When the call was over, Dayne tossed his phone on the table, pulled the magazine closer again, and stared at the picture. Sud denly the image changed in his mind, and it was no longer Marc and his father. Instead it became a family. His family. The bio logical family who didn’t know he existed. He pictured them the way they’d looked that day in Bloomington. Eight or ten people with a few small children walking together through the parking lot of the local hospital, the same weekend he’d seen the girl at the theater. One of the little girls with them was in a wheelchair.
    Even with the sun hot on his face, a chill made its way through him. He shut the magazine and threw it back on the table. What would the press do to the people he’d seen that day in the parking lot? What skeletons lay in the closet of the Baxter family? For starters, John and Elizabeth had given him up for adoption and apparently never told their other kids.
    But what about the wheelchair? Was there a birth defect or an accident that put the child there? Whatever it was, the rags would find out and gleefully splash it across a centerfold given the chance.
    Dayne stood and filled his lungs with the damp, salty air. He leaned his forearms on the railing and stared far out to sea this time. What were the Baxters doing now? No doubt they were still grieving the loss of Elizabeth. The private detective his agent used had found out the information almost immediately. Elizabeth Baxter died of breast cancer just hours after he had vis ited her briefly.
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    KAREN KINGSBURY
    Down the beach a way, a young couple was holding hands and flying a bright yellow-striped kite. Dayne studied them, the way they easily kept their faces out in the open. Did they know how wonderful it was, being out of the limelight?
    Or did they long for fame the way so many did in Los Angeles?
    He shifted his eyes upward. At least he’d found Elizabeth before she died. The conversation they’d shared was enough to answer his hardest questions—who was his birth mother and why did she give him up.
    Elizabeth had loved him and longed for him. She had searched for him at one time and wondered about him all of her married life. In her dying days, her single prayer had been to find him, hold him once more the way she’d held him as a newborn, and tell him she loved him.
    Those bits of truth were enough.
    As for the others, his biological father and siblings, he’d made the right choice by leaving them alone. Dayne leaned hard against the railing. He’d only seen them for a handful of minutes as they walked from the hospital to their cars. They looked like nice people, loving and close. The sort of family he would’ve been proud to call his own.
    But he could hardly land on their doorstep announcing the fact that he was their parents’ firstborn. The paparazzi would capture the moment from the bushes for their next cover story. No, he could never contact the Baxters, never tell them the truth about who he was. They deserved their privacy. Dayne narrowed his eyes. He could see the headlines: “Dayne Matthews’ Secret Family Revealed.” He couldn’t let that happen.
    Even if he spent the rest of his life thinking about them.
    He took his cell phone from the table, slipped back inside the house, and closed the screen door. Suddenly he knew how he was going to find the girl, the one from the Bloomington theater. He dialed his agent’s number.
    “Matthews, how you