Page 58 of A Suite Temptation
From her travel bag, she retrieved her laptop and got to work. At least the Wi-Fi was decent. With her journal beside her, she worked up a list of all the accounts and things that Foster and her people had access to, then methodically worked through it changing passwords and removing user rights.
Around two am her phone started pinging. Martin’s name was the first one on the ever growing list of messages and missed calls. Chloe turned her phone to silent and kept working.
At three am, she took a shower.
At four am, she ordered uber eats from the nearby all night Korean BBQ.
At five am, she managed to scrub the kimchi stains out of her top. Eating and working was a delicate business when you only had a tiny side table to work on.
At six am, she took another shower.
At seven am, she finally returned Foster’s fourth missed phone call.
“Hi. Were you trying to get in touch?”
“Where are you?”
“Out with friends. Why?” Chloe curled her toes up as she forced out the lie. She’d never been good with trying to tell Foster falsehoods. He was a master of the game.
“What friends? Oh, never mind. Somethings wrong with your bank account. Marta says she thinks it and your credit cards might possibly have been hacked. But when she tried to get into your email to check any notifications from the bank, she’d been locked out.”
Damn right she has been locked out.
His remarks raised a raft of new questions in Chloe’s mind. Why would Marta be trying to access the credit card in the middle of the night? And why was she telling Foster about that?Of course.Marta hadn’t been able to get hold of her, and so had tried to access the spend details on Chloe’s credit card to find out where she had gone.
“Everything is fine. I just decided to change some passwords. I’d forgotten some of them. I’ll sort it out later in the morning.” She made a point of not apologizing for ignoring his calls or inconveniencing her personal assistant.
Foster huffed his frustration. “All right, but make sure you give the new ones to Marta and Gabriela as soon as you get home. And fix up their access to your emails. And for fuck’s sake, call Marta.” He hung up.
Understanding finally dawned. Foster and Marta were working together. Foster was keeping tabs on her through her personal assistant. He was controlling her life. Her money. And the people she paid to work for her were his accomplices. “You silly little girl. You fool.”
No wonder they’d been so keen to get Jordan Royal out of her life. He’d posed a threat to their money train. Their issues with him had never been about her focusing on her work and getting the album finished. They wanted him out of the way because he asked too many questions. And if he’d stuck around long enough, she might have started questioning the status quo.
Chloe was nauseous, sick to her stomach. It was like waking up and suddenly discovering that she didn’t live in the world she thought she did. That her entire existence for the past nine years had been a dream.
“Yeah, well I’m fully awake now.”
Later that morning, after having searched, ‘entertainment industry lawyers Los Angeles’, Chloe drove herself to a house in the Hollywood Hills. By the time she left late that night, she had a new powerhouse industry lawyer.
In the middle of the afternoon on the second day of Chloe’s bid for freedom, her lawyer Sandra did a very unlawyerly thing and gave her pop star client a big hug. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you, Chloe. The next few months are going to be horribly tough.”
On day three as Chloe was checking out of her hotel, her new legal team went to Foster’s offices in Century City and served him with a formal notice of contract severance, along with the promise of future legal action. He was not to make any attempt to directly contact his former client.
By the time she got home, her entire entourage, all except for Martin, had been fired. Her head of security would be working out a period of notice while he oversaw the changing of locks and keypads. Chloe felt particularly bad about that, but Sandra had counselled her to make a clean break. To her relief, Martin had graciously agreed with Sandra’s advice. A new high security front gate was also on his to do list.
The guards who manned the security box at the entrance to the gated community were given a new list of people authorized to visit Chloe’s home. Foster, Marta, and Gabriela were not on that list.
Chloe’s final act of the long, emotionally exhausting day was to make a personal phone call to her stylist. “I’m so sorry about all this, I had no idea things had gotten this bad. I’m beyond embarrassed. You’ve basically been working for free since the European tour.”
Stixxluv sighed down the phone. “Yeah. Look I suspected something was up, especially during the album launch. I’m sorry I should have said something at the time, and I didn’t. Marta and Foster were acting weird. They were doing everything to keep people away, including that guy, Jordan, who you were seeing. I think they felt threatened by him.”
When news of her financial problems eventually leaked, and they would, she could just picture how Jordan would view it. His concerns about her people had been vindicated. He was fully entitled to think.I told you they were not good for you.
“Once I get things sorted and have a clearer picture of my finances, I’ll make sure to pay your invoices.”
“What will you do now?”
The past few days had been a whirlwind of meetings with lawyers and accountants. Chloe needed time to process it all. “With Christmas coming up soon, I think I’m just going to take a break. I’m exhausted.”