Zoey Dean - Beautiful Stranger

Copyright 2007 by Alloy Entertainment

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at hachettebookgroupusa.com

First eBook Edition: September 2007

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-04160-7

If you have to ask, youll never be on

THE A-LIST

Be sure to read all the novels in the New York Times bestselling A-LIST series

THE A-LIST

GIRLS ON FILM

BLONDE AMBITION

TALL COOL ONE

BACK IN BLACK

SOME LIKE IT HOT

AMERICAN BEAUTY

HEART OF GLASS

BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

And keep your eye out for the tenth novel, coming April 2008.

Be sure to read all the novels in the #1 New York Times bestselling GOSSIP GIRL series

Gossip Girl

You Know You Love Me

All I Want is Everything

Because Im Worth It

I Like It Like That

Youre The One That I Want

Nobody Does It Better

Nothing Can Keep Us Together

Only In Your Dreams

Would I Lie To You

Dont You Forget About Me

And keep your eye out for the Gossip Girl hardcover prequel, It Had To Be You, coming October 2007, to find out how it all began.

A-List novels by Zoey Dean:

THE A-LIST

GIRLS ON FILM

BLONDE AMBITION

TALL COOL ONE

BACK IN BLACK

SOME LIKE IT HOT

AMERICAN BEAUTY

HEART OF GLASS

BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

If you like THE A-LIST, you may also enjoy:

Bass Ackwards and Belly Up by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain

Secrets of My Hollywood Life by Jen Calonita

Haters by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

and keep your eye out for

Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith, coming October 2007

To Dianne.

Loyalty is everything.

New York was real and California was not.

Twas ever thus.

Lauren Bacall

T here were many things that Anna Percy loved: classic novels written in the nineteenth century, the antique diamond stud earrings handed down from her grand-mother, the idea that a person could, if she really wanted to, reinvent herself. But at this moment, she wondered if the thing she loved most of all might not be slow dancing with Ben Birnbaum.

The orchestra was on a raised platform draped in white and gold, built for this very occasion. The music was smoky and jazzyvery retro. Anna had never heard the song before, but she didnt care. It was the first slow number since she and Ben had arrived at the lavish wrap party for Ben-Hur, and the first time shed been in his arms all night. Transnational Picturesthe studio behind the Ben-Hur remakewas hosting the affair at one of its soundstages in its studio complex in Culver City.

Maybe we should blow this off and go somewhere else, Ben murmured in her ear. His breath sent shivers up and down Annas spine. Said spine was quite visible, in a black silk Christian Dior gown that appeared modest in front but slid below the waist in back. If Anna had been the type of girl to give much thought to what clothes said about the girl underneath them, she would have mused that the dress was much like her on this particular August evening: modest on the surface, offering only a glimpse of the heat beneath. The reason she knew about that heat had everything to do with the boy with whom she was dancing.

I cant do that to Sam, she whispered back, which was true. The star and director of Ben-Hur was Jackson Sharpe, Americas best-loved action hero, and his daughter, Samantha, was the closest friend Anna had made since shed come to Los Angeles seven months before. Anna couldnt very well duck out on her.

Besides, going somewhere more private with Ben was not in her game plan for the evening. She intended to take things slow. They had fallen for each other too hard and too fast, right after Anna arrived in Los Angeles from New York. In fact, it had happened on the plane from LaGuardia to LAX. Shed come to California to spend the second half of senior year of high school, to live with the father shed barely seen since her parents divorce in middle school. Shed come here to try something new, tohere was that word againreinvent herself.

Anna Percy, of the old-money, Upper East Side Manhattan intelligentsia, had wanted something more.

Shed gotten something more. Shed gotten Ben Birnbaum. Ben was the first and only guy with whom shed ever made love. From the very beginning, the experience had been whatever was two steps higher than fantastic on the Bliss-o-Meter. In fact, it defied every scale of measurement Anna had ever known or even imagined.

For one, Ben was knockdown, drag-out, take-your-breath-away handsome. Every feature seemed at once chiseled and effortlessly boyish, adding up to nothing short of a six-foot, blue-eyed, tousle-haired Adonis. She still remembered how her stomach had flip-flopped the first time she saw him, in the first-class cabin of that same NYC-L.A. flight, when hed stood to take off his Princeton sweatshirt. For another, he radiated confidence unlike any other guy Anna had met: he was comfortable in his own skinor whatever his skin was in. Tonight, that was a vintage Armani tuxedo with purple-tinted cummerbund and breast handkerchief. Anna found his looks, and pretty much everything about him, devastating.

Yet their relationship had been plagued by secrets, and at the end of July, Anna had made a momentous decision. Shed taken a stepfive stepsbackward, and told Ben she wanted to roll back to dating. She wanted them to really get to know each other, without sex getting in the way. Ben had been her first, and being with him was so good she feared the constant flood of endorphins in her cardiovascular system was clouding her judgment.

To be honest, there was another guy involved too. During the latest off-again patch of the on-again/off-again cycle of Anna-and-Ben, she had met Caine Manning, who worked at her fathers international investment firm. Anna had boldly told Ben and Caine that she wanted to date both of them at the same time. Somewhat to her shock, theyd agreed to her plan. She was proud of her decisionit wasnt the kind of decision she would have made back in New York. It made her feel much more in control of her love life than she had in a long time. In theory, at least. When she was within a few feet of Ben, the idea of being in control was just that: an idea.

Anna tore her eyes away from Bens perfectly chiseled jawline and looked around her. Transnational had transformed the soundstage, a cavernous building only slightly smaller than an aircraft hangar, into a huge, 1940s-era speakeasy. This had nothing to do with