Blazed (2 page)

"You don't need to spare me the pleasantries, Henry. Just tell me what you want." The almost genuine smile fell from his face in an instant. To my knowledge, I was the only person both immune to Tudor charm and able to disarm the mighty business beast. Without any kind of prompting, Oscar set off in the direction of my flat, so I knew the conversation would be graciously short.

"Well, I've come to try and sway your decision to attend the wedding."

"No." He could have arrived on the back of Cerberus or loaned a stallion from one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, taking me home via the fiery gates of Hell, and I still wouldn't have changed my RSVP.

"Don't you think you're being a little selfish? Obviously he couldn't have you as a best man, but
—"

"Surely it would be more selfish for me to attend and make a scene?" I had absolutely no intention of provoking drama, but the threat was all Henry needed to seriously rethink his request. Any misbehaviour of mine reflected badly on him and he knew it.

And he obviously knew how to pick his battles, because he nodded once to himself and shifted to a new, just as undesirable topic. "Then maybe I can convince you to reconsider taking over from your degenerate sister? Honestly, she's a total liability and appears to be singlehandedly turning my office into a grooming parlour. If I hadn't been at the conception, I would honestly think she simply sprang into existence like a germ."

The way Henry spoke about his eldest daughter might have seemed callous and cruel if you didn't know Tallulah directly. While I had no will to network but a keen mind, Tally had little more than a bad laugh and an Oedipus complex. The business was wasted on her, but honestly, I thought that was a fair price to pay for being corrupt. There was a fair chance that she would be the person to make the off-hand comment to one of Henry's associates that might ruin him and nothing would have made me sadistically happier.

"Still no."

"You won't even come down to
 
The Parr
 and sit in on a few meetings?" I didn't let him see me roll my eyes. He owned six buildings worldwide as business centres and named each after a wife of Henry VIII. Of course, he worked in the building named for the wife who survived...

"No."

He sighed and nodded again, casting a weary eye out through the window. "I'm not giving up on you yet, Emmy. And when I do wear you down, you'll be glad for all of the exposure you have." And there it was. His true reason for turning up was subtle but detectable to the trained ear. 

"You want me at an event," I groaned, sagging back into the soft leather interior that creaked a little under the strain. I'd sooner go to the wedding, at least that wasn't about him and his damn networking. "No, Henry."

Even though I refused, he still pressed on with the details I tuned out like white noise. I got that it was a mixer being held by a Cornelia Alexander— a woman I knew only as a model. Nothing drastic and even less necessary for me to put myself out for, so the finer points of his monotonous droning went unheard. I could have wept with joy when my building slid into view, and let myself out of the Mercedes before it had even fully stopped.

"Just consider it, Emmeline."

"Non, nein, bu, nej, den, nai, aniyo, nie, niet, nema, NO!" I somewhat childishly slammed the door behind me and set off into a ramble of expletives, not really caring whether he heard. There was no way that eleven languages of 'no' would mark the end his pestering, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that it was four more languages than he knew. Working in a book shop had its advantages.

"YOUR ROUND." CHRIS smirked at me across our usual table in
 
Esme's
 and shook his head with a slow growling criticism of a laugh. "Lightweight." I thought I was doing quite well considering I'd been drinking for three hours longer than usual and was still standing, or rather slumping. Past the point of feeling just fuzzy enough to forget all my problems, I was well into the realms of wanting to cry over them. This was nothing new, it was just happening three hours earlier than usual.

I threw my purse at him, trusting him to not take advantage of the credit cards I refused to touch, and collapsed face down onto the table. Every sensible bone in my body told me to stop drinking when another work day stood on the other side of midnight, but those bones appeared to be the smallest ones in my body. The ones in my fingers, maybe. Or the ones in my toes. More likely the ones in my ears. Any time I tried to let them take conscious control, I was met by a roar of objection from the rest of my body that far preferred
 alcoholic escapism to waking up sober. 

In keeping with comfortable patterns, my company was made up only of the social rejects who had a very different outsider impression of my life. Three fifths of that circle sat with me, excluding myself, with our spare, Esme, choosing to extricate herself from our pity party to attend to some pressing 'business' in her office.
 

What that really meant is that she had a private bathroom, had eaten her weight in the brightly coloured cupcakes she insisted on selling, and preferred to save face in front of her customers. Her shock of red Veronica Lake hair and Bette Davis eyes somehow kept her enigmatically charismatic through being absolutely trollied, and she rarely had any will to dispel the illusion that she carried herself with anything other than utmost grace and poise by being caught worshipping the porcelain throne in the ladies bathroom.

Chris, on the other hand, was a beast of a man with a stocky build who might just have had an unfulfilled wanderlust to rival my own. He too craved the change he wouldn't actively seek to discover and overcompensated for that lack of motivation with relentless cynicism and sarcasm. He would be at his finest and most resentful right around the time I hit the full blown depressive drunk zone and we would have tremendous rants about the state of the world, and how our misery was everyone else's fault bar our own. 

The other two fifths of our circle were definitely more of a completed whole than two separate segments. Daniel had been my best friend since I was five and consequentially had a fairly good idea of exactly who the real Emmeline Tudor was. He
 was his usual bitchy self, dripping in designer threads and too much sparkle. His outlandish approach to 'casual' came less from his excess of wealth and more from the fact he had a civil partner who preferred him to be the femme, and dressed him as such. There was no 'too much' for the man who wore what should have been a women's charm bracelet between neon leather strapped wrist bands— the man who could name more shades of pink than an interior designer. It had taken a long time for him to accept his sexuality, but as soon as he had, he embraced his right to be flamboyant. Women loved him for it, and so did his preferred type of man. As a result, the first gay partner he met turned out to be the one he kept.

Jonathan was good for him, and maybe my third favourite
 person in the world because he was the embodiment of everything I loved about the city. He was a sweet Asian cartoon aficionado wrapped up in a suit, topped with purple tipped spikes and the smell of dirty business and cigarettes— diversity capped professionalism with a penchant for the unusual and a flagrant disregard for anyone with a shred of an orthodox lifestyle. He encapsulated the modest snobbery and paradoxical individuality I lived for. He was so liberal and yet so disciplined— nothing ever seemed to phase him. He was everything I envied in almost plush toy form, and he loved Daniel just the way he was. Even better. 

What strange company I kept. When you looked at the five of us
— the dowdy billionaire's daughter, the relative supermodel, the mismatched 
Brokeback Mountain
 replicas and... Chris, it hardly seemed likely that we'd be friends, let alone that we'd be united by the one quirk that made us compatible...

We were all nerdy by nature. Beyond the bar, Esme was a voice actress for numerous video games and cartoons, and had an obvious extensive knowledge of everything she'd starred in. Daniel and Jonathan were computer programmers, Jonathan a little less 'legitimately' so, and considered
a
 Star Trek
 marathon to be a date night. Chris was a writer for an international nerd-based website and reviewed all manner of obscure media with one eye firmly on everything zombie. 

And me... well I was just the little nerd who could. I'd dabbled here and there, working in character design within the same company as Daniel, chasing comic conventions around the country with my sketches and occasionally bingeing on video games when the right one came along. But now I was the odd one out, the one with no ambition. I was happy working by the Dewey Decimal System and doodling in my lunch break, not looking to make it big, just to comfortably exist. Still, we had some interesting conversations about teaming up to create some kind of geeky monstrosity.
 

A piercing whistle from the bar forced me to look up and search for Chris' fuzzy silhouette. The suppressed violence in his wave and grim expression meant only one thing. 

"Your card bounced again," he hissed at me when I approached. Really, this happened far more often than it ought to. I sighed and mouthed an apology, knowing that he resented how I wouldn't dip into my Tudor fortune. He understood why, but that didn't mean he agreed. The way he glared at me was a challenge to let my principles go just once to make sure he didn't remember getting home. That was our routine, and he was damned if that was going to change, even if just for one night.
 

Dismissing him with a scowl, I stared into the meagre contents of my purse and debated just how much of my soul was hard wired into that credit card. Henry would know the minute I used it and that would be just one slip that led me into his own privately purchased sector of Hell. Was one night of inebriation worth it? Really?

"Don't do it, don't jump." Esme's voice snuck up behind me in a whisper, knowing that using that credit card was like throwing myself off a jagged cliff face. Her eyes were bloodshot and shining with tears, a tell-tale sign that too much wine had made her ill, but somehow she was still austerely beautiful. She pulled the card from my purse and whined longingly; she too wished I'd indulge but was a little more accepting of my financial ethos.

I tried to explain my empty bank account with a foolproof excuse; "We drink too much," which earned me a nod and a murmur of agreement.

"I'll cover your rounds for the night if you do me a favour." I hated to admit it, but she had my attention riveted. I spent my life returning her favours, and with no pay day insight for another week, I'd be looking at seven more, at least. "I need a place to... hang out."

"Again?"

"Just for a few days. She's searching the area again, the woman just won't give up." I couldn't even begin to understand what Esme was going through. After running away from home and her abusive mother when she was fifteen, she'd made an impressive way up from the London gutters just by way of pure dumb luck. Even then, she had an irresistible, husky voice that turned the right heads. Now at twenty-one, just a year younger than me, she had this— her own speakeasy type establishment with a glass topped bar, war-time styled glass decanters lining the mirrored shelves, and deep seated red Chesterfield booths and armchairs circling the candle lit mahogany tables. It was her own romantic vision of perfection and she was in no hurry to share it with the woman who never stopped looking for her. Any news that she was in the area sent Esme into hiding and rightly so— the woman was a gargoyle who was only looking for a pay off.

"Of course, 'misery loves company'." She half laughed and kissed my temple, waving a hand to one of the bartenders dressed in black braces and a bow tie to fit the theme. He smiled at her indulgently, far too blatantly displaying his soft spot for the self-made beauty, and put together our drink order without even really stopping to think about it. He might have been disgusting if his affection hadn't been so entirely justified.
 

Then, for the first time, I saw something I'd never seen before. Esme whimpered an indignation and blushed as crimson as her hair, looking at something over my shoulder bashfully then coiling up into a spring of uncharacteristic nerves. When I opened my mouth, she shook her head severely and composed herself before stepping past me to address whatever issue had her crippled like a gawky teenager. I turned with her, mystified, and felt like I'd walked into a brick wall.
 

I missed his name because I was too busy replicating her initial reaction, cringing in embarrassment at just the split second glimpse I caught of what definitely qualified as six foot three inches of screaming distraction. From behind my arm, I stole a better look of the man too beautiful to be human
— a look I didn't feel worthy of stealing. 

Swept back dark hair framed a gorgeous bronze face that would have looked more at home on a god or an angel. Thick lashes edged eyes of the most intense emerald that shouldn't have been at all obvious in the dim light of
 
Esme's
, but all my attention centred on his lips. Lips that looked like they needed to be kissed and bitten— definitely bitten. He gave off the impression that he was a selfish lover who needed to be put in his place. I had to look away before I let my loosened inhibitions rule me and have me jumping up onto the bar, pouncing like a wolf-child.