‘Water,’ repeated Sabrina weakly. ‘Please.’
‘Oh shit, sorry.’ Dorian hurried to the sink, returning with a paper cup of tap water. He held it to her lips and she drank it greedily, nodding to him for a second cup and then a third.
‘Well, hello!’ Dr Emanuelle walked in looking elated, as well he might. ‘We weren’t sure if you were going to make a reappearance. It’s good to meet you, Miss Leon.’
Sabrina looked at him uncomprehendingly, then turned back to Dorian. He could see, physically see, the memory of what had happened slowly and painfully returning to her, the pain of it spreading like a storm cloud across her features, from her furrowed brow down to her trembling lower lip.
‘I didn’t die,’ she murmured.
‘No, my darling,’ said Dorian gently. ‘You didn’t.’
Sabrina’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I wanted to.’ Slumping back against the pillow, she closed her eyes again.
‘Sabrina!’ Dorian panicked. ‘Do something,’ he shouted at Dr Emanuelle. ‘Help her!’
‘She’s fine,’ said the doctor, looking at the red lines on the monitor measuring Sabrina’s brainwaves. ‘She’s tired, that’s all. Let her rest. I’ll leave the nurse with you. When she wakes up again, we’ll run all the tests, but you should try to relax now, Mr Rasmirez. She made it.’
He was right. It was astonishing how quickly, once she’d come around, Sabrina bounced back to normal. Well, perhaps ‘bounced’ wasn’t quite the right word. Throughout the day her mood remained listless and subdued. She herself did not seem to share the general delight at her survival. But physically, her recovery was as fast as it was miraculous. By the end of that first day she was sitting up in bed, eating and drinking and catching up on the television news. When an item came on about the Oscars, she turned up the volume. But when the commentary turned to her own dramatic recovery – evidently, Ed Steiner had wasted no time releasing a statement – and included footage of her and Viorel together, she became visibly distressed.
‘Turn it off,’ she told Dorian, who was still seated in his usual armchair beside her bed. ‘I can’t watch.’
Dorian did as he was asked. He hated to see her so upset, fighting back the tears.
‘He wasn’t right for you, you know,’ he said gently.
It was the wrong thing to say, like opening the floodgates on an enormous dam of emotion. ‘He was!’ sobbed Sabrina. ‘He was right for me. I wasn’t good enough for him, that was the problem.’
‘How can you say that?’ said Dorian. ‘You’re
too
good for him. You’re too good for any man, for that matter. You’re perfect.’
Sabrina was so surprised, she stopped crying for a moment. Was this the same Dorian Rasmirez who’d spent the best part of last year telling her what a spoiled, selfish, obnoxious little madam she was? ‘Perfect?’
‘Well,’ Dorian grinned, ‘perhaps not perfect in the strictest sense of the word. But you’re perfect to me.’ Taking her hand, he said solemnly, ‘I love you, Sabrina. I’m in love with you. Will you marry me?’
Sabrina lay still for a long time, saying nothing.
I should have known
, she thought to herself.
He’s been here in the hospital all this time, waiting for me. That’s more than friendly concern.
But at the same time she struggled to reconcile the Dorian she knew in England, the dictatorial director, with the man clasping her hand now, proclaiming his love for her.
‘I can’t marry you,’ she said, her voice as soft and kind as she could make it. ‘I know there’s no hope for me and Viorel. If I didn’t know that for sure, I wouldn’t have …’ She left the sentence hanging.
‘I know,’ said Dorian quietly.
‘But that doesn’t change the fact that I still love him. I’m sorry.’
As she said the words, she thought:
What am I sorry for, exactly? That it’s over for me and Vio? Or that I’ve just rejected an offer of marriage from one of the most wonderful men in the world?
The truth was that there had always been something between her and Dorian. That night when he’d defended her outside the pub at Loxley and they’d ended up having a screaming row; or after he bailed her out of a police cell in Manchester and they’d shared that totally unexpected kiss; or in Romania, when he’d confided in her about the end of his marriage. There was a spark between them, a connection that ran deeper than friendship or even than the notoriously volatile actress/director relationship. She just wasn’t prepared to have it verbalized here, now, in hospital, only days after Viorel had left her. What else could she say but ‘no’?
Sabrina’s answer wasn’t what Dorian wanted to hear. But he could hardly claim to be surprised. Even if she weren’t still obsessed with Hudson, what reason on earth would a girl like that – a world-class beauty with her whole life ahead of her – have to be interested in an ageing, past-his-prime retread like him? How foolish must he have sounded, proposing out of the blue like that?
‘No,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. It was foolish of me.’
‘Not foolish,’ said Sabrina truthfully. ‘I’m flattered.’
‘Look, can we just forget this?’ said Dorian gruffly. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘OK.’ For the first time since she’d opened her eyes that morning, Sabrina smiled. ‘Let’s talk about our strategy then.’
‘Strategy?’ Dorian raised an eyebrow.
‘For the Oscars,’ said Sabrina impatiently. ‘I’d have gotten Best Actress for sure if I’d done the decent thing and died.’
‘Jesus, Sabrina, don’t say that!’
‘Why not? It’s true. But now that I’ve pulled through, we’re gonna have to fight for it.’
‘All you need to be fighting for is your strength,’ said Dorian soberly, marvelling for the thousandth time at Sabrina’s apparently limitless ambition. Even with a broken heart, and having just emerged from a coma, she was thinking about her next career move.
‘Screw that,’ said Sabrina robustly. ‘Harry Greene fucked your wife. Then he fucked your Sony deal. Are you really gonna sit back and let him fuck your Oscar chances too?’
Dorian smiled. ‘Well, when you put it like that …’
‘Great,’ Sabrina grinned. ‘So we’re agreed. No more weeping and gnashing of teeth. Let’s annihilate the slimy little fucker.’
Dorian didn’t think he had ever loved her more.
Two weeks later, Viorel Hudson was trying to get out of his car in Beverly Hills when he accidentally opened the driver’s door into a paparazzo’s face, knocking the man into the gutter.
‘Fuck you!’ the photographer snarled, clutching his nose, which was spurting blood like a faucet. ‘I’ll sue you for assault, asshole.’
‘Good luck with that,’ drawled Viorel, stepping over the injured man whilst weaving his way through a crowd of his compatriots. ‘Perhaps your lawyer would let me know where I can send the bill for my car? I think you may have scratched the bodywork.’
He’d decided a few weeks ago that if people were going to paint him as a villain, he might as well live up to his new, dastardly reputation.
They want a heartless bastard? I’ll give them a heartless bastard.
Sabrina had left hospital a few days ago and given a press conference in which she completely exonerated him of any wrongdoing, but it had made no difference. ‘
BRAVE SABRINA FORGIVES EX
’, ran the headlines. ‘
HUDSON SHAMED BY LEON’S COMPASSION
.’ Viorel had broken the heart of the nation’s on-again sweetheart. Sabrina might be prepared to forgive him. But nobody else was.
As a result, Viorel had emerged from his self-imposed hiding and begun to live his life in public again, eating out at well-known restaurants, unashamedly attending industry parties in the lead-up to the Oscars, and generally behaving like a man who didn’t care that half of America seemed to view him as on a par with Saddam Hussein. Perfecting his best, Jeremy Irons, villainous British accent, he deliberately taunted the hostile media, ignoring photographers and delivering as many pithy, ironic one-liners as he could think of to every earnestly condemnatory journalist who approached him. In private, he had spoken to Sabrina twice since she’d recovered from her overdose. Neither of them were easy conversations, but Viorel was happy that she sounded healthy and focused on work. She was staying at the private guesthouse on Ed Steiner’s property. He’d offered to visit her there to talk things through in person, but she’d declined.
‘Truly, I can’t face seeing you. Not yet,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘I’ve told Dorian I’m not up to doing promotion yet, at least not jointly.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Vio wryly. ‘Nobody wants me anywhere
near
the promotional events. I’d be about as popular as Hitler at a Bar Mitzvah.’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that,’ said Sabrina.
‘Not your fault, angel.’
‘It’ll pass. You’ll be yesterday’s news before you know it.’
Viorel laughed. ‘Thanks a lot!’
‘Come on, you know what I mean. I’ve been there, remember? Maybe you should try taking some pills? It worked for me.’
‘Don’t joke,’ said Vio angrily. He cared about Sabrina far, far more than people knew, or cared to admit. But, stubborn to the end, he was damned if he was going to show it to the press who were so determined to destroy him.
A pretty, peroxide blonde in a vintage denim miniskirt and cleavage-bearing, Gucci silk shirt thrust herself in front of Vio as he crossed the street.
‘Is it true you’re quitting Hollywood and moving back to England?’
‘No,’ snapped Vio. ‘It isn’t. It’s utter crap, but I suspect you’ll print it anyway.’
Ironically, he found he’d been thinking about England a lot lately. He’d always adored LA. In the last six years he couldn’t bring to mind a single occasion on which he’d felt homesick. But recently the allure of Hollywood’s bright lights had soured, even for him. Cooped up alone in his apartment under self-imposed house arrest, his mind kept returning to Abel and Tish, to Loxley in all its glorious tranquillity, to Tish’s maddening, self-righteous, pull-your-socks-up attitude and clipped, upper-class tones, which had irked him so much last summer, but which now seemed to call to him with all the nostalgic pull of a sea siren’s song.
‘Will you be going to the Academy Awards with the rest of the
Wuthering Heights
cast?’ The peroxide girl was no sea siren. Her voice was nasal and grating, the aural equivalent of lemon juice in the eyes. ‘How do you feel about seeing Sabrina again?’ She smelled even worse than she sounded. Her perfume – Kai – was so strong that Vio felt as if he’d walked into a freshly air-sprayed loo.
‘I’ll support the movie in whatever way I’m asked,’ he said curtly. ‘And I couldn’t care less about seeing Sabrina again.’ Cue horrified gasps from the passers-by in earshot. ‘Now be a good girl and fuck off, would you? I’m busy.’
Pushing past the girl as she gleefully wrote down his last gift of a quote, Viorel hurried into the nearest store. Talk about being hounded. That was truly what the paps were like, a pack of bloodthirsty dogs intent on ripping the flesh from his body. It was a relief when the gold-plated door of Louis Vuitton swished closed behind him, and he found himself on the cool, air-conditioned side of the tinted glass storefront windows, alone at last.
Or so he thought.
‘Well, well. This
is
a surprise. Mr Viorel Hudson, as I live and breathe.’
Chrissie Rasmirez stepped out from behind a row of fur coats and fixed him with a coquettish smile. Vio’s first thought was:
Christ, she looks good
. Dating Harry Greene obviously agreed with her. With her hair newly cut and dyed a softer shade of honey blonde, and her skin glowing like a teenager’s, she looked ten years younger than when he’d last seen her in Romania. The red Hervé Léger minidress she was wearing was probably a bit too young for her, but with her taut size-two figure she managed to pull it off.
‘Are you shopping or hiding?’ She gestured towards the photographers lined up outside the shop window like a firing squad.
‘Neither,’ said Viorel. He was in no mood to make small talk with Dorian’s bitch of an ex.
‘Well, it must be one or the other,’ said Chrissie, either missing his
froideur
or ignoring it. ‘Perhaps you’re looking for a peace offering for poor little Sabrina? If that’s the case, I can recommend the mink stole. A very
comforting
fur, mink, I always think.’
Viorel looked at her, struggling to think of anything to say. Every time he saw Chrissie he felt guilty about Dorian, although their afternoon of lovemaking at Loxley felt like a lifetime ago now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said brusquely. ‘I have to go.’
‘Wait, don’t be like that,’ Chrissie called after him. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’ There was genuine pleading in her voice. Reluctantly, Viorel turned around.
‘How’s Dorian? I know the two of you must be seeing a lot of each other, what with the Oscars coming up and everything.’
‘He’s fine,’ said Viorel frostily. ‘Very good in fact,’ he couldn’t resist adding. ‘Excited about the movie’s chances. We all are.’
‘I wouldn’t get too excited if I were you,’ said Chrissie, running her fingers lovingly over a full-length fox-fur coat. ‘
Celeste
is odds-on to sweep the board.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Vio. ‘What do you care about Dorian anyway? You’ve clearly moved on.’
Chrissie pouted. ‘We were together for almost twenty years, you know. I still care.’
Yeah, right
, thought Vio.
You want to keep your options open in case he gets that Oscar after all, or Harry leaves you for a younger model.
‘I read that he’d been at Sabrina’s bedside for weeks like a lovesick puppy,’ Chrissie said archly. ‘I always knew there was something going on between those two, though of course he denied it.’
Viorel laughed. Her hypocrisy was truly stunning.
‘There’s nothing going on. There never was. Sabrina’s young enough to be his daughter.’
Chrissie laughed loudly. ‘Oh, darling, please. This is LA!’
‘Look,’ said Viorel, ‘Dorian’s a friend of mine, OK? He’s doing well, and he’ll keep doing well if you just stay the hell out of his life. Haven’t you done enough damage?’