Flawless (29 page)

“Spray me?”

The bronzing booth was the ultimate indignity. Standing stark naked in a weird sort of silver pod, her hair in curlers and an old-fashioned shower cap, she felt like Nora Batty beamed up to the Battlestar Galactica. Misty, more of a butch, lesbian mechanic than ever in protective goggles and holding what looked like a blowtorch, walked around her quite unselfconsciously, spraying her with instant tanning mist in some of the most embarrassingly intimate places.

However, even Scarlett had to admit that the end result was impressive.

“My God,” she gasped, looking down at her breasts ensconced in the emerald-green, Monique Lhuillier evening dress. “I’ve gone up three bra sizes.”

Misty grinned. “It’s all about the shading. But hey, you know that. You’re an artist, right?”

She was home by four and had intended to spend an hour sketching a design for a new Tahitian black pearl choker that had come to her under the blow-dryer. But by five thirty the suspense of waiting, combined with Boxford’s persistent, resentful howling—he knew that the evening dress meant he was about to be abandoned—got too much for her, and she drove over to the store, parking her rented Prius out back and walking in through
the garden. She’d added a couple of uniquely English touches—hollyhocks and roses had replaced the original Zen plantings of orchid and bamboo, and the gray paved patio had been switched to gravel paths, hemmed in by formal foot-high box hedges—but otherwise it was unchanged, as glorious and light-filled a sun trap as the day she’d first seen it in January with Jake.

“My, my! Don’t we look a princess?” Perry exclaimed, clapping his hands gleefully as Scarlett walked in. It was Jake who’d tempted him into the job, but he’d soon come to adore Scarlett almost as much. A true aesthete, he was attracted to beauty in all its forms, and no one could deny that the willowy, ethereal Miss Drummond Murray was beautiful. She was also highly talented. After seven long years at Cartier, where designers never took a risk, Perry was overjoyed at being given the chance to watch her creative flow in such glorious, untrammeled action. Like Jake, he had no doubts tonight’s opening would be a roaring success.

“One look at you and those celebrity actresses are gonna turn a-
round
,” he gushed, circling his boss as if he were appraising a sculpture. “No one likes to be outshone in
People
magazine.”

“
People
magazine? Are they coming?” asked Scarlett, half excited and half terrified at the prospect. “Jake never said anything—”

“Try and breathe, honey,” said Perry soothingly. “Our boy knows how to work the press. You just focus on being the creative genius and looking divine.”

Caterers were wandering in and out, adding the finishing touches to the bar—as well as champagne there would be various diamond-themed cocktails on offer (a “Star of India” consisted of two parts vodka, two parts rum, and a dash of cranberry soda) with only a few light, carb-free nibbles on offer to help mop up all the alcohol. Jake was of the firm belief that a drunk customer was a happy customer. Scarlett could only pray that by tomorrow morning her gorgeous new store wouldn’t have been redecorated with indelible red cocktail stains or worse. Inside, she’d
totally revamped the place, eschewing her normal love of color and depth and focusing instead on a clean, white space reflective of their new name and new ethos. Not only were her designs and the diamonds they used flawless, the store seemed to say, but they offered customers the chance to buy beauty with a clean conscience. With Scarlett’s politically correct, eco-friendly jewelry—or, as Perry liked to put it, “Cartier with a Heart-ier”—the new Flawless offered something unique among LA’s high-end boutiques. Tonight would be the first and most crucial test of whether that would pay off.

“Please tell me they’ll come.” Scarlett turned desperately to Perry for reassurance as she fiddled unnecessarily with an arrangement of white lilies.

“Oh, sweetie. Of course they’ll come.” He smiled, hugging her. He smelled of lavender and soap, like a baby, although his arms were astonishingly strong and manly, a hangover from all those years of dancing. It was the most comforting hug Scarlett had had in years. “Trust your uncle Perry. You’ll be beating them off with a stick.”

He was right. By seven o’clock, when doors officially opened, there was already an expectant line of partygoers milling around outside. Within half an hour their numbers had swelled to well over a hundred, and Scarlett’s nerves had shifted focus to the same problem that had been occupying Jake for most of last week—where the hell were they going to put them all? The arrival of Salma Hayek and her new fiancé, shortly followed by the Simpson sisters, prompted the sort of paparazzi scrimmage that Scarlett had only ever seen before on
E! True Hollywood Story
, and by the time her own friends from London put in an appearance the shop was so heaving with bodies that she could do little more than nod toward them helplessly from the far side of the room.

“Not bad, eh?” Jake, who’d rolled up late (“I knew you’d get there early. No point both of us being here”) looking relaxed and
happy after his day at the Peninsula, battled his way through the hordes to her side. His turquoise shirt clashed wantonly with his violet eyes and brought out both his tan and the blondness of his artfully disheveled hair. Wearing a woman’s charm bracelet Scarlett had designed on his wrist—he was so blatantly macho he could get away with it—and a pair of signature Flawless diamond cuff links, he could have been a pop star or an unusually handsome gangster. Hundreds of pairs of female eyes bore into his back like lasers, but he seemed characteristically untroubled by the heat, flashing his “I told you so” grin at Scarlett as he kissed her on both cheeks. “And you thought you’d be sitting here all alone like Norma No Mates.”

“There’s certainly a lot of interest,” admitted Scarlett. “Has anyone bought anything yet?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Salma ordered two pairs of earrings, and Anna May, one of my regulars, is springing for the daisy-chain necklace as we speak.”

He nodded in the direction of the open cabinets, where Perry was cupping a delicate yellow tourmaline, platinum, and diamond chain between his manicured fingers while a man and a woman looked on.

“That’s the most expensive piece in the store,” gulped Scarlett.

“I know,” said Jake. “Those are my stones, remember?”

Back home in Notting Hill, she’d have expected to hold on to a necklace that valuable for months or even years, using it as a display or catalog piece until she happened upon some freakishly big spender. But this couple looked like they were preparing to drop a million dollars on a passing whim.

“Hold on,” she said, looking at the woman more closely. “Isn’t that the girl I saw getting out of your car the other morning? The one you were snogging the face off?”

Jake looked at her blankly. “Which morning? I do wish you’d be a bit more specific, angel.”

“My God, you’re shameless,” said Scarlett disapprovingly. “But then again, so’s she. Isn’t she nervous to bring her husband here? I mean, what if someone says something to him?”

Jake laughed out loud. “This is Hollywood, not Kansas bloody City. Everyone has affairs here. Two of her old man’s exmistresses are over there.” He turned and pointed to a pair of identical brunettes, admiring the rings on display behind them. “And that’s his present squeeze, Leila Collins, with
her
husband, Don. Another loyal client of mine,” he added, enjoying Scarlett’s evident discomfiture.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I think it’s awful,” she said seriously. “Isn’t anyone happily married in this town?”

“They’re all happily married,” said Jake. “Anna May’s one of the happiest married women I know. And I know a few.”

After three months of working together, thrust into one another’s company almost daily, Scarlett was still no better at figuring out when he meant something and when he was teasing her—winding her up, as he put it. Suspecting a tease with Anna May, she managed a smile, which Jake returned with a megawatter of his own.

“That’s better,” he said. “You know you’re much prettier when you stop disapproving of everything for five minutes and give peace a chance. Here.” He thrust a lethal-looking cocktail into her hand. “Have a drink.”

“Thanks, but no, I shouldn’t.” She pushed it back at him. “Tonight’s work, remember?”

“Drink it,” said Jake, and for some reason she found herself complying. “There’s nothing worse than an uptight hostess.”

Watching him drift off into the sea of, to him at least, familiar faces, she began to wonder how many of the women here he must have slept with over the years. Half? Three-quarters? Somehow she found the image of him jumping naked onto so many faceless bodies, like an obsessive rodeo rider, deeply unsettling. So far she’d spent most of her time in LA holed up at Nancy’s cottage, working on her designs, or running around town with Perry, sourcing interesting interiors for Flawless. She hadn’t really been exposed to the other side of life here—to Jake’s LA, with
its bed-hopping, its conspicuous consumption, its all-around trashiness glinting like a fake diamond beneath the ever-shining sun. This was the side she’d dreaded back in London, when she’d thought about making the move. Was it really possible to live in Sodom and Gomorrah, amid so much that she disapproved of—and not just to live here, but to sell diamonds to the richest of the rich—and not become tainted herself, infected with the same morality-eating virus that seemed to have struck down everybody else?

Nancy had managed it. And most of Nancy’s friends, struggling screenwriters making ends meet as waitresses or part-time tarot readers in Topanga, convinced that their stay in LA was temporary, even after decades stuck here, trying to get a break.

Is that what would happen to her? Would she get sucked in to the black hole of LA life, telling herself year after year that she’d move back to London soon, right after the next sale/store opening/ad campaign? The thought made her shiver.

“You cold, sweetie?” Nancy, a breath of fresh air among all these overdone women in hot pants and jeweled flip-flops slipped an arm around Scarlett’s waist. With Scarlett in heels and her in flats, the height difference between them was even more comical. “Hey, I could be your ventriloquist’s dummy!” she laughed, self-deprecatingly, gazing up at her friend. “Then you could say whatever you wanted to Jake and his harem and blame it all on me. It’s going well though, isn’t it? Perry’s selling up a storm to Barbie and her husband.”

“So I hear,” said Scarlett, laughing herself. The wicked green cocktail was at last starting to work its magic, and she did feel more relaxed.

“Shame there aren’t any decent single men hanging around,” said Nancy, scanning the sea of couples as best she could from her low vantage point. “Whoa, scratch that. Jake Gyllenhaal lookalike, two o’clock.”

“Where?” said Scarlett idly.

“Over there!” whispered Nancy. “Oh my God. Oh my God oh my God oh my God. He’s coming over!”

Scarlett felt her heart leap, twirl around, then plunge back into the pit of her stomach in a complicated corkscrew motion, as if it were trying to take gold in the Olympic high dive. There, making his way toward her in a simple dark suit, a smile as wide as the Mississippi plastered across his face, was Magnus.

“Hello, stranger,” he beamed, taking her in his arms and kissing her directly on the mouth before she had a chance to protest. “Did you miss me?”

“Not in the least,” lied Scarlett, crossly. Really, married people had no business being such good kissers. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, of course.” Magnus looked hurt. “I know it’s been months. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

“Oh, don’t give me that pout,” seethed Scarlett. “You lied to me.”

“What…when?” he frowned.

“What do you mean, when? We’ve only ever seen each other once. At Drumfernly, of course, when we had our ‘one-night stand,’ as you so charmingly put it at the time. The night you conveniently forgot to mention that you were
married
.”

“Oh. That.”

“Yes,” said Scarlett caustically. “That.”

“Look, I know what it must look like,” said Magnus. “But honestly, Carole and I have been living apart for over two years now—”

“Save it,” said Scarlett, wishing she didn’t still want him so much, even after all this time.

“Hello, handsome.” Nancy, with her usual impeccable timing, inserted herself between Scarlett and Magnus, unconsciously thrusting her ample chest in Magnus’s general direction. “I’m Nancy, Scarlett’s best friend. But I’d like to make it absolutely
clear that I’d betray her without a second thought if you felt like sleeping with me. And you are?”

Magnus roared with laughter, and offered her his hand.

“Magnus,” he said, still not taking his eyes from Scarlett’s. “Is this the part where you tell me that you’ve already heard a lot about me?”

“Oh, I have,” said Nancy, grinning. “None of it repeatable in public, unfortunately. It’s rude not to tell a girl you’re married before you seduce her, you know.”

“Jesus, I am
not
married, OK?”

“So you’re divorced?” shot back Scarlett.

“Well, no. Not yet. Not officially…” stammered Magnus.

“Don’t worry about her,” said Nancy, seeing his face fall as Scarlett swept off into the crowd to mingle, shooting him a scathing look as she went. “She’s punishing you, that’s all. Which you fully deserve. She’ll get over it.”

“I hope she gets over it sometime this evening,” said Magnus ruefully. “I was kinda relying on staying at her place. So much for surprising her on her big night.”

Across the room, Jake was deep in conversation with the producer of NBC’s latest hit legal drama when he caught sight of Scarlett storming off from the good-looking giant in the dark-gray suit.

“I’m sorry, what were you saying?” he asked. The producer stopped in his monologue, realizing that Jake hadn’t taken in a word.

Suit guy was whispering with Nancy now, thick as thieves. He obviously knew Scarlett well, and from his confident stance and body language, you could see instantly that he was full of himself. Jake found himself fighting an urge to wipe the smile off his face by strangling him with his blue-and-white Harvard tie.