Kirsty gingerly snipped at the bottom of her brown bob and handed the segment of hair to Karin.
As Summer came back into the room, Karin walked
purposefully towards her. ‘I want you to go to Joel at Real Hairdressing,’ said Karin, handing Summer the brunette locks. ‘Tell him I sent you and tell him to make your hair that colour. When he’s done it – and not before – come back here and maybe we can start trying on some swimsuits.’
Kirsty and Dan looked at each other and smiled.
Jilly was worried. After that snake Richard had gone off with the office floozie and Erin had moved out of his apartment, Jilly had fully expected her granddaughter to return to Cornwall immediately. After all, she had no home, no boyfriend, some job answering telephones twelve hours a day; what on earth could be keeping her in London?
‘I just don’t understand it, lovey,’ she said down the phone line. ‘London’s expensive, it’s lonely. Why don’t you come home?’
Erin had to admit Jilly had a point. She’d been in London six weeks and here she was, living in a single room in a Bayswater hotel costing her a hundred pounds a night. She hadn’t any friends to stay with after she’d left Richard’s – she could hardly have asked Adam to put her up for a few days while she found somewhere new to live – and working so hard at the Midas Corporation, there seemed neither the time nor the opportunity to make any new friends. It wasn’t quite the glamorous life either of them had imagined for her; then again, there was something about Midas that made her fizz with excitement, and it wasn’t just her £70,000 pay-packet. She wasn’t quite ready to leave just yet.
‘When you spent four years at university getting a Russian degree, it wasn’t to spend your life making somebody else’s travel arrangements, was it?’ said Jilly. ‘Come home. Finish your novel. That’s you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’
Erin felt an enormous rush of guilt at the mention of her novel. Jilly could almost read her mind; Erin hadn’t written a word since she had been in London. But she’d started another career now and she couldn’t very well admit defeat so soon and go running home just because Richard was such a rat.
‘Let me give it a week,’ said Erin. ‘This hotel arrangement is purely temporary. If I haven’t got settled in a week, we can talk again.’ She put down the receiver and resolved that she had to find somewhere immediately, if not sooner.
‘Now the next property I’m going to show you is really special,’ said the estate agent with an encouraging smile. Erin groaned inwardly. It was the fourth flat in as many days that this estate agent had shown her. He had kept phoning her up at work, promising her he could find her something amazing, but everything he had shown her so far seemed decidedly overpriced or poky.
Perhaps this flat would be the one, Erin thought hopefully, as they pulled up outside a huge Victorian building in a shady street in Canonbury, the prettiest part of Islington. It certainly looked good from the outside, with rich, honey-coloured brickwork and large well-tended flowerpots sitting on the wide windowsills.
‘Incredible isn’t it?’ smiled Ryan Hall, the agent.
It’s her who’s incredible
, he thought.
I’ve got to close the deal on this one.
Ryan had been desperately seeking out impressive properties all week, just so he could see Erin again.
‘It used to be an old cotton factory,’ he said, striding up the path. ‘Lay derelict for years until it was redeveloped a
few years ago.’ He jangled the key in the lock and gently touched Erin’s shoulder to guide her in.
‘I’d live here if I could afford it,’ said Ryan, hoping she’d get the hint and invite him around. ‘A girl like you deserves a place like this.’
As they walked inside, Erin nodded in agreement. There was a large lobby with a marble floor and an old-fashioned grille-front lift – a relic from the building’s industrial days. She had always dreamed of living in a place like this. Erin crossed her fingers as they rode up to the second floor.
Please be nice
, she whispered,
please be nice
. She desperately needed to find somewhere to call her own or she’d be back on that Port Merryn clifftop before the end of the month.
‘Our agency looks after the entire building,’ continued Ryan as he opened the door to apartment eleven. ‘I’ve only been with Thomson Bailey three months but my boss tells me that apartments in this building hardly ever become available. Once you’re here, you don’t want to leave.’
For once, Erin thought Ryan Hall might be telling the truth. It wasn’t a huge space, a corridor painted soft sage green with high ceilings and curly cornices led into a big living space already kitted out with squashy cream sofas and billowing velvet drapes. There was a small open-plan kitchen, a bathroom with just enough space for a shower, and a large bedroom with a sleigh bed and – she gasped – French doors which led out to a tiny balcony.
‘It’s fantastic,’ smiled Erin, unable to hide her glee. ‘You should have shown me this place first.’
‘Then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of your company all week,’ smiled Ryan Hall honestly.
‘How much did you say this one was?’ she asked.
‘Five hundred a week,’ said Ryan, flicking a piece of fluff from his shoulder.
Erin felt her heart clank to the ground. It was almost
twice what she had been planning on playing; over half of her salary after tax.
Just then, Ryan’s mobile began to ring furiously. ‘Make yourself comfortable and think about it,’ he whispered.
‘Yes, er, hello darling. Just got caught up. I won’t be long,’ Ryan hissed into the phone, quickly moving down the corridor and out of the front door.
Erin smiled to herself: the girlfriend. Clearly Ryan’s sledgehammer seduction techniques worked on someone. She wandered back into the hallway, trying to add up her outgoings in her head, when suddenly there was the clatter of the lift door opening followed by raucous laughter. Seconds later, a head appeared round the door.
‘Oh hello. You must be looking round,’ said an Irish accent.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Erin, a little surprised. She took a moment to look at him. He was late twenty-something with a crop of dirty blonde hair, a mischievous smile and lively eyes that looked a little glassy and drunk.
‘Sorry. Just being a good neighbour and all that,’ he said, slightly slurring his words. ‘I saw the door open, so I was just checking it hadn’t been burgled or anything.’ He vaguely extended a hand but then thought better of it and used it to prop himself up in the frame of the door. ‘Anyway. I’m Chris Scanlan.’
‘No, not a burglar, just looking round,’ smiled Erin. Chris Scanlan was dressed in a suit, she noted, but not one that suggested he worked in the City, more like a student dressing up for a wedding. He was standing next to a petite pretty girl with long dark hair who wrapped her arm proprietorially around his waist. She looked a little drunk too.
Chris Scanlan pointed to the door of number twelve. ‘I live there, by the way. Are you going to take it? I’m not drunk and noisy very often, honestly,’ he added.
‘I like it, but it’s a little pricy for me,’ she whispered,
hoping Ryan Hall couldn’t hear her. ‘And,’ Erin smiled, ‘I think the all-night parties might be a bit much.’
‘Talking of all-night …’ smiled the little brunette, tugging Chris Scanlan’s hand towards his flat.
‘Well, it’s definitely a great place to live,’ said Chris over his shoulder, before he was yanked inside and the door was slammed.
What a prat, thought Erin. Do I want to pay all that money to live opposite some womanizer with balls bigger than his brains? She’d had enough of that with Richard.
‘So. Do you want overnight to think about it?’ asked Ryan Hall, appearing in the hallway slightly flustered. ‘Although I have to warn you, I’m showing three people round tomorrow morning.’
Erin turned around to look at the flat lying invitingly behind her. All cosy colours and soft lighting. And she thought of the Bayswater hotel costing her a hundred pounds a night.
‘How about I make a offer of four hundred a week?’ she said, smiling as sweetly as she could. ‘I can supply excellent references. I actually work for Adam Gold, you know, the property developer?’ said Erin hopefully.
But Ryan Hall didn’t need any more incentive. He was already thinking that, if he could get a nice low rent for this very pretty girl, then she might somehow owe him a favour. Like dinner at Lola’s.
‘Tell you what, I’ll put in a few calls and we’ll see if I can wave my magic wand,’ he said with a wink.
Erin drove all the way back to her single bed in Bayswater, hoping that Ryan Hall would do just that.
Alexander Delemere, fifth Lord of Stowe, thought his cock was about to explode. Molly Sinclair sat astride him, grinding her hips into his, the muscles of her pussy tightening exquisitely around his shaft, dipping her body so she lowered a sweet brown nipple into his mouth. Molly leant back, her spine arched, her rounded breast pointing skywards.
‘Yes, yes,’ she screamed, feeling the sweet pulse of orgasm swell around her body. ‘Hell yes!’ shouted Alex in reply, before collapsing on the crumpled linen of the hotel sheets.
‘Good Lord,’ he whispered, as Molly slid herself off his cock and lay down beside him to light a cigarette.
She propped herself up on a pillow and looked at Lord Alexander Delemere through a haze of grey smoke. Ever since Marcus had come on the scene, Molly had cut down her current list of lovers, but Alexander Delemere was one fix she was not prepared to give up, no matter how serious things were getting with Marcus. It never ceased to amaze Molly how good sex with Alexander Delemere could be. Age was not an issue when it came to Molly’s lovers: but enjoying sex, not having to fake orgasm, certainly was. Men over sixty were so soft – their crepe-textured skin, their
blancmangey buttocks and their baggy balls could be quite off-putting unless she was drunk, but Alex was in fine shape for a man his age.
They had been meeting once a week at the Basil Street hotel ever since Evie Delemere’s christening, and the pattern was always the same. They would meet for a quiet lunch in Mayfair in dusty restaurants so far off the social scene they might as well have been in Scotland. Alex would have fish or pheasant. They would take a black cab to the Basil Street hotel where the concierge would pretend each time not to know them. They would undress, have sex, a little conversation, each time getting to know one another a little better. Sometimes Alex would present her with a gift. He was not a generous man. So far she had received an obvious red satin camisole that was too big, a box of chocolates and a small butterfly-shaped brooch with coloured stones that Molly thought were rubies but later discovered were merely crystal.
She was realistic enough to know that at this point she was no threat to his marriage, and that although Alex seemed to crave her body like some infatuated teenager it was going to take a good deal more than a handful of fucks in a Mayfair hotel to break up his marriage to Lady Vivian. He was old money, and that meant golden handcuffs and traditional values. But Molly wanted to keep this iron in her fire to see what would happen. And there were worse things to be than the mistress of one of the richest men in the country, after all.
She watched him get out of bed and put on a towelling robe.
‘Shall I order a little room service?’
Molly shook her head. ‘I assume you have to be going soon.’
‘You assume correctly,’ he replied, glancing at his watch. ‘Although I might ring down for a pot of tea.’
Molly had to suppress a smile.
Rock and roll.
He sat back on the edge of the bed and Molly knelt behind him to give his shoulders a rub.
‘How’s Evie?’ she asked playfully. ‘As gorgeous as her granddad?’
Alexander turned to face her. ‘Do you have to remind me of my advancing years?’
She wrapped her arms around his body, her fingers probing between the fold of his robe. ‘You’re only as young as the woman you feel Alex.’
‘Since you ask, Evie is a delight. Donna on the other hand …’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, she is a friend of yours, I’m being rude.’
Molly sat back on the bed and took a drag of her cigarette to stop herself smiling. Do-gooder Donna was no friend, just someone useful. ‘Please, be my guest and continue,’ she said, lying back on the pillow.
‘It’s just her plans for the estate,’ he said, pacing around the floor with visible irritation. ‘I assume you’ve been?’
Molly nodded. The Delemere estate comprised two main parcels: the main house, a vast Queen Anne mansion often described as an ‘architectural national treasure,’ where Alexander and Vivian lived, and a smaller manor house on the edge of the grounds, where Donna and Daniel resided and where Donna had spent the best part of last year renovating the barns to create the Delemere farm store and spa.
‘She spent the better half of two million pounds on her little alternative health and farming fantasy.
Two million pounds
,’ continued Alexander, his eyes blazing like dark coals. Molly knew that, while she could reduce him to a purring kitten in the bedroom, Alexander Delemere had not built up one of the country’s foremost industrial empires by being soft.
‘That she is spending my son’s money as if it were water
is one thing, but the fact that she has hoodwinked my wife into this New Age mumbo-jumbo folly is another. They are partners now apparently in this ridiculous New Age business. Vivian,’ he paused, seemingly embarrassed to utter his wife’s name, as if it might summon up her physical presence in the room. ‘Vivian is now insisting she use our money,
my
money to expand.’
Molly didn’t like to point out that the Delemere shop and spa was probably a very good business investment where London’s social elite flocked to buy overpriced sausages and organic cheese or pick up an expensive facial. Organic ‘natural food’ destinations were hot, but she suspected Alexander didn’t want to hear that point of view. ‘It is a rather absurd notion,’ agreed Molly, pulling a sheet around her body. ‘Then again, Donna has always been – how can I put this politely? – on the make.’
‘Really,’ said Alex coolly, suspecting she was a sympathizer. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh nothing,’ replied Molly, taking a lengthy drag of cigarette. ‘Just things I hear.’
She really had his attention now.
‘Well, if you ever hear anything else, please let me know immediately,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I will not have that woman go through my son’s money, my wife’s money,
my
money as if it were her own. I won’t have it.’
The doorbell rang. It was a bellboy with tea.
‘Mmm … why don’t we have our Earl Grey in bed, Alex?’ purred Molly. ‘Shame to let it get cold.’