Authors: Jessie Keane
Daniella went into the bathroom to clean up. Annie and Max headed for the door.
‘Oh – one moment,’ said Lucco.
They both turned back, looked at him.
‘What?’ asked Annie, her voice blank with dislike.
‘You’re not welcome here any more. Tomorrow morning, first thing – I want you gone.’
‘Oh, here we go again,’ said Ellie mournfully when she found Annie standing on the doorstep at eleven o’clock next morning. Then she saw Max Carter standing behind Annie. ‘Holy
shi—
hello, Mr Carter.’
‘Mark Carson,’ said Annie.
‘What?’ asked Ellie, trailing after her into the kitchen. She glanced back. Max was coming in, too. What the . . .?
‘Max is acting as my security for the moment,’ said Annie, resting her heavy holdall on the kitchen table. ‘My bodyguard, right? If anyone asks, that’s
anyone
, he’s Mark Carson. The Carter boys already know about it.’
‘Right,’ said Ellie, as if she knew what the fuck Annie was talking about.
Bodyguard?
What the hell was that all about?
‘Sorry about the short notice, Ells, but I wanted somewhere Gerda could reach me.’
‘Gerda?’
‘Layla’s nanny. So I couldn’t do a hotel, it had to be somewhere Gerda had the number for. And I couldn’t do that to Dolly, push her out of her flat, she loves that place, and Queenie’s place is barely liveable in, and I wouldn’t even
think
about my cousin Kath’s, the dirty mare, and anyway there’s no phone line into Queenie’s and Gerda don’t know the number there and she don’t know Kath’s number, so I thought, who’ll have a room or two going begging? And I thought, I know – there’s always a spare bed in a place like this . . .’
‘You got it fixed then?’ Max was looking at the freshly painted kitchen door.
Ellie smiled nervously. ‘Oh, yeah. No problem.’
‘Business good?’
‘Brisk. Yeah. Thanks for asking.’
‘We’ll try not to get under your feet,’ said Annie tersely, thinking that Ellie was going to start
curtsying
in a moment, and that he was big-headed enough without that.
‘No problem,’ said Ellie, but she was thinking that it probably
would
be a problem, because Annie Carter was a problem with a capital P, and you were pissing against the wind if you believed otherwise.
‘Well, let’s get you sorted out with a room,’ said Ellie, trying to be cheerful about it. After all, they’d made up. She’d thought Max was going to rip Annie’s head off when he met up with her, but no, look – here they were, together.
‘Two rooms,’ said Max coldly.
‘One each,’ said Annie, equally cool.
Ah. So hostilities were ongoing.
She showed them up to their rooms. Little blonde Rosie, wearing skin-tight hot pants and a sheer chiffon blouse, passed them on the stairs, and gave Max the glad eye.
‘Who’s
that
?’ she asked Ellie when the Madam came back downstairs to the kitchen where Rosie was making tea. ‘That gorgeous guy. Not a punter, is he? Not this early?’
‘Him?’ Ellie sniffed and sat down heavily. She reached for the biscuit tin. Fuck it, she’d sworn off the things but this called for a chocolate digestive at the very least. ‘That, my girl, is a whole lot of trouble. Don’t even
think
about it.’
‘Well,’ said Rosie wistfully, bringing two cups of tea to the table, ‘a girl can dream.’
Ellie snorted and chomped down on a biscuit.
‘It was dreaming about
that
one that got her into trouble in the first place,’ she said, spitting crumbs.
‘Yeah? What happened?’
So Ellie told her most successful working girl about Annie, about Max Carter, and how she had pinched him from her sister, and all that had happened along the way.
‘But they’re back together now?’ asked Rosie finally, enthralled.
‘Separate rooms,’ said Ellie. Shit, she was on her fifth biscuit now and she didn’t feel like slowing down yet.
‘Ah.’ Rosie gave a grin. ‘But you could smell it in the air between them, couldn’t you?’
‘Smell
what
?’ asked Ellie in exasperation. Through the open kitchen doorway she saw Chris come in the front door and she watched him wistfully as he took his seat in the hall.
‘The sexual tension,’ said Rosie, who in Ellie’s opinion read too many Mills & Boon books when she wasn’t entertaining clients, and had some very airy-fairy ideas.
Ellie tore her eyes from Chris and shook her head. Rosie and her bloody stupid romantic notions. ‘I think you’ll find that was pure hatred,’ she said.
‘Well, thanks a
bunch
,’ said Annie to Max as he dumped the bags onto the floor of her room.
Oh, she knew this room. It was the same one she had stayed in when she had moved in here with Aunt Celia, when she had been in disgrace over sleeping with Max. He had been the entire source of her trouble then, and things hadn’t changed a bit. He was
still
getting on her tits.
‘Meaning?’ asked Max, closing the door and leaning against it.
‘Meaning for fuck’s sake why did you have to go and do that?’ she demanded, rounding on him, furious. ‘You can’t take on Lucco Barolli. Do that and he’ll have your guts. Anywhere in the world, he’ll get you.
Anywhere.
You can’t needle him and think you’ll be safe, ever again.’
Max shrugged. He didn’t seem that perturbed. ‘That little bastard needed a lesson,’ he said.
‘Well, let’s hope he forgets that it was you who tried to give him one. Or, I tell you, you’re a dead man walking.’
‘I’m that anyway,’ said Max.
Annie flung her bag onto the double bed and unzipped it. She paused, looked around her. The place was neat and clean, but it wasn’t Holland Park, not by a long chalk. Her whole life felt like a board game. One moment up, the next down. She turned and stared at Max.
‘Now what does that mean?’
‘Just that I should be dead. But I’m alive. And if you think I’m going to stand aside while Junior cuts up rough with a sweet young girl like Daniella, then you don’t know me at all.’
Annie paused.
‘Maybe I don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know why you’re not dead. You never told me.’
Max came over to the bed. ‘Do you even
care
?’
Yes. She did. This was the man she had once loved best in all the world, the man she had sacrificed everything for, even stopped a bullet for. So yes, she cared. But she couldn’t say that aloud, there was too much anger between them right now for that.
Annie shrugged, deliberately casual. ‘I’d like to know, out of interest. After all, there’s nothing else pressing, is there? You got us chucked out of Holland Park, now we’re dossing down in a whorehouse.’
‘You’re better off out of that snake pit. And anyway, this move might force someone to show their hand, come out in the open, and I’m on home territory now –
my
boys run these streets.’ He gave her a glinting look. ‘And as for dossing in a whorehouse – you should feel right at home here,’ he said.
Annie nodded slowly. ‘Say that to me just one more time and I
swear
, you’re going to get your teeth back in an ashtray.’
Now he
did
smile. ‘You and whose army?’
‘You think I don’t have clout? I’ve got connections.’
‘Nah. Your husband had connections. Your stepson’s got connections. Not you.’
‘Well, he’s thrown us out, thanks to you. And so my social diary’s taken a bit of a dip. So go on. Just to fill in the time. Tell me what happened.’
He sat down on the bed, just a couple of feet from her; but they were miles apart.
‘They threw me over the cliff edge at the villa,’ he said. ‘Smashed me up pretty good. But the doctors put me back together again.’
‘All that time . . .’ said Annie, feeling faintly sick. The sheer cruelty of doing something like that to anybody was beyond her. She could see it in her mind’s eye, so clearly: Max falling, plummeting, his body crashing onto the rocks far below.
It was a miracle that he had survived.
‘But you were gone for so long,’ she said.
‘It took a long time for me to recover. When I came to, I didn’t have a clue who I was. The doctors thought my memory would come back, but they didn’t know how long it would take.’
‘So for over two years you didn’t even know who you were?’
He nodded.
‘Then it came back in fits and starts. Almost the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place was you, and Layla. And then, when I remembered what had happened, I thought you must both be dead. I came back to London and then—’
‘Then you found out I’d gone with Constantine,’ filled in Annie.
‘Yeah.’ He stood up, looking grim. ‘But then – knowing you – that shouldn’t have surprised me, should it?’
‘What does
that
mean, “knowing you”? I was
always
faithful to you.’
‘Until a better deal came along. I’d bet you a penny to a pinch of shit, if you’d met Barolli when we were married, you’d have gone for it then and there.’
Annie gritted her teeth. How the hell could he even
suggest
that? ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said stonily.
‘And if you’d known I was alive?’
‘Then I . . .’ Annie stuttered to a halt to stop herself from saying it. What she had been
about
to say was that if Max had been alive then no one, not even Constantine, would have even come close.
But she had loved Constantine.
There was no way he was going to make her deny that love.
These were two very different men – Constantine brought up in wealth and Max in poverty. But they had both learned to carve out their niche in the world, living on their wits, and Annie admired their toughness, their resilience.
‘You were about to say . . .?’ Max prompted.
‘Nothing.’ Annie stood up, busied herself with emptying her holdall. ‘I’d better get unpacked.’
‘What, is it too painful, thinking about him? Thinking about what you’ve lost?’ asked Max, standing up too.
Annie shook her head. She didn’t know
what
to say.
Suddenly Max grabbed her and turned her to face him.
‘Don’t shut me out like that. Tell me what’s going on in that stupid head of yours.’
‘Oh, this from the man who calls me a slut and says I’ll fit right in at a whorehouse? I don’t
want
to talk to you; all you do is use my own words to beat me up with. And
don’t
call me stupid.’ Annie tried to pull away. ‘And
don’t—
’
‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up?’ hissed Max, and kissed her.
Annie was paralysed with shock.
He was kissing her.
She couldn’t believe it, but he was kissing her.
Instantly she pushed away, struggling to get herself free of him.
‘
Bastard
,’ she spat out, furious because what the hell was he playing at? He cursed her, insulted her, and then
kissed
her? Was he mad?
‘What, you’d prefer it if it was Barolli?’ Max’s voice was harsh, cruel.
‘Yeah, as it happens I
would
,’ said Annie angrily.
‘Well, tough. He’s dead; I’m alive. Get used to it.’
‘Let
go
of me,’ yelled Annie, incensed. But he was still holding onto her arms, holding her there tight against him.
‘You know what I really can’t stand about you?’ he asked her.
‘That I’m a tart? Hey, I got news for you – you’ve already said that.’
‘Nah. You know what’s the worst thing? I’ll tell you. It’s that even though I know what you are, even though I
know
that, even when I first saw you and you looked thin and scraggy and weak – even
then
I felt it. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth – I can’t even be in the same
room
as you without getting a hard-on.’
It was the truth. She could feel his erection pressing against her stomach but she was mad, too mad to even think of responding. ‘I fucking well
hate
you,’ she told him.
There was a knock at the door. They both froze.
‘Fuck’s
sake
,’ muttered Max, and Annie wrenched herself free and went to the door and flung it open.
‘
What?
’ she snarled.
Ellie was standing there.
‘Sorry to butt in,’ she said, looking warily at Annie and beyond her to Max. ‘There’s a woman here to see you.’
The woman didn’t look the kind who would ever willingly come knocking at the door of a backstreet brothel. When Annie found her in the front parlour, she was looking around her as if she might somehow be contaminated simply by breathing the air of Limehouse.
What the hell’s she doing here?
wondered Annie.
Her skirt suit was pale camel, immaculate and obviously expensive. Her blonde hair was elegantly coiffed, her make-up was faultless, her nails too long for housework – or indeed work of any kind. Her expression was, as usual, sneering and unpleasant. Through the net curtains, Annie could see a black limo parked outside, and Fredo the uniformed driver standing alongside it.
‘Good
God
,’ she said with a half-smile, looking around her. ‘So this is what you’ve come to?’
Now Annie understood Cara being here. She’d come to gloat over Annie’s fall from grace.
‘Take a seat,’ said Annie.
She felt shaken to the core from her encounter with Max, and her mind kept replaying his admission that she still – despite all he thought of her – turned him on. Her mouth was still tingling from the force of his kiss. Her head was reeling. But was he only trying to get back with her because of Layla? He wanted his daughter, and she believed that he was convinced – even though she had told him otherwise – that she knew where Layla was. Was he playing her like a bloody violin, to get her to spill the beans? If she
did
, then she knew he would snatch Layla from her.