Authors: Vanessa Fox
Oh my God. A toe-curling cringe hit Alex all over again. And when she’d turned to him, stuttering, had there been a hint of triumph in his eye, a flicker of a smile? Bastard.
Was running out of the apartment the right thing to have done? Anger flared again – perhaps she should have had it out with him there and then, told him exactly why she left, exactly what had happened, opened the wound and salted it liberally with the truth.
No. It came like a door slamming in her head. She’d done the right thing. There was still too much at stake to just blurt it all out, more than just the two of them involved.
She’d done the right thing.
Pulling out of the Eaton Square complex as fast as she could, driving blindly along the seafront towards the city, she’d found herself almost at the hospital before she’d come to her senses. But she definitely wasn’t in the mood to see her dad, had instead veered off towards the sea, pulling up in the huge anonymous car park that ran along the seafront in Sandymount where she now sat. She sighed, her hands gripping the top of the steering wheel. The tide was out, in front of her, huge bare stretches of sand were exposed to the elements, deeply scored by the movement of the waves. Framing the view, the twin chimneys of the Pigeon House power station thrusting for the sky, the Wicklow Mountains rising across the bay, their dark shapes haunting and melancholic. This was the view from Sebastian’s apartment…from the balcony, from every aspect of the living room, even from the…kitchen.
Realisation hit her like an arrow, its tip gleaming as it flew from his kitchen counter right into the side of her car.
Her briefcase. Her bloody briefcase! She’d left it in the kitchen, her laptop neatly zipped inside. On the kitchen counter. Right in the middle of the kitchen counter.
Feck. How the hell could she have been so stupid?
AND HOW THE HELL WAS SHE GOING TO GET IT BACK?
To add a further great dollop of humiliation to the whole damn farce, now she was going have to go crawling back in there and get it. Well, she wasn’t about to do that, to go back so he could smirk at her all over again. He could get well and truly stuffed on that front. So how could she get it back? It only took a moment for Alex to decide. She reached for her phone, which, thankfully she’d left in the car when she went up to the apartment.
‘
Hi Jocelyn, how are you? This is Alex Ryan.’ Alex cradled her mobile on her shoulder as she spoke, turning the CD player down, stilling the fan heater.
‘
Alex? Lovely to hear from you. How did you get on?’
Alex put on her ‘everything went great’ voice, light and airy and unconcerned. Only her last words were spelled out tentatively.
‘
Super, I have everything I need to get going on some ideas. I just had one slight technical hitch.’
‘
What was it my dear, what can I help you with?’
‘
Oh Jocelyn, would you believe it, I was so caught up in the ideas for the apartment I managed to leave my laptop behind. I feel such a twit.’
Jocelyn laughed sympathetically, as if she had done exactly the same type of thing herself,
‘
That’s not a problem AT ALL my dear. But I guess you don’t want to pop back and knock on the door and ask for it?’
Alex laughed, focusing on keeping her voice confident, ‘Exactly. I’d feel like I was asking for my ball back. Not terribly professional is it?’
‘
Don’t you worry…’ Alex could hear Jocelyn flicking through a diary, ‘Sebastian has a meeting in London this afternoon, he’s probably already left…He’s staying there tonight and planning to come straight in to the office tomorrow morning. And I don’t have a key but,’ Alex could hear her voice brighten as she arrived at a solution, ‘the cleaners will be there at 9 a.m. I’ll let the company know you’ll be calling over. How’s that?’
Alex’s sigh of relief was louder than she intended,
‘
Marvellous Jocelyn, thanks so much.’
‘
No problem my dear, us girls have to stick together don’t we, or nothing would get done!’
Alex clicked off her phone, and let go of all the fake enthusiasm and bonhomie, deflated, resting her head on the steering wheel. Thank God. Now, she could nip over in the morning and grab it while he was away, which meant that today, she only had to pop in and see her dad and then she could go home and open a very cold bottle of white wine and get totally and utterly pissed.
Anyone passing might have been concerned for her sanity, as sealed from the rain and the mess her life was in, she shuddered, a tear creeping down her cheek, falling onto the lapel of her jacket, rapidly followed by another.
EIGHTEEN
Grafton Street was busier than Peter had expected, the broad pedestrianised area crowded with people ebbing and flowing along its length, occasionally clustering around street performers, craning to get a better look. A man modelling a sleeping dog from damp sand, a grass green woolly hat lying in front of the sculpture for coins; a puppeteer, his puppet rushing into the crowd producing screams of delight from a gang of foreign students.
At the entrance to one of the side streets a flower seller was busy tidying her pitch, organising buckets of brilliantly coloured flowers. A woman in a velvet coat was keeping the assistant occupied choosing a huge bunch. So much for the recession. Peter paused for a second, the heavy scents from the flowers crowding his mind as his eyes ran over lilies and great spiked bunches of he wasn’t sure what. Would he buy Caroline flowers? Maybe not this time. She might not be on her own when he found her and he didn’t want to create any trouble, not just yet anyhow.
Dodging a woman trailing two small children dressed in berets and button-up coats who looked like they’d fallen out of a TV commercial, Peter slipped through the plate glass doors of Brown Thomas and weaved his way through the designer cosmetics counters to the escalator.
Heading up the scents of perfume and leather jostling for attention, Peter stepped off in The Designer Rooms. He paused for a moment, scanning the sparsely-hung perspex rails to his left, bright overhead lights magnified by hundreds of mirrors. The place was a maze of pillars and subsections, appeared to have no logical layout Ahead of him was a shoe display area. He checked briefly, then in one of the mirrors caught a flash of pink and a dark-haired women heading somewhere to his right. Was that her? His footsteps hollow on the peculiar white lino-like flooring, Peter followed her.
A second later he spotted her in a side annexe. Gucci. He should have guessed.
‘
Hello beautiful.’
Sliding up behind Caroline as she inspected a rail of impossibly delicate silk organza dresses, Peter slipped his hand around her and inside the bright pink boxy faux fur coat she was wearing, burying his face in the back of her neck as he spoke.
‘
Oh my!’ Almost dropping the thick paper carrier bags dangling from the crook of her arm, Caroline spun around to see who was behind her. Peter let her go long enough for her to turn to face him, then slipped both hands inside her coat, pulling her lithe body towards his.
‘
Christ you smell good.’ He kept his voice was low.
‘
How did you know I was here?’ Then, her surprise giving way to common sense, Caroline tried to push him away. ‘Let go! Not here.’ Glancing anxiously from side to side she fought hard not to laugh. Even through the denim of her skin- tight jeans she could feel he was hard. ‘You can’t.’
‘
Oh I can. I want you right now, right here and I don’t care who knows it.’
His voice was husky in her ear, made her wilt against him; he smelled of something woody with a hint of amber, something overwhelmingly sexy, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ it was said with more control than she felt, ‘Not here. Anyone could see us.’
‘
I hope so.’
He tried to slip one hand down the back of her jeans, but they were too tight, his hand too big. Instead he ran his palm up her back, cold against her hot skin, pressing her to him as the other hand worked its way up under her silver All Saints t-shirt, into her bra. Before she realised what was happening, he was massaging her nipple with his thumb, creating powerful waves that radiated straight down to her groin, making her wet, making her weak at the knees. Thank God they were hidden in a corner.
‘
Let go!’ It came out breathy, was almost lost in a wave of pleasure that made her slump into his shoulder.
‘
Only if you promise to have lunch with me. In my hotel room.’ He slipped his hand out from behind her back, and a moment later she felt something slide into the back pocket of her jeans. ‘My key, 372, ten minutes. You haven’t any other plans for the afternoon have you?’
NINETEEN
It had sounded like a great idea yesterday. To go home and get pissed. But this morning as Alex turned over in bed, spring sunlight flooding in through her window, finally vanquishing the previous days of gloom, she wondered if she should have just jumped off the nearest tall building instead. Or into the sea. Anything was better than the pain in her head right now, splitting her forehead in two, better than fighting through a heavy blanket of cotton wool just to open her eyes.
Alex had only ever been really drunk once in her life before: the night she had arrived in Barcelona, a night very like last night when she had just needed something to dull the pain. And, as she lay in bed now, she knew why she had never bothered going out with her pals from college to get slaughtered on cheap Spanish beer. This wasn’t fun. Worse than that, it ranked pretty closely with finding yourself plastered naked across your ex-boyfriend’s bedroom wall.
Alex groaned and buried her head in the pillow. Right now she needed Solpadeine, and needed them fast. And according to the (much too bright) LCD readout beside her bed, it was already 8 a.m. and she had to get over to Sebastian’s in time to meet the cleaner and rescue her beautiful briefcase and her precious laptop, or she might as well resign now and throw away everything she had worked for.
Rolling out of bed, stumbling to the bathroom, it was a full thirty minutes before Alex felt human again. Managing to get into the shower, she already had her head under the shower head luxuriating in the feeling of the red hot jets against her scalp when she realised with that slow creeping feeling of impending disaster that she had no chance of getting her hair dry before she had to leave. A was most definitely not connecting with B this morning. But at least , as she reached for her black trouser suit – it was definitely a black trouser suit day – she began to feel the throb in her head subside, the pounding masked by painkillers.
Thank God Sebastian was in London. Thank God the cleaner could let her in to find her laptop.
Punching the entry code into the security pad outside the black iron gates of the Eaton Square complex, Alex glanced up to the top floor, to the penthouse apartment There was a light on to the left. The study? It clicked off as she was watching, clicked on in the next room. The cleaner must already be hard at work.
As the lift doors slid open on the top floor, just as they had done the day before, the only thing that had changed was Alex. Now, instead of her stomach churning with trepidation at seeing the inside of Sebastian’s apartment, it churned with a potent blend of anger and disappointment. Disappointment that the man she had trusted with her virginity, her first real love, had let her down so spectacularly.
How could he?
Turning out of the lift, quickly glancing at her reflection in the mirror, at her hair slicked back into a tight wet-look ponytail, her white linen shirt crisp, power dressing, Alex could see that Sebastian’s door was closed. This time the sound emanating from the apartment wasn’t Mozart, but Westlife; mid-ballad: ‘life is a rollercoaster…you just gotta ride it’. Knocking loudly, confidently, Alex was surprised when the door opened by itself. Perhaps the cleaner had to take out the bins and had left it on the latch? Pushing it wide, Alex stepped inside.
‘
Hello?’
No reply, only a clatter from the kitchen and a female voice muttering a curse.
‘
Hello?’ Alex was level with the breakfast bar now, could see a slim dark woman peering into the microwave. Before Alex could say anything, the woman slammed the door closed with alarming ferocity, glaring at it as she spoke.
‘
At last. I thought you were never coming. This microwave is absolutement le fin, it makes everything explode. You’ll have to sort it out.’ Still not turning around, she click-clacked over to the huge walk-in fridge, continuing, ‘And the bathroom needs cleaning. Properly this time, not just a wipe over.’
Puzzled for a moment, as much by her polished accent and high heels as by her brusque manner, it suddenly occurred to Alex that the woman must have been expecting her assistant to arrive. And if that was the way she spoke to her co-workers, it wasn’t surprising the girl hadn’t turned up.
‘
Sorry, I just dropped in to collect my briefcase. I don’t want to interrupt.’
The woman turned around slowly, her dark, finely-plucked eyebrows raised.
‘
Briefcase?’
‘
I think Jocelyn Blake contacted you to say I’d be dropping in. I left it here yesterday.’
‘
And what exactly were you doing here yesterday?’
Taken aback by her manner, Alex looked the woman up and down. She had a fabulous face, looked like someone from the cover of Vogue, but, like a model, she was a stick insect, all angular cheekbones and elbows, as if she didn’t eat properly. Heavily made up, her Vogue-like look fell apart a bit with her taste in clothes – sprayed-on black jeans and a skin-tight black t-shirt, a crystal-encrusted designer logo emblazoned across her flat chest. Victoria Beckham on the cheap. Well maybe not so cheap, but definitely tarty. She sounded foreign, but her accent wasn’t exactly inner city. Far from it. Fighting with the remains of her hangover, trying to get her brain in gear, Alex was beginning to get a bad feeling. Her accent was all wrong. And why on earth was she wearing a pair of black sunglasses on top of her head while she was working? They were holding back her long, railroad-straight hair, almost as dark as the glasses themselves. Surely, surely an elastic band would have been more practical?