‘Can I help you?’ Becky asked neutrally, hoping she wasn’t committing some horrible social gaffe.
‘I hope so. My name is Rosalita Morales.’ She was an American, and Becky recognized the light Bronx accent. What was a Puerto R.ican girl from the Bronx doing here? She stuck out her hand, and Becky shook it, reluctantly. She had a nasty sense of foreboding. Had something happened to Aunt Mindy?
‘I’m looking for Rupert Lancaster,’ Lita said, when the blonde social X-ray didn’t introduce herself. ‘I heard he was here yesterday. I need to
talk to him, and I was hoping you’d know where he might be.’ Becky stared at her.
‘What do you want with Lord Lancaster?’ she asked, rather coldly. ‘I’m his fiancee,’ she said.
Becky’s eyes widened. His xhat? He hadn’t mentioned anything about a fiancSe. Her mind did a quick inventory of the woman. She was dressed too well to be selling something. But then why wouldn’t she
know Rupert was here? Why wouldn’t he have brought her? ‘Come in, please,’ Becky said.
‘Thank you.’ Lita stepped into the hallway and folded her hands, looking at Becky expectantly.
‘I’m Rebecca Lancaster,’ Becky said, after an awkward pause. ‘Please, come this way. I’m expecting Rupert for tea here shortly.’
The girl smiled, a flash of white, perfect teeth. Becky thought she was very beautiful, but a little too short, too curvy, too obvious. That white jersey draped all over those massive breasts. Becky thought about her own tiny boobs and pulled herself up straight to compengate.
She marched ahead and showed Lira into the library, complete with flowers and a silver tray laid out with tea, scones, jam and a fresh lemon sponge that Mrs Morecambe was extremely proud of.
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‘Please, have a seat. Would you like some tea? Or I can fetch you ice water, or coffee?’
‘Actually, do you think I could just go and freshen up?’
‘Certainly. There’s a bathroom in the hall. First on the left,’ Becky said. She felt a stab of disappointment right in her chest.
‘Thanks,’ the P,.osalita girl said easily, walking out of the room with a sassy tilt to her hips.
Becky breathed out.
The doorbell rang again. She marched out to the hall and opened the door.
Rupert was standing there with a huge bunch of red roses. ‘Becky. You look ravishing,’ he said, grinning at her.
‘And so do these.’ She smiled back lightly. ‘Did you bring them for your fiancee?’
‘My fiancee?’
Rupert looked totally blank.
‘Yes. l
‘She’s here?’ he said.
‘So you do know her.’ The rush of hope that had come at his blank stare disappeared again.
‘Of course I know her. I worked with her.’ Rupert drew close and murmured into her ear. ‘She’s an ex-girlfriend, a comrnon little model a mistake. Unfortunately for me, she can’t seem to let go. She’s a bit nuts.’
‘But she’s in my bathroom.’ ‘
1Kupert pressed Becky’s hand. ‘Look, I have no idea how she tracked me down here. I’m awfully sorry about it. But why don’t you run upstairs? I need to deal with this as kindly as I possibly can. I’ll get rid of
her and call you when the coast is clear, OK?’
‘All right, 1Zupert,’ Becky said uncertainly.,
‘Where’s your phone? I’ll call the cab fight now. And don’t worry. Everything will be fine. Trust me.’
TOO
Lita heard the doorbell go and the murmur of conversation in the hallway, and her heart jumped. The little bathroom, papered with a William Morris pattern that looked old enough to be original, was equipped with a two-faucet sink and a mirror that was spotted with age in its gilt frame. Her pulse racing, Lira examined her face as she washed her hands. She took out her lipstick and touched her lips up. Yeah, that
was better. She wanted everything to be perfect.
She took a deep breath, then walked out.
1Kupert was standing in the library and the blonde Boston Brahmin chick was nowhere to be seen. Lita smiled and ran to him.
‘lKupert! Darling, I’m so glad to see you. It’s been real tough trying to track you down.’
Rupert shut the library door.
‘Of course it has.’ His voice was ice. ‘I didn’t leave you an address. I sent you a telegram.’
‘I know, but you can’t mean it. We’re engaged-you can’t just break it off out of the blue like that.’
‘I can’t?’ He laughed lightly cruelly. ‘And I thought I had. Look, Lira, it was fun, but now it’s over. Don’t make a scene.’
Lita stepped back two paces from him. She had never seen this look in his eyes.
‘A scene? You told me you loved me.’
Then say lots of things in bed.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry you had a wasted trip, but I never asked you to come.’
Lira suddenly shuddered. Fear ran up and down her spine, scuttling over her skin like a spider.
‘Rupert, what about my money?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What money? What nonsense is this?’
‘The money you asked to borrow for Modern Commercials. You’d said you’d take it only as needed. And when I checked With my bank, they said over three hundred thousand was gone. Almost everything.’
1Kupert looked her right in the eyes and shrugged. ‘Yes, unfortunate. Your money wasn’t a loan, it was an investment in the firm. I lost an
IOI
account, and the money went in overheads. We all hoped the business would succeed, but that’s life in today’s market. I’m sure you can make some more.’
Lita steadied herself on a burgundy leather chair.
‘Your “firm”, if that’s what it was, was only open a month. How can you have spent that much?’
‘Investments. Overheads. Operating costs. They mount up.’ He smiled slightly, and she found she hated him. ‘If you think you have a case to sue, go ahead. I put the company into liquidation. But I hear that lawyers’ fees get pretty expensive.’
Lita nodded. ‘I will sue you, here and in the States. I’ll get back what you stole from me.’
There was a sound from outside, a car pulling up. P,.upert strode to the library door and opened it, not even glancing at her.
‘That’s your taxi. I think you’ll find you can’t say I stole what you gave me signed permission to take.’
Lita gasped; her eyes flled with tears. She couldn’t help herself. ‘Come on, please,’ Rupert said louder and more firmly.
She walked out into the hallway, half-blinded with tears, and brushed them away with the back of her hand.
‘Lita, there’s nothing going on between us and there never will be. You simply aren’t my sort of girl. Becky is, and that’s why I’m here. I feel sorry you had to hear it put so plainly, but it’s for your own good. You need to go away. You’re just … embarrassing yourself.’
‘Very well,’ Lita said, redeyed and loathlng him. ‘I’m leaving.’ ‘Good,’ Rupert said crisply.
He turned on his heel and walked back into the library.
Lita saw that the blonde girl was watching her with a sort of curious detachment from the top of the stairs, like a car passenger rubbernecking at the site of an accident.
She wrenched the door open and stormed out. She hated Rupert and she hated that icy bitch, too.
Lita had packed a pair of sunglasses in her bag. She slipped them on before she was even through the porch. No way she wanted to let Rupert gloat over her crying, or explain herself to the cabbie. She got in the car, careful not to slam the door. Screw them! The tears dried up almost instantly.
‘Where we going, love?’
‘The train station, please.’ Thank God her voice wasn’t wobbly. Grief and shock had vanished; there was nothing left but a pure, icy anger. She couldn’t kid herself any more. Now all she wanted was to get them. lKupert and his bitch girlfriend. Lira started mulling it over as the car
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eased down towards the road, already making plans. She was eighteen going on fifty.
Make that nineteen going on fifty, Lita thought suddenly.
Today was her birthday.
When she got back to London she had a day to kill before her return flight. She packed away all her rich-girl, Euro-lady clothes, and tugged on a pair of jeans and her comfortable red mohair sweater. The clerk at the desk, not sure whether the polished lady was sexier than the fresh faced girl in the ponytail and clinging sweater, suggested as many excursions as he could think of, in the hope that maybe she’d stand there a little longer, and shift from foot to foot, so he could watch those glorious tits jiggle. But Lira wasn’t interested in the British Museum or the National Gallery or the Tower. She just flashed him a smile and walked out, heading for the library.
Rebecca Lancaster. Rupert’s name was Lancaster. The stuck-up snob had received her like it was her home. Lita pulled out her guide book and Debrett’s and Who’s Who and looked up Iebecca Lancaster. She wasn’t listed, but Burke’s Peerage had her as a footnote; Rupert had succeeded Robert Lancaster, his second cousin, who had issue, I. d. Rebecca Elizabeth, and I. s. Charles Henry, who died in infancy. So that d. Rebecca succeeded to the seat, Fairfield Court, which was also claimed by Lord Lancaster, Rupert …
She lifted her head in the silence of the gloomy library and started to write on the cheap yellow pad she’d brought with her.
What had Rupert ever told her about the house? That it was his… Legal troubles …
He had said the house belonged to him. And that there was a court case to be resolved. Let’s say they found in favour of P,,ebecca. What would happen then? P,.upert would no longer be inheriting the house and whatever came with it, so he’d have to make his own money. And instead of trying to earn it from Benson Bailey or somebody else, he’d just decided to steal hers instead. Lita felt herself flush hot with rage despite the cool of the library. That was when he’d started acting strangely to her, presumably. Because now he didn’t want to marry her … he wanted to rip her off. Lita thought, with a sudden burst of insight, that Modern Commercials had probably never existed in any real way. It had been a new ‘firm’ he’d set up so that she would sign that fucking paper, the drip-feed paper, and give him all her money.
And now she was right back where she’d started, give or take a few lousy thousand bucks. Lita glanced down at the diamond glittering on her left hand. He’d
Io3
said she could keep it. Yeah right - very good of you. She tugged it off and put it in her pocket. First thing to do was to sell it off. She had no intention of sending it back. She couldn’t afford grand gestures any more.
She needed every cent for revenge.
The vision of Becky, standing up above her, watching her crying and stumbling out with that cold, priggish expression of surprise made Lita’s manicured fist ball under the table. She hated her, with her huge old house and her titled father and the guy at the station sounding so happy that she was taking Lita’s man. Not that he knew, but … ‘their own kind of people’. Right. Rebecca had been good enough, noble enough, blonde enough for Rupert, and she hadn’t been. He wasn’t prepared to take a chance on them making it when Rebecca was there. And what had Lira become? Just another girl making a scene, like that chick in the club that Rupert had blown off. Lita’s cheeks burnt. Rupert’s voice, so firm, like he was being fair, while his eyes had stared at her with total disdain. ‘You’re just embarrassing yourself.’
Now Lita knew why that chick at the club had called her a poor bitch. She had embarrassed herself. She’d let Rupert make her cry and let Rebecca Lancaster watch, like she was a science project Rebecca was observing.
Lita thought about Rebecca until she was so restless she had to get up and leave. She banged the books shut so sharply a cross-looking librarian padded over to her.
‘I hope there’s no problem here?’ she whispered sharply. Lira looked right through her. ‘There won’t be,’ she said.
On the flight home Lita thought about how she would play it. She bought a copy of British Vogue and flicked t.hrough it. The obvious answer was to model, do more campaigns and get more money. But somehow she recoiled from that. It seemed like moving backwards. Lira remembered what she’d said to Bill about the Costa Rica shoot … putting the other girls down because they were in their late twenties. She didn’t want to be considered over the hill, washed up, before she’d hit thirty. Taking less money, doing worse and worse spots.., winding up in the J.C. penney catalogue, and with her agency not even taking her calls …
No way. The life was not for her.’ Lita remembered school, wanting to use her brain. Her beauW would pass. She shuddered at the thought of hitting thirty. Man, that was old. She wanted to have gotten somewhere before she was that old.
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She was in her last year of being a teenager right now, and it was going to be her last year of modelling. Let Bill get her a couple more campaigns. Just to give herself enough money to get straight, get a new apartment. She’d buy a little piece of real estate in the city, and use the time to find out what was next for her life.
Rupert was right. She saw that. She couldn’t afford a lawyer to go after him right now. But, as the proverb said, revenge was a dish best served cold.
Lira could wait. She wanted more than three hundred thousand dollars. She wanted his total destruction.
And Rebecca Lancaster’s, too.
‘P,.etiriIg?’ Bill Fisher looked at Lira with dismay. ‘Baby, you can’t.
You’re one of our top earners. You’ve made so much money.’
If only he knew.
‘I guess.’ Lita tried to look nonchalant. ‘But, Bill, I’d kind of like to do something else.’
‘You don’t know how to do anything else.’
‘And if I quit five years from now, I’ll be twenty-five with no experience of doing anything else. And what happens then? I get a race and favour job here as your secretary?’ Lita shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I’m moving on.’
Bill made a face. ‘I already booked you in for the Country Fresh campaign.
She thought about it. ‘Country Fresh, the pasta people, right?’ Correct.
‘Who has that account?’ °
‘The ad agency is Doheny.’
Lira smiled. Dohew, with its large offices on Madison Avenue, was one of the biggest commercials firms in New York. They handled NescafS, the Republican Party at State level, the Dairy Farmers of America, and de Beers diamonds, among others.