Fast Friends

by Jill Mansell

  But while he shook hands, kissed cheeks, posed for photographs, and agreed to draw the tickets for the raffle, his mind worked ceaselessly in other directions. In Camilla’s direction. He had taken care not to glance across at the dance floor, nor even toward any of the tables where she might be sitting, but had she seen him, or heard that he was there, or known in advance that he would be there tonight? If she didn’t know already, then she would find out shortly. He was a so-called celebrated guest, and they simply weren’t allowed to hide in quiet corners.

  And what, he wondered, would Camilla do? Maintain a discreet distance throughout the evening? Simply say hello? Or would she come up and speak to him as if nothing had ever happened between the two of them?

  But then, Nico realized as a slow blade turned in his stomach, nothing particularly earth-shattering had happened as far as she was concerned. She had simply slept with her employer, found the experience disappointing to say the least, and—to save any further embarrassment—quietly and discreetly removed herself from his life. Seeing Camilla again for the first time since that night might be earth-shattering for him, but for her it would probably do no more than stir a faint, maybe slightly embarrassing memory. And he had had enough one-night stands in the past himself to know how totally unimportant they could be.

  Caroline tugged his sleeve. “Shall we dance, darling?” Her eyes conveyed the signal that they had spent enough time talking to their hosts.

  Nico smiled and shrugged. “My wife’s trying to make me young again. Would you excuse us?”

  * * *

  “Rubbernecking, Mrs. Stewart?” Matt admonished her as Camilla glanced over her shoulder in mid-waltz and her step faltered. “I thought I was the brash American sightseer around here. You’re the ice-cool Englishwoman, remember.”

  “Sorry,” said Camilla, her apology automatic, her mind suddenly reeling with memories. She wasn’t sure, she wasn’t at all sure…but she thought she might just have spotted Nico.

  * * *

  “Could we sit down?” said Caroline, a faint note of complaint in her voice. Nico glanced at her, puzzled.

  “I thought you said you wanted to dance.”

  “That was forty minutes ago. I didn’t mean all night, nonstop, for heaven’s sake. My feet are aching and I need a drink.”

  “Sorry.” With reluctance he led her off the dance floor, where he had felt—for want of a better word—safe. As Caroline tugged at his sleeve once more, he realized that it was a habit of hers that could easily become irritating.

  “I don’t want to sit at the top table again. Those bloody people bore me to tears. Why don’t you go get us another bottle of champagne and I’ll find a seat at this end?”

  Nico nodded, anxious to keep the peace and appalled at the relief he felt when Caroline released her hold on his sleeve. “I’ll be back in two minutes,” he said guiltily. And in his mind added, Make that ten.

  Caroline felt better on her own. She functioned better as a solo act, as on the day when she had met Nico in Las Vegas. For some reason, becoming his wife had made her feel useless, nothing more than a not particularly important appendage. Everywhere they went, people were more interested in Nico than they were in her. Oh, she had a certain amount of curiosity value, but that was all. He was the important one, the half of the partnership who mattered, and she was the pale shadow at his side.

  And the fact that she herself was intimidated by Nico hardly helped, she knew that. She was intimidated by his lack of love for her, had failed him by being incapable of forcing that emotion out of him. It just made the situation more rickety, more sorry and uneven than ever.

  Which was why she was only ever able to function normally, as her old self had done, when she was alone.

  Cheering up considerably at the sight of Matt Lewis, sitting with his attractive girlfriend at a nearby table, Caroline headed toward them. They were the only two seated at a table for ten, which gave her the perfect excuse to join them. Matt Lewis. This would be something to tell Donna next time she wrote.

  “Phew! Hi, is it OK if I sit here?” she announced, collapsing onto a chair and pretending exhaustion. The golfer picked up a bottle of white wine, filled a glass, and solemnly held it toward her.

  “You look as if you need it.”

  Caroline rewarded him with a smile of bewitching intensity and was interested to observe that the girlfriend wasn’t reacting to it with the usual instant suspicion. Clearly not a run-of-the-mill jealous blond bimbo, thought Caroline, and stuck out her hand in appreciation.

  “How do you do. My name’s Caroline.”

  “And I’m Camilla.” They smiled at each other, Caroline instinctively liking the woman who wasn’t jealous of her, Camilla admiring her good bone structure and wondering if they had ever met before. Somewhere in the dim distance, a very faint chord of memory was struck.

  “I know who you are, of course,” said Caroline, turning to Matt. “I was at the U.S. Open last year. My friend Donna dragged me around the course, convinced that you’d winked at her while you were teeing up on the first.”

  “That’s entirely possible,” said Matt, his dark eyes crinkling with laughter, the wonderfully sexy bags beneath them becoming more pronounced as he took Camilla’s hand and kissed it. “But, of course, that was in the wicked old days before I met my wife.”

  Camilla, with a look of horror, snatched her hand away. “Take no notice of him, Caroline. I only met him yesterday.”

  Matt looked unperturbed. “I can live in hope.”

  “You seem very happy together anyway,” said Caroline, finishing her drink and after a moment’s hesitation allowing Matt to refill her glass. “Thanks. My husband will be back in a minute with some champagne. We can share that when he gets here.”

  “What’s your husband’s name?” asked Camilla, her memory beginning to clear. The woman’s face… She had seen photographs… She’d also been right earlier when she thought she’d spotted him among the crowds.

  “Nico,” said Caroline, thinking as she did so that this was the moment when her own personality began to fade, like an old sepia photograph left too long in the sun. “Nico Coletto. He’s a singer.”

  “Oh,” said Camilla, and in the brief silence that followed realized that she had already left it too long to say “I know him.” Instead, she added lamely, “How nice.”

  Caroline, staring at her glass and finding it yet again empty, twirled the stem between her thumb and forefinger and said with forced brightness, “That’s really rather a matter of opinion.” Then, seeing the expression of shocked surprise on Camilla’s face, and realizing that it was neither the time nor the place for True Confessions, shook her head and laughed. At least neither of them had bombarded her with questions about Nico, as everyone else always seemed to do. They had reacted, in fact, as if they’d never even heard of him. She was still a whole person, and she would damn well make the most of it while it lasted.

  “I saw your little boy on TV this afternoon,” she said cheerfully. “What a darling! How old is he?”

  “Hello,” said Nico, placing two bottles of Lanson with great care upon the table and wondering how the hell he was supposed to react, faced with this setup. Caroline had been deep in discussion with Camilla, and what they were talking about was anybody’s guess. Still, the chances were that they hadn’t been comparing his prowess in bed and marking him out of ten, so to hell with it, he decided. Inadvertently, Caroline had precipitated his meeting with Camilla. It was clearly better to get it over with.

  “Camilla, how nice to see you again,” he said, and watched in amazement as she turned first pink, then deeper pink, and finally an unmistakable shade of red. His spirits lifted; did this mean she still felt something for him after all?

  “How extraordinary,” remarked Caroline, watching the transformation with fascination and not a little intrigue. “Camilla, I didn’t r
ealize that you knew my husband. Why on earth didn’t you say so before?”

  Oh, damn it to hell, thought Nico. Bloody, bloody hell.

  Ironically, Caroline became more animated and more talkative than she had been for weeks, as if the intrigue she sensed had overcome her habitual reticence. When she pulled Nico back onto the dance floor after twenty minutes of incredibly difficult small talk—thank heavens for Matt Lewis’s easygoing, ebullient manner—her eyes were bright and her hips swayed provocatively against his in time with the music. She had also, in that short space of time, finished an entire bottle of champagne by herself.

  “So.”

  “So what?” he countered shortly, wondering why her pouting mouth no longer entranced him.

  “So, are we really expected to believe that the lovely Camilla was your…housekeeper?”

  “Of course she was. What’s so bloody extraordinary about that?”

  Caroline licked her lips. “And were you lovers too?”

  “No!” Christ, even now while they were dancing she was managing to tug at the sleeve of his dinner jacket like a bloody leech. His discomfort was almost palpable; Caroline was enjoying herself enormously. For the first time in their short, unhappy marriage, she had him at a disadvantage. Jealousy mingled with curiosity because it wasn’t as if Nico shouldn’t have had an affair with another woman—by his own admission he had slept with dozens in the past—so why was he so vehemently denying this one? Why had Camilla pretended that she didn’t even know him? Interesting.

  And upon returning to the table, she observed that Camilla and Nico were still as jumpy as a couple of cats on a red-hot roof, the conversation flowing like concrete, the expressions of their faces equally stonelike. Very interesting indeed.

  “My friend Donna would just die if I could tell her that I’d danced with you,” Caroline announced boldly, giving Matt another of her dazzling smiles. She switched to Camilla. “You wouldn’t mind, would you, if we had just one quick dance together?”

  Camilla, stripping a crimson rosebud from the table decoration of its leaves, said, “Of course not.”

  “And you and Nico must dance together,” insisted Caroline, her eyes flicking from one to the other, laser-like, missing nothing. “Come along, let’s really enjoy ourselves…”

  Which was how Nico and Camilla found themselves in the middle of the dance floor, dancing together to the slow, sensual music, but scarcely touching at all, joined by only the lightest possible contact.

  Camilla still wore the same perfume, Nico realized. She smelled wonderful and was looking spectacular. Christ, he thought, for a one-night stand he could still recall every moment of it in amazing detail. But that was probably because, for him, it had been amazing. Camilla was the one who had been disappointed, not him.

  We have to talk, she thought wildly. I have to say something to stop all this desperate awkwardness. Nico’s green eyes were unreadable, his expression quite blank. Only the terrible silence indicated that something was not right between them.

  “I’m…sorry about what happened,” she blurted out, unconsciously moving closer to him so that she couldn’t see his face, his reaction.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Nico quickly, forestalling her. The last thing he needed right now was an explanation, details…her pity. “That’s all in the past. I’m married and you’re here with Matt.”

  “But I wanted to…”

  “No!” he told her urgently, his fingers tightening against the warmth of her bare shoulder. “I’m sorry too, so let’s just forget it. We’re just friends, OK?”

  “Are we? Can we still be friends, really?”

  Not getting what he wanted didn’t come easily to Nico; he simply wasn’t used to it. But he couldn’t have Camilla, and it would surely be easier to get used to it if they were at least on speaking terms. His life for the past three months had been pretty bleak, after all. Right now, he needed all the friends he could get.

  Taking a step backward so that he could see her clearly, and reading the guilt and self-recrimination in the eyes that slowly met his, he gave her a firm, reassuring smile.

  “Nothing can stop us being friends, Camilla. Now, for heaven’s sake, cheer up and let’s make the most of the rest of this bloody-awful evening. Tell me what you’ve been doing lately. Tell me one of your terrible jokes. Tell me,” he said, a strange, hollow churning sensation gripping his stomach, “all about you and Matt Lewis.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The telephone call two days later came like a bolt from the blue. Caroline was out, visiting the hairdressers, and Nico, having just got rid of Monty Barton, was celebrating his manager’s departure with a large Remy Martin and a packet of cookies. Feet up, he was watching a rerun of The Addams Family on Channel 4 while at the same time flipping through a copy of Cosmopolitan left by Caroline on the floor.

  “Five reasons why you shouldn’t fake it!” screamed a headline in the magazine, and Nico winced, rapidly turning the page. “Old lovers—why can’t they be new friends?” inquired the header of the next article he arrived at, and he almost smiled. On screen, Gomez ran a trail of kisses up Morticia’s arm and she answered him with a wickedly enticing smile. Nico downed his cognac and wondered if Morticia ever faked it with Gomez.

  Before he could contemplate the answer, the phone rang.

  “Nico, it’s me.”

  He knew who it was. “Who?”

  “Roz. Roz Vallender,” she added with exaggerated impatience. “The mother of your child.”

  “Sure about that?” he said, more nastily than he had intended but unable to stop himself. “You know what they say, Roz. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

  “She bloody well is your daughter!” shouted Roz. “And you’d better well listen to me. I can’t cope—Nicolette’s seriously ill and I can’t manage on my own anymore. I need you, Nico. You’ve got to help me.”

  He jackknifed into a sitting position. “What’s happened? What’s the matter with her?” It hardly mattered whether Nicolette was his; if she was that ill, he could still respond to Roz’s cry for help. Anyone would, after all.

  “I’ve got to speak to you,” she said urgently. “Can I come over now?”

  “Well…I suppose so. Where are you?”

  “Phone box,” said Roz, concealing her triumph at having cleared the first hurdle. “I’ll be there in five minutes. Thank you, darling.”

  * * *

  As she made her way up the graveled drive toward the front door, Roz recalled the occasion of her last visit, when she had found Camilla here. That very day, according to Loulou, Camilla had packed her bags and left, and had refused to explain why.

  Today, of course, there was the chance that Nico’s wife would be here, but somehow she doubted it. She bloody well hoped not, anyway—this reunion definitely didn’t need any outsiders standing by to witness it, and particularly not a new little wife who, as she understood it, Nico had only acquired to spite her.

  She looked down at Nicolette in her arms. At least the doctor at the hospital had been sympathetic to Roz’s complaints and had prescribed a sedative for the child, one that quieted her enough to stop the incessant screaming. Nicolette was fast asleep now, looking adorable in a tiny, exquisitely embroidered pale-pink dress and well wrapped up in a heavily fringed pink-and-white shawl. Who could resist her, for heaven’s sake, or not want to be the parent of such a beautiful baby?

  As for Roz herself… Well, she was looking pretty damn good as well. The appalling black cloud of depression that had settled over her within days of Nicolette’s birth had dispersed as abruptly as it had arrived, exorcising itself with miraculous agility the moment Roz had broken down in a storm of tears in the consultant’s office at the hospital after hearing the news about Nicolette.

  “Believe me, Mrs. Vallender, I do understand how you must feel,” he had s
aid, passing her a box of white hospital tissues and patting her hand in an awkward gesture of reassurance.

  But for Roz, her tears—the first she had shed in many years, for weeping in her opinion was only for the very weak—performed the miracle she had given up even hoping for. As she wiped her eyes with the tissues and heaved great, shuddering sighs of exhaustion and relief, she could feel the dank, black clouds become weightless, lift away.

  Still gulping and sobbing intermittently, she clutched the eminent doctor’s strong hand and cried out, “Oh God, I’ve been…so…miserable…”

  * * *

  It had gone. Now her energies were poured into the task of sorting out her life, and Nicolette’s sad little life as well. There were plans to be planned, and Roz, though still deeply shocked by the news, found that at last she had the energy to carry these plans out.

  And Number One, she thought briskly as she cradled Nicolette in one arm and rang the front doorbell with the other, was to sort things out with Nico, once and for all.

  He opened the door himself, his green eyes dark and guarded but as spectacular as ever. Seeing him again for the first time in almost ten months, she experienced a jolt of emotion and sought to clarify it. But it was nothing so difficult or complicated as love, she realized with relief. It was merely honest to goodness lust. Nico was still one of the most attractive men she had ever met in her life, that indefinable aura of sexuality emanating right through his scarlet-and-green cashmere sweater and faded denims as clearly as cologne.

  But what she felt for him was not love, so she could deal with it. At last, she was in control again.

  His gaze swept over Roz and remained as enigmatic as it always had when that was what was required, but she smiled to herself when she saw his eyes come to rest upon Nicolette, that fluffy pink-and-white bundle in her arms. He softened visibly, as she had known he would.

  Meet your namesake, darling, she thought, optimism prickling her skin. Aloud, however, she said, “It’s nice to see you again, Nico. After all this time. May we come in?”