Neve wasn’t sure her limited wardrobe could stretch to cocktails on Thursday night too, but she nodded. ‘I suppose this is goodbye until Thursday then?’
Max smiled glumly. ‘Roll on Thursday when I’ll have six thousand words of copy written and filed.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘I’d better buy industrial quantities of coffee on the way home.’
‘I get through an awful lot of peppermint tea when I’m working on my Lucy chapters,’ Neve said. ‘I mean, it’s not even in the same league as your stuff which people actually read, but well, I have a very vague idea of what you’re going through.’
‘You know, what with us both being authors, I’ll give you permission to read my WAG novels if you let me have a look at this biography you’re working on,’ Max offered casually.
Neve bit her lip. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ve written is fit for public consumption, but maybe I should read your novels before Thursday. As research, so I know what to expect before the wedding.’
‘It will be fine, Neevy. Everyone will be so shocked that I’ve turned up with a nice girl who says please and thank you, that they’ll fall on you with grateful cries.’
‘I still think I’ll pop into Waterstone’s on the way to work and buy your books,’ Neve decided. ‘Just so I can pick up some tips.’
‘Nope, I absolutely forbid it,’ Max stated forcefully. ‘I’m not showing you mine, if you won’t show me yours.’
Neve grinned. ‘That’s not how it worked last night,’ and then she wasn’t grinning because she had to take a moment to remember how Max had worked blind to make her beg and plead and moan.
‘Don’t change the subject,’ Max said, even as he dared to lift his hand and rub his thumb over her nipple as Neve squirmed away from him, because they were on her doorstep, in broad daylight! ‘You have to give me your word you won’t read them?’
‘But you were really peeved when I said I hadn’t read them!’
‘That was before we really got to know each other and I don’t want you to lose that smidgen of respect you have for me by reading my ghost-written drivel,’ Max said and it was such a silly, un-Max-like thing to say that Neve cupped his face as a prelude to giving him one last kiss when there was a bark and a pointed cough from behind Max and Neve opened her eyes to see Gustav standing there, his face impassive. Gustav’s face was usually impassive so that didn’t mean anything, but Neve could tell from the particularly pronounced lockjaw that he was less than happy.
‘Are you ready to run laps round the park before work?’ he asked tonelessly, though it was pretty clear from Neve’s current state of deshabille (she’d always longed to be in a state of deshabille, but not like this), that she wasn’t.
Max pulled a face at Neve before he turned round to hold out one hand to Gustav and calm Keith with the other, because he was straining at the leash and growling. It seemed that Austrian personal trainers in head-to-toe black Lycra were yet another thing that yanked his chain.
‘I’m Max,’ he said casually. ‘Neve’s boyfriend. You must be Gustav.’
‘Yes, I suppose I must be,’ Gustav said in that same flat tone, but at least he shook Max’s offered hand.
Neve could tell from the pained look on Max’s face that Gustav had his puny writer’s fingers in a crushing grip. She glared at Gustav, who glared back but released Max, who hurried down the garden path with a rushed goodbye and a limp wave from the hand that had almost been broken.
*
‘Why are you so angry with me? You know that I’ve been seeing someone,’ Neve panted an hour later as Gustav had her doing press-ups in Finsbury Park itself. Proper press-ups, not girl press-ups, on grass, even though she’d complained that it was covered in dog pee and worse.
‘You said it was casual. That he was like a crêpe – and stop arching your back,’ Gustav said sourly. ‘You never said you were sleeping with him.’
Neve was sure she’d done twenty press-ups by now and her back was killing her. ‘Please, Gustav. Stomach crunches, side planks, anything … I can’t do any more.’
‘Crunches, then. Two months ago I would never hear you say “I can’t” and you would never have forgotten a training session.’
‘You never usually make me do proper press-ups,’ Neve hissed through gritted teeth as she started her crunches. ‘Look, I’m committed to this. You know I am. I have to drop the last two dress sizes in three months.’
‘It’s easy to say that but I see this all the time. My clients form attachments,’ Gustav curled his mouth around the word as if it tasted bitter, ‘and they start neglecting their fitness. They go out for candle-lit meals all the time and they put on weight. That boyfriend of yours looks very out of condition. He’ll be a bad influence on you.’
‘I’ve told you a million times, Max isn’t really a proper boyfriend and honestly, Gustav, do you think I’ve come this far only to slide back into old habits?’ Neve insisted breathlessly because apart from a few glasses of wine, she hadn’t deviated from her diet. ‘Anyway, Max is going to start running again now that the weather’s getting warmer.’
It was one of the worst things she could have said, short of admitting that she’d been drinking liquid lard. Gustav had plenty to say about fair-weather runners, and when Neve told him that she wouldn’t be able to make her Saturday session because she was going away, she thought his jaw would break, he was clenching it so tightly.
‘But you never miss a Saturday session,’ Gustav gritted. ‘They’re our special time. I always think of new and exciting things for us to do.’
He did, though Neve would never class exercises with kettle bells or skipping ropes as exciting. ‘Don’t your other clients have to skip the odd session because of their personal commitments?’
‘You’re not like my other clients,’ Gustav said, and Neve knew that he meant it as a compliment, but having seen some of Gustav’s other clients, all successful, glamorous, high-flying types, she suspected that they probably had to cancel personal training sessions because they were jetting off for a weekend skiing in Gstaad or a fortnight in St Barts. Whereas Neve never jetted off anywhere because she was dependable, predictable and, until Max had come along, didn’t really have much in the way of a social life.
Celia also seemed a little put out that Neve was going through with her audacious scheme to leave the Greater London area for the weekend.
‘But what if I have some kind of emergency this weekend and I need you and you’re not here?’ she demanded, when she came upstairs the following evening to borrow some milk and found Neve trying on her trouser suit to make sure her hips hadn’t expanded since she bought it.
‘You could phone me,’ Neve suggested as she twisted round to see what her bottom looked like in the mirror and caught sight of Celia’s pained face. ‘Seels, you knew I was going to this stupid WAG wedding because you were with me when I got the summons from Mandy McIntyre and I know you haven’t forgotten one excruciating second of our shopping trip for wedding outfits.’
Celia threw herself down on Neve’s bed and actually flailed her limbs in frustration. ‘Yeah, but I never thought you’d actually go through with it.’ She folded her arms and stared at the ceiling. ‘I bet you any money that on Thursday morning, you bottle it.’
‘No, I won’t!’ Neve snapped, even though she had half hoped that Mandy’s fiancé might be one of those footballers who couldn’t keep it in his trousers and would be exposed by the tabloids as a serial love rat and that the wedding would be called off, but no such luck.
Her only other hope was that either she or Max went down with something icky and intestinal like the novovirus, but every time she’d spoken to him on the phone, all his usual studied cool and nonchalance had disappeared as he babbled on about getting his Dior Pour Homme suit dry-cleaned and asking if Neve had any preferences for what music she’d like to listen to in the car.
No, she couldn’t bail out when Max was so excited about the wedding. Not just because it was going to
be crammed full of celebrities, but because he seemed to be an honorary member of the wedding party. Mandy and Darren had even asked him to help write their vows, and Mandy had also made Max load up his iPod with Northern Soul classics because she didn’t trust the DJ they’d booked for the reception. For someone who didn’t do relationships, Max seemed very excited about seeing Mandy and Darren plight their troth. ‘Though I don’t think I’ll mention “plighting their troth” in the vows,’ he’d said to Neve. ‘Isn’t a troth something that pigs eat from?’
It wasn’t just the thought of turning up with Max and having the McIntyres and the attendant WAGs wonder what the hell he was doing with her that had Neve in such a panic. No, she was also freaking out about the havoc the wedding would wreak on her routine. What if she couldn’t work out for the entire four days they were in Manchester? And what if the hotel didn’t have unsweetened muesli on their breakfast menu but the regular kind that was stuffed full of sugar, and what if she couldn’t sleep without her memory foam pillow? These were silly things to be panicking about, Neve knew that, but she was a creature of habit and that habit was being sorely tested by the wedding.
It was almost a relief to have an email from Jacob Morrison waiting for her when she got into work on Wednesday morning. At least it would be something different to worry about.
Dear Neve
Sorry I’ve taken so long to get back to you. I read Dancing on the Edge of the World last night – actually I stayed up until three because I couldn’t put it down.
I think you’ve discovered something very special here. I love Lucy’s voice; her dry humour and the way she can write with such a depth of feeling without ever veering into sentimentality. Could you phone my assistant and arrange to courier over Lucy’s short stories and poems?
I also read your synopsis and would like to see what you’ve written so far.
Best wishes
Jacob
It was impossible to tell whether he’d liked the synopsis or not. Neve dared to hope that the very fact that Jacob was asking to see what she’d written was a good thing. Or else he just wanted to confirm his suspicions that she could barely string a sentence together.
Neve completely abandoned any thoughts about transcribing, but every time Mr Freemont poked his head round the door of her office and saw her working so diligently, he gave her a tight smile (he was still smarting over his smack-down at the AGM) and left her alone to try and sprinkle some magic dust on her prose.
Neve spent the rest of the day and a good portion of the night, too, prodding and poking at her six and a half chapters, interrupted only by regular emails from Chloe who kept sending her links to increasingly preposterous tabloid stories about the wedding, though Neve doubted that Her Majesty the Queen had really granted Mandy McIntyre permission to have swans swimming in specially built lily ponds in the middle of the dancefloor at the reception.
The courier arrived at ten on Thursday morning to pick up two laden Jiffy bags while Neve was still unshowered and in her pyjamas. There hadn’t even been time to go to New Look in a lunch-hour to find a suitable dress for bar-hopping with the WAGs, so Neve had no choice but to stuff the silver-sequined shift dress into her weekend bag. It was either that or one of her black wrap dresses, and Celia had made her feelings about them perfectly clear. Besides, it was already eleven twenty and Max was leaning on the doorbell. Neve decided she’d try the sequined horror on again once she’d bought some heavy-duty body-shaping tights to see if it was as bad as she remembered.
‘That reminds me, do you think we’ll have time to go to a Marks & Spencer when we get to Manchester?’ she asked Max as he slid into the driver’s seat of the bright red Mini Cooper he’d been given by his publisher.
‘We can make time,’ Max promised. He shot her a sideways glance. ‘You look a little bit terrified. You’re not going to hurl yourself from the car if I stop at a red light, are you?’
Neve nodded. ‘Thinking about it.’ With the rush to do her best by Lucy, there hadn’t been time to have any more panic attacks about the wedding, but now Neve was free to work herself up into a state of near hysteria about spa days and clubbing with Mandy and her WAG friends who she’d have nothing in common with – and what if the robes at the Spa didn’t fit her, and—
‘You’ve gone really pale,’ Max noted. ‘You don’t get travel sick, do you?’
‘It’s not that,’ Neve said, winding down the window to get some fresh air. ‘I just don’t want to show you up.’
‘Well, that’s not going to happen, as long as you don’t tell anyone that your brother supports Arsenal. Is that a smile?’
‘Might be,’ Neve agreed, and she let her hand rest on Max’s knee for a moment because she’d missed touching him. Which was ridiculous because she’d only seen him three days before. Maybe it was because she’d always tamped down any sexual longing and now her body wanted to make up for lost time. And then some.
Max looked down at her hand, still on his knee. ‘I’ve come up with a song which is absolutely guaranteed to get rid of your nerves,’ he announced proudly. ‘Do you want to hear it?’
‘I didn’t know you could sing.’
‘Well, I can’t, but I think that will just add to my performance. Are you ready for this?’
There wasn’t enough time in the world to prepare Neve for Max’s out-of-tune rendition of ‘It’s a Nice Day for a Wag Wedding’. His loud, toneless voice was almost as bad as her reedy, high-pitched singing, because after she’d stopped laughing, Neve couldn’t resist joining in.
By the time they passed Birmingham, they were happily and randomly adding the word WAG to any song they could think of, when Neve was suddenly inspired and began to warble, ‘With her Fendi bag/She’s my wonderWAG.’
Max had to cut through two lines of traffic, pull over on the hard shoulder, rest his head on the steering wheel and get himself under control before he crashed the car. His shoulders shook violently as he tried to rein in the giggles. Every time he stopped, Neve would think of another line to torture him with, ‘And all the clothes we have to wear are skintight/And if we didn’t tan so much we’d be lilywhite.’
‘No more,’ he begged, his voice hoarse from laughing, as he started up the engine again.
They arrived in Manchester just after four, leaving the good weather behind them as they joined the M6. Malmaison Manchester was an elegant redbrick building – just round the corner from a large Marks & Spencer, Neve was pleased to note. Once they’d braved the paparazzi that were lurking outside, much to Neve’s disbelief, they then had their reservation details, wedding invites and ID approved at two different security checkpoints. Only then were they allowed to approach the reception desk. Another security guard escorted them to the lift, and finally Max and Neve were shown into their junior suite. The huge space was sleek and modern, all cool white with icy blue accents and striped wallpaper, which made Neve’s vision blur if she stared at it for too long. Max had already opened his laptop and was checking the wi-fi access, as Neve peeked into the black and gold bathroom and stared in awe at the huge shower and the sunken bathtub, which was the last word in decadence.
‘This is amazing,’ Neve said, as she walked back into the bedroom. ‘I’ve never stayed anywhere like this. In fact, I don’t think I’ve stayed in a proper hotel before.’
‘But this is only a junior suite. It’s not that amazing,’ Max protested. ‘And what do you mean, you’ve never stayed in a hotel before?’
‘Well, I stayed in bed and breakfasts when we went on holiday when I was little, and when I went to New York, I slept on Celia’s sofa.’
‘What about when you go away on holiday now?’ Max asked.
‘Well, for some reason spending two weeks on a beach in Corfu has never really appealed to me.’
‘I’m not big on vacations either. They’re not much fun when you live on your own and then you go on holiday on your own and you end up cruising bars to find someone …’ Max came to an abrupt halt as
he realised that he was heading steadily for the door marked TMI. ‘Maybe we could sneak in a week’s holiday between now and July?’
‘I’ve always wanted to go to France,’ Neve blurted out, her heart thudding excitedly. In all her stress about the WAG-sponsored weekend, there hadn’t been one moment of angst devoted to spending three nights in a hotel room with Max. On the contrary, Neve had even attempted her first, very amateur bikini wax half an hour before Max had arrived to pick her up. She smiled at Max, who grinned back at her. ‘Right now though, I really want to go to Marks & Spencer.’
Max checked the time. ‘It’s half four now, so we could have a really late lunch or an early dinner, but we’ll still have a couple of hours to kill before cocktails.’ He struck a pensive pose, finger resting on his chin. ‘What would you like to do in this big, comfy room with a big, comfy bed in it?’
‘I need to have a bath and wash my hair,’ Neve said innocently, as she slipped her jacket back on. ‘And it takes me for ever, ten minutes at least, to do my make-up. That still leaves us an hour with nothing to do.’
‘An hour and a half,’ Max decided, as he ushered Neve out of the room. ‘Can’t turn up at eight exactly. That’s ninety minutes, Neve.’
Neve waited until the lift doors were just about to open before she turned to Max, ‘I could always give you another blow job if you wanted. Just to kill the time.’
Chapter Twenty-six
In the end, Neve only had time for a quick shower and made do with some dry shampoo and five minutes for her make-up. The moment that she’d slid between the covers of that big, comfy bed and collided with Max who was already hot and hard, time had seemed to slow down, then speed up, and it wasn’t until she was coming down from her second orgasm that she happened to catch sight of the clock and discovered it was already eight o’clock.
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