Pretty Face

by Lucy Parker

  His blood having made a swift migration south, it took several moments for Luc’s brain to connect the dots and realise that when someone sent a text message and a beep immediately sounded, it usually meant that the other phone was not currently in a dressing room at the Old Wellington.

  Lily blinked at her friend, managed to look both incredibly sexy and a little like a stunned haddock, and flushed to the tips of her ears. “What? Um,” she said, and ran out of ideas.

  “Yeah.” Trix tugged on a loose stand of bubblegum-coloured hair. “I was going to ask if you wanted me to put the kettle on. But I strongly feel like maybe my training wasn’t cancelled this afternoon and I’m needed at the theatre urgently.”

  Lily seemed totally lost for words, which would have seemed like the answer to a prayer when he was watching her TV reel, and underlined the cliché that you ought to be careful what you wished for.

  “Go ahead and make the tea,” he said to Trix, when the silence became screamingly loud. “I’m already late back to the office.”

  She was scrutinising him closely. “Would you like a cup before you go?” Her tone was wary and overly polite.

  He felt the small movement that Lily made at his side, an immediate rejection of that idea. He touched her arm in a fleeting gesture of reassurance. “I appreciate the offer, but I’ve got a meeting with my solicitor and a backlog of paperwork waiting for me.”

  He already had a dull headache building in his temples, which seemed natural enough, since he’d clearly lost his mind.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Lily seemed to read the mangled remains of his thoughts, which were bitterly self-condemning. “My fault as much as yours.” It was a low, unequivocal statement.

  Professionally, he was in a more powerful position, and given his current PR problems, his behaviour was rash at best. Some might say morally reprehensible and totally fucking hypocritical.

  “Hardly.”

  *

  When the door closed behind Luc, Lily released a quick breath. “God. It’s finally happened.” She sat down on the couch. “Gloria’s pulled me over the edge. Best start locking up the vicars now.”

  “Interesting weekend, I take it?” Trix went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle, watching her over the bench as she opened a new packet of biscuits. She cleared her throat. “I’m trying to think of a way to phrase this tactfully. Did you tumble arse-over-tits into a snowdrift and suffer some sort of catastrophic head injury?”

  The words themselves were teasing, but her tone was not, and Lily didn’t smile. “I get all morally superior about the media reports and then do this. Because I can’t help myself. It’s pathetic.”

  “It’s not pathetic. It’s radically out of character, but—” Trix looked down and seemed to realise what she was wearing. “I wore my reindeer PJs in front of Luc Savage. That could have been really embarrassing if I hadn’t caught him making sex eyes at the staff.”

  “Fuck.” Lily rested her forehead on the heels of her palms. “He’s my boss.”

  “That fact only just occurred to you?”

  “I’m hoping that if I repeat it enough, my brain might untangle all the crossed wires.”

  Trix said nothing while she brewed their tea. Lily rubbed her thumbs in slow circles over her temples, as if she could hypnotise her racing thoughts into stillness, and listened to the cosy clinking of pottery, which she usually found calming.

  When Trix came around the bench and passed over a steaming cup of tea, there was a cracker sticking out of it at an angle, already dunked. Like the chocolate flake in a 99, only dry and depressing.

  “I found them in the cupboard,” she said. “Conveniently vegan. Although you probably intended to smother them in cheese, which would have defeated the purpose. And herbal tea. No dairy or caffeine for the voice, right?”

  “Or alcohol, chocolate or curry.”

  “Just like being back at boarding school.” Trix sat down on the couch and curled her legs beneath her. Her movements were flexible and graceful, as if she were one of those dolls with elastic limbs and could just casually loop her knee about her neck if she wanted.

  “You slept with vodka and Milky bars stuffed under your mattress at school.” Lily bit the corner off a cracker. She couldn’t remember buying these, which could mean they’d been in the cupboard since she’d moved in. It wasn’t too bad. Although it was slightly concerning that a vegan cracker tasted like fake chicken.

  “Most of which you nicked.” Trix stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea, still watching Lily closely. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “My history of petty theft? I think it’s mostly behind me. I haven’t even opened any doors on your advent calendar.”

  “Lily.”

  Lily snapped the corner off her cracker and toyed with it, tapping it against the side of her mug. “It’s just—attraction.” The statement—the lie—seemed to loiter in the air, returning a sceptical, silent Oh, yeah? Deliberately, she shrugged it away. “He’s a good-looking man, my sex life has been on the backburner recently, and things—bubbled over. It’s nothing. As soon as I get stuck into rehearsals, I’ll forget all about it.”

  Her conscience heaved a loud sigh and stalked off in exasperation.

  It would have been a decent performance, if she’d been playing to a different audience.

  In her best Gloria voice, Trix said silkily, “Who cares about my professional reputation? I’m so starved for a man and he’s ever so dreamy.” She snorted. “As if.”

  “You couldn’t even pretend that you don’t know me that well.”

  “Despite that brazen lie about your dried-up husk of a sex life, you’ve never come close to compromising your job for an attraction.” Trix took aim and fired. “And thanks to your mother, you usually sprint away from workplace relationships like you’re outrunning a swarm of wasps.”

  Lily looked at the remains of her cracker and imagined choking it down like a mouthful of dust. She set it back on the saucer before she met Trix’s steady gaze.

  Hot-button topic. Nobody enjoyed having their neuroses pointed out to them.

  Her mother was a driven, intelligent woman. A talented, successful singer. A witty conversationalist, well informed and charismatic. And Lily loved her.

  She didn’t love that Vanessa had unapologetically used influential men to advance her career for almost thirty years.

  Dating a club promoter had brought her into Jack Lamprey’s sphere. An affair with Jack had propelled her from backup singer to headline act.

  Lily had been an unexpected extra.

  It was do-or-die survival of the fittest, from Vanessa’s perspective. If you wanted to reach the top of your profession and stay there, you kept a cool head and made shrewd choices.

  “It’s snakes and ladders in this business, darling.” Laughter in her mother’s voice. “You go to school, you work hard, and you take advantage of the shortcuts when they come along. Just be careful you don’t get bitten.”

  Networking, as one paper had called it sarcastically, to her mother’s intense amusement, had opened doors for Vanessa, but it was her talent that kept her on the stage. She would have got where she wanted to be regardless. Her voice had always been able to silence every conversation in a noisy room, whether it was a backstreet pub or an arena. In a good way, unlike when Lily spoke.

  Vanessa was currently living with the chief executive of her record label, whose existence she had ignored until his promotion. Perfectly nice man. Highly unlikely to last.

  Lily could still remember, word for word, what her mother had said when Lily had started going out with her first boyfriend. “Flesh and blood, that’s everything. That love is forever. Men—men are lovely. For a while. It never lasts, kiddo. And it’s nice if you’re left with something more than memories and a bruised ego.”

  As a person: total delight to be around. As a role model for romantic and sexual relationships: not ideal.

  Lily couldn’t control Vanessa’s
choices, but she was in charge of her own. Just because the media was convinced she was going to follow in her mother’s slightly erratic footsteps, and just because she’d inadvertently put a face and voice to the most notorious gold-digger on primetime TV, it didn’t mean that she had to play to type in real life.

  She was already crossing a line with Luc. The whole dynamic was uncomfortably familiar.

  Yet even thinking that also felt weirdly like a betrayal.

  She was going to destroy herself with stress before this show even opened.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said slowly. “And I can’t explain it. But it won’t go any further.”

  Ideally, she would have sounded cool and certain when she said that, not depressed.

  “I hope not.” Concern licked at the edge of Trix’s blunt words. “Because you’ve had one dream since we were at school and it didn’t involve taking your clothes off. Either to play a complete numpty like Gloria or to hop into bed with your director. You’re finally on the precipice of turning your career around. And if you want to start shaking off the shadow of Gloria the Homewrecker, at least until the special-edition DVD box set comes out, you probably shouldn’t be making return sex eyes at a man everyone thought was all but married to the most beloved actress in Britain until a couple of months ago.”

  “Jesus, Trix. Tell me how you really feel.”

  “I made the worst decision of my life this year, and God knows how far I would have sunk if you hadn’t tried to talk sense into me, over and over again. You didn’t half-arse around the point.”

  Lily didn’t reply immediately. She hadn’t held back at the time, but she trod more cautiously around this subject now. “I’m not arguing, but—the circumstances aren’t exactly the same.”

  “No. In this case, there’d be professional implications as well as personal ones.”

  Which pretty much covered the spectrum of her own reservations, but wasn’t what she’d meant. “I should have said, the men aren’t exactly the same.”

  Trix’s fine-boned features set into unreadable lines. “They’re both forty-something workaholics. Used to being in charge.”

  And the similarities ended there.

  Lily gave up on hedging. She was incapable of going soft on Dan St. James. “Dan could have been younger than you and he’d still have had the control issues.”

  “You don’t know what Luc is like outside of work. You hardly know him.”

  Lily’s otherwise uncooperative brain acknowledged that fact. A less rational part of her instinctively disagreed. The Romantic poets would call it her heart; realistically, it was probably her hormones.

  “Maybe not, but—Luc isn’t Dan. God, I’d be even more worried about myself if I really thought he was anything like Dickhead Dan—” Flushing, she cut herself off. “Sorry.”

  It was a tiny flicker, but the first time she had seen Trix smile when they’d been anywhere near this subject. “It used to slip into text messages when you were getting really heated.” That scrap of a smile faded. “It was one reason why I was glad I kept a second phone.”

  It was in the past now, thank God, but that whole situation could still infuriate Lily. It had been a horrendous time, with Dan slinking about like a manipulative octopus, wrapping his tentacles about every aspect of Trix’s life, trying to cut off anybody who could see what was going on.

  They’d come within inches of losing their friendship altogether, when Trix had still been so wrapped up in him that she’d listened to every poisonous word that dripped off his forked tongue.

  Lily had disliked him the first time they’d met; six months in, she’d never detested anybody so much in her life.

  “I’m just thrown,” she said eventually, veering away from the subject of Dan before her brain imploded with residual rage. “I thought I’d be fighting Luc professionally throughout the whole process, however short it turned out to be. I thought that if I managed to do this, it’d be despite him. I didn’t expect—”

  She hadn’t expected Luc Savage, the insufferable, insulting twat, to be Luc, the man who had suffered through an awkward cuddle to comfort her when she’d almost vomited from Kirkby nerves.

  “It’s just—temporary.” She did manage firmness this time, although the words were very quiet.

  Trix still looked worried. “Is it? I’ve never seen you like this. You blushed. You’re usually so unflappable around men. I’m not surprised most of them find you intimidating.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Uh, they do. You only see the crap that’s written by strangers. The people we actually know, guys we meet—most of them spend two minutes with you and want to run home to Mummy.”

  Lily choked on the mouthful of tea she’d taken to ease the dryness in her throat. “Thanks a lot. You make me sound like the White Witch from Narnia.”

  “You’re not cold. You’re just very self-contained. Erring slightly on the side of cynical.”

  “Cynical?”

  “You’re never surprised when your mother ends a relationship. You expect it to happen, and it does. Every time. You love your dad, but you don’t have much faith in him. You expect to be let down. You aren’t exactly Little Miss Trusting. Which I don’t think is a bad thing,” Trix added hastily, seeing Lily’s expression. “I mean, you were never taken in by Dan. Right from the beginning, you told me to be careful, and you were right. It was a fucking mess, and I still can’t believe that I just let it…spiral.”

  Absently, Lily shook her head. “I think that’s why people like Dan are so dangerous, though. Anyone could fall for the charm offensive. He worked by stages, one step at a time, so your warning signals never went off. He never bothered to manipulate me. He saw me as some sort of twisted competition for your attention from day one. I bet he used to say all sorts about me, in a really light way, like he was joking.” She saw from the tinge of colour in Trix’s cheekbones that she was right. “You can’t blame yourself. He’s a career manipulator. I bet he was a vicious little shit at school, always playing people off one another and tugging the strings. It’s emotional abuse. Bullying should be illegal.”

  The unfamiliar traces of hardness fell away from the downward curve of Trix’s mouth. “I do blame myself.”

  Lily reached out and took her hand. “I know. It makes me want to strap him to that table with the industrial laser in Goldfinger.”

  “And you wonder why men run away crying.”

  Lily bit her lip. “Cynical?”

  Trix squeezed her fingers. “In the most lovable way.” She added softly, “Just—don’t lose yourself looking for something that’s not really there.”

  *

  The door closed behind his legal team and Luc jerked open a desk drawer, sifting through the contents for painkillers. He could deal with a headache; he didn’t need it turning into a migraine. The tablet on his desk buzzed with an incoming call.

  Margo.

  He answered while he swallowed a couple of tablets dry. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” She sounded exactly as usual, voice perfectly trained, emotion carefully restrained. He’d never been able to tell her mood from a phone call. She’d been good at covering it in person as well, but he’d directed her enough times to recognise her tells. “I’m downstairs—okay to come up for a minute?”

  “Shouldn’t you be killing time in an Italian airport about now?”

  “The concierge at the hotel was a fan of Alberto’s.” He thought he heard a hint of a smile that time. “He got us a free upgrade and an earlier departure time.”

  Luc suspected that was a metaphor for Ferreti’s life in general. Most people regularly experienced delayed flights and bad customer service, and most people didn’t bounce when they walked.

  “I have a meeting in twenty minutes,” he said, checking his schedule. “First free window I’ve had today. Nice timing. Come on up.”

  She came into his office a few minutes later, after one obligatory knock. For some reason, that single knock s
eemed to punctuate their new relationship. He hadn’t seen her for a while. If she came to his house now, she’d knock on the door, when she’d once had a key. After the breakup, she’d removed her things so efficiently that she hadn’t left behind so much as a stray hair tie—and he’d spent so little time at home the past couple of years that he hadn’t built up enough memories of her there to make it seem empty now.

  The behemoth of a man walking behind her gave Luc one hard stare, barked, “I’ll wait outside,” and spun on his heel.

  Luc looked at Margo quizzically as she shut the door. “Assistant, bodyguard or overzealous fan?”

  “He combines the roles of driver, coffee purchaser and fan buffer.”

  “You didn’t come across him in Rome, by any chance? Slaying lions in the Colosseum?”

  “I found him in Shoreditch, bench-pressing twice his own body weight.”

  “He really felt it necessary to follow you up here?”

  “Are you kidding? I told him I was going to discuss business with my ex. It was difficult to talk him out of packing nunchucks.”

  He sat on the edge of his desk as he surveyed her. She looked tanned and relaxed, her hair falling in a shiny black bob. It was surreal. He felt like she was an old colleague or a friend he hadn’t seen in years. It was hard to believe that a few months ago he’d been living with her. Sleeping with her.

  She was studying him with equal fascination. “You look—different.”

  “I know, it’s bizarre. Eight years, and I feel like our entire relationship was some sort of surreal dream.”

  She blinked. “No, I mean, you’re actually different. You’re even acting differently. You would never have said something like that when we were together. It wouldn’t have occurred to you. To analyse our relationship in any way.”

  That was uncomfortably true, and he realised it belatedly. He shrugged, deliberately casual. “There was never a need. We always got along well.”

  “Yes, we did. Which I’ve since realised was another symptom. We never argued when we were a couple. People who love each other argue. People who hate each other argue. People who aren’t invested enough to bother just get along.”