Reputation in Tatters

by Maggie Cox

  Her vehemence made Nash grin. It didn’t hurt that his suggestion had piqued her pride. It demonstrated that she was still capable of displaying a little grit. Seeing the way she’d been when he’d first arrived—sitting alone in a freezing cold room without the light on—he had been concerned that depression had struck deep. Now he knew that it was only a low mood that had descended, and he was honestly relieved. It made him even more determined to help her return to the land of the living and claim the full life that was naturally hers.

  ‘I’ve arranged for the press to meet you at my office, and I’ll be here at about nine in the morning to pick you up and take you back there. I want to make everything as easy as I possibly can for you, and I don’t want you veering off into fantasy land, imagining everything is going to be horrendous. I’ll be right beside you, and you’re going to be just fine,’ he told her. ‘Of that I have no doubt. When it’s all over we’ll spend some time talking about how it went. After that, I believe your uncle has arranged for us to have lunch with him at his restaurant.’

  ‘He’s always trying to feed me,’ Freya quipped, with a little half-smile playing about her pale lips. ‘He thinks I don’t eat enough.’

  ‘Do you?’ Nash asked sharply.

  ‘I don’t look like I’m starving myself, do I?’

  Nash let his gaze rove boldly down her body, in the baggy sweater and floor-length skirt, and his blue eyes glinted with humour. ‘How would I be able to tell in that outfit? Do you always cover up like that?’

  Out of the blue a memory came to him of Freya playing the female lead in an action/adventure movie he’d seen about four years back. Her role had been that of a fiery slave-girl in a sultan’s harem, and she’d been all long tanned legs and curves aplenty. Just the recollection alone helped Nash get hot under the collar.

  ‘It’s a cold day, and I was trying to keep warm,’ she replied testily.

  ‘Then put the fire on,’ he advised, walking to the door. He turned to briefly face her again, his expression serious but not bereft of kindness. ‘Try and get a good night’s rest. You’re going to need all the energy you can muster for tomorrow. If you need me for anything…anything at all…here’s my number.’ He handed her a small business card. ‘Sleep well, Freya.’ And with that he departed.

  Unmoving for several minutes after he’d gone, Freya stared down at the little card in her hand as if it was the first lifeline she’d been handed in a long time. Nash might only be helping her because of her uncle’s claim on his friendship, but she couldn’t deny she was glad to have someone like him on her side. There was something about the man that told her he could handle almost anything…that nothing would faze him because he’d seen it all—both the light and the dark side of human existence. Now, what had brought on that belief?

  Shivering, Freya headed determinedly for her bedroom. She needed to survey the somewhat diminished contents of her wardrobe and decide what she was going to wear during her big ordeal tomorrow, when she would voluntarily face the press after so long spent trying to avoid them…

  Nash dropped into his office to check that everything was ready for the press visit before going to collect Freya the next morning. He’d hardly been able to sleep for reflecting on their meeting yesterday. She hadn’t confirmed it in so many words, but the idea that she’d been living like a hermit for the past two years, with only her uncle and her mother to stand by her in the face of all that had happened, had elicited a fierce, almost physical protest inside him. Injustice of any kind was apt to raise his hackles like nothing else, and he never failed to be astounded at the base depths some human beings could sink to in order to exploit another. She was well rid of her grasping, loud-mouthed ex-husband, that was for sure, and the best revenge in his book was always success. Nash didn’t doubt for a second that Freya’s star would rise again once her confidence had returned—and return it would. He would make sure of that.

  Raising a corner of the cream-coloured blind at the window, he glanced broodingly down at the gleaming black Mercedes with personalised number plates parked beside the kerb below. Then, turning his head, he considered the dozens of signed celebrity photographs that were displayed round his office walls. He felt the ease and luxury of the bespoke suit he wore, which perfectly complemented his strong, hard physique. His good fortune never ceased to gratify him. In the inauspicious beginnings he had had, dreams of the kind of amazing success Nash enjoyed now had been either delusions or fantasies in other people’s book. Yet he had still dreamed, and he had turned his dream into a reality.

  But the thought wasn’t entirely benign. It immediately provoked a disturbed frown between his dark blond brows, and for a moment Nash was consumed by some of the darker memories of his past. He’d been at the top of his profession for nearly six years now, but it never failed to bring him back down to earth when he remembered the painful and arduous route that had got him there. The point was he had risen above his seemingly insurmountable difficulties and succeeded. Now he needed to show Freya that she could do the same.

  In the privileged circles that he moved in Nash enjoyed an admirable reputation amongst peers and clients alike, and he’d no doubt been helped by a biography that boosted the credentials he already had…even if some liberties had been taken with the facts… Most people assumed that he came from a fairly privileged background, with professional people as parents, and had benefited from a top-class education at a British public school. After all, his enunciation was perfect, with no traces of a Swedish accent at all. But Nash wasn’t the best publicist in the country for nothing. He’d never resorted to out-and-out deceit—but he intimately understood people’s tendency to put two and two together and make five and he knew how to use it to his advantage.

  From very early on in his career he’d been able to get away with revealing very little information about his origins—just a half-truth here or there, helped along by allowing various untrue assumptions to go unchallenged. That being the state of play, eventually a story had built up around him that was now more or less accepted as fact. He was Nash Taylor-Grant, raised in Suffolk, England, by a Swedish mother who was a chemist and a British father—an eminent scientist who had unfortunately died from a heart attack abroad on a business trip. There was also some vague notion that following his school years Nash had naturally gone on to Oxford or Cambridge—or at least one of the country’s other leading universities.

  The reality could not have been starker…

  He hadn’t been raised in Britain at all. He had been raised in a poor suburb of Stockholm in Sweden, the only son of Inga Johannsson—a laboratory technician who’d been forced to give up her job when she fell pregnant with Nash and had eventually had to work as an office cleaner just to keep body and soul together for herself and her small son. Nash’s father had in truth been British. Nathan Taylor had been a biologist at the same laboratory where Inga had worked, and that was how the two of them had met. Unfortunately, when Nash was only three years old, his father had been killed in a car accident. With no compensation because she’d been unmarried, and no family to whom she’d been able to turn for help, Inga had had to get by on welfare. There had followed a series of disastrous relationships with the kind of men who would easily have found a niche in horror movies.

  Flinching now from possibly the worst memory of them all, the time he’d witnessed yet again his mother being verbally and physically abused, Nash couldn’t help but shudder. He remembered lunging at the man—his mother’s current lover—and pummelling him with blows so hard that he’d split and broken the skin on his bare knuckles. But that had been before the man had turned on Nash and, with his far superior weight and strength, all but beaten him to a pulp. It would have been bad enough if Nash’s ordeal had ended there, but neither he nor his mother could have anticipated what had happened next. In one horrific, unexpected act his attacker had produced a flash of something silver from inside his jeans pocket and torn open Nash’s flesh with a flick-knife.


  He’d almost lost his life that night. He’d certainly lost a good deal of blood, and put the fear of God into his poor mother as she’d sat weeping and wailing beside him in the ambulance that had gone screaming through the streets to take him to hospital.

  Shame, hurt and fury moved through Nash’s body in one relentless wave of white-hot emotion as he remembered. Somewhere at the side of his ribs the old wound throbbed with renewed pain, and for a moment or two he really struggled to regain his equilibrium. Moving restlessly away from the window, he picked up the file he’d started on Freya Carpenter to will away the distracting and painful recollections that were bombarding him.

  Yes…he’d experienced first-hand how human beings could wilfully hurt and maim each other—whether physically or with words—and because of that he had a genuine ability to understand the kind of hell this woman must have had to endure. But although he knew deep down that he didn’t deserve to feel shame about his past any more, there was a part of him that still couldn’t allow himself to admit the truth to everyone. He wished he could get over his own mistrust and think to hell with it, but it wasn’t proving easy. Only time would tell if he would ever be at ease with himself enough to adopt such an approach…

  As the press and television cameras whirred away in the small courtyard of Nash’s smart Belgravia offices, before Freya read out her statement, he moved his gaze from the blur of journalists and photographers gathered round to study the woman that was the centre of so much clamouring attention standing by his side.

  Astonishing beauty like hers scarcely needed the adornment of fine clothes and cosmetics to enhance it, but Nash would be a liar if he didn’t concede that the elegant pink Chanel suit she wore—along with the perfectly applied make-up—elevated her looks to the realms of stand-out gorgeous. He already knew that the camera loved her—he’d seen the results often enough in photographs and on film—but now he could intimately see why. But did anyone but him guess that beneath Freya’s faultlessly applied make-up her skin had the same pale sheen as ice-cold ivory?

  Even now he sensed her tremble, and he deliberately slid his arm loosely round her small waist and gave her a reassuring squeeze. At that moment he didn’t much care how the gesture might be misinterpreted. All he knew was a genuine desire to let her know that she wasn’t alone, that he was firmly in her corner and would be staying there for the duration.

  She turned briefly to acknowledge him, and the glint of warmth in her dazzling dark eyes momentarily unsteadied him. Clearing his throat, Nash addressed the small crowd in the courtyard. ‘Ms Carpenter will now read out her statement, after which I will allocate just five minutes for any questions. All she and I would ask is that you accord her due respect and politeness for the great courage it has taken her today to speak out after two years of dignified silence. Thank you.’

  It was over, and Freya knew she was still alive because her heart was beating strongly in her chest and her tastebuds could easily distinguish the strong Italian flavour of the coffee that she was sipping. Now alone with Nash, sitting on the stylish sofa in his office, her glance taking in the celebrity photographs that adorned the walls—many of whom she’d met—she could almost attest to breathing normally again.

  ‘First hurdle over,’ he commented, reaching for his own coffee as he settled himself in the matching armchair opposite. ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Grimacing, Freya crossed one long slim leg over the other and saw Nash’s gaze gravitate there almost immediately. For a moment it distracted her to be the recipient of that brooding and arresting cynosure, and the words she’d been about to speak got temporarily lodged inside her throat. She coughed a little to cover her unease. ‘I feel like I’ve done a fire-walk…only I don’t have the elation flooding me that’s supposedly the result of doing one of those! Instead I’m wondering what I’ve started and if anything I’ve said will make a difference. If you want me to be frank…I’m also concerned about how James will retaliate. What I said doesn’t exactly put him in a good light.’

  Her words made Nash sit up in his chair, his cup of coffee returned swiftly to the table in front of him. ‘Has he threatened you in any way?’ he demanded.

  ‘Do you mean physically?’ Freya answered quietly, looking pensive. ‘No. He has a good enough command of the English language to do enough damage using words alone. If you’ve read any of the newspaper reports from the past two years you must have noticed that.’

  ‘You cry wolf enough times in my experience and you’re going to get a kickback. I think the public are already drawing their own conclusions as far as your vindictive ex-husband is concerned, Freya. People aren’t fools…’

  ‘Words can cut so deep. Sometimes I think they can pierce the skin far worse than any physical violence. They have a way of inflicting damage where you’re most vulnerable. That was James’s particular little trick, anyway.’

  ‘Even so…you can fight back.’

  ‘Fight fire with fire, you mean? That’s not my way.’

  ‘I meant by getting on with your life again…by being a success! If you give up your acting career because your ex made you feel so bad that you can’t face the world then he’s won, Freya! You’ve made your statement today, stating the true facts of the case, and I know there’ll be a lot of sympathy out there in return for your candour. After this you’re bound to be in demand for all kinds of interviews, and depending on who’s organising them and what their agenda is I’d advise you to agree to some of them. But don’t worry…I’ll guide you on that. If it means more positive publicity, then that’s ultimately what we want. Plus it would get you back into appearing before the public again, and it might also help you rebuild some confidence.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  Leaning more fully against the chair-back, Freya looked reticent. Nash wasn’t blind. He could see that the woman was hurting, and hurting badly. It was becoming evident to him that she had suffered greatly in the past two years, and right now it was probably hard for her to believe that anything good could ever happen to her again. For someone with all the amazing assets she had it was a crying shame. Still, Nash wasn’t in the business of lost causes. He was in the business of putting reputations to rights again.

  ‘Remember what we agreed yesterday?’ he prompted her, leaning forward and resting his hands on his knees. ‘You have to give this enterprise your all! And it’s not as though you have to negotiate all the hurdles on your own. I’ll be with you, backing you up all the way…that’s a promise.’

  ‘What if public reaction isn’t good? What if people still believe everything James has said about me?’

  ‘It won’t happen. Public sympathy will be totally on your side, Freya. Trust me, I know this business intimately. After today they’ll know the truth about Frazier at last, and any further interest will be because people want you to do well again. Anyone who saw you out there today could easily see that you were a million miles away from being on the verge of a breakdown. You looked and were…amazing.’

  They were just words, and Freya knew that, but she didn’t doubt in those few charged moments that Nash meant them. She was only human, and could she help it if they melted her a little? Made her want more of this man’s honest regard? Yet, even so, she knew the regard she craved ultimately had to come from inside herself. She couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes, or constantly search for validity outside. Such a useless endeavour was always going to put her in a weak position and ensure her continuing vulnerability.

  ‘Thanks. The suit helped. Uncle Oliver bought it for me when I attended my first awards ceremony.’ Uncrossing her legs, she leaned forward to place her cup on the polished wooden coffee table between herself and Nash. Her lips quivered a little as she tried to form a smile. She was anxious that he wouldn’t think she was deliberately fishing for compliments.

  ‘It’s a nice suit,’ he agreed, an enigmatic smile of his own alighting on his highly sensual mouth.

 
CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘FREYA? You’re hardly eating anything, darling…’

  ‘Please don’t take it personally, Uncle Oliver…the food is wonderful, as always. I’m just not very hungry today. Do you mind?’

  Meeting the older man’s concerned stare, Freya touched her white linen napkin delicately to her lips and laid it on the table beside her plate. They were sitting in a private part of the beautiful French restaurant that Oliver Beaumarche owned—a kind of plush anteroom, with red velvet curtains, set aside for high-profile guests who preferred not to be seen dining by the rest of the public. But, even though the room was private, it was hard to eat when everything inside Freya felt as though it had been exposed to the penetrating glare of the most powerful microscope.

  Having her performances on stage or screen scrutinised was one thing—but having to admit personal failings, such as marrying a man who had neither loved nor respected her, who had betrayed her trust and financially ruined her, and having then been driven to explain her actions publicly to defend herself…well, it had left her feeling a bit like an ant squashed by a heavy boot.

  She lifted her gaze to observe the man sitting opposite her. Nash did not seem to be eating much of the delicious food that had been placed in front of him either. That inscrutable brow of his seemed to denote that he was thinking hard about something, and Freya wondered if he was considering that she should have made more of a stand against her ex-husband’s vicious slander? To a man whose demeanour and presence suggested he was capable of dealing with any disaster—whether personal or public—it was probably beyond understanding that a person’s self-esteem and will could be so crushed by someone far more manipulative and clever that they were, almost paralysed into inaction. Well, he was wrong if he thought her heart wasn’t really in this battle, Freya considered with force. She knew it was time to fight back and put things right in her life. It was just taking a little time to acclimatise herself to the idea of voluntarily putting herself under the public gaze again—especially when her experience of it during the past two years had been so relentlessly negative.