Gil froze.
Bella walked away.
She slept on the plane. She would have said it was dreamless. But when she woke up there were tears on her face.
The next month was a nightmare. She threw herself into work but it was no distraction. At the back of her mind all the time was Gil’s face. She did not think she would ever forget it.
He had gone so absolutely still. Why on earth had she told him? She had never told anyone about that horrible night at Kosta’s flat! She had hardly admitted it to herself. Gil must have been disgusted.
Every time she thought about it, Bella winced physically. Once she’d actually jumped in her seat at work. She had been trying to concentrate on proofreading her article and the memory had just crept up on her. Shocked, she’d clapped her hands to suddenly burning cheeks and had said out loud, ‘Oh, no!’
‘Is that a woman with a nasty secret, I hear?’ said Sally, passing on her way to the photocopier.
‘Secret?’ Bella’s laugh was a groan. ‘Haven’t got a single secret left.’
‘Sounds bad.’
‘It is. I splurged them all on the last man—’ She broke off. ‘Never mind.’
Sally looked at her shrewdly. ‘We’re not talking the guy from finance, right?’
Bella was bewildered. ‘Which guy?’
‘Thought not,’ said Sally with satisfaction. ‘I mean, you weren’t really interested, I know. But you didn’t actually look through the poor guy. Not until you went home to your sister’s wedding. What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ said Bella, so ferociously that even Sally blinked. She was not talking to Sally though. She was talking to herself.
To begin with Gil rang several times. Every time she got home there were messages on her machine. His tone varied from sweet reason to icy exasperation but the message was basically always all the same.
‘Call me.’
Only the numbers he told her to call changed. He was obviously travelling all round the world. She wrote them down. But she never called any of them.
In the end the messages ceased. Bella told herself it was a relief. That did not stop her calling up her home phone every hour to check whether a new message had come in. But Gil had gone off the air.
Eventually she found out why, thanks to Annis.
Back from her honeymoon, it seemed that Annis had nothing better to do than keep Bella informed on the progress of her business consultancy. So one May morning, Bella went to her computer and found she had an email waiting for her on Elegance Magazine’s central register. It was headed ‘My First Millionaire!’
Under this dramatic heading, Annis’s voice was as familiar as if she was in the room, not on the other side of the Atlantic.
Hi!
Thought you’d like to see this. I’m cock-a-hoop about it. Kosta keeps saying I shouldn’t get excited, it’s bad for the baby. But I think the baby ought to share his mother’s triumphs. Heaven knows, there will be plenty of disasters for him to get used to. I’ve dropped the baby doll three times at the parental practice night. And at the antenatal class, I kicked the woman in front of me halfway across the room. She and her partner slid like the British bobsleigh team. Not sure I’m cut out for this motherhood thing. Kosta says to stop worrying. By the time our child can compare notes with proper parents, he’ll be past caring. But I’m going to make sure that he knows I’m a very good management consultant. He’s got to have some respect.
Bella grinned. That sounded like Annis. But the next sentence made her grin die abruptly.
So forget Bugs Bunny. The son and heir is getting Gil de la Court pasted on his bedroom wall.
Love, Annie.
PS Love the photo. He’s so brainy, you forget the man’s gorgeous with it.
Heart sinking, Bella opened the attachment.
It was quite a short article. It seemed to be from a newspaper in Sydney.
Gilbert de la Court is the newest member of the exclusive club of Net Millionaires. He launched Watifdotcom last month. This has seen off practised sharks who were snapping round de la Court’s small company of old college friends, looking to strip out the ground-breaking randomised filter programme. It has also made de la Court and his mates millionaires overnight.
‘We’re just getting used to it,’ says de la Court, a quiet-spoken dynamo. ‘We wanted to keep our research capacity independent and we’ve managed that. The millionaire stuff is an unexpected bonus. We’re just computer nerds who love pushing the boundaries.’
Industry watchers say this modesty is typical but deceptive. De la Court left his university teaching post to set up the company only three years ago and has seen it go from strength to strength. Since he brought in new-kid-on-the-block consultancy guru Annis Carew, the market has been waiting for him to make his move. This is expected to be only the first of many. Welcome to a new Net Star.
And the picture was, as Annis had said, gorgeous. Horribly, memorably gorgeous.
For some reason the paper had pictured him at the helm of a yacht. It looked like a holiday photograph. He was wearing ragged shorts and his hair was too long again. The digital picture on her screen showed in cruel detail how the muscles bunched in his tanned shoulders as he swung the wheel. The dark eyes were narrowed against the sun. He looked alert, intent and vividly alive.
Bella felt her heart turn over in sheer longing.
‘Nice,’ said Sally approvingly, leaning over her shoulder.
Bella jumped. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Who is he?’
‘Oh, just a client of my sister’s.’
‘Lucky sister.’
Bella shook her head. ‘My sister doesn’t care,’ she said in a constrained tone. ‘She just got married to the love of her life.’
Sally leaned forward to get a closer look. ‘If I were you, I’d ask her to pass along his phone number.’
‘I’ve already got his phone number,’ said Bella, goaded.
Sally grinned, unrepentant. ‘In that case, lucky you.’
Bella threw a paper-clip at her.
Sally caught it, laughing. ‘You’d better be nice to me. Or I’ll tell Gary in finance about his rival.’
But it was not Gary she told. It was Rita Caruso. In front of the whole department.
It was an editorial meeting about the July edition.
‘OK,’ said Caruso, about two thirds into the meeting. ‘Millionaires of the Month. We’re going to have to do better. April was the pits.’
The journalist responsible bridled but everyone else reluctantly agreed.
‘He was eighty and lived in a condo in Florida,’ said the beleaguered journalist in defence of her piece. ‘Find me an undiscovered millionaire who doesn’t.’
‘Well,’ said Caruso, looking like a cat that had got the cream. ‘Someone may just have done that. Bella? Do you want to tell us about “My First Millionaire”?’
Bella was sketching masks of tragedy on her note pad. And then giving them yachtsman’s shoulders. And scrubbing them out. Hearing her name, she jumped.
‘What?’
‘The email in your inbox this morning. Who’s the guy?’
Too late, Bella remembered that incoming mail went straight to central collection area, in order that any crank mail could be filtered out. Anyone could search that index. Caruso, they all knew, regularly did a search and find on key words. Millionaire, Bella now realised, had to be one of them.
Why on earth couldn’t Annis have found a better title for her message, thought Bella, irritated.
She said, ‘It was only a message from my sister.’
‘And?’
‘About a mutual—er—friend.’
‘So you know this millionaire?’ said Caruso tapping her rolled-gold pen against her teeth. ‘What’s he like?’
That was when Sally intervened.
‘A hunk,’ she said helpfully. ‘And Bella has his phone number.’
‘Great.’ Caruso’s eyes gleamed. ‘OK. Let’s have his detai
ls.’
‘But I don’t know any details,’ said Bella alarmed.
‘Then do the research. You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ Caruso prepared to move onto the next subject. ‘Let me have what you find by the end of the day.’
So Bella reluctantly went to work. She found his academic site and printed off a couple of archived papers on Internet development which Gil had written and posted there. A general search also revealed more recent newspaper clippings. The clippings varied from enthusiastic to adulatory. She managed to lose the more breathless ones, along with all the photographs. Though she did print off a dramatically brooding one from an Internet magazine and slipped it into her shoulder bag.
She took the folder into Caruso with bad grace.
‘De la Court,’ said the features editor, leaning through the sheaf of press clippings at the advertising manager. ‘Some guy was talking about him at dinner last night. He’s the new cyber millionaire. There’s got to be a story in this.’
Bella managed to look bored. She was really pleased with the result.
‘He’s just another geek in an anorak.’
‘Geek!’ Caruso gave a high-pitched crow of laughter. ‘I just love it when you’re superior. So British.’
Bella scowled. She knew when she was being sent up. ‘Geeks aren’t sexy.’
Caruso stopped laughing. ‘You’re missing the point here,’ she said. ‘He’s an unmarried geek with a sudden infusion of personal wealth. This is more than sexy. It is the fairy tale.’
Bella snorted.
Caruso’s eyes were steely behind her designer spectacles. ‘Don’t knock anything that gives our readers hope.’
Bella muttered under her breath. Caruso ignored her.
‘Now, what I want you to do is this. Call him. Tell him what you’ve dug out.’ She waved a hand at the clippings. ‘Be as controversial as you like. Challenge him. Do one of your hatchet jobs if you want. But get him to comment. Understand?’
Oh, yes, Bella understood. Her stomach was already in free fall at the prospect. But after six months in the job she was much too experienced to say so. Caruso was not given to indulging in compassion. If she thought that Bella had any history with her chosen Millionaire of the Month, her only concern would be how to use it to spice up the article.
‘Yes,’ said Bella with minimal expression.
‘Good. Amazing as it sounds, I have great hopes of you.’ She tipped back her leather chair and looked up at Bella with a winning smile. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t keen when they wanted you to join us here. I don’t like amateurs. I don’t like trainees. And I really don’t like daddy’s little rich girls. But you’re all right.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bella, warmed in spite of herself.
‘You’ve got the instinct. You knew you had no experience but you made that work for you. Your New in Town pieces were cool. You work hard. You party, but you make that work for you too. You’ve got your finger on a pulse. Hi, to my correspondent from the metropolitan young.’
‘All in all, quite an asset, then,’ said Bella coolly. ‘So why waste it on a piece like the Millionaire of the Month? Anyone could do that.’
Caruso stopped smiling. ‘Don’t push your luck. Do you want a permanent job or not? It’s next month you leave us, isn’t it?’
Suddenly Bella was alert. ‘A job? Here?’
‘Probably in London but you’d still do stuff for us. London’s hot. We can use someone like you.’ Caruso examined her nails. ‘You’d have to take the assignments you were given, of course.’
‘You mean I’ve got to do this millionaire piece or I’ve lost my chance of a job,’ interpreted Bella.
‘You have to do it well, or you’ve lost the chance of a job,’ corrected Caruso amiably. ‘That’s market forces for you.’
Bella set her jaw. ‘OK. But I still thinks it’s dull.’
Caruso yawned. ‘Up to you to make it sound not dull.’
Bella knew she was beaten. She picked up the file and went to the door.
‘Oh, Bella…’
Caruso was pulling some proofs towards her across the desk but she stopped for a moment with a friendly smile. Well, as friendly as a piranha got, thought Bella.
She stopped. ‘Yes?’
‘Don’t even try to lose that picture.’
‘What do you mean? What picture?’
‘I opened the attachment too. He’s got a lot of muscles for a geek. I want that photograph in the magazine. Unless you can come up with something sexier.’
Bella did not even attempt to answer.
She did not telephone Gil. She did not even email him, although she had the address on the paper that had come with the fiery flowers he’d sent her on Valentine’s Day. She should have thrown the paper away but for some reason she had not. Still, she was not going to admit that she knew how to get hold of him.
Instead she called Annis and explained Rita Caruso’s idea for an in-depth profile. She made it sound as tacky as she could. No one, she thought, would advise their client to give an interview to a journalist who came up with an outline brief like that. Certainly not Annis, who valued dignity almost as much as privacy.
But Annis did not do her duty.
‘Fine. I’ll talk to him,’ she said, infuriatingly obliging.
Bella could have danced with frustration.
But that was nothing to what she felt when she got into work the next day and found a message from the office of the chief executive of Watifdotcom.
‘Mr de la Court will be in New York next week. He will call at Elegance Magazine’s premises on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on his itinerary.’
Bella took it to Rita Caruso.
‘We can’t let him do this. He’s jerking our chain.’
Caruso sucked her teeth, interested. ‘He’s jerking your chain,’ she corrected thoughtfully. ‘Cute.’
‘You mean, you’re just going to sit here and let him get away with it?’
Caruso inspected the ceiling. ‘Just make sure you keep your cellphone with you at all times. Don’t so much as go to the rest room without it. And don’t turn it off ever. Not until the guy has told you what he eats for breakfast.’ She diverted her gaze from the ceiling to Bella’s furious face and raised an eyebrow. ‘Unless you already know?’
Bella did not trust herself to speak.
‘Fine,’ said Caruso sweetly. ‘Close the door on your way out.’
She was not, Bella promised herself, going to let Gil’s imminent arrival have any effect on her private life. She was not going to sit at home and wait for him to call. Still less to turn up on the doorstep. She was going to go out and have fun. And then somehow, anyhow, she would get through Tuesday with her sanity intact. Unless he arrived on Wednesday, of course.
At some point in the small hours of Sunday morning, she found herself in Hombre y Mujer. She was not looking for Gil. Of course she wasn’t. But when the only faces she recognised were New York residents, she flung herself into a series of wild routines that even attracted the attention of a world weary dancers’ agent. She accepted his card without interest and turned away, rapping on the bar and pointing to a bottle of mineral water.
The barman was impressed. ‘Hey, Paco,’ he called to his boss. ‘We got a star being discovered here.’
Paco lounged over. He raised his eyebrows when he saw Bella.
‘Well, well, well. Welcome back. Bella, isn’t it? And present obsession of my old friend Gil de la Court.’
It was too dark under the strobes for him to see how hard she flushed, Bella assured herself.
‘I’m flattered,’ she said, not meaning it. ‘But obsession is surely going a bit far.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, you know Gil.’
‘N-not really.’
‘He calls all the time to ask if you’ve been in. And who you’re with.’
‘Oh!’ Bella recovered quickly but she was shaken. ‘Bet it’s not the first time he’s asked about a woman.
Pac
o looked at her oddly. ‘First time I’ve seen it.’
In fact Paco had been mildly surprised at Gil’s reaction to the blonde dancer. Of course everything Gil did, he did a hundred per cent. But this pursuit was unprecedented. In his experience it was usually women who did the pursuing, while Gil responded with beautifully mannered bewilderment.
‘Gil on the hunt is a new phenomenon,’ he said wryly. ‘I’d have said he’s the last man in the world to pick up strange blondes in nightclubs. He takes his relationships seriously.’
He sounded surprisingly disapproving. He was a nightclub owner, after all, not normally a profession that doubled as arbiter of morality, thought Bella, with fury.
‘Well, excuse me for breathing,’ she said evilly. ‘Is it my fault he’s decided he wants to give himself a fling now he’s a millionaire?’
She was remembering a little too clearly what he had said at the wedding. ‘All that fire. All that passion…What do I have to do to get her back, my Tina?’
That was what it was all about, she realised suddenly. That was it!
Gil was a man who had always taken his relationships seriously. Suddenly there was this party girl who could dance him off his feet and he had found that it was possible not to be quite so serious. Hadn’t he?
She had even told as much, herself! ‘It’s not supposed to be a tool for anything. It’s supposed to be fun.’ Heaven help her she had actually said that to him! So it wasn’t really surprising that he had walked out on her the morning after they’d made love, was it? She had licensed him to do just that, with her own stupid, shallow words.
Paco leaned towards her, one elbow on the bar.
‘So what do I tell him?’
Bella did not answer at once. For a moment she felt so wild with shame and loss that she wanted to throw her water in his face and march out. But, of course, she could not do that, it would not be cool. And if she was nothing else, she was cool.
So she took a swig from the water bottle, fighting to handle these turbulent and unwelcome feelings. And made a discovery. It was not Paco she was angry with. It was not even herself. It was Gil.
She looked at Paco, eyes narrowed, jaw tight, and said just what she meant, no subterfuge, no irony, no pretending. She could handle it after all.
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