“Mmmm. Well, you must let me know. Especially if he starts pulling any of his little tricks.”
Little tricks? That sounds ominous.
Saad gets to his feet, then leans down to place a long, lingering kiss in the hollow of my neck and collarbone. “So can I see you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes. Why? Are you busy, or something?”
“No, not busy at all … I just mean … well, I’ve already seen you today, that’s all. And the day before that. And the day before that.”
He blinks at me. “Sorry, is there some kind of Grace-quota I don’t know about?”
“No, but …”
“Some kind of regulation”—he places another kiss on my neck, a little farther up this time—“that says that I can only get my fix of you twice a week, or something?”
“No.” I’m distracted for a few moments, drifting off on a wave of nerve-tingling pleasure as he kisses all the way up from my neck to my lips, and then all the way back down again. “I’m just,” I manage to utter eventually, “surprised that you can make so much time for me.”
“Grace. I run the company.”
I take a deep breath. “OK, then. That you want to make so much time for me. I mean, haven’t you got other women you want to be … um … getting your fix of?”
He lets out a loud laugh. “A bevy of Serbian supermodels, you mean? Or a girl like Britta? The kind of girl my brother thinks I ought to be shagging?”
I’m truly shocked. “Adnan thinks you should be shagging Serbian supermodels?”
This time his laugh is even louder. “Yes, Grace. My six-year-old brother thinks I should be shagging Serbian supermodels. God, you kill me!” He leans down to place a kiss on the top of my head. “I’m talking about my other brother. Wael. You probably see him in the papers sometimes, falling out of a nightclub with—would you believe it?—a Serbian supermodel on his arm.”
“But don’t you want to? Fall out of a nightclub with a Serbian supermodel, that is. Or … well, I suppose she doesn’t have to be Serbian. There are a lot of very stunning Russian models, aren’t there, and some superhot South American ones. And then there was Britta, of course. Who I assume was Swedish, or something—all that incredible blond hair—or …”
“Grace. I can understand why my party-loving cokehead of a brother wants to persuade me to shag supermodels. But it’s not clear to me why you want me to.”
“I don’t want you to! I’m just wondering why you’re not, currently.” I swallow, hard. “I mean, I’m assuming you’re not, currently. It’s none of my business if you are.”
“I’m not,” he says gently.
I let out a little laugh that’s supposed to be an unconcerned giggle but is in fact more a kind of belch of relief.
“And you know something, Grace. Messing around with models can get pretty boring.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“It’s true! Models don’t have great senses of humor. They don’t tend to be all that good in bed. They all seem to want to just lie back and have all the work done for them.”
I’m torn between nausea (at the idea of Saad in bed with models) and triumph (at the fact that they were all—allegedly—humorless and lazy).
“Those kind of women have never turned me on like you do, Grace. In fact, I’ve never slept with anyone like you before. Anyone quite so giving.”
Now I’m torn between embarrassment (at the fact that I’m so obviously an even bigger slut than I realized) and exhilaration (at the idea that I’m better in bed than an entire catwalk-ful of international models!!!!).
Exhilaration wins. Just.
“Hey, don’t blush!” Saad tells me as he gets to his feet and starts heading for the door. “Actually, forget that,” he adds. “You look gorgeous when you blush. I must try to find ways to make it happen more often.”
He blows me a final kiss and leaves the bedroom.
Once he’s gone, I stop postcoitally languishing right away, jump up out of the bed, and start to walk, naked but for my Jimmy Choos, out of the bedroom. I have to find my discarded items of clothing first, then I’ll give Thomas a call on the internal phone system and broach that issue of the cab.
The trouble is, I can’t find my discarded items of clothing.
My skirt isn’t where I left it in the dressing room, my blouse isn’t where Saad removed it in the lobby, and as for that underwear I was already uncertain about … well, there’s no sign of any of it.
There’s only one explanation.
Thomas.
I scurry (no mean feat in these teetering heels) to the nearest phone, which is on the Paul Frankl coffee table in front of one of the squashy sofas. I dial 1.
Thomas picks up a couple of rings later. “Mrs. Costello?”
It’s not the time to say Please, for the love of God, just call me Grace. This is going to be an awkward enough conversation as it is. “Thomas, I’m upstairs in S … in Mr. Amar’s bedroom, and I’m afraid I … well, I seem to have misplaced my clothes.”
“I do apologize, Mrs. Costello,” he says. “I picked them up when I was gathering Mr. Amar’s clothes. I didn’t realize you were staying for such a short visit.”
“That’s …”—even snider and sneakier than I thought—“really nice of you, Thomas. But I just need them back. That’s all.”
“Certainly. Now, what is it you need back, specifically? Your skirt? Your brassiere? Your …”
“All of it!”
“Of course. Would you hold on just one moment, please?” There are a couple of moments of silence, and then he returns. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Costello, but that won’t be possible.”
“What do you mean, it won’t be possible?”
“Your skirt and blouse were picked up by the dry cleaners when they came to collect Mr. Amar’s suit half an hour ago. And your intimate items have already been put in the washing machine.”
This is one of his little tricks, isn’t it?
“You … put my undies in the washing machine?”
“On a delicate cycle,” he says, sounding deliberately offended.
“That’s not my point! The point is … look, I need them! And my skirt and blouse. I have a toddler to collect from nursery in half an hour’s time!”
“Well, I’m afraid there isn’t very much I can do. I mean, I could phone the laundry pickup people, but it’ll take them a good half hour to get back here, even if they haven’t already put the clothes through for processing … remind me, Mrs. Costello, did you bring a coat?”
“Oh, no, Thomas. I am not walking out of here in nothing but my coat and my stilettos.” Panic has made me unusually bold. “So I suggest you think of something else for me to put on. You’ve made it quite clear that Mr. Amar has … um, entertained other women here on a pretty regular basis. Hasn’t one of them ever left something behind that I can borrow?”
He thinks about this for a moment. “I’m just not sure I could find you anything that would fit …”
“Well, try! And I’m only a bloody size ten, you know!”
“Of course. I’ll see what I can find in one of the guest bedrooms. Wait there, Mrs. Costello, and I’ll bring something along in just a couple of minutes.”
I head for the dressing room again, planning to grab a shirt of Saad’s from the wardrobe to use as a temporary cover-up, when suddenly the door to the lobby starts to open.
Powered by the thought of the humiliation that will ensue if Thomas sees me naked but for my Jimmy Choos, I hurl myself at the door like Usain Bolt on a really, really fast day. But as I reach it, twisting myself sideways so that if Thomas does get a glimpse of me, it’s a side-on view rather than the full frontal, I realize that the person opening the door isn’t Thomas at all.
Not unless Thomas has taken to wearing a slim gray pencil skirt, fishnet tights, and leopard-print Louboutin court shoes.
Oh, sweet Jesus. It’s Louboutin Lexie.
I don’t know if she’s
seen that it’s me. If I’m lucky, all she’s seen is that there’s a high-speed, naked woman slamming the door on her foot.
“Fucking hell!” she shrieks on the other side of the door. She pulls her foot backward, so that I can slam the door properly. “What the hell are you doing? You nearly took my fucking foot off, woman!”
Woman. Not Grace. Not even whatsyourname-that-I-spoke-to-for-the-first-time-this-morning. Maybe I have been lucky after all.
“Sorry!” I call back, in a high, quavering voice that’s partly meant to be a disguise, and is partly just the way I sound when I’m this nervous. “But this is private!”
“You don’t say?” Now I know for sure, from her voice, that it’s definitely Lexie. And she doesn’t sound badly injured. She just sounds extremely pissed off. “Look, I’m just trying to find a bathroom. And I only came up here because Mr. Amar said I should go and have a look at the Gauguin on the half-landing.”
Even though I haven’t really had time to process too much information in the past fifteen seconds, I’m still relieved to realize that Lexie must be this Maroun bloke’s art buyer.
And not, as I’ve had at the back of my mind for at least five of those fifteen seconds, one of Saad’s visiting “ladies.”
“There’s a bathroom on the ground floor!” I warble.
This is met with silence. Which I assume means that Lexie has limped off in either the direction of the half-landing or the direction of the downstairs bathroom. And which is broken, a couple of moments later, by Thomas’s smooth tones from out in the hallway.
“Can I help, madam?” he’s saying.
“I was just on my way back down to the bathroom,” I hear Lexie say. “That is, assuming the weird naked girl in there has told me the right place to go.”
“Oh, I’m sure she has.” Thomas’s voice is even more mellifluous than usual. “Mrs. Costello knows her way around here.”
I’ll kill him. I don’t care if he’s ex-military. I don’t care if he’s former Special Ops, for fuck’s sake. I will literally kill him.
“Costello?” Lexie is saying. “You don’t mean Grace Costello, do you?”
OK, I know I’ve got a memorable surname. But she wasn’t even supposed to be paying attention at the bloody meeting this morning! She was only meant to be there to get popularity points for her daughter!
I have to act fast. Thomas hasn’t the slightest loyalty to me—I think we’ve already proven that if anything, it’s quite the opposite—so if I’m going to prevent him from announcing to Louboutin Lexie (and thus to every Miranda in existence) that yes, he does mean Grace Costello, the very Grace Costello, in fact, who’s having an affair with Saad Amar … well, I need to come up with something good.
I make a dash for the dressing room, grab the first shirt of Saad’s that I see on one of the wardrobe rails, and start pulling it on.
“Thomas?” I yell, as I go, in my ordinary voice. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Costello. I’m just bringing you the clothes you asked for …”
“Excellent!” I cut him off before he can say anything else. “If you’d just leave them outside the door, please, Thomas. My model can get them when you’ve gone.”
There’s a brief, confused silence. It’s long enough for me to grab a pair of Saad’s trousers and start pulling those on, too. They’re going to be far too loose and far too long, but I’ll just have to belt them tightly and roll them up to my ankle. With my sky-high Jimmy Choos, I might even have found myself a brand-new look.
“Your model, Mrs. Costello?”
I can’t find a belt to hold the trousers up, so I pull a silk tie from the special hanging tie rack. It’s the bold orange one Saad wore to our lunch at Locanda Locatelli. I wrap it around the trousers waist and tie it, sharply, in a knot. Then I grab my handbag and stride to the lobby door, flinging it open. Thomas is staring at me, his eyes wide as saucers.
“Yes, Thomas, my model. Mr. Amar’s girlfriend. The one I’ve been commissioned to paint a nude portrait of!” Shit. Now that I’ve said it, it sounds more ludicrous than I thought. “She’s rather shaken, I’m afraid,” I force myself to carry on, “because someone opened the door on her a couple of minutes ago when she was looking for the clothes you were bringing her…. Oh! Lexie!” I pretend I’ve just seen her hovering in the hallway behind Thomas. “What a lovely surprise! You never said you knew Saad Amar. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know Saad Amar. I didn’t even know I was coming here until a couple of hours ago. I’m with my boss. Maroun Sawaya. I buy art for him. And … what did you say you were doing here, again?”
“Oh, just getting some preliminary sketches for a portrait,” I say as breezily as I know how. I can feel myself sweating into the fine wool of Saad’s suit trousers.
“A portrait?”
“Mmm-hmm. I happened to mention to Mr. Amar that I trained as an artist—specializing in the female nude, in fact—and he asked me to do one of his girlfriend.” I think I’d better try to make this nonexistent nude girlfriend a more convincing presence. “Britta, her name is. Stunning, blonde, legs to die for—”
“I had no idea you were an artist,” Lexie interrupts.
“Yes, well, it’s not something I go around bragging about at the gates of St. Martin’s. That’s where our children go to school,” I add, pointedly, to Thomas.
To his credit, he turns rather pale. Judging by the ridiculously small cocktail dress he’s holding in one hand, the dress he’s brought up for me to put on, I think he was just trying to get in a bit of a dig at my expense. I don’t think he knew quite what a fire he was stoking.
“Could you take that dress to Britta, please,” I tell him, “and tell her not to worry—nobody saw anything. Um, did you, Lexie?”
“No …” She’s looking at me with a very particular gaze. I wouldn’t call it suspicious, as such. But it’s certainly beady. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Good! Let’s go on downstairs together, shall we?” I link my arm through Lexie’s and start practically hauling her down the stairs despite her loud protests about wanting to look at the Gauguin. But they’re obviously much louder than even I realize, because as we reach the bottom of the stairs, Saad and a rather rotund man in his early sixties emerge from the drawing room to see what the racket is all about.
“Grace?” Saad’s eyebrows have vanished up behind his floppy dark fringe, and he’s shooting me what the hell? looks. When he notices that I’m wearing his clothes, he looks more astonished still. “I … didn’t know you were still here …”
“Sorry, I should have let you know. But I had just a couple more sketches I wanted to make of Britta before I left. It’s going to be a fabulous portrait,” I go on before he can blow my cover by asking what the hell Britta is doing in the house, and why I’m suddenly claiming to be sketching her. “Such a wonderful thing, to commission a nude of your girlfriend—don’t you agree, Lexie?”
“Do you two know each other?” Saad asks, comprehension beginning to dawn across his face.
“Yeah,” Lexie says. “Our kids go to the same school. Same place you’re sending your brother, so I gather. Thanks to Grace here.”
“Oh, it was nothing.” I hoist my bag up onto my shoulder. “Well! I really should be going. Leave you to your powwow in peace. It was lovely to meet you, Mr. Maroun,” I say to the rotund man, even though we haven’t, really, met. And even though I’ve just remembered his name isn’t actually Mr. Maroun. “And great to see you again, Lexie! We should have lunch sometime.”
“Absolutely. We could talk about your … art.”
I shoot her a dazzling smile, but I can’t quite find the right words to reply to this.
“Can I help you get a taxi …?” Saad begins, but I brush him aside as I start heading to the front door.
“No need. Thanks anyway! I’ll send you the sketches as soon as I’ve put the finishing touches to them,” I add. And then, with shaking hands, I shut the front door behind
me.
Bella
Tuesday, December 15
I’m in a top-of-the-range kitchen in top-of-the-range Fulham, catering a pre-Christmas buffet supper for fifty. Buffets are usually easy jobs, because you can get pretty much everything—terrines and pates, savory tarts and quiches, varied salads—completely ready in advance. But today’s buffet isn’t proving quite as easy as I’d assumed it would be. Anna is running late, for one thing, which means I’m getting stressed about getting all the desserts ready in time. For another thing, my mother has called three times already since I arrived at the client’s, and she isn’t taking my no-answer as a hint. And most difficult of all, the client is a Total Nightmare.
I probably should have expected it from the phone calls and email correspondence we’ve had, but it’s far worse than even I could possibly have imagined. Despite the fact she’s recently been made nanny-less (I can’t say I’m surprised) with two baby twins to take care of, as well as (I assume, seeing as she’s told me this evening’s party is for her colleagues) a demanding full-time job, she’s still somehow found the time to police the kitchen ever since I’ve arrived, double- and triple-checking everything from the sell-by dates on my cartons of double cream to the consistency of my homemade mayo.
“Actually, this mayonnaise tastes quite good,” she’s saying rather grudgingly, now, as she licks a teeny-tiny amount from the teaspoon she’s just stuck into my Magimix. “A dash more lemon juice wouldn’t go amiss, though. Correct it, would you, please?”
“I’m sorry, Vanessa.” I’m calling her this even though she’s not directed me to call her by her first name. Anything to correct her view that she’s the lady of the manor and I’m the lowliest scullery maid. “But my mayonnaise really does work best with that precise amount of lemon juice. Any more than that and it can start to taste just a little bit too sharp for the potato salad.” My phone starts to ring, with the “Darth Vader Theme” ringtone that I’ve allocated to Mum. “And I’ll be putting lots of herbs in with the potatoes, so that will give the whole thing a lovely fresh taste,” I carry on, speaking louder than before to drown out the noise of tinny Star Wars music. “I really don’t think there’s any need for more lemon. A fraction more salt, maybe, will bring out the fragrant lemony flavor a bit more.”
There Goes the Bride Page 22