Vaughn mistook the shiver for incipient lust and gently but firmly turned her around. Grace knew that she had to stop behaving like the soggiest of blankets just because her mother issues were still unresolved and it was a bit nippy outside. ‘I don’t mind ordering in,’ she husked, though that was less about sounding seductive and more that her throat was still dry.
‘Good girl,’ Vaughn murmured, and it was the nicest thing he’d said to her in days so Grace leaned up for a kiss.
The moment that his tongue slid between her lips, Grace’s head started to swim. Not in the usual swoony way that meant her insides were getting ready to melt but more like fainting was a possibility. All of a sudden, Vaughn’s arms were holding her up rather than holding her tight as Grace slumped against him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded sharply, touching a warm hand to her forehead which, if it was anything like the rest of her, felt cold and clammy.
‘Nothing, I’m OK,’ Grace said quickly, as the world came back into focus. ‘I’m probably just hungry from missing dinner on the plane.’ She punctuated the sentence with a sneeze that morphed into a cough, which did nothing to ease the tickle in her throat.
‘Are you going down with something?’ Vaughn asked suspiciously, as if Grace was feeling peaky out of sheer wilfulness.
‘I’m fine, really,’ Grace assured him, swallowing down another cough. ‘It’s just the change in climate and sleeping too long. Get a hot meal inside me and I’ll be back to my usual chipper self.’
‘You’re many things, Grace, but chipper has never been one of them.’ Vaughn took her arm and led her back into the lounge as if she was an elderly relative who might keel over and break a hip if left unattended.
After a gourmet pizza that had shaved parmesan on it instead of the unidentifiable stringy cheese that Grace was used to, she went to bed.
Grace could have sworn that she didn’t sleep at all. She spent the night on a constant repeat cycle of burning sweats, then convulsions as too hot suddenly became so cold that it felt like her blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen. She must have dropped into a fitful doze at some stage, because she woke when suddenly the drapes were wrenched back, throwing beams of blinding sunlight across the bed. It felt like a million pointy implements stabbing at her cranium.
‘Go away,’ she croaked in a voice that was barely audible.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Vaughn was already dressed in an immaculate YSL charcoal suit, which made Grace feel even more like something that had been chewed up and spat out. She sat up, despite the painful protest of her aching muscles and pushed a lank lock of hair out of her eyes.
‘I’m dying!’ She flopped back and put her hands over her eyes to block out the light. ‘Seriously, I think I’ve got flu.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Vaughn crisply. ‘Probably just a head cold. You’ll feel much better once you’ve had a shower.’
That was obviously meant to be Grace’s cue to shake a leg but she curled up under the duvet. ‘I can’t.’
But she could for the simple reason that Vaughn pulled back the quilt, yanked a hand under her arm and hauled her up on to her own very unsteady feet. ‘I don’t need this today of all days. I let you have a lie-in. Now you’ve got two hours to get ready for this lunch. I don’t need to tell you how important it is.’
Because he’d already spent hours doing just that - in mind-numbing detail. Vaughn made an impatient sound in the back of his throat as Grace stumbled to the bathroom, clinging to pieces of furniture as she went.
Grace sat on the floor of the walk-in shower as she washed and conditioned her hair and figured that her body was clean enough from the shampoo to skip the soap part and move on to levering herself to the vertical position and slathering on moisturiser.
‘What’s taking so long?’ Vaughn called, rapping sharply on the door. ‘I want to go over some notes with you.’
‘Go away,’ Grace hissed to herself. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’ She tucked a towel around her and shuffled back into the bedroom to find Vaughn rifling through her wardrobe.
‘Maybe this,’ he decided, tossing her beloved Marc Jacobs frock on the bed with scant regard for its designer status. ‘Or maybe this.’ A purple Uniqlo sweater dress followed it.
Grace sank down on the nearest chair and huddled deeper into her towel. ‘Vaughn, will you listen to me?’ she said in a raspy whisper. ‘I’m ill. Something is very, very wrong with me.’
Finally her words penetrated. Vaughn strode over, face squinched up like he thought she was faking and pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘You’re very cold,’ he announced. He peered at her curiously. To show willing, Grace stuck out her tongue and croaked out an ‘Aaaahhh,’ that sounded like someone trying to kickstart a motorbike.
‘When did you last have a flu jab?’
‘Um, sometime like never.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Vaughn whipped out his BlackBerry, stabbed at a couple of buttons and waited to be connected. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you sort out Grace’s flu jab?’ Grace looked on in amazement as he proceeded to give Madeleine Jones a vitriolic tongue-lashing, the likes of which even Kiki had never been able to achieve.
‘Vaughn! It’s Christmas Eve. Stop shouting at her.’ Grace paused to cough - a wet phlgemy rattle that didn’t stop even when Vaughn held his phone to her face.
‘Can you hear that?’ he ranted. ‘Does that sound like a little chill? I want a doctor here in ten minutes or you can start the New Year by looking for a new job.’
Vaughn was done ranting. Grace threw off her towel as the hot flush started and watched him cause havoc in her drawers as he rummaged through her underwear. She had a horrible feeling that she knew where this was going.
‘Put these on!’ he ordered, throwing bra and knickers at her, followed by a pair of tights. ‘Where’s your hair dryer?’
‘I can’t go,’ she protested weakly, even as she hooked an ankle into her Coco Ribbon panties.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Vaughn snapped, crouching down to help her. Desperation was not a good look on him. And he was much, much better at getting Grace out of her clothes, than into them. She was leaning against him as he pulled the sweater dress over her head when they heard a knock on the door.
‘Doctor,’ Vaughn said eagerly, rushing to answer the summons, as Grace tugged at purple wool that was going to slowly boil her insides. She collapsed back in the chair, strangely calm now because Vaughn would have to listen to a trained medical professional.
The doctor looked too young to be a trained medical anything. Grace suspected that he mostly strapped sprained ankles and referred more serious skiing injuries to the nearest hospital. Still, he shoved a thermometer in Grace’s mouth, shone a light in her eyes and ears and throat and passed judgement. ‘Flu,’ he diagnosed succinctly. ‘I’ll prescribe you an anti-inflammatory but really you need bed rest and lots of fluid. Guess you won’t be skiing this vacation.’
Grace smiled wanly and gave up a silent Hallelujah. ‘Guess not.’
‘But she’s well enough to attend a little lunch-party,’ Vaughn insisted forcefully. ‘It’s flu. It’s not as if she has pneumonia.’
‘Well, flu can be pretty serious . . .’ the doctor, and Grace’s current favourite person in the world, started to say, when Vaughn put a heavy hand on his shoulder.
‘Can I have a word in private?’ he asked in that silky smooth voice he always used when he was trying to persuade Grace to do something she wasn’t sure about, whether it was ordering dessert or letting him bind her wrists to his bedposts.
Grace decided to dry her hair while the doctor told Vaughn in no uncertain terms that whatever he was proposing was against the Hippocratic Oath.
Vaughn returned on his own and with cheeks so flushed that Grace wondered if his own flu jab was up to date. ‘You look much better,’ he insisted, like if he said it then it had to be true. ‘Now, let’s get some war paint on.’
‘What’s the po
int? I’m not allowed to go, the doctor said.’ It was really hard to sound authoritative when you had to choke at the end of each sentence.
Vaughn crouched down again to take her hands in his as he gazed at her so unwaveringly that Grace didn’t even dare to blink. ‘I’ve booked a car so you’ll only be outside for a matter of seconds and when we come back here, I’ll hire you a nurse, find you Lemsip - anything you want. But I need you to do this one thing for me, Grace.’ He gave her hands a gentle shake as she tried to protest. ‘You’re going to be fine. The doctor left a little something to make you feel better. But put some make-up on first.’
‘What is it?’ Grace asked warily, but she knew that she was going to lunch, probably with some black market flu remedy in her, because Vaughn’s force was far greater than her resistance. Besides, she didn’t have any fight left in her. It took all her last reserves of strength to dab on a little highlighter and some lipgloss. The finished effect screamed crack whore.
‘I suppose you’ll have to do,’ Vaughn sighed, surreptitiously producing what looked like a yellow pen from his breast-pocket. ‘This will only hurt for a second,’ he added, as he flicked off the top and grabbed Grace’s leg in a tight grip.
‘What wi . . . Fuck! What did you just do to me?’ Grace gasped as she gave a sudden jolt, just like Uma in Pulp Fiction. She could feel her heart flipping over several times as the blood surged through her veins.
Vaughn didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed as he threw the empty syringe at the wastepaper basket. It missed. ‘Just an adrenalin shot,’ he murmured. ‘It will give you some pep.’
Grace felt like she was having a heart attack - it was all she could do to take in huge gulps of air and listen to the faint gurgle of the central heating and stare at the patterns in the deep pile of the carpet, because as an added side-effect she had surround sound and extra-sensory vision now. It felt a lot like her one and only foray into acid and that hadn’t ended at all well.
But then she could move, picking up her handbag and stuffing some tissues in it, grabbing lipstick and lozenges, and the effort no longer made her want to puke.
‘See? You’re feeling better already,’ Vaughn looked out of the window. ‘I think that’s our car.’
Grace stared at him for as long as it took until he turned away from the snowy vista and met her eyes. ‘I fucking hate you,’ she enunciated slowly and clearly.
Vaughn shrugged and his lips quirked maybe a half of a millimetre upwards. ‘I know,’ he said, sounding not the least bit surprised.
chapter twenty-three
‘I think it’s a combination of jet lag and being in such close proximity to a film star,’ Vaughn said to Robert Simmons, when he unsuccessfully tried to bring Grace out of her energy slump. The adrenalin shot had long since worn off. ‘She’s not normally so shy. Quite the opposite. Usually I can’t get a word in.’
Grace tried to send him a dirty look but just thinking about narrowing her eyes made her head hurt. She didn’t even have the energy to hate on the eight other people, who all laughed at Vaughn’s comment as they sat in the private dining room of a restaurant that called itself a bistro, even though everything came heaped with black truffle shavings (including Grace’s onion soup, which was the only thing she could swallow).
Vaughn was glaring at her from across the table, while simultaneously sucking up to Martin Halpert, who was an able-bodied Doppelgänger for Stephen Hawking. Then there was Robert Simmons, star of stage and screen, and a UN Ambassador who helped starving orphans and had an old skool Hollywood glamour that brought to mind Cary Grant by way of the Ratpack. In the flesh, he was so devastatingly handsome that Grace finally understood the meaning of over-trumpeted clichés like charisma and star quality. But his lunch-date wasn’t his quirky, indie actress girlfriend but a quiet, homely-looking man in his forties who made Grace’s Gaydar ping. And when Robert Simmons shook her hand (Vaughn had advised him not to kiss her because ‘she’s just getting over a cold, Rob’), Grace’s Gaydar had practically vibrated. It was probably just as well that Vaughn had made her sign a non-disclosure agreement all those months ago.
The other two men were standard-issue, moneyed douche-bags. Both of them had blatantly checked Grace out, eyes lingering on her boobs and bottom, when they were introduced, but compared to the three other women at the table, Grace didn’t measure up. Two of them had the slightly glacial features that Americans mistook for class: hair carefully streaked to what Maggie, the Skirt Beauty Director, called heiress blonde. Their breasts were maybe half a cup size too large for their frames and perky in a way that breasts aren’t after the age of seventeen, without the efforts of a really good surgeon. Kelly wore Calvin Klein. Anna wore Gucci and both of them ordered the winter greens as a main course and had only one glass of the 1995 Gosset Celebris Brut champagne.
But Lucy Newton? She was one hot mess of an ex-motor show model. Everything about her was too much, from the Day-Glo tan, to the pneumatic tits, to the leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana dress she was almost wearing, to the huge amounts of vintage champagne she was knocking back like it was fizzy pop. If Grace hadn’t felt like she had only twenty-four hours to live, then she’d have definitely wanted to hang out with Lucy. She was the kind of girl who was made for bar-hopping.
As it was, Grace couldn’t even bring herself to make eye-contact. That would have required all her powers of concentration, which were currently being employed so she didn’t collapse across the table. Even The Last Supper couldn’t have taken so long, she thought forlornly, but finally they cleared away the cheese course and one of the douchey men said, ‘You ladies might want to take coffee in the lounge while we talk shop.’ It was like fifty years of feminism had never happened. Kelly, Anna and Robert Simmons’s maybe-boyfriend were making noises about touring the wine cellar, but all Grace wanted to do was find the nearest sofa and fall down on it.
Grace had just made it to the door when Vaughn’s arm clamped round her waist. ‘Be back in a minute, guys,’ he said jovially in a very un Vaughn-like manner. Then it didn’t matter that Grace was having trouble walking because Vaughn marched her down the hall so quickly that her feet barely touched the ground.
The waitress in the lounge looked up in surprise as Vaughn pushed Grace through the door. ‘Get out!’ he demanded. One glimpse at the thunder and lightning on his face and she was gone.
Grace stared longingly at the couch but before she could negotiate the five steps to get her there, Vaughn practically lifted her up and threw her down on it. Then he placed his hands on the cushions on either side of her head so he could get right up in her face. Grace could have individually counted each one of his pores if she’d had a mind to.
‘You’re not even trying!’ he said menacingly in her ear. ‘You’ve had an adrenalin shot, so why the hell are you sitting there like a wet weekend in Wigan?’
Grace leaned back as far as she could, which was a matter of mere millimetres. ‘I’m ill.’
Vaughn’s smile was as icy as the view of snow-capped mountains out of the window. ‘Boo hoo. You’re ill.’ He cupped Grace’s chin so she couldn’t look away from the uncompromising, couldn’t-give-a-fuck set of his features. ‘If you screw this up for me, Grace, then God help you.’ He didn’t specify just what assistance the Almighty would provide but Grace got the message.
She turned her head and before she could start to splutter, Vaughn let her go. He watched her hack out another cough with his arms folded, then turned on his heel and left.
She was beyond tears, which was a Grace Reeves first. Instead, she popped another lozenge in her mouth and curled up in a tight ball on the couch, as the shivers seemed to turn her body inside out, then back to front.
The door opened just as Grace was struggling to get her shoes off, and Lucy Newton staggered in, a bottle of champagne clutched in one red-taloned hand. ‘Oh, I think we just had lunch together,’ she said in a high-pitched breathless voice, like she’d been inhaling helium.
&
nbsp; ‘Yeah,’ Grace agreed. She was meant to be launching into the hard sell right about now, but she couldn’t remember her Abstract Expressionists from her YBAs. ‘I’m Grace.’
Lucy was fiddling with her Louis Vuitton clutch. ‘Have you got a light?’
For the first time that day, Grace managed to do something right and handed Lucy her disposable lighter. Then she pulled out her own crumpled pack of cigarettes. The nicotine could hardly make her feel any worse and it might even numb the ache in her throat.
Lucy came and sat next to Grace so they could share a saucer as a makeshift ashtray. The other girl was clutching at herself and rocking slightly as if she was having a psychotic episode rather than just being very, very drunk.
‘Are you all right?’ Grace ventured softly.
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