The Duke's Proposal

by Sophie Weston

‘The press…’

  ‘Have decided I’m a spoiled brat,’ supplied Jemima. ‘I’ve just had lunch with my PR advisers. They’ve given me the rundown.’

  Madame shook her head. ‘They’re wrong. The press enjoys spoiled brats. Our problem is that they are forgetting you.’

  She picked up a handful of magazines and flung them across the coffee table. Jemima saw European titles mixed with North American celebrity titles.

  ‘Take a look,’ said Madame in a hard, level voice. ‘Show me your name. They’ve got film stars, baseball stars. Even some damned aristocrat who’s been missing for fifteen years. How far off today’s news is that? But no Jemima Dare. And, more important, no face of Belinda.’

  Jemima frowned. But she was fair. She went through the magazines rapidly. Madame was right.

  Tom and Sandy: will they split? Eugenio takes us into his lovely Florida home. Where is the Duke? The hunt is on…

  She pushed the magazines away. ‘Okay. No Belinda. No me. I’ll give you that. So?’

  ‘Time to do something about it.’

  Jemima’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is the One Last Chance chat, isn’t it?’ she said suddenly.

  Madame President’s eyes flickered. ‘Yes,’ she said baldly. ‘Have you had lots of them?’

  Jemima laughed. ‘My cousin Pepper is an entrepreneur. We share an apartment. I listen to her work problems,’ she said coolly. ‘I know the signs.’

  Madame looked annoyed. ‘Then deal with it.’

  Jemima smiled. ‘I’d say there was an unless coming. You’ll cancel my contract unless I—what? Dye my hair? Write a celebrity novel? Sing? What?’

  Madame laughed unexpectedly. It sounded rusty. ‘I like you, Jemima. You’re gutsy.’

  I need to be, with sharks like you signing my pay cheque.

  She did not say it, of course. She gave her a demure smile. ‘Thank you. So spit it out. What do you want me to do? Short of dating Francis, that is.’

  Madame was temporarily side-tracked. ‘Why not Francis? He’s very talented. He’ll go far.’

  Jemima leaned back and crossed her legs. ‘And he’s a complete prune. He asked me out over the head of another girl while I was dressed in nothing but a pair of knickers and a lot of sticky tape.’

  Madame was startled enough to allow herself to be sidetracked again. ‘Sticky tape?’

  ‘He’s into deep, deep plunge this collection.’

  They exchanged a look of total understanding. In her time Madame President had been a model too. She nodded.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What’s more,’ said Jemima, watching Madame from under her lashes, ‘when I said I’d take a rain-check he looked as if he’d been let out of prison.’

  There was a small silence. Madame’s lips tightened.

  ‘How on earth did you sign him up?’ Jemima was genuinely curious.

  Madame looked like a lizard about to spit. But she was a good tactician. After a brief struggle with herself, she said curtly, ‘Offered him a joint promotion next Christmas.’

  ‘Well, he tried,’ said Jemima fairly. ‘So, want to tell me why?’

  Madame examined her rings absorbedly. ‘When we were looking for the new face of Belinda, we had a very specific brief in mind,’ she said at last slowly. ‘A woman of today—a woman who made her own decisions, a woman with a career, sure, but a woman to whom other things were important too—friends, things of the mind, love, children.’

  Jemima regarded her with an unblinking gaze. Then, ‘If you want me to have a baby, forget it.’ Her voice was hard. ‘That’s not a decision I’d take because a cosmetic company told me to. Or any other employer, for that matter.’

  To her surprise, Madame looked delighted. Triumphant even. ‘Exactly. That’s the tone I want.’

  Jemima flung up her hands. ‘I give up.’

  ‘Look,’ said Madame, suddenly a lot less dramatic, ‘you were my personal choice for the face of Belinda. I liked the way you presented yourself. You didn’t crave the celebrity circuit. You didn’t worry that laughing too much would crack your make-up. You thought about things and you weren’t afraid to have an opinion. I liked that.’

  Jemima was taken aback. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Silvio said you weren’t glamorous enough.’

  Weasel, thought Jemima. That isn’t what he said to me when he was wining and dining me. Aloud, she said, ‘Really?’

  ‘But I said that it didn’t matter. This is the twenty-first century, I said. It is time for a change. She lives with her sister and her cousin like a regular person. Besides, they are all three go-getters.’

  Jemima grinned. ‘Oh, yes, we’re that all right.’ She thought of Pepper the businesswoman and Izzy the adventure freak. ‘By the bucketful.’

  Madame grinned back. She was very charming when she grinned, thought Jemima. For a shark.

  ‘So I thought—there’s my twenty-first-century woman. Gorgeous redhead who doesn’t spend her life worrying about the size of her bum. Girl with a life. And a future.’

  Jemima was touched. ‘Thank you,’ she said again.

  ‘So how did all go so wrong? What happened to that lovely girl with her feet on the ground?’

  Jemima winced.

  There was a brief knock and the Vice-President appeared at the door, ushering in a waiter with a huge tray. The waiter poured coffee and glasses of mineral water and left. The Vice-President hovered. Madame waved him to sit. He sank into an armchair with a distinct sigh of relief.

  Frowning, she said, ‘When that stupid manager started turning you into a professional partygoer, I told Silvio, “Call him up. Tell him to back off.” Didn’t I, Silvio?’

  He nodded enthusiastically. ‘You did, Madame.’

  ‘But then you fired him. And I thought, Great. The girl has good instincts. We’re back on track.’

  Jemima had gone rigid. ‘I didn’t fire Basil.’

  Madame ignored that. ‘Only now you don’t go out at all.’

  ‘I didn’t fire Basil.’

  Jemima was starting to shiver, she realised. To hide it, she looked around for her shoulder-bag and fussed through it.

  Madame seemed disappointed. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

  The shivers down her spine were turning into a positive cascade. ‘I left his management by mutual agreement.’

  Madame looked sceptical.

  ‘It was.’

  Well, eventually. When she had threatened to expose the things he’d done—the pills to keep her thin, the break from her family to keep her ‘focused’, as he’d called it. Oh, yes, he’d been glad enough to give back her contract when she’d faced him with all of that. Only now he was having second thoughts, and…

  If she wasn’t careful, she was going to start shaking again.

  With another of her abrupt changes of mood Madame lost interest. ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have no life. You don’t date. You don’t go out anywhere unless it’s an assignment.’

  Jemima was still shaky. ‘I work. I don’t have time to go out.’

  ‘Make time.’

  ‘What?’

  Madame said with finality, ‘Go back to being a regular person. You don’t have to disappear and come back a duke. You don’t even have to date a designer if you don’t want to. But date someone.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I’m cancelling the shoot in New York. Take a break. Go meet some guys, like other girls. I want to see you living a life like our customers lead. And I want to see the press stories to prove it.’

  She stood up. The interview was clearly over.

  Jemima stopped shivering. She was not afraid of Madame.

  She tipped her head back. On this dull grey afternoon the penthouse was lit by warm table-lamps. In their light the wonderful red hair rippled like fire, like wine. And Jemima knew it. She knew, too, that the woman who had personally chosen her as the face of Belinda would not want to admit she had been wrong.

  She said, quite gently, ‘Or?
’

  Madame recognised a challenge when she saw it. She might like Jemima personally. But she couldn’t afford to let a challenge go unanswered. Her jaw hardened.

  ‘We’re already into planning the Christmas campaign. I won’t pull you off that. But it’s your last unless you—’

  ‘Get a boyfriend,’ supplied Jemima. Her temper went back onto a slow burn. She smiled pleasantly at the shark. ‘I’m almost certain that’s illegal.’

  Madame did not care about piffling legalities. She snorted. ‘Unless you get a life.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  The eyes were blank and lizard-like again. ‘You’re off the team.’

  Jemima flipped off the sofa. ‘Cast your mind back,’ she said sweetly. ‘Like I said, I quit.’

  She steamed out before they could answer.

  The commissionaire summoned a taxi for her. She sank into the big seat and called the agency.

  ‘Belinda and I just fired each other,’ she said curtly.

  She rang off to squawks of horror.

  And then she did what she had been putting off all day. She checked her text messages.

  Her fingers shook a little as she pressed the buttons. Basil had stopped leaving messages on her voicemail these days. But he texted a lot. Mostly she managed to zap them unread. But today she saw one she had thought was from her limousine service.

  As soon as she saw it was not, she killed it. But not soon enough.

  The message was the same as always. The words changed. But the theme was constant.

  U R MYN.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JEMIMA let herself into the apartment. It was dark and silent. She dropped her overnight bag and closed the door.

  ‘Pepper?’ she called, without much hope.

  But there was no answer. Well, it was only what she had expected. Izzy was away in the ice fields, helping her love with his training. She had hoped that her cousin might be here, though.

  Jemima hefted the bag over her shoulder. Switching on lights, she made her way to the kitchen.

  It was the heart of their shared home. Here they sat at the table and laughed and argued and made plans. Now it was unnaturally tidy. No flowers on the table. No scribbled messages on the memory board. All the work surfaces were clear and gleaming. Even the answering machine was neatly aligned in the corner, with what looked like a week’s post in front of it. The last person in here had clearly been the cleaning lady.

  Jemima shivered and dropped her trim flight bag. She flicked on the radio and bopped gently to the music as she opened the fridge.

  Lots of water. A couple of bottles of wine. Some elderly cheese. It didn’t look as if Pepper had been here for days.

  ‘With her Steven in Oxford,’ said Jemima aloud.

  Just like Izzy, with her Dominic.

  ‘And I could be out on the town with Francis Hale-Smith,’ she mocked herself. ‘Holding hands whenever we spotted a camera.’

  It was even more chilling than the empty flat.

  She started to make coffee, although she didn’t really want it, and hacked off a small corner of the dying cheese. Not because she wanted that either, but because Izzy always made her some food when she came in late. Or she’d always used to.

  ‘Hi, Jay Jay. How was Paris? And how have you been?’ she said to the empty chair.

  She walked round to the other side of the table and answered herself. ‘Oh, you know—busy, busy. And my ex-manager won’t leave me alone. Hounding me seems to be his new career choice. He’s really putting his back into it, twenty-four-seven.’

  In the silence she did not sound anything like as ironic as she’d meant to.

  ‘Damn!’ Her voice broke at last.

  She sank down on a kitchen chair and dropped her head in her hands.

  The phone started to ring. She ignored it. She had not cried, not once, since Basil started his campaign. And now it didn’t seem as if she could stop. She didn’t even try to answer the phone.

  The answering programme clicked onto Izzy’s voice. She sounded as if she were laughing.

  ‘We can’t take your call at the moment. But talk nicely and we might get back to you. Here come the beeps.’

  Jemima gave an audible hiccup. They had laughed so much when Izzy recorded that. It had been airlessly hot. All the windows open. They’d been drinking white wine spritzers and they had juggled ice cubes to decide who got to record the message. Izzy had been wearing a tee shirt and nothing else, and she said you could hear it in her voice on the recording.

  Now Jemima reached across and pressed the outgoing message button, just to remind herself of that night. Now Izzy had Dom, and Pepper was getting married. And Jemima?

  Jemima had her very own stalker, she thought with savage irony.

  She gave herself a mental shake. This was stupid. Besides, she hated being so sorry for herself. It made her feel a wimp.

  She stood up, looking for kitchen roll to blot her streaming eyes.

  And again the phone burst into shrill life.

  She jumped so hard that she knocked over the kitchen roll. While she was retrieving it the answering programme kicked in. Izzy’s lovely laughing voice, and then…

  ‘Welcome home, Jemima,’ said a voice she knew.

  She stopped dead. Her hand stilled on the paper roll. Suddenly the self-pitying eyes were dry. Dry as her mouth.

  ‘Pick up. I know you’re there.’

  Slowly she straightened and put the kitchen roll back on the fitment very precisely. Her throat hurt. She swallowed, looking at the telephone. She did not move.

  The voice got impatient. ‘Come on, pick up. Don’t be stupid. I saw you put the lights on.’

  Could he see her? The kitchen window was three feet away. Slowly Jemima backed to the door and out into the windowless corridor. She could hear her own breathing.

  The voice pursued her. ‘Pick up, Jemima. We need to talk. You know we do. Come on, pick up. You owe me that.’ It sounded so reasonable, put like that.

  Only she knew it wasn’t reasonable. And neither was Basil any more.

  She backed up against the wall. Her hands were slippery with sweat.

  Think! she told herself.

  ‘I bloody made you, you bitch,’ he spat, fury overcoming that spurious reason at last.

  Jemima blocked it out.

  He must have been waiting outside, she thought feverishly. Or he might have followed her. She hadn’t seen him when she’d left her interview with Madame. But then half the time she didn’t see him. He would just step out of the crowd, smiling except for those mad, angry eyes.

  And he would say…

  He would say…

  ‘You are mine.’

  Just as he was saying it now.

  The flat had never felt so empty. Jemima looked round and took a decision.

  I have got to get out of here.

  It was actually surprisingly easy. She had a ticket for New York in her bag which she didn’t need any more. And one of the great things about first class air tickets is that they are as transferable as it gets.

  All she had to do was get out of the building without the watcher following her. What she needed was a veil, thought Jemima dryly. Or, failing that, a crash helmet.

  A crash helmet…

  The pizza delivery guy was so intrigued he would probably have lent her his helmet and jacket anyway. But the fistful of notes certainly helped. She parked his bike in front of the all-night pharmacy and waited to hand over the key. She called a cab while she was waiting. It arrived as he came strolling down the road.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, no sweat. Pleased I could help.’

  She had told him it was boyfriend trouble. Clearly dazzled, he had not doubted her for a moment. It was going to be all round the pub this weekend, thought Jemima.

  She did not care. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘My hero.’

  He beamed. And held the door of the taxi cab open for her with a gallant flo
urish.

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jemima with feeling. ‘I can do with it. I really can.’

  And she could. Change the flight? The booking clerk was helpfulness personified. Yes, certainly, no problem. Where did she want to go?

  ‘Ah.’

  For a moment Jemima’s mind went completely blank. Wildly, she scanned the posters behind the desk. They all looked like the sort of photographs she was used to starring in, only without the high fashion.

  She shrugged. Oh, well, if you’d been everywhere, what else could you expect? This was an escape, after all, not a proper holiday.

  She played the eeny-meeny game in her head, and it landed on silver sand and palm trees beside an improbably jade sea.

  She nodded to the poster. ‘There.’

  ‘The Caribbean? Yes, madam. Which island?’

  On the point of saying she didn’t care, Jemima stopped. From somewhere out of the well of memory a name surfaced.

  ‘Is there somewhere called Pentecost Island?’ The moment she said it she felt a tingle, as if this was somehow meant. She stood up straighter. ‘Do you go there?’

  The clerk smiled. ‘We can get you there, Ms Dare. Via Barbados. First class again?’

  And that was how easy it was.

  No one in the world would know where she was. So not even Basil could bribe or bully or spy on anyone to tell him.

  Alone in the bathroom in the first class lounge, Jemima studied herself in the mirror as narrowly as Basil had used to study her. She looked fine. Tired under the harsh lighting, but as well as anyone else would look on this overnight flight. She had beaten Basil!

  ‘Gotcha!’ she said, punching the air.

  She almost skipped onto to the plane.

  Her euphoria lasted through the night, through the long, dull early-morning wait at Barbados airport, through the trip on the far from first class local island hopper. It lasted right up to the moment she disembarked at Pentecost.

  The airport was small. Shiny and modern, and clean as a new machine, but tiny. Jemima had never seen an airport like it. Once through passport control, she found a concourse that would just about take a row of plastic chairs and a small coffee stall.

  She stared round blankly.

  ‘Toy Town Airport,’ she said aloud.