Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  And he held my gaze for just that crucial extra beat. I swallowed. I couldn’t help myself and his eyes twinkled in recognition. He’d seen it.

  ‘Where are the others?’ he said, looking round.

  ‘Amy’s gone to the loo and Spotter’s over there dancing with the girl who was with Bart Simpson’s granddad. He’s left. Gone back to the rest home.’

  Jay laughed.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Jay again, standing up and putting his hand out to me. ‘You and me. Now, before the Venus flytrap in furs comes back. She’s only gone to check out the rest of the club – or to let the club check her out, more like.’

  ‘But what about the others?’ I asked.

  ‘Spotter can look after Amy. We’ll leave them a note. Tell them to take the Pimpmobile.’

  He fished in his pocket.

  ‘Here’s the driver’s card; we’ll leave it for them.’

  I was about to ask him some really pathetic questions along the lines of: ‘But how will we get back to the hotel if we leave them the limo…?’ when sense took over. I scribbled a note for Amy on my business card and propped it with the driver’s one, against her drink. I knew she’d find it there.

  ‘OK,’ I said, standing up. ‘Let’s go.’

  That was our first challenge. We were heading towards the lift where we’d come in, when a commotion in that area revealed that Jericho was just re-entering by that route. We needed an alternative way out, and fast.

  I was looking around for the fire exit, when Jay grabbed the nearest waitress and slipped a banknote into her hand. She looked momentarily surprised, as she glanced down at it, and then took us behind a partition wall to the service lift. We jumped in and down it went.

  When the doors opened at the bottom we found ourselves in a dark and smelly back alley.

  ‘Guess this is the true VIP exit,’ said Jay, taking my hand as we squeezed past some rank industrial garbage bins.

  I laughed.

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ he said. ‘They often leave the real back way, like this, to escape the paps and crowds, but I can’t see Jericho coming out this way. She actually likes to be followed by the paparazzi and mobbed by fans, which is lucky for us.’

  After stepping over a pile of unsavoury-looking wet cardboard boxes, we finally emerged on to a scruffy fourlane road, nothing like the elegant avenue of plane trees at the entrance to the club.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ he said, looking around and rubbing his stomach thoughtfully. I envied his hand. ‘Nothing. Not even a bus stop.’

  He looked up and down the road a bit, then back at me. I was shivering in my flimsy dress. It was only mid-March and the night air had a biting chill in it.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he said, and taking off his jacket, he placed it gently round my shoulders. He pulled it closed across my chest, letting his hands rest on my shoulder blades, and then, as I breathed in the scent of Acqua di Parma, he leaned forwards and kissed me, very gently, on the lips.

  ‘Pretty girl,’ he said, his eyes roving over my face. ‘Very pretty girl. Let’s get you home.’

  He took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it in the air, smacking it down on to the back of his hand and then looked up at me, with one raised eyebrow.

  ‘Call,’ he said.

  ‘Heads,’ I answered.

  ‘Heads it is,’ he said, taking his top hand away. ‘Good. That means this way.’ He started walking along the road, holding firmly on to my hand. ‘And I’m glad about that, because this is the way I wanted to go all along.’

  ‘So which way would we have gone if I’d called tails, Jay?’ I asked him.

  He turned to me and grinned. ‘This way. I’d better watch you. You’re on to me.’

  We walked for what seemed like ages, until I could no longer hide how much my shoes were hurting me. Jay stopped and turning his back to me, stooped down a little.

  ‘Hορ on,’ he said. ‘I just want to get us to those shops along there. I’ll carry you.’

  So he did, with both of us, I’m sure, equally aware of my breasts pressing into his back and a similar scenario lower down. My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry by the time we got to what had looked like shops from further back.

  But they weren’t shops, they were apartments. Nasty little concrete bunkers of apartments. And outside them was a row of scruffy mopeds, chained to a line of metal posts.

  Jay bent down and looked at one of the padlocks, and then he glanced up at me before producing a penknife from one of his jeans pockets. In what seemed like just a couple of little twists, the lock was open.

  Then he pulled out a thick wad of banknotes, which I could see were American dollars. I’d never known a guy who carried so much cash. He peeled about ten notes off and after folding them carefully, wedged them under the chain and padlock. As he did it, I saw they were $100 bills.

  He rocked the moped off its stand and wheeled it back along the road a few hundred metres, with me hobbling behind. Then he got out the penknife again and with a little more effort than it had taken to break the lock, and a little light swearing, the engine eventually spluttered into life.

  He climbed on to the Vespa and put out his hand for me, smiling brightly.

  ‘Misspent youth,’ he said, smiling broadly. Picked up a few tricks.’

  I jumped on the back and we whizzed off, my arms tightly around his waist, back in the direction we had come from.

  ‘I’m just going to keep going until we get somewhere,’ Jay shouted over his shoulder. ‘And then we can figure out how to get somewhere else from there.’

  We could have been on Mars for all I knew. We’d been riding around in that limo for hours – I had absolutely no idea where we were and I didn’t care. I was grinning into the wind that was whipping the hair back from my head and making my eyes water.

  Eventually we came to a big junction with a proper signpost. Jay pulled over and we stared up at it.

  ‘Cagnes-sur-Mer,’ he said, after a few moments. ‘That’s where we need to go. That’ll get us back to Cap Mimosa, I think…’

  He turned round and grinned at me. He had a truly beautiful smile, which lit up his whole face. I beamed back, then we set off again and after a few turns, we were on the coast road.

  As we hummed along, passing hardly any other vehicles, the sky ahead of us gradually started to lighten. With that, and the sea being on our right, I knew we were going east, but I didn’t get my bearings until we were zipping along the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, which was eerily quiet at that time of the morning.

  It was an exhilarating run, but by the time it was nearly fully light I was so cold I had practically no feeling in my bare legs, so I was relieved when Jay stopped by a small café, where the proprietor was just beginning to roll down his awnings.

  ‘Let’s have a break,’ he said.

  Speaking what sounded like pretty perfect French, he persuaded the man to make us some coffee, although he wasn’t officially open yet, and then he popped over to a nearby bakery and brought back some pains au chocolat still hot from the oven.

  We huddled together and ate them like the starving beasts we were – my rushed dinner seemed a lifetime ago – and then Jay gently rubbed my feet and legs until the feeling came back into them. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said suddenly, looking at me in that intense way he had, with his dark blue eyes moving around, like he was trying to put my face together.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ I asked, suddenly shy.

  ‘Well, I know you’re covering this trip for the Journal, so what do you write about? Pop stars? Jewellery? Motorcycle thieves?’

  I hesitated before replying. Even though I took professional pride in my work, I always felt stupid telling people what I actually wrote about. My nickname on the paper was ‘fluff correspondent’ and it bothered me a lot more than I let on.

  �
��It sounds really dumb,’ I said, playing with a sachet of sugar on the table. ‘But I write about luxury – about luxury goods, the big brands behind them, the artisans who make the things, the history and traditions, the business side of it, and of course, the shopping.’

  Jay looked quite serious. There was a little frown line between his brows.

  ‘Is that something you’re really into?’ he said quietly. ‘Luxury shopping?’

  I laughed.

  ‘No. That’s why it’s so silly. I mean, I love shoes as much as the next girl, but I only ended up doing this by accident. I always wanted to work in newspapers and I did politics and economics at university because I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, covering wars and revolutions, and things like that. But then while I was a postgraduate trainee, working in features on the Journal, I did an interview with Henri Krug – you know, from the champagne family?’

  Jay nodded.

  ‘Well,’ I continued. ‘The editor of the paper really liked the piece and he offered me a permanent job on the strength of it and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.’

  ‘Why do you think you have a feel for that kind of subject matter?’ said Jay, still looking serious.

  I was slightly beginning to feel like he was interviewing me for a job himself, but as long as I had his attention, I didn’t mind.

  ‘Well,’ I said, slowly, thinking as I spoke. ‘My father is an architect and he brought me up to think in terms of quality and design and to analyse why some things are somehow just right and others aren’t. I’m certainly not into luxury brands for the status-symbol side of things, I actually don’t really like that element of what I do, but I do love good things which are beautifully made. It’s the integrity I like, not the status.’

  Jay was smiling broadly at me again, his whole face was animated.

  ‘What’s your dad’s name?’ he said, enthusiastically. ‘I’m really interested in architecture, would I know him?’

  ‘You might,’ I said. ‘Henry Montecourt…’

  ‘Lord Montecourt?’ said Jay, sitting up suddenly.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ I said.

  Dad had been ennobled a few years earlier for his services to architecture – particularly for his work on low-cost public housing – but it wasn’t something we ever talked about. I was really proud of him, and while he did take it seriously and go to the House of Lords and all that, it embarrassed him to have a fuss made about it.

  He was a low-key kind of guy in some ways. He didn’t use the Fain part of his double-barrelled name professionally, for the same reasons I didn’t use the Montecourt bit. As far as the paper was concerned I was just Stella Fain and I’d been embarrassed the day before when Amy had used my full name to introduce me to Jay.

  Montecourt-Fain was such a mouthful and made us sound much posher than we really were – like tenth-generation landowners, or something – but while maybe we had been quite grand around 1066, when our ancestor had paddled across the Channel with William the Conqueror, we certainly weren’t any more.

  Ham had made all his money himself, he hadn’t inherited a bean of it and any property he owned, as he was fond of saying, was from the toil of his own head and hands, and he was fiercely proud of that. Very much a Labour peer, he wasn’t a big fan of inherited wealth as a concept – to put it mildly – and he’d always told us kids not to expect anything when he popped off.

  And I knew he wasn’t kidding; after four divorces and with a tribe of younger children still to support, I knew Ham didn’t have much cash hanging around, even with the extremely high professional fees he commanded. I didn’t mind, though; it was one of the reasons I was so serious about my career.

  ‘I love his work,’ Jay was saying, really enthusiastically. ‘He did the museum in Boston for…’

  Then he stopped suddenly and it wasn’t until much later that I understood that the end of that sentence would have been ‘for my family’s arts foundation’.

  At that point, though, I was still blissfully ignorant about the true nature of Jay’s background – and he was loving it.

  We finished our coffee and after a quick chat to the café owner and a look at a map, Jay said he knew exactly how to get us back to the hotel.

  The sun was out as we set off again and it was a glorious run along the coast. I was almost disappointed when we pulled up on the circular driveway outside the hotel.

  The porter ran forwards to park the Vespa for us and Jay turned and smiled at me as he tossed him the keys.

  ‘Good thing he doesn’t know how I got hold of it, huh?’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, Stella. I know the concierge here pretty well and I will make sure the bike gets taken back to its owner later today.’

  I was sure he would, but I had other worries. As we walked into the lobby I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I looked like a voodoo doll. My dress was all crushed, I had mascara smeared down my cheeks, and my hair had been blown into a fright wig. I was just taking in the full horror of it when my rival from the Post newspaper, Laura Birchwood – immaculately coiffed, as usual – walked out of the lift and saw me.

  And then, just as she noticed me, Jay turned and called over to me from the reception desk.

  ‘Stella, honey,’ he said, in a most affectionate tone. ‘What’s your room number?’

  ‘Hello, Stella,’ said Laura, loudly, making it clear she wasn’t going to save my embarrassment by just nodding and walking on. ‘Looks like you’ve been out on the town. Or was it the gutter?’

  Jay came over with the room keys and clearly not registering Laura’s presence, he took my hand and brought it gently to his lips. But Laura had certainly noticed him; she was staring at him like a hungry dog looks at a sausage.

  ‘Hi,’ she croaked, as Jay finally glanced up and clocked her. I mean, Jay was good-looking and all that, but I couldn’t understand why she was gazing at him as though he was a heavenly vision.

  ‘Hi,’ he said back, coldly.

  ‘Oh, er, Laura,’ I said, hating her for standing between me and Jay and the lift. ‘This is Jay. Jay, this is Laura. She’s here for the press trip too,’ I added, not wanting Jay to think she was a friend of mine.

  ‘Are you Jay Fisher?’ said Laura, still staring at him.

  ‘Are you Laura Ashley?’ said Jay, in the iciest of tones, and stepped round her, into the lift, almost dragging me with him.

  ‘The first presentation is in five minutes, Stella,’ Laura practically shouted at me, as the lift doors closed.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked him.

  ‘I thought she was quite rude, didn’t you?’ he said, with a look on his face I hadn’t seen before. He looked all cross and pinched, with a deep frown line between his brows.

  It was an expression I would get to know well, in the future, when I would call it his ‘money-horror face’. It was always brought on by crass people making direct references to his family and his wealth. But back then, still in the innocent flush of our first attraction, I had no idea what was bugging him.

  I was about to ask him how on earth Laura knew his name, but something in his expression stopped me and then, as he took my hand again and smiled, I simply forgot about it.

  The lift stopped at my floor and Jay put his finger on the hold button and kept it there.

  ‘I’ll see you to your door, Miss Montecourt,’ he said, then he smiled wickedly and moved closer to me. ‘Unless you would like to come up with me and see what a really good room in this place is like…’

  I replied by knocking his hand off the hold button and he pressed the one for the top floor. His ‘room’ covered about half of it. I’d noticed the plaque on the door as he opened it: Presidential Suite.

  ‘Crikey,’ I said, taking in the wall of glass and the vast deck looking out over the bay. ‘It is a nice room, you weren’t kidding.’

  ‘Come out here,’ said Jay, leading me to the deck, where there was a large spa tub, gurgling away. ‘Feel like a bubble bath?’

 
; I nodded and he slid the straps of my dress off my shoulders and then, torturously slowly, he nibbled and kissed his way round my neck, and gently behind my ears, his mouth finally meeting mine as his hands reached up and found my breasts through the fine fabric of the dress.

  As his tongue slid into my mouth for the first time, I felt as though my entire body had just gone into freefall on some kind of crazy theme-park ride.

  Pulling away, I took a deep breath to recover myself, and then stepping back a little, I reached behind and pulled down the zip on my dress, so that it fell suddenly to my feet, and I was standing there in nothing but my yellow silk Myla knickers and my gold shoes.

  Jay moaned slightly as his fingers grazed my bare nipples, which were standing to full attention through the combination of his stroking and the gentle sea breeze.

  Then he dropped his hands suddenly and just stood looking at me, his eyes sliding slowly down my body. He wasn’t even touching me and I felt like I was going to faint. I had never felt so sexually attracted to anyone in my life – and I wasn’t an inexperienced girl in that area.

  I could see Jay was similarly affected. His chest was rising and falling quickly beneath his shirt and I moved back towards him and slowly unbuttoned it, so I could run my fingers over the chest and stomach that had been tantalizing me since the first moment I had seen him.

  I pulled his shirt down over his splendid shoulders, and he let it slide off his arms. Then, not taking his eyes from mine, he slowly unbuckled his belt, then pulled down his jeans and kicked them off, so he was standing there gloriously, splendidly naked.

  I still wasn’t and as I took his hand and led him over to the hot tub, I didn’t take my knickers off. It was quite deliberate. I wasn’t going to take them off – even though the chlorine in the spa would ruin them – because I wasn’t going all the way with Jay.

  I had never wanted to have sex with anybody so much in my life, but it was a decision I had made much earlier in the evening. Round about the time we hit the dance floor at Wonderland. There was no way I was going to sleep with him that first night, because I wanted there to be a lot more nights than that.