by Fiona Harper
‘I want to apologise for the way I treated you at school. Back then…let’s just say I had issues at home, and I dealt with it by taking it out on people like you—easy targets.’ A genuine look of remorse clouded his features. ‘Not that you were ever the soft touch I’d taken you for. You just refused to cower, no matter how hard I tried. In the end it just made me all the more determined to try. Not the right way to handle it, I know. But I’m afraid I just wasn’t brought up to know any better. It was the only example I had.’
Cameron had come across Mr Fitzroy Senior over the last couple of years. He was a big cheese in banking, and Cameron wouldn’t have liked even to work for the old goat, let alone be related to him. He bullied everyone he came into contact with. Being his son had to be a nightmare. From what he’d witnessed, nothing was ever good enough for that man.
He was suddenly reminded of his laser eye surgery—how everything had gradually come into focus, how he’d felt he was seeing everything in a new light afterwards. He looked at Daniel Fitzroy now and no longer saw an arrogant enemy too powerful to prevail against. Now he just saw the remnants of a boy who hadn’t had the inner strength to cope with a vindictive father. How had he never seen how weak, how deserving of pity Daniel Fitzroy had always been?
And how had he never realised how similar he and the other man had been on the inside? How they’d both been damaged by their fathers’ low opinions of them, even if they’d worn that pain very differently on the outside.
‘I’m not that person any more, Cameron. I’ve changed.’ He stole a look at his wife, who was deep in conversation with Jessica. ‘And I want you to know that I am truly sorry.’
Cameron stood there, blinking at the man, the hot coals of the anger he’d been stoking for almost twenty years now smoking and hissing. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard what the man had said, although part of him wished he could. Then he’d be able to go on hating, letting the furnace drive him forward. But Daniel Fitzroy had just made a genuine apology, and Cameron was not a man to ignore courage and integrity—even when it appeared in the most unlikely of places.
He reached out and shook Daniel’s hand.
The other man breathed out a long sigh of relief and signalled with a quick glance at his wife that the deed was done. Silent communication. Unfortunately it gave Jessica an excuse to walk over with the woman, and she looped her arm in his and leaned into him, her large blue eyes wide and blinking—a little trick he knew she thought men found appealing, and once upon a time he had.
He honestly didn’t object to talking to Daniel and his wife for the next ten minutes or so. The only drawback was that Jessica seemed to be attached to his arm as if she had octopus suckers, and he couldn’t shake her loose without creating a scene.
Daniel’s wife was obviously very much in love with him. She looked adoringly at him as he spoke, her arm in his, her free hand rubbing the top of her bump almost constantly.
Cameron got the oddest feeling. He looked at the man Daniel had become and, while he wasn’t sure they would ever be friends, he acknowledged how much he’d grown. He might not be the power-player his father was, but in Cameron’s eyes it took guts to humble yourself before your greatest enemy.
In comparison, Cameron felt a little two-dimensional.
Where was his own adoring wife? His own promise of new life for the future? Nowhere. Because he’d dedicated his life to proving to the Daniel Fitzroys of this world that he was every bit their equal. And, for some totally unfathomable reason, he’d decided the best way to go about it was to amass as much money as he could and gallivant about town with useless creatures like the one currently affixed to his left arm.
Fitzroy hadn’t let the past define him as Cameron had done. All these years he’d been fighting ghosts, fighting the shadows of bullies who had moved on with their lives, become men with lives and families. And now the anger was gone he realised there was a huge gaping hole in his life. The abscess had been drained, removing the fiery pain, and now there was nothing left but an ugly-looking hole. What was more, he had no idea how he was going to fill it.
Alice brushed Coreen’s sharp little fingernail away. ‘What do you mean me…? Oh, no! No way! Absolutely no way!’
Now the dramatics kicked in. Coreen threw her hands in the air and her voice boomed. ‘Look around! Although we’ve booked models of different shapes and sizes, lots of these girls have exactly the same build as you. Poor old sick-as-a-dog Amber is virtually your body double.’
That might be true—sort of. But Alice knew for a fact that just because she’d been labelled a stick insect since her first day at school, just because she might look the part, it didn’t mean she could actually model!
‘Coreen, you must be out of your mind. You’ve obviously got me confused with someone who can walk more than five steps in heels without tripping over. And there are stairs…’
She ran to the back of the stage and peered through a gap in the scenery. The stage was flat enough—a wide rectangle, long side facing the audience, but they’d decided against the traditional T-shape of a catwalk, reasoning that if more space was needed for dancing later it would be better to have the models walk down a short flight of steps and parade along the marble floor before turning back and doing the process in reverse.
‘Nonsense,’ Coreen said, shoving her to the side to get a look herself. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Alice put her hands on her hips. Her future business was on the line here, and she wasn’t going to muck it up with her clompy walk and complete lack of gracefulness. She couldn’t go out there and have everyone looking at her—the whole room looking at her. Especially when someone would be looking at her, making her stomach flutter, her pulse race. There was a huge probability she would fall at his feet—literally.
She grabbed Coreen from where she was gawking at the other guests and made her look at her. ‘This isn’t a fairy story or a Broadway musical. The poor little insignificant nobody isn’t going to step into the star’s shoes and save the day! I can’t do it.’
She waited for the fireworks, for Coreen to beg and plead and manipulate, but Coreen’s eye was back at the crack in the scenery, and she was eyeing up the runway again. It didn’t even look as if her fuse was lit.
‘Hold that thought,’ she said, and ran back to the dressing rooms.
The lights everywhere but on the stage dimmed, and a rustle of excitement went through the crowd. Gentle music—a little bit fifties, a little bit Italian—filtered through hidden speakers. The two banks of chairs with a central aisle weren’t arranged to face the stage but each other, leaving a wide channel for the models to walk down, allowing the onlookers to get the best view of the outfits on display.
A lone figure stepped out onto the stage, and there was a collective gasp from the crowd. Cameron, seated in the front row, smiled. This wasn’t usually his thing, but somehow this was different. He knew all the hard planning that had gone into it—every minute detail.
He knew, for example, that this wasn’t really Audrey Hepburn, in a full skirt, flat shoes, prim white shirt and a scarf knotted round her slender neck, but a professional lookalike—one of a handful Alice had hired to make the fashion show a little more dramatic. By the looks of the people on either side of him, it had worked. ‘Audrey’ made her way down the short flight of four or five steps from the stage to the floor of the atrium and stayed in character as she walked, looking every inch the Hollywood star. A spontaneous round of applause rippled round the room. And then, as Audrey passed him, another model appeared—this one in a white dress with big red roses on it. A white scarf covered her hair and she was wearing sunglasses.
There was something familiar about that woman.
Coreen?
What was she doing modelling the clothes? That wasn’t supposed to be her job—although, by the reaction of a couple of men sitting opposite him, it really ought to be. It looked as if they were ready to leap off their seats and follow her wherever she went.
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br /> He was still puzzling as the Roman Holiday section ended and a small spotlight came up on a lectern at one side of the stage. A woman stepped into the pool of light and coughed slightly, before leaning a little too close to the microphone so it squealed back at her.
‘Sorry,’ a gentle voice said through the speakers, and every hair on every inch of Cameron’s body stood on end.
He thought he was going to have a heart attack right then and there in the middle of his own party. It was Alice. And she was…Alice was…All he could think of. All he could look at. All he’d ever thought she could be and more.
The little vintage outfits she’d worn to the office had been cute, but this…Rich, dark green, swelling and curving and flowing around her. And her hair—her eyes! Dark, liquid, smoky make-up, and the deep crimson lips of a goddess. She turned round to ask someone behind the scenes something, and he really did think his heart had stopped for a second or so.
If the front of the dress had been spectacular, the back was…
He’d run out of words.
Two wide satin straps crossed over between her shoulder blades and travelled down, down, down until they reached the low back, just where the top of her bottom rounded away. Someone across the room wolf-whistled, and Cameron almost jumped out of his seat and started searching for him so he could knock his teeth out. But he managed to contain himself. Just.
She turned back again and tested the microphone, which was now behaving itself.
What was Alice doing there, staring at the audience, her eyes large and round?
CHAPTER SEVEN
OH, LORD, thought Alice. What I am I doing here?
Every eye in the room was on her. Every ear straining to hear what she was going to say. The only problem was she didn’t know what she was going to say. They were expecting something witty and engaging. All she had in her head was garbled phrases.
Why, oh, why had she refused to model? What was so hard about strutting about a bit? At least that would only have involved being looked at. But with Coreen stepping in for Amber she’d been forced into the role of auctioneer. Now she had be looked at and say stuff.
The plan was to auction off the pieces straight after their section of the show, so they were fresh in people’s minds. The first model—Annie, the Audrey lookalike—stepped out onto the stage and struck a relaxed pose, her hands clasped behind her back in a girlish manner, and it instantly reminded Alice of stills she’d seen from Roman Holiday. She could almost hear the music—almost see St. Peter’s Square and the Colosseum, feel her own heart beating with the first love of a shy girl escaping from her life of duty for a few precious days.
And then the words were there, inside her head. She took a deep breath and leaned into the microphone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, imagine yourselves in Rome at the height of summer, zipping through the crowded streets on a Vespa, the wind in your hair, the swell of freedom in your heart…’
If anyone had asked Cameron what each piece of clothing had sold for, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them. He hadn’t been paying attention to the numbers, only to the soft clarity of Alice’s words, the way she moved her hands when she described a piece, the smile she bestowed on the winning bidders. Cameron wasn’t a man who took his time deciding what he wanted, and he knew what he wanted right now—one of those smiles.
The final section of the auction was progressing—the one with the Marilyn lookalike. Evening dresses in all colours of the rainbow, made out of all kinds of fabrics: lace, satin, taffeta, organza…
Not that Cameron knew anything about fabrics, but he retained the information because it had been delivered in Alice’s voice.
She was amazing. The whole audience was eating out of her hand, leaning forward to catch every syllable she uttered. Coreen would have been a great auctioneer, parting the punters from their money with her outrageous curves and cheeky banter, but Alice…Alice was something else. Totally different.
A unique way of looking at things, he’d said. And now she was putting that gift to work with marvellous effect.
She didn’t sell the clothes, she sold the dream—the very essence of all those classic movies. She didn’t just describe each item of the sale, but she put it in context, creating a little story about each blouse, each handbag, each dress, until the guests were desperate to outbid each other for just a little bit of that fantasy. He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of the pieces had gone for ridiculously high sums.
He’d been so busy caught up in her spell he realised that he’d forgotten to bid for anything—had forgotten to earn one of her smiles. Not that he’d have known what to bid for. Whatever would he do with a stole or a pill-box hat? It wasn’t as if he had a woman in his life to shop for any more. And now the last bid had been made, for a metallic embroidered sheer dress similar to the one Marilyn had worn in Some Like It Hot. That dress he remembered all on his own. What red-blooded male wouldn’t?
But it wouldn’t have done. He wouldn’t have bought it anyway, because it would have looked so wrong on her…
Oh.
Mentally he’d been looking for something for Alice, and he hadn’t even known it.
He frowned and berated himself. He should have known, should have made more of an effort, because now everything had been sold and his chance to surprise her with a gift, to say thank you for the wonderful job she had done, was gone. A little voice in his ear urged him to stand up, make one of the happy bidders give something up for him. He could do it. It was his ball, his building, his night, and he knew he could make any outrageous demand he wanted and people would scurry round to make it a reality.
But he didn’t.
In his imagination he could see the look of disapproval on Alice’s face. She wouldn’t accept anything he obtained for her by those means anyway. So, although it was almost painful, he kept his mouth shut and his bottom in his seat.
Silence fell, and Alice removed the microphone from its stand and walked to the centre of the stage.
‘We have one last piece of vintage clothing to auction off this evening…’ She did a little twirl and Cameron felt his stomach clench, the blood pound in his ears. ‘This Elsa Schiaparelli dress.’
A murmur of excitement rumbled around the room.
‘It’s a deep emerald satin evening gown, designed in 1938 for…’
The details blurred in Cameron’s ears. He didn’t need to know them. This was Alice’s dress. No one else should ever be allowed to wear it—and he was going to make sure they wouldn’t.
He was going to buy it for her.
And, in the process, he was going to earn himself one of those smiles.
It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. Coreen had said she could auction this dress if she wanted to, and while it was the most beautiful thing she had ever worn and was ever likely to wear, when would she really ever have the chance to wear it again? After tonight she’d be back to blue jeans and T-shirts, bashed-up old trainers and her brother’s fleeces.
The amount the auction had managed to raise for the local charity so far this evening was truly amazing, much more than she’d ever imagined possible, and she’d rather that this exquisite dress put an extra couple of hundred pounds in the kitty rather than sit in the darkness at the back of her wardrobe doing nobody any good.
‘I’m going to start the bidding at one hundred pounds.’ The reserve was five hundred. Surely it would go for much more than that. ‘Do I have one hundred pounds?’
Instantly a hand shot up, the woman half rising out of her seat.
‘One hundred pounds to the lady over there. Do I hear—?’
‘Two hundred.’
Alice stopped mid-flow and turned in the direction of the voice. Not just a voice, but the voice. Her eyes met Cameron’s. He was looking straight at her, his expression completely open. What on earth would Cameron want with a dress like this?
She couldn’t look away as she said, ‘Do I hear—?’
‘Three hundr
ed.’
This was a new bidder. She acknowledged a woman in a mink stole with a nod, but before she could open her mouth that deep, sexy log fire kind of voice said, ‘Five hundred.’
And that was how it carried on. Every time someone else bid, Cameron topped it. She stopped looking at the other bidders and felt a gentle heat rise to her cheeks as she kept her focus on him. Only on him. He was smiling too. A secret smile. A shared smile. One that connected them in such a way that the rest of the room melted away, became like background music.
She really must remember to breathe. It was interfering with the whole auctioneer thing. But the way that Cameron was looking at her—as if she was the only thing in his field of vision—seemed to be having an effect on her ribcage, making it squeeze tight around her lungs.
He’s bidding for your dress. For you.
Don’t be so stupid, she told herself. That would mean…Well, it would mean all sorts of things it was impossible for it to mean.
But that warmth in his eyes, his smile…
She knew it was true even as she accepted a bid of a thousand pounds from the original bidder and the whole room gasped. Cameron just smiled, and Alice knew his lips would open again, that he would add another hundred.
And he kept doing it. But Cameron was not a patient man, even though his nonchalant expression all through the auction almost fooled her. Hard lines of irritation at being constantly trumped started to show around his jaw. When the bid reached one thousand eight hundred, he snapped and stood up.
‘Ten thousand,’ he said, in his low, controlled voice, daring anyone to go higher.
Nobody did. They were all too shocked, busy whispering about his outburst, and before anyone with enough capital behind them had enough thought to bid against him it had gone. It belonged to him.
She belonged to him.
And, while the crowd dispersed in a collective hunt for another champagne cocktail before the ball proper began, she stayed centre stage and he stayed in his seat. They were grinning at each other.