Lie For You

by Pippa Summers

Now Damian was watching from across the busy airport departures hall as I signed a scrap of paper for a fan, a flushed and excitable girl of about twelve whose mother beamed and thanked me profusely before dragging the girl away.

  Missie handed back my bag, then we strode after Damian and the rest of the entourage, me clicking all the way in brand-new Louboutin heels and Missie operating in near-silence in her signature ballet-style pumps, taking two rapid steps to each of mine. People stared, as usual, but I kept my gaze straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eye.

  ‘It should take thirty minutes or so to clear Customs,’ Damian told us, and signalled us both to follow the airport official who was waiting to make sure we got through the bag and passport checks smoothly. ‘There’s a private waiting lounge, then we should be able to board the charter plane about an hour after that. I’ll call ahead once we’re ready to board, make sure there are cars waiting for us at Paris.’

  ‘Sasha!’ someone shouted from across the concourse, and I half-turned, taken off guard.

  A flash bulb went off close-by, startling me. A fair-haired young man in a blue T-shirt and cut-off denims grinned as he lowered his camera. ‘Thanks, Sasha, darling,’ he drawled, then hurried back to join his colleague.

  Damian looked after them furiously. ‘Bloody pap-rats. How the hell did they find out we were flying out today?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Really?” He looked at me assessingly as we were ushered through into the private Customs area. ‘This charity concert isn’t on our official schedule, and for good reason. I didn’t think you’d want the newspapers knowing about this trip ahead of time. They’ll only dredge up the past, get people talking about Paris again.’

  I had not thought of that. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Well,’ he said calmly, handing his passport over to the waiting official, ‘with any luck the French papers won’t catch on for a day or two. That should give you a breathing space at least while you rehearse for the concert.’

  I wanted to believe him. But I had not forgotten the international press furore after the accident: my name in front page headlines everywhere I turned, the garish flash-lit photographs from that terrible night. The steel-grey Aston Martin with its bonnet staved in, the other car still smouldering beside it the next morning, a burned-out wreck. Then days of coverage in the English newspapers and on television when I discharged myself from the hospital in Paris and flew back to the UK. ‘The lucky one,’ they had called me, describing the carnage of that head-on collision, apparently unaware of the irony.

  ‘What are the chances of that?’

  Missie put an arm about me. ‘Stop thinking so hard. You hear me, please? It’s done now. No use crying over what has already been spilled.’

  I nodded to reassure her. But my muttered agreement was strained.

  None of us were innocents. We all knew how journalists operated. That photograph of my face, probably looking pale and tired after a sleepless night, would soon be splashed across the national press again, coupled with old photos of Lisette and that horrific scene from the car crash.

  Damian thought it was time I faced my demons. And it seemed I was going to have to do precisely that on this trip to Paris.

  The flight would not take long, I discovered, precisely as Damian had predicted. The organisers of the charity concert had put a comfortable private jet at our disposal, the seats almost large enough for two, covered in smooth cream leather. The two uniformed flight attendants were French but both spoke excellent English.

  ‘Bienvenue, Madame,’ the male flight attendant said, welcoming me aboard the small jet. The man had a quiet courtesy that I liked, his smile genuine. ‘A glass of Cristal before take-off?’

  ‘Why not?’

  I found a seat near a window while the others were climbing aboard and stowing their hand luggage; I hated not being able to see where I was going when I flew. I leant forward to put my bag on the floor, then sat back on the very comfortable seat and crossed my legs. My slit skirt rode up slightly, but I ignored Damian’s interested glance as he settled opposite. There was a small table between us but plenty of space for me to curl up and sleep if I wished.

  The flight attendant came back a few minutes later with a silver tray, handing out glasses of beautifully chilled champagne.

  ‘Merci,’ I said, taking one and glancing at his name badge above the tray, ‘Mattieu.’

  The man smiled at my use of his name, and inclined his head. He offered a glass of champagne to Damian, then moved silently down the plane to where Missie was sitting with Damian’s assistant, Paul, a recent business school graduate with muscles like a rugby player and aspirations in the entertainment industry. Paul was young and attractive in a ruddy-cheeked, thick-set way, and it was clear that Missie had some mild interest there. There was quite a gap in their ages, but that would not stop Missie entertaining herself with a casual flirtation.

  I sipped at my glass of Cristal, loving the taste of its crisp expensive bubbles against my tongue, and stared at the city as the jet climbed high above the eastern suburbs of Birmingham.

  It was a view I loved – though only when coming back down to land. Because that always meant that I was going home. Or as close to home as I ever came these days, living about a quarter of the year in my London flat in Chelsea and the rest in hotels and apartments on the road. Now that Nan’s house had been sold, there was nowhere left in Birmingham that I could claim as home territory. But being a native Brummie meant the city still drew me back like a charm. It tugged at my heart whenever I looked down from a circling plane and saw tenement buildings and high-rise towers of central Birmingham, glass reflecting the light across the cityscape, the delicate minarets of a mosque reaching into the sky, and recognised streets and parks and playing fields where we had hung out as kids.

  That’s home, I always thought, and let my heart ache with bitter-sweet memories.

  I fiddled with my diamond bracelet, turning it round and round on my wrist. It was a diamond lily cluster by Harry Winston, a birthday treat I had bought for myself. I loved the way the diamonds burnt white as ice in the sunlight.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Damian said softly.

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ I looked up after another minute and found him smiling at me wryly. ‘What?’

  ‘I meant the bracelet. Not Birmingham.’

  I did not know what to say, so looked away. Was Damian flirting with me?

  The private plane banked steeply for a few minutes, then turned gracefully, heading due south. Soon the urban sprawl of Birmingham had been left far behind and we were flying over open farmland.

  In common with a commercial flight, there was a discreetly wrapped sick bag and a laminated set of safety instructions in the padded pocket to my right. The usual terrifying reminders of where the exits were, no doubt, including how to slide down a bouncy castle-style tube with my arms folded across my chest in the event of a forced landing, despite the cheerless fact that hardly anyone survives when things go wrong in the air.

  I studied the top few lines of the safety instructions without removing them from the pocket, my attention caught by the company logo.

  ‘What’s the guy’s name?’ I asked Damian.

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘The father of the kid who’s sick. The one who’s putting on this charity concert.’

  He looked up at me in surprise, then put aside the sales report he had been reading. ‘Jean-Luc Ressier.’

  ‘As in Ressier Software Solutions?’

  He stared. ‘That’s right. His company’s really big in France. Software giant. You’ve heard of him then?’

  I pointed to the safety instructions, which were in dual French and English, and labelled with a large blue and white sticker with an elegant RSS logo, the two S’s linked one on top of the other, and Ressier Software Solutions written beneath it.

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘Yes, this is his company jet.’

  ‘How old is the kid again?’
>
  Damian checked through some of the paperwork on the table before him. ‘She’ll be eight on Saturday.’

  I grimaced. ‘It must be awful for him and his wife, having such a sick child.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s married. Not anymore. A widower.’

  ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘Well, like I said last night, she’s very excited about the concert. Really looking forward to meeting you.’

  I heard the undercurrent in his tone and smiled drily. ‘So I’d better not screw up, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘If the cap fits.’

  I dipped a finger in my champagne and flicked some wine at him.

  ‘Oh, very nice. Very mature.’ He wiped his cheek, but he was grinning. ‘Close your eyes, you need some rest. It’s not a long flight. We’ll be starting our descent before you know it.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say, not a comforting thought, but I decided against it. Damian already thought I was flaky about this trip.

  The fewer signs of nerves, the better.

  I did not know what I had expected on arrival in Paris. Dark stormy skies, perhaps. Thunder and lightning. Some sign of displeasure from the gods. Certainly not the clear sunny afternoon that awaited us as the charter plane dipped, banked, then descended gracefully to Charles de Gaulle airport.

  There were no paparazzi anywhere in evidence when we landed, much to my relief. But two uniformed chauffeurs were waiting for us just beyond the Arrivals area, holding up a simple white sign on which had been written in marker pen, SASHA. Both well-built men with thick black moustaches, they took charge of the luggage, dividing it at once between the two cars, then one led Missie and Paul out to the car park. The remaining driver tipped his peaked cap and indicated that we should follow him, his English okay but spoken with such a thick accent I found it hard to follow.

  ‘Is the car this way?’ Damian asked, always cautious about safety when we were travelling abroad.

  ‘Monsieur Ressier vous attends,’ the chauffeur said, then added more slowly when he looked blank, ‘My employer is waiting for you at the car. Please follow me?’

  Damian looked impressed. He whispered into my ear as we followed the driver out of the concourse, ‘So the big man himself has come all the way out here to meet us. That’s very generous of him.’

  I pinned a smile to my face, but in truth my heart was sinking. I had not managed to grab more than a few minutes’ sleep on the plane before we were suddenly landing, and the last thing I wanted was a lengthy meet-and-greet with Jean-Luc Ressier. Though I supposed that was unavoidable. He was the one who had laid on the private jet for us, after all, and was paying all our hotel bills while we were in Paris, which would prove a hefty bill for four people staying in two luxury suites at a ‘palais’ like the Hotel Meurice.

  I guessed Monsieur Ressier would be one of those well-fed business executives who fancied himself as a patron of the arts. Over the past few years I must have met dozens of them, and smiled, and shaken hands, and sometimes even talked for hours over dinner, all in return for their backing of some high-profile event. He would probably be in his late forties or fifties, old enough to have become established in his business but not so old that he stopped sponsoring arts events and turned to pro-golf instead.

  Sure enough, there was a long sleek limousine parked in a special bay not far from the airport entrance, with a wiry-looking man in a dark suit standing a few feet away.

  Monsieur Ressier?

  But then I saw the way he was standing – feet slightly apart, hands loose by his side as though ready for action – and the earpiece he was sporting, and realised he must be some kind of bodyguard. Damian had hired a bodyguard for me and Lisette when we were still teenagers and on tour for the first time; it had been part of his agreement with our grandmother that he would look after her girls. An agreement he had not managed to keep, I thought, remembering how rapidly things had gone wrong last time we had come to Paris.

  Then two things happened.

  The back door to the limousine opened and a man stepped out, putting on a pair of dark glasses as he straightened to his full height in the sunshine.

  Tall and lean, I guessed him to be in his late twenties. At first glance, his looks were spectacular. His face was hard and intelligent, his body solid muscle from the way his suit moved and clung, a grey tailored three-piece with a crisp white shirt beneath. There was a kind of repressed energy about his body. He was pure Mills and Boon material, a cast-iron hero, I had seen that with my first glance and now found myself staring at him, thinking, oh my God, oh my God …

  In the same moment he looked directly at me. For a second it felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the world. I blenched and stumbled, catching at Damian’s arm to stop myself falling.

  ‘Careful,’ Damian said at once, righting me with care. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I insisted, recovering quickly. Too quickly, perhaps; I could see suspicion in his face. I flashed Damian a reassuring smile. ‘Sorry, I … I caught my heel in a crack in the pavement.’

  But my gaze soon returned to the man in the steel-grey suit. Because we had met before. I did not know when or how or why. But we had met before, I was sure of it, and my body was trembling with that instinctual knowledge.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I studied him closely. To the best of my recollection I knew no one in Paris, and would certainly have remembered this man, even if I had met him in London or New York or Berlin or some other major city. Yet everything inside me was screaming at me to get away from him. I did not believe in psychic powers or anything supernatural, though Lisette had been keen on all that nonsense, obsessed with ghost stories and always reading out our horoscope in the newspaper.

  So what was it about this guy that had me desperate to run in the opposite direction?

  The man in the three-piece suit stepped forward, crisp white cuff with diamond cufflink exposed, tanned hand outstretched.

  ‘Bienvenue a Paris, Sasha,’ he said, and his voice matched his looks, deep and husky.

  Instincts aside, this was one sexy-as-hell Frenchman. I took his hand as though in a dream. His handshake was daringly intimate, his thumb moving gently against my skin, our hands fitting together perfectly. Perhaps it was Paris that was making me nervous, not this complete stranger.

  I felt almost bereft when he released my hand and said in perfect English, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Jean-Luc Ressier.’ Then turned his head slightly to one side, as though inviting me to examine the cruel raised scar that ran across his right temple down to his eyebrow.

  Somehow, I said, ‘Hello,’ and even managed a smile in reply to his. The kind where my lips barely moved.

  I did not intend to be impolite or turn on the super-brat celebrity act. He was our host for the week, after all, and regardless of my fame, Nan had brought me and Lisette up to be well-mannered.

  But I could not help it.

  Inwardly I was still reeling as though from a blow. Dazed, I studied him covertly, and could not understand the extremity of my reaction.

  So his face was scarred. Handsome but ruined. Surely that was not why I seemed incapable of coherent thought? I had met a few people with facial scarring before. What on earth was wrong with me? And why did this man seem so familiar when I knew – or thought I knew – that I had never set eyes on him before in my life?

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Relieved that my voice sounded calm and level, I pushed myself to ask, ‘Have we met before, Mr Ressier?’

  He removed his sunglasses and studied me intently. It was like being put under a microscope. ‘I don’t believe so.’

  Damian came forward to shake his hand too, leaning in with a reassuring smile. ‘I’m Sasha’s manager, we spoke on the phone. Damian McDowell. How are you, Mr Ressier? I expect Sasha has seen you on the cover of GQ. I’ve seen you there myself more than once.’

  I flicked
a glance at my manager. Yes, perhaps that was the explanation. This man was almost certainly photogenic; he was certainly devastating in person. A hot property in the otherwise dry world of international finance and industry. It would explain my instinctive feeling that I had seen him somewhere before if he had been on the covers of a few top mags in his time.

  ‘No doubt,’ Ressier said smoothly. ‘Good to meet you too, Mr McDowell. But please, both of you, call me Jean-Luc. I am very well, thank you.’

  With the slightest nod of his head, he indicated to the hovering chauffeur to open the passenger door of the limousine. ‘Tell me, how was your flight? I trust everything was to your satisfaction?’

  Damian began to discuss the generous seating on Ressier’s private jet while I slid inside the waiting car. The interior of the limousine was pleasingly spacious too, more than enough room to stretch out my long legs, and I could hear the discreet whirr of air-conditioning behind the music that was playing at a low volume.

  I recognised the song at once and grimaced; it was one of the hit singles from my debut album with Lisette. But what had I expected?

  The kid was a fan, so maybe the dad was too, or thought it would put me at my ease to hear my own music playing in the car. People often did assume that. But of course when it’s your own song, you can be heartily sick of it by the time it’s released, and then if it becomes a big hit, you have to sing it again every time you get up on stage. So all in all, not hearing it ever again in your entire life would be super.

  But the limousine was fantastically comfortable. The shiny black leather bench was deep and cool after the warmth of the May sunshine outside. I let myself relax back into it, crossing my legs and placing my handbag on the seat beside me. Glancing out through darkened glass, probably bulletproof, I watched the bodyguard speak into his cuff as though communicating with another member of his team. The second car, perhaps. Then he stepped forward to close the car door as first Damian and then Jean-Luc Ressier climbed into the limousine behind me.

  Damian slid in beside me. Ressier sat opposite. I glanced at his scarred profile, then away again. I could not bring myself to think of him as Jean-Luc. Somehow it felt too intimate. Dangerous, even. Which was ridiculous.