Party Girl at Heart

by Karen Elaine Campbell

  Crystal’s eyes glittered, ominously. “Hmm?”

  “She’s decided to leave Giles, and she wants to move in here with us,” he stated without preamble.

  “No. No way,” Crystal declared vehemently, before she could stop herself. “Here, in their house? No, most certainly not.”

  Jazz frowned. “She’s my sister, Crystal. I don’t see how I can refuse her.”

  “It’s simple. Just. Say. No,” Crystal ground out between gritted teeth. She stared at her feet. She knew that she was being childish, she knew that it uncharitable, but she didn’t want that miserable old bag living here, not in her house. Not today, not this week, never.

  Jazz released out a heavy sigh. He’d guessed that he might come up against opposition; he knew that Imogen drove Crystal completely nuts, but he also suspected that there far was more to the current situation than Imogen had so far divulged.

  “She can move in with your mother if she needs a roof over her head, or send Giles back to London; he spends most of his time up there in their flat as it is,” Crystal declared, and then halted mid-flow as pain flickered across her features and her gaze locked with Jazz’s as she realised what she’d just said. “He does spend a lot of time up in ‘town’, on his own, doesn’t he? Do you think he’s having an affair?” he asked tentatively, her voice dropping away to a mere whisper as she contemplated the situation.

  Jazz rolled the whisky around in his glass. “That’s not the reason that Imogen gave for her decision, but the idea had crossed my mind too,” he answered, honestly. That and the fact that he had the photographic evidence of Giles’ latest indiscretions, locked away in his safe, the only place where it was secure from prying eyes.

  “Oh. I see. So what is Imogen’s problem then?” she asked, all sympathy rapidly dissolving as she reverted to her previous opinion, she didn’t want Imogen living here!

  “Giles told her today that he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to have a baby with her, ever, apparently.”

  Clever man, Crystal thought.

  Jazz cast Crystal a serious glance, “Crystal, she thought she was pregnant, and she’s just discovered that she’s not.” he flicked a speck of non-existent dust from the edge of his white tee shirt, the action brought his chest muscles, clearly defined beneath the thin material into sharp relief. He coughed, delicately, “Giles has been asked to perform certain acts, in the interests of medical science, which he finds unacceptable, apparently.”

  Crystal frowned.

  Jazz started laughing. “The doctor wants his sperm Crystal, to analyse, as part of the infertility treatment,” Jazz chuckled. “Giles is refusing to comply,” he elucidated as he relaxed and moved in towards her, bracing his hip against the arm of the same sofa that Crystal was perched on.

  Crystal couldn’t help it, it wasn’t funny really, but she could imagine the serious and straight-laced Giles being asked to present a ‘specimen’ and she could visualise his horror when he realised exactly how he was expected to conform to the request. The bit she couldn’t imagine was how Imogen had explained the predicament to her brother. The heat of suppressed mirth brought a bubble of warmth straight up from the pit of her stomach, right up through her midriff to her chest as the humour of the situation swept away the earlier anger and the fury that had so far been lodged in her breast.

  As she relaxed and toyed with a lock of straight, long blonde hair, she wrinkled up her nose and tried to conjure up an image of Imogen explaining things to Jazz politely. Her lips twitched and she reached over to place the palm of her hand flat against the muscles of his chest. “So how did Imogen explain it exactly Jazz?” she asked huskily. “This, umm, predicament that she’s in?”

  “A lot more delicately than you would madam, that’s for sure,” he answered on a growl as the heat of her skin scorched through the thin material of his shirt. He leaned in closer, and her scent, slightly musky in the heat of the fire, slipped in under his guard. “We wouldn’t have those kind of problems, would we?” He commented, as he gave in to the pull that her proximity was exerting over his rationality. He’d sworn that he wouldn’t fall for this tactic, when he’d watched her snogging that instructor on the airfield today, but now, with her here, this close, he realised that he really didn’t give a damn. So what did that make him, better than Giles, or worse? He’d work it out later, he thought, as he pushed her back forcefully onto the hard and unforgiving leather of the squashy chesterfield sofa and began to undo the buttons on the bright orange flying suit.

  Chapter

  13

  WEDDING GUESTS

  Imogen prowled around the empty house, duster and cleaning solution in hand, looking for finger prints. She had no idea why Jazz didn’t hire a ‘daily’, he could surely afford to have someone come in and clean for them, but when she had broached the subject, soon after she’d moved to the village, he’d coughed politely and told her that he and Crystal liked their privacy.

  Imogen considered herself to be a ‘private’ person, but she still couldn’t imagine living in the chaotic tumble of books, papers, magazines and belongings that seemed to seep out of every available nook and cranny of the beautiful, newly refurbished cottage. Why Crystal needed to use the kitchen as an office, when there was a purpose built study located on the ground floor, right off the downstairs hallway, was a complete anathema as well, though she doubted that Crystal would see it that way, of course.

  In the end, she just closed the door to the kitchen, so that she couldn’t see the riot of papers, files and computer media that spread all over the table, the dresser and crawled off over the floor as well. She’d promised Jazz that she wouldn’t interfere in his relationship with Crystal, regardless of how unsuitable she thought that his choice in women was, but he hadn’t stopped her from cleaning things, not just yet, anyway.

  So she moved on into the study, her brother’s lair, as she liked to call it, and began flicking the duster at the piles of papers stacked in neat order, lined up like soldiers. He spent a great deal of time in here, even when he was home. He worked too hard, he should spend more time out enjoying himself, not working away here until exhaustion claimed him, every night of the week. He was only a couple of years older than she was herself, yet he acted like a man twice his age, the pressures of leadership sat easily on his broad shoulders, but at what cost?

  He’d actually settled down since he’d met Crystal, she realised. Prior to Crystal, there had been a steady stream of equally unsuitable women in her brother’s life, but to be honest, tarty as Crystal was, she seemed to suit Jazz.

  She wasn’t really paying much attention as she started to shuffle up the papers on the antique oak desk, but one paper slipped from the pile and fluttered off onto the floor. It was only when she went to put it back in amongst the other pages in the middle of the desk that she realised the significance of what she held in her hand, and as she stared at the black and white image she experienced the faintest sensation of guilt. It wasn’t her doing, of course, she wasn’t completely responsible, but she knew how those had found their way into her brother’s study.

  Surprisingly, she now hoped that they hadn’t caused trouble between Jazz and Crystal, everyone deserved to be happy, everyone deserved to find that special someone, the person who loved them right back, unconditionally.

  In LA, Olivia stared at the racks and racks of clothes, all hung neatly in dust jackets and ranged according to colour and style in the huge walk-in American style ‘closet’ attached to the vast master bedroom of the LA apartment. The faint hum of the traffic in the busy street below was already increasing in volume which meant that it was already way past time to get dressed.

  She rattled the hangars as she rummaged through the contents of the cupboard; there was nothing in here that she wanted to wear. She flopped back onto the big double bed, already exhausted and watched the intricate lace pattern on the underside of the blades of the fan as it swished around rhythmically overhead. The room felt comfortable and claustr
ophobic all at the same time, but it still didn’t feel particularly familiar, then again nothing ever did, apart from the dreams.

  She’d been back here in the US for several weeks now and although the external scars had faded to one single, fine white mark which ran right up into her hairline, that was not the end of the problem. It was the invisible scars that ran deepest, the wilful and elusive memories which fringed her sub-conscious and promised the earth but in actual fact delivered precisely zero. It had started with the dreams, the ‘haunted dreams’ as she labelled them when she was forced to consider them at all. They’d begun almost as soon as she had returned here with Phil. Erotic, passionate, carefree and deeply moving dreams, scenarios in which she was free, free from all cares and, most importantly, free to love again.

  The man in the dreams looked down at her with such passion in his warm brown eyes that she ached to succumb to his magnetism. His smile was dangerously personal and his eyes flashed intimacy the second that she connected with him, she was tempted to believe that this moment was special and reserved exclusively for her. Frustratingly though, always at the moment of surrender, she awoke chilled and trembling, every time.

  The first time the dream had struck, she’d been mortified to be having such impure and blatantly sexual thoughts about a man that she’d never met. She’d put the experience down to frustration, Phil had been unwilling to share the big double bed in the huge master bedroom with her and had moved into the tiny box room in the penthouse attic, assuring her that they would resume their relationship again, once she regained her strength and her memory. He didn’t want to take advantage of her in her current delicate condition, he said.

  The problem was, the dreams hadn’t stopped. If anything, they’d increased in their potency and power, and quite frankly they were driving her nuts. Who was the man? Was he real, or was he just a figment of her imagination, dreamed up with the sole purpose of driving her slowly insane? She had no idea, and she didn’t know who to ask, either. She didn’t know the physician that Phil had engaged on her behalf, and even though he claimed to know her, there was something about him that she felt oddly disturbing and she couldn’t bring herself to ask him the kind of personal questions that were keeping her awake at night.

  Reluctantly she roused herself from the bed and considered the clothes in the wardrobe again, reaching out a hand to finger the delicate fabric of yet another designer creation, strangely familiar, yet oddly distasteful. She pulled a sleeve out of the dust-bag and raised the fabric to her nose, inhaling deeply. The scent was light and musky all at the same time, and it reminded her of a farmhouse nestling in a valley on the outskirts of some large town. England, not America. It reminded her of her youth, if she could just remember where that was. She knew that she’d been brought up in the countryside, just outside Bath, in England, they said at the hospital, and she had some memories of that place. Fractured fragments, like broken shards of glass from a mirror, reflected back images in a kaleidoscope of colours, disjointed and surreal, snippets of a life buried in her sub-conscious, lost for the moment and at liberty to taunt her every waking hour.

  She dropped the fabric as if burned. These were not her clothes. She knew that in an instant, this colour, hot pink, it didn’t even suit her. She looked better in muted pastels, smoky heather and soft bruised grey, she always chose from the soft palette of colours which favoured her milk white skin and raven black hair, not these harsh bright colours currently nestling in her closet. She didn’t know whose clothes they were, but they didn’t belong to her.

  It was her own fault, of course. She’d found the clothes in the spare room, the one that Phil was using, the first week that she’d returned to LA from England, pushed right back into the furthest recesses of the eaves under the roof. She’d had the maid install them in the cupboard in the master bedroom in the vain hope that they’d help her to regain her memory, but now all they were doing was posing more questions and she had enough of those already. She’d ask Phil about the clothes when he came in from work tonight, she resolved.

  For the moment though, she had to find something to wear to this blessed wedding next week, in England. She had no idea who the people were, of course. She’d been told that Jeremy was a blood-relative, her cousin, and she’d met both Jeremy and Saskia, Phil’s boss, on occasion over the past couple of months, but they may as well have been Eskimos for all that she could remember. Try as she might, she just couldn’t place either of them, not at the moment. They seemed nice enough, and they made every effort to include her in this, her life now, but it was all so superficial. How could you just catapult into a life, aged thirty-one, heading for middle-age, with no past to speak of? It turned the simplest of tasks into a fact-finding mission, and she was getting fed up with it all, to tell the truth.

  Now she had to find a suitable outfit and prepare herself for a whole room full of people that she didn’t know. Most of them were her family too. It was all too much; she sat down on the bed in the big master bedroom and howled tears of pure frustration. She didn’t want to go to the wedding next week and mingle with all of those people, pretending to be happy and serene, when in truth she felt broken up and fractured on the inside too, just like her mind.

  The maid stood outside the door to the main bedroom and listened to Miss Olivia’s sobs, loud and wracked with the anguish of fear and futility. She knew that she could fill in of some of the gaps for the poor young woman, if she’d been allowed to, but Mr Phil had made the position quite clear on the subject of Miss Olivia. He’d insisted that she was only to answer the questions that she’d been asked and she was not to volunteer information indiscriminately. She’d seen a fair few changes around here, these past five years, ever since Miss Crystal had departed so unexpectedly, and she knew that Mr Phil had suffered too, so he’d asked her to do this one thing for him, and she supposed that she’d follow his wishes. He did pay her salary, when all was said and done.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Verity was suffering from a similar plight. Her lover was intending to attend the same venue as Olivia, with his wife, playing happy families for the sake of appearances, while she, his lover and mother of his unborn child, had not even received an invitation to the up-market shindig. She knew that she was being unreasonable. She’d insisted on anonymity, fearing the worst if news of their relationship was made public, so she really couldn’t complain when he toed the family line and attended the ‘do’ with his wife. But in truth, she was finding the whole thing just a little bit more than she could bear.

  Not for the first time, she questioned her decision to allow Jazz to handle the ‘delicate’ situation on her behalf. Things were not moving quickly enough for her, didn’t her half-brother have any idea how much she wanted this whole thing to be resolved? All she wanted was for her lover to ditch his wife and return home to her, long before their first child was born.

  It might have helped, if she’d told the father of her baby the joyful news, but she wasn’t sure he’d be overly impressed with her condition, now that she thought about it. Just when was it usual to tell your clandestine lover that he was about to become a dad?

  She pulled a suit out of the closet and cringed when it wouldn’t do up over her ‘bump’, people in the office were starting to notice how much weight she’d put on lately, this baby would be common knowledge, within a few weeks. She felt fat, frumpy and very lonely. No-one had explained how her hormones would overwhelm her when she least expected it, and she sat down on the edge of her bed. Huge fat tears of self-pity and despair rolled down her cheeks and fell in great, fat, round drops onto the bedcover as she tried and failed to come to terms with her current situation. The whole world looked bleak.

  At the pub in the village, Crystal was also staring fate in the face. The thin blue line on the pregnancy test-kit really must be a figment of her imagination, right? There was no way that she was pregnant. It just couldn’t be true. She rummaged in the bag from the chemist and stared at the second testing kit
, still wrapped in its polythene wrapper. They sold these things in two’s for a reason, didn’t they? Surely the first one could easily fail? That was why they sold them in two’s, right?

  The only trouble was, she’d done two tests yesterday, and the day before that as well, and they’d all been positive too. She really did have to face facts here, she was having Jazz’s baby. She rolled the idea around in her mind. He was going to totally flip, as would Imogen.

  Bloody Imogen. She was now neatly installed in the spare bedroom, the tiny box room just a hairs breadth from their own, and she was busy sticking her prissy little nose into everything that Crystal did. Which was the main reason why she was holed up here, at the pub.

  She sat down on the huge double bed and prodded experimentally at her smoothly rounded tummy. There was barely a curve there, really. Was there truly a baby growing inside there? She stared again at the test stick, she supposed that there was. So, how did she go about explaining this one to Jazz then? They’d never discussed having a family before. She didn’t even know if he wanted children. She smiled. She’d always wanted a little girl, with long brown hair in pig tails. What would their child look like? Studious and serious, like Jazz, or scatty and winsome, like herself?

  Her mind drifted and she rolled back onto the bed.

  It was nearly ten o’clock when she awoke again. Her mobile was warbling away in her handbag like a furious bumble bee, buzz, buzz, buzz. She groaned and reached out a hand, keeping her eyes closed, and tried to locate the bag on the floor beside the bed, anything to silence the noisy instrument. The phone stopped vibrating and there was a beep as a text message came through hard on the heels of the phone call. Whoever had called was very insistent, she thought.