Fast Friends

by Jill Mansell

  “I’ll see to him,” said Carol, reaching across to take him from her.

  Camilla’s arms tightened around his plump little waist. “It’s OK. I know how to change a nappy,” she said happily. “I’ll do it when he’s finished his food.”

  * * *

  “You did what?” yelled Loulou down the phone at midnight.

  “I went to St. Stephen’s,” repeated Camilla patiently. “I’ve been there since lunchtime. I loved it.”

  “But that’s the loony bin!”

  “It’s a hospital for the mentally handicapped. I went along to help out on the children’s ward. Most go home for Christmas, but some can’t. They’ve either been abandoned or the families simply can’t cope with them. Do you know, Lou, that the nurses there draw lots to see who can work on Christmas Day? Three nurses came in, even though it was their day off. I couldn’t see Toby and Charlotte this year, but I suddenly realized that I could be with children who weren’t able to see their own parents. It was wonderful; there’s a little boy there named Marty who has Down syndrome, and he…”

  “She’s flipped,” Loulou whispered to Nico, her hand over the mouthpiece. Then she grinned at him, because it was difficult not to grin at a rock star wearing a blue plastic necklace out of a cracker and a pair of false Dracula teeth. “But she sounds more cheerful now than she has since she moved in, so who am I to say anything if a visit to a loony bin makes her happy?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Meeting and instantly flooring Omar Khalid with one of her more reckless insults had been one of the most important events in Loulou’s life. Possibly the most important, she sometimes felt, since Vampires had stayed with her for far longer than any of her three husbands or numerous lovers.

  It had been fate—she had never for a second doubted that—that had caused his pale-blue Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce to break down directly outside the shabby Clapham wine bar where she was working at the time. Men like Omar traveled between Heathrow, Mayfair, Knightsbridge, and maybe Surrey, but they never intentionally went to places like Clapham. Which explained why it had to be fate that had quite deliberately snapped the accelerator cable and worsened Omar’s mood to the extent that he had stormed into the wine bar and demanded irritably, “Give me an orange juice and a cigar.”

  Loulou, who had spent most of the night fighting with Mac because he categorically refused to keep the expensive lamb’s-wool sweater she had bought him, was in no mood for further displays of male arrogance.

  “What are we, a goddamn charity?” she had snapped back through tightly clenched teeth. “You probably earn more in a day than I do in a year. And you want me to give you an orange juice and a cigar? Would you give me that car of yours? Mind your manners and pay for what you want or take a hike.”

  Omar Khalid, accustomed as he was to the ultimate in deference and humility, actually felt himself turn a shade paler. Through his quick mind ran a series of conflicting emotions jostling for position: shock, amazement at the audacity of this stunning young girl, a faint sense of outrage, a stronger one of admiration…and amusement, because he had never in his life been addressed in such a manner, and it really made rather a refreshing change.

  The wine bar, since it was not yet midday, was entirely empty. Late-morning sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows behind the woman, surrounding her with colors that only enhanced his image of her. She was an angel.

  Without moving a muscle or opening his mouth to speak, Omar gazed at her, drinking in her shimmering blond beauty and defiant eyes. Incongruous amid the leafy foliage and brass fittings, she looked so ferocious that he didn’t want to do or say anything to spoil the exquisite moment.

  And then she smiled a dazzling smile, and he was utterly, infinitely lost. It was the smile of the century: melting, beguiling, and, at the same time, so knowing that it gripped the very center of his soul. This is it, thought Omar. This is the woman I want.

  “The car is yours, of course,” he said, inclining his head and permitting himself the smallest of smiles in return. “And I do most humbly apologize for my rudeness, which was unpardonable. May I now have my orange juice please, and the honor of knowing that you might forgive me, madam?”

  Loulou, enjoying her victory enormously, leaned across and tickled the seventh richest man in the world beneath his smooth brown chin. “For a Rolls-Royce, sweetie,” she said in cheerful tones, “I can forgive anybody practically anything.”

  Omar was even further enchanted, though perplexed, when he later learned that Loulou had been joking and that she steadfastly refused to take seriously his perfectly serious offer of the Rolls-Royce.

  “I’m used to driving a Mini, for Christ’s sake.” She giggled. “How the hell do you suppose I’d ever manage to squeeze a Roller into a parking space?”

  “That is not a problem,” replied Omar with a shrug. “Naturally, the chauffeur will park it…”

  Bestowing gifts upon Loulou proved difficult, if not impossible. She either howled with laughter at the idea of accepting the more extravagant ones—and Omar Khalid was not at all used to being laughed at—or very touchingly attempted to return in kind the smaller ones.

  Each time he bought her a drink during his now daily visits to her wine bar, she would invariably buy him one in return. By the end of the week, he had proposed to her.

  “I wish to propose to you,” he said, his brown eyes solemn, and Loulou burst out laughing.

  “I’m already married, dipstick! Hey, that’s pretty appropriate for you, being in oil, wouldn’t you say? I’m wittier than I thought.”

  “I propose,” continued Omar, leaning across the polished bar, “that you leave this place and become the manager of a new wine bar, which I happen to own.” He felt it unnecessary to mention that he had owned it for less than twelve hours.

  Loulou stared at him, and his stomach muscles tautened in admiration.

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “There are many things about me of which you are unaware. It is in Knightsbridge, and very much larger than this.” He gestured with a sweep of his hand around the small, now crowded bar. “There is a restaurant also, attached to it, and a large flat above that would, of course, be yours.”

  “Why are you offering it to me?” Loulou challenged him.

  He shrugged. “It needs you, my dear. It very badly needs you.”

  Exactly a month later, redesigned and renamed, Vampires opened amid a whirl of expertly planned publicity, although it was not that alone that made it such an instant—and then lasting—success. Loulou did that herself, simply by being there in the right place and at the perfect time. People with plenty of money to spend, tired—like Omar—of being pandered to, welcomed Loulou’s irreverent attitude with open arms, a joyful explosion of champagne corks and a tireless compulsion to return.

  “He wants your body,” Mac told Loulou, his Scottish pride by this time severely dented by the manner in which the oil-rich Omar had so effortlessly altered their lives. Loulou was fast becoming a celebrity, and he was still struggling to make even the poorest of livings. “That’s if he hasn’t had it already,” he added unfairly, yet unable to stop himself.

  “Darling, you know that isn’t true,” said Loulou absently, as she rearranged a line of bottles above the sleek new black marble bar. “Omar simply thought I was the right man for the job.”

  Mac watched her, so happy and so totally involved in her work that she was oblivious to his jealousy. “That’s exactly it,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “You’re the right man for the job, and I’m the housewife who gets her allowance every week. I won’t be your wife, Loulou. Don’t expect me to be.”

  She turned, exasperated by his stubbornness. “You’re so bloody Scottish, Mac. What does it matter who’s earning the most money at the moment? I’ve had my lucky break, that’s all. You’ll have yours, sooner or later. Why
can’t you just be grateful to Omar for giving me mine now?”

  Mac’s eyes glittered. “I don’t want to be grateful to Omar,” he said bitterly. “Do you think I don’t notice the way he looks at you, damn it? Why the bloody hell should I be grateful to a man who only wants to sleep with my wife?”

  Exactly four weeks later, he moved out.

  “Now I know why it’s called the monthly curse,” Loulou had joked feebly to her friends, while inside she disintegrated and died. “I realized that we women had to expect period problems, but this is ridiculous.”

  And when, just three months after Mac’s departure, Omar Khalid was killed in a freak air accident over the Persian Gulf, the curse was compounded. Grieving for both her lost husband and the man who had been both friend and benefactor to her for such a short period, she turned to Roz.

  “He never laid a finger on me,” she sobbed, “but Mac wouldn’t believe me. Poor, poor Omar. And now that they’re both gone, poor me.”

  “Perhaps Mac will come back,” said Roz, “now that Omar’s…gone.”

  “Why should he?” Loulou sniffed inconsolably. “He still thinks I was unfaithful to him, and how the hell can I prove that I wasn’t? They can hardly test to see if my hymen is still intact.”

  Loulou was right, and at the same time Mac felt that his assumptions had been proved correct when she was contacted by Omar Khalid’s high-powered lawyers and informed that Vampires was hers.

  “You’re telling me that he didn’t even go near you, yet he left you a property worth almost one and a half million pounds? I wasna born yesterday, you know,” he shouted, his Scottish accent increasing in direct proportion with his jealousy.

  Loulou, longing to hurl something at his head, jammed her fists into her trouser pockets and faced him with unconcealed fury.

  “You nasty, vicious bastard!” she yelled back, unable to stand the torture of being innocent but proven guilty. “Sex isn’t the be-all and end-all for everyone, you know. You might not be able to think further than your dick, but some people can manage without it. I certainly can. In fact, since you walked out, sweetheart,” she went on heedlessly, wanting only to wound him now in return for the pain he had caused her, “it’s been a positive pleasure not having to sleep with you. You never did a bloody thing for me anyway!”

  * * *

  It was odd, thought Roz as she lay back and submitted to the ineffective foreplay of the man kneeling over her, that sex—the sexual act—could be the ultimate pleasurable pastime with one man, yet so unutterably dull with another. How could one affect her so deeply, while another left her ice-cold?

  Lost in her own thoughts, she stifled a laugh, which David Shearing interpreted as a sigh and plunged into her so vigorously that she winced. Any moment now, she would have to begin faking her orgasm, and she didn’t really know whether she could be bothered. Men like this didn’t deserve even a fake, she thought, but if she didn’t pretend, he might carry on longer, and the only thing worse than boring sex was a boring sexual marathon.

  It was best to get it over with as quickly as possible, Roz decided, and raked her fingernails along his spine. “Oh, David, yes, yes…”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Outside, pale-green buds unfurled along the slender branches of the young elm trees surrounding the house, and clumps of daffodils dotted the lawns on either side of the graveled drive. Camilla crossed the kitchen to turn down the central heating a notch, because Nico liked the temperature inside the house to be at least tropical, and after an hour and a half of vacuuming, she was beginning to feel pretty tropical herself.

  Bending down to wind the cord back onto the vacuum cleaner, she paused for a second and smiled to herself. Who would have thought a few months ago that she could wear a pair of size-8 501s and actually bend down in them?

  But then, who would have imagined that she would be here, housekeeping for one of Britain’s most popular and successful rock stars, let alone looking after him, who certainly required a great deal of looking after, and who didn’t help matters by constantly urging her to “sit down and relax, Cami; we can both do the washing up later”?

  Throughout his upbringing in an extremely Italian household, Nico had watched his father issuing commands and his mother obeying them, assuming every imaginable duty without complaint. It had made his stomach churn, yet to protest was hopeless, for his mother invariably, and infuriatingly, sided with his father. So Nico had suffered in silence, vowing to himself that never would he treat a woman in such a sexist manner, and now Camilla was learning to suffer—not always silently—as a result. It was undoubtedly an admirable quality in a man, but it drove her insane. She was his housekeeper, yet he was too honor-bound to let her housekeep without interruption, and since he was as eager to learn as he was to help, simple tasks like preparing a meal took three times as long as they should have done.

  Only last night he had removed three quarters of the leaves from the Brussels sprouts and painstakingly carved crosses in the tops of the acorn-sized remains. And after their dinner the ridiculously expensive dishwasher had remained redundant while Nico had splashed around in the sink, washing saucepans first and glasses last, and losing three solid silver knives down the waste disposal. It had taken Camilla two hours to retrieve them this morning.

  Yet she loved her new, unexpected life and knew that it suited her. Her work was endlessly appreciated, the nightmare of her separation from Jack and the children was at last beginning to fade, and she was regaining confidence so long buried that she had almost forgotten it ever existed. Nico’s enthusiasm for music, food, parties, and fun was infectious, and their easy relationship, though Camilla still couldn’t understand it, was infinitely precious. The almost instantaneous camaraderie hadn’t needed to be worked at; she had never had to try less hard in her life, yet it worked, effortlessly and of its own free will. With Nico, and to almost the same extent with Loulou, she could simply be herself.

  And here I am, she thought, reaching for the phone as it started to ring for the tenth time and catching a glimpse of her reflection in the kitchen window as she moved. If I’d passed myself in the street six months ago, I wouldn’t have recognized me. Someone had once remarked that death was nature’s way of telling you to take it easy. Well, maybe divorce was nature’s way of telling you it was time to go on a diet.

  She picked up the phone, hoping that it wasn’t the BBC again. Nico was supposed to have rung them this morning and had sloped off instead to look at a helicopter he’d taken a fancy to.

  “Hello.”

  “Ah, yes. May I speak to Nico please?” said the voice at the other end.

  Camilla almost dropped the phone. Horror flooded through her. There were some voices one could never forget, and Roz’s was indelibly stamped in her memory. Roz. Jack. That fateful dinner party. Involuntarily, Camilla turned toward the doorway, almost expecting the nightmare scene that had taken place in Jack’s study to be repeated. Stupid, stupid, she told herself fiercely. This was no recorded message; this was Roz on the other end of the phone. And she was asking to speak to Nico.

  “I’m afraid he isn’t here,” said Camilla, thinking wildly that she should be disguising her own voice but unable to conjure up an accent in time. Why was Roz phoning Nico, anyway? For her TV program? Did they know each other? But if that were the case, surely either he or Loulou would have mentioned it before now. He couldn’t know Roz, she thought possessively. It wouldn’t be fair.

  “I see. Well, are you expecting him home today?”

  “Who’s speaking, please?” prevaricated Camilla, her voice stiff and businesslike, and Roz’s soft laugh made her skin crawl.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m a very close friend of Nico’s. My name’s Roz Vallender. Are you writing this down?”

  It was an effort to speak; all the oxygen seemed to have been sucked from her lungs. “Yes.”

  “Well, would y
ou let him know that I’d like to see him tonight? I’m at my London flat. If he can’t make it, could he ring me? Got that?”

  Hesitating for a suitable length of time, Camilla said, “What number shall he ring?”

  Again, the smooth, confident, overtly sexual laugh that knew no rejection. “Don’t worry about that, dear. Nico knows my number well enough. Goodbye.”

  So there it was, thought Camilla numbly as the line went dead. The casually dropped bomb, wounding and maiming indiscriminately, but always seeming to land on her. There could be no mistake: Nico and Roz either had been—or still were—lovers, and once again, she was the last to know about it. Greedy Roz, taking whomever she pleased to her bed, had most probably been seeing both Nico and Jack at the same time, since the tone of her voice hadn’t suggested that she and Nico had been out of touch for any serious length of time. She hadn’t even had the decency, Camilla realized with a mixture of burning jealousy and hatred, to be faithful to the man whose mistress she was. Well, maybe—just maybe—it was time to let Roz discover what it felt like to be on the losing side for once.

  Not daring to analyze her muddled motives, knowing simply that she had to do it, Camilla set to work with a bottle of white chardonnay and great attention to detail. Lunchtime slipped into afternoon, and by seven in the evening, everything was done. Nico, invariably an hour late anywhere, had left that morning saying he would be home by six thirty at the latest. Camilla, falling into an armchair and pouring herself another small glass of wine, reckoned that she had another half hour in which to plan the finer details of the campaign. Several minutes later, when none whatsoever had come to mind, she gave up and had another drink instead. How, after all, could she be expected to plan a seduction? She had never in her life tried it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You look exhausted.”

  “I’m not exhausted. I’m just windswept,” said Nico with a grin, running his fingers through his blond hair and trying to look guilty. “I bought the helicopter.”