Accepting his hand, Lucy smiled, tilting her head slightly. ‘Hello, Hartley. I’m Lucy. And this is my good friend Amy.’
Buoyed by a few glasses of Krug, he realized he was having fun chatting to Lucy. Amy was utterly unaware of who their new companion was. She smiled politely after shaking hands and excused herself to go to the Ladies.
When Amy returned, Lucy and this chap Hartley were laughing. Encouraging, Amy thought. Lucy had been single for over a year since finishing with John, a disarmingly handsome professional rower who used his boyish charm to seduce her. He had adored Lucy. Well, for the first few months. Then his restless nature had surfaced. By their first anniversary, his rowing times had reached a worrying low, while his betrayals and boozy nights out were at an all-time high. Lucy was devastated when she learned of the other girls and told him it was over. She had been down for months afterwards, her confidence at a low.
It was time Lucy had some male attention; it was just what she needed. And this guy looked respectable and sweet. Amy winked knowingly at her friend and announced she had to leave for fear of being a terrible wreck at a breakfast meeting.
Lucy decided there was no harm in staying a little while and settled into an easy conversation with Hartley. She had been prepared to find him arrogant but he had an unexpected warm magnetism. There was something about his slightly bumbling character she found endearing. Lucy was fascinated to hear how he tried to be self-sufficient when at home on his family estate in Scotland; she found it strangely sexy that he could work the land to live, that he didn’t need anything from anyone else.
Hartley stopped suddenly and smiled. Catching Lucy’s confusion he leaned in close. ‘What a pleasure it is to meet someone who wants to listen. Don’t you find so many people want only to talk about themselves?’
Lucy laughed.
‘So, do you live in London?’
‘I do.’ Lucy smiled. ‘In Kensington. But I’m actually from Scotland too. My family live in Broughty Ferry. Do you know it?’
‘Of course – the little seaside place next to Dundee? It’s beautiful. It used to be a fishing village, no?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I went out to Fat Sam’s nightclub in Dundee once when I was staying with my friend Robbie over the water in Fife.’
‘Ah Fat Sam’s – it used to be my regular haunt during uni holidays.’
‘Ha! You sound about as Scottish as me,’ Hartley teased. ‘What happened to your accent?’
‘I grew up there but moved to Kent, to boarding school, when I was thirteen. I guess I just adopted the accent around me.’
Hartley nodded. ‘It’s a bit of a bugger speaking like this in Scotland; no one believes you’re a bloody Scot, more like a Sassenach. And it takes me an age to get served at the bar – too posh to be understood apparently.’
Lucy threw her head back and laughed at the thought of the Earl repeating himself over and over again in Fat Sam’s. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the girls at the bar look over to see who had caught the Earl’s attention.
Touching Lucy lightly on her arm he whispered conspiratorially: ‘I love London, Lucy, but it’s nice to meet someone who doesn’t think life starts and ends here.’
Lucy nodded. ‘And London is kept wonderful by having other beautiful places to escape to.’
‘Exactly.’ Hartley clinked his glass with Lucy’s and caught her eye for a few magical seconds.
Checking her watch, Lucy realized she had been talking to Hartley for almost an hour.
‘I really must be off. Like Amy, I too have work in the morning.’
‘Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you. I only hope I haven’t been too much of a bore.’
Flicking her golden hair, Lucy laughed, dazzling him with her white smile. ‘Not at all, it was lovely to meet you.’
When he asked gingerly if he might call her, Lucy obliged with a calm smile, which hid her elation at Britain’s most eligible bachelor wanting to add her number to his little black book. She corrected herself inwardly, knowing the real reason she was happy was that she liked him and wanted to see him again.
Lucy couldn’t help but feel flattered. Hartley must be so used to girls hanging on his every word. He had his pick of the women who socialized in his circle.
But maybe, just maybe, he liked her… well… for her and not for trying desperately to impress him with talk of members’ clubs and skiing in Aspen.
Oh God, wait until she told her boss. Lucy considered the possibilities. Either Genevieve would insist Lucy became her new best friend and ask her to be her ‘plus one’ for all the big parties. Or she would spread it around their offices that Lucy was social climbing. Maybe she shouldn’t tell her. After all, it might seem a little boastful. Then again, watching Genevieve, who was a tremendous snob and name-dropper, choke on her celery stick (‘it contains less calories than you use to digest it’) over lunch might just be worth it. Anyway, Hartley may tire of her. He could be overwhelmingly underwhelmed by her lack of travel, multiple gap years and inherited titles. Yet, so far, he seemed to like her just the way she was.
MAX DRAWS THE SHORT STRAW
‘Let’s get this straight.’ Max was addressing her boss, who was sitting at the other side of the showbiz desk at the Daily News offices. ‘You want me to walk down the Kings Road – one of the busiest places in London, littered with restaurants and shops – wearing only my bra and pants?’
Her boss stifled a laugh. ‘Sorry, Max, it’s not funny.’
‘Yes, it is. It’s fucking hilarious,’ piped up Simon, Max’s fellow showbiz reporter.
A few minutes earlier Claire had come out of morning conference with the various heads of department – news, features, sport, online – and the big boss, the editor of the paper, and gingerly told Max her name had come up.
‘There’s some woman in Sheffield,’ she’d explained to Max. ‘She’s in the paper today.’
Claire thumbed through the paper and opened it at a picture of a woman who looked like she’d seen better days. She was in a lacy black bra and pants in what appeared to be a changing room.
‘This woman, Betty, swears that the only way to go shopping for your summer wardrobe is to wear just a bikini or underwear – with a coat on top. That way she doesn’t have to take all her clothes off then put them all back on again every time she gets into a changing room.’
Max took in her words. ‘OK, so they want me to be the girl who tries out her theory?’
‘Correct.’
‘Why me?’
‘All the paper’s glamour girls are on location in Spain for a photo shoot and they want it in tomorrow’s paper so…’
‘Anyone will do?’
‘Yes, I mean no… you have the best figure in the office.’
‘Oh please.’ Max rolled her eyes skywards. ‘Well, it won’t be so bad – you said this woman wears a long coat to cover up, so I can too.’
‘Not exactly. As you know, the pictures have to tell the story and the best snaps will be of you in your bra and pants with all the builders ogling you.’
Not quite what Max had had in mind when she became a showbiz writer for the country’s second biggest-selling paper.
But she was smart enough – and fearless enough – to realize that, on a staff of hundreds of reporters, saying no to such a task would only count against her.
Not a black mark as such, but refusing would put her in the same category as the vast majority of writers who would never dare to do the daft things she found herself being asked to do on a weekly basis.
‘OK, I’ll ask the picture desk to assign a photographer and head down in a cab now.’
‘Good girl. Best of luck.’ Claire was suddenly businesslike again. Max was gone from her mind, replaced by thoughts of how she could prove that Madonna wanted to adopt her fifth African baby.
It was fine for Claire. Come tomorrow, it wouldn’t be her arse staring up at millions of readers around the country.
BUTTERFLIES OVER CREAM TEA
Hartley had been such a sweetie about the whole Ascot affair. On the day Lucy found herself front-page news, she had met him at Claridge’s.
She and Max had squealed like children over the story.
‘Luce, Bridget is the bloody queen bee of London’s society girls,’ Max had told her. ‘No one does this to her. But my butter-wouldn’t-melt sister has stuck one to the po-faced cow. Luce, I’m so proud.’
Carlos, Lucy’s best friend at the magazine, could barely contain his excitement. Lucy had met the one and only Carlos Santiago on her second-ever styling job for the magazine. He was a renowned PR, having made his name working for a large company that represented the likes of Madonna, Sir Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue in Los Angeles before starting his own firm – Why Not? – with his boyfriend, Raymondo. They specialized in representing up-and-coming models, and keeping damaging headlines about their wild antics out of the papers.
The publishing house that owned Lucy’s magazine and a few others – a lifestyle monthly and upmarket interior design quarterly among them – had made Carlos an offer he couldn’t refuse to look after the PR for all their publications. So he worked from Lucy’s office four days a week while Raymondo took charge of their other clients.
Lucy was astounded by how gorgeous Carlos was when they first met. From the stories she had heard about his reputation for getting results she had expected a gruff, ageing tyrant. You didn’t get to be known as the best damage-limitation PR in London by being a pushover.
But he looked more like a male model. His body could pass for a footballer’s: neat but solid and muscular. His clothes looked effortlessly thrown together yet immaculate. Carlos Santiago wore the labels, not the other way round, unlike so many women and men desperate to get the look of the moment.
Everyone wanted to know him and yet feared him in equal measure. With his name, Lucy thought he might have been Italian or Spanish but he was a black New Yorker who took no shit. Lucy guessed (Botox or face peels aside) he was not yet forty. Everything from his Armani pinstriped charcoal suit to his baby-pink Prada cravat and tan leather Gucci lace-ups looked perfect on his solid yet understated frame. He wasn’t all bulk and biceps like the gym goons but there was no denying that even under a suit Carlos was in shape.
His features were a curious mix of great-looking guys, Lucy had decided. There was a hint of a young Denzel Washington, with a smattering of Jude Law – though neither comparison did him justice. And Carlos’s eyes were simply mesmerizing, an impossibly bright green. He insisted they were entirely natural, nothing to do with coloured lenses, but Lucy noted the slight playful tone to his voice.
Only when he opened his mouth was it obvious that he was gay and American, with a strong Brooklyn accent. His voice was a funny mix of ‘New Yowk’ movie star with a bit of the George Michael lisp and dramatic rolling of the eyes thrown in whenever possible. Lucy wondered at first if it was a big joke, if he was doing his very best gay impression. But no, it was Carlos. And Lucy was delighted he was her work buddy. He was as straightforward as Genevieve was false and Lucy admired his natural talent for assessing a situation and grasping what had to be done.
They had hit it off when they’d met and he asked her where she’d got her emerald-green neck scarf.
‘Topshop.’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
Lucy laughed. ‘No, really. Topshop. Hi, my name’s Lucy.’
‘Your name is Gorgeous, girlfriend,’ he told her. ‘Anyone who teams Topshop with Chloé and works it like Claudia Schiffer has my vote. Want to get some sushi?’
And from that moment Lucy knew she had at least one friend she could trust at the magazine.
The morning Lucy made front-page news, he had called and screamed down the phone: ‘You’re a fucking star! It’s always the quiet ones. You showed that bitch. Well done, baby. Champagne on me. Tell me all about it… no, don’t… can’t chat. Raymondo’s kid from his marriage when he was straight is here. He’s three and he’s a friggin’ psychopath. Save me every detail and I’ll call later, OK? Ciao.’
Lucy couldn’t help but share a small sense of achievement with Max and Carlos. Amy had text-messaged her too: ‘My best friend the socialite, huh? U go girl! X’.
But by the time her afternoon meeting with Hartley had come, Lucy was terrified.
What if he thought she’d courted the publicity? Gone out of her way to get attention?
She needn’t have worried. He seemed to know exactly what had happened without her mentioning a thing. And he was so apologetic that she had had to encounter his vile ex.
When she arrived at Claridge’s, Lucy had been escorted by a member of staff to a table for two. There had been no sign of Hartley.
The huge drawing room was almost full, mainly with ladies meeting up to talk about their friends. These were women in their sixties who looked amazing – thanks to a lifetime of pampering, Lucy guessed. You could almost tell some had got rid of their wrinkles with a facelift or two but the work was so discreet it left no trace, unlike the Los Angeles wind-swept look.
Lucy tried to concentrate on an enormous chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling and the imposing portraits of royals and dignitaries, but her mind was racing with thoughts of that morning’s news.
Hartley was one of the most private people Lucy knew. He had never bragged of his wealth, title or connections and hated the idea of his personal life becoming public. Lucy, who also was intensely private, admired this for he certainly had plenty to boast about.
He had told her over dinner at the Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant Hakkasan how he’d fallen out with a close friend with whom he had boarded since he was nine because of the friend’s obsession with fame.
‘He’d stagger out of clubs every night knowing that photographers would talk about him – after all, he is the son of the woman who married a royal,’ Hartley had told her. ‘I thought that was stupid but he was my friend. What I couldn’t forgive was when he tipped off some diary writer about where I was holding my birthday party. He knows my family. Having photographers camped outside was an intrusion – and it was not long after my father had died. That was unforgivable. I still speak to him but we’ll never be close again.’
Lucy liked Hartley’s principles and the fact that his morals shaped the way he led his life.
Lucy wasn’t like that friend. She hated the idea of fame, of being followed everywhere, of life becoming a circus. Although she had to admit she hadn’t minded the Mail on Sunday headline one bit. But perhaps the fracas at Ascot had made it seem the only reason she was dating Hartley was… Oh God, what would he think?
Lucy loved Hartley’s passion for his work. He had set up the Balmyle Foundation, a project which helped under-privileged youths get the training they needed to have a better start in life.
He spent three days a week in the small Chelsea offices off the Kings Road he had bought, and employed two full-time staff dedicated to raising funds and setting up projects to train apprentices who had dropped out of school with no qualifications. Normally it was down to family problems. Hartley had told Lucy about one girl whose mum was a heroin addict. Since her daughter was six, the mother had used her to pick up her drugs packages while she lay spaced out at home. By the time the girl was thirteen she was addicted too, having been offered her first hit by her mum. She was also being abused by her mother’s boyfriend but, when she tried to tell her, her mum had slapped her across the face and called her a lying, jealous whore. She ran away aged fifteen and a year later came to the Balmyle Foundation for help. Two years on she was now clean and halfway through a secretarial studies course at college. Hartley used the girl, called Vanessa, as a shining example of what the Foundation could do. She often gave speeches at the fund-raising balls he held, her story never failing to touch the hearts of guests whose upbringing had been a million miles from her dark world. They forgot about sipping fine port and champagne to listen to her.
More
than once Lucy had seen Hartley’s eyes well up over dinner as he spoke of the lives he had helped change – and his frustration that he couldn’t help hundreds more.
As well as the money he raised, he donated a tenth of his own income from various estates to his charity. Most endearing of all, he never boasted of his personal donations to friends – or indeed how hard he worked behind the scenes to raise cash. Even most of his close friends had no idea how much he gave and Lucy was touched he had bashfully confided in her. He knew more of the suffering of people whose lives could not be more different to his own than any of the pretentious waifs parading in Prada on her editorial floor.
Sometimes she caught herself daydreaming about a future with him. If only she could be like her sister, who lived for the next party, not looking and planning ahead. But it was hard to throw caution to the wind when you had been hurt before. She had trusted her ex blindly and felt such a fool for doing so. But Hartley had behaved impeccably and he was good company. Lucy found herself checking for text messages on her phone throughout the day, her heart leaping if Hartley’s name appeared. He was clearly smitten by her, for now at least, hanging on her every word and showering her with flowers and compliments. Not all men are shits, Lucy told herself – something her sister had often reminded her of after ‘that cheating bastard’ John.
Lucy had not given up on finding her soulmate. But, having turned thirty one, perhaps it was time she thought about stability, a lifelong partner.
The fact Lucy hadn’t slept with Hartley was good, she reassured herself. Each time he had dropped her off at her Kensington flat they’d kissed, softly at first, with the tiniest touch of tongues. This had developed into passionate kissing, pressing into each other’s bodies.
At first, Lucy had pulled away, perhaps out of fear of letting herself go. But the last time they had kissed it had been Hartley who broke off.
Maybe he was showing restraint out of respect and taking things slowly. Or maybe, as Max had suggested with that mischievous twinkle in her eyes, he was gay. Lucy had laughed. She would bet their Kensington flat on that not being a possibility. Each time they pulled up to her flat he had made her small pink nipples harden and she had felt a tingle between her legs that spread all over her body in anticipation of what was to come.
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