by Wendy Holden
They were ridiculous blue even from this distance, drilling into hers. He was, she managed to absorb, almost stupidly handsome, all cheekbones and lips and glossy, ruffled black hair. He looked like something from a perfume advert, one of those bulging crotches in white underwear that women crashed their cars into walls straining to look at. He ought to have made her laugh.
But Darcy had never felt less like laughing. Her heart leapt in mixed terror and excitement as he rose to his feet. Her scrambled senses realizing a few seconds later that he was leaving. The two people he was with led the way: a man and a woman. The woman was thin and fiftysomething, not lover material, Darcy quickly noted. His agent, maybe? The man looked businesslike too, tanned, grey-haired, trim, sharp-eyed, the Hollywood player type she had imagined Mitch being. Her eyes followed him; his remained locked to hers. For all she was focused on his face, she could sense the power of his body: broad shoulders and a graceful animal muscularity, like some jungle big cat. She felt a pulsing in her groin.
"Hey, are you listening to me?" Mitch interrupted. His eyes followed Darcy's; he breathed a sharp inward breath. His small eyes narrowed in dislike. Oh no. Not that guy. Anyone but him.
Darcy glanced at him vaguely. "Yes, of course, I'm listening. Go on. But before you do," she leant over and hissed, "tell me who that man is."
Mitch's heart sank at the urgency in her voice. He had heard it before. He spoke stonily into the wooden table. "Christian Harlow."
"And who's he?" Darcy asked, her eyes following Christian through the restaurant, her heart steadily sinking because any moment now he would disappear through the door. Then, to her delight, he stopped, paused at the entrance, and, eyes still on her, raised two fingers to his lips and kissed them. Then he disappeared into a hail of flashbulbs.
Darcy whirled back to Mitch, her eyes blazing. "He's famous?"
"Famous for being an asshole," Mitch growled, his good mood severely dissipated. Famous too, he added to himself, for being the man who had caused all Belle Murphy's problems. Ruined her career, pretty much. And, to endear himself to Mitch ever further, Christian had just this week joined Greg Cucarachi at Associated Artists; Greg having pried Christian away from the agent he had been with since the beginning. Although given Christian's loyalty record, that was, Mitch imagined, probably as difficult as prying apart two halves of a cheese sandwich.
Darcy was still gawping at the door through which Harlow had just departed. Then something clicked in her head. She blinked and felt a strange sensation, as if released from a spell. She felt a wave of sickening guilt. Where was Niall in all this? Where was her loyalty? She felt hot with self-disgust. How could one glimpse of a stranger wipe out so completely all thoughts of the man she loved?
She had called Niall repeatedly on landing, but he had not answered. He had an audition today, she knew—yet another. She desperately hoped it would go well. Or, at least, not as badly as the others. Sitting in the L.A. restaurant, sickened and ashamed, Darcy concentrated all her love and thoughts on her boyfriend and, from eight-thousand miles away, wished him luck from the bottom of her anguished heart.
Chapter Sixteen
"Cow!"
"Pig!"
The children's angry-sounding shouts were the first thing James heard as he opened the front door. He closed his eyes briefly. A wave of misery swept through him, followed by the reflection that perhaps it was only to be expected. The honeymoon period with the new nanny was over.
Hero and Cosmo were arguing. Chaos had come again. He'd known Emma was too good to be true, and now here was the proof—she'd lost control of the children, just like every other nanny before her. From now on, it would be the familiar downward spiral to her inevitable sacking. If she didn't walk first, that was. He'd seen it many times before.
Only this time, he wasn't going to.
Soaring into James's mood of glum acceptance now came a thunderbolt of determination. Usually he just watched the collapse of their childcare regimes from the sidelines, but this time he couldn't. The other nannies hadn't been much of a loss anyway, but Emma was different. The fact that she cared about the children, loved the job, and was brilliant at it meant that on no account was she to be let go.
He would talk to Vanessa about it as soon as she got back. But the fact that his wife seemed inexplicably irritated by Emma had not escaped James. The thought had flitted briefly across James's mind then that his wife suspected him of more than strictly professional interest in the new nanny, but he had dismissed it instantly. How could Vanessa imagine anything of the sort? He was, admittedly, scared of her, but he was also devoted to her and always would be.
It was with a clear conscience and pure motives, therefore, that had James consistently shored up Emma's position within the household, praising her to Vanessa whenever he could, and in the strongest terms.
"Pig!" Cosmo now screamed, derailing his father's train of thought.
"Cow!" yelled back Hero.
The situation was clearly deteriorating. James set a determined foot on the bottom-most stair.
"Dog!"
He couldn't hear Emma's voice at all, James realised. Panic seized him at the thought that she had gone already, before she was pushed. For if he himself, notoriously unobservant as he was, had picked up the vibes from Vanessa, it seemed likely Emma had too.
"Elephant!" screamed Cosmo.
James had gained the landing now. A great sense of relief flooded through him as he saw, on the sisal floor of the upstairs hall, his children in clean pyjamas—pink gingham for Hero, blue gingham for Cosmo, hair neatly brushed and no doubt teeth too, sitting opposite each other with great grins on their faces and their legs stretched out. Between those legs was a pile of cards with animals printed on the back.
At a movement behind him, James turned. Emma, drying her hands on a floral tea towel, was hurrying up the stairs behind him. She smiled apologetically. "Sorry, didn't hear you come in. I was in the kitchen." She looked happily at the children. "I've just taught them to play Snap, and they're having a quick game before bed. They love it. I didn't realise they didn't know how…"
James did not reply. There was, despite the private child care they had enjoyed—if that was the word—since birth, so much the children didn't know. Emma's methods, her constant engagement with the children, showed in sharp relief the extent to which the other nannies had not bothered at all, unless it was to dump them both in front of a DVD or shove Cosmo in the direction of his PlayStation.
Since Emma had come, the DVDs had largely been phased out, access to computer games rigidly controlled, and the children taught Snakes and Ladders and Tiddly Winks, both of which they had quickly taken to. In addition, besides teaching Hero and Cosmo the beginnings of reading and some rudimentary arithmetic, Emma had taken them out into the world and showed them how buses worked, the Tube, post offices, and shops.
It was, James said admiringly to Vanessa, nothing short of a miracle. She had sharply pointed out that Emma was not the first of their caregivers to take the children shopping. James remembered that one three nannies ago had, indeed, taken Hero and Cosmo to Oxford Street Topshop almost every other day. Only not, he suspected, for their benefit.
"Mouse!" shrieked Hero, slamming her card on the pile, on top of which Cosmo had just put down a mouse. "Sna-a-ap!"
As Cosmo groaned with the agony of losing, Emma bent down, gathered up the cards—"Yes, children, you help. We tidy up our playthings."—and shooed them off to bed.
"Come on, Hero," Emma urged the silver-haired three-year-old as she lingered over a card with a cat on it. Of all animals, cats were Hero's absolute favourite. "You need your sleep. It's a big day for you tomorrow. What day is it?" she enquired gently, dropping to her knees before the child and taking both white, chubby hands in her own.
Hero's big blue eyes looked shyly into Emma's pretty, ruddy, beaming face. "Birthday," she whispered, before collapsing with an excited squeal on Emma's white-cottoned chest.
A surge
of horror possessed James. While he had not forgotten it was Hero's fourth birthday, he now remembered he had heard nothing about the arrangements for it. Usually, when the children's birthdays loomed, Vanessa was storming about the house in a blue funk as she and whatever nanny was resident at the time tried to secure the real-life Charlie and Lola, the cast of High School Musical, or whatever that year's must-have happened to be.
But there had been no such scenes recently. That Vanessa had forgotten was surely impossible, but James resolved to talk to Emma after bedtime nonetheless. If Hero's birthday party had somehow slipped through the net, perhaps they could come up with something together. Emma was a resourceful woman, and he had absolute faith in her.
"Bed!" Emma was commanding the children. There was a flurry of movement and laughter, a blur of blue and pink gingham, and almost before James realised, his children had pressed warm, flannelcovered, bath-scented little bodies to his, deposited hard wet kisses on his cheek, and tumbled into their room, from whence the comforting sound of Emma singing nursery rhymes now issued.
As James went back down the stairs, an unfamiliar smell surged round his nostrils. Making his way along the threadbare sisal of the passage into the kitchen, James now discovered the source of the mysterious, but by no means unpleasant, scent.
It was baking. The sweet, warm, rich smell of cakes cooking. He hadn't recognised it because cakes were so rarely cooked in their house. Whenever needed, they were bought in from whatever modish bakery enjoyed Vanessa's favour at the time.
James's stomach gave a mighty rumble. He loved homemade cakes, and the sight that greeted him now was not only a fantasy made reality, but as if someone had, in one fell swoop, sought to make up for the baking deficit of years in their particular kitchen.
Every available surface—the table, the units, the cooker itself,
the top of the fridge—was covered in cupcakes in paper cases. Sixty at least, James swiftly calculated. All decorated, all in different ways. Some had the squodge of buttercream icing—a generous squodge too, James noted approvingly—and twin sponge wings of the traditional butterfly cake. Others were jam and cream splits. Some were covered in the sprinkles called hundreds and thousands, others with chocolate, still others with silver balls on top of icing that had a pinkish iridescent sparkle. James stared at the shining, glittering, glowing mass of sweet-scented cakes in childish wonder. It looked like heaven as a five-year-old might imagine it.
The cakes on the table, James now saw with a more adult appreciation, had been particularly beautifully iced. They had that thick, flat, smooth professional look, some the pale pink of sugar almonds, some white. And with something iced on top of that—cat's faces, James recognised with a stab of delight. The pink ones had an outline in white, lovingly hand done, of a cat's face with silver sugar balls for eyes. The white ones had the same outline in pink.
A tremor of pure joy now seized him as he noticed, at the back of the kitchen table, a large white cake in the shape of a cat's face, with eyes, nose, and whiskers in pink icing. Other details of fur and eyelashes had been added in the same iridescent pink sparkle—edible paint, James realised—he had spotted on top of the silver-ball cupcakes. Around the cake's edge was tied a fat, pale-pink satin ribbon, to which was attached a small silver bell. Four silver candles stood, two each side, among the whiskers.
Hero was going to erupt with excitement. Her father felt almost tearful at the prospect.
Hungry too. Everything looked so delicious. He hadn't had a homemade cake like this for years, and it seemed years, too, since the canteen bacon sandwich that had constituted today's scrappy office lunch. He reached for the nearest cake, which happened to be one of the butterfly ones, and quickly, furtively peeled off the wrapper.
When Emma entered the kitchen, seconds later, the cake had just entered James's mouth.
"Sorry," he floundered, his mouth full of crumbs. It was worth the shame however. The cupcake was delicious, every bit as sweet, fresh, and buttery as it looked. Substantial too, not like those cakes you bit into only to find your teeth instantly meeting, that seemed to contain nothing but gritty, sugary air.
"Don't worry," Emma assured him. "There's plenty to go round. I'm expecting ten children tomorrow…"
She moved to the sink.
"Ten?"
"Yes. For Hero's birthday. We're having a tea party." Emma looked up from stacking the dirty bowls on a small tray to transfer them to the dishwasher in the utility room. It wasn't the most convenient of washing-up arrangements, James knew, but alone of all the nannies he could remember, Emma hadn't complained about it.
"A tea party?" James was aware that all he was doing was repeating everything Emma said, but he could not help it nonetheless.
As she looked up, nodded, and smiled, a hank of reddish-brown hair dislodged from the rest and fell fetchingly across her face. "It seemed the easiest thing," Emma said, rather breathlessly. "From what I gather from Vanessa, birthdays had become a sort of torture for her…"
James raised an eyebrow. Many things were a sort of torture for his wife.
"And she hadn't got very far with organising Hero's. Obviously she's busy and everything," Emma added hastily. "But, of course, she was thinking about one of those expensive party places…" the nanny continued, her eyes wide and enthusiastic. "And I suggested that, really, that wasn't necessary. That she could save a fortune, and Hero would have a much nicer time if—well"—she shrugged and smiled—"we just had an afternoon birthday tea party at home for Hero's friends. With a few games. Old-fashioned, I know, but nice. Back to basics."
James's eye flicked towards the glowing, glittering, pink-andwhite display of cakes. There was nothing remotely basic about those. Or if there was, it was his sort of basic. But as he rushed to the kitchen door to hold it open for her, a hideous thought struck him.
"Who'll do the games?" He pictured himself standing, vainly shouting about Musical Chairs, in the middle of a pack of rioting children.
Emma was looking at him in surprise. "Well, me, of course. Musical chairs, pass the parcel, that sort of thing. All quite straightforward."
James stared at her. She was going up in his estimation all the time. Not only was she professionally super-competent and a marvellous cook, but she was possessed of astounding courage into the bargain.
"You're wonderful," he exploded passionately, ears thumping too hard with excitement to hear the rattle of the front door. Just in time to hear him say this, Vanessa walked in.
Chapter Seventeen
Belle lay on the vast bed in the Portchester Hotel penthouse, clutching a bottle of champagne to her like a teddy bear. She was wreathed in creased linen and gloomy thoughts. So much so that she didn't hear the phone shrilling at first.
"I'm ringing to remind you you've got an audition this morning," Mitch told Belle with a firmness that masked the worry he increasingly felt.
He had hoped that, in the absence of a PA for Belle, the Portchester Hotel, prompted by him, could organize alarm calls, limos, and so forth.
As indeed it could, in theory. And, according to the manager, actually had. The problem was that the hotel couldn't physically make Belle go to the auditions. From the sound of her voice during some of their phone conversations, Mitch suspected the limos just took Belle straight to the nearest bar.
"You haven't forgotten about this audition?" he added suspiciously, into the silence.
"No," Belle said in a tiny, sheepish voice that Mitch hardly recognised from the thundering complaints of old. "What is it?"
"Titus Andronicus."
Mitch wanted to scream. She had forgotten, damn her. Meaning she wouldn't have learnt any of the lines. She'd have to get through the audition on star power alone, and her wattage was getting dimmer all the time.
"What's the part?" Belle said sullenly. She sounded utterly unrepentant, Mitch thought. Not to mention ungrateful. He'd had to pull some serious strings to get the director to agree to see her. Word about Belle and au
ditions had clearly been getting around. Didn't she want to save her career?
"A queen," he replied carefully. At least, he thought it was a queen. He had only had time to absorb the vaguest outline of the plot, which hadn't sounded too good. The high point of the part Belle was auditioning for was the character realising she has just eaten both her children in a pie. He decided not to draw this to his client's attention just now.
"There's a limo for you downstairs, " Mitch urged, his wheedling tones spiked with impatience. "And the paparazzi too. Make sure you look good, yeah?"
Belle took a final, resolve-stiffening swig of warm champagne, which went straight to her empty stomach. She could not remember the last time she had eaten—a proper meal, that was, instead of the skinny lattes and crackers which she normally got by on—any more than she could remember not having a hangover. Her head ached with one now. Low-level but persistent, like someone slowly levering her brain apart. She had a feeling they had become constant around the time that Christian left. But she could not be sure. She hadn't been sure of anything since then.
