Pretty Face

by Lucy Parker

  Whatever he said in response made her look at Lily and then cast her gaze upward in a bid for patience.

  However, half an hour later, when Luc strode into the studio, tense and furious, her eyes stopped rolling and opened wide. Lily saw the astonishment first and then the speculation, before her attention was taken up by Luc. He dropped to a crouch in front of the chair that someone had brought out for her. His hands settled on her knees. His grey eyes were intent on her face.

  Which was probably still the colour of Calpol. She was waiting for the medical clearance so that the makeup team could turn her skin a pasty, bloated white-blue instead.

  If she’d wanted less glamour—score.

  Luc studied her, his own face pale, and then released a long breath. “You’re okay.” It was a statement, but there was a note that sought reassurance, which she responded to.

  “I’m fine.”

  His index finger hooked hers, and Lily caught sight of Margo’s arching eyebrow.

  Awkwardly, she moved her hands away, but he had already turned his focus on Steve, who had got over his initial shock and was now reviewing the footage of the incident.

  “We might be able to use this,” Steve mused, and was lucky that Luc couldn’t actually laser people’s heads off with a single look.

  Without asking permission, he rose and joined Steve at the monitor. To really cap off the crappiness of her day, he watched over the other man’s shoulder. His jaw tightened so much that the skin went completely white.

  “Use that footage,” he said emphatically, “and you’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”

  Steve jumped and automatically scrabbled to turn off the monitor. “…Savage? What the fuck?”

  “My question exactly.” Luc’s tone was glacial. His eyes returned to Lily, scanning her again from head to foot. “What the fuck? What kind of bullshit safety measures did you take?” He took in the tank and pump system. “For Christ’s sake. One simple stunt and you almost fucking drown her.”

  “We had her out of there in seconds—” Steve was reduced to defensive rambling. He was still retorting things about test shots and stunt doubles when Luc walked away mid-argument.

  “Are you up to finishing this tonight?” he asked Lily, and ignored Steve’s immediate “Do you know how much it costs to shoot one scene? The medic has cleared her. We’re getting the shots tonight.”

  “Are you up to it?” Luc repeated evenly, looking only at Lily, and she nodded.

  Setting aside the blanket, she stood up, testing for any lingering shakiness. She felt okay. The heavily sugared tea had helped. The medic had waved aside her half-hearted protest about the caffeine. She hadn’t taken much persuading, even though she suspected Jocasta wouldn’t accept anything short of awakening from a coma as an excuse for breaking the vocal hygiene diet.

  Basically, this wasn’t the first time she’d attempted something semi-athletic and ended up looking like a complete prat.

  “I’m good,” she said, to both Steve and Luc, who was still being tall and intimidating. If he ever got bored with directing, he’d make a steamroller of a theatrical agent. Nobody would try to sneak cleverly worded clauses past his clients. If Peter were more like him, she could probably have left Knightsbridge a year ago and there wouldn’t be footage of her flailing about in large pants.

  Luc continued to stand there scowling, watching every move that the technicians made as they redressed the set.

  It was uncomfortable, to say the least, putting the nightmare wet dress back on and returning to the freezing water, but her own self-respect wouldn’t let her plead out of the scene. Bad enough that the entire room had witnessed her earlier freak-out, either catching the live show or crowding around the monitor for the action replay; she wasn’t letting an obviously faked, stunt-double death scene air as her last body of work on the show. It had been her first acting job. She hoped it was the worst performance she ever gave, but she’d still invested four years into this role.

  A grip had taken out the pump, so this time she was able to keep her dress at thigh level and her eyesight as clear as it could be underwater. She kept having to come back up for air and to hear Steve’s barked instructions, so after the initial “I don’t want to do this” flight-or-fight instinct, it quickly became so repetitive and annoying that she forgot the residual fear.

  She was treading water at one point, her arms hooked over the edge of the tank, when she saw Luc and Margo. She swiped a tangled clump of hair from her eyes. Luc was watching her; Margo was watching Luc with great interest.

  This whole situation was getting more complicated by the day.

  Taking another deep breath, she pushed back into the water and found the clear grip on the side that would keep her suspended a few feet below the surface. Her wrist slipped through the loop, keeping her hand and arm floating in dead eeriness. She messed up a couple of takes by holding her breath with her cheeks puffed out. Ash was obviously rattled by what had happened, since he screwed up even more times than she did and he was usually a one-take wonder.

  Finally, she was able to get out of the tank to shoot the last scenes, where the audience would be left with the flattering memory of her artificially swollen cheeks and blue lips.

  Ash, kneeling at her side on the wet floorboards, heartbroken, muttered, “For some reason, I’m having flashbacks to the night we realised you’re allergic to shellfish.”

  With her tongue, she moved the foam pads to a more comfortable position around her teeth, and covertly lifted her middle finger. He snickered.

  It was almost ten o’clock when they finally wrapped. Luc and Margo had both disappeared at some point, but Luc knocked on her dressing room door while she was creaming off the makeup.

  Wordlessly, she stood back to let him in. The room was a generous size compared to the cupboards they put the bit parts in, but he shrank it to mouse-hole proportions.

  When he slipped his hands into his pockets, the thin wool of his jumper pulled tight over his shoulders and outlined the breadth of his upper arms. His sleeves were pushed up to just below the elbow, and his face was lined with fatigue. His jaw was beginning to shadow with beard. She’d only ever seen him clean-shaven before.

  “Well,” he said. “You know how to go out with a bang, at least.”

  She sat back down at her vanity table before she lost all touch on reality and hugged him. “Or a damp fizz.” With a muslin cloth, she scrubbed off the last of the greasepaint. Her face was red from the cleansing. “They aren’t using the first footage, are they?” She never wanted to see that while flipping through channels.

  “Not anymore.”

  Looking at his expression, she wasn’t surprised that Steve had changed his mind.

  “How are you now?” His eyes were unreadable, but the skin around his mouth was still taut. Abruptly, he said, “You scared the hell out of me.”

  She was intensely aware of the rhythm of her fractured, rapid breath. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I was on the phone to Margo when she said all hell broke loose in the hallway and some kind of alarm went off.”

  God, they’d sounded an alarm? Like what, the big red fail button?

  “‘Oh my God, Lily’s drowning,’” Luc quoted acidly, and managed to replicate Margo’s usual pitch exactly. He made an exasperated sound. “I didn’t even know where she was at that point.”

  “What did you think, that I’d fallen in your courtyard fountain or something?” Lily took refuge in sarcasm. She clasped her hands together tightly, watching her knuckles flex.

  “I didn’t know what to think,” Luc snapped. He shoved one hand through his hair, a gesture he’d made a number of times by the look of it. “I heard Lily’s drowning and my heart just about fucking stopped. And Margo chose that moment to become incoherent for the first time in her life.”

  She didn’t think this time. She just got up and went with the hug. When her arms slid around his waist, he held her tightly and his hand came up to cup her head
. She’d blow-dried her hair and it was sticking out like a dandelion puff, so his fingers caught in the fine strands and tugged painfully.

  And then, because obviously some kind of public service text went out as soon as they got within two feet of each other, Margo appeared in the open doorway.

  “Oh.” She stood still, staring at them. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” Her voice sounded odd.

  She started to back up, but Lily stepped out of Luc’s arms. His hands tensed for a second as if he were going to hold on to her; then he let them drop away.

  “You’re not interrupting.”

  It was a ridiculous thing for her to say. That couldn’t be passed off as anything but an emotional cuddle.

  Margo didn’t respond. The look on her face was one that most people saved for a bad opening speech at the Golden Globes.

  Also as usual, Luc’s phone rang, which somehow increased the tension instead of breaking it. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at it. “Sorry. I’ve been waiting for this.”

  He had the grace to hesitate. Their gazes locked. He seemed to debate further speech.

  And then the lucky bastard left the room.

  How very male.

  “Well.” Margo was a bit red in the face, as well. “That explains why Luc went all shifty when I mentioned the recent media attention.” Her lips compressed. “Okay. Feeling a little stupid. It didn’t even occur to me before tonight that those particular stories were true. I was starting to wonder earlier, when he showed up like that, but—Luc, having an affair with one of his actresses.” She frowned. “A fairly young actress.”

  “We’re not having an affair,” Lily said at once. Touchy. Skating the edge of truth at this point. She closed her eyes for a second. “Technically.”

  “It’s none of my business if you are.” Margo sounded troubled. “Oh God,” she said after a moment, and scrubbed the back of one hand over her forehead. “I’m sorry. I never cast myself as the witchy, dog-in-the-manger ex. I’m not jealous.” She seemed to turn the words over in her mind, testing them. “I’m not jealous,” she repeated, more decisively. “It’s just—I like you, and you don’t seem like the type to—Ugh.” She cut herself off with a frustrated noise in her throat. “Just…don’t get hurt, all right?”

  “Luc wouldn’t hurt anyone.” Lily spoke quietly, but without hesitation.

  “Not on purpose,” Margo agreed. “But he’s not—The theatre is everything.” Her gaze was unflinching. “It will always be the theatre first, everything and everyone else second.”

  That was something that had crossed Lily’s mind more than once in the past few days. For that reason, as if shying away from a direct hit, she asked the question. “For you or for Luc?”

  Margo made a small movement, a slight inclination of her head. “For both of us.” She read Lily’s mind. “Yes, I’m married now, and I adore my husband, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. But.” She lifted one shoulder. “When Luc rang and offered me this role again, I didn’t hesitate. We always were a little too alike. Alberto is a very generous man. He accepts that my work is a part of who I am.”

  There was something about having a conversation with Margo that occasionally made Lily expect to hear a director snap “Cut!” and order that they read the scene again, approaching it from a different emotional angle.

  “Ambition isn’t your sole prerogative,” she couldn’t help pointing out, a bit drily, and Margo looked at her thoughtfully.

  “No, it isn’t. And the theatre is obviously where you want to be.”

  Was there a slight off-note in those words?

  Everything in Lily revolted against the implication she read into that. “I would never use a man, or anyone, to advance my career.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” Margo said, and it was very definitely an exit line. “Which is exactly where you differ from Luc and me.”

  Chapter Eight

  Lily was still troubled by Margo’s parting shot when she got home the following night. The rest of the Knightsbridge cast had given her a send-off with a chocolate cake and several rounds of cocktails that she couldn’t eat or drink, so her defences were especially low.

  Trix was in the living room, doing leg stretches in front of the TV. She was still wearing her coat. She was always wired after a performance; it took her a good two hours to wind down each night. That was obviously only a side-effect of performing live. Lily was usually so knackered after a day of filming at CTV that she fell asleep on the couch by nine.

  Trix grabbed the remote and paused the screen. “Hey. You look…not like someone who just finished a job they hated.”

  “I didn’t hate it,” Lily said automatically. She stooped to switch on the Christmas tree lights.

  “You got hammered at your twenty-second birthday party making a drinking game out of how many ways Gloria could have died through sheer stupidity. You knocked back about sixteen shots of tequila. That was, like, a week after the pilot episode aired. You hated it.”

  Lily dropped her bag on the coffee table and herself down on the couch. “Ah, tequila,” she said reminiscently, and Trix grinned.

  “The journey from Lorelei Lee to contralto painfully dry, is it?” she asked, and Lily threw a cushion at her. “Seriously, what’s up? Please tell me it’s not Senõr Surly and his sexy scowl. You weren’t even at rehearsal today.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “So you keep saying. Increasingly unconvincingly.”

  Lily stared at the frozen TV screen. “Do you want to go out?”

  Trix’s fingers paused partway through unbuttoning her coat. “‘Go out’?” she repeated, stressing every syllable, as if Lily had suggested that they go to Regent Street and do their Christmas shopping nude.

  “Yes. Go out. Relax. Unwind. There’s a new club in Mayfair. Dylan Waitely said he’s put my name on the list.”

  Trix’s eyebrows almost disappeared into her hair. “Dylan Waitely? Dylan I’ve-had-sex-with-over-a-thousand-women-because-I-owe-it-to-my-enormous-cock Waitely? Who are you and what have you done with Lily? You never go to Central London nightclubs. And you’re not even allowed to drink.”

  “Mocktails.”

  “But—it’s half past eleven.” Poor Trix was actually stuttering.

  “It’s Friday night.”

  “Yes. Exactly. I have my biggest show of the week tomorrow. And you have rehearsal all afternoon. What the hell?”

  “I just—” Lily jiggled her crossed leg, bouncing her foot. The fairy lights on the tree were blurring into one pulsating circle. She blinked away the halo. “I don’t know. I feel really restless tonight.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what doesn’t usually help with anxiety? Drunken crowds and conceited dickheads.”

  Lily looked at her. “One hour.”

  Just for tonight, just for an hour, she wanted music and festiveness and a distraction. She didn’t want stress and confusion and other people’s words superglued to the front of her mind.

  “The theatre is everything. It will always be the theatre first, everything and everyone else second.”

  “Flesh and blood, that’s everything. That love is forever. Men—men are lovely. For a while. It never lasts, kiddo.”

  Trix stared back and then groaned. “Oh God.”

  *

  Lily was going to smell like Dylan’s aftershave for the next month. He’d latched on to them as soon as he spotted her through the crowd and had insisted on introducing them to half the people in the club. Apparently it had been necessary to keep his arms around them the whole time. Giorgio Armani had seeped into her pores.

  They finally managed to escape to a booth in the back of the room, and Dylan traipsed off somewhere to break a few more marital vows.

  Across the table, Trix finished her drink and reached for Lily’s glass. “I’ll admit it. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. A Dylan Waitely haunt, I was expecting strobe lighting and suspiciously sticky floors.”

&nbs
p; The floors were polished marble. There was a lot of crystal and copper, a live band, a Christmas tree that would have looked at home in the foyer of the Savoy, and at least a dozen familiar faces, which explained the amount of photographers outside.

  “I’m a bit drunk,” Trix said wonderingly.

  “That would explain why you were doing salsa to Band Aid.”

  Trix swallowed a mouthful of water. “And you look like you’re having about as much fun as I expected. I.e., none.”

  “No, it’s good. I wanted a distraction.” Lily watched the political anchor for CTV’s morning show attempt some serious moves. “Mission accomplished.”

  With the odd exception—like when she received her first review in the Guardian on her twenty-second birthday, or when she totally lost her head over a man who was probably thinking about floor plans and lighting angles right now—she avoided camera-bait clubs like the plague. A few hours of dancing with strange men never seemed much recompense for inner-city taxi fares and the inevitable tabloid commentary. She preferred going out for a drink at their local pub, where no one tried to get a photo up her skirt or prayed to the paparazzi gods that she tripped over her heels and fell into a gutter.

  Jacko Clubs’s TV starlet daughter looking a little worse for wear, leaving X club with X.

  She also preferred just relaxing at home. With Netflix. And Jammie Dodgers.

  Sanity was returning.

  “Would you like to tell me again why we’re here?” Trix asked. “When there’s clearly a ninety-five-year-old woman trapped in that gorgeous body, just waiting to get out and nap?”

  It was actually worth the discomfort and boredom to see Trix acting like herself. She’d been dancing and flirting and laughing in her old way, not with the brittle, defiant edge she’d adopted since the breakup with Dan.

  “Lily.” The change in Trix’s tone made Lily look up. “It’s about minus five degrees outside, there’s black ice everywhere, and we’re here. In five-inch heels. How deeply are you in?”