STEPS TO HEAVEN
Sally Heywood
She was busy every evening--from now until forever
Suave, sexy Elliot Priest was the kind of man every woman dreamed of--including Rachel Jackson. But another dream came first: her singing career. As sultry nightclub singer Zia, Rachel dreamed of a recording contract. She didn't intend to shelve her ambitions for a brief fling-and that's exactly what it would be with a man like Elliot. y
But Elliot knew, he and Rachel wanted the same thing--each other--and he was determined to thaw that barrier of ice she hid behind. Even as the sultry voice and breathtaking innocence of Zia drew him mysteriously like a moth to another flame . . . .
CHAPTER ONE
Rachel placed the wig on the model's head as a final touch then stepped back. Her mind wasn't really on her job—she was still thinking about last night—but she forced herself to concentrate on what she was doing and adjusted the position of the model's hand to a more elegant pose. The silvery tresses of the wig were just fine. Really dramatic with the black day dress the model had on, she thought. Maybe if she asked Lulu, the chief window dresser, she might be able to borrow the wig when this week's display was finished. It would be just right for what she wanted.
'Hurry up, Rachel. Are you asleep?' It was Lyn, the girl with the accessories. 'Like this hat?' she asked, coming into the window area and placing a wide-brimmed garden party hat on top of the model's head:
'Where would you wear a hat like that?' Rachel brought herself back to the present with an effort.
'Ascot?' It was June and the races were coming up the following week; the store was full of women shoppers splurging on eye-catching outfits suitable for the Royal Enclosure.
'Ascot?' exclaimed Rachel. 'We should be so lucky. We'll be here, slaving away all week as usual.' She gave a yawn.
'Late night?' Lyn was already busy matching bags and scarves to the display as Rachel turned to go.
In reply she merely nodded. Shyness made her reluctant to admit where she had been and what she had been up to for the last three nights. If things worked out she would tell Lyn and everyone else before long. She would even, she crossed her fingers, be handing in her notice. If things worked out.
'Lulu?' she asked when she reached the staff refreshment-room and found the head of their group just coming in for a cup of coffee. 'What happens to the wigs when the displays are finished with?'
'They go back to the store-room. Why?'
'And just lie about on the shelves, gathering dust?'
'I suppose so.'
'Then I don't suppose there's any chance I could borrow one, is there?'
'To wear, you mean?'
Rachel nodded, suddenly blushing. It sounded ridiculous now. Lulu would think she was crackers.
But the older girl grinned. 'I get it. You're going to a fancy-dress party? You youngsters always start looking at the displays when there are parties in the offing.'
Rachel continued to look hopeful.
'If you're very careful I don't see why not—so long as you ask me first—and Rachel,' Lulu paused, 'don't spread the word around. I'm not really supposed to do it.'
Rachel had already guessed she had created quite a good impression at work and now she had proof. 'I'll be really careful. Lulu,' she added impulsively, 'you are sweet.' Then she bit her lip. 'It isn't just a one-off thing though; I meant, could I borrow it for a couple of nights or maybe even longer?'
'Your social life!' She obviously thought Rachel intended to wear it at a succession of parties. 'How long did you say you'd been in London?'
Rachel's oval face broke into a smile and she put on a country accent. 'I been oop from t'farm these three months past,' she joked.
It was true, she thought as she took a quick coffee break and went back to do a shoe display on the first floor. Three months. But, contrary to thinking it was a short time like Lulu, she was conscious of every minute passing and getting no nearer her goal. Until this week.
Her secret ambition was something no one in the world knew about, and the plans she had laid in order to fulfil what seemed like a wild dream had only begun to fall into place when her parents had given permission for her to leave home. They had demurred at first, Mrs Jackson believing that twenty was too young for a girl on her own in London and Mr Jackson going along with whatever his wife said, until, as luck would have it, one of Rachel's school friends had got a place on a catering course in London. Not wishing to go up alone and knowing Rachel was keen to go, she'd asked her if she would like to share a flat until they both found their feet.
A further stroke of luck from Rachel's point of view was when she managed to get a job as window dresser with a large Knightsbridge store. She had done the same job in the Dorset town close to where she lived after doing a training stint at the local an and technical college.
'Surely you can't have any objections now, Mum,' she'd pleaded when the plan was mooted. 'Ros is as sensible and reliable a flatmate as anybody could wish for.' If she'd exaggerated slightly in order to plead her cause it wasn't too far from the truth, and Mrs Jackson had finally given in, though not without a promise that Rachel would come straight home if things didn't turn out well.
'You'll be back, my lass,' she'd said as she bustled around the big farmhouse kitchen. 'You'll be missing your friends, and the horses, and the choir and the village carnival. Country things are best. You'll learn London streets are paved the same as anywhere else.'
But Rachel had taken to London as if she had been born and bred in the city. Not that she didn't miss the farm and her friends and all the country sights and sounds, but she consoled herself with long walks in the park, grateful that the flat Ros's London uncle had offered them in a part of his Regency terraced house was just five minutes from the sight of trees and grass.
But, despite all the excitement of settling in a new place, right up until last week she had felt she was merely marking time. Then her big break had come.
'Rachel! Wake up! You're miles away!' It was one of her friends on the perfume counter. 'I asked you if you wanted to try a spray of this.' She held up a sample of expensive perfume and Rachel came to with a start.
'Sorry, I was just thinking!' She held out a wrist.
'Is he gorgeous?'
'Who?' Rachel blinked her blue eyes, then gave a little laugh when she understood what Francine meant. 'I was not dreaming about a man, thank you very much! No time for those!'
'No time? Why, whatever else can you be up to?' Francine waited, obviously expecting all to be revealed, but Rachel, despite the urge to blurt out what she was 'up to', refrained from telling her, saying only, 'Getting used to life in the big city, Francine, that's what I mean!'
In a waft of expensive perfume she made her way back towards the escalator. With all her dreaminess today she was a little behind schedule, and after a quick look at her watch she began to fume at the slowness of the customers as they plodded in front of her. Usually she felt sorry for them, having to lug heavy shopping-bags around with them and with only a limited time to enjoy the merchandise on display when she herself could stroll round at leisure after the store was closed, picking and choosing in her imagination what she might buy—if only she could have afforded the expensive goods on sale.
But this morning she was in too much of a hurry to dawdle among the shoppers; her head was still buzzing after the previous night and besides she was behind schedule. And that meant she would be late getting back to the flat. And in turn that gave her less time to go over her songs beforehand.
She dodged round a group of women and children but came slap up against the store manager conducting a party of men in suits. Directors, she judged, looking at their briefcases and serious expressions.
She
reached the staff lift just before they did and was surprised when they followed her in. Mr Maynard ignored her, as did the other men, and she found herself crushed in a corner, making her scowl behind a wall of dark backs. When she glanced up, a pair of deep blue eyes caught her own and gave a flash of sympathy. The man's lips tightened in an attempt not to laugh and he turned away, giving her adequate time to inspect his profile as the lift travelled softly between floors. He was certainly worth looking at, she though idly, for once torn away from thoughts of the evening ahead.
The men were obviously going up to the boardroom on the top floor and Rachel had to push her way as firmly as she could towards the doors without seeming to appear rude, a seemingly impossible task until the blue-eyed stranger murmured something to the men next to him and they parted to let her through. She shot a brief glance of gratitude at him as she slipped through the silently opening doors. Then she forgot him.
There was a smell of something delicious coming from the kitchen when she finally reached home that evening. Throwing off her shoes in the hallway, she sniffed the air appreciatively and went through.
'There's certainly something to be said for sharing a flat with a catering student. What are you concocting tonight, Ros?'
The dark-haired girl looked up, rather pink in the face from having just been peering anxiously inside the old-fashioned electric oven. 'Wait and see! It's a surprise!'
Rachel pottered around the kitchen, helping where she could, but in reality her mind was miles away.
The thing for which she lived was drawing closer. Only another three hours! Then she would be treading the stage! She imagined the trio striking up with her special tune, the one she had written herself, and the gradual hush that would fall over the audience. Then Rachel Jackson, junior window dresser, would exist no more! Her practical, workaday garb of jumper and jeans would be replaced by a glittery tube of diamante and her straight mouse hair would be caught up in a clip which, from the front tables, should look like diamonds. Rachel would become Zia. And then she would begin to sing and the bliss of knowing the audience seemed to like what she did would sweep over her. She gave a contented sigh at the prospect.
'My stage fright hasn't come yet,' she remarked, as she washed her hands and started to get on with laying the table. 'It really hasn't.'
But it did. Halfway through supper she pushed back her plate. 'I'm sorry, Ros, it's nothing to do with your cooking. But I feel dreadful. I'll have to put this in the fridge for tomorrow.'
'It'll be ruined.' Ros wasn't offended. She had seen Rachel on previous nights, seen how pale she suddenly became, and how her hands started to shake. She had pushed her food away then as well, even though she had already admitted to being ravenous after a busy day at the store.
Ros tried without success to jolly her out of it but it was no good, her stage fright stayed with Rachel all the time she was sitting in the taxi as it took her into the West End, and it stayed all the time she was getting changed and putting up her hair and applying her stage make-up, and it wasn't until she stepped into the pool of silver light and gazed out at last into the darkness surrounding the stage and began to sing the first throbbing notes of her opening ballad that it finally left her.
It was then the excitement took over, the alert attention telling of the audience's least change of mood. The first time she had felt it she had been surprised. But in three short evenings she had come to expect it, to love it, to find herself reading it and playing to it, structuring her songs to fit the mood, playing on their sense of expectation as if she could tease them into giving her their approval, then, having it, turning it into a spiral of happiness to match the happiness that bubbled up inside her until at last the music died and the lights faded.
Tonight she collapsed in her dressing-room, pleasurably exhausted, until the manager came through as he had done the previous nights. He was smiling. That was a lovely set, Zia. Listen!' He held the dressing-room door open. In the distance she could hear the applause continuing like the fall of surf on a distant beach. He turned back. 'You're going to have to give them one more.'
She moved in a dream, back into the spotlight, stage fright forgotten. This time the lights were glowing softly over the tables and for the first time she could see individual faces in the audience. It was slightly unnerving but she turned to the band and took up the cue and in a moment she was launching into a popular love-song, aware of the eyes on her, of being the centre of attention, and not frightened at all.
* * *
When she eventually returned to the flat Ros was just getting ready for bed. She made two mugs of cocoa and, handing one to Rachel and noting her starry-eyed look, said, 'I always knew you were special when we were at school. I'm really pleased things are working out for you.' She looked thoughtful. 'I have to say though, love, I think you're making a mistake in cutting yourself off from ordinary life. You can't work all the time. You need a social life as well... Everybody needs people, Rachel.'
'By people I suppose you mean men?'
'Singular. A special man. You never go out. Now you're at the club you're singing there every night and when you're not singing you're rehearsing. You won't meet any nice men like that.'
Rachel could see the concern in her friend's eyes but her lips tightened fractionally. 'I've ruled out social life for the time being, Ros. And I'm certainly not looking for a husband! He would only get in the way. I'm sure you'll be able to run a career and be a good wife if it comes to it, but it's not for me. There's no way I could dedicate myself to my career and have spare time for anything else. I need to be free, not have a husband hanging round my neck! I'm going to have to be free to travel, to tour... I couldn't give one hundred per cent to a relationship until I'm established. It's one or the other.'
'All or nothing?'
'Yes, I suppose so.'
'Do you realise what you're giving up?'
'I'm not giving anything up.' For some reason a brief image of a pair of laughing blue eyes floated in front of her and she gave a little shrug of annoyance. 'I don't look at it like that.' She finished her cocoa. 'I'm giving nothing up at all. Now I really must go to bed. I'm dog-tired.'
That was the end of the matter as far as she was concerned. Next morning when she went in to work all her thoughts were on what Ray, the manager of the club, had said to her the previous night. 'I want to put you under contract, love. You're too good to lose to any passing booking agent just yet.'
'You gave me my first chance, Ray. I wouldn't dream of leaving you so soon,' she had replied.
'You will do one day. And it's my guess it won't be far into the future, either. You're going to be big, love. You're a natural. If I was into singer-management I'd get you on my books straight away.'
'You're a flatterer, Ray,' she remembered saying, but her heart had begun to dance at his words. Could it be true? Certainly she had seen how the audience reacted.
Ray had concluded by asking her to come in early to look over a short contract he had had written up. 'For six weeks,' he told her. 'That suit you?'
When she nodded he went on, 'If nothing has turned up for you by then, I expect I'll be more than willing to renew it.'
It was then she knew she could hand in her notice at the store. Six weeks, possibly longer? He was paying her far more than the store, though admittedly she got a large discount on any goods purchased plus paid holidays and sick-leave too.
She was mulling the problem over when she got into work, clocking on at the staff entrance and pressing the lift button semi-automatically after three months of doing the same thing every morning. Slightly late, she was pleased when it came down straight away, and she was just about to punch in her floor number when a voice called across the foyer, 'Hold it, will you?'
Such was its note of authority she automatically put out a hand to hold back the door, then glanced across to see who had called. A tall, muscular shape in a dark suit shouldered his way inside.
'Thanks.' A well-shaped hand rak
ed through a head of dark hair, as if the owner had left in too much of a rush to groom it properly and now regretted his haste.
Such thick dark waves on a man were very unusual, Rachel remembered thinking before she found her eyes drawn towards the same pair of blue eyes that had impinged momentarily on her thoughts the day before.
'Don't you use the directors' lift?' she remarked, blurting the first thing that came into her head as her mouth went suddenly dry. He not only had outrageously sexy eyes, with a smile to match; he was also, on closer inspection and in full face, as dishy as her curious glance had revealed yesterday when she had glimpsed him in profile during that short journey between floors with his colleagues. Now, close up, she judged him too young to be a director, for he was surely no more than thirty? Thirty-two at the very outside. The same as her brother, Mark. But there all similarity ended.
He had already made some sort of reply to her blurted question, but such was her state of mind that she missed what he said and had to ask him to repeat it.
'I still don't know my way around,' he said with a quirk of firm lips that irrationally claimed her attention then.
'You walked straight past it,' she babbled, feeling weak at the knees. It's true, she registered, it does affect the knees. Literally. It? she asked herself. She turned away and frowned at the floor indicator. What on earth was she doing, reacting like an idiot to a mere man? A hand came down over the pushbutton as the lift slowed at the floor she wanted and she felt it increase speed again, going up.
'What the --?' She turned angrily. 'I'm going to be late. Why did you do that?'
Instead of being worried by her obvious anger he laughed quietly. 'I'm not as lost as I pretended just now. I saw you getting into this lift so I thought I'd take my chance while I had it.'
'What on earth do you mean?'
'I mean, I didn't want to lose you a second time.'
'But this is ridiculous!' She gazed at him in astonishment then let her glance slide to the floor indicator again. 'You're making me later than I already am! And just so you can chat me up!' She was genuinely angry, both with herself and with him for the way he was making her feel.
Steps to Heaven Page 1
