by Penny Jordan
Lucy tensed. She didn’t want to talk to Marcus about her business. She had had a letter from Andrew Walker, reiterating that he didn’t want her to discuss their meeting with anyone and explaining that he was still out of the country on business and would be in touch with her on his return. Of course there should be no secrets between husband and wife, but she had given her word and she had no intention of breaking it—and besides...Nick’s betrayal of her trust had left a painful scar. She knew that Marcus would never cheat her financially, but her growing insecurity about the future of their marriage made her want to hold on tightly to the security of Prêt a Party. If at some future date Marcus chose to decide that their marriage wasn’t working with the clockwork efficiency that he had decided that it should, she might need her business—not just to support herself financially, but to validate her as a person.
‘I’ve decided that the simplest way to deal with the current situation would be for me to inject enough capital into the business to clear its debts,’ he said.
‘No! No—I don’t want you to do that.’
Lucy could see that her outburst had surprised him.
‘Why not? Less than two months ago you begged me to let you utilise what was left of your trust fund to put into the company.’
‘That was different,’ she told him stubbornly. ‘That was my money, not yours. And besides...’ She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him about Andrew Walker—not yet—and even if she did she suspected that he would not understand why she felt able to accept both financial assistance and financial involvement from someone else, but not from him. Having one husband involved in her business and virtually destroying it, and her, had taught her a harsh lesson. It wasn’t one she wanted to repeat.
Marcus frowned as he looked at her. It was obvious to him that Lucy was having second thoughts about their marriage. Was it because, despite all that he had done to her, she still loved Nick Blayne? And why was she rejecting his offer to pay off Prêt a Party’s debts?
‘Lucy...’
She stopped him fiercely. ‘Prêt a Party is my responsibility, Marcus, and I want to keep it that way.’
Her responsibility and her salvation, perhaps, should he ever decide to end their marriage.
A feeling of intense inner aloneness filled her. Sometimes it seemed as though her whole emotional life involved keeping painful secrets she could not share with anyone else. She badly wanted to cry, but of course she must not do so. Her two best friends had been so lucky, finding men who were their soul mates and true partners—men with whom they could share every part of their lives and themselves, from their most mundane thoughts to those that were most sacred and private to them. But not her. She never had and now would never be able to share her innermost longings and feelings with anyone.
She gave a small shiver. Marriage to Marcus would mean closing the door on the deepest of her feelings and shutting them away for ever. But she knew she simply wasn’t strong enough to let him walk away from her and find someone else. The pain would simply be too much for her to bear. And, as Marcus himself kept reminding her, it could already be too late for her to back out of their coming marriage. She might already have conceived.
* * *
Lucy looked at her watch. Marcus would be in Edinburgh by now. He had said that he would only be away for a couple of days, but already she was missing him.
Tonight was the launch of the new football boot—the last of Prêt a Party’s major events. She was pleased with the response she had received to the invitations she had sent out, and even Dorland was going to be there. Although corporate events, no matter how lavish, were not really his style.
Her mobile rang, jerking her out of her thoughts, and her heart leapt when she saw that it was Marcus who was calling.
Although she wasn’t officially living with him yet, she was spending more nights in Marcus’s bed than she was her own.
‘Has your mother sent out the wedding invitations yet?’ he asked.
‘They went out yesterday,’ Lucy told him. Her mother had spent several afternoons cloistered in the Holy Grail of stationery requisites that was the basement of Smythson’s Sloane Street premises, poring over samples of wedding stationery. ‘Although she’s telephoned people as well, in view of the lack of time. You do realise just how many guests are going to be at our wedding, don’t you, Marcus?’ she cautioned him.
‘Two hundred and rising at the last count—and that isn’t including my second cousins four times removed from Nova Scotia—at least according to my mother and Beatrice,’ he relied promptly.
‘What? No, Marcus.’ Lucy panicked. ‘It’s more like—’
‘Two hundred each. That is to say, my mother is planning on inviting two hundred guests, whilst I understand your mother can’t get her list down under two hundred and fifty.’
‘Oh, Marcus,’ Lucy wailed. ‘We said we wanted a quiet wedding.’
‘Talk to your mother—apparently that is a quiet wedding,’ Marcus told her dryly.
Lucy sighed. ‘Thank goodness it isn’t summer. Ma said the other night that if it had been she thought it would have been a good idea to tent over the gardens in your square.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it done.’
‘So have I, and I know exactly what hard work it is. Anyway, I thought we both agreed that we just want a simple wedding breakfast, somewhere like the Lanesborough—not five hundred people and a ballroom at the Ritz.’
‘Well, maybe we do, but we aren’t our mothers. Stop worrying about it,’ Marcus advised her, ‘and let them get on with it and enjoy themselves. I don’t want you too worn out to enjoy our honeymoon.’
Lucy could feel her face stating to burn.
‘If I am, that won’t be because of the wedding preparations,’ she told him valiantly.
‘Shagged out already?’ Marcus asked her directly.
‘Totally,’ Lucy agreed lightly. There was no point in wishing he had spoken more lovingly. ‘When will you be back?’
‘Oh, not so shagged out that you don’t want more?’
‘I was asking because of the christening,’ Lucy told him in a dignified voice.
‘Uh-huh? Well, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten that we’re driving down to the christening on Thursday.’
Julia and Silas were having their three-month-old son christened at the weekend, and Lucy had been asked to be one of his godmothers along with Carly, the third member of their trio.
Although Silas was based in New York, he and Julia spent as much time as they could in England, mainly because of Julia’s elderly grandfather, and the christening was being held in a small village close to his stately home.
‘I’d better go; take care of yourself,’ Marcus told her calmly, before ending the call.
No I love you; no do you love me... But then, how could there be? Marcus didn’t love her.
‘I’m going now, Mrs Crabtree,’ Lucy called out to the housekeeper, forcing back the threatening tears clogging her throat.
Marcus’s housekeeper had made it plain that she welcomed the idea of Marcus being married, and she and Lucy had spent several very happy afternoons discussing how best to renovate the slightly old-fashioned kitchen.
‘There’s a parcel just arrived for you, Lucy,’ she called back.
‘Oh?’ Lucy hurried into the kitchen and stared at the large box sitting on the table.
There was a note attached to it, in Marcus’s handwriting.
Hope that this will make our mornings together worth waking up to.
Slightly pink-cheeked, Lucy started to open it. Marcus had already ensured that she thought he was worth waking up to, and it was difficult to imagine how he could make their mornings any more of a sexual pleasure than they already were.
But she realised that had been wrong as she opened the box to revea
l not some outré sexual toy, but an espresso coffee machine.
‘Oh, Marcus!’ she whispered, suddenly overwhelmed by the emotions she had been trying to suppress.
‘He said as how you were missing your espresso in the morning,’ Mrs Crabtree told Lucy with a wide smile.
She desperately wanted to ring him and thank him, but she contented herself instead with simply texting him—in case he was already with his client.
* * *
Lucy exhaled slowly in relief. It looked very much as though the evening was going to be the success her corporate clients had hoped for. Having half a dozen Premier League football stars here had certainly been a good draw, and the models and It Girls clustered around them were making heavy inroads into the orange and red striped cocktail invented to match the orange and red flash on the new football boots being promoted.
If so far as the female guests were concerned the footballers were the main attraction, then her clients were equally delighted by the number of media people attending, and had told her so.
The cheerleaders had done their bit and been wildly applauded, and even her tongue-in-cheek curry and chips mini-suppers had been greeted with enthusiasm—especially by the footballers.
‘Lucy!’
‘Dorland.’ Lucy smiled affectionately as the magazine owner and editor took hold of her arm and guided her to one of the tables.
‘You’re a very naughty girl not telling me about you and Marcus,’ he told her, wagging his finger in front of her. ‘I had to read about your engagement in The Times.’
Lucy gave what she hoped was a convincing laugh. ‘Blame Marcus for that, Dorland, not me. But you are coming to the wedding, aren’t you?’
His expression softened. ‘Of course.’
Lucy had insisted that Dorland was to be invited as a guest, even though her mother had not totally approved.
‘Lovely stiffie by the way, sweetie. Very grand. It has pride of place on my mantelpiece.’
Lucy giggled. These days, ‘stiffie’ didn’t mean ‘upmarket invitation’ to her.
‘Lucy, there’s something I want to talk to you about,’ Dorland added, suddenly looking unfamiliarly serious. ‘Come here and sit down for a minute.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Lucy asked him, as soon as they were tucked away in a corner.
‘One of my snappers mentioned that he’d seen you having lunch at the Pont Street Brasserie the other week with Andrew Walker.’
Lucy could feel herself starting to colour up guiltily. What bad luck. She had seen the paparazzi outside the Brasserie, and she should have guessed she would be spotted. Dorland had eyes and ears everywhere.
‘He knows my cousin,’ she answered as casually as she could, but Dorland was shaking his head.
‘He’s a really bad guy, Lucy. Don’t get involved with him.’
The shock of Dorland looking so serious and saying something so appalling made her stare at him uneasily. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How much do you know about him?’ Dorland asked her.
‘He’s a very successful entrepreneur who has built up a turnkey business based in London supplying concierge services for wealthy people who don’t have time to sort out their own domestic support services.’
‘That’s the legitimate tip of the iceberg of his business,’ Dorland told her flatly. ‘The truth is that he works for a group of Eastern European mafia-type thugs, fronting a money-laundering exercise. The workers he uses in his turnkey business are mostly illegals, brought into this country to work in fear for their lives. The poor sods have to pay thousands to get into this country in the first place, and then when they get here they’re told that they can be sent back at any minute if the authorities find out about them. So they’re forced to work for next to nothing and housed like battery chickens.
‘And that isn’t the worst of it. Young women—girls—sometimes sold by their families, sometimes just stolen, are sold into prostitution and passed from owner to owner. What he’s involved in is the cruellest business in the world. He traffics in human misery and degradation. And, by the way, Andrew Walker isn’t even his real name.’
‘How can you know all this?’ Lucy protested.
‘I know because last year he approached me with an offer to buy his way into A-List Life. He said that he was looking for somewhere to invest the profits from his turnkey business. He talked about taking A-List Life into Europe and even Russia. I admit for while I was tempted, and not just because of the money he was talking about—which was phenomenal. But once I started looking a little deeper and asking questions all sorts of stuff started crawling out of the woodwork.
‘The reason he wanted to buy into A-List Life was because he’s looking for ways and means to launder the money he’s making from trading in refugees and prostitutes. He told me about an idea he’d had for us to employ our own A-List Life girls as “hostesses” at celeb events. The way he described it, it sounded perfectly above board and respectable.’ Dorland shook his head. ‘It wasn’t. What he meant, of course, was that he wanted to use A-List Life to supply upmarket prostitutes.’
With every word Dorland spoke, Lucy’s heart was hammering harder.
‘I’m not going to pry into your personal business affairs, Lucy, but I know how these people work—they offer of a terrific business deal made in secret and kept that way. If that’s why you were having lunch with him, then take my advice and don’t get involved.’
‘But if he’s as bad as you say, why haven’t the authorities done anything about it?’ Lucy asked Dorland unhappily.
‘Probably because he’s too clever for them to prove anything. The only reason I know is because I asked around—and I asked the right people. London has its share of Russian oligarchs, some of whom I happen to know, and they know people who know other people, et cetera. They aren’t involved in any way with him, or what he does, but they have contacts who have contacts, and they know the people he does business with. And I was told—don’t get involved. He and those he works for play very dirty. Have you told Marcus about lunching with him?’
Lucy shook her head.
‘No. And I...I couldn’t. Not now.’
‘No. He definitely wouldn’t like it,’ Dorland agreed.
‘We only had a meeting, that was all,’ Lucy stressed. ‘Nothing more.’
‘Well, if I were you, Lucy, I’d make sure that there aren’t any more meetings. And I’d also make sure that Walker knows you aren’t interested in any proposals he may put to you, either now or at any time in the future. It’s none of my business, I know that, but I’ve always had a bit of soft spot for Prêt a Party and for you. You’ve got class, Lucy, and I like that. I admire what you did with Prêt a Party, even if things haven’t worked out. But it’s just the kind of outfit he’s looking for, and once he drags you down into the dirt with him I’m afraid you’ll have the devil’s own job getting out of it again. These people know how to keep their victims trapped and dependent on them, and like as not they’ll drag Marcus down with you.’
* * *
Lucy looked at the letter she had just finished checking. It was to Andrew Walker, telling him that since she was shortly to get married she had decided against going ahead with the business venture they had discussed. Her husband was going to become her new business partner, she had added, untruthfully.
She signed it, then folded it carefully and put it in the envelope she had already addressed.
Just to make sure that Andrew Walker did receive it she was going to the post office with it right now, so that she could send it for guaranteed delivery.
She gave a small shudder as she sealed the envelope. Thank heavens Dorland had alerted her to the real nature of Andrew Walker’s business. She just wished that the authorities could do something to prevent him from continuing with his evil trade. But when she had
said as much to Dorland, Dorland had shaken his head and told her grimly, ‘Removing him wouldn’t solve the problem. There will be a hundred or more other men all too willing to take his place. Illegal workers are big business, and men like Walker get a double pay-off—firstly when the poor devils pay for what they believe is going to be their freedom in another country, and secondly when they have to pay over most of their wages to buy the silence of the very people responsible for them being there. They can’t win, and men like Walker can’t lose. And that’s why it’s so hard for the authorities to do anything. Their victims are too afraid to say anything.’
And Prêt a Party would have been an ideal money-laundering vehicle for them, Lucy recognised. All the more so because it was so labour-intensive, and in a way that used casual labour.
Thank goodness she hadn’t told Marcus about it. He would probably have been too worldly aware to fall into the trap she had, and she could just imagine what he would have had to say about the situation if he’d known how easily she had fallen for Andrew Walker’s smooth words. No doubt he would have also immediately reminded her that she had already proved her naïveté once, by marrying Nick and letting him defraud her, and that there was no need for her to compound her folly.
Marcus. He would be back later this afternoon, and then tomorrow they were driving down to the country for the christening.
Marcus. Didn’t she already have enough to worry about without this added problem of Andrew Walker and the trap he had set for her?
* * *
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘Am I?’ Lucy gave Marcus a too-bright smile, glad of the glaring sunlight that meant she could hide behind her sunglasses as Marcus drove them towards the motorway, en route to the christening. They were going down a couple of days early so that Lucy, Carly and Julia could have some time together before the other guests arrived, and Lucy was really looking forward to seeing her two oldest friends.
Marcus had booked them into a small manorhouse hotel, teasing her that they could ‘practise for their honeymoon,’ which they were actually taking in the Caribbean.
