Playing the Game

by Cathy Cole

  THE SERIES

  1. The New Girl

  2. The Trouble With Love

  3. More Than a Love Song

  4. A Date With Fate

  5. Never a Perfect Moment

  6. Kiss at Midnight

  7. Back to You

  8. Summer of Secrets

  9. Playing the Game

  10. Flirting With Danger

  11. Lovers and Losers

  12. Winter Wonderland

  A bucketful of thanks to

  Lucy Courtenay and Sara Grant

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  The Heartside Bay Series

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Look Out for More Heartside Bay

  Copyright

  ONE

  The Heartbeat Café had seen a lot of parties lately, but this one was the biggest Lila could remember. She adjusted her black silk dress and wished she hadn’t drunk her mocktail as quickly as she had. It had been delicious, but now she just felt awkward standing by the stage with an empty glass in her hand.

  Scientists and deep-sea divers, ballerinas and plumbers, DJs and professors were still flooding in through the doors, their tickets clutched in their hands and their eyes wide as they took in the packed space and the decorations. The whole school had been buzzing with stories about Eve Somerstown’s latest party for days. Now that term was finally over and the summer holidays were here, it was clear that every teenager in Heartside Bay wanted a part of the action. Lila envied their imaginative costumes and adjusted her plain black dress again.

  Speakers hung on the café’s panelled walls had been pouring out music for the past half an hour. As she listened, Lila had to laugh. She leaned a little closer to Josh.

  “Have you noticed the songs? Every single one has had the word ‘future’ in the lyrics!”

  “Eve’s hardly going to just put her music library on shuffle,” Josh shouted back, and kissed the tip of Lila’s ear. “She’s not the party queen of Heartside Bay for nothing.”

  As part of the evening’s entertainment, Eve had booked Josh to do drawings of people in their outfits from eight o’clock onwards on special WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE? headed cards printed for the party. Lila and Josh had arrived early so Josh could set up his caricature stand by the stage.

  “Make sure you dress like your future artistic self,” Eve had instructed Josh earlier in the week, surrounded by to-do lists in multiple colours. “A paint-splattered smock would be good.”

  Josh had looked appalled. “I was thinking more T-shirt and jeans,” he said. “I’m going to be an illustrator and graphic novelist, not Vincent van Gogh.”

  “A smock would be perfect, Josh,” Eve had coaxed. “And maybe a beret. This is a party about future careers. No one wants to see you dressed as an ordinary person.”

  Josh could be just as stubborn as Eve when he wanted to be. “It’s T-shirt and jeans or nothing, Eve,” he said as Lila giggled at the thought of her boyfriend in a smock and a hat.

  Wisely, Eve had given up that particular fight. Josh wasn’t the dressing-up type. The only concession he’d made to Eve’s fancy-dress theme was a coloured pencil he’d stuck behind his ear. He’d bought a set of them for the summer illustration course he was starting on Monday.

  Even that’s more imaginative than my outfit, Lila thought to herself with a sigh. How am I supposed to dress up as something I haven’t decided on yet?

  She glanced around the room, trying to pick out her friends in the crowd. Eve was easy to spot, directing troops by the bar in a close-fitting green dress. A shiny silver crown with the words PARTY PLANNER TO THE STARS written around the brim was sitting on her sleekly pulled back auburn hair. She was organizing trays of drinks for the waiters in their WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE? T-shirts to offer the guests as the came through the doors. Eve’s girlfriend Becca stood beside her in gardening overalls, laughing at something Rhi’s dad was saying behind the bar.

  “Lila!”

  Rhi was waving, pushing through the crowd, hand in hand with her boyfriend Brody. She looked adorable in a playsuit printed all over with black and white music notes. Lila noticed a clef-shaped pendant on the leather necklace Brody wore around his neck.

  “You two didn’t have to dress up as anything,” said Lila as Rhi hugged her and Brody and Josh shook hands. “Everyone knows you’re going to be the most famous musicians ever to come out of Heartside Bay.”

  “Polly found this amazing fabric and promised to make me something to wear tonight, so I couldn’t refuse,” Rhi laughed back. “We’re playing later. You should see the set Eve’s rigged up for us behind the curtain. Then the summer will really begin. Brody and I have so many gigs, I’m going to need another holiday by the time we get to September.”

  “November you mean,” Brody corrected with a smile. “I got a call this morning booking us at the Stag’s Head for Halloween. We’re booked up right through until then.”

  Rhi clapped her hands and kissed Brody full on the lips.

  Two more people who knew who they were and what they wanted to be. Lila couldn’t help a feeling of doom. Eve was already planning parties most weekends with her business partner Caitlin. Ollie would come through the Heartbeat Café’s doors any minute dressed as the professional footballer he’d wanted to be since he was about ten years old, and Polly would be next to him wearing one of her original designs from her upcycling label Turned Around With Love and looking incredible, and … here she was. Boring old Lila in a boring old dress, looking like nobody at all.

  You have lots of waitressing over the summer doing Mr Gupta’s weddings, she reminded herself. Heartside Bay heaves with weddings every summer, that’ll keep you busy.

  It was work, true enough. But it wasn’t exciting, and it certainly wasn’t what Lila wanted to be doing for the rest of her life. As Rhi and Brody headed for the stage, Lila sighed and adjusted the necklace she was wearing.

  She felt Josh kiss her lightly on the temple. “You look absolutely beautiful tonight,” he whispered in her ear. “I won’t be able to keep my eyes off you.”

  Lila flushed with pleasure. “Really? You don’t think I look boring? You don’t think it matters that I’m not a scientist, or a dancer, or a judge or something like that?”

  Josh kissed her on the lips. “I can’t see you as any of those things, to be honest,” he said. “And you’d hate being a judge. Those wigs are so unflattering.”

  That was true, Lila thought. She was pleased that Josh thought she looked good tonight, but she still felt out of sorts. I should have come dressed as a bag lady, she thought glumly. That’s about the only future I can picture right now.

  “Eve alert,” said Josh suddenly. “I’d better get to work. Tonight’s fee is paying for tomorrow’s illustration course.”

  He kissed Lila one last lingering time and slid behind his caricature stand as Eve appeared with two mocktails in her hands, held high above the crowd. Her silver crown twinkled in the party lights strung overhead.

  “I saw your glass was empty, Lila, and as any good host knows, that’s the worst party crime in the world
. Try this one, Rhi’s dad designed it last week. We’ve called it Raspberry Résumé. I thought of the name,” she added. “It has a lovely ‘future career’ ring to it, don’t you think? What have you come as, then?”

  Lila had been dreading that question. She opened her mouth, wondering what would come out.

  “Are you a reality TV star?” Eve asked with a little laugh.

  Lila flinched. That wasn’t a compliment. She tried to make a joke of it, pouting her cherry-painted lips and striking a pose. “Maybe I could get my own show,” she said, wiggling her hips from side to side. “Something like The Blonde Game would be good. I could give Lorna Lustre a run for her money.”

  Eve laughed with amusement, just as Lila had hoped she would. “Perfect,” she said, in Lorna Lustre’s trademark husky tones. “No talent required there at all. All you need to do is dye your hair and get a boob job.”

  “I loathe reality TV. It represents everything that’s wrong with society.”

  Lila swung round, startled by the venom in Josh’s tone. He was glaring at them both, frowning so hard that his eyebrows met in the middle.

  “We’re only joking,” said Eve in surprise. “I’m sure Lila has more brains than to aim for a fake life in front of cameras twenty-four hours a day. Good luck with the drawings, I know you’ll be marvellous.”

  Lila stared at Josh as Eve headed back to the bar. “Are you OK?”

  He was muttering under his breath as he sharpened a pencil. “The whole reality TV bandwagon just gets up my nose.”

  Lila wound her arms around his neck. “Don’t be angry, Josh. This is a party. I’d never be on a reality TV show, you know that.” She grimaced. “My life wouldn’t interest anyone.”

  She could feel the tension leaving him as she rubbed his shoulders with her hands. “It interests me,” he said, looking down at her.

  “You’re biased because you’re my boyfriend. No one else but you would want to hear about my life. Ooh, Lila wakes up and brushes her teeth. Lila goes to school! Wow, Lila hangs out at the Heartbeat, haunt of the rich and famous! Newsflash, Lila cuts her toenails at the kitchen table! I don’t, by the way,” she added hastily, not wanting Josh to think she was gross. “I cut them over the bin.”

  Josh’s face twitched with a smile as he looked down at her. “Too much information.”

  Lila felt relieved that he looked happy again. “Forget I mentioned toenails,” she said.

  “You just mentioned them again.”

  “Doh,” said Lila, whacking her forehead with the palm of her hand.

  He laughed out loud at that. “Kiss me, toenail girl,” he said.

  Stop worrying about the future so much, Lila told herself as she kissed Josh. You’re in the here and now. You have a lovely boyfriend you’ve been dating for over a month, but it feels like for ever, in the best possible way. He treats you well and you love being with him. He’s like your best friend and your boyfriend all rolled into one, and what could be better than that?

  “This is going to be a brilliant summer,” she said firmly when Josh pulled back, his arms still looped around her back. “School’s out, the sun is shining and we’re going to have FUN.”

  Lila wished she could believe her own words. Even as Josh kissed her again, she felt uneasy. Everything had been going so well for her lately. It couldn’t last. If living in a seaside town for the past few months had taught her anything, it was that tides flowed out as surely as they came in.

  TWO

  “Fast lane freak,” Lila sang under her breath, her hands linked behind her head in the cool dry sand. “I ain’t ashamed, I ain’t ashamed, la la la.” She propped herself up and flapped a hand under Josh’s nose to get his attention. “Rhi and Brody were better than ever last night, weren’t they? The crowd went so nuts for ‘Fast Lane Freak’, I thought the roof was going to come off.”

  Josh gently pushed Lila’s hand out of the way. “They were brilliant, yes.”

  “And you were a total hit with your drawings. You must have drawn about fifty people. How many was it?”

  “Lots,” said Josh. He bent his head a little closer to his sketchbook.

  “I loved Polly’s dress,” Lila continued. “She’s doing so well with her market stall, have you heard? Turned Around With Love. It’s such great idea, upcycling clothes. No one item of clothing is ever the same. She’s going to do so well as a fashion designer, I know it. We should go and see her at her market stall one day and buy something.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I wish I knew what to do with my life. What do you think I should do, Josh?”

  Josh looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “Lila,” he said patiently, “you know how much I love to chat when I’m drawing. But is there any chance you could perhaps, I don’t know – be quiet for a bit?”

  “You’re rubbish at chatting,” Lila informed him, lying back on the sand again. They were in their favourite spot on the beach, a quiet stretch of sand that was located just where the beach started to curve to form the famous heart shape of Heartside Bay. It was far enough down the beach from the pier that it wasn’t too crowded, but it provided the perfect vantage point from which to watch both halves of the bay. “I might as well chat to that seagull. Hello seagull, I like your hair.”

  The seagull looked at her suspiciously, and hopped a little further away.

  “That’s the one I was drawing,” Josh sighed.

  Lila giggled. “Whoops. He’s still the same seagull, though. He’s just further away. You should draw faster.”

  “You’ll drive me mad one day,” Josh said, leaning across and kissing her. His lips tasted salty, like the sea.

  “Tell me honestly, Josh,” said Lila. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Stay very still.”

  “What?”

  He had his sketchbook out again. “Do as you’re told for once. As you’ve frightened my seagull away, I’m going to draw you instead. Close your eyes.”

  Lila obliged. The sea breeze felt cool against her face, and her eyelids glowed orange against the sun. “I wish you could make a career out of lying on beaches,” she said after a few minutes. “I’d be really good at that.”

  “You’re good at lots of things.”

  “Maybe I should work in the wedding industry. It’s big business around here.”

  She opened one eye and squinted down the beach, where she could see one of Heartside Bay’s customary wedding parties gathering at the edge of the water. A photographer was snapping another happy couple across the beach by the clock tower, while wedding guests in brightly coloured dresses, coats and hats hurried along the Marine Parade heading for one wedding or another, holding on tightly to their hats as the brisk sea breezes tried to tug them from their heads.

  “You already work in the wedding industry, oh waitress of waitresses,” Josh pointed out. “You can sit up now, I’ve finished.”

  As usual, Josh had captured her brilliantly with her hair spread out around her head on the sand. Her freckles and the little mole she had on one cheek were in exactly the right place. Lila wasn’t sure she was nearly as pretty as Josh drew her, but she wasn’t complaining.

  “I prefer your seagull,” she teased.

  Josh put his sketchbook away and rested his arm on Lila’s shoulders. “I don’t. Kissing seagulls is no fun at all.”

  They kissed for a while. As Josh took out his sketchpad again and started a fresh picture of the white-sailed boats out in the bay, Lila leaned back against her rolled-up towel and watched the wedding party by the water’s edge. The groom looked twice the bride’s age, and seemed a little lost, standing to one side as his bride walked at the water’s edge with her dress lifted daintily up to her knees. Lila wondered what had brought them together.

  Maybe the bride was marrying him for his money. She would feed him a poisoned shrimp at the weddi
ng breakfast and inherit his vast estates in Argentina the moment he died. It was perfect. He looked a bit poisoned already. Maybe she’d already done the evil deed. The image was so strong in her mind that she giggled out loud.

  “What are you laughing at?” Josh asked, his eyes still trained on the boats out in the harbour.

  “Nothing. Just something stupid I thought of.”

  “Stupid how?” When Lila told him, he grinned. “You have a wicked mind. Maybe they just fell in love like most people.”

  “That’s boring.” Lila studied the couple again. “I bet he’s blackmailing her into marrying him. Maybe he’s a kind of Bond villain who’s holding her extremely rich father hostage.” She squinted up into the sky, where she could see a helicopter circling the bay. “Her father’s in that helicopter right now, trussed up like a turkey. ‘You must marry me now, Maria,’” Lila improvised in her best Russian accent, getting into the story she was telling, “‘or my henchmen will throw your dear daddy to his death!’”

  Josh laughed. “I have to draw that. Tell it again.”

  Lila embellished happily, filling in details as they occurred to her. Maria had met Mr Wrinkles on a cruise. Her father owned a huge diamond mine in Africa; Mr Wrinkles’ lair lay deep beneath the polar ice caps. Josh’s fingers flew across his sketchpad as Lila lost herself in the details.

  “Maria is in love with Hans, of course, which makes everything worse,” she informed Josh halfway through the story.

  Josh paused. “Wait, who is Hans?”

  “Maria’s loved Hans since they were children.” Lila pictured a meadow full of wild flowers, Maria and Hans running towards each other with their arms extended. “Hans has promised to save her on her wedding day. But he’s late and it’s all going wrong—”

  To her delight, she noticed a tall man in sunglasses approaching the wedding party. He was a bit skinnier than she had imagined, and he had a very wet dog on a lead. Hardly the stuff of romantic legend, but he’d do.

  “And here he is!” she said, sitting up straighter. “Hans himself!”