A Twist of Fate

by Joanna Rees

  She tried to sound meek and grateful as she told him about her research into the Maddox Inc. newspaper group in London, and how she’d like to take an active role in the company. It was something she’d thought long and hard about. For a long time she’d considered walking away and doing something else, but Tom had told her she was crazy to.

  Besides, it was her inheritance. Something she’d been planning on doing all her life. It was what she’d been born to do. And if she didn’t? Well – everything with a Maddox name will be mine for the taking. Brett’s mocking voice rang in her memory as if he were speaking in her ear.

  ‘Thea, I’m not sure working for me would suit you.’

  ‘Why not? Brett does.’

  She suddenly felt childish, her jealousy was so overpowering.

  ‘Brett is a very talented young man,’ her father said. ‘Even if he wasn’t family, I’d want him in the organization. He’s proved himself to be a very valuable asset.’

  Thea fell into silence, into a darkness blacker than the night. A voice deep down inside her wanted to scream at him, to tell him what Brett had done. But another part of her strangled those practised words in her throat, telling her that she was disgusting, that her father would find her disgusting, that he’d think what had happened had somehow been her fault.

  It was her father’s voice that pulled her back from the void. It felt as if a hypnotist had just snapped his finger and broken her free from a trance.

  ‘If you like studying, I could organize for you to do some kind of postgrad?’

  She stared at him, marvelling at his ability to trivialize her life whilst simultaneously expecting her to be grateful. Well, Brett might have stepped into a position on the board without question, but she was damned if she was going to be so nepotistic.

  No, she’d find a way to prove herself to him. She’d succeed despite him. Show him what a valuable asset she was. No matter what it took, she would claim her place as his rightful heir. And it wouldn’t involve a postgrad course that he’d bought for her.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she mumbled.

  He patted her shoulder. ‘I’m giving you more shares for your birthday,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like that more than money.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She didn’t add ‘Daddy’ and she didn’t give him a hug.

  Later the party at the chalet was in full swing, but Griffin Maddox slipped off early to bed, Thea noticed. She wanted to go to bed too, but Tom wouldn’t hear of it, DJ-ing on the decks in the den to the delight of Storm, who danced with her friends until they were so hot and sweaty that they went outside to plunge into the snow, whooping and giggling.

  Brett stayed in the den, deep in conversation with Justin Ennestein, and Thea couldn’t help but wonder what they were discussing. She didn’t want to be on the outside any longer. She wanted to know what was going on.

  Working at Maddox Inc. had been something she’d been expecting to do since she could remember. Her father blocking her, for what she could only surmise were sexist reasons, only made her ambition stronger.

  And OK, yes, it would be easy to walk away. Admit defeat. Accept that Brett had filled the role that her father had always told her would be hers. But she already knew she wasn’t going to. She wasn’t going to accept her father’s ‘No’.

  She flicked her head at Tom, hoping he’d sneak off to their room, where they could discuss her conversation with her father. But Tom was already too drunk to be as serious as she needed him to be. Besides, Storm was clearly on a mission to prove to him that she was the most fun anyone could be. Thea noticed how she kept filling up his drink and laughing at everything he said, her hand with its long talons resting on his arm as she shrieked with fresh peels of mirth. It wasn’t long before Storm and her equally exuberant friends had persuaded Tom to go outside, where they were diving into the snow. He shrugged helplessly at Thea as they dragged him along.

  Thea laughed weakly, refusing to join in and calling him ‘crazy’ as she watched from the doorway. In a minute, at the first chance he had to extricate himself, he was back, shivering. Storm was calling him from the outdoor hot-tub, but Tom appealed to Thea. ‘Let’s go to the sauna,’ he said, his teeth chattering.

  She was about to refuse, but decided against it. It was much better for her to be in the sauna with him than leave Tom with Storm and her friends. Some heat might sober him up. She took him downstairs

  Tom only lasted five minutes in the sauna before Thea was seriously worried about him. ‘I’ll be straight back,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’m going to get some water. Don’t go away.’

  ‘OK, I won’t, but be quick,’ she said.

  Thea sat back in the heat. It had been a while since she’d skied, and she ached all over. She had to admit that her stiff muscles did feel better for being warmed up. She could hear the distant sounds of Storm and her friends putting on more music.

  She stood up and wiped the steam off the window of the door, wondering whether to go and find Tom.

  But just then a face at the door made her jump and she yelped, falling backwards onto the hot wooden slats as the door swung open and Brett came in. He was wearing a short white towel. She recoiled at the sight of the gingery blond hair on his chest and his pale-pink nipples.

  ‘Where’s Tom?’ Thea asked, wiping the sweat-soaked hair back away from her face.

  ‘He’s gone to lie down,’ Brett said. ‘He told me to tell you. You shouldn’t have let him get into the clutches of the old lady. He’s wasted.’

  He grinned at her. She pulled her knees up, upset that she was in a bikini in such a confined space with him.

  But Brett was in no hurry to leave. He leant back against the door, crossing his feet.

  ‘He’s quite keen, that Tom guy.’

  That Tom guy. Why wasn’t anyone taking him seriously?

  ‘Yeah,’ Brett continued, clearly enjoying the way he was unnerving her. ‘He showed me the ring he’s going to give you tomorrow.’

  Tom was going to give her a ring? Did that mean . . . ?

  Thea felt her heart plummet through the floor. She stared at Brett, loathing him for the way he was enjoying ruining this for her.

  Suddenly he plucked the scoop from the hook on the wall and, dipping it in the small wooden barrel of water on the floor, carelessly splashed the water on the hot coals in the corner. There was a loud hiss and the temperature spiked. Thea squirmed on the seat, determined not to show him how scared he was making her feel.

  ‘So. Dad told me you’d asked him for a job,’ Brett said. He sounded amused, as if her request had already been the subject of a private joke between them.

  Dad. Her father wasn’t Brett’s dad. God only knew who Brett’s real father was. Storm had always been so evasive about her ex-husbands. So how dare Brett steal hers? She felt furious that her private conversation with her father had already been reported.

  ‘You don’t want to work for us, Thea,’ Brett said. It sounded like a threat.

  Us?

  ‘Why? You’re worried I’ll expose you? Or outshine you?’ she snapped back. ‘You don’t frighten me,’ she went on, trying to sound much braver than she felt. She had to get out of here. Fast. She had to get back to Tom, where she’d be safe.

  She got up and tried to push past him, but suddenly Brett whipped her around and pinned her up against the rough wooden boards of the sauna wall. Her cheek burnt as it pressed into the hot wood.

  She felt dizzy in the heat, weak in his grasp, as he pushed her arm up her back, making her shoulder scream with pain.

  This couldn’t be happening. Not again.

  Where was Tom?

  ‘Don’t,’ she gasped, terrified. ‘Let me go.’

  She struggled harder this time, but he held her like a vice. Thea felt nausea rise in her mouth as he jerked off his towel.

  ‘How d’you think your little boyfriend Tom would like it if I told him what you let me do to you?’ Brett said. ‘What a little slut you really ar
e?’

  She tried to scream, but he put his hand over her mouth, choking her violently.

  Panic set in as he ripped down her bikini bottoms. She struggled much harder, her muffled screams lost in the heat. Brett hit her then, momentarily stunning her, before pressing her all the harder against the burning wood, his hand grasping her hair tightly. Then he pushed her legs apart and positioned himself against her. Then into her.

  ‘Happy fucking birthday, little sister,’ he said, thrusting with each word.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  May 1993

  It was a perfect spring day in Paris. The sidewalk cafes were jammed with people sipping chilled wine in the sunshine, and tourists dawdled through the Tuileries gardens snapping pictures of the majestic horse-chestnut blossom as the trill of birdsong filled the air.

  On the Avenue George V, above the plush designer window and behind the billowing net curtain on the second floor, Romy stood on the polished parquet flooring of Perez Vadim’s atelier, as the great designer walked around her, his bony, nicotine-stained fingers on his puckered lips.

  A line of immaculately dressed assistants waited for his approval, as if this were an audience with a king. Behind them the enormous doors opened from Vadim’s famous salon onto the pattern-cutting room, with high desks covered in drawings. Dressmaking mannequins draped in the finest silks were crammed in between the high tables, and the walls were covered in sketches of dresses and hats.

  ‘What do you think?’ Vadim asked Romy in his gnarled North African drawl, peering over his thick-framed black glasses. Since she’d last seen him he’d dyed his short hair blond. He was wearing electric-blue drainpipe trousers with low pointed cowboy boots and a black jacket with the tailor’s stitches on the outside. A signature piece from his autumn collection, Romy remembered. She’d done hours of homework on the great designer before she’d come today.

  She stared down at the mock-up of the exquisite evening dress she was wearing. This was the last in a long line of dresses in various stages of design that she’d modelled today from Vadim’s forthcoming couture range.

  ‘I like it,’ she said, moving slightly and lifting off the fabric samples that had been draped across her shoulders. One of them – the favourite – was green. But Romy felt repelled by it. She didn’t mind green generally, but this material was the same colour as that green blanket she’d found in Lemcke’s office all those years ago. It reminded her of that moment of furious, impotent anger she’d felt. As if she’d opened a treasure chest and found it full of sand.

  Once again, she forced herself to lock the memory in the vault. She was a different person now, she reminded herself. All of that was in the past. And the past was a foreign country – a phrase she’d read in a book and one that had stuck with her.

  ‘I don’t like the green,’ she said. ‘Personally, I think the blue is better.’

  Vadim nodded slowly. ‘Yes, midnight-blue. Not the green. You’re right,’ he said.

  Romy pulled a humble face at Jocelyn and Marie, who made hurried notes on their clipboards. She was amazed that Vadim had listened to her and, by the looks on their faces, they were too. Another assistant hurried over and collected the sample from Romy. The green silk fell to the floor in a pool by her feet.

  Vadim stood staring at her. ‘I’m still not sure about this neckline,’ he said.

  He put out his hand, gesturing for his assistant, Marcel, to come forward. He was wearing skin-tight drainpipes to match Vadim’s, and his thick black eyebrows shot up at Romy as he handed his master the dressmaking shears.

  ‘Still,’ Perez told Romy. Then he put the scissors in the fine material near the armpit and slashed the arm of the dress away. Jocelyn and Marie came intrepidly around the front to look at Vadim’s work.

  ‘Better, huh?’ he said. ‘Diana will like this,’ he said conclusively. ‘She is here next week. Make sure it works by then. With the sequin-line down here,’ he said, tracing a line down the skirt, his fingertip caressing Romy’s thigh beneath. But he didn’t seem to notice. Instead he ruffled the skirt, and Romy imagined the dress moving when it was made up in the fabric for the newly single English princess.

  He handed the scissors back to Marcel.

  Romy cleared her throat. Vadim turned slowly and looked at her, his neck wrinkled like a turtle, his hooded eyes curious over his beaked nose.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, it feels too . . . ’ she began, then stopped. What had Nico told her this morning? She was to turn up at these studios and do as she was told. She wasn’t to venture an opinion at any point.

  ‘. . . too?’ Vadim asked.

  Romy sighed, shifting her weight onto her other leg. Those high heels were killing her. ‘It’s just . . . I once wore a bandage over my chest. It’s a long story,’ she continued hurriedly, with a nervous laugh. ‘This feels like that. Just the line of it here,’ she went on, looking at the straight line across her chest and remembering the bandage she’d worn in the clothing factory in Berlin so that she could pretend she was a boy.

  Vadim walked back towards her and held his hand out for the scissors once again.

  ‘Where?’ he asked her, nodding at the dress.

  Romy looked down. ‘It needs to feel just slightly more at an angle,’ she said, tracing the line with her finger.

  ‘Comme ça?’ Vadim chopped more of the fabric away. Then he stood back with a surprised smile.

  The sun was low in the sky by the time Romy was finally allowed to leave, the streets bathed in a warm late-afternoon gold. Nico was waiting for her, standing smoking a cigarette against his old black Mercedes, which was parked underneath a cherry-blossom tree on the street. Romy’s dog was on a lead by his feet, and Romy laughed at what a reluctant dog-sitter Nico had turned out to be.

  ‘You should be a model yourself, posing like that,’ Romy said, picking up Banjo and giving the delighted mutt a cuddle.

  ‘You mean the dog should be a model, or me?’ Nico asked.

  ‘The dog, silly,’ Romy laughed. ‘What on earth are you wearing, anyway?’

  Nico pulled at the green German-army jacket. Romy knew they were the height of fashion, but she couldn’t get used to seeing people wearing them. They reminded her of the guards at the orphanage.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  She could tell he was disappointed, so she changed the subject.

  ‘Has he been any trouble?’ she asked, tickling Banjo behind the ears and thinking that he actually looked as if he was grinning. It was no surprise, considering how he’d looked a few weeks ago when she’d found him, half-starved, a broken chain around his neck strangling him.

  ‘He peed on my new Converse, but apart from that he was OK. Anyway, how did it go?’ Nico asked, treading on his cigarette and opening the car door. ‘Did you behave yourself?’

  ‘I modelled a dress for Princess Diana. It was so sexy,’ Romy said, ushering Banjo into the tiny back seat, before running back and picking up her bags.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Nico asked, looking down at the designer names over the top of his sunglasses.

  ‘Oh,’ Romy grinned. ‘I went shopping earlier.’

  ‘But I dropped you off—’

  ‘But I was early, so I had a snoop around. Oh my God, Nico, you won’t believe the stuff in some of these shops.’ She got into the car and put the bags on her knees, before delving inside. Nico sat in the driver’s seat.

  ‘There was this shirt,’ Romy said, pulling the Oxford stripe out of the bag. ‘I couldn’t not buy it. You’ll look amazing in it.’ She held it up against Nico’s face. ‘Much better than this silly army look. You look great in classic stuff. I thought you’d like it in white too.’

  Nico shook his head, pulling an exasperated grin. ‘You shouldn’t have. You have to stop. You have to save. The whole point about fashion is that people will give you everything for free.’

  Romy took one of the skyscraping yellow heels out of the sho
ebox and showed it to Nico. ‘But how could I leave them in the shop?’

  Nico rolled his eyes at her, then took her bags and wedged them in next to Banjo, who clamped his sharp teeth around the fancy rope handles of the shoebox. ‘You’re going to have to keep them well away from this little fella,’ he warned.

  She petted Banjo, then grinned at Nico, pulling the Aviator sunglasses out of his hair and putting them on herself, as he started the car and drove down the wide avenue.

  ‘I love Paris,’ she told Nico. ‘Isn’t this amazing? Are you really sure you don’t mind being here with me?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll make do,’ he told her, turning up the neat car stereo, then grinning at her. It was the new acid-jazz CD Romy had brought from the buskers the other night, when they’d been having dinner.

  Romy sat back in her seat, putting her sore feet up on the dashboard. She still had the scar from her run-in with Tia Blanche all that time ago, but it was fading now. Just as Tia herself was. Romy was gratified that she’d been chosen over Tia for several high-profile jobs in the last few months. The perfume campaign, with the shot of her dangling the keys on her finger as she sat on Jovo, was everywhere. She’d even seen it on a hoarding in Charles de Gaulle airport, right above Duty Free.

  Romy had insisted on splitting her fee with Jovo, her co-model, who had made enough to send his granddaughter to university and to buy a new car, he’d told Romy in his last letter.

  She was delighted, as was Tomaz, the client, who’d also been in contact to assure Romy that sales of the perfume were soaring and to tell her that if she was in the South of France in the summer to be sure to look him up in his chateau. Simona had already booked Romy in to be the face of their new make-up range, charging quadruple her normal fee. When Simona had told Romy how much she was going to get, she’d nearly fainted.

  And now that she and Nico were going to be settled in Paris, she felt as if life couldn’t get any better.

  ‘So. I have a surprise,’ Nico told her.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The apartment is ours.’

  Nico reached into his jacket pocket and threw the keys to her. Romy squealed with delight as they entered the ninth arrondissement and moved into the warren of streets, past the Moulin Rouge and the row of clubs, cabarets and bars. Pigalle certainly wasn’t the smartest place to live, but it was the most hip, and all the artists Nico knew were gathered here, where the apartments were much cheaper than in more salubrious neighbourhoods.