Beaumont Brides Collection (86 page)

‘Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll try something even more outrageous.’

‘You won’t fool me a second time. Meet me here at seven if you decide to come.’

‘Well, gee, thanks Richard,’ she murmured to his departing back. That had to be about the least gracious invitation she’d ever received. And he hadn’t offered to pay for the coffee either, she noticed.

Well, what had she expected? Had she gone to all that trouble simply so that Richard Latham would tell her what a clever girl she was for fooling everyone with her disguise? That had been easy. She flipped open her shoulder bag to pay for the coffee, anxious to be away.

Inside the little pocket at the back was the coin she had tossed. She had chosen risk without even looking and now it seemed to mock her. And she refused to be mocked.

Richard was right. It was all very well dressing up and fooling one’s friends, but that was just like one of those stupid television programmes. All you had to do was smile and say “Got you!” and it was over. And so what?

*****

Busy Bees was situated in a building just one step up from a garage, in a street that could only be described as uninviting. Melanie, standing on the pavement outside had a sudden failing of confidence.

What on earth was she doing there? She didn’t want a job. She just wanted to prove to Richard that she was capable of getting one.

Yet having taken so much trouble with her appearance, her clothes, her story it seemed crazy to turn round and walk away. Instead she took a deep breath, pushed open the door to the office and having abandoned her Australian accent in case it caused awkward queries about work permits, asked the woman sitting behind a desk if they had any vacancies.

‘What can you do?’

‘Cleaning?’ she suggested, with just a touch of irony.

Janet Graham, the dour Scots woman who ran the place sighed. ‘Cleaning. Of course. And have you any experience, Miss Devlin?’

Melanie considered that an odd question. Didn’t everyone? Her mother had certainly made a point of ensuring she knew one end of a vacuum cleaner from another and the proper way to clean a sink. She suspected it had been her way of keeping her daughter’s feet firmly on the ground. ‘Of course I’ve experience, I’m a woman,’ she replied, as if that was sufficient.

The look she received for her pains was searching. Flippancy, it said, was not appreciated. ‘I meant professional experience. You don’t look like a cleaner.’

‘Don’t I?’ She didn’t know that cleaners had a special look. She should have studied for the part. ‘I’ll put some rollers in my hair and tie it up with a scarf if that will help,’ Mel offered, deciding that since she was obviously not going to get a job she might as well have some fun developing her character.

‘That won’t be necessary. If we take you on we supply a uniform. With a cap,’ she added, giving Mel’s hair a glance of disapproval. She’d decided to cut the wig into a slightly spiky style.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Devlin. Melanie Devlin.’ Well, it was the name she had been born with. The name still on her passport. The name that would cause her the least amount of trouble.

‘And have you any references?’

‘Not for cleaning.’

‘Somehow, Miss Devlin, that doesn’t surprise me.’ But she picked up a card from the desk in front of her and tapped it thoughtfully against her thumb. ‘Could you do a job straight away?’

‘Now?’ Suddenly it wasn’t quite so funny. Either flippancy was the stock-in-trade of cleaners, or Janet Graham was desperate. Pushed to decide, Mel would have come down on the side of desperate.

‘It’s an emergency post-party clean-up that’s just come in,’ she said, immediately confirming Melanie’s judgment of the situation. ‘If you do a good job, I’ll think about taking you on.’

A post-party clean-up? Melanie’s stomach quelled at the thought of what might be expected. She could be lying in the sun right now. And yet she felt something close to excitement too.

Until now her life had been oddly sheltered for an actress and this felt, if not exactly dangerous, certainly different enough to make her stomach flutter with something very like stage fright. And it would show Richard Latham.

‘No problem,’ she said, taking the card with the job details. She could buy a pair of rubber gloves on the way.

The address to which Melanie had been directed was on the top floor of a converted warehouse overlooking the Thames not far from Tower Bridge.

Expensive, large and the furnishings suggested an austerity of taste that she might have approved of, but since most of them were buried beneath the detritus of what must have been a long-sustained and well attended party, it was difficult to tell.

‘Yes? What is it?’ Melanie considered the young man who had opened the door, his eyes blood-shot, his demeanour suggesting the kind of hangover that required a long period of undisturbed silence in a darkened room.

‘Mr Wolfe?’ she enquired, politely, although there was no doubt that she had come to the right address. Wolfe? She’d heard that name somewhere recently.

‘Yes. Look, if you’ve come to complain about the noise...’ - he put his hand to his head - ‘...the party’s over.’

‘I can see that and I haven’t come to complain. I am Miss Devlin.’ She introduced herself, crisply. Then she took a deep breath. ‘I’m a Busy Bee.’ Somewhere, deep down inside, she considered what she had just said. And she couldn’t believe it. If Richard could see her now, he’d probably die laughing.

‘A what?’ Then, ‘Good grief, are you the cleaner? I thought you’d be older -’ Pained by the sound of his own voice, the young man evidently decided he didn’t care how old she was. Instead he put his hand to his head.

‘Does it matter? You sent for help and you certainly look as if you need it.’

‘Yes, well, you’d better come in and make a start,’ he said, returning to an agonized whisper. ‘Jack will be home in a couple of hours.’

‘Jack?’

‘My brother. This is his place. He insisted I stay here while he was away but he’ll kill me if he finds it in this state.’

‘From the look of you he’d be doing you a favour.’ She looked around at the mess. ‘What happened?’

‘A few college friends dropped round.’ He winced, waved him arm vaguely at the disarray. ‘Look, just do your best will you. I’m going back to bed.’

‘Bed?’ Losing sight of the fact that she was supposed to be a humble cleaner, Mel turned on the hapless young man. ‘You’re not going to bed. You made this mess and if you want it cleaned up in a couple of hours, you’re going to have to send for reinforcements, or give me a hand. Frankly I don’t think even the Seventh Cavalry could arrive in time to save you.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. Come along Mr -’ She paused, unable to seriously envisage calling this young fool Mr all afternoon. ‘What’s your first name?’ she asked.

He leaned towards her confidentially. ‘I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.’ And then he giggled.

‘Oh, God,’ she sighed.

‘No, not god. Tom. Your turn.’

‘Melanie,’ she said.

‘Menalie ... Milenie ...’ He gathered himself and launched himself into the word. ‘Melanie. Nice name.’

‘I’m glad you like it. And now we’ve got that out of the way, you’d better come with me.’

‘Have a heart, Melanie -’ But she had taken him firmly by the wrist and was already wading through the bottles littering the floor in her quest for the ingredients to make a swift, if brutal hangover cure that was famous at the television studios where the soap opera she had once starred in was recorded.

Since she had always been stone cold sober she had become a dab hand at making it for everyone else. It was scarcely any wonder that Richard thought she was boringly sweet and virginal. She was beginning to think he was right.

First she propped her unhappy employer against the central island in the kitchen.

‘Stay there,’ she commanded, using much the same tone she would use on a badly behaved puppy, then she began to assemble the gruesome concoction in a glass. With one last twist of the pepper mill she turned back to the suffering young man. ‘Drink this,’ she commanded.

‘You’re joking?’ One look at her face warned him that she wasn’t doing any such thing and he shifted his blood shot eyes to the mixture she was offering him. ‘What is it?’ he asked, taking the glass and sniffing at it suspiciously.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ she lied without shame. ‘Just take a deep breath and swallow it down in one go.’

The effect was immediate and a few seconds later he shuddered, turned pale and ran.

Mel, meantime, began flinging bottles, half eaten pizzas and take-away curry cartons into a plastic sack without the least consideration for her employer’s aching head. Her sympathy was entirely with his brother.

By the time Tom had returned from the bathroom still pale, but shocked out of his stupor, she was beginning to cut a swathe through the debris.

‘Go and dump these while I start on the glasses,’ she ordered, indicating the full sacks, then, as she spotted another pile of take-away cartons she stopped him. ‘Wait. Pass me those, will you?’ she said.

He groaned, nevertheless he turned to obey, but his hands, still unsteady, fumbled and the cartons wobbled and slipped. ‘Oh, heck.’

Mel’s carefully chosen outfit may not have been the height of fashion, but it had been clean. Splattered from neck to hem in curry sauce, “heck” was not the first word that sprang to her mind as the smell rose to overwhelm her. And she didn’t feel in the least bit sweet.

‘Find me something to wear,’ she said, and without stopping to consider the effect of her actions on an impressionable young man, she stripped off the t-shirt and skirt before it soaked through to her underwear, then bent to unlace her boots so that she could divest herself of the black tights which had taken the worst of the spill.

Tom hadn’t moved. Her outer garments might have been hideous, her underwear, lace edged oyster satin, was anything but. ‘A t-shirt, an old pair of jeans?’ she suggested, quickly, realizing rather too late that she might have been a little precipitate in shedding her clothes.

‘Right.’ He swallowed. ‘Er - can I say that you’re a great improvement on any Mrs Mop I’ve met before.’ He was definitely on the mend.

Melanie hid her satisfaction at this indication of recovery, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

‘And you’re an authority on the subject, I suppose.’ He blushed painfully and she realized, with a sudden rush of sympathy, that he was younger than she first thought. Nineteen or twenty, perhaps. No more. ‘Maybe I’m not everyone’s idea of Mrs Mop,’ she allowed, a little more kindly, ‘but I’m not working in my underwear.’

‘Gosh, no,’ he repeated. Definitely younger than he looked. ‘A t-shirt. I’ll find one.’

‘And some jeans.’

‘Jeans.’ He backed out of the kitchen, presumably in order to keep her satin clad figure in sight for as long as possible and she finally favoured him with an encouraging smile that displayed her dimple to its best effect. ‘Oh, my God,’ he mumbled.

Realizing that the dimple might have been a mistake, Melanie made a strategic withdrawal to luxurious cloakroom near the front door and accepted his offering of clothing, with belated modesty, through the door.

The jeans, soft from much use, were a mile too long and she had to roll them up over her ankles. The t-shirt had seen better days too and came down to her knees. Scarcely flattering.

Melanie gave her wig a tug to make sure it was still firmly in place and then regarded her reflection with disfavour, wondering what Trudy would make of her transformation from soap queen to Cinderella. Personally, Melanie had always considered that Cinderella was a bit of a wimp.

Stopping at home to do the cleaning while everyone else had the fun was not, in her opinion, a proper role model for the modern girl. Still, if she was ever induced to play Cinderella, she’d be able to give real authority to the part. And giving the jeans one final hitch up, she returned to the fray.

She looked around her and took a deep breath.

She’d transformed her own appearance comprehensively, and it was to be hoped she could do an equally dramatic job of transforming the flat or young Tom was going to be in trouble when his brother came home.

She’d never had a big brother, but Luke had come close and it didn’t require much in the way of imagination to work out what his reaction would have been if she’d got his place into this kind of mess. With that thought to inspire her, she set to work.

Tom, still dazzled by the vision of Melanie in her underwear seemed to have forgotten his hangover and he made a start on rubbish disposal while she began gathering up the glasses and after that things seemed to go remarkably well.

She was beginning to feel a real sense of satisfaction in restoring order out of the chaos, completing forgetting her subservient role as she bossed Tom around without a thought for her role.

Another hour of hard work and Melanie began to congratulate herself that not even the most discerning eye would be able to tell there had ever been a party.

‘Er, there’s upstairs,’ Tom said, when Melanie suggested they might treat themselves to a cup of coffee.