Fast Friends (11 page)

Those silver-grey eyes. That incredible hair. That
delicious
body. The incomprehensible female
logic of the woman. And
how could he possibly resist her unique
personality?

‘
I do,’ said Mac, smiling. ‘I do.’

Loulou, replaying the memory of that evening in her mind,
was
appalled to find that her eyes had filled
with hot, frustrated
tears. Tears were quite out of the question,
particularly at this
moment. Camilla, the new
Camilla, was making her entrance
and
it was a sure bet that she was feeling a lot worse than she
was herself Her marriage to Mac had lasted just ten
months
and Camilla had been married to
Jack for ten years. Was the
grief
magnified twelve fold, she wondered, quite unable to
assimilate how that
must feel.

Swiftly, abandoning her own gloomy thoughts, Loulou slid
down from her bar stool and moved quickly towards her friend. Apart from today’s
shopping excursion, this was Camilla’s first
venture
into the outside world as a separated woman. And it
was glaringly
obvious.

‘
You look amazing,’
Loulou told her, not quite truthfully.
The
make-up, hair and clothes were there, but Camilla still
projected her
ugly duckling mentality, her expression absolutely rigid with fear at the
thought that any minute now she might be
accused
of masquerading as a swan. It was clear that she was
still desperately
in need of self-confidence, and Loulou knew
exactly
who could give it to her. Help was at hand in the form
of Miles
Cooper-Clarke and there he was, standing not 20 feet away at the opposite end
of the bar. Now if Camilla would just
stop
looking like a terrified gerbil the evening stood a chance
of being a
success – the first small step along her long road to recovery.

Camilla, every bit as panic stricken as Loulou suspected,
avoided looking at anyone at all by concentrating
on the decor
of Vampires instead. The
first time she had been here she had
been
so overwhelmed at finding herself in the exhilarating
company of both Roz and Loulou that the wine bar
itself had
quite escaped her notice.
On this, her second sortie, she turned
her
attention entirely to the way Loulou had decorated her
renowned bar.

From the black ceiling hung a single Victorian chandelier
flinging facets of light like diamonds around the
central area
of the room. Gilt-framed
oil-paintings were hung above the
tables
bordering the room, their haunting Gothic scenes
cunningly lit from below in order to heighten their mystery.
The only other source of light was from the many
candles,
grouped together on black
plates so that the dripping crimson
wax
formed interlacing patterns, amid the stalagmite candles
of all shapes and
sizes.

The walls, too, were crimson, what
Loulou called Vampire
red, and
the black marble floor was flecked here and there with
droplets of the same crimson paint, so bloodlike – as Loulou
had told Camilla with relish – that a murder could
quite easily
go unnoticed so long as
the body was disposed of without a
fuss.

All the tables and chairs were black,
apart from two red
velvet
chesterfields which lined the entirely mirrored far wall, and these favoured
seating positions were so zealously fought
over that Loulou was frequently called upon to arbitrate
and
make the critical decision as to whom should be allowed to
occupy
them.

Camilla’s attention was diverted now by Loulou’s hand upon
her arm as with the other she hailed a customer lounging at the other end of
the gleaming black bar.

‘Hey, Miles! I wanted to introduce my friend here to a
good-
looking man, but it looks as if I’ll
have to make do with you
instead. Come over here and meet Camilla.’

Gulping down her entire glass of much needed white wine,
Camilla wished at that moment that – much as she
liked her
friend – she could gag her.
Only her trust in Loulou, who
seemed
convinced that this was the perfect way to get over
Jack, prevented her
from running out of the wine bar and back
upstairs
to the sanctuary of her bed. Maybe, just maybe, she
thought helplessly,
Loulou was right.

Miles Cooper-Clarke flashed his famous white-capped smile,
smoothed his Clark Gable moustache with a
practised gesture,
and was only
slightly put out by the realization that the
attractive, well-rounded blonde whom Loulou wished him to
meet was looking not at him, but determinedly down
at her
feet. A shy one, was she? No
problem there, he decided,
relishing
the challenge! The quiet women were always the
wildest once he succeeded in persuading them to drop their
guard.

Oh God no, thought Camilla as Miles
and his liberally
applied cologne
arrived before her. Eau Sauvage was what she had bought Jack for years,
although he wasn’t much of a cologne man and had only worn it under protest.
Still, she must have
unscrewed the bottle on
his dresser a hundred times to inhale
the clean-smelling scent and since
he had never worn any other kind, she couldn’t help but associate it with him.

Enchantée, mademoiselle,’
said Miles, who had been born
and brought up in Kent. He bowed and extended an
alarmingly well-manicured hand towards Camilla, who felt sick.

‘Oh, cut the crap, Miles,’ Loulou intervened, glimpsing
the
panicked expression in her friend’s eyes.
‘No need to push the
boat out, she isn’t that rich. Just be nice, for
God’s sake.
Normal
nice.’

‘
Who’s normal and nice
in Knightsbridge?’ riposted Miles,
but he toned down the megawatt smile
for Camilla’s benefit and shook her hand in a purely businesslike fashion.
Miles Cooper-Clarke wasn’t a gigolo, he just happened to find wealthy women
more interesting and somehow more attractive than poor ones.
And if it gave these dear wealthy women pleasure
to buy him
gifts, or to pay for their more extravagant outings together,
how
could it be wrong to refuse them? Loulou’s
friend was well
dressed, but she didn’t possess the vibes that told him
she was
wealthy, and judging by the look of
thinly disguised terror in
her rather
pretty eyes he guessed that she was either newly
separated from her husband or just out of a long-term affair.
He’d seen that look of vulnerability too often
before not to
recognize it.

‘Camilla. Why don’t we just ignore Loulou and get to know
each other? What would you like to drink?’

This isn’t working, Camilla told
herself, trying hard not to
panic. I
can’t sit here and pretend I’m enjoying myself. Oh, how could Loulou do this to
me?

‘
On the house,’ said
Loulou firmly, plonking a carafe of
white wine on the bar between them. ‘And
I’m going to have to
leave you now because
apparently some joker has just emptied
his dinner plate over his
boyfriend’s head in the restaurant. See you later.’

She disappeared through the door to
the restaurant and
Camilla felt as if her
oxygen line had been cut. Her knuckles turned white as she watched Miles refill
her glass. Just pretend
he’s a business
colleague of Jack’s and you’ve got to make
polite conversation with him, she instructed herself fiercely.
You’ve
done it often enough before, after all. Ask him about his family, his home, his
career and look
interested.
It’ll be all over soon, like the dentist ..
.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ asked Miles, interrupting
her disorganized thoughts, and Camilla turned white.

‘
Talk about what?’

‘
Whatever it is that’s
making you look as if you’re sitting in
the electric chair
waiting for the switch to be pulled.’ He had
spotted the wedding ring by now, and past experience had
taught him that women liked to talk about their problems. He listened,
let them realize that he was on their side, and
gradually they
began to treat him
like a friend. Then, once they had learnt to
trust him it was easy to
get them into bed. And this one, even if
she
didn’t have money, looked as if she might be worth it
anyway.

‘
Your husband,’ prompted Miles. ‘My guess is
that he ran off with another woman. Am I right?’

’This is
becoming a bit of a habit,’ said Loulou severely, eyeing Camilla like a
schoolmistress although the effect was somewhat
spoilt by the fact that she was naked. ‘Now I’m not saying that
it’s
necessarily a bad habit, but when I buy a carafe of wine I’d
rather it was drunk than poured over a customer.
Next time try
and hang on until
they’ve
bought one.’

Chapter 10

‘
I’m
sorry, Lou.’

‘
Don’t be sorry, darling. It was all quite in keeping with
the
atmosphere of Vampires, after all. But
what on earth did poor
old Miles do to deserve it?’

Camilla, who had been crying for four
hours, wiped her
bloodshot eyes with
the edge of the duvet and shook her head.

‘Nothing, really. I’m just not ready for men like him yet.
He asked me if my husband had run off with another woman and made it sound so .
. . commonplace . . . that I couldn’t stand it. It was just as if he was
guessing what I’d eaten for breakfast!’

‘Oh, baby,’ said Loulou sympathetically, patting Camilla’s
heaving shoulder. ‘I suppose to Miles, it is
commonplace. Like
he said, who’s nice and normal in Knightsbridge?
Probably only you.’

‘
Will he complain about
his suit being ruined?’ sniffed
Camilla,
her conscience beginning to prick her, and Loulou
laughed.

‘
It was clever of you
to have thrown white wine over him,
not red. If it makes you feel better
you can pay for it to be dry
cleaned, but I
wouldn’t. It’ll teach him to be less insensitive
next time.’

Camilla shivered beneath the
bedclothes. "There won’t be a
next time
if I can help it.’

‘Not you, dopey. I meant the next woman he meets. Every
forty-five seconds,’ she lied, improvising rapidly,
‘another
marriage in London bites the dust. That means an awful lot of
grieving women falling prey to the so-called
charms of men
like Miles. You have to
realize that you aren’t the only one,
Cami. It helps, truly it does.’

‘
Why is it always the
women who have to suffer?’
said
Camilla resentfully. ‘Don’t the men ever go through it
too?’

Loulou thought for a moment about her
own ex-husbands.
‘I
think so,’ she mused. ‘A lot don’t. But a few of them . . . I
think they suffer as much as women. In
a different way,
somehow. But I promise
you, Cami. Some men
do
go through it too.’

The Christmas spirit was beginning to get through to her at last, Camilla
realized with relief, although at the same time
she still felt vaguely
guilty, as if she didn’t deserve to feel this cheerful. Yesterday she had seen
her children for the first time
since
leaving home two weeks ago and tomorrow she would see them again to give them
their Christmas presents before
Jack
drove them to Yorkshire to spend the holiday with his
parents and their noisy, cheerful family. Toby and
Charlotte
adored their grandparents
and innumerable relations and were
so
excited by the prospect of seeing them that they had
scarcely seemed to
register the fact that Camilla would not be going with them.

The realization had both hurt and reassured her. Her own
children, whom she was now missing terribly, didn’t
seem to
mind at all that their mother
had ‘gone away for a holiday’,
greeting
her as casually as if she had just returned from a visit
to the supermarket, yet at the same time Camilla
knew that it
was far better for all of them that it should be like that.
If Toby
and Charlotte had clung to her,
weeping and pleading with her
not to leave, she would have been
distraught, not knowing what to do.