Going La La (33 page)

‘And what about yours, Frankie?’

Taking the bag from Dorian, Frankie delved inside. ‘Well, here goes.’ She smiled wryly, breaking open the cookie. ‘It says, “A surprise is just around the corner.” ’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah right. What surprise?’

‘If you knew that, it wouldn’t be one.’

Frankie jumped. It was a voice. A man’s voice. A familiar voice.

She turned round to see where it was coming from. And there in the shadows, standing at the entrance of the balcony, was Reilly.

‘You didn’t hear me knocking the music was so loud, so I let myself in.’ Running his fingers through his hair, he smiled nervously. ‘I managed to get a flight back from Veracruz. Better late than never, hey?’ His voice was apologetic and he looked nervously at Frankie, who’d stood up and was staring at him in disbelief. Smears of dirt and mud coated his jeans and T-shirt and his skin was scorched a deep tan. Chunks of sun-bleached hair fell on to his face, while his stubble had grown into a thick, dark beard coating his chin and throat. He looked more dishevelled and messier than ever, but it didn’t stop her stomach flipping over like an Olympic gymnast.

She hesitated, not knowing what to say or do. Her heart was telling her one thing, but her head was telling her another. It was Reilly who made the first move. Bending down, he scooped her up and, holding her tight, buried his head in her hair. ‘Boy, did I miss you.’ It was the Christmas present Frankie had been waiting for.

Hugh knew he couldn’t wait any longer. His gran and Great-aunt Prudence were absolutely right. Why hadn’t he realised it before? It was as if he’d spent the last couple of months struggling through a difficult exam and now two old-age pensioners had just shown him all the answers. Shown him what he had to do.

‘Thanks,’ he whispered, kissing his gran and Great-aunt Pru on their powdery, lavender-scented cheeks before jumping up from the sofa, stepping over Belinda and Jerry, who were singing along to Thomas with a twin in each lap.

‘Mum, I’m going.’ Grabbing his mother as she reappeared from the kitchen with half a Christmas cake and her antique bone-china cups, he gave her a quick hug.

‘What?’ Her pearls bobbed up and down round her neck as she watched him disappearing down the hallway. ‘But I’ve just made more tea and Daddy wanted us to play
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
later. Why have you got to leave so early? Where are you going?’

Without missing a beat, Hugh opened the front door, letting in a blast of icy wind. ‘Los Angeles.’

35

Frankie couldn’t remember whose idea it had been to go to Las Vegas for the millennium. It was probably Dorian’s. But then it could have been Rita’s. To be honest, after Reilly’s appearance, the rest of Christmas Day had become a bit of a blur.

Nevertheless, here she was at three p.m. on New Year’s Eve, cuddled up next to Reilly on the back seat of Dorian’s brand-new Ford Expedition – a Christmas present to himself – gazing out of the tinted windows as they pulled off Highway 15. Rising before her out of the dusty desert was a neon-flashing strip of glittering hotels and their larger-than-life casinos. Huge self-contained fantasy lands where the religion was gambling, the language was money and time was measured by the revolutions of a roulette wheel. Frankie felt a flutter of excitement. So this was Las Vegas.

‘Bloody hell, it’s a bit better than Blackpool illuminations,’ gasped Rita, as Dorian pulled up outside Caesar’s Palace and they emerged from the coolness of the airconditioning and into the baking heat of the Nevada desert.

‘Are we staying here?’ whispered Frankie, taken aback as the shiny-shoed, waistcoated porters swept down upon them and began loading up their luggage. She’d been expecting to stay at some cheap twenty-bucks-a-night motel with fag burns in the carpet, quilted headboards and cellulite-enhancing aquarium lighting in the bathroom. Despite its neon tackiness, this place didn’t look cheap.

‘Absolutely,’ chirped Dorian, doing his hamstring stretches, as if he was limbering up for a marathon. Catching her worried expression, he let out a snort of laughter. ‘Don’t look so worried. It’s on me.’

‘Dorian’s a high roller,’ yawned Reilly, who’d been asleep since Death Valley. Blinking in the bright sunlight, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘In Vegas that’s the name they give to the big gamblers.’ Grabbing his dusty Stetson, he put his arm around Frankie’s shoulder, pulling her towards him as they followed the porters scurrying across the forecourt. ‘The casinos love him,’ he whispered, sleepily nuzzling into her neck.

Dorian overheard as he marched ahead towards the entrance. ‘You won’t have to pay for anything. Hotels, room service, food, drink . . . it’s all free,’ he declared, waving his arms enthusiastically around in the air as if he was conducting his own symphony.

‘
Free?’
parroted Rita, trying to keep up in her skyscraper heels as they were ushered on to the moving walkway that swept them past a full-size replica of Michelangelo’s
David
. She made a mental note to buy herself a pair of shoes she could actually walk in – after being in LA for six months she’d got out of the habit. ‘
Everything?
’

‘Only if you play your cards right,’ smirked Dorian, suggestively slipping his arm around her waist as they entered a vast labyrinth of slot machines, mirrors, multicoloured lights and green baize.

Rita pulled a face. Something told her he wasn’t talking poker.

As Dorian steered Rita deftly through the sliding doors and into the smoked-glass VIP reception area, Frankie loitered behind, gazing at the rows of shorts’n’vest brigade with buckets of dimes, feeding the slot machines like animals at the zoo. ‘Do you gamble?’ She looked up at Reilly.

‘Sometimes. It depends if I’m feeling lucky.’

‘And are you?’ Her voice was quiet against the jingly, jangly soundtrack of the amusement arcade which sprawled out before them in all directions, as far as the eye could see.

Reilly couldn’t help smiling. Ever since that night at his house, he hadn’t been able to believe how lucky he was. That someone like Frankie would be interested in someone like him. Putting both arms around her waist, he pulled her closer. ‘What do you think?’

Over the last week, Frankie had broken every rule of the dating game: 1) leaving seventy-two hours between each phone call, 2) inventing a hectic social life when arranging a date and 3) playing it cool and
not
inviting him in for coffee even if you’re gagging for it – and instead had spent every moment, waking and sleeping, with Reilly. For the first time in her adult life, she’d ignored what all those women’s magazines, her best mate Rita and years of experience had taught her about how to keep a bloke guessing with all those complicated bluffs and double bluffs. She didn’t want to play games. She just wanted to be with Reilly. It was as simple as that.

And so throwing the rulebook out of the window, they’d spent every day together. Days walking barefoot along Malibu beach watching the dolphins turning somersaults over the surf, driving to Santa Barbara in his beaten-up Bronco and drinking beer as the sun set in orange and pink marbled streaks over the eighteenth-century Mission high on the hill. Evenings spent having barbecues in his garden – her with her veggie burgers and Chardonnay, him with his sixteen-ounce steaks and Jack Daniel’s – and afterwards curling up like cats in his hammock, swapping childhood stories, looking at old photographs and talking about their lives until their words turned into drunken kisses and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other any longer.

Frankie was completely unprepared for any of it. After Hugh she’d never expected to find someone who could make her laugh one minute and feel horny as hell the next. Everything was too good to be true, even the sex was amazing. Not in a gymnastic, throwing-your-head-back-and-wailing-to-the-moon kind of way, but in a deliciously intimate, unhurried, Barry White feel-like-we’re-making-love kind of way.

But wasn’t it always supposed to be great in the beginning? Lying naked next to Reilly one afternoon, bathed in the afterglow of orgasm and stubble burn, Frankie pondered the question. The beginning of what? She stopped herself right there before she got carried away by the lust and thrust of it all. If splitting up with Hugh had taught her one thing, it was that relationships couldn’t be predicted. There were no guarantees. Who knew what would happen in the future?

After all, it wasn’t as if she and Reilly had talked about how they felt about each other. They hadn’t had any of those awkward ‘what happens now?’ chats, where each person is afraid to say how they feel, in case they’ve completely misjudged the situation and the other person feels exactly the opposite. Maybe Rita was right, maybe it was just a fling and she was reading too much into it. Maybe Reilly was only interested in a fling. A few weeks of sex, with no strings attached. Looking at it from his point of view, he probably assumed it was just a holiday romance, something short and intense, and that it would be over as soon as she left LA.

The thought saddened her and she stared up at the ceiling. So much had happened over the past couple of weeks, it was difficult to know what to think. But one thing was for certain, she couldn’t stay in LA for ever. Very soon she was going to have to face the grim reality of going back to London and trying to pick up the pieces of her life. Finding a room to rent, paying off her debts, probably signing up with a temp agency until she sorted out what to do about her career. She sighed. Just thinking about it depressed her. Turning her head against the pillow, she looked across at Reilly, his bare torso half covered by a sheet, and she couldn’t help smiling. For the moment reality could wait.

‘I think I’m going to burst,’ mumbled Dorian, abandoning a king prawn and pushing away a plate piled high with translucent pink carcasses. ‘I can’t eat another thing.’

‘Me neither,’ groaned Reilly, eating the last mouthful of steak and leaning back against his chair. He would have loosened his belt if he’d had one.

Lunch had been Dorian’s idea, even though it was after four o’clock, and so after checking in to their lavish penthouse suites they’d gone downstairs to find something to eat. Less than an hour later they’d become victims of the Las Vegas buffet. A huge, winding zigzag of tables groaning with mounds of seafood which jostled alongside gigantic platters of cold meats, cheeses, breads, salads, fruits, which in turn led into avenues of chiller cabinets of shiny desserts glistening under the lights – cheesecake, gâteaux, Mississippi mud pies, chocolate chip cookies . . . The calories just went on and on and on.

Faced with more food than Sainsbury’s, Frankie had been taken aback. So this was where people from LA went to pig out when they’d had enough of the Zone. Forget less is more. This was gimme more, and more and more, until I simply can’t eat any more. And all for $6.99.

‘Anyone for pudding?’ yelled Rita, from the dessert counter. For the first time since puberty, she wasn’t on a diet, and it was all thanks to the director of
Malibu Motel
, who, after being struck with the ‘totally awesome’ idea of making Tracy Potter a
plump
British receptionist, had instructed her to put on ten pounds. Ironically, in a cruel twist of fate, now that she’d been given free rein to eat anything she wanted without feeling guilty, Rita had discovered she didn’t want to and had lost three pounds in a week.

Ignoring the Mississippi mud pie, she reappeared with a bowl of fruit salad. ‘You didn’t answer so I’ve got four spoons and we can all dig in,’ she breezed, plonking the bowl down on the table. Forget Del Monte and a few diced-up bits of pear with a fluorescent pink cocktail cherry thrown in for colour, this was a delicious combination of exotic fruits.

‘Thanks, but I’m going to have to pass.’ Holding up his hands in defeat, Dorian stood up. Catching sight of his silhouette in the wall-to-wall mirrors, he tried adjusting the waistband of velvet trousers that had suddenly become more than a little snug. And then gave up and put his jacket back on. ‘Anyone fancy a game of blackjack?’

‘Yeah, why not?’ said Reilly, scraping back his chair. It was a couple of years since he’d been to Vegas and he was in the mood for gambling. Especially seeing as they were with Dorian, whose reputation preceded him like a red carpet. Since they’d arrived they’d been getting lots of nodding, smiling and any-friends-of-Mr-Wilde-are-always-welcome-type handshakes.

‘Come on, guys, it’s time to watch the professional at work.’

‘Only on one condition,’ said Rita, chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of kumquat.

Dorian paused in anticipation. Perhaps his persistence had paid off. ‘What?’

‘This time you’ve got to keep your clothes on.’ Rita let out a snort of laughter that boomeranged around the restaurant, causing the rest of the diners to pause mid-mouthful and stare across at Dorian, who’d blushed the colour of his raspberry velvet suit.

Trying to hide his acute embarrassment at being reminded of his humiliating defeat at strip poker, Dorian gave a tight-lipped smile. He had a delicate ego and he bruised easily. Something which Rita seemed to delight in. Turning on his Gucci loafers, he set off towards the bright lights of the casino. Something told him she was never going to let him live that down.

36

Walking into the casino was like entering another world. A completely sealed environment where plastic chips replaced money, natural daylight was replaced by multicoloured neon, and the absence of any clocks meant that time had no meaning and the outside world ceased to exist. Lost in a maze of bottle-green baize, roulette wheels and crystal chandeliers, everyone was suddenly equal. From the dinner-jacketed multi-millionaires on their red velvet thrones gambling with hundred-thousand-dollar chips to the peroxide OAPs on metals buffets betting dimes, everybody was pursuing the same goal. Everybody was hoping that on the next turn of the card or yank of a slot-machine handle they’d strike it lucky, hit the jackpot, win a million. And if it didn’t happen this time, it could be the next, or the next, or the next. No wonder Vegas was addictive.