River Deep (27 page)

‘Oh yeah, but not to Christian, duh! I don’t even know him!’ She wondered if the hint of Becca had possibly been a bit over the top. ‘Nooo. Actually, I haven’t mentioned him before, but there’s this bloke I’m seeing. Pete, his name is. And well the thing
is
,’ Maggie said. ‘The thing
is
that he’s engaged, but his fiancée upped and went to the other side of the world
for a year
the day after he proposed to her …’

‘No!’ Louise was open-mouthed.

‘I know! It’s obvious she’s just stringing him along, but he can’t see it. He
loves
her, apparently.’ Maggie rolled her eyes for dramatic effect. ‘We’re supposed to be having this no-strings-attached sex thing, but I know I could make him twenty-five times happier than her. He just can’t see what’s right for him, do you see?’ Maggie finished.

‘Oh, I do see,’ Louise said. ‘Christian and I were supposed to be having a no-strings-attached sex thing and then we just went right ahead and fell in love anyway. Couldn’t help it. How come you never mentioned him before?’

Maggie wondered what her chances of getting off for the double homicide of Louise and Christian would be if she cited temporary insanity. Slim to nil, she guessed regretfully.

‘Um, because, well, I’m older than you and I can handle it and besides we came here to talk about you, not me.’ Maggie smiled warmly and was caught off guard as Louise reached for her hand and squeezed it before letting it go.

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I am so lucky to have met someone like you. Someone older and wiser and so kind. It’s not often you meet someone and you just know you can trust them, sort of instantly, don’t you think? Mind you, they say calamity – like getting trapped in an office – can bring people together.’ Louise giggled. ‘I wish I could get you and Christian together, then maybe you could talk some sense into him. You’re such an insightful person, I bet he’d listen to you.’

With murder out of the question, Maggie wondered what would happen if she had a heart attack right then. She’d probably die; it’d be a nightmare getting an ambulance across the centre of London on a Saturday. Still, anything was preferable to this stupid bloody ridiculous mess she’d got herself into.

Unable to take the pressure any longer, Maggie was about to confess when something unexpected happened. As if delivered direct from heaven, Pete dropped into the chair next to her with a cheery ‘All right? I didn’t think you’d be here for ages yet. It’s cool, though, because there’s only so long you can window shop in
Agent Provocateur
without looking like a perve!’ Pete was completely unaware of the open-mouthed awe he was attracting from every member of every sex in the immediate vicinity as he leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. He did look particularly fine, Maggie supposed, in his tight pale blue T-shirt with his skin all brown and warm and firm. She pulled herself abruptly out of
that
runaway train of thought and back to the problem in hand.

What was Pete doing here so early? She wasn’t supposed to meet him for an hour yet, and Louise was supposed to be well gone! Besides, even if she had been about to confess to Louise, at least that would have been her own (admittedly ridiculous) idea. The last thing she wanted was the humiliation of Pete accidentally blowing her cover for her.

‘You’re early!’ She sounded slightly accusatory, and Pete looked slightly taken aback.

‘Well, I thought as I was meeting you up here I’d come a bit early and check out the studios where I’ve got my interview on Tuesday.’ He nodded towards Wardour Street. ‘They’re just up the road. I thought it’d be a good idea to scope it out, try and beat the nerves and all that.’ He directed a quick smile at an entranced Louise, and then, as he did a double-take, Maggie witnessed him unleash the full force of his smile on the girl. His blue-eyed gaze almost burned a trail, Superman style, across the table top cluttered with purses and coffee cups, over Louise’s torso and directly into her come-to-bed eyes.

Maggie was surprised and more than a little disappointed that Louise didn’t spontaneously combust. She rolled her eyes churlishly and sighed. For the first time in her life she understood what people meant when they banged on about levels of attractiveness. Here were two people from the very top level displaying open admiration for each other. And the worst thing, or maybe the best thing, was that Pete had absolutely no idea that he was doing it, she was certain, because he just wasn’t the type to have a pulling look or a chat-up line. It must be some deep primaeval impulse within him to get hold of the nearest woman who looked the most likely to be able to breastfeed fifteen children, Stella or no Stella.

‘This is
Pete
.’ Maggie said flatly, emphasising his name as he reached out and took Louise’s hand. She found she wanted her to know that as far as she was concerned, Pete was spoken for.

Louise shot Maggie a quick ‘what-a-hottie’ glance, and Maggie remembered what mortal danger all of her plans were in.

‘Pete,’ she said quickly, ‘this is
Louise
, remember, who I was telling you about last night?’ She tried to weave a secret message into the sentence but ended up sounding as if she were talking to a slightly retarded four-year-old.

‘Oh yeah,’ Pete said brightly, and then he remembered what they had talked about. ‘Oh!
Yeah
.’ He nodded in a none-too-subtle way at Maggie. ‘Hi!’ he said again to Louise, as if she was now an entirely different person. Maggie wondered if she should have tested his undercover skills a bit more thoroughly before embarking on the night’s planned expedition, but she couldn’t think about that now, she had to think about the situation in hand.

‘Well, Carmen!’ Louise said, helpfully reminding Pete of Maggie’s pseudonym. She didn’t seem to think any further comment was required, and Maggie understood her implicit admiration for Pete. Maggie smiled wearily and noticed that now a full one hundred per cent of the café’s occupants were checking out her table in one way or another. And none of them were looking at her, she’d lay money on it.

‘So, Pete.’ Louise leaned towards Pete a little and Maggie noticed she used the tops of her arms to squeeze her ample bust together just a little to emphasise her already deep cleavage. ‘What do you do for a living?’

Maggie was gratified to see Pete’s eyes widen slightly with alarm as Louise focused on him. As for Louise, in love with Christian or not, it seemed that just being near an attractive man started her flirt ignition. It was hard to work her out. One minute she was poor, lovelorn, grief-stricken child, and the next she was a full-on nuclear reactor of sexual power. Pete, she noted with a sort of off-key pride, seemed to be more intent on explaining to her the intricate workings of something called Avid that he did on admiring her charms, and, while her smile remained attentive, Maggie noticed Louise’s eyes had begun to glaze over.

‘Anyway.’ Pete finished talking and disarmed Maggie in a single manoeuvre by dropping his hand on to her knee and squeezing it. ‘Do you want to get going? I know it’s only early, but I thought we could have cocktails at the bar while it’s still quiet and then go on for dinner. Seafood, maybe?’

Maggie stared at him and then at his hand on her knee. It didn’t feel as strange as Declan’s hand, which had been on exactly the same knee only a short time ago. In fact it felt sort of nice and tingly. She was beginning to wonder exactly how Pete saw her when she realised that … Pete from Leeds drinking cocktails and going out for seafood? He was far too much of a lager and curry man for all that nonsense.

Pete caught Maggie’s eye and raised an anxious eyebrow, confirming her suspicion that he was looking for the quickest way to get away from Louise’s unrelenting magnetism. He was actually scared of her. Typical, Maggie thought. No one is ever scared of me. He just wanted her to help him lose Louise.

‘Ooooh, where are you two going? Anywhere fancy?’ Louise asked Pete, clearly fishing for an invite and excluding Maggie from the question. She jumped a little in her chair as she said it and her breasts made the return journey a split second after the rest of her body. Even Pete couldn’t help noticing that little ploy.

Maggie almost growled out loud. The little minx had already got her claws into one man in her life. She certainly wasn’t going to get Pete too.

Of course, if Maggie had been thinking straight she’d have thought that Louise’s obvious attraction to Pete was a way for her to distract her from Christian and get her to take her eye of the ball, whilst Maggie made her move on Christian and got him back for good. But Maggie wasn’t thinking straight. She was barely thinking at all.

‘Oh,’ Pete said cheerily. ‘We’re going to this bar up the road. I’ve never been before, but … Carmen says it’s really cool. It’s called The Drinking Den? Do you know it?’

Louise nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yeah! One of Christian’s mates runs it!’ she said.

‘You should come too,’ Pete said, clearly realising what he’d said only after it had left his mouth. He shot Maggie an apologetic look. She ignored him carefully, afraid of what her eyes might give away. She couldn’t tell if he was being deliberately stupid or just idiotically friendly, but right at that moment she could have killed him with her bare hands. Apart from the fact that he was supposed to be seeing
her
behind his fiancée’s back she had no way of knowing if Paul, the bar manager, had ever met Louise. If he had, and he saw Louise, Maggie, who was also known as Carmen, and Pete all together at the same time in the same place, everything would hit the fan all at once, and it wouldn’t be pretty. Maggie’s cover would be blown in two seconds flat and she’d have to retire to a nunnery. In Austria. No, she couldn’t let that happen.

‘Ah! But,’ Maggie jumped in quickly, ‘you said Christian is taking you out tonight, you know, for the big talk? You don’t want to miss that, do you? Or to let him down now when he might be wavering?’

Maggie couldn’t believe she was actually pushing her rival into the arms of her lover, but events seemed to be overtaking her and she was having trouble thinking on the spot, let alone keeping the one step ahead that she needed to.

Louise paused and gazed at Pete, making him squirm once again under her naked admiration. A hint of colour grazed the tops of his cheeks, and Maggie forgave him. He wasn’t trying to be a sex god, it was just being thrust upon him, so to speak.

‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Louise said reluctantly as she rose from the table. ‘You two have a good time.’ She directed the comment at Pete, the hint of suggestion lingering in her voice.

Pete smiled back at her, and without any warning he removed his hand from Maggie’s knee and put his arm around her shoulders. He drew her close against him and dropped a quick, soft, intimate kiss on her neck, just below her ear. Louise must have really rattled him.

‘We always do,’ he said, smiling at Maggie.

Louise gave a little shrug and a wave, and headed off into the thickening crowd, shouting, ‘Call me!’ over her shoulder. It wasn’t clear who she was talking to.

‘Ha! I won!’ Maggie thought to herself as Pete headed inside to pay the bill. For a golden moment she bathed in the glory of her triumph.

And then she remembered. It wasn’t Pete she was supposed to be fighting over.

What neither Pete nor Maggie knew just at that moment was that things were about to get a whole lot more complicated than they already were.

Maggie seethed, Pete noticed, for all of the short walk from the café to the subterranean bar. In fact, periodically she actually hopped with fury as she recounted her conversation with Louise. Pete had never seen anyone literally hopping mad before, and he had to admit, it was quite charming in a peculiar sort of way.

Maggie huffed out a loud sigh of anxiety as they descended the steps into the bar. It had opened a year ago with celebrity backing under one of Soho’s most exclusive restaurants. Deliberately shady, with only soft, ambient lighting, it had a carefully constructed air of designer seediness which gave credence to its name, The Drinking Den. Paul’s opening press release had said he wanted his customers to feel as if drinking there was ever so slightly dangerous. He hadn’t done a bad job, Maggie supposed as she looked around the bar. Except that later on, when the now near-empty room was filled to the rafters with designer totty gabbling on about whatever it was the very rich and beautiful do gabble on about, it would somehow take the edge off the atmosphere. It would make it look a bit more like the centre pages of
OK!
magazine than somewhere the Krays might have frequented.

Maggie huffed again. Louise, with all her contradictions and red herrings, had completely thrown her off kilter and she wasn’t nearly as calm and collected as she needed to be. The whole purpose of this trip was for Paul to see her with Pete and report back to Christian, and that was it. She had to remember that and not get carried away with the confusion of new and unfamiliar feelings Louise had stirred up in her. She was blurring the edges of her feelings for Christian and Pete, and that would get no one nowhere, and fast.

‘I mean,’ she said out loud as Pete lent over the dark veneered bar and nodded at the barman, ‘did you see her? She was all over you and you were supposed to be
my
illicit love-doomed affair, not hers,’ Maggie spluttered. ‘I don’t know, when I first met her I thought she was all sweet and misunderstood, and all –’ Maggie put on a high-pitched voice – ‘ “Oooh, I’m just a country girl, please be kind to me.” I really thought it was Christian who had seduced her, and she was giving it all that again today until you turned up and she became some sort of bionic Marilyn Monroe. I mean, before you showed up she was all misty-eyed over the love of her life – who is
my
boyfriend, by the way!’ Maggie slapped her palm on the bar indignantly, making the waiting barman look a little nervous.

‘Um, ah,’ Pete said, not quite sure how to reply, and giving the barman an apologetic look. ‘Anyway, what do you want to drink?’

Maggie studied the row upon row of jewel-like alcopops that lined the clear-fronted fridges behind the bar.