The Goddess Rules (5 page)

Unsurprisingly they discovered that in many ways they were very similar: Both had experienced the adulation of millions, were possessed of similar sexual appetites, and also exhibited flashes of such pampered wickedness that to most people they would have seemed amoral. To each other it was amusing. So a bottle of wine down and after much talk of film directors they’d worked with and how nauseating they found the paparazzi, they still hadn’t even gotten onto the subjects that interested them most—namely themselves.

“So, Mirri, why aren’t you married?” Jonah leaned across the table and fed Mirri a golden ring of calamari. She took a very well-practiced bite, which had half the men in the restaurant distractedly putting forkfuls of aubergine in their ears instead of their mouths.

“Why are you married?” Mirri asked Jonah. “I can’t imagine why you would want to. Unless you want a housekeeper and mother for your children.”

“Well, sure, she does those things. But really . . .” Jonah leaned over and confided theatrically in Mirri’s ear, “being married makes it easier when it comes to other women—they don’t get as heavy, they don’t expect as much, they know where they stand. It’s neater.”

“I suppose. But if you’re honest you don’t need to hide behind anything. That is the neatest way possible,” Mirri told Jonah, who hadn’t enjoyed himself this much for a long time. Here was a woman who was completely unintimidated by him, perhaps even a little bored by him, and he found that enormously sexy.

“So you’re always honest?” he asked her.

“Of course. Life’s too short not to be.” She took a mouthful of red wine.

“I think we should start.” Kate said as she drained the last drop of what was probably her third glass of wine. She’d been picking at the bread for the past half hour and was in danger of not having the appetite for even an olive if she ate any more. The sun had set and the garden had all but sunk into darkness; the only light now came from the flickering candles dotted around the still-pristine table.

Leonard looked at his watch. “I hope she’s okay. That she’s not hiding in an alleyway somewhere from the paparazzi.”

“She doesn’t strike me as a woman who would hide in an alleyway from anything.” Hunger always made Kate irritable. “Besides which, she has a lion with her. I don’t think she’ll come to much harm.”

“Yes, yes. You’re probably right.” Leonard finally picked up his fork and hesitantly skewered a piece of poached salmon. “Who knows, she may still make it in time for the lamb.”

“She might,” Kate said, not caring whether Mirri Moncur even made it for cornflakes in the morning. As far as Kate was concerned she’d let Leonard down and welshed on a meeting with her, and that was neither kind nor professional. And until Kate had polished off a decent supper, she wasn’t likely to feel any different. “But then again maybe she’s gone to visit her smart friends at the palace. In which case we may never see her again,” she added.

“No need to be catty, my dear. Mirri has nothing against you.”

“I’m sorry, she just seemed a bit full of herself. But then if you’re an actress I suppose that’s your job description.”

“Indeed. But she does terribly good things for animals, you know. She’s made millions with that wildlife trust of hers. So she can’t be all that bad at heart.” Finally Leonard had managed to shame Kate into silence.

“So how were the auctions this morning?” she asked as she tucked into her dinner. “Any good finds?”

“Very nice set of Regency chairs and a bookcase.” Leonard nodded. “A little overpriced but worth it, I think.” As Leonard discussed the hellish drive back into London from Sussex, Kate stole a peep at her cell phone, which had been nestling in her jacket pocket. If Jake had been asleep with a hangover all day he had to be up by now—it was ten o’clock, after all, and that would have been the longest lie-in in history. But no, the phone wasn’t blinking with a message for her. It was plunged into darkness.
Like my heart,
she thought morosely and wanted to stab herself with a fork for being such an idiot last night and believing him.

Meanwhile Mirri and Jonah held hands as they collected a much-admired and well-fed Bébé from the restaurant owner and headed back across the park toward Leonard’s place. Mirri, who was in no way interested in a head-on collision with the paparazzi, led her handsome prey through the back gate and onto Primrose Hill. Together with Bébé they stalked through the undergrowth of nettles, over the dried-up grass cuttings and neglected garden canes, and emerged beside Kate’s shed. Mirri noted that no lights were on—the girl was probably still at dinner with Leonard, she thought, with a barely there pang of guilt.

“You have the bottle of wine?” Mirri asked Jonah in a hushed voice.

“Sure do.” He waved the bottle that they’d brought from the restaurant in the air and reached a hand out for Mirri’s irresistibly apple-shaped bottom.

“Okay, come with me. I can see them having dinner in the house, so be as quiet as possible and stay in the shadows, okay?”

“Terrific, I go home with an older woman and we behave like teenagers. I love it,” Jonah said, moving his hand up and hooking it into the awesome curve of Mirri’s waist. God, they didn’t make women like this anymore, he thought. They were all skinny and sinewy these days, with muscles where only men were supposed to have muscles and hard little tummies that seemed to be made for keeping men at bay, not tracing a lazy finger over. No, Mirri was like a piece of soft, slightly overripe fruit, he thought longingly.

“You sit over there,” Mirri said, breaking free from his hold and taking Bébé by the leash up toward the house. “I’m going to sneak in and put him to bed. I’ll be back soon.” She disappeared stealthily into the dark and headed for the house, bypassing the orangery, where clinking sounds of china were mingling with chatter as Kate and Leonard cleared away the table. She held her breath and hoped they didn’t suddenly appear in the kitchen as she was tiptoeing through it.

Moments later, after Mirri had deposited Bébé in her bedroom, she reappeared with a packet of Gauloise and no shoes. She found an old hammock hanging in a far corner of the garden and sat down in it.

“Here, you must be very careful not to fall out of it,” she instructed him. “And if you do then you must not scream.”

“How come you’re so afraid of being caught?” Jonah asked as he lowered himself carefully down beside her.

“I’m not afraid. But if I am caught then I will have to join in and talk when really I just want to be here.” She lit up a cigarette and inhaled as if her life depended on it. “I hope you are as good as you look.”

“Well, so do I,” said Jonah, taking Mirri’s half-smoked Gauloise from her and dropping it to the ground. “I’d hate to disappoint, madame.”

As Kate wandered back toward her shed she was sure that she could smell cigarette smoke and decided that it must be coming from the camp of photographers who seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the pavement outside the house. She even felt a little sorry for the woman who had stood her up for dinner. It must be pretty hellish having twenty men baying for your photograph. Men who would be particularly pleased if she were to show up looking raddled and ancient—because that way they’d be able to sell their photos to the newspapers for so much more. A glimpse of cellulite or a turkey neck, even if it was just a trick of the light or a bad angle, was so much more to the general public’s taste.

“Sshhhh.” Kate heard a thud and then a low-pitched male laugh somewhere in the bushes to her right. She stopped in her tracks and was about to launch herself into the house and inform the police that some gentlemen of the press were trespassing in her garden—when she heard the inimitable sound of Mirabelle Moncur.

“Oh that is very good. I like
that,
” she was saying in her husky voice. Kate stood stock-still and peered in the direction of the voices. There, beneath the cherry tree, where Kate had hung her hammock only last week, she saw something glowing in the pitch dark. She crept in closer and noticed that it was a lit cigarette butt that somebody hadn’t extinguished. God, Kate hated people who discarded their cigarettes all over the place. But just as she was about to march over to Mirri and ask her to pick it up, she heard another sound that suggested she might not want to march anywhere other than the opposite direction at the moment. It was the satisfied groan of a man. So instead of taking a step closer, Kate crept away, making a mental note to ensure in the morning that the cigarette butt had gone. And if not she’d take up the matter with Leonard. It was a filthy habit.

Once back in her shed, Kate went to shut the window that she’d left open before she’d gone out. But as she approached it she realized that not only were the noises of Mirabelle Moncur and her lover being carried very efficiently on the breeze—right into her shed—but she also had top-dollar, ringside seats for the show.

“Oh, hell,” she said as the light from the neighbor’s bathroom, which overlooked the garden, perfectly illuminated the scene in the hammock.

“Oh baby, that is great,” the man, who was lying back on the hammock, with his trousers in the nearby herbaceous border, was saying. Mirri, rather unsurprisingly, was kneeling on the grass and had her head planted firmly in his lap. Facedown. Kate, who was squeamish even about couples who made out on escalators in the tube station, almost let out a yell of disgust, but managed at the last moment to suppress it. She wasn’t quick enough, however, to prevent a startled “Fucking hell” from flying out of her mouth when she saw the face of Jonah Sinclair bob up for air. She knew instantly that it was him because not only was he more famous than the prime minister, but his was also the same face she had seen on a movie poster at the bus stop only yesterday as she wandered through Primrose Hill. It was indeed the face she gazed at every time she went to the loo. It peered out at her from the cover of
Heat
magazine, which lay on the floor of her bathroom. But though Kate did her best to duck down beneath the windowsill so that she couldn’t be seen, it was too late.

“Oh, Kate, hi there. I’m glad you’re home,” Mirri said loudly, barely looking around, and without stopping doing that thing she was doing to Jonah. “I want you to start on Bébé early tomorrow. I have to go shopping in the afternoon.”

“Okay,” Kate said in alarm as she turned her head away from the spectacle before her and darted toward the bed, where she sat down with a thud. “Sure.”

“Okay, eight o’clock,” Mirri confirmed. “Good night.” And without another word she got back to business, leaving Kate hyperventilating at the trauma of being busted. Watching someone, and an old person at that, have sex.

She wondered whether she ought to turn on the light. Or whether she should draw the curtains. Certainly she ought to draw the curtains, she decided, and twitched as silently as possible back over to the window.

“I’m so glad that some things you read in the press are true,” Jonah Sinclair was murmuring as he slipped his tongue into Mirri’s ear.

“You like?” Mirri laughed as she pulled her skirt up to her waist and, with perfect sleight of hand, removed Jonah’s boxer shorts.

“I bloody well love,” Jonah groaned just beyond her window.

“Oh no,” Kate breathed to herself as she gathered a curtain in either hand. But before she could pull them together and put an end to the sight, the human pretzel that was Mirri and Jonah had spilled out of the hammock and onto the ground. And horrifyingly for Kate it was compelling viewing on a par with suddenly realizing that you’ve been allocated a porn site on cable by mistake. You would never order it yourself but you can’t help having a sneaky peek. Especially if the stars are two of the most sexually desirable, and probably sexually experienced, human beings on the planet. Albeit one might be just a bit past her use-by date.

“Yuck,” Kate said, as she bent down a bit so she could see more clearly just which leg belonged to which sex. What she was witnessing was like a how-to lesson in carnality. Mirri and Jonah were now standing against the cherry tree, Jonah going hard at it as Mirri licked his armpits. Kate thought this a bit gross, but it certainly seemed to be doing the trick for Jonah, whose buttocks were pumping up and down as enthusiastically as a toddler on a trampoline. And when Mirri then slithered down the tree with a satisfied series of gasps and decided to pay a little more attention to Jonah’s indefatigable erection, Kate had an overwhelming urge to make notes.