What She Wants (75 page)

‘At least Sam is fighting a live woman for her man,’ Virginia said sorrowfully to Hope. ‘I’m competing with a dead one.’

‘How is Kevin?’ asked Mary-Kate delicately.

‘He keeps phoning me, asking me out to play golf,’ Virginia said. ‘I don’t mind playing golf with him but then he thinks we should go out to dinner and I can’t cope with that broken record of “Ursula said this, Ursula did that.” Do I go on like that about Bill?’

‘No,’ they all said at the same time.

‘Thank God for that.’ Virginia was relieved. ‘It’s like competing with a saint. No matter what I do, I’ll never measure up to Ursula and frankly, I don’t want to. Sorry, I’m sounding bitter. I don’t mean to.’

‘You’re not bitter,’ Delphine said. ‘Stupid Kevin needs his head examined.’

‘Lots of people round here need their heads examined,’ Virginia remarked. ‘We should apply for a grant for a resident psychiatrist.’

‘Can I have the first session?’ begged Hope. ‘You’re doing fine, aren’t you?’ said Delphine with an anxious look in Hope’s direction.

‘Fine, yes, fine,’ said Hope faintly. She couldn’t tell them that she was going to have a baby in a few months and that she had no idea how she was going to cope as a single mother with three small children. She spent hours at night working out her finances and worrying about how much money she and Matt would get if they sold the house in Bath. How would the divorce courts view their circumstances? Would she get to stay in Curlew Cottage? Hope’s list of worries was endless.

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘You’re going to love Vegas,’ Karen Storin sighed. ‘It’s a crazy place but there’s such a buzz about it and after British weather, it’ll be bliss to feel some real heat.’

Both she and Sam looked out the office window where a rainbow straddled the sky. There had been a lot of showers recently, which Karen clearly felt was outrageous behaviour from Mother Nature seeing as it was August.

‘You get used to this sort of weather,’ Sam said.

‘I don’t think I ever will,’ Karen replied with a shudder. ‘I know Chicago has the most awful winters on this planet, but at least it’s hot and dry in the summer. The only negative is that Vegas is going to be very hot. I don’t know if I’d have picked it myself as a conference venue. Sure, they have big hotels, which is what we need, but August can be very hot in Nevada. It’ll be like an oven.’

‘As long as the hotel has top-notch air-conditioning, we’ll be all right,’ Sam pointed out. Unlike Karen, she’d been at world wide company conferences before. In her experience, when four hundred of a record company’s top executives gathered every couple of years for an intensive, five-day conference, nobody ever got to leave the hotel. The meetings started at eight in the morning, lasted till dinner, and with artists performing until the wee small hours showcasing their new albums, the chances of some free time alone to explore were nonexistent. The participants could have been on Mars for all they got to see of the place they were visiting. At the last conference she’d been to in Zurich three years previously, all Sam had seen of the famous city was the hotel,

the view from her bedroom window, and the view from the front seat of the people carrier which brought her back to the airport after four exhausting days. She’d bought some Swiss chocolate in the airport as if to prove to herself that she’d actually been there.

‘I’m kind of looking forward to it,’ Karen said.

‘I’m not,’ Sam said grimly. ‘It’s survival of the fittest at these things. I know there’s a bit of that at ordinary UK conferences, with everyone determined to prove that they can work hard and party hard too, but at the big world wide gigs, it’s worse. The meetings and presentations are so tiring, but nobody dares leave early at night to catch up on sleep in case it looks as if they’re not up to the job. You’ll be wrecked when you get home.’

‘Yeah, but I guess we’ll get a bit of personal time,’ Karen said confidently. ‘I’m going to take my training stuff with me so I can work out in the gym too but I won’t go near the slot machines. They’re lethal. The first time I was in Vegas was with my room mate from college and she blew a fortune.’

‘I’m not much of a slot machine person,’ Sam said, ‘and it’s years since I played Blackjack.’ Just in case they did get any free time, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to pack her swimsuit and a few casual outfits.

The rain showers had thankfully finished that evening as Sam walked up her road. In the past month, since the argument with Morgan, she’d taken to walking home a different way so she didn’t have to pass his gate. This way, she rounded the corner, past the big cherry tree whose roots were slowly and steadily ripping up the footpath, then reached her gate, all in about one minute.

Even if Morgan had spotted her, he’d never be able to rush out and accost her in time. And if he rang her doorbell, which he hadn’t, she’d have ignored it.

Contradictorily, she did want him to rush out and accost her, mainly because she longed for the chance to apologize for all the things she’d said to him, and because she wanted

to hear his excuse. She’d replayed that scene so many times in her mind, mostly in the heat of the night when she lay awake listening to the sound of traffic in the distance. In those replays, she’d been regal and hurt, making Morgan almost beg her to forgive him.

And she would forgive him.

Well, that was immaterial now. She unlocked the apartment door and, when the kittens didn’t arrive to greet her, she shrugged off her light jacket and played her phone messages. There was only one. Billy No Mates strikes again.

Catrina had rung ten minutes previously. ‘It’s eight fifteen, Sam, I hope you’re out and about and not still at bloody work. Even masters of the universe take breaks. I’m phoning to see if you and Morgan can come out to dinner with us next Saturday. I thought it would be nice if the gang could have a special dinner together to celebrate little Amber’s birth. My mother’s going to babysit her - she’s the only person I trust. In fact, Amber behaves better for my mother than she does for me! Give me a buzz, byeee.’

Saturday week, Sam knew she’d be flying to Vegas for five days of pure exhaustion. She was almost glad not to have to face dinner with her oldest friends. She’d visited Catrina and baby Amber three times since the baby was born but, luckily, there had been so many other visitors that she and Catrina had never been alone. If they had been, Catrina would have asked meaningfully about Morgan and Sam couldn’t bear having to tell her that it - whatever it had been - was over.

She’d phone Catrina from the office the next day and make her excuses. But Catrina wasn’t giving up. At ten, when Sam was about to watch a documentary about stalkers, the phone went again.

‘Got you at last,’ said Catrina. ‘You weren’t at work until this time, were you?’

‘No,’ lied Sam, feeling guilty for lying, ‘I was at an album launch and I only just got in. I didn’t want to phone you so late at night.’

They chatted briefly, with Catrina making Sam laugh about how little Amber had changed her life.

‘I am exhausted because she sleeps in bursts of two hours but I adore her,’ sighed Catrina. ‘Hugh is determined to be a new man and changes as many nappies as possible, but he’s also exhausted because he wakes up when she cries and then can’t go back to sleep. Now tell me, what about dinner next Saturday?’

‘Can’t, sorry. I’ve got to go to an international conference in the US.’

‘Where?’

‘Vegas.’

‘How exciting,’ sighed Catrina.

‘Not really,’ Sam pointed out. ‘It’ll be all work, I’m afraid. The only way to have fun at these things is to stay a few days after the conference and have a bit of a holiday.’

‘Are you doing that?’

‘No, I’ve too much to do here.’

‘And who’s looking after the kittens?’

Sam hesitated, thinking of how Morgan had publicly offered to take care of them on the night of her birthday.

‘Er, Jay’s taking them for me,’ she said.

‘Right.’ Catrina paused and then asked artlessly, too artlessly, Sam should have realized: ‘How’s Morgan?’

It was Sam’s turn to pause. What was the point of lying? ‘I don’t know,’ she said candidly. ‘We had a bit of a falling out and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘I know,’ confessed Catrina. ‘Hugh and I brought Amber out the other day and we met him on the King’s Road. When I asked him how you were, he told me he hadn’t seen you for weeks. You didn’t need to be a nuclear physicist to work out you’d had an argument of some sort.’

Sam nibbled her index finger. ‘He didn’t say anything else?’ she asked.

‘No, just held Amber and said she was adorable, as if we didn’t know. Oh yes, he had his stepdaughter with him. She’s very beautiful and knows it, mind you. And she’s a

bit flirty. I think Hugh was impressed in spite of himself, and you know he’s not into twenty-five-year-olds. Well,’ she laughed, ‘I hope he’s not into twenty-five-year-olds! With me still the size of a whale, you couldn’t blame him for looking at skinny little brunettes with no stretch marks. I keep waiting to get miraculously thin with all the breast feeding but it hasn’t happened yet.’ ‘But,’ said Sam confused, ‘that couldn’t be his stepdaughter. She’s only fourteen or fifteen. I’ve never met her but she’s only a teenager. Fifteen at the most.’ ‘This was definitely his stepdaughter,’ Catrina insisted. ‘Maggie her name was. Quite the daddy’s girl. The way she hooked her arm around his and proudly told us he was buying her a present to cheer her up, it reminded me of my sister when she was ten and wanted to marry our dad. That sort of carry on is all right when you’re ten but it’s a bit much for a twenty-something. Talk about a handful. She’s been at college in London so I’m surprised you never met her.’ Sam bit her lip as the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. ‘Actually, I think I have met her, except I didn’t know who she Was.’ It took ages to write the letter. After four drafts, Sam finally thought she’d got it right. But when she re-read it, all the complicated explanations about how she’d thought the girl in his arms was a girlfriend and then Catrina had made it clear she wasn’t, simply sounded stupid and trite. She ripped the fourth draft up and started again with a short note that would, hopefully, make Morgan understand that she’d wanted to see him again long before she realized that she’d wrongly accused him.

Morgan, I’m sorry about everything. I was wrong and I’m so sorry. Please forgive me for all the horrible things I said. I miss you and our friendship. Please call me. Sam.

The next morning, she planned to deliver the letter on her way to work but as she was leaving she saw a taxi cruising down the road with its light on, so she raced out the gate and hailed it, thinking she’d drop the letter off that night.

The For Sale sign was enormous, a double-sided one in elegant Roman script telling all and sundry that Jefferson, Power and Dowden were the agents for the house sale. Sam stopped in her tracks when she saw it as she emerged from the taxi that evening.

‘I can’t wait to see what he gets for it,’ said the voice of one of the neighbours, an elderly lady who was giving her two Yorkshire Terriers their evening walk. Both she and Sam contemplated Morgan’s house. ‘The builders have been there for months, so it must be lovely inside,’ the elderly lady continued. ‘I do hope somebody nice buys it. The road has gone quite downhill since that rock star chappy bought number 77. My friend at number 76 said they have sex in the garden at those all-night parties. Disgraceful, I call it. She saw them at it with her binoculars.’

Sam didn’t have the heart to smile at this innocent remark. When she’d said goodnight to the lady and the panting terriers, Sam walked up to Morgan’s door and slipped her envelope in the letter box. She wasn’t to know that the house was vacant and that the estate agent scooped the mail up the next day, shoving it all into a drawer in the hall table so as not to make the place look messy for the first viewing on Saturday. He meant to take it all out and leave it for Morgan, but he forgot. Sam’s fifth draft lay unnoticed between a flier about window cleaners and a bank statement.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Nicole stared out of the car window and watched a little old lady with a shopping trolley walk briskly past while the car sat wedged in a traffic jam which had seen them inch forward about three yards in the past ten minutes. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t get the underground.’ It didn’t seem very sensible to her to spend an hour in early morning traffic getting to the studio when they could have been there in twenty minutes on the tube. Ollie, LGBK’s new press officer, looked at her reprovingly. ‘Artists don’t get trains,’ she said. ‘You don’t see Celine Dion on the train, do you?’ ‘You would if she was in a rush,’ Nicole grumbled impatiently. They were on their way to a magazine shoot for Teen Babe, the cover, as Ollie kept saying reverently. The cover was the Holy Grail for interviews and as far as the industry was concerned, getting the cover of Teen Babe was on a par with getting an audience with the Pope. The only downside, as far as Nicole could see, was that she had to spend the entire day in a studio with the Teen Babe people answering inane questions about her favourite colour, was she utterly thrilled about having a single out in two weeks, who she fancied most in the whole world and had she ever snogged anyone famous? Or at least these were the main questions the previous Teen Babe cover-star had answered and Nicole was not looking forward to an entire day of this sort of stuff. If she was really honest, she was nervous about the

whole thing. Giving a ten-minute interview over the phone was one thing, but spending the whole day with a team of photographers, make-up artists and stylists was another entirely. But Nicole had discovered that since her single, ‘Honey (Don’t You Know) I Need You?’ had been getting so much airplay on the radio, her career had moved up a notch. The single would be out in two weeks and everyone at Titus was crossing fingers, legs and anything else they could find in the hopes that it got into the top five. Top ten would be doing fine but to really make an impact, the single needed to hit the top five. The record company had certainly pulled out all the stops. Nicole’s smoky tones were heard blaring out of radios everywhere, which was great. But she’d had to spend the past week being whizzed around the country doing appearances and interviews, for radio, print and television, which wasn’t great. Although she’d never admit it to anyone, Nicole was feeling shy for the first time in her life. She’d enjoyed the touring because she was with a gang. It had been a bit like being down the back at Copperplate, only with Lorelei to tease instead of Miss Sinclair. Now, Nicole was on her own. She was simply Nicole, a star, expected to have opinions on everything and a fantastic life where she wouldn’t dream of being home at night to watch her soaps and eat beans on toast. The car pulled up outside the photographic studio and they all clambered out. As they did, Nicole’s mobile rang. ‘Hello,’ she said softly, recognizing Darius’s number. ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘We just got here,’ Nicole said. ‘We’ve been in traffic for ages. I should have walked.’ Darius laughed. ‘Hugely successful, gorgeous sexy stars don’t walk.’ Nicole sighed with pleasure. ‘Good news on two fronts. One, I was talking to a girl from that estate agent’s and they have another flat in the complex you like. It’s got a smaller balcony but it’s two