You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (47 page)

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘It was,’ Neve agreed, tugging off her socks and nearly falling off the desk in the process. ‘But feel how soft my feet are.’

She waggled her foot in Max’s face as he reared back even though her feet were as fragrant and silky smooth as they were ever likely to be.

Max wasn’t looking at her feet but her face again. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘Of course I’m not,’ Neve scoffed, because she wasn’t drunk. Although now the row was over and they were friends again, the sheer relief was making her feel lightheaded. ‘I had a leetle bit of champagne.’ She tried to hold up her thumb and forefinger to illustrate the minuscule amount of champagne that she’d drunk, which wasn’t as much as the others had knocked back, and she’d had some croutons with her chicken salad at lunch to mop up the alcohol, but now she was having difficulty in getting her thumb and forefinger to do what she wanted.

‘What have those girls done to you?’ Max shook his head. ‘You are. You’re pissed.’

‘Maybe just a teensy bit merry,’ Neve decided, clutching Max’s arm so she could get down from the desk. ‘But I’m only going to drink spritzers tonight and Mandy wants everyone tucked up in bed by eleven so we don’t have hangovers tomorrow. She’s very detail orientated.’

‘You should eat something before you go out,’ Max said firmly. ‘Something laden with carbs to give you some ballast.’

Neve glanced at the clock on the nightstand. ‘I haven’t got time.’ Max was dogging her footsteps as she went from wardrobe to bathroom. ‘You’re not going to be stuck in here writing all evening, are you?’

‘I’m meeting Bill for a drink so we can work on his father-of-the-bride speech,’ Max said, eyeing up the dress that was in Neve’s hand. ‘Don’t suppose that has a zipper you might need a hand with?’ he asked with a leer.

‘No, it just goes on over my head so …’ Neve put her hands on her hips and tried to look stern. ‘You’re not doing anything to me that will smudge my make-up or flatten my hair,’ she said, shutting the bathroom door.

She’d just succeeded in carefully easing the dress on without dismantling her bouffant when Neve heard a banging on the door of their suite, then the sound of much shrieking and laughter.

Neve buckled her three-inch Mary-Janes, which seemed to be getting less comfortable the more she wore them, and was just about to step back, look at herself in the mirror and decide that silver-sequined shift dresses really weren’t her thing, when the bathroom door crashed back on its hinges and the bathroom was invaded by skimpily dressed, bare-legged, shiny-haired, highly excitable women.

‘Right, you’ll do,’ Kelly said. ‘Let’s get going. We’ve got a pink stretch limo waiting in a no parking zone behind the hotel, because the front is
crawling
with paps.’

Neve had to push Tasha and Lauren out of the way so she could get a good look at herself in the mirror. ‘Does this look OK?’ She tugged at the hem of the dress. ‘I don’t look fat?’

‘You look gorgeous,’ Emma said as she sprayed herself with a generous amount of Neve’s Chanel No. 19. ‘Lose the tights.’

Neve would lose her 60-denier, body-shaping opaque tights when they were ripped from her cold, dead legs. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should wear jeans and a nice little top. My sister Celia says—’

No one was interested in Celia’s opinion that heels, jeans and a statement top could take a girl from day to evening and even cocktails. Tasha took Neve’s arm and yanked her out of the bathroom. ‘Just grab your phone,’ she ordered.

‘Purse …’

‘You don’t need a purse,’ Lauren said pityingly. ‘Dinner’s paid for, limo’s paid for, we’re on six different guest-lists with bar tabs, what do you need money for?’

‘Take your purse,’ Max said, shouldering Emma out of the way. ‘And call me if you want to bail out early and— Christ, that dress
is
a bit short.’

Neve looked down at her legs in dismay. ‘My legs look sturdy even in body-shaping tights.’

‘Of course they don’t,’ Max snapped, his face reddening when Emma openly laughed at his over-protective boyfriend routine. ‘You look great, that’s what I’m worried about.’

‘Aw, sweet,’ Tasha cooed. ‘Don’t worry, lover boy, we’ll have her back by midnight. Or around midnight.’

‘No, Mandy said we had to be back by eleven,’ Neve reminded them. ‘She was really particular about that.’

‘Eleven, twelve, what’s the diff?’ Emma drawled, grabbing Neve’s hand and pulling her towards the door. ‘Will you get a move on?’

As she was hustled out of the door, she heard Max bark, ‘I want her back in one piece.’

There was a collective cackle from the cheap seats. ‘One piece was never part of the deal.’

Something diseased and furry had crawled into her mouth and expired while she slept. That was the only possible explanation as to why Neve had a rancid taste in her mouth and a heavy, viscous paste coating her teeth and tongue.

‘I think I’m dying,’ she groaned. The wretched state of her mouth was the least of it. There was a pounding in her head, echoed in the roiling of her gut, and her bones ached, her vital organs ached, her throat ached, even her hair follicles ached.

‘You’re not dying,’ said a voice in her ear, which sounded like nails scraping down a blackboard, even though Max’s voice had barely risen above a whisper. ‘You’ve got a hangover.’

Neve had had hangovers before and they just made her feel a tiny bit nauseous and grouchy. This felt like the bastard child of bubonic plague and the ebola virus.

‘Dying,’ she reiterated, and now she realised that she was in bed, which had been a very comfy bed the last time she’d slept in it, but now it felt as if she was lying on a pile of rocks, and even though she had the quilt and Max’s arm tucked around her, she was still cold and clammy. Neve tried to raise her head but her gaze collided with the stripy wallpaper and as well as searing her retinas, it was making her stomach heave. ‘Sick. Going to be sick.’

‘Sweetheart, I don’t think so,’ Max said, stroking the back of her neck with feather-soft fingers. ‘You’ve already thrown up just about everything you’ve eaten in the last week.’

‘Urgh …’ Had she? The night before was a big gaping hole in her memory. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know what happened but I got a phone call from the Head of Hotel Security at three in the morning asking me if I could identify a raving madwoman in a silver dress who couldn’t remember her room number but insisted that someone called Max Pancake was sleeping there. They thought you might be a hack from the
Sunday Mirror
pretending to be absolutely spannered as a way of getting into the hotel.’

‘Oh, no …’

‘Yeah, apparently Ronaldo’s staying in one of the penthouse suites and I saw Wayne and Coleen in the bar last night. Anyway, as you were staggering down the corridor, you told me very proudly that you’d lost your phone and you’d just eaten two pieces of KFC and a bag of chips.’

‘KFC? Oh, God …’

‘But I wouldn’t worry about that because after you’d tried to persuade me to have my wicked way with you, you started throwing up and you didn’t stop, not for hours. I thought you were going to sleep curled around the toilet at one point.’

‘Goodness …’

The blanks Max was filling in weren’t coming as a total surprise and Neve started to see a slideshow of images: being followed by a flashing, yelling pack of paparazzi everywhere they went, velvet ropes being unclipped, a tutorial from Kelly and Mandy on how to strut rather than walk, a table full of empty glasses and a clutch of bedraggled cocktail umbrellas.

There was the boy who wouldn’t leave her alone at Dry Bar until Kelly mentioned that he played for Manchester United’s youth team and was only fifteen. She remembered Mandy going at ten accompanied by two hulking bodyguards, after making the girls solemnly promise that they’d leave the bar they were in no later than eleven. Obviously they’d still been raging well past eleven because Neve could now distinctly recall hitting Canal Street where she’d sung ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ in a karaoke bar with Dolly Parton. A very masculine-looking Dolly Parton and …

‘I think I danced on a podium. Why would I do that?’

‘Please tell me there’s photos.’ Max’s voice bubbled with barely contained laughter though it couldn’t have been much fun for him, when she’d got back in such a drunken state.

‘Sorry I got you out of bed,’ Neve mumbled, carefully and slowly rolling over so she was lying on her back. The movement made the room and her stomach lurch alarmingly.

‘I wasn’t in bed. I was pacing the floor and worrying that you were dead in a ditch somewhere when you didn’t answer your phone the first ten times that I called it.’

‘Oh God. Alcohol bad. Very, very bad.’

‘It is very bad but I think you’ll live to drink another glass of champagne,’ Max said, propping himself up on one elbow so he could look down at Neve who was lying with her eyes shut. ‘You’ll probably feel better once you’ve had a shower.’

‘It will kill me.’

‘No, it won’t, it will just feel that way for the first five minutes,’ Max said, sitting up, which made the bed move and Neve moan piteously. ‘I’m going to ask Housekeeping to send someone up to sort out the bathroom and then you’ll have to get up, because I hate to break it to you, Neve, but we’re attending the Wedding of the Year in five hours.’

Neve tried to tell Max that she couldn’t leave the bed, much less stand unaided for the foreseeable future, but he was already getting up. She could hear him pottering about the room, speaking in a low voice on the phone as she let herself drift in and out of sleep, barely stirring even when two chambermaids arrived to start work on the bathroom. Maybe it was shame that forced her back to sleep, when she heard one of them say, ‘We’re going to need more bleach. A lot more bleach.’

The second time that Neve opened her eyes, she realised that she wasn’t going to die. Not until she’d cleaned her teeth anyway. She threw back the covers and tried to pass on a message to her brain that she really wanted to move her legs.

‘Hey! What are you doing? Let me help you.’ Max was standing in the bathroom doorway and Neve could only gape at him in amazement.

‘You’re wearing a suit,’ she pointed out with razor-sharp powers of deduction, because he was indeed wearing a black, slim-fitting, beautifully cut suit with a snowy-white shirt. Even his hair had been tamed into submission with what looked like an entire tub of Brylcreem. Only the toes of his red socks poking out from the bottom of his trousers jarred against the general dapperness of his ensemble. ‘You look so smart.’

Max put his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I hate wearing a suit,’ he scowled. ‘I’m not putting on my tie until I hear the first notes of “The Wedding March”.’

He moved over to the bed and gently levered Neve to a standing position. She swayed uncertainly for a moment, then decided that she could remain vertical, as long as Max kept hold of her arm. ‘I need to clean my teeth,’ she said, as they started the slow, perilous walk to the bathroom, passing a crumpled heap of silver sequins on the way.

At some time during last night’s shenanigans Neve had stripped, or had been stripped, down to bra and knickers, but she still felt too wretched to care. Max hadn’t been so traumatised by the sight of Neve’s wobbly thighs, sagging paunch and all the other horrors that she usually kept hidden, that he’d done a runner. In fact, he was being incredibly sweet and patient as he carefully steered her to the bathroom as if she was made of spun glass.

‘What you need is a really good fry-up,’ he told Neve, grinning as she winced. ‘But I’ll order you some tea and toast to start with. You’re still looking really peaky.’

Peaky was the greatest understatement of all time, Neve decided as she looked in the mirror while she brushed her teeth. The foam wedge was poking out of Medusa-like tendrils of hair and she had black eye make-up smeared around her eyes and running in sooty rivulets down her cheeks, where it mixed with the remains of her red lipstick.

She looked and felt a whole lot better after showering and washing her hair, apart from the bruising around her eyes, where she’d burst blood vessels from retching so violently.

‘People are going to think I’ve been knocking you about,’ Max said, when Neve emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy white robe and a towel wound turban-style around her head. ‘We need to send out for some heavy-duty concealer.’

‘Just in case you didn’t hear me the first time, I want you to know that I’m never, ever drinking alcohol again,’ Neve sniffed, pouring herself a cup of tea but avoiding the toast that had also arrived – she didn’t feel ready for solids just yet. ‘But thank you for taking care of me.’

She sat down on the sofa next to Max and took another slightly incredulous look at him. Yes, it wasn’t a DT. He was wearing a suit. ‘You look so spiffy.’

‘Spiffy?’ Max nearly spat out a mouthful of toast and jam. ‘You’re the only person I know who uses words that I’ve only read in books.’

Neve wrapped her fingers around her cup and took a cautious sip of tea. It tasted like the nectar of the gods, and when Max put his arm around her and she snuggled against him, head on his shoulder, she decided that her hangover wasn’t terminal. She might just make it through the day intact and even manage to smile in the wedding photos.