Bad Girls (12 page)

Lew whistled down the phone. ‘Classy choice!’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a pleasure doing business with you.’

‘What was that?’ Jada asked, unselfconsciously lifting up her pyjama jacket to scratch her muscled stomach.

The springs of the old couch groaned as Skye’s love interest of the night before stirred, groaning as he sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The first thing he saw was Jada, her PJ jacket pulled up just below her breasts, her entire stomach above her hipster panties bare, and his eyes bugged out as he fixated on the sight.

‘What’re
you
looking at?’ she said amiably enough, still scratching her stomach as if he weren’t even in the room. ‘Come on, lover boy, the party’s over. Time to get back on your bike.’

‘You better tell us how much we owe you,’ Skye said.

Not fully awake yet, he blinked, madly trying to work out what she meant.

‘Yeah, you were so good in bed we wanna pay you for it,’ Jada added, deadpan, and then the two girls burst out laughing at the expression of incredulity on his face.

‘Oh boy, that was
totally worth
making my head hurt all over again!’ Skye giggled, clutching her skull.

But this still sucks
, her headache told her.
You still just spent a ton of money on blow last night and fooled around with the bike messenger, for fuck’s sake. You live in a dump and you get wasted most nights and wake up with me pounding nails into your brain. You’re not saving a cent, you’ve got no health plan, and last night some guy put his finger up you and scratched you for kicks.

Your life is shit, Skye. You better fix it soon.

One of the big plusses to being an exotic dancer was that your costumes didn’t take up any room at all in your handbag. The pale blue sequined Lycra hotpants and halter top that Skye was planning to wear that night folded up so small that she could easily fit them in her best bag, an oversized Dolce and Gabbana clutch on which she’d blown way too much money just a couple of weeks ago. Still, its shiny black patent was totally current, the gold D&G clasp was nice and big, so you could see even across the room who the bag was by, and it felt really expensive. After all, if you were going to spend thousands of bucks on a bag (Skye shivered briefly at the memory of exactly how much she’d paid) it should damn well look and feel as if you had.

Skye was assuming that Lew wanted to pick her brains about gossip on the celebrities who came into the Midnight Lounge. That was more than OK with her. Exotic dancers didn’t exactly have a culture of kissing and not telling. The
National Investigator
would have had trouble filling its pages without all its stories about guys making out with strippers: Kiefer Sutherland, Ben Affleck, Joe Jeffreys . . .

So, although it was weird that Paulie had given her number to Lew, Skye didn’t waste any time on speculating about other reasons he and Kevin might want to have a drink with her. What she
had
been determined to do was to dress as classily as possible. She knew exactly what everyone’s image was of an off-duty exotic dancer, and she had to admit, when people pictured a girl caked in makeup, dyed hair scraped back into a tight ponytail, wearing Juicy Couture sweatpants and a T-shirt straining over her artificially inflated breasts, ninety-nine per cent of the time they’d be right on the money.

She’d noticed the way Kevin-from-the-LA-office looked at her last night; not dismissively, but as if he’d met girls like her a million times before and knew exactly what to expect. Well, if there was one thing Skye hated, it was being taken for granted. When she emerged from her bedroom, ready to go out, Jada whistled, long and slow.

‘Honey,’ she said admiringly, ‘it ain’t you, but it looks damn fine.’

Maybe it
is
me, though, Skye thought, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirrored lobby of the Bryant Park Hotel. Just a different me. Someone who looks like she belongs in a place like this – here in her own right, not just visiting to party with some rock star.

New York girls – classy Manhattan girls – were all about the subtle approach. They wore as much makeup as a stripper did, and spent the same amount of time applying it, but their aim was to look, not shiny and plastic, but invisibly, exquisitely groomed. It was a hell of a lot of work. Skye had spent half the time just blending stuff in. No bright colours at all: if Bobbi Brown didn’t make it, Skye didn’t have it on her face. Mocha, peach, caramel, dark brown mascara. Her hair was coiled into a chignon at the back of her head, just a couple of loose blonde strands artfully working their way free, so it looked as if she’d just twisted it up and pinned it in a couple of minutes, rather than spent half an hour with a ceramic straightener and a box of hairgrips. She was dressed all in black, of course, purchased at the boutiques on West Broadway that were her major stamping ground.

Lovely pieces, all of them. She had just never put them together before. The shantung Alice + Olivia cigarette pants were usually worn with a tight T-shirt, and the fine silk knit sweater, caught elegantly round her slim hips with a wide laser-cut suede belt, was normally thrown over a sky-high mini. Her only jewellery was a silver Tiffany chain necklace, the classic Paloma Picasso design with a big central clasp. Her butter-soft suede wedges, from Otto Tootsi Plohound, were a mere three inches high – definitely not the spikes you’d expect an exotic dancer to flaunt.

Skye might not have a savings account or health insurance, but she had some
really
sharp investment dressing.

As she passed through the lobby and down to the bar, male heads turned, as always. But their glances were completely different from the way they’d have looked at her in her itsy-bitsy blue hot-pants outfit in the Midnight Lounge. Now, the way they checked her out was downright respectful. Appreciative, sure, but it was the appreciation a man gave to a woman he saw as girlfriend, even wife, material. Skye dressed in her hooker gear was arm candy, a toy to play with. Skye dressed up in her chic black and her Tiffany was nothing short of trophy-wife potential.

Kevin didn’t even recognize her as she rounded one of the uplit vaulted pillars of the cellar bar and approached the high table where he and Lew were sitting. It was Lew who jumped up and pulled out the padded bar stool for her, a gentlemanly courtesy he would never have paid to exotic dancer Skye.

‘Baby, you clean up
really
nice,’ he said, grinning a wide-as-water-melon smile. ‘Kevin? See? Was I right about this one, or was I right?’

Kevin’s eyebrows had practically disappeared into his hairline.

‘Boy, oh boy,’ he said, as Skye hopped up on the stool, crossing her legs demurely, and flashed him her best smile. ‘Now this is what I call versatile.’

‘Skye, honey, why don’t you order yourself a drink?’ Lew gestured to a waiter, who glided forward smoothly.

‘I’ll have a mojito,’ Skye said. Mojitos were always safe; they were above fashion. She knew better than to pick something like a Cosmo or an apple martini. Only out-of-towners went for those now.

‘So I’m going to let Kevin do the talking,’ Lew said, grinning, as the waiter disappeared. ‘This is his baby. He’s come up with an idea so sleazy even
I
was shocked by it.’ Lew’s eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘He looks all clean cut and Boy Scoutish, but I tell you, he’s got a mind as dirty as a fucking tar pit.’

‘Skye,’ Kevin began, leaning forward, ‘I
was
going to start by asking you if you really see yourself as an exotic dancer, longer term, but I can see already that I don’t need to go there. Look at you.’ He gestured at her. ‘The way you’re dressed, the way you’re presenting yourself. Picking this bar as a rendezvous. You’ve answered the question already.’

Skye gave him her best smile and waited for him to continue.

‘I have an undercover investigation I’m setting up,’ Kevin continued. ‘And I need a very . . .
specific
kind of operative to help me with it. And it has to be a female. We’ve got women journalists on the
Investigator
, of course, but none of them –’ he exchanged a smile with Lew – ‘none of them exactly have the attributes we’re looking for.’

He wasn’t looking at her breasts when he said that: Skye gave him points. She actually wished she hadn’t had any work done on them at all. She’d gone up from a B to a D cup, and though there weren’t any scars – the surgeon had gone in through her bellybutton – you heard so many horror stories at a strip club about implants going wrong that she really just wanted to take them out now and have done with it. Right now she was wearing a minimizer bra, which she always needed when she wanted to look classy. It was nuts. She should just have bought some padded bras for work and saved the plastic surgery fee.

‘You mean they’re not blondes with boob jobs?’ she asked sweetly, as the waiter returned with her mojito.

She’d wanted to see if she could embarrass Kevin, who seemed so poised, but he was made of much tougher stuff than her usual Midnight Lounge client.

He just smiled, as if he saw exactly what she was trying to do, and responded: ‘I mean there’s no way they could pass for an exotic dancer.’ His expression grew completely serious. ‘This is something we’ve never tried before. I need a girl with your kind of beauty and brains. And believe me, that’s much harder to find than you’d think. Lew said you were sharp as a whip, and I think he might just be right.’

‘And the boob job doesn’t hurt,’ Lew said cheerfully, winking at Skye. ‘So? How about it? You wanna hear the rest?’

‘Can’t wait,’ she said, smiling back.

P
etal was on a collision course with something, something big and scary with a lot of pointed edges. She could feel it in the dark, waiting for her, ready to cut her into pieces when she made the last in a series of very wrong moves and smashed right into it.

But she couldn’t stop for the life of her. She was going way too fast, and her brakes had broken. In retrospect, they had broken the night she picked up Dan Drummond, the night she’d realized she’d met a boy who she actually really liked, one who seemed to like her back. Dan had everything: a cool career, drop-dead-gorgeous looks, and a total enthusiasm for her that was unlike anything she’d met before.

She’d watched him like a hawk when she threw out casually the revelation that her dad was Gold, the world-famous rock star, and though his eyes had widened in awe, all he had said was: ‘Well, no wonder you walk around like you own the world, eh, pet?’

Which, although it had annoyed the fuck out of her initially, had actually, when she thought about it, been a huge relief. A boy who was teasing her about having a sense of entitlement as big as the Grand Canyon wasn’t simultaneously going to suck up to her madly for the chance to play on Gold’s new album or write a song for him, like so many of his would-be predecessors had done.

If anything, Dan seemed a bit intimidated by her status as rock-star royalty, second generation. They were photographed together endlessly, the media falling over themselves to anoint them as a couple. In and out of nightclubs; at secret gigs; partying with real royalty at the posh clubs in Kensington, for a laugh, where braying rich brats with titles wearing rugby shirts were way more impressed with them than any cool club kid in Hoxton. They leaned against each other, thin as rails, pouting sulkily, as if bored with the world.

‘He’s such a
sweetie
,’ JC drawled, as he was dying Petal’s hair the daffodil yellow he’d promised. ‘And so
gorgeous
! Honestly, are you
sure
he’s not even a little bit gay?’

‘Well, he fancies me,’ Petal said, pulling a face, eternally obsessed about her lack of tits. ‘I mean, I’m not exactly a porn star . . .’

‘Turn you over, you’re almost like the real thing!’ JC giggled. ‘I was going out with a posh boy once, he’d been to university at Cambridge and everything, and he said there was a tutor there who was a raging queen and that’s what he’d say about the skinny girls. “Turn her over, she’s almost like the real thing!” Can you
imagine
?’ He sighed. ‘I had to dump him in the end. He was totally fucked up. All the posh boys are, really. I blame public school.’

He finished wrapping Petal’s head in silver foil.

‘Right, that’s forty minutes,’ he said, setting the timer he’d brought. ‘And then you’ll be all fresh and new. Is Tas coming round to do your makeup?’

Petal started to nod, then stopped, nervous of shifting the paste and foil on her head.

‘She said she wanted to work out a new look for me now you’ve done this whole freaky blonde thing,’ she told JC.

‘Oh, fantastic.’ He beamed. ‘
Tons
of press tonight. You’ll get into all the daily freebies, plus
Heat
,
Grazia
, all the celeb websites . . .’

JC and Tas did Petal’s hair, makeup and styling for free, but the perks for them were huge. The sheer volume of free stuff that was sent to Petal – hoping she would wear the clothes or the bags or the jewellery or the shoes, mention the perfumes, travel to the luxury resorts – was gigantic, and JC and Tas got to plunder the goodie pile at will.

But the main benefit to them was that Petal was their canvas, their walking advertisement of their creativity to the world. If Petal’s new haircut and colour was deemed a success, JC would book advertising campaigns, be tapped by haircare companies to advise on new products, be seen as a celebrity hairstylist who had his finger firmly on the pulse of what the youth of today wanted.

And it was the same for Tas, who was desperate to be a stylist in her own right and break free of assistant jobs. With Petal, Tas could show the world that she could dress an It girl to perfection, find the latest trendy designers before anyone else had heard of them, prove her credentials in photos that would be on the web for everyone to see.

‘Ooh, look! A houseboat! You have the
coolest
place!’

JC was on the balcony, staring down at a boat chugging by on the Regent’s Canal below. Petal’s father had bought her a two-bedroom flat in Camden when she passed her A levels; Camden incarnated scruffy chic. The flat, in a building that jutted out to the side of the canal like the prow of a boat, had a wraparound balcony that ran its full length, culminating in a terrace at the tip where Petal loved to gather her inner circle to sit and drink before heading out for the evening.