A Summer Fling (29 page)

‘And I do?’ he cut her off, his voice losing the amused quality.

‘Well . . . yeah,’ said Anna. ‘I would have thought so.’

‘And why would that be?’

‘Well, because you’re . . . I thought you were . . . aren’t you? Well, you’re, erm . . . you’re gay, surely, aren’t you?’ said Anna, less confidently now.

‘You think I am gay? Because I am a designer – you think I am gay?’ She couldn’t tell if that spark in his eyes was anger or amusement.

‘I thought . . .’

It was amusement. He threw back his head and laughed.

‘
Nebunatico!
You silly girl – oh no, no, no, Anna. I am not gay.’

Anna looked up at this newly re-classified, non-gay, big Romanian bloke and pulled her robe a little tighter around her. God, he’d felt her boobs. How embarrassing!

Vladimir Darq’s mouth curved up at one side as he watched her.

‘Believe me, Anna, if I had wanted you, you wouldn’t be safe. I am a very dangerous
straight
man. Now, please, stop smiling and let Maria put your make-up on.’ And he issued a ‘
la dracu
’ of his own as he walked away to impart their conversation to Leonid, who was setting up big, umbrella-shaped reflectors. Anna heard them laughing together and she fumed silently as Maria got to work on her face. Jane came over with a coffee for her, not that Maria would let her drink it.

‘I apologize but I was eavesdropping,’ Jane admitted. ‘Who’s Tony?’

‘My fiancé,’ replied Anna with a loaded sigh. ‘Well, at least I think he’s still my fiancé. He ran off the day after Valentine’s Day with the teenage Girl Friday who works in his barber’s shop.’

‘Great timing, men, haven’t they? I got dumped last Christmas Eve.’

‘Dumped – you?’ said Anna incredulously. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could dump someone as gorgeous as the woman in front of her.

‘It’s OK though,’ said Jane with a big, sloppy smile. ‘Bruce gave me a shoulder to cry on and, well, we’ve been together ever since.’

‘Really?’ Anna gasped with delight. ‘You’re very professional then at work because I would never have guessed.’

‘That’s the idea,’ winked Jane. ‘But don’t be fooled. At home, he’s an absolute tiger. Incidentally, Dumping-Boy turned up at my front door, like the proverbial bad penny, on New Year’s Eve and I had the great satisfaction of kicking him to the kerb.’

‘Brilliant,’ laughed Anna. She wondered if her own ‘dumping-boy’ had turned up at her front door while she was here.

‘Were you very hurt?’ Jane then asked softly.

‘Crucified,’ Anna replied. ‘I couldn’t see any way round the pain for a long time. It hurt like hell.’

‘How are you feeling now though? Is time a great healer like they say?’

‘Not for the first few weeks it wasn’t,’ Anna answered, thinking back to that awful lake of pain and not being able to even see the bank, never mind swim to it. ‘But I feel a bit of ground beneath my feet now, although I still have my moments. This programme has made the weekends seem not so long and lonely, and the women I work with at the day job are fantastic and really supportive. It’s very strange, because we’re all different ages, but we get on. The age thing doesn’t get in the way at all.’

‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Jane’s ears seemed to prick up. ‘Where do you work?’

‘In the White Rose Stores’ headquarters on the Eastings business park. I’m in the Bakery department there.’

Maria started on Anna’s hair, piling it into a huge, gravity-defying tower.

‘Do you think you’d take him back?’ asked Jane, half-transfixed by Maria’s skill.

‘Yes, I think I would,’ replied Anna. The brain which should be throwing up all the rotten things he’d done – like bugger off while she was having her miscarriage – was annoyingly remembering his positive points instead: his physically gentle nature, his lust for her body, his career ambition, his generosity with money. He had a lot of good points as well as shitty ones. She hoped they could get back on track if he returned.

Twenty minutes later, Jane was deep in conversation with Anna, for the camera this time.

‘So, here you are wearing a 99p value T-shirt, Anna, on top of a Vladimir Darq bodyshaper – how sexy are you feeling?’

Anna looked into the mirror. Maria had built her hair into a beehive that would have given Amy Winehouse a run for her money. She had also given her smoky eyes and glossy pink lips, but it wasn’t the make-up that was filling her body with electricity. Vladimir Darq’s bodyshaper had given her the knockers of a nineteen year old and a waist that swooped in and out to a grand pair of hips. For once, instead of curving her back to minimize her chest, she was sticking it up and out. Even wearing the cheapest T-shirt in the world, Anna was looking hotter than she thought possible.

‘I can’t believe it, Jane,’ said Anna. ‘I didn’t think I could have my boobs back up here again. I thought they were destined to loll around my waist.’

Bruce suppressed a snorty giggle.

Jane’s attention switched to the designer. ‘Vladimir, talk us through what you’ve done for Anna,’

‘It’s very simple. I have made a bodyshaper, which I call “The Darqone”, which is both comfortable and sexy,’ he said confidently. ‘It’s not impossible to be both.’

‘How can you do that for every woman and keep the price point low?’

Vladimir gave a small laugh as if the answer was obvious. ‘The trouble with these firms who say “Yes, we have G sizes and H sizes” is that they have 32G and 34H but they don’t have 44G and 46H,’ he went on to explain. ‘I will have ALL sizes available. “The Darqone” which Anna is wearing now will become a wardrobe basic, just you wait and see. I will sell so many that I can keep the price down, of course.’

‘You seem very sure, Vladimir,’ parried Anna, playfully. ‘What if you don’t sell as many as you project you will?’

‘I will,’ said Vladimir Darq. His answer scored 300/10 on the confidence chart.

‘Cut,’ called Mark. ‘We need to see the body thing now, Anna. We’ll just get a few shots of it before we call it a day.’

‘That’s all you lot ever seem to say to me: “get your kit off,” smiled Anna.

‘Yes, and you love it,’ said Mark, blowing her a kiss.

Grinning, Anna slid the T-shirt over her head.

‘Your tits really are fantastic in that top, Anna,’ called Bruce from behind the camera.

‘Hands on waist, Anna,’ instructed Mark. ‘And I agree.’

Anna laughed. If someone had said that to her a month ago she would have thought he was a deranged pervert with cataracts. Now she nearly allowed herself to accept it as a genuine compliment, albeit with a blush.

Vladimir Darq said nothing. He stood by Maria, arms folded, a saturnine glower on his face. But he noted that Anna’s shoulders were back and how long her neck looked when she wasn’t trying to hide herself away.

‘So, how was Milan? Was it a fashion week?’ said Anna, slipping into her robe after the shooting had finished.

‘I didn’t go for the fashion,’ said Vlad. ‘I went for the Italians.’

‘Italians?’ Anna gulped.

‘Yes, I was hungry and Italians taste so good.’

‘You’re joking, right?’ said Anna.

‘
Vampiri
– they don’t joke about their food,’ said Vladimir Darq with such an intense stare that Anna felt mentally ravaged. Then he turned to liaise with Mark, leaving Anna to fan some cool air onto her heated cheeks.

Vladimir sent Anna home with her smoky eyes, big hairdo and ‘The Darqone’ on. He told her to keep wearing it and walk around her house feeling like the woman she had seen in the mirror. He gave her a parcel of more in various gorgeous colours and told her to wear nothing but those all week under her clothes.

The note she had left for Tony was still there on her door when she got back home. He had not called. ‘Ah well,’ she sighed, in a hurry to have a look at herself in her make-up. She made a bee-line for the long mirror in her bedroom and posed seductively at her reflection, trying to imagine what Tony would think if he saw her now, all pouty-mouthed and attitude. Lynette Bottom would be launched into the nearest wheely bin and he’d have leaped on her. She smoothed her hands over her curves. She felt magnificent. Tony wouldn’t have had a chance at resisting her, looking like this.

Calum had been out at his mate’s thirtieth birthday do all Saturday night and was just going up the stairs to bed on Sunday morning as Dawn was coming down them.

‘Where you off to?’ he slurred.

‘Meadowhall. Wedding stuff,’ she lied. It wasn’t even eight o’clock but Calum’s eyes couldn’t have focused on a clock.

‘Have a nice day,’ he waved behind him. ‘See you at Mum’s for chicken.’

Drat!
She had forgotten they were supposed to be going to Muriel’s. Not that, ashamedly, it would alter her decision on how her day would be spent. She was giddy as a kipper and any feelings of guilt she should have had were being squashed with all her might. She would ring, supposedly from Meadowhall, and tell Calum to send her apologies but she was too busy shopping and had lost track of time. More guilt to add to the mix.
But then, why should you feel guilty
? asked her brain. After all, she was only showing a cowboy around some Yorkshire countryside. A friend.
Yeah, but a ‘friend’ who makes your heart gallop,
came a counter-argument. A ‘friend’ who would be gone from her life in a couple of weeks and whom she was never likely to see again, fired back her brain. It was one argument too far.

Al was waiting for her, sitting on the wall in the sunshine. He was wearing faded denim jeans and a black T-shirt that made his chest look wide and his waist look small. She found herself smiling as soon as her eyes touched on him.

‘Good morning, Dawny Sole,’ he said. His presence seemed to make the sun shine brighter. He had a lazy grin that made her feel as if she had swallowed some of that sunshine and it was making her stomach glow.

‘Hi, y’all,’ she drawled back and he laughed.

‘So, where are you taking me?’

‘Wait and see,’ she said casually, belying the fact she had pored over the Internet for ages the previous night. There were so many places she could have taken him, but she had made sweet, gentle choices rather than wildly exciting ones. Places she liked, places she would go to when he had gone back to Canada and remember him.

‘How about we start with a walk in a nice park?’

‘Sounds good to me, honey,’ said Al, swinging his body into her passenger car seat. Dawn’s foot was very shaky on the clutch.

The ducks and geese at Higher Hoppleton were so well-fed they looked at the breadcrumbs scattered by little children with total disdain. Dawn had often been the recipient of their disgusted glances, so this time she had lovingly prepared two bags full of Madeira cake.

The ducks waddled forward, quacking a ‘that’s more like it’.

‘Do you feed ducks in Canada?’ said Dawn.

‘Only to diners,’ said Al, grinning again.

‘Oh, that’s awful,’ said Dawn, laughing.

‘Sure is a lovely house,’ said Al, looking over his shoulder at Hoppleton Hall. ‘Can we go in and take a look?’

‘Yes, it is on my to-do list,’ said Dawn.

‘Is an English cream tea on your list too?’

‘Of course,’ said Dawn. ‘I’m going to blow your mind with my choice for that later,’ she said.

‘You’re my kind of guide, Dawny Sole,’ he said, saluting her.

They fed the greedy ducks and then walked around the lovely old Hoppleton Hall, looking at all the military memorabilia, and Dawn’s imagination played with the idea that they were a couple on one of many days out. Like Ben and Raychel. Calum never wanted to go anywhere but the pub or, occasionally when his mates dragged him, the football ground. Even when they’d gone to the seaside last year, he’d spent the afternoon in a beer garden, saying it was too hot to walk around. And sand bored him. He’d looked at her as if she were daft when she’d suggested that they take off their shoes and go paddling.

It was just over an hour to the coast. Cleethorpes wasn’t the busiest seaside town, but it had sun and sea and sand, some of the things that Dawn wanted to share with Al. She had always wanted to live by the sea or some water. Al, apparently, lived by a lake so big it was like an ocean, he said, making Dawn sigh. Again. She sighed a lot in his company. They chatted, played daft games like ‘comparing favourite things’ and ‘being the first to spot a . . .’ for the whole journey, driving along roads which were surprisingly clear for such a beautiful day – and a Bank Holiday weekend to boot. Cleethorpes itself was busy but they dropped on a good parking space just as a family with a screaming toddler were leaving it.

Dawn headed straight for the nearest novelty shop and bought two Kiss Me Quick hats.

‘It’s illegal not to wear one of these at the seaside,’ she said, and then dragged Al off for his first taste of British fish and chips, doused with salt and vinegar, and they ate them from the paper as they sat on a bench and looked out at the sea and kids with buckets and spades and donkeys with tinkly bells and teenagers showing off to each other with skimpy bikinis and sloppy shorts and volleyballs.

‘I love water,’ said Al, finishing off the half of fish that Dawn couldn’t manage. ‘The lake I live alongside is full of fish. Ever been fishing, Dawny?’

‘Dad used to take me fishing,’ said Dawn, sliding into a memory that was as cosy as a pair of old slippers.

‘Your mom ever remarry?’ asked Al, licking his fingers.

‘Mum and Dad died together. Car crash. Some idiot boy racer.’ She shook her head as she thought of the community service ‘sentence’ which the dangerous little teenage twit got for destroying three lives. He had arrived in court with his face all sorry and a theatrical neck collar. He had ripped it straight off when he left court with his celebrating mates.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Al. ‘I didn’t realize.’

‘They’re buried next to each other. Dad and his guitar, Mum and her piano.’ Dawn’s smile was fond and sad. ‘I’m joking, of course. Mind you, it was the only thing that wasn’t in her coffin. It was like a car boot sale with all the flowers and bits of music and poems and stuff that all their musician friends put in.’