Charlie Glass's Slippers (18 page)

“No . . .”

“Do you work near the Ferrari showroom in South Ken-sington? I’ve been in there quite a lot recently, picking out a new car.”

“No, I don’t work near—”

“Oh, I know—do I know you from Davos? I take a ten-bedroom chalet there for three weeks every Christmas, hire a Michelin-starred chef, and throw some pretty raucous dinner parties, Cristal as far as the eye can see . . .”

“No. I’ve never been to Davos.” And I’m not entirely sure why Hamish is apparently so keen to list all his luxury possessions and hint at his vast entertaining budget. I pull my shoes back on, the better to make my exit. “I’ve never been skiing at all.”

“Never been skiing? Well, I suppose that makes sense.” A smile passes across his shiny lips (I have a sudden feeling that he’s wearing a light layer of clear lipgloss) and I wait for him to say something obnoxious about me not looking the athletic type, or make some crack about breaking the ski lift. “You wouldn’t want to risk the damage, would you, not with a body as incredible as yours?”

I stare at him. I’m dimly aware that my mouth has dropped open. Getting mistaken for a model was one thing—it
is
pretty dark in this corner, after all. But having Hamish McGarrigle telling me that my body is incredible, after (only three months ago) calling me a heifer . . .

If Lucy were here, she’d get all excited and tell me that I need to behave like Julia Roberts in that scene in
Pretty Woman
where she goes back, transformed and elegant, to visit the snooty shop assistant who refused to serve her when she was looking all trashy, and revels in rubbing her face in it.

But I don’t feel like replicating that scene right now. Because in
Pretty Woman
the snooty shop assistant wasn’t pressing her thigh unpleasantly hard against Julia Robert’s thigh,
nor placing a sweaty, Play-Doh hand on Julia Robert’s bare shoulder.

“Look, how’s about this for a plan?” Hamish is saying. “Why don’t you and me get out of here? Go and grab a drink somewhere. My flat in Mayfair, for example.”

“But there’s plenty to drink here!” I waggle my martini glass at him before hastily downing the contents. “In fact, I need to go and get myself a refill!”

He stops me from getting up by pressing his hand more firmly down on my shoulder.

“Actually, I meant somewhere more cozy. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Oh, well, I’m not really a fan of cozy. Cozy isn’t really my cup of tea. In fact”—a bright idea occurs to me—“talking of cups of tea, I suddenly have this horrible feeling I’ve left the kettle on at home . . .”

“No need to worry about the kettle. Leaving an iron on is the only thing you have to worry about.”

“But my kettle is . . . is wired up to the iron! I had a very peculiar electrician,” I add, when Hamish frowns at this. “He took an extremely cavalier approach to wiring. If I leave the kettle on, my whole flat is in danger of burning down.”

“Tell you what, gorgeous.” Hamish’s hand slides damply downward, from my shoulder to my wrist, and interlocks its fingers with mine. “If your flat burns down, I’ll buy you a new one. In the meantime, I’ve got a bit of blow in my pocket.” He’s breathing, hotly, right into my face. His breath smells of booze and—oddly—fresh horseradish. “Why don’t you and I go up to one of the bedrooms and start a little private party of our own?”

“But I don’t blow. I mean, I don’t
do
blow,” I correct myself, hastily. “And it would be pretty rude, I think, to start a party of our own, when this one’s still going on.” I give my hand a sharp pull, succeeding in freeing it from his grasp, and get to
my feet. There’s a worrying creak from the seams of the Valentino dress, but I choose to ignore it. I’d honestly rather bust out of this dress altogether than stick around with Hamish a moment longer.

“Oh, no, you’re not going anywhere!” Hamish gets to his feet, too, making him literally at eye level with my prize-melon cleavage. “We’ve only just started getting to know each other . . .”

I’m about to say that I’m perfectly happy knowing Hamish exactly the amount that I do right now, and no better, when Jay Broderick appears, quite suddenly, at Hamish’s shoulder.

He’s wearing a midnight-blue suit and a crisp white shirt. His hair (still) looks as if he’s just rolled out of bed after a night sleeping the wrong way on it. His cheekbones are more razor-sharp than ever in the sultry lighting. He looks, in the words of Chloe/Zoe, insanely hot.

“Hamish,” he says. “Everything all right here, mate?”

“Oh, Jay.” Hamish can barely hide his irritation. “Actually, mate, I’m a little bit busy right now. Mind giving me some privacy?”

“No problem, except that I think Charlie’s had just about all the privacy she wants for one evening.” Jay fixes his sooty eyes right onto mine. “Right?”

“Well, I do have a . . . er, friend I wanted to talk to . . .”

“Sure.” He reaches right around Hamish and takes my hand. It’s possible that this might just have created a couple of sparks of electricity; at least that’s what it feels like. I’m a bit too dazzled by his proximity to pay much attention to the finer details. “Let’s go and find her.”

“Oh, come on, mate.” Hamish is looking furious. “Don’t do this to me. I saw her first.”

“Wrong.” Jay flashes a rather dangerous smile in Hamish’s direction, before his eyes lock onto mine again. “I’ve been waiting for her all night, as it happens.”

“All right, all right.” Hamish gives a rather mirthless laugh. “It’s your party, mate. Don’t let me cramp your style.”

“I won’t.” Jay interlaces his fingers with mine. “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go and get a breath of fresh air, shall we?”

And before I can say another word, Jay has led me away from my corner, weaving through the crowds without stopping. We go out into the lobby and towards the elevator, where he pushes aside the velvet rope, presses the button, and stands back to let me through the elevator doors as they open.

“Come on up. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

• • •

It occurs to me, about three seconds before the elevator doors open again, that he could be taking me to a bedroom.

Probably
is
taking me to a bedroom, in fact. We’re certainly not stopping off at the first floor, where the main party is, but going two . . . no, three floors up above that.

I’m torn between incredible, pulsating, overwhelming desire (for Jay to throw me onto a bed and take me to heights of pleasure I never knew were possible) and total terror (because I haven’t done any heights-scaling with a man, pleasurable or otherwise, for roughly 80 percent of the last decade).

Oh, and gut-wrenching regret that I didn’t get that showgirl wax Galina was bugging me about this morning.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Jay says, just as the elevator doors open. (Thank
God
, we don’t seem to be stuck between floors.)
“I’m not taking you away to be ravished or anything.”

I manage to laugh—tricky, from within the Valentino rib-crusher—and try not to look too disappointed.

“Oh, one more quick question.” He stops, just as we’re halfway out of the elevator. “You’re not scared of heights, are you?”

Of pleasure?

“Charlie?”

“No, no, I’m perfectly fine with heights.”

“Great.” He grins, then squeezes his interlocked fingers gently around mine as he leads me out of the elevator. “Then I hope you like it.”

We’re standing on the edge of a roof garden. It’s about the size of my kitchen, and beautifully landscaped with a single magnolia tree in the center and lilac bushes growing all around the sides over waist-height railings. There are fairy lights strung from the lilac bushes and Chinese lanterns hung from the branches of the magnolia, and in the far corner there’s a low, Arabian-nights-style sofa, plump with garden cushions. Beside the sofa is a little cast-iron table, bearing a tray with a glistening silver ice bucket, a bottle of champagne, and two glasses. There’s a second, lower table that has another tray on it, this one with three plates of elegantly arranged canapés, bite-sized pieces of fruit, and cocoa-dusted chocolate truffles. From some unseen place, speakers are playing light jazz, something that Dad would have been able to identify at a hundred paces but that I can only guess is Miles Davis.

Is this . . . has Jay set all this up . . . for
me
?

“I took a chance you’d like champagne,” Jay is saying. He lets go of my hand and heads for the cast-iron table, where he takes the bottle out of the ice bucket, deftly pops the cork, and starts pouring the contents into the champagne glasses. “Though I’m afraid I didn’t know if you like rosé . . .”

“I love rosé.”

“. . . which is why I played it safe and stuck to white.” He glances up at me and smiles. The smile is still devilish, but softened with something more . . . angelic, perhaps? “My apologies, Charlie. I’ll sort out the pink stuff for next time.”

Next time?
I’m not even sure my heart is going to make it through
this
time. Now that we’re here, in this personally catered roof-garden idyll, I can feel it starting to hammer, nineteen to the dozen, inside my chest. If I’m not careful, the extra
movement is going to put my prize-melon boobs in danger of wobbling right out of the top of the dress. I need to sit down again. I mince over to the sofa and lower my spangly red bum all the way down towards it.

“One glass of plain champagne coming up.” Jay turns to me, both glasses in his hand, and looks rather surprised when he sees I’m already attempting to sit. “I’d thought you might like a look at the view first. You can see all the way to Big Ben from up here.”

“Oh!” I stop myself, mid-lower, before my spangly red bum hits the sofa cushion, and start cranking myself back upward again. “Of course!”

“On second thought . . .” He’s moving towards the sofa himself. “I can show you the view later. After all, Big Ben isn’t going anywhere. Please, Charlie, have a seat.”

I realize that, thanks to his dratted perfect manners, he isn’t going to sit down until I do, so to make sure I get a decent head start, I begin winching myself back down towards the painfully low sofa cushions again, talking while I do so to cover any give-away creaks from my seams.

“Do you know you can go up Big Ben? On a guided tour, I mean. I never realized that until a couple of years ago, when my best friend, Lucy, took her godchildren out for the day, and . . .”

I can stop. I’ve finally parked my bottom on the Arabian-nights cushions and don’t have to worry about covering up creaking seams anymore.

Jay looks at me for a couple of moments, politely waiting for me to finish my story, but when he realizes I’m not going to, he sits down (with enviable ease) on the cushion next to me.

“So,” he says, clinking our glasses. His eyes are fixed on mine again, just the way they were down in the library. “You made it. I was starting to wonder whether you were going to
come at all. And then I saw you trapped in that corner with Hamish . . . I hope you didn’t mind, by the way.”

“Being trapped in the corner with Hamish?”

He lets out a shout of laughter. “Well, I assume you minded
that
, from the desperate expression on your face. No, I meant that I hope you didn’t mind me riding to the rescue. It’s just that Hamish has a bit of a reputation with girls. Especially with a girl like you. You know—a nice girl. A girl who’s too polite to tell him to back off.”

Oh. Well, it’s nice that he thinks I’m nice. And polite. That’s never a bad thing to hear, is it?

But I can’t deny I’d have liked it even more if he’d—for example—taken my face in his hands and said,
a girl like you, Charlie, who’s so drop-dead gorgeous that I can scarcely look at her without wanting to tear off her suffocatingly uncomfortable Valentino dress and caress every sinful curve of her body.

“And of course, Hamish has a
really
bad reputation with girls who are breathtakingly, devastatingly, mind-bogglingly sexy.” Jay takes a sip from his champagne glass. “Girls like you, Charlie, as it happens.”

Which is about a million times more exciting than what I was just fantasizing he might say.

When I realize that Jay is still just looking at me, and that I’ve got no idea how much time has elapsed since he last spoke, I swallow to moisten my throat, then open my mouth to speak.

“Do you . . . think I’m sexy?”

Brilliant, Charlie. Just brilliant
.

“Nah, not really.” Jay casts an amused eye around our idyllic setting. “I quite often go to this kind of trouble to impress a girl I find only mildly attractive.”

“Oh, right . . .”

He lets out a shout of laughter, then shifts a couple of inches on his cushion so that he’s closer to me. “Doesn’t the private party in the secret roof garden tell you
anything
?”

“It might just be another VIP section,” I point out.

Jay groans. “Oh, God, the VIP section. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“A bit,” I admit.

“Okay, in my defense, I didn’t know a thing about any VIP section myself until about an hour ago, when I started wondering why lots of my friends didn’t seem to be turning up to the party. Then I found out that the party planner had unilaterally drawn up a VIP list, and that most of my friends weren’t actually on it . . . But no, Charlie—in answer to your point, this isn’t another VIP section. This is just for you and me.” He reaches for the bottle of champagne again and tops up both our glasses. “And here. Try one of these.” He reaches for the plate of canapés and picks up a little puff-pastry goat’s cheese tartlet, which—before I can refuse—he’s popped into my mouth. “Good?”

I nod, unable to speak until I’ve swallowed, and partly just unable to speak because the canapé is not just “good,” it’s the most delicious thing I’ve tasted in months. The pastry is buttery, the goat’s cheese is sharp and creamy, and it has actual
texture
, unlike the no-fat yogurt and vegetable soup that has formed the entirety of my diet since mid-March. Even though I know the Valentino dress is going to punish me for this, I have to reach out and help myself to another. (And then, when Jay turns his back to put the champagne bottle down again, yet another.)