Hearts and Diamonds (11 page)

‘Absolutely nothing,’ he purred, ripping down her knickers.

And with that, he was inside her. No ceremony, no sweet talk, no stroking and feathering, just the quick, hot connection they both craved.

She didn’t know when or how he had shucked down his trousers and pants, but somewhere in those few panting, wanting moments between falling on the couch and getting nailed, he had managed.

What a talent
, she thought, her head swimming with the delicious dirtiness of what he did to her.
Well spotted, Jenna
.

Now his hand was on her neck, holding her in position so he could thrust hard without fear of her collapsing forward.

She surrendered to everything: his control, her own desire for it, the primitive urgency of the coupling, letting herself fall into it and forget all else.

He let go of her neck and instead grabbed a ponytail of hair, wrapping it tight about his fist. She pushed her hips back, signalling how much she loved what he did to her, raising her bottom to him.

He smacked it, hard, but not too hard to break her intense focus on taking pleasure from her submission.

He grunted now with each thrust, plunging deeper. It was as if he was determined to find something hidden at her centre, a core of her, perhaps her soul. She knew he was demanding something of her.

She thought she knew what it was, too. She worked hard to sustain the rhythm they established and to make sure each forward drive of his cock rubbed against that crucial little spot inside her. He wanted her to come. He wanted her to feel that she owed him her pleasure. For that to happen, she must first let it overwhelm her.

‘Yes,’ she muttered, once she was sure she was on course to her orgasm. The first low stirrings rushed up from the pit of her stomach, then a tremendous climax radiated outwards from her g-spot, causing her to press her mouth to the arm of the sofa and howl into the buttoned leather.

‘Yes, yes,’ answered Jason, slamming into her. ‘You love it.’

He still tugged at her scalp but she felt no pain, only a melting, maddening tingling all over.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Give it to me.’

He grabbed her hips and emptied inside her, for so long that she thought there would be nothing left inside him, just a boneless shell of him lying limp on the sofa.

She was almost right.

When she managed to wriggle out from underneath him, he looked as if he might never move again.

‘Are you OK?’ she whispered, brushing his sweat-damp brow.

An exhalation parted his lips. It might have been some kind of laugh.

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ he whispered. ‘What do you think?’

‘You look . . .’

‘Shagged out? Yeah. There’s a reason for that.’

He encircled her with a shaking arm and brought her down to lie, squashed between him and the sofa back, leather on one side, quivering flesh and hot blood on the other.

‘I do love you, you know,’ she said, rubbing her forehead against his.

She felt his eyelashes flutter on her cheek.

‘Mutual,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever stop.’

JENNA WOKE UP
the next morning feeling sore. Her bones ached and she needed a shower more than she needed air. Jason had kept her up half the night. If there was any justice, he should be feeling even worse.

She turned reluctantly to her side, ready to ask him, but he wasn’t there.

Must be in the shower
, she thought groggily, but no sounds of water splashing on to the wet room floor could be heard.

She yawned and tried to prop herself on her elbows for a squint round the dim room. Too much effort. She flopped back down and reached for her phone on the bedside table. That made her open her eyes. Half past nine already! And she had meetings scheduled for eleven and two o’clock today.

She edged herself into a sitting position, wincing at the sting between her legs.

‘Jay,’ she called. ‘Jason.’

No reply. Damn. She was going to have to get out of bed.

Gone were the days when she could shag all night and spring back into shape like a bath sponge. A twinge of regret that Deano, rather than Jason, had enjoyed those years of insouciant flexibility added itself to all the other twinges as she hobbled around the room looking for her dressing gown.

‘Jen, you’re thirty-five not ninety,’ she chided herself, stretching out her limbs before slipping on the silk robe. ‘Get your act together.’

She was almost out of the bedroom and in the open-plan living area before it occurred to her that Jason’s clothes were not where he had left them. He had obviously dressed. Perhaps, she thought with a burst of optimism, he had ordered a room service breakfast and it would be waiting for her, together with copious amounts of coffee, when she walked out of the room.

But no.

Nobody was in the living area, or the bathroom.

He’d popped out for some fresh air, perhaps, although there was a balcony for that. The sun shone brightly through the gauzy curtains that covered the balcony door. She would get some coffee brought up and drink it out there, she thought.

Before ordering, she grabbed her phone and tried to dial Jason on the contract smartphone she’d bought him the week before.

She swore under her breath as it chirrupped back to her from the other side of the bedroom. Wherever he was, he was incommunicado.

She took the coffee, once it was delivered, and went out to the balcony, deciding to try and enjoy her enforced wait. He’d be back soon, no doubt. Gone out for a paper or a quick stroll round the block. Freedom was still a wondrous novelty to him after all those weeks cooped up at Harville Hall. He was stretching his wings. It was fine.

From the balcony, the lush green expanse of Hyde Park stretched out before her, Kensington Palace visible at a distance above the flourishing tree tops. The London morning was busy as always. Down on Park Lane, cabs and buses filled the road. Speakers’ Corner was already open for business, a small crowd building up around the soapboxes. On the pavement, artists attached their paintings to the railings, ready for another day’s business. Here and there, a tourist or two stopped to admire the work of a pavement artist, drawing their portraits, or those of a famous person, in chalk.

Jenna’s idle gaze stopped roving and she focused abruptly. She got up from the small table and peered from the balcony edge, squinting to make sure that she was seeing right.

‘Oh
God
!’ she said, abandoning her coffee and running to the shower for the quickest douse under the warm needling water before dressing and hurrying out.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded, down on the pavement. She wore sunglasses and a headscarf tied in a fifties style under her chin, hiding her hair. Even so, she couldn’t be sure a couple of faces in the small crowd that had gathered hadn’t lifted in recognition.

Jason looked up from the chalk fantasy that now encompassed half a dozen slabs. His face was dusty, in several pastel colours.

‘What’s it look like?’ he said carelessly. ‘Earning a crust.’

He waved a hand over to a battered cap in which several coins and even a few notes lay.

‘I tried to phone you,’ she said.

‘I told you,’ he answered, in a tone of long-suffering patience. ‘I’ll use that phone once I’ve paid you back for it. You can call that your first instalment.’

He picked up the cap and proffered it to her.

She took it without further remark, for she had just noticed what the chalk art represented. Amidst a backdrop of orchards and birds and flowers and trees was her face, exquisitely rendered, like a da Vinci.

‘That’s . . .’ she whispered.

‘Yeah, Jenna Diamond,’ he said loudly, so that she caught on that he was trying to preserve her anonymity amongst this crowd. ‘Well recognised.’

‘Looks just like her,’ commented a woman at her side. ‘Though I think she’s overrated myself. I mean, she’s no Cheryl Cole, is she?’

Jenna wasn’t keen to hear much more of this.

‘Have you forgotten?’ she urged under her breath. ‘We have an appointment at eleven. It’s after ten already.’

‘Right. The Italian bloke.’

‘Alfonso, the best men’s stylist in London, I think you’ll find. Come on. You need a wash. I can’t take you there all covered in chalk.’

Sighing, Jason packed up his chalks, waved to his admiring onlookers and took his leave.

‘Shame the rain’ll wash it all away,’ he said, looking back at his handiwork.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jenna, unsure whether to be annoyed with Jason or moved by the beautiful portrait he had made of her. ‘That’s why you should be concentrating on making a proper, lasting career of your art, rather than busking on street corners.’

‘Every little helps,’ he said. ‘And you can stop telling me off. I’m not some snotty kid in your class or something.’

‘Sorry. I just wish you’d let me know where you were going.’

‘I left a note.’

She stopped and looked at him.

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah. On the table in the living room.’

‘Oh, God, I didn’t realise. I didn’t see it. Sorry.’

‘Apology accepted,’ he said, so loftily that she immediately wanted to snap at him again.

But she refrained and, once in the lift, offered him a compliment on the portrait instead.

‘You weren’t working from a photograph?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘From here.’ He put a hand on his heart and all her residual irritation faded clean away.

It didn’t return until, washed and brushed up, they were in the cab heading for Alfonso’s Shoreditch consultancy office.

‘So this is like a clothes shop?’ said Jason. ‘Where we’re going?’

‘No,’ said Jenna. ‘Alfonso is a stylist. He doesn’t sell clothes. He suggests looks for you.’

‘What’s the point of that? Why not cut out the middleman and just go shopping? If we must,’ he added in a sulky undertone.

‘Jason,’ said Jenna, slipping without realising it into a professional lecturing tone, ‘all successful people in the public eye need styling. The days when you could get away with wearing what
you
thought looked good on you are gone. With so many magazines and papers selling copies on the back of pictures of celebrities who made bad style choices, you can’t afford to get caught out like that any more. Believe me, if you put a fashion foot wrong, it will be all the way around the world before you can blink. That’s the frightening reality of modern celebrity.’

‘Yeah, but it’s shit, though. Just because something’s shit doesn’t mean you have to go along with it.’

Jenna couldn’t even begin to formulate an answer to this, not least because, somewhere near the core of her consciousness, she had a nagging feeling that he could be right.

Instead, she chose to bluster. ‘Trust me, Jason. This is what I do. I know what I’m talking about. Think about the pop music you grew up with. Which acts broke through the quickest? Was it the most talented? Was it the ones with the best songs? No. It was the ones with the strongest style. The Spice Girls, Take That, Britney and all those others. The public love their stars to be instantly recognisable, to be unique and yet also easy to copy. Madonna pulled that trick off brilliantly. So did Michael Jackson.’

‘What about Susan Boyle? What about Johnny Rotten?’

‘Johnny Rotten was styled to within an inch of his life,’ she said, on surer ground now. ‘Believe you me. But that’s an interesting thought. We go left field, do something nobody’s expecting. I’ll discuss it with Alfonso.’

‘You’d better not make me look like a tosser. I won’t be made to look like a tosser.’

‘Why would I want that?’ Jenna snuggled her head into his shoulder. ‘I still have to fancy you, don’t I?’

‘I should bloody well hope so. And don’t forget. There’ll be payback for this later.’

Somehow she didn’t think threats of payback were meant to make her feel quite so hot and bothered, but this one did.

She was still tingling mildly when the taxi disgorged them and they mounted the narrow stairs to Alfonso’s office in a converted warehouse.

The floor on which he held his premises was an open-plan space filled with small business units. In one, a group of women cut cloth and worked at sewing machines; in the next, a younger mixed group sat on a circular sofa huddled over iPads. Inspirational posters and strangely-clad tailors’ dummies were rushed past until Jenna located the unit she needed to get to.

‘Alfonso,’ she called, and a short, dark man in an outsize pinstripe shirt and neon yellow skinny jeans burst out from behind a screen, arms spread wide.

‘Oh my God, you
are
real,’ he cried, tackling her into a hug. ‘I thought someone had cloned your voice pattern or something when you made the appointment before. I didn’t dare to hope.’

He stood back, laughing all over a good-natured, pointy-bearded face.

‘Still a goddess,’ he said.

‘Still a bullshitter,’ she grinned back. ‘But fantastic to see you, all the same. I’ve watched your progress from behind my desk in LA. You’ve got some of the hottest clients in town. Congratulations on the Girl Crush gig.’

‘Oh, those bitches are hell on wheels to work with,’ he exclaimed, then he lowered his voice, putting a finger to his lips, although his eyes still twinkled. ‘But you didn’t hear that from me. Come into my lair, darling. Oh God.’ He stopped dead, staring at Jason. ‘I’m
so
sorry. I was so bowled over by the goddess Jenna that I didn’t even . . . Do excuse me. Alfonso Vannetti.’

He offered Jason a hand to shake. Jason took it and shook it awkwardly, muttering, ‘Jason Watson.’

The three retired behind a pair of giant screens plastered all over with photographs of Alfonso’s celebrity clients on various red carpets and podiums. In his large corner space, he had racks upon racks of clothes samples and little else beyond a desk on which a slim silver notebook computer lay shut, and a very large, very plush, very marabou-trimmed sofa.

‘Take a seat on my sofa of the stars,’ he offered, pulling out a mobile and speed-dialling. ‘Freya, Alfonso. Champagne, please, and three glasses.’

Jenna could feel Jason’s discomfort radiating out from him in waves. He was sitting stiffly, looking at the clothing rails with some dismay.