Heller's Revenge (4 page)

“That’s not a good idea, Mr
Hazzard. She’s going to be flat out working for the rest of the
day. She has a number of TV and magazine interviews lined up after
the show,” I lied. “She’ll be lucky to be out of here by
midnight.”

He faltered and continued
softly, “But I don’t want her to think I wasn’t here to support
her.”

“I’ll let her know you were
here,” I assured, thinking that if Jenna had wanted the poor guy
present at her show, she would have made sure that he received an
invitation. She obviously hadn’t.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

He was defeated. “Okay. Ring me
a taxi.”

Yes!
I silently cheered.
Heller was going to be so proud of the calm way I handled
this
, I thought happily. I couldn’t wait to tell him. I was
forever in trouble with him over something or other, so this would
make a pleasant change.

“Can you lend me an arm to lean
on?” Frankie asked humbly in a low voice. “I’m a little under the
weather today. It’s been a real shit of a week so far.” He laughed
with charming self-deprecation. “Actually, it’s been a real shit of
a decade so far.”

“My pleasure, Mr Hazzard.” I
held out my arm and he rested his on it gratefully, gripping a
little harder than I’d expected, to be honest. I herded him towards
the door.

“Call me Frankie. Now tell me
why in God’s name you’re wearing such an . . . er . . .
interesting
outfit? Not that it isn’t a welcome sight for an
old fart like me.”

“It’s a long story,” I began
with a huge sigh, but before I could say another word, the manager
called me back with a discreet whistle that I didn’t for one second
mistake for a sign of appreciation at my rear view.

“Hey, you! You’re not walking
out of here wearing one of Jules Roux’s lingerie sets! That’s a
thousand dollars worth you’re wearing there.”

Holy shit! A thousand bucks
for these pieces of nothing?
Heller didn’t pay me enough to
shop in this store. I spun around to snap at him that I’d be back
in a second with his precious lingerie, only to find that somehow
one of Frankie’s cufflinks had become tangled in the silver chain
of my leather wrist band.

I raised my arm to gain a better
view of the tangle and Frankie’s arm was forced to rise along with
it.

“Oops. Looks as though we’re
caught up together,” I giggled.

Frankie frantically shook his
arm around trying to disengage the cufflink from the chain, only
making us more tangled as he did. My laughter dried up.

“Just stay still,” I ordered,
annoyed by his drunken attempts to help. I put my hand on his chest
to push him back a smidge, so I had a better view of the tangle,
raising our arms above our heads again.

“No, if we twist this way, it’ll
work,” he insisted, trying to turn me sideways but only succeeding
in snagging his other cufflink to the chains linking the pieces of
leather covering my boobs. Realising his blunder, he yanked his arm
away, pulling my chains with him and straining the leather across
my chest.

“Whoa, hold on, Frankie! Don’t
move any more. You’re going to rip my bra off!”

“Oh shit. Sorry.”

“Hell,” I grumbled to myself as
I tried a few moves to extricate him from my chains. I might have
sorted it out myself, but Frankie insisted on ‘helping’, fumbling
with the chains, raising our linked arms when I wanted them
lowered, pushing me back when I was trying to peer at the tangle
more closely. We struggled against each other, our arms waving
around, his unsteadiness on his feet causing us both to
stagger.

“Stay still, will you?” I bit
loudly, losing my temper, forcing his arm down yet again, needing
both my hands to attempt to detangle his cufflinks from my
chains.

“Oh my God! There’s a fight!”
shrieked a female voice from the audience.

A fight? Where?
I
thought, looking around in alarm before realising that everyone was
staring at Frankie and me, running over at our commotion.

“He’s attacking one of the
models!” squealed another in terror. “Someone get help.”

“It’s a mad man!” screeched a
third. “He’s probably a Jenna stalker. Where’s security? Someone
call the police!”

“No, no –” I started to explain,
but Frankie panicked when he saw the angry crowd heading his way
and spun to flee, jerking on my chains as he did. Taken unawares, I
didn’t have a chance to ready myself and twisted awkwardly, falling
against him and bringing him to the ground. I landed on him
heavily.

“
Ooof!
” he grunted in
pain. “Get off me!” He pushed against me and rolled from one side
to the other to dislodge me, while I tried to stop him and to get
him to remain still for a minute so I could free us. But judging
from the ensuing clamour, I guessed it appeared to the gathering
crowd as though we were scrapping.

During his exertions, Frankie’s
cufflink freed itself from my chest chains. In another attempt to
stop him struggling, I flipped him on his stomach and raised his
hand behind his back so I could unpick the tangle of his cufflink
in my wristband. Finally liberated from each other, I gently helped
him to his feet and looked around for my colleagues, who were
sheepishly pushing their way through the crowd towards me.

That was when I realised that
the show had stopped and Jenna and her retinue of models were
standing idle up on the catwalk, seething, nobody paying them any
attention.

Somebody was going to pay for
that
, I thought with resignation. And that person was probably
going to be me.

“Put him in a taxi and send him
home,” I instructed one of the men in a low voice as I handed
Frankie over to him, conscious all the while of Jenna’s death-glare
directed at me. “I’m making myself scarce.”

I slipped away, grateful to find
myself alone backstage. I located my uniform and hurriedly changed
back into it, glancing nervously towards the gold curtain, not
wanting to face either Jules or Jenna. Grabbing handfuls of
moistened wipes, I hastily cleaned all the makeup off my face and
twisted my hair back up into a professional bun. I was ready to
rejoin my security team.

I was just congratulating myself
for escaping detection, when the whole disgruntled troupe of women
returned backstage, headed by a distraught Jules and a stony-faced
Jenna. I made a run for it.

“
You!
” they both shouted
when they spotted me.

I froze.
Damn!
A few more
seconds and I would have been home free.

I swung around and smiled at
them with fake brilliance. “Fantastic show! I’m off now. Thanks for
the experience – it’s been a real . . . um . . . experience. The
lingerie’s in the changing cubicle and the shoes are somewhere near
the stage.”

“You ruined my business,” wailed
Jules.

“You ruined my show,” spat
Jenna, icicles of icy rage shooting from her eyes. “You’re going to
pay for this, bitch.”

I sighed.
I just knew that
somehow everything was going to end up being my fault.

Jenna stalked up to me, jabbing
her finger at me, anger spoiling her beautiful features. Spittle
collected unattractively at the corners of her mouth as she
screeched at me. “I am sick to death of talentless, ugly, fat women
like you trying to steal my glory.”
Hey!
I thought, annoyed.
I’d admit to being talentless, but I wasn’t ugly or fat. “
I
am the star here. You are nothing! Understand?
Nothing!
And
if you ever dare to upstage me again, I will make sure that you
never work in this business again. Understand?”

She’d obviously forgotten that I
didn’t work in this business, so instead of offering my grovelling
apologies as she clearly expected, I confused her by going on the
offence.

“Well, that gratitude for you,
isn’t it?” I demanded from all the other women in the room.
“Especially after I just saved her from a dangerous stalker.”

But Jenna was scornful. “That
man was no stalker.”

“He said he’d been ringing you
repeatedly,” I explained honestly. “And that he wanted to be here
to see you on your big day. He wanted to talk to you.”

She paled and slumped, leaning
heavily on the back of a chair. Her fury evaporated. “You really
think he was a stalker?”

I felt callous then because she
was genuinely fearful, having been spooked by stalkers before.

My tone was suitably
sympathetic. “Yes Jenna, I really do.” And I sent a silent
‘
sorry’
to poor Frankie for turning him into a villain,
knowing that now I could never pass on his message of support to
his niece.

“But what happened?” she
puzzled. “I didn’t notice anything until the music stopped.”

So I explained how I’d seen the
man from up on the stage and expressed my fake regrets about
abandoning the show to deal with the situation. Then I told her
that I would never have willingly risked ruining her show, but that
as a licensed security officer, I was duty-bound to place the
safety of my client above all other considerations. And that
sounded horribly corny to me, but she lapped it up happily.

Some of the stylists burst into
the room then, chattering excitedly about how a stalker had been
stopped from harming Jenna, greatly boosting my story.

She turned to me, sincere
gratitude in her eyes. “Thank you so much . . . um . . . um . .
.”

“Tilly,” I smiled.

“Thank you, Tilly. I’ll make
sure that your employer hears about what you’ve done today.”

Good God, that was the last
thing I wanted!
“That’s not necessary,” I assured hastily.
“Your thanks are reward enough for me.”

And being the person that she
was, she accepted this as only being natural.

“But what about
me
?”
fussed Jules. “My show’s fucking ruined!”

“That’s nonsense,” I insisted
impatiently. “All you have to do is get out there and perform that
grand finale again. Show everyone that Jules Roux and Jenna
Mackenzie can’t be stopped by a mad stalker.” And then to my shame,
I embellished further. “Even one with a knife.”

“
A knife!
” the crowd of
ladies whispered to each other with muted excitement.

Jules and Jenna conducted an
entire silent conversation with one exchanged look, before both
nodded.

“And then,” I continued my sage
advice, inching my way to the exit. “Call some media outlets and do
some interviews after the show. It’s free publicity for you both
and everyone comes out looking good.”

Everyone except poor
Frankie
, I thought sorrowfully as I reached the door. Jenna and
Jules nodded at each other again, before assembling the women into
formation again, Jules ordering the sour blonde girl who’d jostled
me to stand down so the numbers would be even. The bitter look of
pure hatred that she shot me in response haunted my dreams for a
few nights afterwards. I didn’t want to ever meet her alone in a
dark changing cubicle.

I disappeared through the
doorway and scrambled down the stairs to find Tony, chuffed to
extricate myself from that piece of madness without any
repercussions.

“Don’t know what we’re going to
tell the Boss about all of this. He’s not going to be happy,” Tony
noted dolefully, carefully watching my reaction.

There were a lot of men at work
who thought I was Heller’s little playmate and that I would go
running to him, telling tales about my colleagues. I never would,
but it’s hard to shift people’s preconceptions sometimes. I wasn’t
really sure why the men thought that anyway, because I was the one
person in the office who found herself in trouble more often than
anybody.

My response was cool. “We’ll
tell him that the job went smoothly except for a little disturbance
that was sorted out straight away with no fuss.”

Tony evaluated me for a moment
before cracking a smile.

“Provided . . .” I continued,
taking advantage of that small but promising sign of friendliness,
“that Heller doesn’t find out about my adventure on the catwalk.
Deal?”

Tony’s smile widened and he
nodded. “Deal.”

Both satisfied, we turned our
attention back to the job. It wasn’t long before the models had
reassembled and were strutting on the catwalk again finishing
Jenna’s grand finale. Tony’s concentration quickly wandered back to
more fleshly pleasures, but the remainder of the show proceeded
without any further problems.

Soon enough, the four of us had
returned to our
Heller’s
4WD, heading back to the office to
knock off for the day. But instead of returning there, I asked the
men to make a small detour on my behalf in order to drop me off on
the footpath outside a small and pretty suburban cottage. I waved
as they drove away, already forgetting them as I eagerly jogged up
the stairs of the house to its front door.

Chapter 3

Much later that evening, I made
another half-hearted attempt to leave.

“Don’t go,” he pleaded again,
sitting up to kiss my back, reaching his arm around to cup my
breast in his hand. He gently brushed his fingers across my nipple
and I closed my eyes, enjoying the thrilling sensations his touch
sparked. His other hand crept down past my stomach, one finger
darting out to lightly rub intimately against me.

“Stop it,” I groaned, twisting
around and pushing him backwards on the bed, the tangled sheets
surrounding us testament to the ardent hours we had spent together.
I straddled him and held him down by his shoulders. “Haven’t you
had enough yet? You’ve screwed me three times already tonight. You
can’t possibly be hard again.” I leaned down to kiss him
lingeringly on his mouth, reaching down to find that unbelievably,
he
was
hard again.

“I’ll never have enough of you,”
he grinned wickedly, kissing and teasing my nipple with his
tongue.