Sins (25 page)

‘But you’re bound to get something better. You are so good.’

‘Good, but out of work and broke, and about to be beaten up by a bunch of heavies over someone else’s debts. Oh God, Janey, I don’t know why you bother with me. You’d be better off without me. The damn world would be better off without me.’

The anguish in his voice had panic clutching at Janey’s tender heart. She desperately wanted to make things right for him.

‘No, Dan, you mustn’t say that. I shall lend you the money.’

Dan gave a short, broken laugh. ‘There’s no point–because I can’t repay it.’

‘Then I shall give it to you,’ she told him firmly, ‘and I warn you now, Dan, I shan’t take no for an answer.’ She opened her handbag and removed twenty-five pounds from her purse–a fortune really, which she only happened to have with her because Amber had given it to her to pay it into her bank account.

‘Here you are,’ she told him, ‘and I don’t want to hear another word about it–ever. In fact, I think we should forget all about it.’

‘Forget your kindness?’ Dan’s voice was thick and raw with emotion. ‘Oh God, but you are so special, Janey, so good and kind and wonderful. Come here, and let me show you how much I love you.’

When he reached for her, Janey went willingly into his arms, wrapping her own around him as he kissed the side of her neck and then just behind her ear, on the spot he knew always made her shiver with delight. She moved closer to him, her heart filled with happiness.

‘You’re so good to me, and for me,’ Dan told her, his voice muffled because he had pushed her top out of the way and was kneading her breasts, freed from the confinement of her bra.

The damp chilliness of the air in the basement flat brought out a rash of goosebumps on her skin and made her nipples pucker.

‘Great tits,’ Dan told her, eyeing them with admiring approval. ‘In fact they’re good enough for
Tit-Bits
.’

Janey pretended to look shocked at his mention of the well-known magazine, famous for its jokes and pictures of scantily dressed girls, but Dan didn’t notice. He was too busy playing with her breasts, making Janey herself forget her pretend disapproval when he sucked on one of her nipples, causing her belly to cramp up in fierce delight.

Dan was an impatient lover, their sex exciting, hot and very quick, and mostly over before they had got undressed properly.

Afterwards, when Dan said how good it had been, Janey could never bring herself to tell him that it was over too fast for her in case he thought she was one of those silly frigid girls who didn’t properly understand about sex. All the boys in the crowd Janey went around with said that the worst kind of girls were the ones who had sex like virgins and were obviously frigid.

Now, with Dan pushing up her skirt and sliding his hand into her knickers, Janey longed to suggest to him that they got undressed and into bed, instead of Dan pushing her back against the wall.

‘Oh, babe…’ Dan was crooning, which meant Janey knew that it wouldn’t be long now before he lifted her up and thrust into her a couple of times before coming, because ‘Oh, babe’ was what he always said before he did that.

‘Why don’t we do it on the bed?’ Janey suggested, slightly breathlessly.

‘It’s better standing up,’ Dan told her, adding softly, ‘There’s my good little pussy, all wet and ready for me. Want me to give you a finger fuck as a treat first for being so good to me?’

Janey nodded, closing her eyes and concentrating fiercely on the sensation aroused by Dan’s fingers inside her. If she could just concentrate hard enough then surely she could capture that elusive feeling that she knew was there waiting for her, if Dan would just be patient and not so…

She gasped in protest when Dan stopped touching her, telling her, ‘There you are, I’ll bet you enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ before thrusting himself into her.

Janey felt so disappointed that she almost wanted to cry. She could hear Dan panting and groaning as he thrust deeper and harder, but she had preferred what he had been doing before, and she would have liked it even more, she acknowledged, if only she’d felt brave enough to tell him just where she’d really like him to touch her.

Feeling guilty because she wasn’t more grateful, Janey produced an appreciative moan just as Dan came.

She cleaned herself up in the cold, grubby bathroom that Dan shared with the tenants of the other flats. Her handkerchief would have to be thrown away now but she couldn’t bring herself to use the grey towel Dan had offered her. Despite her efforts she still felt sticky and uncomfortable.

‘Shall we go out tonight?’ she asked him. ‘There’s that new coffee bar that’s opened.’

‘I’d love to but I can’t. I’ve promised to help a friend of my sister’s work on her lines. Of course, I’d much rather be with you, but I’ve said I would and I wouldn’t like to let her down.’

‘No, of course you mustn’t. I wouldn’t want you to.’

The approving smile Dan gave her was, after all, all the reward she needed.

‘It’s a very nice little piece, Ella, now that you’ve polished it up properly.’ The travel editor’s voice was patronising but Ella didn’t care. At least, she did, but she wasn’t going to let her disappointment over the way she had had to water down her carefully crafted article on Venice, to suit the travel editor’s demands that it be ‘more glamorous, darling–
Vogue
readers adore glamour; it’s positively essential to them’.

‘It will go in next month’s issue along with some of Oliver Charters’ photographs from the Comte de Livron’s Masquerade Ball.’

Dismissed from the travel editor’s office, Ella made her way back to the cubbyhole of an office she shared with some of the other editorial assistants. Getting her travel piece actually in print, and with her name as a
byline, was a huge step forward and she mustn’t let herself dwell on her wish that the editor had not cut the two paragraphs lovingly detailing the work that went into making Venice’s gondolas, and the simple lives of these boatbuilders, their skill passed down the generations, contrasting them with their glamorous passengers, being ferried from one glittering occasion to another.

Ella’s heart was pounding, but she was used to that now. It was one of the side effects of the pills prescribed for her by the diet doctor, like the sudden compulsion to chatter, the feeling of restless energy that had her dashing everywhere, and, of course, not wanting to eat.

Which reminded her. As she sat down at her desk Ella reached into her handbag for her bottle of pills, putting them on her desk and then going to fill the office kettle to make herself a cup of tea.

Oliver hesitated outside the assistant editors’ office. He’d just left the fashion editor, who had been praising him for the photographs he had done for the Venice shoot, and that had made him reflect reluctantly on the part Ella had played in enabling him to get those shots.

He had been feeling guilty about Ella, and, in some inexplicable way, almost responsible for her. She was so ruddy naïve when it came to men, and he had had no right to kiss her the way he had done.

He pushed open the office door. The first thing he saw was the telltale bottle of diet pills, one pill placed ready on the desk itself–Ella’s desk. Oliver knew immediately what they were. All the models used them, and got hooked on them.

He strode across, picked up the bottle and turned to Ella, who stiffened in outrage, trapped in the corner by the kettle as he shook the bottle at her and demanded in angry disbelief, ‘Don’t tell me that you are stupid enough to be taking these?’

‘It’s none of your business what I do,’ Ella told him. He was still holding her precious bottle of pills and she desperately wanted him to put them down so that she could retrieve them.

‘Do you know what these are and what they do–apart from allowing idiotic girls to half starve themselves?’ Oliver challenged her. ‘They’re amphetamines,’ he continued without allowing her to answer him. ‘Speed, that’s what they’re called, because that is exactly what they do: speed you up. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you talk twenty to the dozen, they speed up your heart and your life, and if you’re unlucky–and plenty are–they speed it up so much that it’s over almost before it’s begun and you die young–of a heart attack.’

‘You’re just making that up,’ Ella defended herself, not wanting to admit how much his outburst had shocked her, all the more so because she so clearly recognised the symptoms he had described.

‘No, I’m not. And dying of a heart attack is what you get if you’re lucky. This stuff sends some people mental, paranoid. I thought you were supposed to be intelligent,’ he told Ella with disgust as he flung the bottle into the waste-paper bin.

Immediately Ella rushed across to rescue her precious tablets but, realising what she was going to do, Oliver got there first, standing over the bin and then grabbing
her to hold her off, his expression suddenly changing from impatience to grim anger.

Before Ella could stop him he had wrenched up her top to expose her pride and joy, her ribcage with all her ribs clearly on display. It was unfortunate that her breasts were still so large, but she was sure that she could get them smaller if she just kept on dieting.

Furious with Oliver, she tried to pull free of his hold, but he was manhandling her towards the mirror on the wall, holding her in front of his own body as he positioned her before the mirror so that her bare midriff was visible in the reflection.

‘Have you seen what you’re doing to yourself?’ he asked her savagely.

Of course she had, and she was proud of what she had achieved.

‘You look like a skeleton, like someone who has just come out of Belsen.’

It was an awful thing to say to her–comparing her with the poor people on whom atrocities had been committed in the German death camps, and Ella wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

Shaking with temper she threw back at him, ‘Well, at least I don’t look like an elephant, so if you and Laura want to find someone to make fun of and joke about behind their backs, it won’t be me any more, will it?’ She was literally shaking with anger, her face red and her eyes bright with emotion.

Oliver released her and stared at her in disbelief. ‘You’ve done this to yourself because some silly model made a bitchy remark about you?’

‘You agreed with her.’ Ella was beyond caring now about what she was revealing about herself.

‘What?’

‘You agreed with her when she said that I wouldn’t be able to diet. You laughed with her.’

Oliver was shaking his head. ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t care what you think you overheard, I can tell you that there is no way I would ever, ever have agreed that you needed to lose weight. Do you want to know why I know that?’ When Ella didn’t say anything, he continued bitingly, ‘I know it because I just happen to think that you have–had–the most gorgeous, sexy, lush, damnably lustable-after body in the entire
Vogue
setup. A proper woman’s body, with curves and soft flesh and fabulous tits, the kind of woman’s body that makes a grown man want to fall on his knees and thank God for making it. And now look what you’ve done to it.’

To o angry to wait for Ella’s response, Oliver strode out of the room banging the door behind him, leaving Ella shaking with a mixture of relief and shock.

It was half an hour since Oliver had left the office and Ella was still staring into space in disbelief, her tea now cold and her diet pills, she had to assume, in Oliver’s pocket.

Well, that didn’t matter. She could get some more. And she would get some more because she hadn’t believed a word of what he’d said to her, not one single word.

Oliver stared moodily into his pint of beer. He still couldn’t believe that Ella had been stupid enough to do
what she had done and ruin that damn near perfect body of hers, all because of some bitchy model. OK, so maybe she could have spared a couple of pounds, four or five at the most, but to lose the amount of weight she had done…Along with his anger, Oliver felt a renewal of his earlier sense of responsibility towards her.

Ruddy women, especially wet-behind-the-ears women like Ella. The sooner she found some posh toff to marry her and give her a few kids to keep her busy, the better, Oliver decided grimly.

‘Emerald, my dear, you look so hot and bothered, do come and sit down and let me order some tea for you.’

Shaking her head angrily in refusal, Emerald stepped towards her mother-in-law and thrust the letter she had removed from her handbag at her, stating furiously, ‘I received this letter from Alessandro this morning saying that he is going to have to stay in Lauranto at least another month. I want to know what all this is about.’

The princess brushed the letter aside with a gesture that said quite clearly to Emerald that she was perfectly well aware of its contents. Because no doubt she was responsible for them, Emerald seethed.

‘Well, my dear, I should have thought it was perfectly obvious to an intelligent young woman like you, Alessandro has his duties—’

‘Alessandro’s most important duty is to me, his wife,’ Emerald interrupted her sharply.

‘That might apply to an ordinary man, but Alessandro is not an ordinary man, he is a prince, and as such his first duty must always be to his position and his people.’

‘Very well then, if Alessandro can’t come back to London to me, then I shall go to him.’

Alessandro’s mother gave her a coldly appraising look. ‘Ah, yes, your marriage to my son. Conducted in such great haste and secrecy. Not what I would have expected from my son. But of course, Alessandro wasn’t the one who engineered the marriage, was he?’

Before Emerald could answer, she continued, ‘There is a history of hasty marriage in your family, as I discovered recently when I was looking into your background. Your own mother, for example—’

‘What do you mean, you’ve been looking into my family background?’ Emerald stopped her.

‘Well, when one’s son–the heir to a principality and its ruler–ends up married to a young woman unknown to his family, and in the dubious fashion in which your marriage to my son was conducted, naturally one wishes to equip oneself with whatever information is available about such a person–and her family.’