Читать книгу Power Games - Victoria Fox, Victoria Fox - Страница 12

London

Regardless of how many celebrities she interviewed, Eve Harley would always be amazed at the scale of their egos. Supermodels were the worst.

‘I guess I kinda always knew I was beautiful,’ Tawny Lascelles was saying from her position in the make-up girl’s chair, angling her face as the blusher brush swept across a pair of immaculate cheekbones. Tawny had a lilting, Texan drawl, and a flush of softness to her voice that betrayed what Eve was beginning to suspect was a core of gritty ambition. She was the magazine favourite of the moment, sweet as candy but sharp enough to be interesting, with a well-publicised streak of rebellion.

‘Can you remember your first shoot?’ Eve asked, adjusting her position on the uncomfortable stool alongside Tawny’s cushioned throne. In the portrait awarded by the bulb-lined mirror she accepted the uncrossable distance between prettiness and beauty. Eve was attractive enough, with her neatly cut shoulder-length brown hair, green almond eyes and petite, bright features, but next to Tawny’s Cara Delevingne vibe anyone was going to look like a sack of potatoes.

‘Oh, yes,’ Tawny’s blue eyes widened, ‘a girl never forgets.’ She pouted to permit a rose-pink liner to caress the contours of her perfect, bee-stung lips. Ravishing wasn’t nearly enough for tonight’s parade: she had to be flawless. ‘I was so nervous. I mean, I’m actually totally uncomfortable with this whole “look at me” thing.’

I bet you are, thought Eve, tapping keynotes into her tablet.

‘So, lucky for me,’ Tawny went on, ‘it was on this paradise beach … and d’you know what the really weird thing was? Like, totally surreal?’

Eve took the question as rhetorical, but when Tawny’s sapphire eyes at last deigned to meet hers in their joint reflection, she shook her head.

‘I’d been there before! On vacation.’ The make-up girl tilted Tawny’s chin, lifting it like a petal so she could add a hint of gloss. ‘And as soon as I walked out on that sand,’ Tawny managed to keep her mouth totally still while she spoke, ‘I was, like, Whoa, this is cosmic, y’know? Like it was meant to happen that way. I was meant to do this. I was meant to be a model—and no one was going to stop me!’

Eve highlighted the section on her pad. She had it all on Dictaphone but, when it came to revisiting a piece, she liked to know which bits had jumped out at the time. This was one of them. Tawny’s tone had slipped. An edge of bitterness had crept in, of having earned her place in the celebrity tree through more than a few strokes of luck.

‘So you believe this is your calling?’

Tawny’s eyes were closed against the delicate application of mascara. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.’

‘Don’t you think it’s an empty sort of profession?’

There was a pause. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, good as you might be at it, it’s not really changing the world.’

‘It depends which way you look at it.’

‘Which way do you look at it?’

‘I’m helping people feel better about themselves.’

‘How?’

‘Modelling gives regular people something to aim for.’

‘Even if it’s not attainable?’

Tawny’s eyes opened a fraction, snake-like. ‘What?’

‘The impossible dream, for most women: size 6 and wearing Karl Lagerfeld.’

Tawny batted the make-up girl off. ‘So I should leave them to stew in their fat, sad little lives watching re-runs of America’s Got Talent and stuffing potato chips in their pie-holes?’ Catching herself, she clarified somewhat more demurely, ‘What I mean is, I’m giving them something to aspire to. Beauty … Well, it inspires.’

‘Are you an inspiration?’

‘Yes. In a way.’

‘What way?’

‘Girls want to grow up to be just like me.’

‘Even if they can’t?’

‘Why can’t they?’

Eve thought it was a joke, but Tawny appeared serious.

‘Beauty is a construct,’ she pointed out, ‘right? It’s subjective, prone to change, evolution? In twenty years’ time, will girls want to look like someone else?’

Tawny’s expression was blank.

‘Do you see modelling as philanthropic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ answered Tawny, ‘I don’t know what that means.’

But Eve suspected she did. ‘To enhance the world, to make it a better place.’

‘Then, yes, I suppose I do.’

‘Why?’

Tawny’s eyes opened, flashing danger. The make-up girl’s brush stumbled. ‘Where exactly is this going?’ she demanded. ‘Why, why, why? How, how, how?’

‘It’s an interview.’

‘Well, it sucks.’ Tawny gestured for her assistant. ‘Jean-Paul! Here!’

‘You’ll admit not much is known about how you arrived on the circuit,’ Eve threw out. ‘Maybe something from your childhood made you feel this way?’

‘What, like making the world a better place?’

‘Allegedly you’ve said of your family that—’

‘I’ll stop you there,’ Jean-Paul intervened, ‘I think that’s time. Did you get everything you need?’ But he turned away, not bothering to hang around for an answer. Tawny’s hair crew were next to descend, rattling bottles of spray and cooing over their darling’s fragrant mane as if it were the last head of hair on earth.

‘Get me my grapes,’ came a bad-tempered bark from somewhere inside the melee. ‘I need sugar, JP. I’m dizzy.’

Jean-Paul scurried off to obey.

Eve Harley was frozen out. The interview was over.

The evening was a showcase of upcoming designers, each teamed with an established name in a kind of haute-glitz mentorship programme. Opposite Eve in the ranks sat a prim arrangement of fashionistas, editors, rock musicians and royalty, anyone whose image was regularly splashed across the London society pages—a colourful tableau of elaborate hairstyles, sharp suits and sleekly crossed legs, all with that slightly self-conscious way of sitting, as if these VIPs’ entire lives had become a public display and a lurking photographer could be about to jump out at any moment.

A new collection spilled onto the runway. Tawny Lascelles strutted down the walk, glossily gorgeous and all too aware of that fact, in a Japanese-flavoured drape dress courtesy of a breakthrough artist. But for someone who was all too happy to disclose the finer points of her colonic irrigation regime, or how many egg whites she consumed for breakfast, Tawny was ferociously private about her past.

Eve would get the story, no matter what it took. She always did. She would hunt down the facts and she would hunt them her way. She didn’t do failure and she didn’t do backing out. Her column in the UK’s biggest tabloid relied on it.

The show over, she made a swift exit. January in London was bracing and chill, shining red buses sliding past, their windows clouded with condensation. The River Thames glittered beneath a chain of bridges, snaking down to the golden crust of Westminster, whose peaks were obscured by shifting mist.

Eve checked her phone. It was the usual address, the one he used whenever he visited town. Hailing a taxi, she climbed in. The city rushed past, a blur of lights and sounds, and she spritzed perfume onto her wrists and between her legs.

She couldn’t suppress the wave of butterflies that came with the inevitability of their meeting. It wasn’t as if there were feelings involved—just sex, always sex—and the cold, efficient transaction of it somehow made it more of a thrill.

The cab dropped her at Marble Arch and she walked the rest of the way. Down a moon-frosted lane, away from the crowds, she arrived at his townhouse.

Tapping in the security code, the gates parted, a fairytale twist of black iron.

Orlando Silvers was already on the porch. The door was open, spilling yellow light.

They didn’t say a word. He drew her into the warm and pushed her against the kitchen counter. She went to speak and he crushed her with a kiss, hooking her knee and flipping her round, strong thumbs tearing down her knickers. She felt them rip and he spread her wide and in a second he was inside, hot and deep and thick, her face pressed against the cool steel surface as he pounded, his hand snaking beneath her blouse and freeing her tits.

Eve let him drive against her, her skirt up over her back, one shoe kicked off, her hair pulled and grabbed and her lipstick smudged, until the calm, composed journalist of thirty minutes ago was all but obliterated. Only when Orlando was ready to come did she ease off and draw him to the floor. He was flat on his back, his dick straining beneath the crisp white fabric of his shirt. Slowly she mounted him, unbuttoning her top with tantalising leisure, and he groaned and reached for her as she backed away, peeling off her bra and watching his eyes feast. Making him wait, she finally sank onto him, feeling him fill her up, easing him in and out, right to his tip and down to his base, wetter and wetter each time as his cock became stiffer.

She rode him hard. Only through sex could Eve feel this way—like all the anger and hurt was set free, existing in some separate universe, and all she had here, now, was the intensity and blaze of their combat.

She collapsed against him, their explosions colliding.

Afterwards, Orlando lit a cigarette. They spilled onto the couch, naked and spent. Eve leaned on his chest, running her fingers across his torso, the skin olive-brown and scattered with dark hair. Orlando was the opposite of what she normally went for, serious-faced journos who smoked roll-ups and read satire. He was a cocky Wall Street boy, a glossy Starbucks American—not to mention one of the richest men on the planet. She felt him inhale, heard the crackle of cigarette paper.

‘Is it true your father’s retiring?’ she asked.

Orlando laughed. ‘That was a record.’

‘What?’

‘Fifteen seconds before you went for the story.’

Playfully, she smacked him. He grabbed her, kissed her again.

He was right, though. Eve had worked in this business ten years, yet she never tired of the buzz; what it was to chase a scandal. Today, millions across the globe read her work. Her biting appraisals were infamous. She took no prisoners, she refused to sugarcoat and her allegiance couldn’t be bought—she wrote what she thought and she was faithful to her instinct, whether her subject liked it or not. Over the years she had gained a fearsome reputation. Eve wasn’t out to hurt these celebrities, or to sabotage them, but she believed that if you were going to put yourself up for scrutiny, to use the media to your own ends, then you had to be prepared for it to use you back. Stars who crowed on about privacy didn’t seem to mind so much when they were summoning paparazzi to the opening of their new perfume, or when they had a hot date on their arm or a radical new look to unveil.

Teen superstar Kevin Chase was a prime example. His success was so closely entwined with his courtship of the press that it was impossible to separate the two, yet when Eve had challenged him on the issue of sex (Kevin’s stance had, until recently, been emphatically chaste), he had fumbled his way through a confused, tetchy, half-baked response before barking at her to fuck off because it was none of her business.

None of her business … It was a red rag to a bull. Eve intended to make it her business, whatever it was, and she would stop at nothing until she got there.

‘So?’ she tried again.

Orlando ground out his smoke.

‘Don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Come on,’ she urged, ‘give me something.’

‘I’m forever giving you something.’

‘And I’m not?’ She raised herself up on one elbow. ‘What about that exclusive I kept back on the Mitzlar Brothers—?’

‘You were planning to hold fire anyway.’

‘I wasn’t. My editor would kill me if she knew—sex dens, strippers, a world-class banking family …’

‘We needed their sponsorship. This story would have ruined them.’

‘Exactly.’ Eve trailed her fingers down his stomach, felt him harden once more. ‘So what do I get in return? I did it because you asked me …’

‘You don’t do anything you’re asked.’

‘That depends who’s asking.’

He threw her off the scent. ‘Tawny Lascelles just signed for my sister’s label.’

Eve leaned over, reached into her bag and pulled out her pad. ‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘D’you know Tawny?’

‘She was at the launch a couple of weeks back.’

‘Yeah, I figured that part out. Who was she with?’

‘No one, I don’t think.’

‘Does Angela run checks on models before she employs them?’

‘Why?’ he scoffed.

‘Tawny’s press people are like Rottweilers, she’s giving nothing away—but I know, I just know there’s something there, if I could just …’

Orlando touched the end of her nose. ‘You never let up, do you?’

‘I came from the gala,’ she explained. ‘Tawny and I chatted.’

‘Why didn’t you ask her?’

‘Don’t be facetious.’

‘Don’t use long words.’

She stuck up her finger. ‘That short enough for you?’

‘Cute.’

Eve got up. She fixed herself a drink, raised the carafe in question. He nodded.

‘Come on,’ she said, leaning back against the mahogany dresser, ‘I already had it in the bag about Tawny and Fit for NYC. What else?’

Orlando narrowed his eyes. ‘What if I just wanted to see you?’

‘Crap. I know you see other women.’

‘Do you see other men?’

‘What’s it to you?’ But she didn’t see other men. She didn’t have time.

And I don’t want to.

He pulled her back to the couch.

‘For chasing other people’s secrets, Harley,’ he murmured, ‘you’ve sure got some mysteries of your own.’

Orlando held her down, his tongue tracing its practised route down her neck and across her breasts. She didn’t answer, but then he didn’t require it.

Suffice to say, there was a good reason why Eve did this job, and she wasn’t about to compromise for anyone. Not even for him.