Divas (3 page)

This was where she was born to be.

Georgia had organised the pedicure party – to perfection, everyone agreed – and Madison, who knew every fashionable restaurateur on three continents, had taken
charge of dinner. Naturally, they had a private room in the Japanese restaurant, with a long table made from a single sheet of black granite with a black glass strip set into its centre, lustrous
and smooth, the perfect surface for what Georgia was pouring out of a plastic bag, carefully, making one straight line all the way down the glass, from one end to the other.

‘You look like you’re icing a cake!’ giggled India, who had had refills on the rose-petal martinis and was already, as Madison would say, lightly toasted.

‘
Right
, ’ Lola drawled, ‘as if any one of us would get near enough a cake to ice it—’

‘Or even know
how
!’ Madison exclaimed, horrified that anyone would think she would know one end of a piping bag from the other.

‘Mmm, cake, ’ India said wistfully.

‘Oh darling—’ Georgia threw one slender, tanned arm round India’s shoulders. ‘You
can
have cake, just as long as you—’

‘Bring it straight back up again afterwards!’ Devon along with Georgia chorused.

Georgia set out five narrow, short-cut straws.

‘Ooh!’ Lola said, reaching for a straw. ‘Exactly what the doctor ordered when you’re trying to get into a size zero bias-cut satin Vera Wang wedding dress.’

With a practised gesture, she held one nostril closed with the thumb of the hand holding the straw while inhaling three inches of Georgia’s long line of cocaine up the other nostril, her
other hand sliding back to her nape to hold her hair out of the way.

‘Whoo!’ she said, straightening up and shaking back her mane of hair. ‘Good stuff, Georgie!’

‘Fresh off the plane, ’ Georgia said smugly. ‘Only the best for us.’

‘Darling! You look so pretty!’ came a man’s voice from behind them, and all the girls turned round, flicking their hair and flashing their best smiles.

‘Jean-Marc! You shouldn’t be here!’ Lola said, shocked. ‘It’s my hen night – isn’t that bad luck or something?’

‘I’m sorry, darling!’ Jean-Marc’s smile was just as wide as the girls’, his blond hair just as shiny. In a dark blue velvet jacket, white silk shirt, perfectly
faded jeans and custom-made loafers, he looked like Lola’s exact male counterpart, glossy and groomed, impossibly handsome, his teeth and the whites of his eyes almost blindingly bright.
‘I just wanted to drop in for two seconds – Madison told me where you’d be.’

He was holding out a jewellery box to Lola, who cooed: ‘Oh, you
shouldn’t have
. . .’ even as she took it and snapped the lid open.

‘Oh my
God
!’ exclaimed Georgia, who was standing close enough to Lola to see the contents.

‘Just a little something to make you sparkle even brighter.’ Jean-Marc smiled.

Lola slipped the yellow diamond bracelet out of the box and onto her wrist, where it rippled elegantly, catching the light. Jean-Marc fixed the clasp for her, and they admired the effect
together.

‘It’s your stone!’ he said. ‘Gold diamonds for my golden girl!’

‘I’m
so fucking jealous right now,
’ India muttered, tipsy and honest enough to say out loud what every other girl was thinking.

‘Thank you
so much
, darling!’ Lola purred, leaning forward just enough to brush Jean-Marc’s lips with hers. ‘You’re
so
sweet.’

‘Anything for you!’ he said. ‘And now’ – he looked round the room and mimed shock on seeing the cocaine-covered table – ‘I see you have your appetiser
all set out, so I mustn’t keep you from dinner!’

A chorus of laughs greeted this, as Jean-Marc produced his own straw and took an extremely long pull of ‘appetiser’.

‘One for the road, ’ he said, wiping his nose as elegantly as he did everything. ‘And now I love you and leave you.’

‘You are
so fucking lucky
!’ Georgia complained as the door closed behind him.

‘I know, ’ Lola admitted smugly.

‘Right then, time for dinner!’ Madison announced. Over six feet tall in heels, her pale green silk jersey dress – the precise colour of her contact lenses – clinging to
her Amazonian frame as if it were in love with her, she moved to the sliding doors at the back of the room and stood there, commanding everyone’s attention. Her pale blonde hair glowed
against the black walls. ‘Everybody ready?’ Her grin was wicked. ‘It
is
a hen night, after all . . .’

She held up her free hand and tapped once on the sliding doors, still facing the girls, making the scene as theatrical as possible. The doors slid back, guided by unseen hands, and the four
girls facing her gasped in unison, and then burst into titters of laughter.

‘Oh,
Mad
, you are
amazing!
’ Lola cried, teetering across the room to embrace her friend. ‘Thank you
so much!
Best hen night
ever!’

In the room beyond Madison was another long granite table with glass running down its centre, just like theirs. But this one, instead of being decorated with a long fat line of coke, was
sporting an extremely buff, nude young man, lying on his back, with exquisitely prepared bite-sized portions of sushi and sashimi garnishing his long, smooth, heavily muscled limbs. Against his
skin, which was almost as dark as the table, the raw fish glowed like jewels: coral salmon, cerise tuna, white mackerel translucent as moonstone against its jet background. The girls clustered
round their dinner, their giggles deeper, dirtier, acknowledging the sexually charged treat that Madison had provided, the erotic charge of slowly, ritually stripping a gorgeously built hunk of
manhood of the scraps of food that were partially concealing his nakedness.

‘I’m not even hungry, ’ India announced, ‘because of all that lovely lovely coke, but I’m going to have a bite anyway!’

And, with glee, she picked up a pair of ivory chopsticks and selected a glistening piece of yellowtail, framed by a couple of bright green leaves, nestling right on the centre of his stomach. As
she lifted up the sashimi, she squealed in excitement, having revealed his belly button, a dark hollow swirl, mysterious and inviting, the start of a very faint line of black hair leading down to
even more inviting places. There was a real gasp in the room, the first piece of real nakedness, of something that had been hidden that was now revealed, and the awareness, too, that it was in
their power to strip this gorgeous young man of everything. Eyes widened, tongues flicked out to lick lips, and the girls closed in on the table. No one, after the coke, was hungry: but nobody
cared.

‘Is he
completely
starkers, Mad?’ Georgia exaggerated her drawl to sound as if she didn’t care one way or the other, but her eyes were gleaming with excitement.

‘I think Lola should find that out, don’t you?’ Madison said, smiling wickedly. ‘She
is
the bride-to-be, after all.’

‘What will he do after we’ve eaten everything?’ Georgia breathed.

‘Oh, honey, ’ Madison said, ‘it’s a hen night! He’ll do absolutely anything we want!’

And she reached out and flicked a piece of tuna off the swell of a pectoral muscle, revealing a plump little nipple so pink and pert that everyone sighed in unison, snatched at the chopsticks
and dove into their dinner.

‘Ugh, my head’s
killing
me, ’ Lola mumbled, paying off the cab driver, and looking so pretty, even after a long night and morning spent partying, that
he smiled at her sympathetically and waved her away when she started fumbling in her change purse for a tip.

Dying to climb into her cosy bed, don her cashmere eye mask, and take a super-strength sleeping pill to knock her out during the hangover and coke comedown that were well on their way, Lola
teetered down the Mayfair mews street. She was pretty good at walking on cobbles in four-inch heels by now, but that didn’t make the process any less painful. Just a few more steps –
ow, she felt like the Little Mermaid when she got her feet, every step was walking on nails – yes, she was at her cute little white house, sliding the key out of her bag, in seconds
she’d be inside and kicking off these instruments of torture she had strapped to her feet—

That was weird. Her key wasn’t working.

She pulled it out, looked at it, tipping up her sunglasses to check it was the right one. Even the pale London sunlight hurt her eyes. But yes, it was the right key. Despite the pain to her
retinas, she kept the sunglasses propped on top of her head as she re-inserted the key.

And then twisted her wrist uselessly, trying to force it to turn.

Oh! Was she so drunk and coked up still that she was at the wrong front door? How embarrassing that would be! She took a few steps back to make sure, raising a hand to shade her eyes from the
almost non-existent sun.

No, she hadn’t made a mistake: this was definitely her house. Her silver-beige silk curtains at the downstairs window, her pretty little topiary pots on the first-floor wrought-iron
balcony. God, she was going to miss this place when she moved into Jean-Marc’s Chelsea penthouse.

One more try with the key. It definitely wasn’t working. And now that she looked closer – which of course aggravated her headache even more – she could see that the lock was
really shiny. New-shiny. As if it had just been installed. Which wasn’t possible, because she had never had the lock changed, and she’d been living here for three years now . . .

Through the drug-addled, martini-and-champagne-fuddled haze in her brain, Lola slowly began to connect the strange new lock on her front door to the fact that none of her credit cards had been
working since yesterday afternoon at the dermatologist. With the first faint stirrings of disquiet, she fished out her phone and scrolled to her father’s mobile number. It would be seven a.m.
in New York – Daddy would be up by now. But frankly, even if he wasn’t, she’d be ringing. This was an
emergency.

‘Hello, Lola, ’ came a voice.

Not her father. Her stepmother, Carin.

And for maybe the first time in her life, Lola Fitzgerald felt a faint cold tremor of fear slide down her spine.

‘What are you doing answering Daddy’s phone?’ Lola blurted out.

‘Ah, Lola. Always so polite, ’ Carin commented. ‘I have some bad news for you, I’m afraid.’

‘What? What is it?’

The headache was really beginning to clamp itself round Lola’s temples now.

‘Benjamin slipped into a diabetic coma last night, ’ Carin said as lightly as if she were announcing that she’d had steak for dinner. ‘Apparently there’s no chance
he’ll come out of it. God knows I tried to get him to diet, but he was always so stubborn. Well, you know what your father was like.’

Lola nearly dropped the phone.

‘
What?
Daddy’s in a
coma?
’ she gasped.

‘It was inevitable with his lifestyle, Lola. You know he refused to take care of himself.’

‘You’re talking about him like he’s already
dead
!’

‘Well, we must face facts, mustn’t we? As I said, the doctors say there’s practically no chance Benjamin will come out of the coma.’

Lola realised that she had never fully before understood the meaning of the phrase ‘being unable to get your head round something’. It felt as if Carin’s words were bouncing
off the side of her skull, failing to penetrate her ears. Her beloved Daddy in a
coma
? He’d had Type II diabetes for years, of course, brought on by the huge amount of excess weight he
was carrying, and the doctors had kept warning him how dangerous that was, but neither he nor Lola had ever believed that he was seriously at risk: how could a man as phenomenally rich as Benjamin
Fitzgerald be seriously at risk of anything? Money would buy him the best healthcare, keep him safe, just as money had bought him and Lola everything else they could possibly want.

Money had bought him Carin, too, an ex-model who had put a very high price on her own head. Horrible, frigid Carin, with her white-blonde hair and icy, pale-blue eyes, as cold and frightening as
the eyes of a Siberian husky, with a soul even more frigid than her eyes and an Ice Queen shard of glass for a heart.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Lola managed to get out.

‘Oh, I’m afraid I am, ’ Carin said.

‘But you didn’t – when did this happen? Why didn’t you
ring
me?’

One of Lola’s neighbours, a middle-aged divorcee who managed to look like Lola and her friends from behind, but whose face, despite all the surgeries, looked like a raisin stretched on a
rack, walked up the mews, tutting at how loud Lola’s voice had risen. Still, she couldn’t hide the jealousy in her face as she snapped her eyes up and down Lola’s perfect figure
in the tight white jeans which would have revealed every imperfection, if Lola had any.

So it was with utter shock that Lola realised that the tables had just been turned. Because, watching Raisin-Face teeter along in over-tight jeans tucked into high suede boots, shifting her
Selfridges Food Hall shopping bag to reach for her keys, Lola was flooded with jealousy for her. Because Raisin-Face was about to go inside her own house, and Lola was locked out of hers, which
meant she had to stand in the street hearing this appalling, unbelievable news about her beloved Daddy, unable to crumple onto a sofa in decent privacy and cry her eyes out—

‘I didn’t want to disturb you, ’ Carin said, distinct amusement creeping into her voice now. ‘Weren’t you on your hen night? I was sure you’d ring sooner or
later. When you realised there was a problem with the money fountain.’

Lola swallowed hard.

‘Did you do something to my credit cards?’ she asked in a tiny voice. ‘And my key isn’t working—’

‘Like I said, I was sure you’d ring sooner or later!’ Carin wasn’t even bothering to pretend not to enjoy this. ‘I’m organising something of a financial
restructuring, now that I have power of attorney—’

‘You have power of attorney?’ Lola realised that she wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

‘You
do
know that the house is owned by one of your father’s companies for tax reasons?’ Carin said. ‘And your father made me a co-trustee of your trust fund.
I’ve suspended payments from that too. I think your withdrawals from it have been unreasonably large for years.’