(2012) Evie Undercover Page 13

‘If that’s the only massage on offer,’ he said with a grin, ‘bring it on.’

  She glanced across at Tom. His eyes were shut, and she turned back to look out of the window at the world in miniature beneath them.

  They’d only been gone a week, but it felt a zillion times longer. What a week it had been.

  When she’d left London, she hadn’t been in love, and now she was.

  A week ago, she’d thought she’d make an awesome investigative journalist, and now she knew she wouldn’t.

  Seven days ago, she hadn’t known that she was going to defy her editor, and now she did.

  Her editor. She felt a stab of cold fear. Knowing how best to tell him was going to be a problem.

  It was essential that she and Tom had some quality time together before she told him the truth, which meant that she mustn’t quit her job till after that. If she did, her pig of an editor might go berserk, pick up the phone and tell Tom why she’d really gone to Italy with him. And if she hadn’t already told him the truth by then, it would certainly be the end of their relationship. So somehow or other, she was going to have to string the editor along for at least the first week she was back.

  She glanced out of the window again and saw that the plane was losing height. They must be very close to Heathrow.

  She couldn’t wait to get back to Camden Town to tell Rachel and Jess that she was turning her back on Pure Dirt. The minute they heard her news, they’d go back to being the way they used to be. Obviously, she wouldn’t tell them what Tom had told her – she’d never pass his secrets on to anyone – but she’d make sure they knew she could have given a story to Pure Dirt, but had chosen to quit instead. They needed to know that faced with a choice, she’d made the right one.

  She gave a deep sigh. It would be a tricky couple of weeks ahead, but she’d make sure she got it right – there was too much at stake to make a mistake. She and Tom were meant to be, and that was the way it was going to stay.

  The landing gear ground noisily into position. Tom opened his eyes.

  She turned to him and smiled. ‘You were right earlier on, Tom. You said it had been a marvellous week, and it has, and I’ve got a feeling that the next few weeks are going to be even better still.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  From one friend to another …

  ‘That’s day one of minding Gabriela gone. Only one and a half more days to go. She’s turning out to be OK, though,’ Evie told Rachel and Jess as they reclined on dark brown leather sofas around a low table in their favourite wine bar. She leaned across and helped herself to the last of the nachos from the plate. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t that keen on her at first as she looks quite hard, but the more you get to know her, the nicer she is. Also, I was a bit put off when I met her in Italy as I thought she might have set her sights on Tom, but now I’m sure I was wrong about that.’

  ‘What makes you think you were wrong?’ Jess asked. ‘You’ve hardly met her. A person’s first instinct is often spot on.’

  ‘Well, I’m certain mine wasn’t. Call it a gut feeling, if you like. And what makes me even more sure is that at lunch today, she told me that she’s really keen on someone in Florence. They’ve been an item for several months, but Eduardo doesn’t know about him yet.’

  ‘And that’s why she’s come to England for a year, is it? Because she’s so keen on him,’ Jess said, glancing at Rachel in amusement. ‘Yeah, that makes good sense.’

  ‘Very funny. It’s not that simple. Gabriela’s high-powered, and I bet she’s also high-maintenance. Her guy’s changed his job a few times and that’s a worry for her. Just because she loves him, it doesn’t mean she’s brain-dead. She’s put a bit of distance between them so they can find out what they really feel about each other.’

  ‘Quite a big bit of distance, if you ask me.’ Rachel picked up the bottle of red wine from the centre of the table and topped up their glasses.

  ‘Duh! Italy’s not that far away. She’ll go back to Florence, and he’ll come over here. They’ll see each other – just not as often. And if they’re still together at the end of the year, they’ll know that it’s obviously meant to be. That’s the plan, anyway.’

  Jess gave a derisory laugh. ‘It sounds a bit of an iffy plan, if you ask me. If you want to find out whether you can live with someone, you spend time with them – you don’t leave them for months on end. Also, absence makes the heart grow fonder – everyone knows that – so how will she know at the end of the year what’s real and what’s not?’

  ‘To go back to something you said before we got on to the love life of Gabriela, Evie,’ Rachel cut in, ‘you said she was nicer than you’d thought she’d be. Nice in what way? Nice as in a saintly sort of person, i.e. mega dull and to be avoided at all costs, or nice as in cool and fun to hang out with?’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly say she was cool – cool’s a bit funky and she’s super sophisticated, not funky at all. She’s so together, always dressed to the nines and not a hair out of place – at least, she has been every time I’ve seen her so far. That’s what makes her come across as hard. She doesn’t come across as saintly and boring, either. She’s pleasant, that’s all.’

  ‘Where did you go with her today, you jammy individual?’ Jess asked. ‘What wouldn’t I give to be paid to wander around the shops all day?’

  Evie laughed. ‘It’s a tough life, but someone’s got to do it. We wandered down New Bond Street, hung around that area, had lunch in Carluccio’s in Fenwick’s, then we got a cab to Knightsbridge and walked around there for a bit.’

  ‘Did you go into Harrods?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Yes, but not for long. We wandered around the departments and had a quick look at the Diana memorial downstairs, but today was more about getting to know each other. She obviously wants to be friends. Why, I don’t know, but she does. Anyway, we finished up with a glass of wine at the top of Harvey Nicks. The only things we bought were some magazines for Gabriela and some food and drink.’

  Rachel held up her hands in mock disbelief. ‘What, no shoes? That’s got to be a first for you. But to move on to something even more interesting than la bella Gabriela – I can’t wait to meet her, by the way – what’s the latest on Tom? When’s he taking you out? And very important, when are we going to meet him?’

  ‘Give me a chance! I haven’t seen him since we got back from Italy, he’s got so much work to do. He’s got a big case starting in two weeks’ time. And being away for a week didn’t help.’

  ‘But surely you can find a moment to be together,’ Rachel said in disbelief.

  ‘It’s not that easy. On Monday and Tuesday, he was gone before I got to the house and he didn’t get back till after I’d left. He wrote me a note each day, though, saying how much he was longing to see me again and how frustrated he was at having to go into Chambers so early and stay on so late. But now that I’m babysitting Gabriela, I don’t go to the house at all, and I won’t till Friday afternoon, and he’ll still be at work then, anyway.’

  Jess looked at her curiously. ‘Why don’t you visit at night, once he’s home? Don’t you want to see him?’

  ‘Of course I do. I can’t wait to see him and I think about him all day. Despite the fact that I feel soooo bad about the Pure Dirt thing, and am dreading what he’ll say when I tell him the truth, I want to spend every single minute I can with him. But he said at the start that he’d be working long days and in the evenings, and even on Sundays, and we’d probably only be able to see each other on Saturdays.’

  ‘So no prizes for guessing you’re seeing him on Saturday then,’ Rachel said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘He’s taking me out to dinner.’

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ Rachel and Jess asked at the same time.

  ‘Fuck knows! Gabriela wants to buy some new clothes tomorrow so I’ll probably look for something for myself while I’m out with her, though I’m not convinced that Gabriela’s sort of shop will be mine. In fact, I’m sure it won’t be.�
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  ‘Rachel and I thought that the three of us could go to Wagamama on Friday evening and then perhaps on to a club. Why don’t you ask Gabriela to come with us? I bet she likes noodles – they’re not that different from spaghetti – and then we can show her some London nightlife. I’m curious to meet her. We both are. If we get on well with her, she might be willing to see if the company she’s with can throw some work my way. They must have events that need planning.’

  ‘Why not? I reckon I could put up with her for an evening. But only for the Wagamama part of the evening. I don’t think she’d be into clubbing, and I’m certainly not going to get wasted on the night before my first date in England with Tom. My first date with him, period – in Italy we weren’t dating. No, I’ll definitely give clubbing a miss. I’ll ask Gabriela when I see her tomorrow.’

  Rachel leaned forward in her chair. ‘So, Evie,’ she said firmly. ‘We want the lowdown on Pure Dirt now. You’ve told us about Tom and you’ve told us about Gabriela. You’ve said that you’re jacking in Pure Dirt, but that’s all that you’ve said. We know you’ve come to your senses at last, but we want the gory details about why.’

  ‘Rachel’s right. We want to know what happened to your Pure intention of digging up Dirt on Tom, so spill the beans before we explode.’

  ‘It’s dead simple: both of you were right and I was wrong. I thought I could do it, but I found I couldn’t. I must have been completely delusional ever to think I could do such a nasty thing to anyone. That means that soon I’ll be out of a job. And whatever I finally manage to get, it won’t be to do with magazines. I can’t even bear to think about that.’

  Jess leaned forward. ‘Wait a minute – when you say you found you couldn’t do it, does that mean that you found a story, but came to your senses and decided that it was a shit-awful thing to do to anyone? Or is it that you couldn’t discover anything nasty about Tom?’

  ‘The first. Sort of. I did find out something, but it was something Tom volunteered after I’d realised I could never go through with it. I don’t think it’s that much, but my frigging editor could easily make it into more than it is. He rang yesterday and asked – and that’s a nice way to describe his tone of voice – asked me where my copy was.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘That he originally said I didn’t have to send it in till my last day of working for Tom – he’d thought I might need the two weeks in London to get more details. I told him that I needed that time if I was going to make it as good as it could be. He bought it. I could hear him drooling and dribbling at the other end of the line, the pig.’

  ‘But why didn’t …?’ Rachel began.

  Evie hunched her shoulders and held up her hands in front of her. ‘OK. You don’t need to say it. You’re going to ask why I didn’t tell him straight out where to stick his effing job.’

  ‘Hole in one.’

  ‘I haven’t quit yet because before I do, I must tell Tom the real reason why I went to Italy with him. If we’ve got any future together, even if it’s only a short term future, I don’t want it to be built on top of a whopping great lie.’

  Jess beamed at her. ‘At least you’re thinking like a human being now, not like a muckraker. Isn’t she, Rach?’

  Rachel nodded.

  ‘If I told the editor that I hadn’t been able to find out anything, or if I just quit the magazine, he’d be so bloody mad at me for wasting a once in a lifetime chance to wreck the life of someone he really hates, that he might be vindictive enough to tell Tom the truth about me. I’d never put it past him. You can’t predict how a scumbag like that will react.’

  ‘Would it really matter that much if he told him?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘It would if he told Tom before I told him. He’d put me in the worst possible light, and it would instantly kill off any chance of there being a Tom and me – Tom would never believe that I’d intended to confess all to him. I don’t know for sure if the pig would do that, but I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘I suppose that makes sense, when you think about it,’ Jess said.

  ‘It really does. By stalling him like I did, I’ve got him off my back for a bit, and I’ve given myself time to see if Tom and I click in England like we did in Italy. I’ll have some idea of that when we’ve been out on Saturday. Saturday evening is mega important to me.’

  ‘Suppose you don’t click?’ Jess asked. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then nothing. I’ll never tell anyone what Tom told me – that stays with me whatever happens or doesn’t happen. There wouldn’t be any need to tell Tom about Pure Dirt, though, as it wouldn’t matter. Tom would go his way and I’d go mine. I’d temp until I get another job.’

  ‘And if you do click?’

  ‘I’ll tell Tom at the end of next week, probably on the Friday or Saturday. Instead of giving the editor a story on the Friday, I’ll tell him to get stuffed. If I don’t see Tom that night, I’ll tell him on the Saturday. The editor wouldn’t be able to contact him till the following week, and by then he’d be too late.’

  ‘It’s brill that you’ve seen the light, Evie. Rachel and I knew you would.’

  ‘You could have fooled me! You were really shitty to me before I went away.’

  Jess shrugged dismissively. ‘That’s water under the proverbial. So how about we celebrate the return of the Evie we know and love with another bottle of wine? Yeah, I know – any excuse. And we’ll get some more nachos. This time we’ll go the whole hog and have the works – nachos, sour cream, guacamole, salsa and jalapeno peppers. Not to mention lashings of melted cheese on top.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Come into my parlour …

  It had been a highly satisfactory first full day in London, Gabriela purred inwardly. Her coffee cup in her hand, she strolled over to the large front window of her first floor apartment in the Holland Park house leased by the Italian design company she worked for, and gazed out. Highly satisfactory.

  It had been just the sort of day that she’d had in mind when she’d brought forward the date of her flight to London, thereby giving herself the chance of having two or three days alone with Evie before she started on the project that she’d been sent to England to oversee. These were days in which they would begin to get to know each other, to bond closely and to see each other as friends. And this was what was happening.

  She gave a thin smile of satisfaction.

  The invention of Alessandro had been inspired. And how easily she’d been able to make Evie believe that she, Gabriela di Montefiore, had fallen in love with a man of no status. As if she, with her superior background and education, would find herself enamoured of a man the English would term a loser. She gave a short laugh of derision, raised the small white china espresso cup to her lips and moved over to the window.

  Sipping her coffee as she stared out at the leafy garden in the centre of the square, her dark eyes gradually narrowed their focus to a man and woman who were lying in the middle of the grass, clearly hoping to catch the last rays of the late afternoon sun. The man had undone his shirt and opened it wide in order to let the sun hit the bare skin of his grotesque belly, and the woman had rolled her denim skirt up to the top of her wide thighs and lay with them splayed apart.

  An expression of distaste flickered across Gabriela’s face and she turned away from the window.

  She’d never understand the obsession of the English with getting their skin as brown and leathery as possible. They had no sense of what was beautiful, and they seemed completely unable to appreciate the elegance and the refinement of pale skin. Instead of rejoicing in the natural pallor of the English skin, they removed their clothes at the first hint of sunshine and put themselves where everyone could see their ugliness and watch the sweat pouring off their obscene bodies.

  Shuddering at the image that filled her mind, she went out of the sitting room, across the hall and into the narrow kitchen. There she carefully put her cup and saucer into the dishwasher, straightene
d the brushed stainless steel toaster that stood on the granite worktop so that it was in line with the rim of the white cupboard, returned the coffee beans to the wall cupboard and went back to the sitting room again.

  Pausing in the middle of the room, she stood for a few moments looking around her, thinking about possible ways of dressing the room so as to give it the appropriate aesthetic appeal for somewhere that was to be her home for several months, somewhere that would, in effect, be an extension of herself and a reflection of her values. Then she moved to the long glass coffee table in front of the black leather sofa and bent over the table to the large pile of magazines that she’d bought when she was out with Evie.

  Early in the day, she’d mentioned to Evie that she’d like to buy a magazine or two. To her surprise, Evie had stiffened. She didn’t even know if Evie was aware of it, but there was a definite charge in the air, and it was noticeable that she’d had to remind her several times in the day about the magazines.

  In the end, Evie had selected some magazines about fashion, design and houses, but she’d pressed her to include the most popular of the celebrity magazines. These were not really seen in Italy where people’s privacy was something to be respected, she’d added, and she was curious to discover if they were as unpleasant as she’d heard.

  After a quick flick through the heap of magazines on the table, she selected three and sank gracefully to the sofa. She smoothed her trousers over her knees, pulled the first of the magazines to her and opened it. Her mobile phone sounded. She dropped the magazines on to the floor, hurriedly took the phone from her bag, glanced at the contact name and gave a slight exclamation of disappointment.

  ‘Pronto, Eduardo,’ she said into the phone, and leaned back, waiting for him to draw a breath between the questions he was excitedly plying her with, one after the other.

  Her apartment seemed to be well-located, she was eventually able to tell him. It was in a lovely large house, which had rooms with very high ceilings. He would adore the ornate carvings on the cornices and ceiling roses. Yes, she was quite certain that both the apartment and its location would suit her well.