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A short ride down, the elevator opened into a huge gold lobby and then they were climbing winding stairs and walking a wide corridor lined with doors and the kind of arty, atmospheric black and white photos she’d once loved to take herself. Up another set of stairs and then, finally, they entered a sprawling, darkly lit but glittering room with copious mirrors that immediately brought to mind the Hollywood glamorous gangster ideal.
One quick skim revealed an abundance of faces she recognised from the big screen and small, and from the glossy fashion magazines she used to buy to study how photographers created mood and atmosphere in their shoots.
Suddenly feeling every inch the mother of twin babies amongst such glamour, she slipped her hand into Diaz’s and pressed herself closer to him.
‘Relax,’ he murmured, perfectly understanding her nerves without her having to say a word. ‘These people don’t bite. Champagne?’
‘Do they serve it by the bottle?’
Laughing, he swiped two flutes from the tray of a smiling host.
Feeling a bit more grounded with her hand clasped in his, Rose let Diaz lead the way, noticing his nods of greeting at some of the familiar faces and his gestures to others that he would be back to talk to them soon. Once they’d passed the main throng, she realised he was leading her to a large crowd by the bar, and thought how handy it must be to be as tall as Diaz and able to see over everyone’s heads.
A bald, diminutive man wearing horn-rimmed glasses holding court spotted them and immediately stopped whatever he was saying to beam widely. ‘Diaz!’
‘Pedro!’ he replied with an identical beam before embracing him in a bear hug.
So this was the birthday boy and director whose films she so admired. He was exactly as Rose had imagined.
After a short exchange in Spanish, Diaz switched to English. ‘Pedro, meet Rose.’
Pulling her into a tight embrace, Pedro said in heavily accented but perfect English, ‘Thank you for agreeing to come and forcing Diaz here—I have been dying to meet you.’
That took her aback. ‘You have?’
‘Who wouldn’t want to meet the woman who turned Diaz Martinez into a recluse?’ He beamed again. ‘But I understand it. My sister was the same when she had her first baby. Two for you. No wonder you are so slim. They must keep you very busy.’
‘They do,’ she agreed. ‘It’s the first time I’ve left them.’
‘Don’t think about them,’ he urged. ‘Otherwise you will spend the night checking your phone and be boring like my sister.’
‘Rose could never be boring,’ Diaz interjected with a faint wink at her.
Rose’s brain was reeling so much she had no idea how she was able to hold the long conversation that followed between her, Diaz and Pedro, the other guests dipping in and out, the topics ebbing and flowing between movies and scripts and salacious gossip.
She’d never really thought about if or how Diaz had explained their situation to his friends and acquaintances. And now she knew. He’d dropped off the social calendar with the simple truth that he had twin babies and their mother wasn’t ready to leave them.
He’d turned down this party with a man who was clearly a great friend for her sake. He really hadn’t wanted to put her under any additional pressure.
‘How do you know Pedro?’ she asked after Diaz had extricated them with the excuse that they were monopolising Pedro’s time and found them an empty booth to sit in.
‘I was the main investor in one of his films six years ago. None of the studios wanted to touch it because it wasn’t in English. I heard about it from a friend of a friend and approached him. We hit it off and now I provide most of the finance for all his films.’
She thought quickly.‘La Viuda Blanca?’It had swept the movie industry awards for best foreign language film.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know it?’
‘I love Pedro’s films. They’re all so dark and twisty and have such great cinematography.’
‘I thought you meant his English-speaking ones. I never knew you’d watched his Spanish-speaking ones too.’
Glad the lighting meant he’d be unlikely to see the blush she knew was burning her cheeks, she said, ‘AndInever knew you were involved in any of them.’
‘I’m not, I’m just the finance behind them. It’s good to diversify. If you watch the Spanish ones, does that mean you now speak my language?’
‘I use subtitles.’ She drained her champagne so she didn’t find herself admitting that she’d initially started watching Pedro’s films in the wake of her night with Diaz, a form of self-torture, immersing herself in the language he’d whispered to her when he’d made love to her.
That had been in the days when she’d held onto the faint hope that his English whispers had come from his heart and that he would come back to her.