Page 67 of Guilty Pleasures

‘Do you want a drink? An ice cream?’ he added weakly.

She took a seat on a rattan chair and paused for a moment, breathing deeply.

‘It’s not a social call,’ she said coolly.

‘No, I didn’t think it would be.’

‘I’ve come to follow up on our agreement.’

Rob raised an eyebrow.

‘Have I signed my soul away to the devil and don’t even know about it?’

‘Not quite,’ she said, trying not to smile. ‘Remember when you first asked me about renting this place?’ she said, her eyes still glued to the action in the garden.

‘How can I forget that sight of you in cycling shorts?’

He saw her flush pink. Ah-ha, a little nick in her steel-plated, career-girl armour! He couldn’t help notice how pretty she was when she wasn’t so uptight but he pushed away the thought as quickly as it had popped into his head. She was his landlady, not some girl in the jacuzzi.

‘Yes, that occasion, when we were running,’ she said with a little frown line between her brows. ‘You said that you could get some of your celebrity friends to use our products, endorse them perhaps?’

From her red cheeks and stilted delivery, Rob could tell it was difficult for her to ask him for help. Now her hands were on her lap and she was playing with her fingertips.

‘Celebrity endorsement,’ he said seriously. ‘That can get expensive.’

Emma looked up, her mouth open.

‘You led me to believe they’d do it for free,’ she said.

For a second Rob thought he could have some fun, string it out. Emma was obviously easy to wind up, but the truth was Rob did want to help her. Emma Bailey might be his polar opposite – she was serious and formal and her idea of a good night was probably a nice game of Scrabble – but he recognized many of her weaknesses and anxieties so clearly it was like looking in a mirror. Rob thought back twelve years; when his elder brother was killed in a climbing accident. The family tragedy that meant Larry and Patricia Holland had gone from expecting nothing from their dilettante second son to expecting everything. Rob’s easy, idle life had been turned upside down when he was thrown into a senior job in his father’s media empire, where half the workforce cried ‘Nepotism!’ and the other half just dismissed him as dead wood. Emma Bailey was just about to find out how lonely it was at the top – perhaps she already had. There were no such things as friends, just people who wanted things from you. Well, she was going to serve him his notice at Winterfold but the least he could do was try and give her a break.

‘So you’re asking for my help?’ he teased.

She shook her head and got up to leave. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come.’

‘Hey, hey! Wait,’ he said, touching her arm. ‘I think I can help you.’

He handed her a drink and she took it.

‘Ste Donahue: the guy that probably just got me kicked out of here. The guy who took the coke,’ he said nodding towards the tall, skinny man wearing just jeans and dirty sneakers. ‘See that girl on the Lilo? That’s his girlfriend.’

Emma watched as the woman rolled off into the water, then pulled her long lean frame out of the pool, a tiny gold bikini barely covering her perfectly-proportioned body. She shook her wet tawny hair across her back and tilted her face to the warmth of the sun, revealing high cheekbones and green eyes.

‘Gosh! Is that who I think it is?’ gasped Emma. ‘She’s that model, isn’t she? Clover Connor – even I know her. She’s always on billboards in Times Square.’

Rob nodded, a sly smirk on his face.

‘Exactly. I think she made $14 million dollars last year; catwalk, editorial, advertising. I think you could say she’s big.’

Emma pulled a face.

‘And Clover Connor goes out with him?’

Rob laughed. ‘You really don’t read the gossip pages, do you?’

‘I can’t believe someone like that, goes out with someone like that,’ she repeated quietly.

‘Ste is the lead singer of Kowalski, one the country’s biggest rock acts who are breaking through in America. It’s the classic celebrity pairing,’ shrugged Rob. ‘Model and rock-star. It doesn’t matter that he’s white and skinny and takes more drugs than a lab rat; in her eyes he’s a poet, an artist with even more credibility and fame than she’s got.’