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  Praise for Rebecca Chance’s debut novel DIVAS

  ‘A bright new star in blockbusters, Rebecca Chance’s Divas sizzles with glamour, romance and revenge. Unputdownable. A glittering page-turner, this debut had me hooked from the first page’

  LOUISE BAGSHAWE

  ‘I laughed, I cried, I very nearly choked.

  Just brilliant! This has to be the holiday read of the year. Rebecca Chance’s debut will bring colour to your cheeks even if the credit crunch means you’re reading it in Bognor rather than the Balearics’

  OLIVIA DARLING

  Also by Rebecca Chance

  Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating

  Divas

  First published in Great Britain by Pocket Books, 2010

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Rebecca Chance, 2010

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  Pocket Books & Design is a registered trademark

  of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  The right of Rebecca Chance to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84739-396-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-184-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8EX

  To my gorgeous Greg, who’s been forced to accompany me to a series of luxury destinations for settings in this book. Thanks so much for sacrificing so many weekends to my research, darling.

  Acknowledgements

  My agent Anthony Goff has been an absolute tower of strength as always and I’m really lucky to have him and his whole team behind me. Maxine Hitchcock and Libby Yevtushenko – your editing skills, constant encouragement and wholehearted enthusiasm for this book have been a joy, and I feel just as lucky to have you as my publishers! It’s been a total pleasure working with you, ladies. Rob Cox and Emma Harrow have been working so hard and creatively to make sure my books reach as many readers as possible – huge thanks for that.

  Katharine Walsh, blonde bombshell and PR extraordinaire – thanks so much for introducing me to the Intercontinental Park Lane, the St James Hotel, and the utterly fabulous Bovey Castle: the books sparkle because of your glittering five-star touch! Kirsten Ferguson, you were a star for answering all my questions about the Intercontinental and for organizing the Spa Boudoir experience. And everyone at the Ca’ Maria Adele hotel gave us one of the most exquisite visits to Venice that we could possibly imagine.

  Prologue

  Amber was swimming in a sea of vodka with Vicodin islands floating in it, big white oval pills like inflatable boats. The pills looked lovely from a distance, but when she got close they were hard and slippery; her hands kept sliding off them when she tried to clamber aboard. Her mouth tasted metallic and dry, like lead. She was wearing a silk nightdress, which was plastered to her body by the vodka. Maybe she was doing an underwater photoshoot? Amber loved underwater shoots; the feeling of weightlessness, her hair streaming behind her, the serenity of being completely submerged. She never wanted to come up.

  But right now, she didn’t feel serene at all.

  She started to thrash around in panic, trying to swim up to the surface, to breathe. The vodka was thick and viscous, weighing her down. Amber was pushing it away with her hands, a clumsy, ugly breaststroke that would have had her sacked from an underwater shoot immediately. Desperately she tried to open her eyes; her lids were as heavy as if she was wearing ten pairs of fake eyelashes. She turned her head, shaking off the vodka, managing to lift her face a little, to peel open her eyelids, even though her lashes felt glued together.

  Light. Daylight. No water. Soft around her. Silk on her body: her peach La Perla nightdress. Silk pillowcase; she always slept on silk pillowcases to avoid wrinkles. And a quilt on top of her. More than just one. Quilts, blankets, enough layers for an Alaskan winter. Or not blankets – books, maybe. Solid things with corners, heavy.

  Books? What were a lot of books doing strewn all over her legs?

  She heaved herself back on her pillows, eyelids fluttering, her hair matted around her face. Her skin was clammy with sweat. The quilt on top of her smelled of vodka; she managed to get one hand out from under the layers and push back the quilt, shocked by how damp it was. A bottle rolled across the bed and dropped onto the floor beside her with a crash.

  And someone laughed. A woman, standing close to her, laughed.

  Amber’s head was stuffed full of cotton wool. Cotton wool soaked in vodka. She flailed around with her hand, grabbing anything she could reach, frantically searching for clues to what was happening to her. The glossy pages of a magazine crumpled into her palm and she dragged it towards her, craning to see what it was.

  Herself. Herself in Interview, wearing a Hervé Léger bandage dress and Galliano ankle-wrap shoes.

  She closed her hand on the corner of a book and pulled it into view. A Helmut Newton retrospective, open to a double-page spread of her at sixteen, standing with her legs apart, shot from below so she looked ten feet tall, a beautiful Amazon in a one-piece black belted swimsuit, her expression sulky to conceal the terror she’d felt all the way through the shoot.

  The next thing her fingers touched was a vial of Vicodin, transparent yellow with a white plastic lid. That was when Amber really started to panic – when she realized the vial was empty. And what was Vicodin doing anywhere near her? She’d cleaned up! She hadn’t had any pills for over a month now!

  Twisting, flailing like a fish in a net, weighed down by piles of fabric and paper, she writhed upright enough to get an overview of her bed. It was covered in photographs of herself. Tearsheets from magazines. Her model cards. Polaroids from shoots. Victoria’s Secret catalogues – lots and lots of VS catalogues. Huge hard-backed coffee-table books; no wonder she was weighed down. Magazines from her glory days, some almost as heavy as the books: Vogues and Harper’s and Vanity Fairs from all over the world, advertising and editorials. Amber’s beautiful face, Amber’s statuesque body, selling watches and diamonds and shoes and perfume and handbags and lingerie.

  And then something across the room caught her attention, something incongruous, something that shouldn’t be there: she had to look up. Though her head felt as if it weighed fifty pounds and her vision was so blurry white spots danced across her retinas, she managed to tip her skull back and stare, horrified, at the white wall opposite, on which was scrawled, in what looked like dark brown lipstick: ‘I’M NOT BEAUTIFUL ANY MORE’.

  The woman standing next to her reached out one hand and pushed Amber back down to a prone position.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said, holding Amber down with the press of her fingers on Amber’s forehead. ‘Don’t try to move. Just go back to sleep.’

  Amber’s lips moved, but no sound came out.

  ‘Help me,’ she mouthed desperately. ‘Please, help me . . .’

  Because if she did as the woman said, and passed out, she knew she would never wake up again.


  Part One

  Amber

  Amber Peters was used to being the most beautiful woman in the room. Even if there were other stunning models present – if she were sunbathing on the deck of a yacht moored off Capri, for instance, or at a cocktail party for the Paris collections – Amber would still be the one everyone’s eyes returned to, full of envy or desire. Her beauty wasn’t currently fashionable: she’d never be booked for French Vogue, which preferred editorial models with pale skinny limbs, big bug-eyes and jutting collarbones, girls who hunched their backs awkwardly to look like broken-down dolls. Though she was half English, half Slovak by birth, Amber’s beauty was the American dream; in her photos, she was either laughing, showing her perfect teeth, or pouting, sultry-eyed, at the camera over a glossy, suntanned shoulder. With her slanted green eyes, endless legs, and mane of tawny hair, Amber was the girl that every woman wanted to be, and every man wanted to be with.

  Since she was fourteen, Amber had made her living from being the incarnation of sexiness. Grooming had been drummed into her till it was as automatic to her as breathing. Currently, as always, she was flawless: her teeth were perfect and pearly, her skin smooth, glowing and lightly tanned, her eyes framed by thick tinted lashes, and her hair cascaded down her back in layers of gently styled curls.

  And this was only breakfast time.

  ‘No one here can take their eyes off you, honey,’ gloated Tony, smiling at her proudly. ‘You look stunning.’

  Sure enough, every head in the lavish breakfast room of Bovey Castle Hotel snapped away as soon as Amber glanced around, the unmistakable indication that the other guests had all been staring at her; she was so used to it by now that she took it for granted. The waitress, setting down Amber’s cappuccino, blushed and averted her gaze, overwhelmed.

  ‘I don’t fit in here,’ Amber said, embarrassed.

  The clientele were dressed in cords and sweaters, suitable wear for the English countryside; not a jet-setter among them.

  ‘I know! But hey, I don’t fit in here either!’ Tony said cheerfully. ‘This is old-school English, baby. Isn’t it cool?’ His brow furrowed. ‘Don’t you like it?’ He leaned across the table and took her hand. ‘I know it’s not the usual kind of place I take you to, but you’ve got the spa, don’t you? And the swimming pool?’

  ‘Yes! I’m fine!’ Amber said, smiling back at him. ‘I just feel too glitzy.’

  She glanced down at her skinny cream jeans, tucked into knee-length suede boots, the silk T-shirt, and the aquamarine silk and cashmere cardigan knotted at her waist. Form-fitting, showing off her long, slim body, her high, round breasts. Perfect for LA or Monaco, but not for a sporting estate in the heart of Devonshire.

  ‘We are glitzy, babe,’ Tony pointed out. ‘I’m from Houston, Texas. We like things big and shiny there. And you’re an international supermodel – that’s the definition of glitz!’ He grinned widely, his teeth a superb example of American dentistry.

  Amber was about to respond, but instead she squealed in shock as an enormous bird landed on the sill of the leaded window next to her chair. It was the size of a small dog, its eyes huge and yellow, staring directly at her through the glass.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Amber panicked.

  ‘It’s the giant owl! Cool!’ Tony said happily. ‘Remember, from the hallway?’

  Amber stared at him blankly.

  ‘Honey, you need more coffee,’ he said, beckoning the waitress. ‘Remember, in the hallway just now we walked past the guy with the giant owl on a stand? With the black Lab lying at his feet? He’s taking me out this morning to do some hawking?’

  I walked past a giant owl just now, Amber thought, baffled, and I don’t remember?

  The owl was still staring at her. She was more thankful than she could say that the leaded panes were between them. It hopped from one huge clawed foot to another, squeaking urgently. Tony reached out and tapped on the glass, and, surprised, it opened its wings, the span at least four feet, and flapped away.

  ‘You scared it,’ Amber said sadly, but Tony was already jumping up, throwing his linen napkin on the table.

  ‘Oh boy, that means the falconry’s started. I’m gonna go outside to watch, and then I’ll head off to go hawking!’ he chuckled happily. ‘And then I’ve got fly-fishing on the lake. Jeez, I can’t wait to catch us some dinner!’ He bent down to kiss her. ‘You have a great time in the spa, babe. Be back in the room by four, will ya? I’ll be raring to go by then.’

  Amber nodded as he dashed out of the breakfast room, almost a head taller than most of the Englishmen there, and much healthier-looking. Square-jawed, with a nice thick head of hair, Tony had the typical, neutral good looks of the American man. He wasn’t handsome, but he could pass for it in England because he was so big and healthy from the high-protein diet of milk, beef and eggs that all good ol’ Texan boys were raised on.

  Reaching into her bag, the Vuitton to which she was almost surgically attached because of its precious contents, Amber extracted her pill dispenser.

  ‘Goodness, that’s a lot of pills!’ the waitress blurted out, setting down Amber’s single poached egg on rye bread, and her second cappuccino.

  ‘Vitamins,’ Amber said, smiling at her, as she hooked a French-manicured nail under a big white oval and popped it out.

  This should help, she thought.

  And whether it was the ‘vitamin’, or the Fruit Active Glow facial in the Elemis spa, followed by the really superb Aroma Stone massage and mani-pedi, Amber felt wonderful as she lay in the sunken whirlpool bath of her treatment room a few hours later, staring dreamily at the sky. For her, this meant that she was actually feeling very little, utterly suspended in a hazy cloud of bliss that wrapped around her and insulated her from the outside world, just like the bubbles of the whirlpool bath.

  Underwater lights cast an eerie, otherworldly glow around her; they had been red when the bath was turned on, but Amber had asked for blue instead, and the beauticians had been only too happy to oblige. Red was much too stimulating. Red was the colour of passion and fire; it stirred you up; while blue was cold and clear, the colour of the sky and the sea. Blue cleansed and purified you.

  The swimming pool turned out to be blue as well, cobalt mosaic tiles with gleaming pewter accents. There was a Jacuzzi at the far end, where she sat in another cloud of bubbles and gazed at the Devon moors beyond, the gentle rise of the hills, pale green and grey. Clouds moved slowly across the gunmetal sky. It was hypnotic. She pulled herself out of the water eventually, catching sight of her reflection in the mirrors, her white crochet Shoshanna bikini pale against her lightly tanned skin. The room was lined with large diamonds of Art Deco glass, and at the far end was a sunburst of mirrors, faceted silver; if she tilted in the right direction, she could make herself disappear completely between the diamonds of cut glass.

  She wrapped herself in a big, soft white towel, sinking down onto one of the loungers arranged in a semicircle in the glassed-in pool area, staring out over the grounds of Bovey Castle, the stone terraces that led down to the lawns and golf course beyond. It was the perfect English country home. By now she was floating on her own invisible bubbles, and the covert glances everyone else cast her, their whispered speculation about who she was – actress? model? socialite? all three? – were lost in the pale blue haze that surrounded her.

  Outside the curving glass walls was a gravel path on which people strolled past, pausing by the little pond with its pale grey stone fountain of a nymph and fairy, water trickling gently from the nymph’s hands. But then they looked through the glass and saw Amber, sun-glazed, her long, perfect limbs the colour of pale biscuit, the white towel turban wrapped around her head emphasizing her slanted green eyes and impossibly high cheekbones, and they double-took in shock, staring at her avidly before they remembered their manners and reluctantly turned away. Amber was much too exotic a creature to be anything but a rarity and a wonder in the English countryside.

  Eventually, Amber got dressed and ma
de her way back through the grounds to the stone lodge that she and Tony were occupying for the weekend. Made of local granite and oak, it had three ensuite bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room with a central fireplace and a vaulted oak ceiling, three storeys high. It was much bigger than they needed, and stunningly luxurious. Amber lit the fire, opened the glass, living-room doors, popped some more vitamins, and curled up on the wooden lounger on the deck, smoking a cigarette and gazing down the slope of the hill, through the trees to the lake below. Daffodils and crocuses bloomed in the woodland, pale yellow and white and purple.

  Eventually, she roused herself and went upstairs, to the lush, red-carpeted master bedroom. It was three o’clock, and she had completely forgotten to eat any lunch; but then, that was one of the useful side effects of her ‘vitamins’. She plugged in her hairdryer and styling tongs, sat down at the mirrored Deco dressing table, and spent forty minutes sculpting her hair into lush, cascading waves, and twenty more making up her face, curling her eyelashes, glossing her lips, dusting glossy highlighter along her cheekbones, turning up the wattage on her beauty. She stroked Lancôme’s Star Bronzer all over her body, working it in until her skin glowed pale gold, and slipped on a delicate pale blue silk bra and panty set, drawing matching hold-up stockings up her thighs and smoothing out the ribbed velvet-covered elastic.

  She wandered into the bathroom, set under the eaves. When they’d checked in last night, Tony had sighed in ecstasy over its gigantic bath, big enough even for a Texan to stretch out in, and its equally huge power shower. The walls were papered in zebra print, the far one hung with a full-length mirror in which Amber now surveyed herself.

  This was one of the moments that gave her the most pleasure of all. Dressed up in exquisite underwear, made up to perfection; she threw some poses in front of the mirror, flicking back her hair, smiling to herself. It was something men didn’t understand, the satisfaction that a woman received when all her hard work paid off, the dieting, the exercise, the grooming, the money spent on beauty treatments, the painstaking, detailed construction of the absolutely best image of herself that she could present to the world.