Divas Page 3

  ‘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.’

  Lola’s headache was like a vice now. She was literally unable to process all the information Carin was throwing at her. Grief was bubbling under the panic. She could sense it down there somewhere, far below, but it hadn’t reached her yet. Could Carin truly be behind Lola being locked out of her own house.

  But, according to what Carin had just told her, it wasn’t her house at all . . .

  ‘How could you do this?’ Lola gasped. ‘How could you think – Daddy’s really sick and instead of looking after him, you actually got someone here to change the lock on my house—’

  Carin’s voice sharpened to a point.

  ‘I think I just explained that it isn’t your house, Lola! You have a fiancé – go and stay with him! Your father’s supported you for long enough – it’s someone else’s turn now!’

  ‘But I’ve got all my stuff in there!’ Lola wailed, too hungover and spongy-brained to come up with any better riposte, though she was dimly aware that there must be hundreds.

  ‘I’ll make arrangements for you to get your things, ’ Carin said airily. ‘Now I must go, I’m afraid. I have so much to organise!’

  A click on the line signified that Carin had hung up, but Lola, unable to believe it, kept saying: ‘Hello? Carin? Hello?’ for at least a minute afterwards. Then, frantically, she searched her phone for Jean-Marc’s number. Five minutes later, having left three frenzied messages begging him to call her as soon as possible, she slumped back against her pretty pale-green front door, which wasn’t her front door any more, apparently. Her headache was pounding at her temples with a croquet mallet, and her brain was so overloaded she thought that if she had to take in one more unbelievable piece of information, grey ooze would start pouring out of her ears.

  She was almost convinced that this was some awful joke Daddy and Carin were playing on her. It couldn’t really be true. Her father couldn’t really be in a coma! Maybe this was some kind of Swedish custom, messing with the bride the day after her hen night? Some awful, psychotic, evil Swedish custom, of course—

  And why wasn’t Jean-Marc calling her back?

  Across the little mews, a front door burst open and Raisin-Face came running out, waving something. Having changed into slippers and velvet lounging trousers, she reached Lola in a matter of seconds.

  ‘Do you know? Do you know? Have you heard?’ she gasped, flailing with the paper.

  ‘It’s in the Standard?’ Lola grabbed the paper. ‘Daddy’s in the Standard?’

  But the headline that greeted her wasn’t about her father.

  ‘PLAYBOY HEIR IN SEX SCANDAL OVERDOSE!’

  Lola’s legs gave way under her. She sank down to the cobbled pavement, one of her Jimmy Choos twisting and snapping off a heel as she collapsed. But Lola was far, far beyond realising that her last pair of shoes had just broken. She was staring at the photograph on the cover of the Evening Standard, which showed someone being carried on a stretcher out of the nastiest-looking council estate staircase Lola could imagine. His face was blurred, but the golden sweep of hair over his forehead was horribly familiar.

  Lola realised why Jean-Marc’s phone was going straight to voice-mail.

  ‘STEEL HEIR JEAN-MARC VAN DER VEER OVERDOSES IN TRANSSEXUAL LOVE PAD!’ the cover screamed. ‘FIANCE OF “IT” GIRL LOLA CAUGHT WITH TRANNY LOVER!’

  And just then, from the main street, a woman came running into the mews, her face lighting up as she spotted Lola.

  ‘Lola!’ she yelled. ‘Caroline Francis from the Sun! Am I the first to catch you? What are your feelings about Jean-Marc’s overdose? Had you heard? Did you know he was seeing a transsexual prostitute?’

  Raisin-Face grabbed Lo
la’s arm and dragged her up.

  ‘Run!’ she said. ‘Come on, run!’

  And so, hopping grotesquely from a four-inch heel to a flat foot, her head feeling as if it were about to explode, her only refuge the house of a woman she didn’t even know, Lola Fitzgerald ran from the home that wasn’t hers any more, pursued by a Sun reporter yelling unbelievable allegations about her fiancé.

  They barely made it back to Raisin-Face’s house in time. She literally slammed the door in the eager face of Caroline-Francis-from-the-Sun, and turned to Lola, completely unable to disguise both her excitement at being in the middle of such a juicy tabloid story, and her joy at Lola’s humiliation.

  ‘So!’ she said, her over-stretched face trying so hard to move that it looked as if it might pop at any moment. ‘Did you know about the transsexual prostitute?’

  Lola did the only thing left to her. She burst into a flood of hysterical tears. And then she fainted.

  Chapter 2

  Evie was halfway up her pole and contemplating what to do next. She hung there, head down, her ponytail a pale line of hair pointing towards the ground. Her ankles were wrapped tightly around the pole, her knees clamped one on either side in a double-lock that ensured she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Hmm. She tried a Caterpillar, holding onto the pole with both hands and levering herself up, rubbing her upper body along the pole so her bottom rose up suggestively, repeating it in a long slow sexy loop of movement that she knew would send anyone viewing it into an instant wash of desire, watching her taut buttocks lift closer and closer to her crimson stack-heeled shoes, then descend as the front of her body caressed the pole. After a couple of Caterpillars she checked her lock and changed her grip and pushed herself up and away from the pole into a Swan, gripping for dear life with her legs, using her considerable abdominal strength to hold her in a deep arch, arms out to either side, breasts pushed forward like a figurehead on a boat.

  It felt good, but it was a little too gymnastic to be sexy. Evie crossed her arms in front of her chest. Was that better? No, too coy, a bit like a statue on a tombstone. . . She lifted her arms again and played with her hair, flicking it lightly, swaying her upper body fractionally from side to side, and knew she had the move now. Sexy mermaid. Cool. She could always sense it as soon as a move worked, as soon as it connected with her crotch, like someone pulling lightly on her G-string. Instantly she felt sexy, as if a hundred male eyes were on her and fifty men were breathing fast and deep, watching her play with her hair and twist her body into shapes that made their palms sweat and the blood rush to their groins.

  Jesus, her ankles were killing her, and the muscles along her spine were burning up . . . Evie came out of the Swan, loosening the locks at knees and ankles just enough to slide gently down the pole till she could put her palms on the floor. Then she let the locks go completely, straightened her legs against the pole, and used it to kick herself over into a bridge. Careful not to bang her face into the pole – she’d nearly broken her nose once doing that – she stood up from the bridge, her back groaning after holding the extreme arch of the Swan for all that time. She dropped to all fours and did some cat stretches, pushing her lower back as high as she could, forcing it to round out, and finally it stopped complaining.

  Then she looked at her ankles and winced. She was really working hard on all her extreme hanging poses, and it showed. Benny would freak. He was obsessed with her feet being smooth. He paid for twice-weekly pedicures, threw hissy fits if he ever saw her with bare feet – even in the apartment – and had bought her so many velvet slippers, marabou mules, softening foot lotions and pumice stones that even if those were the only possessions she owned, her bedroom and bathroom closets would have been bulging at the hinges.

  It wasn’t all she owned, of course. Benny had bought her plenty more than that. Which was why the spare bedroom had been converted three months ago into her walk-in closet. Evie loved that room, with its cedar panelling, its sliding drawers, its revolving clothes rails, its recessed lighting that switched from day to evening so you could assess the true colours of the clothes you were choosing, its shoe shelves reaching to the ceiling with the built-in stepladder for getting right up to the top.

  Shoes. All those shoes. And the entire set of drawers right next to the shoe rack which were all for stockings, hold-ups and knee-highs. Benny loved that room even more than Evie did: he could spend hours in there pulling things out and selecting outfits for her. She was his little dress-up doll. With a special emphasis on the leg and foot area.

  Evie grimaced, looking down at her ankles with the hard red lines running across the front of the bones, where the pole had bit in. She’d have to put on some opaque stockings for Benny this afternoon, or he’d have one of his tantrums. God. Benny was a wonderful guy – so sweet, so generous – but you’d think a guy as smart as he was could figure out that a girl he’d met hanging upside down on a hard metal pole by her ankles might have a few scrapes and bruises every so often as she pursued her art.

  Benny didn’t think that way, of course. He’d seen a girl who could do all those moves in a pair of flame-red patent heels, stacked six inches high, and fallen in lust in twenty seconds. Hard and fast, the best way. He’d had Evie out of the Midnight Lounge and into this Tribeca penthouse loft quicker than you could say ‘billionaire tycoon’. And Evie, like every other girl she’d worked with in the Midnight Lounge, could get those words out pretty damn quickly. Benny saw Evie as a delicate, fragile creature, slender as a wand (years of gymnastics at high school, you needed to be skinny to compete), big dark doe eyes, slender wrists and ankles, small pointy breasts – his little gazelle, he called her sometimes.

  Actually, Evie was lean and strong as a steel wire, tensile and hyper-flexible, with clearly defined muscles in her arms and back from all that taking her weight on her hands, and she needed to be that thin to do the pole moves she did. Curvier girls looked even better on a pole, those luscious breasts and asses wrapping round it seductively, but they could rarely do the hardcore flips and climbs, or hold the poses for long. They were carrying too much weight for full-on routines, it strained their arms and back too much and cut into their ankles really bad. Whereas slim light little Evie could haul herself up that pole in seconds and hang off it for what seemed like hours. She had the wiry build of an athlete. And for a Latina, she was pale, pale enough for her blonde hair to be plausibly natural.

  But Benny, bless his heart, chose to see Evie as a frail soft-petalled naturally blonde orchid whose petals had been gently bruised by the cruel world. An orchid that Benny needed to put in water and cherish like a precious jewel. And Evie was more than happy to let him have his fun.

  She undid the cruel stacked stilettos and took them off, flexing her feet. Other girls practised in bare feet, but not Evie. Nothing to do with Benny and his particularities on the subject; no, she’d always thought that if she started training in bare feet, she’d get too nervous to do some of the scarier moves when she put her shoes back on. If she always wore the wicked spiked heels, took them for granted, allowed herself no possibility of trying any move without them, then she eventually forgot the fear that comes with knowing you’re kicking above your head in stilettos that could take your eye out if you aimed one wrong.

  The clock on the wall said ten of twelve. Evie felt her lower body soften, melting down in pleasurable anticipation. Lawrence was always punctual to the minute. She hadn’t realised how much she was looking forward to seeing him till this precise moment.

  She stood up, suddenly half a foot shorter, and kicked her shoes across the room. They were just practice heels, banged up already, it didn’t matter how scuffed they got. For the rest, she was already dressed for it; a black racerback sports bra and high-cut short shorts, covering the minimum amount of flesh possible. You needed bare skin on the pole: it gripped ten times better than any fabric you could ever find. Evie swivelled a tad to catch sight of herself in one of the full-length mirrors. One thing this apartm
ent wasn’t short on: mirrors. It was like a cross between a dance studio and a, well, a mirror showroom. You’d have thought Benny sold the things for a living. He sure did like to watch.

  And so did Evie, though in an utterly different way. Benny looked at her and saw fantasy: Evie, merchandise. As she did several times a day, she stared at herself now with narrowed, assessing eyes. With the shoes off and her hair tied back, she could be taken for a gymnast still, her stomach flat, her small breasts pretty little points flattened slightly by the sports bra. She was short-waisted, which meant she had to work really hard on keeping that stomach flat, as there wasn’t much space for all her internal organs, and that tended to make your tummy bulge out, even without any fat over it. But the plus side of being short-waisted was that you got lovely long legs. Even though Evie wasn’t that tall, in her heels it looked as though her legs went on for days. All the women in her family had good legs, but hers, after all the exercise and stretching, were perfect now.

  Almost perfect. She bent down, critically pinching at a small swell of flesh on the inside of each knee. It wasn’t fat, of course not, it was solid muscle, but it needed to go just the same, so her line was totally smooth. Well, that was what she had Lawrence for. And at the thought of his name, her lower body softened again. Lawrence, her personal trainer, who would be here any minute, and who would gaze into her eyes and make her sweat from every pore of her body . . .

  Just on time, the buzzer went. Evie crossed the floor to the intercom and said:

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Miss Lopez, it’s your noon appointment, ’ said Henry, the doorman.