“Right. Here’s a tenner. Get down to the chemist and buy a test. And I want to watch you pee on the stick.”
Laura hesitated for a moment, then made a sound of inarticulate disgust and flew off, knocking Rocky’s shoulder in her haste to vacate the scene.
“You know she was lying, don’t you?” he asked urgently, stepping forward, bending down to Flipp’s draggled figure in the booth doorway.
“Who is she?”
“Nobody. Nothing.” Rocky, noticing a tear in Flipp’s lacy vest top, put a finger over the hole, the gloved pad of it cool against her scratched skin. He looked down at it, his breath held, his eyes in a place of distant trouble that looked as if it contained fighting and smoke, then he looked up at her and the sheer heat of it made Flipp tremble all the more. Unconsciously she moved towards him, pressing the finger farther into her flesh, her whole body wanting to be on his.
“Better…go upstairs. Can’t have Cordwainer guessing anything.”
Rocky swallowed and pulled himself away, walking swiftly to the office door without a backwards glance.
Laura slammed the tears out of her eyes with the heel of a hand, leaning over the pier railings to breathe in huge lungfuls of fresh sea air, hoping they would replace the sick feeling in her stomach—a sick feeling that had nothing to do with the impending joys of motherhood.
Staring at her shoes—the red slingbacks from Office—she became gradually aware of somebody behind her, then beside her, then a hand on the rail beside hers.
“Are you okay? Feeling faint?”
It was a man’s voice, vaguely familiar. Laura tried to quell her irritation at the unwanted company and muttered, “No’m fine, thanks.”
She took one last gasp of saline oxygen, straightened up, wiped her brow and looked at the speaker.
“Oh, you,” she said. “You’re…I’ve met you before, don’t tell me…you work for the Gazette.”
“Yes,” he said, clearly pleased to have a coveted spot in the golden girl’s memory. “Jeremy Weill. I interviewed you when you won the Carnival Queen vote.”
“That’s right. Jeremy.” She smiled in recollection of past glories. “You asked the most dreadfully bland questions of all time. Favourite nail polish. Did I have any pets? What were my ambitions?”
“Carnival Queen interviews aren’t meant to stir controversy.” Jeremy smiled back. “But I can do a no-holds-barred confessional now, if you like.”
Laura managed a laugh, her fury at Flipp and Rocky simmering down to a low boil. “Not sure about confessional,” she said. “But no publicity is bad publicity. Perhaps a periodic feature about my adventures in the modelling business—would you be interested?”
“There’s a thought. Could be interesting—glamour, showbiz, something to hook the younger readers. I’ll pitch it to my editor if you like. Tell you what, it’s…six-thirty now. Have you eaten? Can I buy you dinner? If you’re free, of course.”
Laura looked over at Caesar’s Palace, at its garish frontage and battered paintwork. She didn’t belong there. She was better than that.
“Why not?” She smiled charmingly and took Jeremy’s proffered arm.
Over spaghetti alle vongole in a backstreet Italian place, Jeremy steered the subject, with some difficulty, away from Laura’s incessant self-promotional chatter and asked, “So, about that confessional. Are you secretly addicted to penny fountains?”
“No.” She laughed, puzzling over the Chianti glass.
“Fruit machines? Bike simulators?”
She caught his drift and looked away for a split second, gathering her wits.
“Of course not,” she said coolly.
“So what were you doing at Caesar’s Palace? It’s like bumping into the queen down at Poundstretcher.”
Laura, softened by the flattering comparison, let her guard back down.
“I was looking for Daddy. He does some business with Mr. Cordwainer sometimes.”
“Oh really? He’s a builder, though, isn’t he?”
“He owns a build