Sins

With him standing so close to her in the confines of the carriage, his arms lifted up whilst he destroyed her hat, Ella could see the ripple of the muscles in his arms and torso beneath the thin T-shirt he was wearing, and smell the fresh male scent of his body.

It was too much for her. She wasn’t used to this kind of proximity to this kind of man. It made her feel hot and angry and somehow dangerously light-headed. She stiffened.

Instantly Ollie’s concentration left the hat, his professionalism giving way to the male instinct of the hunter sensing vulnerable prey. His gaze dropped from the hat to Ella’s trembling mouth. He let his attention drop further to her throat, where a pulse thudded frantically in the pale skin, and then drop lower still to her breasts, disguised as they were by her shapeless clothes. Ollie, an expert in such matters, estimated that they were just the right size to fill his hands. Now that would be a thing, bringing Miss High-and-Mighty down to earth, if he hadn’t got more important things to do. No way did he really want to get entangled with a ruddy stuck-up virgin.

He looked back at the hat, frowning as he adjusted it a second time, before telling the fashion editor, ‘That’s how they should be wearing their titfers, so that I can get the light on their faces.’

‘Celine,’ the fashion editor addressed the most senior of the three models, ‘you put on Ella’s hat and let me have a look. I’m not letting you loose with those model hats, Oliver, until I’m convinced you’re right.’

Celine, the elegant soignée society model, gave Ella a sympathetic look as Oliver removed Ella’s now ruined hat to place it on the model’s carefully coiffured hair.

It was, Ella thought, going to be a long journey to Venice.

* * *

She would never ever want to work full time in fashion, Ella decided angrily later in the day as the train approached Paris’s Gare de Lyon. She was exhausted and wrung out, her head ringing with the instructions and counter-instructions the fashion editor and Oliver Charters had both flung at her.

It was a relief to be allowed to return to her own carriage, her head pounding and her heart racing. A kind-hearted cabin attendant brought her a much-needed pot of tea and a croissant. Leaving the croissant, Ella took one of her diet pills, swallowing it down with the tea. She was definitely thinner, although since she was still wearing the same clothes, no one else had noticed–as yet. Ella didn’t particularly want anyone else to notice, especially not anyone like Oliver Charters. She didn’t want him, or indeed anyone, thinking she had lost weight because he had made fun of her. It was enough that she had proved to herself that she could lose weight. But only because of her magic little pills. Ella pushed that knowledge away. She didn’t want to think about the pills. After all, no one else needed to know about them, and as soon as she had lost enough weight she would stop taking them.

Whilst she’d been drinking her tea they’d pulled into the Paris station, and the models had disembarked, ready for Oliver to photograph them.

They did look wonderful, Ella acknowledged, watching them through the carriage window. No one would know, looking at them from the front, that one of the suits had been so much too large for the slender model that it was pulled in all down the back with clothes pegs. Ella marvelled at the patience and good nature of the models. She would hate their job. Not that she exactly loved her own, but it wouldn’t always be like this. One day she would be a proper investigative journalist, and then she wouldn’t have to put up with people like Oliver Charters mocking her and laughing at her.

Ella’s hands were shaking slightly as she poured herself a second cup of tea. How much weight would she have lost by the time they reached Venice, another two days from now? She wasn’t going to stop dieting until she had lost two stone. Then she would weigh exactly eight stone two pounds, and be a size ten. Exactly the same size and weight as the model who had laughed at her and told Oliver Charters that Ella was the size of an elephant. Normally, before the diet pills, just remembering the humiliation of that moment would have had her reaching for her favourite dark chocolate digestive biscuits, but now she didn’t want one at all.

‘So what do you think?’

Standing on the pavement outside the salon, Rose dutifully looked up at the sign that had just been fixed in place and which read ‘Hair by Josh Simons’.

‘I like it,’ she told him truthfully.

The door to the salon was open, as were the windows, the sounds and the smell of painters at work carrying out into the street.

Rose had nipped over to King’s Road during her lunch hour, knowing that the sign was going up.

‘I’d better get back. I’ve got to source some trimming for a storyboard on my way back.’

‘You should be running your own business, with your talent, not work

ing for someone else,’ Josh told her for the umpteenth time.

‘That isn’t what I want and besides, I’m not good enough for that yet. There’s still loads I need to learn. You wouldn’t have left Vidal’s salon before he had said that you were ready to go it alone, would you? Besides, my aunt wants me to work in the London shop eventually.’

‘What about what you want?’

Josh’s question had caught her off guard, and she hesitated before telling him firmly, ‘I want the same as my aunt.’

‘If I’d done what my dad wanted me to do,’ Josh reminded her, ‘I’d be cutting suits somewhere off Savile Row now, and working for someone else.’

‘That’s different,’ Rose responded immediately.

Thinking of her aunt reminded her of the fact that soon it would be Easter and that she would be going home to Denham.

Denham. She had such mixed feelings about her childhood home. She had no memory of her father taking her there, of course–she’d been too young, little more than a baby–but she did have memories of being held in caring arms there and of being loved, of a soft voice urging her to live. Then later, when she’d recovered from the malnutrition and the fever that had nearly killed her, she’d come to recognise her aunt Amber and to love her. That love had been her only safe haven in a world where everyone else was hostile: her great-grandmother, Emerald, her nanny, and most of all her own father. Rose shuddered, remembering her father’s cruelty to her.

‘Hey, where have you gone?’ Josh demanded.

‘Nowhere.’