Sins

She had recognised him, of course. It would have been impossible not to; he was the lead singer with one of the country’s most successful rock groups.

Rose gave him her best professional smile and shook his hand.

‘You’d better come in and have a look round,’ he told her.

Rose followed him into an elegantly shaped hallway, although the shape was the only elegant thing about it. The walls were grubby, pieces of the ornamental plaster from the cornices and the ceiling lay on the floor, and the banister was missing from the staircase.

‘I got it cheap because it’s in a bit of a state,’ Pete informed her.

Rose tried not to look as dismayed as she felt. ‘I think what you really need is an architect, not an interior designer,’ she told him.

‘That’s OK. You can find one for me, can’t you? The thing is that we’re off on tour in a week’s time, and I’ve promised the rest of the band that they can come and stay here when we get back just before Christmas. Oh, that reminds me, I’m going to need a recording studio. I’ll clear out my stuff before we go on tour, so that it isn’t in your way.’

‘You’re living here?’ Rose could hardly believe it.

‘Yeah.’

She wanted to turn and run. The amount of work the place required was way beyond her scope.

Nearly two hours later, having been shown all over the house, Rose told Pete firmly, ‘You really do need an architect.’

She was standing on the landing just outside the bedroom that Pete was using. He’d painted the purple walls himself, he’d told her, but unexpectedly the new-looking bed was covered in plain white bedlinen and looked clean and neat. He was a lot taller than Rose, broad-shouldered, with muscular arms, one hand resting on the door frame, his rolled-up sleeves and open-necked shirt revealing his tanned skin.

‘Let’s go down to the pub and talk about it,’ was his response.

Which was how, half an hour later, Rose found herself seated opposite him in the restaurant of the village pub, with its thatched roof and quaint old-fashioned air, eating beef wellington and listening to him telling her some surely exaggerated stories about things that happened to him when he’d been on tour with his band.

He’d ordered a bottle of wine, but Rose had stopped drinking after one glass. His stories about the disasters that had befallen them made her laugh, as he obviously intended them to do.

‘There was one time in Amsterdam,’ he told her with a big grin, ‘our first solo tour when we were the main act. We’d finished playing at two in the morning, having only arrived in Holland in the afternoon. The last two hours of the gig, all that kept us going were the joints that Mickey, our roadie, kept passing to us between sets. Of course, once we came off stage there were the usual groupies hanging around–perk of the job,’ he told her, before continuing, ‘Naturally these girls expected to be taken back to some fancy hotel but thanks to our manager, who was as tight as a duck’s arsehole, we were supposed to be sleeping in the van. Not that we hadn’t had plenty of shags in there. But what with still being high on the joints and the gig, we ended up wandering round the red-light district ’cos Mickey had said that we’d be able to get a shag there and a bed thrown in with it for a couple of quid. Shows how much Mickey and the rest of us really knew, because the girls charged a couple of quid for a couple of minutes, not the whole evening.’

Normally Rose would have been left feeling uncomfortable by such frank disclosures from a man she was on her own with, but Pete had that way about him that somehow diffused her self-consciousness and anxiety. He even managed to make her laugh, when she felt that really she should have been disapproving. She was enjoying being with him, she realised, much to her own surprise.

It was still light when they left the pub, Pete curling himself into the passenger seat of her Mini.

Emerald looked down at the hem of her Courrèges frock, which was short enough to expose the length of her sleek tanned legs.

Max had just arrived to collect her for their dinner date at Annabel’s, but there was something she wanted to discuss with him first.

‘I’ve some exciting news,’ she told him. She was feeling in a good mood, triumphant at the thought of what she had planned and how it would enable her to have Max all to herself for the summer.

‘A friend of mine has offered me the use of her villa in St-Tropez for the summer. We could leave next week—’

‘No.’

‘What? Don’t be silly, Max, of course we’re going.’

His response was to grab her wrist in a painful grip and tell her curtly, ‘Listen, lady, no one tells me what to do and most especially not a bird. And what’s all this “we” business? There’s you and there’s me, but there’s no “we”. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to stay.’

Emerald wasn’t used to being treated so cavalierly. She pulled her wrist free and demanded, ‘And what if I don’t want it to stay that way?’

‘Too bad,’ Max told her succinctly, ‘because I do. I’ve got business here in London so that’s where I’m going to be, you can please yourself what you do and where you go. I don’t give a monkey’s. In fact—’ he began.

Emerald stopped him, demanding, ‘In fact, what?’

‘Work it out for yourself.’

Was he really trying to imply that he was dropping her? For a minute she was too shocked to react. That wasn’t what she had expected and it wasn’t what she wanted. A feeling not quite panic, but certainly something close to it, gripped her. She wasn’t ready to end things between them yet. Being with him was still too exciting. But then her confidence broke through her panic. Of course he didn’t mean it. He was just doing a bit of sabre-rattling. Max knew when he was well off. He might feel that he needed to prove his machismo and his independence but the reality was that his sexual desire for her was every bit as strong as hers for him.