“Come home now otherwise you won’t see me again.”
13
The barman served a scotch for Luke and a double gin and tonic with two slices of lime for Eva while Luke watched her standing at the end of the bar. Her fingers rested on the phone handset as if she expected it might jump up and hit her if she didn’t hold it down.
A man tall enough to hide the fact that he was obese, said something that flustered her. Eva limped to the exit, but he followed, Luke a few seconds behind. He heard their voices, the low tightness of an argument in a public place before he caught sight of them on the switchback of the grand staircase.
“You know me better than that.” Eva limped down the next flight of stairs, gripping the marble banister.
Luke stayed beyond their eyeline on the first floor landing.
“I’m not in the habit of having people walk away from me.”
“I’m not walking away from you, Stuart. I’m walking into an emergency. If you can’t secure their donation, Dario’s as good as me.”
“The donor wants you. I have to insist.”
Luke heard Eva’s awkward stepping down pause, the man’s shoes clipped to a stop.
“You know what Every Drop means to me so I don’t need to tell you I wouldn’t be doing this unless it was life or death.” She sounded lost, wounded.
“If you’re walking away from your responsibilities here I can’t be responsible for what happens.” The man snapped at her, ignorant or uncaring of the breaking in her voice.
“Seems we all have to do what we have to do.” Eva reached the bottom step before the man’s shoes rapped his annoyance back up the stairs, past Luke as he went after Eva.
Outside the hotel entrance, she shivered, rubbing a hand over her non-bruised arm. He imagined he could smell her perfume from where his jacket had laid on her skin. A black cab drew up and Eva got into it.
Luke showed the concierge the ID that always shattered the data protection defence and he told him where she was going. Curious.
The drinks he’d abandoned waited for him. From his trouser pocket he took a tiny vial and, subtle beyond notice, he passed it over the gin. He sipped at the scotch. Very good. Thanks, Addison, for your charge account.
He picked up both glasses and wove his way into the main function room where the diamond encrusted audience was still congratulating itself on such generosity. Passionate about her cause, Eva’s speech hit all the right notes. He’d have donated himself, if he were who he was playing.
Easy to spot, her bright red, too short, too tight, too low, just out of place, dress a beacon. Luke held the gin glass out to Annabel Grayson. “You strike me like you might be an,” anything in a glass, “gin and tonic girl, am I right?” He smiled his best at her.
She giggled. “Am I so easy to read?” Enough compensatory champagnes had passed between the incident downstairs that she didn’t appear to recognise him.
“It’s quite some night, isn’t it? Cheers.” He touched his glass to the base of hers and they drank. “That’s Jonathan Trainer?” He nodded in Trainer’s direction where he was holding court with a wife resplendent in a silvery dress that caught the light when she moved. “Is it true he’s the richest person here?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She took a step away from him.
“You’re not going to drink with me?”
“You’re too James Bond for me.”
Luke burst out laughing. “How can anyone be too James Bond? You don’t like bad boys?”
“I’m engaged.”
Not for much longer after her performance earlier, but her bare finger explained it.
“Does that mean you can’t share a drink, chat with someone new? I flew in from Monte Carlo this morning.” Annabel looked him up and down. More so when he carried on spouting his bullshit. “Reckon I’d give Trainer a run for that title.”
He smiled and wet his lips with the whisky, watching her mirror him with a gulp of the gin. So predictable, so boring. Her reaction to him was nothing to do with the drug in her drink, everything to do with pound signs.
He leant closer. “What do people do around here for fun?”
“That depends what kind of fun you have in mind.” She took a baby step sideways. It was working.
“Let’s take a seat.” Luke took her elbow and steered her to one of the empty tables at the back of the room.
When she dropped onto the chair, her gin slopped over her braceleted wrist. “Oops.” She giggled like a schoolgirl on her first glass of wine, ran her tongue over the cheap jewellery, watching his reaction. It wasn’t the hardest smile he’d ever had to hold.
“Is that from your fiancé, it looks like it could be from the Royal collection?”
“You know him?”
“We go back a long way. So what’s the deal with you and Jonathan Trainer earlier?”
Her baby doll face crumpled into a frown, the drug told him what she wouldn’t have said otherwise. “I didn’t use anyone for anything, we’re all adults here.”
Whichever way she had to justify it, she must be on the way out to risk it all so publicly.
He went with his hunch. “Who told you to compromise Eva Janssen?”
“Whadyoumean?”
Luke leant forward, his forearms on his knees, making her duck to hear him, enhancing the drug’s effects, making her feel off balance, unsettled.
“The media threats, even though you wouldn’t want your fiancé to see that you’d been getting jiggy with anyone else. You have way more to lose than Trainer does, it’s just money to him. You’re risking your marriage?”
“It’s not,” she covered her bare ring finger on her left hand with her thumb. “What happened with her. . .” She half-shrugged, a brief touch on her stomach telegraphed her plan. You sad sod, Trainer. This evening would cost him a lot more than whatever donation he’d made. How would Mrs Trainer take that? Not delighted for there to suddenly
