had agreed to have medical help only because her mother was so distraught. Keira hadn’t really believed she was ill. The first month in the clinic had been a long struggle between her and the medical staff. It had taken some time before she had begun to listen to them, begun to understand what she had been doing to herself. Since then she had been through a bitter battle to start living a very different life, and she was angry with herself for having fallen back again.
‘That’s the last thing I want! I couldn’t stand going through that again!’ she assured the doctor, who smiled.
‘Good girl. Then what you must do now is break this pattern before it starts. I think you should take a holiday, get away from the problems that have caused the recurrence.’
‘But now I’ve lost Rexel I’ll have to get other work, which means I must be in London.’
‘That can wait, my dear, believe me. The most important thing at the moment is for you to get back to the position you were in a year ago, feeling strong and sure of yourself. Going away will help you see things more clearly; from a distance everything will look different. Go somewhere sunny. Just relax and have fun, forget everything else. Eat three meals a day, never eat alone, don’t eat in between meals, but above all if you feel an attack threatening do something. Get a friend to go with you, stop you going near food. That little girl out thereSara, is it? Get her to go with you. And while you’re there go out all the time, keep busy, surround yourself with lots of people.’ He smiled at her. ‘You have broken the cycle once, my dear. Don’t let it re-establish itself.’
‘I won’t. Thank you, Dr Patel.’ Keira smiled at him. His soothing manner and understanding had made her feel more human.
When he had gone Sara came into the bedroom and sat on her bed. ‘What did he say?’
Keira told her and Sara nodded. ‘I think that’s very good advice. You haven’t had a holiday for ages, you’ve been working so hard.’
‘Rexel kept me busy,’ Keira said, her mouth turning down at the corners as she was reminded of the lost contract. She had hoped for so much from it—the constant appearance on TV had been making her face instantly recognisable everywhere she went. Being seen on magazine covers, or inside magazines, never had that sort of impact. Of course, she had known it couldn’t last forever, but she had hoped for another year, at least.
Sara gave her a sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, Keira—it must have been a terrible blow. But at least now you’re free to take other work, and after you’ve been the Rexel girl and on TV all the time for a year your face is famous—you’re bound to be offered lots of jobs.’
‘For a while, maybe. But I’m getting too old! You know how young you have to be in this business. In a few years the place will be overrun with girls of seventeen who’ll get all the jobs, and I’ll be out, finished. I’ll be lucky to get a job modelling clothes for home-shopping catalogues.’
‘You’re just depressed. You’ve got plenty of time to make it into the big league; you’re only twentytwo.’
‘I feel a lot older.’ Keira grimaced, her mouth turning down at the edges, then shot Sara an accusing look. ‘By the way, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’
‘A bone?’ For once Sara’s brilliant grasp of English failed her; she stared blankly.
‘Gerard Findlay!’
‘Oh…’ Sara put one of her elegant little hands up to her mouth, giggling helplessly.
‘It isn’t funny! You know I hate the man—I certainly didn’t want him to see me looking like that! I could kill you!’
Sara looked apologetically at her. ‘Sorry, I was in a panic. I just needed…’
‘A man to tell you what to do!’ Keira finished for her, eyeing her with half-impatient amusement. ‘I know you; when a problem comes up you always scream for a man.’
‘They are so useful! I wasn’t brought up to break down doors; think what it would do to my nails!’
Keira looked at Sara’s long, beautiful manicured fingernails and laughed. Sara was smart, lively, very shrewd and down-to-earth, when she was with her own sex; but let a man walk into the room and she threw a switch, started fluttering her lashes, using a soft, sweet voice, acting dumb and helpless. And the really maddening thing, thought Keira, was that it always seemed to work; men loved it. Had Gerard Findlay liked it?
Sara added triumphantly, ‘And I was right: he got in here, didn’t he? And without having to break the door down. He is clever…’ She grinned. ‘As well as very sexy.’
Keira wished she could deny it, but much as she might dislike Gerard Findlay she couldn’t ignore his smouldering sexuality. The first time she’d seen him he had made an indelible impact with his black hair and angry grey eyes, that lean and powerful body. He was intensely male, and he made Keira deeply aware of her own sexuality. Everything female in her vibrated in response, as if buried deep inside her was a magnetic needle which quivered and swung towards the north pole of his masculinity.
‘I hate the man,’ she repeated, and Sara gave her a glinting, teasing smile.
‘That’s what you say.’
To her own fury, Keira felt her skin colour, glow hot. At that second the telephone rang. Deeply relieved to be able to change the subject, she said, ‘Could you answer that? Ask whoever it is to leave a name and number and I’ll call them back later.’
‘OK,’ Sara said, then, with a mocking flick of her lashes added, ‘Saved by the bell!’
Keira did not ask her what she meant. Sara was intensely intuitive, unfortunately. She picked up feelings and thoughts Keira did not want her to guess at; it was part of Sara’s strongly developed femininity, which was half instinctive, half learnt at her mother’s knee.
It was the merest accident that Sara came to be in London, let alone working as a model. Her Arab parents had brought her to London when she was four because her father got a job with an Arab bank in Mayfair. When Sara was six, he had died, and her ravishing, still very young mother had stayed on in London because her brother worked in the same bank and was at hand to take care of his sister and her child.
Sara’s mother was young and beautiful; within a year she had married again, a client of the bank with an enormous fortune. Sara had lived in England ever since. At seventeen she had become a model and had been very successful. Her family made sure she never took her clothes off in front of a man, never modelled underclothes or swimwear, but that had not hindered her career. She had begun by working with one of her cousins, a talented young designer who modelled his clothes on her: Arab-inspired caftans and evening dresses, hooded cloaks that swirled around you as you walked, filmy loose white gauze trousers tied at the ankles. His clothes were romantic, visually exciting; he had helped make Sara’s reputation, she had begun to appear on magazine covers and was soon in great demand. When she’d retired from the profession to get married, aged twenty-one, a wail of regrets had gone up from the photographers and designers who liked to have her work for them.
Sara had been blithely indifferent. Oh, she had enjoyed modelling, but now she was eager to be a wife and mother. Sara always threw herself wholeheartedly into whatever she was doing, and loved variety, excitement, novelty—she got bored doing the same thing every day. What she wanted was constant change.
Keira
