Oscar laughed despairingly. ‘I was going to say, if you could make her understand…but of course that’s unreasonable.’
Meditatively, Luis swirled the dark amber liquid round in his glass and then drained it in one mouthful. ‘We’ll see, Oscar. Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you, Luis. I’m grateful.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘You’ll be all right here, Miss Balfour?’
Standing blinking in the doorway, Emily looked around the opulent room in front of her, and then turned to look at Tomás in alarm. ‘I—I don’t understand…whose room is this?’
‘Yours, Miss.’ Tomás’s tone was soothing. ‘Since you’re so tired His Highness thought you might like a chance to freshen up before dinner. Maybe to have a bath and relax a little before eating?’
Emily regarded the elegant antique furnishings, the soft lighting, the vases of flowers, warily, wondering what the catch was.
‘Where is Lu—His Highness?’
‘The Prince has a suite on the floor above, Miss Balfour. He’s in there right now having a drink and making some phone calls. Would you like me to ask him to come down when he’s finished?’
‘Oh, no, thank you,’ Emily said hastily. ‘No, it’s fine. I’d love to have a bath.’
If only to put off the moment when she’d have to face Luis Cordoba over the dinner table, she thought, stepping forward and feeling her feet sink into the thick pile of the cream carpet. The room was huge, decorated in a classic English country house style which—apart from the addition of a Victorian-style bath standing on a raised platform in front of the huge French windows—was poignantly reminiscent of Lillian’s pretty bedroom at Balfour. Or at least how it had been before the paraphernalia of illness had crept in to spoil its carefully designed scheme.
‘Very good, Miss Balfour. Perhaps you could phone down to reception when you’re ready? One of our staff will be there to accept the message.’ Tomás left, quietly shutting the door behind him, and Emily wandered slowly over to the dressing table, running her fingers along its polished surface as if in a dream.
She leaned forward, looking into the mirror, where her own eyes stared back at her—smudged and dark with exhaustion. She was so tired, maybe it was a dream. Maybe she’d wake up any minute and find herself back in the narrow, lumpy bed in her bedsit, beneath sheets from which no amount of trips to the launderette could remove the smell of damp…
But then she remembered Luis Cordoba was waiting for her and felt her stomach clench with painful unease that left her in no doubt that she was wide awake. Compared to where she’d just come from this place might look and feel like paradise, but it certainly wasn’t without its serpents.
She straightened up quickly, tugging the band from the end of her plait and loosening her hair with shaking fingers.
She’d been stupid to let her guard down by falling asleep in the car, but just for a moment it had felt so wonderful not to have to think any more. She was so tired of thinking, and the relief of having someone come along and take over, tell her what was going to happen and what she had to do, was profound.
It’s just a shame that that someone was a shallow, untrustworthy playboy whose interest in women extended only as far as the bedroom, she thought, crossing the room to where the bath stood in decadent splendour. Although today he hadn’t actually shown so much as a flicker of interest in her, she reflected miserably as she turned on the taps and remembered the cool, dismissive way he’d looked her over.
She stripped off quickly, wincing as she pricked her finger on the safety pin that held up the black skirt she’d bought in a charity shop. She threw it onto the bed, where it looked more depressingly cheap and nasty than ever against the silk coverlet and the smooth Egyptian cotton sheets. Quickly she reached for the hotel bathrobe that was folded, fat as a cushion, on the end of the bed and put it on, wrapping its miraculous softness around her too-thin body.
She could hardly blame him for not being interested in her.
Even she was repelled by the jut of her hipbones, the hard ridges of her ribs beneath her skin, so she had no illusions about anyone else feeling differently. Especially not a connoisseur of the female form like Luis Cordoba. Call me when you grow up, he’d taunted. But she hadn’t just grown up in the past year. She’d grown old.
The bath was full. Turning the taps off Emily shrugged off the bathrobe and hastily slipped into the water, lying back so that it covered her body completely. Closing her eyes she inhaled deeply, savouring the exotic, expensive fragrance of the designer bath oil and trying to refocus her thoughts. It was criminal to let anything spoil this moment of rare luxury. Sinking farther down in the deep water she exhaled again, feeling some of the tension that had taken up permanent residence in her shoulders lately ebb away, and with it a little of her iron-hard resolve.
God, she missed the physical comforts of her old life at Balfour. The day after Lillian’s funeral, when she’d walked out with nothing but a heart full of hurt and a head full of moral indignation, if she had known what she was letting herself in for she might have hesitated for a second before slamming that imposing door behind her. Her leaving was hardly planned, it was simply a logical response to what she’d come to consider an intolerable situation. She needed time and space to come to terms with what had happened, and she’d imagined going to London, getting a place in one of the major ballet companies there, and finding herself a pleasant, sunny flat in an area where popping out to buy a pint of milk wasn’t an extreme sport…
In other words, behaving like a grown-up.
How naive she’d been. Sheltered from reality by the Balfour wealth, she hadn’t even known how much a pint of milk cost.
She had easily got auditions with three ballet companies, but it seemed that the months of grief and turmoil had taken their toll in ways she couldn’t have begun to anticipate. Each audition passed in an excruciating embarrassment of clumsy footwork, mechanical arm movements and missed timing. It was as if she had lead weights inside her, pulling her down. As if she was trying to dance with a heart full of cement.
She had failed to win a place with any company.
After that nothing seemed to matter much. She had lost everything she cared about, and it simply became a matter of survival, which meant finding somewhere to live and a means of income. The advertisement for the job at the Pink Flamingo had caught her eye because it contained the word dancing.
It was only as she’d stepped into the beer-and-nicotine-scented gloom when she’d gone to see about the job that she realised what kind of dancing it was. Horrified, she had told the oily man into whose seedy office she was shown that she had made a mistake, but after running his eyes shrewdly over her he had offered her a job behind the bar.
Realising she had no choice but to accept it had been one of the lowest points of her life.
But she wasn’t going to think about that now. She had survived the past two months by using the self-discipline she had acquired during her years at ballet school to block out the bad stuff and focus on small pleasures and triumphs: sharing a coffee with Kiki in Larchfield’s shabby kitchen, seeing the pride on the faces of the little girls in her ballet class when they learned a new position. And now this…relaxing in
