Fame. Tilly Bagshawe

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      ‘I see,’ said Dorian wryly. ‘Young Cathy or Old Cathy?’

      ‘All the Cathys have to be young,’ said Don firmly. ‘And hot.’

      ‘Right. So all I need is to find a major movie star who’s prepared to work for peanuts and get her panties off for some gratuitous nudity.’

      ‘It wouldn’t be gratuitous.’ Don looked offended. ‘There’d be a very important point to it.’

      ‘Uh-huh. And what might that be?’

      ‘Ticket sales,’ said Don.

      Dorian had the good grace to laugh. ‘OK. Well if anyone springs to mind, you be sure to let me know.’

      ‘Actually, someone does. How about Sabrina Leon?’

      At first, Dorian had assumed his agent was joking. When he realized he wasn’t, he dismissed the idea out of hand. Sabrina was toxic right now, a Hollywood untouchable. Plus she was known to be a majorly disruptive influence on set: demanding, diva-ish, unpredictable. Just associating Sabrina’s name with a project could be enough to kill it before they shot a single take.

      ‘All true,’ agreed Don. ‘But she’s still a huge star.’

      Dorian held firm. ‘No way.’

      ‘Plus, everyone’s watching to see what her next move will be.’

      ‘I’m not.’

      ‘Plus, she loves getting naked, on and off set. The kid’s allergic to clothes.’

      ‘I know Don, but c’mon. I need a serious actress.’

      ‘She’ll work for free.’

      And that was it. Jerry McGuire had Dorothy Boyd at ‘hello’. Don Richards had Dorian Rasmirez at ‘free’.

      Stretching his long legs out in front of him, Dorian at last began to relax. If American Airline stewardesses were fans of the story, it clearly couldn’t be that highbrow. It’s gonna be all right, he told himself. Sabrina Leon had signed on the dotted line. Of course, casting her as Cathy – both Cathys – remained a dangerous, double-edged sword. Dorian would have to keep a tight grip on her behaviour. But Don Richards had convinced him she was a risk worth taking. He’d just have to do the sell of his life to convince distributors that, by the time the movie was due for release, the furore over Sabrina’s Tarik Tyler comments would have died down.

      ‘Even if it hasn’t, people’ll still come and see the movie,’ said Don.

      ‘You reckon?’

      ‘Sure. They like watching her. It’s like slowing down on the freeway to gawk at a car crash.’

      Dorian hoped he was right. Because, if he wasn’t, it would be Dorian’s career, life and marriage that would be the car crash. Almost certainly a fatal one.

      For Dorian Rasmirez, everything depended on the success of this movie.

      Everything.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      As Dr Michel Henri lifted the child out of its crib, Letitia Crewe watched his beautifully defined biceps rippling beneath his grey T-shirt and thought: I have to get a grip. I’m here to play with the children, not ogle Michel like a love-struck puppy. But it was hard. What business did a paediatrician have being that attractive? There ought to be a law against it.

      Tish Crewe had come out to Romania in her year off to spend six months working with orphans in the northern city of Oradea. Five years later and she was still here, visiting hospital wards like this one, rehousing as many abandoned children as she could. It was gruelling work, and distressing at times, but it was also addictive and rewarding. Dr Michel Henri felt the same way. It was one of the things that had first brought him and Tish together, their shared compassion and sense of purpose. That and the fact they both wanted to rip each other’s clothes off the moment they laid eyes on one another. Tish still felt the same way. It was Michel who’d moved on.

      Watching him move purposefully from bed to bed, engaging each child with eye contact and talking to them in that deep, gentle voice of his before each examination, Tish calculated that she had been in love with him for a full year now.

      Wow. A year of my life.

      It felt like twenty.

      Michel was so wise. So good. So capable. Tish Crewe was capable herself, very much head-girl material, and she admired this trait in others. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Michel also looked like a younger version of George Clooney, complete with sexy, two-day stubble growth and smouldering coffee-brown eyes. Nor that he was so good in bed, Tish had had to restrict the lovemaking during their brief, six-week affair to Michel’s apartment, afraid that she might make so much noise at home that she would wake up Abel, her adopted five-year-old son, and scare the living daylights out of him.

      It wasn’t Michel’s fault. He’d been honest with her from the beginning. ‘I don’t do commitment,’ he told Tish bluntly, the night they first kissed on the bridge over the Crisul Repede in Oradea’s old town. ‘My work is my passion. If you’re looking for something serious, I’m not your man.’

      Tish had assured him she was not looking for something serious. After four years of almost total celibacy, living in a city that still looked and felt as dour and grey and lifeless as it had under communism, the idea of some fun, especially the kind of fun that Dr Michel Henri was offering, sounded utterly perfect. Since founding her own children’s home three years earlier, and particularly since adopting her darling Abel, Tish barely had enough time in the days to eat and shower, never mind indulge in a sex life. I deserve some fun, she told herself. Why not?

      But of course she’d had to go and spoil it all by falling in love with him. Fool, she told herself, but then how could one not? When Michel took up with a pretty orthopaedic surgeon from Médecins Sans Frontières a few weeks later, Tish’s heart was crushed like a bug. It had taken every ounce of her self-control to hide the worst of her anguish from Michel himself. But to everyone else who worked with her, it was painfully obvious.

      ‘He’s not worth it, you know.’ Pete Klein, the head of one of the American NGOs, had been watching Tish gaze longingly after Michel’s retreating back in the hospital car park a few weeks ago.

      He is to me, thought Tish, but she forced a professional smile.

      ‘Hello, Pete. How are you?’

      ‘Better for seeing you, my dear.’

      A kindly, born-again Christian in his early sixties, Pete Klein had decided to make it his personal mission to find the lovely Miss Crewe a suitable husband. She was, after all, a gorgeous girl. Not gorgeous in an obvious, long-legged, modelly sort of way. No, Tish’s beauty was of an altogether more wholesome variety. Slight and naturally blonde, with a long nose, strong, aristocratic bone structure and a glorious wide, pale pink mouth that Pete had seen express every emotion from compassion to courage to delight, Tish had a natural, make-up-free charm to her that a certain type of man would give his eyeteeth to come home to every night. As Tish’s schoolfriend Katie had once accurately, if tactlessly, put it: ‘You’re Jennifer Aniston, Tishy. Guys like Michel always go for СКАЧАТЬ