Vanity. Lucy Lord

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СКАЧАТЬ fiery – and the contrast (and, to be scrupulously honest, the illicitness) had turned him on. He’d tired of Poppy pretty quickly, after the initial thrill, not least as she had been so evidently off her pretty face on coke all the time, going on about her guilt about Bella, boring the pants off him. Still, he shouldn’t have moved in on his best mate’s bird; that was unforgivable. Ben and Damian had grown up together and he still missed Damian’s easy good nature and laid-back sense of humour; he’d yet to meet a comparable buddy in the States. All things considered, if he could have done last summer differently, he would. It had been a mad time for all concerned.

      But now wasn’t the time to be crying over spilt milk.

      ‘Ben, honey, where ARE you? Are going to come and show me how to do it again? I was a virgin until last night, but you’ve given me a real taste for it. I’m only seventeen …’

      The Laker Girl was clearly lying and up to every trick in the book but, nevertheless, Ben felt his cock getting hard.

      ‘I love America,’ he sang as he made his way to the bedroom. The cheerleader was on her hands and knees, arse aloft. Her skin was golden brown, soft and peachy.

      ‘Does that feel good?’ asked Ben, loving the feeling of her tight, young body.

      ‘Oh … Yeeees … Oh, Benny … I’ve never done this before … Ohhhh …’

      If she was telling the truth, she was half his age, and just for a split second he felt ever so slightly like a dirty old man. Then he refocused. Christ, she was hot.

      And so was he.

      Driving up the freeway en route to meet Belinda at Chateau Marmont (it was difficult to express how much he loved the LA cliché), Ben turned up the radio, which was playing the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

       Californication.

      He laughed, and for the second time that day thought of Damian, thinking how much he’d have enjoyed the serendipity. He put the idea firmly out of his mind and dwelt instead on nubile nymphets, fame, fortune, blue skies and palm trees. A pretty brunette in a white convertible lifted her shades to get a better look at him. She kissed her fingers and clutched her heart, feigning undying love. He clocked the rings on her fingers and blew a kiss back. Then he put his foot on the gas.

      Modelled in the 1920s on a chateau in the Loire Valley, the Chateau Marmont was still the ultimate byword for hedonistic glamour. As Ben walked out of the lobby towards the pool, he could feel the cloisters themselves oozing their Tinseltown, rock’n’roll heritage. The stars who had stayed under this roof included Judy Garland, John Belushi (who had OD’d here, poor bugger), Vivien Leigh, Jim Morrison, Jean Harlow, Led Zep … The roll call was as bibulous as it was illustrious. He continued through beautifully fragrant and lush gardens until he’d reached the pool, which was surrounded by even lusher plants, and tables shaded by black-and-white stripy parasols.

      ‘Ben! My handsomest client, looking sexier than ever. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you’d just had a pretty piece of LA ass!’

      Belinda winked and Ben laughed. Was it really so obvious?

      His agent didn’t look like the hard-nosed bitch whose reputation preceded her, even the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, when he’d first met her, he’d wondered if he’d walked into the wrong office. Belinda, who was probably in her mid-forties, though it was hard to tell, contrived an air of luxe hippy softness, in the Rachel Zoe/Nicole Richie mode. Her golden hair was loose and tousled around her shoulders – a casual California style that cost at least $1,000 a month to maintain. She wore a simple spaghetti-strapped maxidress in a splashy floral silk, flat tan leather sandals, wooden bangles stacked up her sinewy, Bikram-yoga’d arms, dangly vintage silver-and-turquoise earrings and the most enormous pair of shades Ben had ever seen.

      ‘Looking pretty bloody gorgeous yourself, darling.’ Playing up the posh-Brit thing hadn’t done Hugh Grant or Rupert Everett any harm, after all.

      The pool wasn’t as big as he’d imagined, but Lindsay Lohan was swigging from a bottle of tequila on a black-and-white-striped sun lounger, bitching into her BlackBerry about ‘that asshole who calls himself my dad’, and one of Keith Richards’ daughters was having her photo taken for a magazine shoot. Belinda had wanted to meet him at Café M on Melrose, the hottest new health-food café, insisting that Chateau Marmont was for wannabes, but Ben wanted to live the full LA dream. Besides, he wanted a real drink, somewhere he wouldn’t be accused of being an ‘alcoholic Brit’.

      He sat down opposite his agent.

      ‘I guess you want something alcoholic?’ she sighed.

      ‘Well, a cocktail would be nice.’ He gave her his most winning smile. ‘What’re you drinking?’

      ‘Iced green tea with ginseng. You should try it sometime.’ He did his little-boy-lost look and she laughed. Belinda was just as susceptible to his charms as every other female on the planet.

      ‘Hey, I’ll let you off this time.’ She put a hand weighed down with cocktail rings on his arm. ‘And I’ll have whatever you’re having. We may have something to celebrate.’

      ‘What?’ Ben felt an enormous jolt of excitement. ‘Why, what’s happened?’

      ‘Don’t get your hopes up too quickly, handsome boy,’ said Belinda, loving the power she had over him. ‘Let’s wait for the drinks.’

      It was agonizing waiting until the waiter (a ‘resting actor’, good looking but not nearly as fit as Ben – which was presumably why he was resting) came back with their Margaritas. But Ben feigned nonchalance, complimenting Belinda on her body and business acumen.

      ‘Well,’ she eventually drawled. ‘Paramount are casting a new movie. It’s gonna be huge, they say, but they always say that …’

      ‘What’s it about?’

      ‘The South of France in the 1950s. Saint-Tropez, Bardot, you know.’

      ‘Oh, cool. And I love that part of the world. I went backpacking along the Riviera with all my drama-school mates in the college holidays ten years ago.’ It was more like fifteen, but Belinda didn’t need to know that. ‘Nice, Antibes, Juan Les Pins, just so we could get a glimpse of the stars at Cannes.’ He remembered them all smoking dope and drinking cheap wine out of their rucksacks on the beach, assuring one another that they’d be up there one day. If they could see me now, that little gang of mine …

      ‘You European kids,’ said Belinda, slightly wistfully. ‘So much culture at your fingertips. Anyway, Cannes is the cynical premise behind this venture. The producers think that a movie based on its doorstep might get those uptight bastards to sit up and take some notice of something produced by a MAJOR studio, for once, instead of one of those fall-asleep-in-your-popcorn subtitled crapolas where everybody, like, dies.’ She made a gesture that combined an extravagant yawn with slitting her throat.

      Ben laughed easily. He was amazed by his own patience.

      ‘And? Do they want to see me, or what?’

      ‘Oh, honey, of course they want to see you. I wouldn’t be telling you all this now would I, if they didn’t? What kind of a woman do you think I am?’

      She pouted and Ben refrained from telling her.

      ‘It’s СКАЧАТЬ