Tasmina Perry 3-Book Collection: Daddy’s Girls, Gold Diggers, Original Sin. Tasmina Perry
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left him in such a buoyant mood at Cannes airport, Elmore had naturally insisted on knowing the source of her sudden hysteria. At first Serena hadn’t wanted to tell him anything, but she was feeling vulnerable, alone and emotional. As she had left Michael’s villa she had felt an overwhelming feeling of something she hadn’t felt in a long time: loneliness. She was a beautiful, famous woman, desired the world over, and she had literally nowhere to go.
She had immediately phoned her PA, Janey Norris, demanding she get her on a flight home as soon as possible. But it was the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, and not even Janey’s fearsome efficiency could get Serena out of there before nine that evening. She was also not going to use her reservation at the Du Cap – the place would be like a fishbowl – so Serena had called her nearest lifeline, the driver of Elmore Bryant’s Bentley. He had still been crawling through the traffic on La Croisette and rushed back to take her to the sanctuary of Elmore’s villa. In tears, she had been seated by Elmore under an elaborate pagoda overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and the words and secrets had spilled out.
Elmore was obviously delighted with the drama of it all but, while he was an inveterate gossip, he also had a heart as big as the moon. He had assured her she could stay with him as long as she wanted, shooing her to a guest suite overlooking the dazzling sweep of Cap Ferrat. The villa was a fabulous place in which to curl up and retreat from the world; somehow creeping between the crisp Irish linens on the huge Louis XV bed in the guestroom, her brain comfortably numb, Serena had felt just a little better. But now, almost twenty-four hours later, her shock and hysteria – and, if she was brutally honest with herself, hurt and betrayal – had now evolved into something more potent: rage. Just as she thought that things couldn’t get any worse, her publicist in New York, Muffy Beagle, called Serena to say that the Sun and Mirror tabloids were both planning to run stories about her the next morning. The Sun was going with an interview with the two French hookers who had mysteriously managed to employ the services of Charlie Nolan, the ruthless kiss-and-tell PR who had been brokering lurid tabloid tales of this kind for the last twenty years. And the Mirror had managed to find out about something even more damaging. Her pregnancy.
‘I just don’t know how they found out about the baby,’ moaned Serena, throwing the peach onto the floor of the terrace with a soft thud.
‘It’s my stupid fucking sister, isn’t it?’ she said, ‘God, do you think Cate actually went to the press?’ She looked up at Elmore in horror, considering the thought for just a second before catching Elmore’s disapproving face.
‘No. I suppose not. But she was stupid enough to go and buy that pregnancy test. She is so naïve and selfish. She goes running off to the chemist without any consideration for the impact it might have on me. It’s got to have been someone from that chemist. They must be on the lookout for celebrities all the time.’ She paused her frantic train of thought for a moment, thinking of all the possibilities.
‘Or maybe some reporters went rooting through her bins. Or maybe they tapped my phone! I don’t know. How do the press get hold of these things? They’re like bloody Mossad!’
Elmore pulled up a sun-lounger alongside her and plumped up the white padded cushions to lower himself into a more comfortable position. ‘Darling, it’s happened, there’s no point in worrying about it. What you’ve got to think about now is how you can minimize the damage.’
Serena had already had that particular conversation with her manager, Stephen Feldman; she had contacted him in New York as soon as she found out that the papers knew about her pregnancy. Feldman had pulled no punches. Abortion was now totally out of the question, he had told her. She had bitterly denied even entertaining the thought, feeling her face flush with shame as she did. The night before, curled up in Elmore’s guest bedroom, she’d kept herself awake for hours, convincing herself of the benefits of terminating her pregnancy. She was realistic enough to know that Michael could, and probably would, wash his hands of her and the child. And where was she without Sarkis and her career? Did she really want to be a single parent at the expense of everything else? But, as Feldman had pointed out in his brutally matter-of-fact way, abortion was the preferred route if news of her pregnancy had not yet leaked, but now that it had … Well, to have an abortion now would be career suicide. In Middle America, having an abortion was tantamount to being a serial killer. Worse, in fact. The American public – any public she was trying to seduce – just wouldn’t have it.
Serena lay back, sinking deeper into her lounger and pulling the white fluffy towel wrapped around her up to her chin like a comforter. Equal parts wounded and glamorous, she looked like a cross between a Bond girl and a lonely little girl.
‘You could always take him back,’ offered Elmore, pausing to take a sip of his Cristal. ‘Women have forgiven men for far, far worse crimes. And people do go a little crazy in Cannes.’
Serena shook her head violently. She knew that what she was experiencing was not heartbreak. It felt too detached, not numb enough for that. She knew it was fifty per cent fury, fifty per cent the torment that came with betrayal, and it was the betrayal she could not handle. Serena’s ego would never let her forgive anybody who had been unfaithful. She was simply too vain to accept that someone would choose another woman – especially a hooker – over her, no matter how beneficial it could be to her in the long run.
‘I don’t want to get back with him, I want to chop his balls off,’ she said flatly.
Elmore took a sideways glance towards her and smiled. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a rat, my darling. Hit him where it hurts. In the wallet.’
‘I don’t want that bastard’s money. I don’t want anything from him, except maybe his head on a platter.’
‘Don’t be pig-headed.’
‘I mean it. I don’t want a penny of his money.’
‘Pride comes before a fall, darling,’ her host said sagely.
‘Keep your cod philosophy, Elmore dear. I don’t want anything from him. Michael Sarkis can rot in hell.’
Serena stayed at Elmore’s villa until the end of the week. Elmore had deliberately banned any papers coming into the house and, when her sisters had all frantically called to see how she was, she had purposely told them not to tell her about the full impact of the story. That pleasure was left to her publicist, Muffy Beagle, who had however insisted on filling her in. All the UK tabloids had gone heavy on the story for two days. It was only the emergence of pictures of a supermodel smoking a crack pipe and an affair between two cabinet ministers that had relegated the story to page eleven by day three.
It had helped that the hookers had had very little to say for themselves. One of them had embellished the incident of Serena dropping the plant pot onto Michael’s Ferrari by claiming she had slashed its tyres, but as Muffy had pointed out, Fleet Street would have stayed on the story a lot longer if Michael had been both British and as famous as, say, Tom Archer. The news of her pregnancy had actually attracted lots of sympathetic column inches for Serena, with countless cynical columnists waxing lyrical about the difficulties faced by single mothers, no matter how rich or famous. To Serena, however, the sympathy was worse than the hookers. She hated to think of herself as a victim in any way, but as Stephen Feldman had said, this was exactly the way they had to play the game in the press. Stephen was well aware that she had a glamorous if difficult persona in her home country, and he was convinced that this whole episode could soften her image considerably. She could make a few choice chat-show appearances on both sides of the pond, he decided. After this, Oprah and Vanity Fair might be interested.
However tempting it was to stay at Elmore’s villa indefinitely, the practical and ambitious side of Serena knew that she had to get back to London to get her life back on track. London first, then New York, she corrected herself, not wanting to venture back onto Michael’s territory quite yet. Anyway, there were a few pressing things that needed sorting out immediately: