Stopping a passing bunny girl, she replaced her empty flute of champagne with a full one and took a big gulp, sending bubbles rushing unpleasantly up her nose and making her eyes water.
“You’re just jealous because I have a career that’s actually going somewhere,” she said, forcing a smile. “And you’re going to spend your life elbow deep in a horse’s arse.”
“Jealous? Of you?” Sean laughed. “Not in this lifetime, sweetheart.” He looked pointedly over at Todd, who now had a redhead on one arm and a Grace Jones lookalike on the other, and was throwing his head back in laughter like he hadn’t a care in the world. “You do realize he’s out to screw Bobby, don’t you?”
Here we go again, thought Milly.
“I mean, I know you’re not the sharpest tool in the box,” said Sean, “but you do get that, right? Your boyfriend’s a fockin’ user and the whole of LA knows it.”
Turning on her heel, Milly strutted off toward the house, locking herself in the safety of the ladies’ room. Ever since their row over Highwood the other day, she’d had a niggling suspicion that perhaps Todd did have some ulterior motive for starting a relationship with her. She’d convinced herself she was being paranoid. But hearing Sean put her fears into words plunged her back into a flood of doubt.
Fumbling in her gold clutch for her powder, she fumed silently as she retouched her makeup. Fucking Sean. Who the hell was he to take the moral high ground with her, slagging off her Boot Barn commercial, or with Todd for that matter? Everyone knew he’d shagged every woman with a heartbeat—and probably a few without—within a fifty-mile radius of Palos Verdes. Even Bobby, who liked the guy, always used to describe him as a hopeless womanizer.
Even so, his comment about Todd bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
Was he using her, to get at Bobby? And, if so, how? And why? On one level, it all seemed so far-fetched. But on another, it felt worryingly plausible. Certainly he wasn’t behaving much like a devoted boyfriend this evening, flirting with those awful girls right under her nose. It was all most confusing.
Her face repaired, she emerged into a candlelit corridor and paused to get her bearings. She appeared to have stumbled into a sort of shrine to Marilyn Monroe, who according to the memorabilia smothering the walls was the first ever Playmate. Through glass double doors to her left she saw Todd deep in conversation, this time, mercifully, with a man. She was just about to walk over and join him when she was accosted herself by a strikingly handsome guy.
He looked to be in his early thirties and was smiling so broadly his teeth seemed to glow in the dark, which was mildly off-putting. Even so, he was still exactly the sort of chiseled, Cary Grant type that she’d hoped might come and chat her up right where Todd could see them.
After all, two could play the flirtation game.
“I’m Johnny Haworth,” the Adonis introduced himself. “Aren’t you the girl from that sportswear commercial? The cowboy rider girl?”
“That’s right.” Milly beamed, immensely gratified to have been recognized. She only wished Sean were around to see it, but annoyingly he seemed to have slunk off. “I’m Milly Lockwood Groves. Pleased to meet you.”
She spoke just loud enough for Todd to catch her voice and felt a small surge of triumph as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him making his excuses to his companion and heading over toward them.
Ha! So he was jealous!
But her smile faded as, moments later, he greeted her new admirer with a familiar smile. Was there no one here he didn’t know? “Hey, Johnny,” he said warmly. “How’s business?”
“Pretty good.” The Adonis nodded, looking straight past Milly now and giving Todd his full attention. “The AACS just ranked me number one on the West Coast for breasts and eye lifts. In fact, I was about to give this young lady—Jilly, wasn’t it?—my card. In case she wanted to consider a little augmentation, you know?”
Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a business card and thrust it into Milly’s hand. It read: DR. J. HAWORTH, M.D., COSMETIC SURGEON.
So much for making Todd jealous. The guy didn’t want to chat her up. He wanted to carve her up! She didn’t think she’d ever felt so humiliated.
“It’s Milly,” she said frostily. “Milly, with an ‘M,’ okay? And I’m perfectly happy with my body, thank you very much.”
Johnny looked down at her flat, bony chest and for a moment an unspoken “really?” hung in the air between them.
“I’m a professional jockey,” she snapped. “We don’t come with built-in air bags.”
“Hey, fair enough,” he said, throwing his arms wide in a gesture of innocence, like a footballer admitting a foul. “It never hurts to ask, right? Hey, Adrianna! Wait up?”
He scuttled off into the more voluptuous arms of what was probably one of his satisfied clients, leaving Todd and Milly alone.
“That was a great line.” Todd laughed. “Air bags—I like that.”
“Really,” said Milly angrily.
She’d wanted to play it cool, but what with Sean’s insinuations earlier and now this awful doctor shaming her so publicly, all pretense at sangfroid went out the window.
“Well, air bags are obviously your thing, aren’t they? You’ve been ogling every bloody pair of knockers in here for the past hour.”
Todd loved the way she looked when she was angry, the way her lower lip shot out in an almighty pout and she wrinkled up her nose. Sometimes she really was eighteen going on eight.
“I don’t know why you even bothered to bring me here in the first place,” she sulked, “if all you’re going to do is dump me at the bar like a piece of left fucking luggage while you go off on the prowl!”
Putting one warm hand on the back of her neck, he pulled her toward him.
“Poor little Milly,” he purred. “We have been feeling sorry for ourselves, haven’t we?”
She knew she should pull away. Keep her anger going. Teach him a lesson for once. But it was so reassuring to have him hold her, after all her insecurity before, she couldn’t do it. All it took was the faint smell of his aftershave and the soft warmth of his fingers pressing gently into the back of her neck and already her knees were weakening with desire. She wished she didn’t want him so much, but it was hopeless. Closing her eyes, she leaned into his stocky, boxer’s chest and inhaled the scent of him.
“If you must know,” he said, growing hard himself as he felt her tiny, needy body pressed hard and insistent against him, “I haven’t been ‘on the prowl,’ as you so poetically put it. I’ve actually been doing a little business on your behalf.”
“What sort of business?” she mumbled.
“Well, no promises,” he said, his breath tickling the top of her ear. “But I think I may have landed you a Playboy spread.”
Milly leaped back from him in horror. “You what? Playboy?” Her voice was rising. “Have you lost your mind? You want me to strip for Playboy?”
“Sure.” Todd looked nonplussed. “Why not? You’re trying to raise your profile, aren’t you?”
“Why not?” Milly was incredulous. “Erm, well how about because I’m a sportswoman, not a porn star? Rachel Delaney might be happy to mince around in a bra and a bit of spray paint, but I’m not. Besides,” she ended on a rather more practical note, “Jimmy’ll hate the idea.”
“No, he won’t,” said Todd. “He’ll love it. And it just so happens they have a special sports issue coming out next month. Kinda weird that Brad Gaisford missed it, actually. Most of the editorial’s already shot, but they always have room for late additions, if they’re hot enough.” He gave her a knowing smile. “If Jimmy wants your name out there, this’ll do it. Screw fucking Boot Barn.”
She was torn. On the one hand it was awful, tacky beyond words. Her mother would have a heart attack—not that Milly particularly cared what Linda thought since she’d sold out to Rachel, but still. And then there was the ribbing she’d get from the grooms at Palos Verdes and all the other chauvini
st pigs on the quarter horse circuit. It was bad enough being the only female competitor at 99 percent of races, but a Playboy spread? She might as well just hand them her head on a platter. Sean would have a field day.
But, on the other hand, it would mean overnight notoriety. The modest taste of fame she’d experienced so far had been more enjoyable than she’d thought it would be—more than it probably ought to be, but who cared? Why shouldn’t she be the center of attention for once?
“Look.” Todd took her hands in his and pulled her close again, despite her protestations. “You wanna buy your farm back from Rachel, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she admitted grudgingly. “You know I do. But naked pictures . . .”
“It’s not just the money,” he whispered. “I’d like you to do it. For me. I think it’d be sexy as hell.”
Milly could feel her resolve crumbing. It wasn’t just that she wanted to please him, although she did. But she was scared too. She knew that if she pushed him away tonight, there were a hundred blondes lining up to take her place. This evening’s party felt ominously like a bad trip to Christmas Future.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, standing up on tiptoes to kiss him on the lips.
“Good.” He smiled the satisfied smile of the victor. “Now let’s get out of here. I want to get you into bed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rachel Delaney sat in the bathroom of her father’s Knightsbridge flat, waiting for her top coat of hot-pink nail polish to dry while flicking through the new issue of Playboy.
“Fuck,” she said, biting down on her lower lip in fury as she flipped through the pages and saw that no less than four had been devoted to Milly as the “English Cowgirl.” “How the fuck did she get that?”
One of the most infuriating things about Milly Lockwood Groves—and there were many—was the way she kept popping back up no matter how many times you flattened her. She was like that bloody girl in Austin Powers, the one that wouldn’t die even after she’d been hurled from a seven-story building and riddled with machine-gun bullets. One minute she’d sailed off to America with that twat Bobby Cameron, destined for a life of lassoing or whatever the fuck obscure cowboy sport she’d gone there to do. And the next she was all over the press as American racing’s Next Big Thing, with her gorgeous, millionaire boyfriend and her scrawny little body plastered across Playboy.
It was ridiculous. She might have a new haircut and have perfected a pout, but she was still Milly Lockwood Groves. She still brayed in the forest. And she had no tits.
If that was what Jimmy Price’s sponsorship did for you, it was high time Rachel met the man. Des Leach could bloody well pull his finger out of his arse and set her up some meetings in America.
Leaning forward to blow gently on her toenails, she reflected on how bored she was in England, anyway. True, she’d had a good summer season, by far her best to date, with a win in the Ascot Ladies Diamond Stakes, and she was now well known enough to have her picture in Heat, the ultimate litmus test for British celebrity. Although as often as not she was still pictured with Jasper as one half of “Racing’s answer to Posh and Becks,” which infuriated her. What had he ever done to deserve the attention, other than been linked to her?
But despite her success, an inordinate amount of her time and money were being sucked into Newells. It was starting to depress her. When she’d bought the place from Linda, she’d thought she’d landed a bargain. But running a stud turned out to be a lot harder than it looked, and Newells was hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate.
A few weeks ago she’d finally hired an experienced manager to take over the day-to-day running of the business for an exorbitant salary. He told her point-blank that selling off so many of Cecil’s stallions had been a mistake, which did little to improve her mood. She might have hurt Milly, but she’d done so at a great cost to herself, and the bills only seemed to be rising.
Too proud to ask for help from her father, she might almost have turned to Jasper. Presumably even he must have picked up something about stud management by osmosis growing up at Newells. But he seemed to have gone completely off the rails recently. For one thing he was throwing money around like water. She assumed he was stinging Linda for it, but even by his mother’s legendarily indulgent standards, this was a lot of cash. And most of it was going straight up his nose.
Her thoughts were disturbed by somebody buzzing repeatedly on the doorbell below.
“Fuck,” she muttered, flinging the magazine to one side and smudging her little toe in her haste to get to the entry phone. “Yes, all right, all right, I’m coming.”
All she could see on the fuzzy black-and-white monitor was a hunched male figure, wrapped up tight in a raincoat and with a cap pulled down over his face.
“Who is it?” she snapped. “If you’re selling tea towels, we don’t need any, so just bugger off, all right?”
“It’s me,” Jasper’s voice came crackling over the intercom. He was panting and clearly out of breath. “Open the door, Rach, for fuck’s sake.”
Buzzing him up, she left the flat door open so he could get in and hopped back to the bathroom to redo her ruined nail. When he appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, she got the shock of her life.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped. “What happened?”
His face had been so badly beaten he was almost unrecognizable. Big, spreading plum-blue bruises covered his cheeks and jaw, and trickles of blood had dried beneath his smashed nostrils and split lower lip, like badly smudged makeup. The flesh around his right eye was so swollen that the eye itself was now no more than a tiny slit; and with his left eye he looked around him nervously, as if expecting his assailant to jump out at any moment from Rachel’s bathroom cabinet.
“I need a brandy.” He was still shaking as he dumped his overnight bag unceremoniously on the floor. “Have you got any?”
“In the drinks cabinet in the drawing room,” she said, taking his hand. She was feeling more warmly disposed toward him than usual since he had whisked her off to St. Tropez last week for a surprise minibreak. Watching his tanned, rippling torso as he’d strolled around the deck of their rented yacht glued to his cell phone, arranging no-expense-spared parties at Les Caves for which he invariably picked up the tab, she’d felt the first stirrings of genuine attraction for him. There was nothing quite like money to add to a man’s sex appeal and give him instant spray-on confidence.
Not that he looked remotely confident now, shivering like a Titanic survivor as she sat him down on the sofa and quickly fetched his drink. Her father appeared to be out of brandy, but figuring any spirit would probably do, she poured a good four fingers of her mother’s Grand Marnier into a tumbler and handed that to him instead.
Jasper took one big gulp and coughed at the strength of it, before sinking back weakly into the sofa. Slowly, the warm liquid began to work its magic.
“We need to get you to hospital, you know,” said Rachel eventually, once his breathing had slowed to something approaching normal. His battered face looked even worse in the bright drawing room light than it had in the bathroom.
“No,” he said, getting agitated again. “No. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
And piece by piece, the whole sorry tale began to emerge. He had been on his way to King’s Cross to catch the Newmarket train when, yards from the entrance to the tube, a big lump of a man had accosted him, claiming to be a friend of Ali Dhaktoub’s. Before he had a chance to say anything, he found himself being bundled into a van, in the back of which were two more thugs, one white, one black, who had proceeded to beat the living shit out of him. At some point he must have lost consciousness, because the next thing he knew he was waking up in a pile of boxes at the back of a warehouse in East London. That must have been about two hours ago—the time it had taken him to get his bearings and walk back across town to Rachel’s flat—and now here he was.
“I fought back, of course,” he assured her, between comfor
ting sips of the Grand Marnier. “Gave them a run for their money.”
In fact he’d whimpered like a baby and begged for mercy from the moment the van doors were opened. But Rachel didn’t need to know that.
“Problem was there were three of them and one of me. I didn’t stand a chance.”
“But . . . I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Why would Ali Dhaktoub’s friends want to beat you up? It doesn’t make sense.”
Looking up, Jasper caught sight of his battered face in the mirror above Sir Michael’s Regency fireplace and groaned. He was vain enough to care more about losing his looks than the throbbing pain in his face and ribs. The bruises would heal, but his nose looked well and truly broken. What if it never set back into its former straight, handsome line? He’d end up looking like some battered linebacker! Dear God, it didn’t bear thinking about.
He tried to pout but, finding his lips were too swollen, let out a melodramatic wail instead.
“Well,” said Rachel firmly, “you can explain it all to me at the police station. If you won’t go to the hospital then at least we can report the incident.”
“You don’t understand, Rach.” He shook his head. “I can’t go to the police.”
Draining the rest of his Grand Marnier for courage, he decided to come clean with her. He was in over his head and he had to talk to someone.
Once he’d gotten over his initial nerves, he soon discovered that stopping horses for cash was in fact laughably easy. Unfortunately, as his income shot up, so did his expenditure. Women were an expensive habit, as was coke—and it wasn’t long before greed got the better of him and he started using his inside info to place bets on his own online account. Ali had strictly forbidden personal bets, for the sensible reason that they drew unnecessary attention to their scam. The odd little indiscretion here or there he might have forgiven. But Jasper’s recent wagers had been enormous. Hence today’s “personal warning.”
For a few moments Rachel was stunned. Not only that she’d somehow managed to miss all this but that Jasper had had the foresight and daring to try such a thing in the first place.