Chapter Seventeen
Two months later
Baby London was glued to my right boob, feeding away, greedy little sod. He just wouldn’t wait till the photoshoot was over. I know it’s not exactly usual to have wedding photos with one boob hoicked out of your dress, but you could barely see it and who cares anyway! I mean, you see more of my tits in any of my calendars! Wow! magazine put it on its cover – bit controversial, and we got loads of publicity, which was excellent. They asked me on This Morning and Loose Women to talk about breastfeeding mums’ rights and all that stuff.
I really love that photo, actually. Laylah’s even looking like she’s happy to see her baby brother, which is funny as she pretty much tried to kill him loads of times when he was little. God, she was a jealous little mare. Frank had to bribe her with sweeties to get her to smile at me and the baby for the camera.
Oh well, at least she was doing her job for a change, being a good girl, and she really did look lovely in her flower girl dress. As London fed, I took a deep breath and thought about how much I’d achieved, all the boxes I’d ticked. Handsome, loving, minted husband: check. Two gorgeous kids: check. Lavish home: check. The top-rated reality show on UK TV: check. My own column in Lovely! magazine: check. Endorsements, supermarket clothing lines, my own-brand hair products and extensions, accessories, fake nails, with more rolling out every year: check, check, check, check.
It’d been a non-stop ride since I went on Who’s My Date?, and trust me, it wasn’t just in the upward direction! More like a roller coaster – big ups, big downs. But I always held on tight, kept a smile on my face, no matter what was happening, and my fans loved me for that, bless them.
I glanced down at the ring Frank had slid onto my finger just an hour ago, nestled next to the humongous diamond that had made me burst into tears of happiness when he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
Caroline paused. She had no idea whether Lexy had cried when Frank proposed, but she had swiftly learned that Lexy didn’t care about strict accuracy. After the first few times Caroline had pestered Lexy with follow-up questions after a recorded session, Lexy had told her ghostwriter not to bother her with this kind of thing, to just go ahead and make it up.
‘You’ll do a better job like that anyway,’ she had said nonchalantly. ‘I mean, we’re selling what readers want to buy, right? Tell ’em what they want to hear!’
So Caroline simply sent each chapter to Lexy for her approval as soon as it was written. Lexy changed very little, limiting herself to tweaking her own dialogue. As long as Caroline made Lexy seem sympathetic and relatable, Lexy didn’t care; and since writing went much faster if Caroline didn’t keep checking with Lexy, ‘Ghost Mouse’ had no complaints either.
After all those years of unreliable men, ones who’d cheated on me, lied to me, tried to control me – fuck, the one who was into wearing my knickers and stretching them out, which was bloody annoying considering how much they cost – the dickhead and arsehole parade was over. I felt incredibly lucky to have my lovely loyal Frank.
Caroline stared at the last line. Typing it had made her feel queasy. There was no question that it described Frank correctly. But a loyal man would never leave his wife for her ghostwriter . . .
Ah, she told herself swiftly, but he would when he found out that she had cheated on him! He would have to, for the sake of the children, who couldn’t be brought up in an atmosphere of betrayal and deceit! When Frank had taken his wedding vows, he had thought he was making promises to a woman who was as sincere as he was, who had the same qualities that he did.
While actually, Lexy was a liar and a cheat, who had no right to be in a relationship with a man like Frank at all, let alone be married to him.
Caroline took a deep breath and typed:
Today was the first day of the rest of my life. There’d be more ups and downs, no doubt about that, new worlds to conquer.
And I’m still on that roller coaster! You lot have been with me from the beginning! I hope you’ll stick with me for the rest of the ride. I promise, there’ll be plenty of thrills and spills!
Watch this space!
Was this a good enough ending? It sounded catchy. And Caroline wanted to suggest that there might well be further memoirs from Lexy, or maybe even novels written under her name – by Caroline, of course. But ‘watch this space’ – didn’t that also sound a bit cheesy? More appropriate for a column in a magazine than a proper book?
The answers, she had the gloomy feeling, were ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. But Caroline was totally burnt out. For the last eight weeks, all she had been doing was writing, sleeping, exercising and starving herself, and she could barely muster energy enough to type ‘The End’ and haul herself from her desk to her bed.
Flopping down, kicking off her slippers, she lay on the coverlet, staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t sleepy, but she was incredibly tired – no, she corrected herself. Not tired. The experience of writing a book in such a tearing hurry had trained her to seek at great speed the exact word for what she was describing. She had made her brain into a highly efficient machine, and she couldn’t simply press a switch to turn it off. The word, it told her, was drained, completely and utterly drained.
Unbelievably, she had had to finish it even faster than originally agreed. On finishing the first five chapters, Caroline had sent them, as promised, to Gareth and Miranda. Gareth had promptly organized a conference call to tell Caroline how delighted he was with them; so delighted, in fact, that he wanted to get the book finished and into proof as soon as humanly possible so that they could send it out to press and bloggers to get a real buzz building for publication.
This meant, he said blithely, trying to get a first draft done even faster, ideally, than the contract specified. If Caroline could deliver the manuscript in eight weeks, Gareth offered temptingly, Bailey and Hart would authorize another grand to be paid to her on delivery – subject, of course, to the same conditions as her contractual payment, i.e. she couldn’t rush so much that the draft was unreadable.
Even though she was Lexy’s agent, not Caroline’s, Miranda, stepping in, had nudged the ‘speed bonus’ up to fifteen hundred. And then Miranda had dropped a side email to Caroline, saying that she’d love to have a meeting with her after the book was finished to discuss possible future projects. It was exactly what Caroline had hoped for, and it made her more determined than ever to complete the book to the new deadline.
In order to achieve it, Caroline had initiated a new schedule. She had suggested to Lexy that she travel down to Sandbanks on Sunday night and stay until Saturday morning, as she unquestionably got more writing done in the cocooned surroundings of the guest suite. She didn’t even have a desk to work at in her cramped London bedroom; she had to sit on her bed with her laptop on her thighs, a padded computer rest beneath it to stop it burning her up.
Lexy and Frank had been more than happy with Caroline’s suggestion. Lexy had joked that she’d slice a bit off Caroline’s advance for room and board, to which Frank had retorted that with the amount of childcare Caroline seemed to be doing, they should probably pay her for it. Lina had given notice several weeks ago, London having bitten her one too many times, and in the interim period before the agency could find a nanny who was long-suffering, physically unattractive and willing to be repeatedly bitten, Caroline had stepped up to help.
Caroline wasn’t a natural with children. She’d never been one of those people who could instinctively talk to kids on their level, mesmerizing them like the Pied Piper so that the kids would follow them round for hours afterwards, wide-eyed and tugging on their sleeves. But she remembered very well how her mother had kept her large brood in order with a judicious blend of discipline and promises of treats to come.
And she had an advantage that none of the previous nannies had possessed: hardcore motivation to charm Laylah and London, as the children were an essential part of her strategy to win over Frank. A less intelligent woman might have targeted him directly, but to Caroline it was obvious that his family was the key to his heart. Caroline was very aware by now of his wish to have more children, a wish his wife was refusing to grant. Caroline, twenty-seven to Lexy’s thirty-seven, was statistically able to have more children than a woman ten years older than her, and her goal was to position herself as the person who was able to give him what Lexy would or could not.
Getting the kids to like her had been surprisingly easy. It had quickly become clear that their rotating corps of nannies had never really spent time getting to know them. Laylah and London had so many toys, so many games, so many gadgets, plus of course their swimming pool and lavish gardens, that all the nannies had needed to do was to supervise them as they ran from one activity to another, make sure they didn’t injure themselves, tidy up after them, make sure they ate and went to bed on time, before retreating to their own very cosy room with its high-definition television.
But no one supervised the nannies in their turn. Lexy didn’t care what went on as long as the children didn’t bother her, and Frank assumed, with typical male naivete, that the nannies knew their jobs already. Much as he loved his children, he had the traditional male attitude that raising children was women’s work; when they squabbled and fought, his first instinct was generally to yell for the nanny to come and sort them out.
So the children had had very little quality time with adults, which explained their near-feral behaviour. Caroline started by simply sitting down with them on the floor of their playroom and asking them what they wanted to do. London begged her to set up the £500 Scalextric track that was still sitting in its box, and organize endless car races; Laylah chose to model outfits she had styled from her capacious wardrobe, with Caroline as her audience.
And both of them, more than anything, craved one-to-one chats with an adult who actually listened to what they said.
Caroline did all of that and more. She played hide and seek with them, got into the swimming pool with them – rather than sitting on the side fully clothed, scrolling through her phone, which had been the modus operandi of all the nannies in the past – or took them into the garden and set up obstacle courses, tiring them out so that they would behave better. It worked out very well for her: she ran first thing in the morning, then wrote for most of the day before she picked up the kids from their daycare and school, spending the late afternoon and early evening with them before returning to her suite to read and edit what she had written earlier that day. The break to play with the children wiped her brain clear, leaving her fresh for the editing session, and the extra activity meant that she was burning even more calories.
Lexy, of course, barely noticed any of this. When she saw Caroline and the kids coming up in the lift, wet-haired, wrapped in pool towels and giggling, or noticed Laylah and London running across the lawn, shrieking in excitement as they tried to jump in the right order into a series of hula hoops Caroline had placed on the grass, her only comment was that they were making a lot of noise.
But of course, all this was not being done for Lexy’s benefit. When Frank expressed amazement at how much better behaved the kids seemed to be nowadays, how they were laughing instead of screaming at each other, Caroline would modestly say that she was only using the techniques her mother had perfected bringing up six kids close in age: first tire them out, then make sure they ate healthy food and got lots of love.
‘They already get great food,’ Caroline had said innocently, ‘and so much love from you and Lexy! So all I’m doing is playing with them and giving them lots of exercise.’
‘Oh,’ Frank had said, as Caroline knew he would, ‘you’re doing yourself down there. Laylah and London really care about you. Look how much they love hanging out with you!’
And since at that point, Laylah had run up to Caroline, grabbed her hand, shrieking: ‘London and me want to do a hopping race in the swimming pool, come on, come on, come on!’ and dragged her off with the ruthlessness of a nine-year-old who knows that an adult will obey her commands, all Caroline had had to do was to shrug, smile apologetically at Frank and let herself be led away to emphasize the point that he had been making.
After a couple of weeks a new nanny was hired – another unhappy Eastern European called Gabriela, who would have much preferred to be in London, where she already had friends and a social life: but word had got round Bournemouth and Poole about Lexy’s out-of-control children, and no local girls would take the job, not after several had tried and retreated with bite marks. Gabriela was openly sullen and unmotivated, quite unimpressed by Lexy’s fame. Like the other nannies, she did the minimum possible, picking the children up from school, bringing them home and then leaving them to their own devices, which meant that Caroline could work for longer during the day while still maintaining her hold on the children’s affections.
She had even managed to cure London of biting people. He wasn’t a budding sociopath, just an intelligent, spoilt kid who was perpetually angry, chafing at the dominance of his equally intelligent and extremely bossy older sister. Too scared to bite Laylah, who would without question have bitten him back harder, he took it out on the Montessori providers and nannies who he knew weren’t allowed to do anything but complain to his parents.
Caroline had dealt with it the way she remembered her mother handling her little brother when he went through an ankle-biting stage. When London, in a fit of pique, lunged towards her, teeth bared, she let him dig them in and then put her hand on the back of his head, forcing his open jaw right into her arm. Almost immediately, he started choking, and Caroline gave it a count of five before she let him go.
‘That hurt!’ he yelled angrily at her, big brown eyes wide with indignation.
‘If you want to act like a dog, you get treated like a dog,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s what you do when a dog bites you, if you can – you shove whatever it’s biting even further into its mouth, so it chokes and lets you go.’
‘Really?’ London stared at her incredulously.
‘I dunno if it actually works,’ she admitted, ‘but that’s what my mum used to say. And it’s what she did to my brother when he bit her. He only did it once, and that was it.’
‘Your mummy was mean,’ London said.
‘Biting’s mean,’ Caroline retorted, showing him the dents his teeth had made in her arm. ‘That really hurt. If you want to be a naughty dog in future, why don’t you bark or something instead of biting?’
At this, London had giggled, dropped to all fours and started barking; Caroline threw a ball for him, telling him to fetch it in his teeth, and he scampered around the playroom blissfully for a good twenty minutes before tiring of the game. She had been planning to drop the news to Frank casually that evening that she was channelling his son away from biting people; Lexy was filming at a modelling and fashion show in Birmingham and would be away for two or three days, so the timing was perfect.
But as it turned out, London did it for her.
‘Daddy!’ he said, running towards Frank when he got back from his radio show that afternoon. ‘Daddy, Caroline told me that only naughty dogs bite, and I’m going to be a naughty dog but not like that any more, and when a dog bites you, you should push its head to make it bite you harder so it stops . . .’
‘Whoah, whoah, tiger, slow down!’
Frank caught his son and swung him in the air.
‘I’m not a tiger!’ London yelled. ‘I’m a naughty dog!’
Laughing, Frank looked over London’s head at Caroline, who was coming down the stairs; she had been waiting eagerly to welcome him home, something Lexy never did. In anticipation, she had donned her new slim-cut jeans and a loose silky top that showed a hint of cleavage and spent time she couldn’t really afford to take off work doing her make-up and hair very carefully.
‘Caroline! What’s all this, then?’ Frank asked her. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of what he’s going on about!’
‘Oh, we’re working on London’s little biting problem,’ she said, looking modest. ‘Not a big deal, but I thought I’d try to get him to stop.’
‘Caroline, you do too much for us, you really do,’ Frank said, looking guilty. ‘You’re not even his nanny. Where is Gabriela, anyway?’
‘Laylah’s got a friend here for a playdate, and Gabriela’s watching them in the swimming pool,’ Caroline said, choosing her words carefully.
Frank picked up exactly what she had intended to convey by this seemingly neutral statement.
‘Yeah, she’s watching them, but you’d be in the pool with them if you were down there,’ he observed. ‘What are we going to do without you, Caroline?’
Caroline drooped her head sadly.
‘I know!’ she said. ‘I’ll have finished the book in another two weeks if I keep going at this pace, and then I’ll be gone, I suppose. It’s silly of me, but I’m going to miss the kids so much!’
This went down perfectly. Frank’s expression softened even more as he gazed at her, giving her his entire attention. London, sensing that his father’s focus was elsewhere, started to wriggle, and Frank set London down, still, however, looking at Caroline.
And to Caroline’s delight, London put the cherry on top of the cake. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he dashed over to Caroline, hugging her legs and wailing:
‘No, no, Caroline don’t go, don’t go, Caroline don’t goooo . . .’
Lying on her bed now, that memory brought a very satisfied smile to Caroline’s face. She lifted her hands to her breasts. Three months ago, they had been two cup sizes bigger, spilling over her chest; now she could pretty much encompass them in her palms. Riz had commented wistfully about her boobs shrinking as she lost the weight, and received the snappy response that it was only the Lexys of this world, who had money for plastic surgery, who had unfeasibly large boobs on a slim frame.
Maybe, when I’m at my target weight, I should have plastic surgery too, Caroline thought. I won’t be a DD cup naturally – no one has that at a size 10, which is what I’m going for. If I want to be as like Lexy as possible so Frank fancies me, I should have a boob job . . . you can get financing for them, I’ve seen the ads . . .
Her hands slid down to her ribcage, to the waist that was now defined, the stomach that was unquestionably flatter, the hips that were two inches narrower than they had been when she started working out, the thighs with their strong quad muscles developed from near-daily jogging.
Frank noticed my leg muscles when he came down to the pool the other day, she remembered proudly. The swimsuit she had brought with her, a drab high-necked Speedo style, had long been discarded as too droopy and big for her slimmer figure; she had splurged last month – over a hundred pounds! – for a mauve and white polkadot Miracle Suit at Debenhams. It was low-cut to show off her breasts, gathered and draped tactfully over her tummy, the legs cut in a boxer-short style to help conceal the cellulite on her bottom.
She had been standing in the shallow end with the kids, throwing a ball back and forth, and had gradually sensed that there was someone else in the pool room; turning her head, she had seen Frank standing in the doorway, clearly having been there for a little while. Her eyes met his, and he raised his hand in greeting.
‘Uh, your quads are looking good,’ he said. ‘Nice definition.’
It was the kind of comment that, as her unofficial fitness coach, was not inappropriate; but there was something in his tone of voice, something in the way he was keeping his gaze very carefully on her face, that gave Caroline the wonderful sensation that finally, after all this hard work, Frank was seeing her not merely as the dowdy ghostwriter and amateur nanny, but a woman who could actually be considered attractive . . .
The memory of the way he had looked at her was bringing a warm flush to the entire front of her body, a tingling that built as she closed her eyes and called up Frank’s face, Frank’s body in his tight Under Armour workout clothes. She imagined him sweaty after a gym session, walking into her bedroom and peeling off that T-shirt, hands going to his waist to hook his thumbs in the waistband of his shorts and drag them down . . .
She should lock the door to be safe, but it was early afternoon, with London and Laylah still at school. No one was around. Her vibrator was safely stored on the top shelf of her wardrobe where the kids couldn’t reach it – Laylah in particular was very nosy – but Caroline’s need was suddenly so pressing that she had to satisfy it immediately, without taking the time to retrieve her Rabbit. Flipping the coverlet over her, she wriggled her sweatpants and knickers down to her knees, slid her hand between her legs and started to stroke herself.
In her fantasy, Frank’s shorts and briefs were catching on the tentpole of his cock, and he had to pull them out to make space for it, a big, fat, pink-flushed prong that made Caroline’s mouth water as she stared at it. She rose from the bed, instantly slimmer, clad now in the kind of silky negligee Lexy wore around the house, her skin moisturized and perfumed, her hair cascading to her shoulders in freshly tonged curls. As Frank shoved his shorts down to his ankles, she dropped to her knees in front of him, her hands closing around his tight firm sweaty buttocks, her mouth wide to take in his moist, sticky cock.
Caroline couldn’t see Frank in his workout gear without wanting to intercept him at the end of a session and do exactly this, lick off his sweat, shove her nose into his most intimate area, showing him that she wanted to know everything about him, how he tasted, how he smelt. He would groan above her, his hands wrapping into her hair, beginning to pump into her mouth; and she would work his cock with everything she had, her lips, her tongue, wanting this to be the best blow job he’d ever had, hearing him yell her name as he shot down the back of her throat and felt her swallow him down, not wasting a drop . . .
Caroline was coming fast and hard, bucking against her hand, the picture in her mind so vivid that she almost believed it was happening. Frank’s golden, glowing skin, the salt of his sweat, the almond taste of his come, the scent of his body and his soap in her nostrils, the tight curly black hair at the base of his cock . . . she was coming again and again, her hips pumping the mattress, her fingers damp and viscous with her own moisture. Her lips parted. Over and over, she whispered: Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank . . .
She wasn’t even aware that she was doing it. It was an incantation, a witch’s prayer, a subconscious attempt to summon him, as if by repeating his name she could somehow reach Frank as he worked out in the basement gym, bring him upstairs, into her suite, not even knowing why he suddenly felt drawn there; first startled by seeing her like this, then stripping off his clothes and joining her, his fingers replacing hers between her legs, then his tongue . . .
The two sets of fantasies overlapped, overwhelmed her; she strummed so frantically that the edge of her middle fingernail started to scratch her with the sheer force of her movements. Only then did she reluctantly stop, and realized that her hand was cramping, her chest heaving almost as hard as if she had just slowed to a cool-down walk after a run on Studland beach.
Wow, she thought, her body damp with perspiration. I really needed that! What a celebration for finishing the book!
As soon as she could muster up the energy to heave herself off the bed, she’d need another shower to freshen up. The coverlet was clammy. She’d open the window, drape the bedspread over it to get some fresh air and dry it out in the sunshine. And then she’d start thinking about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
Five and a half thousand pounds would be paid to her as soon as she sent off the book, which, because it chronicled Lexy’s wild party years, was to be called Lexy on the Loose. Four thousand for the rest of her advance, plus the grand and a half extra for the speed bonus. It sounded like a lot if you thought of it as a lump sum, but it really wasn’t. The rent for Caroline’s room in Edmonton was four hundred and eighty a month before she paid her share of the utilities. Since starting the book, all her travel had been paid by the publisher and her meals had been almost entirely prepared by The Gables’s cook; but she had still had to dip into her bank balance to keep paying the rent.
So a good portion of that five grand was already spent, the thousand she had been paid as the signature advance long gone. She needed a new book contract straight away, and hopefully one that would pay a larger advance.
I bet Sophie Kinsella or Lee Child or J. K. Rowling get to finish a book and then take a lovely holiday, Caroline thought gloomily. In a really posh spa by the seaside, like that amazing one in Crete I saw on Facebook yesterday – three outdoor pools, one saltwalter, exercise classes every day and lovely-looking diet food all included in the price . . . but with their money they probably go to the Maldives to recharge their batteries . . .
That image made her picture herself as a car, its driver vainly turning the key to bring the engine to life, but hearing only sputtering sounds under the bonnet as it failed to catch and fell back to nothing.
Out of petrol, out of charge. I’m running on empty.
She took a long, deep breath, kicked off her knickers and sweatpants, rolled off the bed and padded over to the ensuite bathroom to wash off her sex sweat. Lexy was downstairs conferring with her publicity team, who had travelled down from London for the day to brainstorm ideas for the simultaneous launch of the new season of her show and Lexy on the Loose. Caroline wanted to sit in on part of the meeting, and if she showered and changed quickly, she could manage that. She’d grab lunch, come back to her room, read over the last chapters again, and see if Lexy wanted to glance at them before Caroline sent them off.
And then she would start thinking up book ideas of her own, maybe even something that she could write under her own name. Turning on the shower, she allowed herself to picture a book jacket with Caroline Macintosh below the title; the image made her shiver from head to toe with excitement.
But even as she indulged herself with this fantasy, she had to deal with the fact that she had taken, as it were, two steps forward and one step back. Finishing Lexy on the Loose meant leaving The Gables, giving up the rapport she had built with Frank and the children. Even if she were commissioned to write another book for Lexy, Caroline would not be back here for a while, maybe months; that was too long to wait. Out of sight, out of mind.
She needed to come up with a solution to stay on in Sandbanks, keep the momentum going, while simultaneously finding a way to nudge Frank into turning towards her, away from his wife. As she stepped under the running water, her fertile brain turned this question over and over, treating it like a puzzle which must have a satisfactory answer, if she could only find it . . .