All Work And No Play...

She crossed her arms. ‘You said it would be up to me when we told the rest of Pearce Grey we’d split up.’

‘Yes, but … I think it might be easier for you if we made it public sooner rather than later. We wouldn’t have to worry about how it appeared to other people.’

Jane glanced through the boardroom window at the busy office outside. It wasn’t as if she and Gary had ever been demonstrative at work. But their engagement was common knowledge, and people did, she supposed, expect them to have a certain familiarity and intimacy in the way they behaved with each other.

‘You mean it would be easier for you,’ she said. ‘You could talk about your new relationship all you liked.’

While she would be regarded with pity as the scorned fiancée. The woman who’d landed a promotion and promptly been dumped on her backside.

‘It’s not time yet,’ she said. ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’

She left the boardroom and headed for her office, avoiding the glances of the other people who worked for the agency. She really could have used those five minutes before she had to go to her lunch meeting. Even three minutes would have been enough, a breath of time where she could look in her email inbox, see the message that Jonny had probably sent her this morning from up in the Lake District. A message from Jonny would make her smile for real.

But the design team were already gathering outside her office door. Which meant she’d be lucky to have thirty seconds to herself before she had to leave for her lunch meeting.

Jane put on a bright expression. Her email, and a real smile, would have to wait. ‘Is everyone ready?’ she asked.

‘Jonny. Yo, Jonny.’

Jonny pushed his glasses up his nose and narrowed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate on the HTML code on the laptop screen in front of him. Thom’s voice wasn’t easy to ignore. It was loud, vibrant, and unabashedly Californian. Jonny typed in a line of code anyway.

‘Jonathan Richard Cole Junior!’ Thom leaned across the first-class railway carriage table and waved his hand in Jonny’s face.

Jonny gave up and looked at his friend. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I was ignoring you. I gave you one condition for this trip when you kidnapped me, remember?’

‘I didn’t kidnap you, dude!’ Thom put on his fake-innocent grin. ‘I let you go get your computer and a toothbrush before I dragged you to the Penrith train station. And I only came up to get you in person because I know what you’re like when you’re writing a book.’

Jonny smiled, because it was impossible to stay annoyed with Thom Erikson. The man was incredibly rich, incredibly generous, and he talked as if he had a surfboard permanently attached to his person. And he’d stayed close to Jonny, even when Jonny had left California to go back to England.

In a world full of transitions and disillusion, Jonny had learned to appreciate loyalty, even when the loyalty was also accompanied by unrelenting persistence.

‘You also agreed not to call me by my real name,’ Jonny reminded him. ‘When I’m working with you I’m not Jonny Cole, I’m Jay Richard.’

‘Oh, yeah. I forgot because you had your Clark Kent glasses on. Sorry.’

Clark Kent. Jonny took off his glasses and rubbed his nose, thinking that comparison wasn’t so far-fetched. He didn’t become a Superman when he took his glasses off, but his life certainly got different.

He’d prefer leaping tall buildings to posing in front of cameras, though.

‘I wish you’d change your mind about the pseudonym,’ Thom continued. ‘Your double life would make great publicity: computer how-to guru moonlights as one of Britain’s most up-and-coming male models. From geek to gorgeous. Dweeb to dude. Nerd to—’

‘Enough.’ Jonny laughed, holding up his hands. ‘I’m not going to use my real job to get myself publicity, because as soon as I make enough money I’m quitting modelling. I told you that when I started.’

‘You are so deluded, my man. You’re a natural and the camera loves you. You could have a very, very good career in modelling. And this new job is a real triumph. The face of Giovanni Franco’s new cologne.’ Thom whistled.

Jonny did have to concede that Thom should know what he was talking about. The man ran one of the most successful modelling agencies on the west coast of the USA, so successful he’d started to branch into Europe.

And Jonny also had to admit that, much as he disliked the idea of being a model, it was a godsend right now.

‘I didn’t have an easy time of it as a teenager,’ he told Thom. ‘I really was a computer geek then. I only started working out so I could fight back against the guys who used to beat me up on a regular basis.’

‘And success is the best revenge, right?’

Jonny shook his head. ‘The situation hasn’t changed. I’m still being judged by my appearance. Ultimately, it’s not honest. I’m not a body, I’m a … bloke. I’m a writer. I’m me. That’s why I want to keep my modelling life and my real life separate. And then when I’ve made enough money, it’s back to the writing.’

‘Dude.’ Thom leaned forward again. ‘If you need money, I’ll write you a cheque. You don’t need to face a single camera. You know that.’

‘No,’ Jonny said, and then realised he’d said it violently enough to make his friend blink. ‘I mean, thank you, Thom. But I’ll earn my money.’

‘What do you need so much money for, anyway? If you’re in trouble—’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Jonny said, and, although he didn’t want to hurt Thom’s feelings, he said it crisply enough to stop the discussion.

Thom was a Californian, and Californians talked about everything. Despite Jonny’s own years on the west coast of America, he was still English, and he still knew that some things were best kept private.

A woman came down the train aisle with a trolley of coffee and tea. They gave it to you free in first class, a fact Jonny never would have discovered without Thom and his insistence on travelling the best way possible. ‘Coffee, thanks,’ Jonny said when she stopped at their seats, and his eyes wandered back to his laptop. When the coffee didn’t arrive, he looked up.

The woman was staring at him, half a smile on her face. She was cute, with blonde hair scraped back into a pony-tail. Her cheeks flushed slightly as she said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t usually ask things like this, but haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’

‘Now that you ask, Jay’s been in—’

Jonny interrupted before Thom could start on the list of magazines and advertisements he’d got Jonny jobs modelling for. ‘I don’t think we’ve met, no. Sorry.’

The woman looked from Jonny’s polite smile to Thom’s grin, and then back to Jonny. ‘Oh. Well, here’s your coffee, and if I can get you anything else …’ Her voice, though shy, was unmistakably flirtatious.

‘Just the coffee is fine, thank you.’

Thom snagged a can of cola as the trolley passed, and settled back in his seat, shaking his head sadly. ‘You disappoint me, my friend. That was your perfect chance. Stewardesses are hot.’

‘She wasn’t a stewardess. This is a train, not a plane.’

Thom leaned out into the aisle and looked after the woman. ‘Uniform is still pretty cute from behind, though.’ He turned back to Jonny. ‘Do you know how many women are hot for models? And how many of those models are actually straight? You’re a rarity and you should be shagging everything in sight.’

‘Thom, I want to hook up with a woman because I have something in common with her, not because she’s seen me in some magazine.’

‘You mean you want a female computer geek.’ Thom took a long drink of his cola. ‘That’s fortunate, because, with the amount of time you spend on a computer, I bet the only sex you’re getting is virtual.’

‘You know, Thom, I’d be much more offended by what you’re saying if I didn’t personally know that you haven’t had sex since the last leap year.’

‘We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. You’re living up in the middle of nowhere and you spend all your time online. When we get to London, how about I set you up with somebody?’

‘That won’t be necessary. I’m meeting somebody already.’

Like his evasion of Thom’s questions about his financial situation, this wasn’t quite the whole truth, and Jonny felt a stab of guilt. It was a measure of how much the circumstances of the past few months had affected him that he was being deliberately misleading.

‘I mean, I’m going to try to meet a friend,’ he corrected himself. ‘You didn’t give me a whole lot of notice that I was coming to London.’

‘A friend.’ Thom looked interested. ‘Is this a sex friend?’