Page 29 of Read My Lips

Oh bollocks. My phone was on the floor under the bed because the cable wouldn’t quite reach all the way out. I hadn’t checked it all morning.

“Are you having second thoughts?”

“You mean am I going to drop you in it?” Christ. Three years having his back in every single meeting, and he still didn’t trust me at all. What a reality check.

“This is a bit above and beyond. You’re not obliged to⁠—”

“I haven’t changed my mind.”

He held his hands up, full-on surrender gesture, stepping back. “Ok.”

He looked tired when he wasn’t smiling. The thin skin under his eyes was all grey and washed out. He probably hadn’t gone back to bed yesterday, had he? He’d probably been working since I left the office yesterday, fielding the avalanche of queries and emails a PR disaster generated. Coming up with counter-narratives and distractions and strategies all the time had to be exhausting.

“Sorry – where are we going?”

Maybe Mel had forked out for us to stay in an exclusive hotel swarming with paparazzi so we’d get photographed together to tie a nice little bow under the drama.

“Richard’s place.”

Or maybe Simon had hit his head really, really hard.

“Sev’s going to shoot more footage with the pair of us, get our faces in shot, and pass it off as the original.”

“Have you both gone mad?”

“It shouldn’t take all day. An hour and a half each way, but we only need three minutes of footage.”

Because timing was the major flaw with this plan.

My eyes boggled. I’m sure they did. It felt like they were about to fall out of my skull.

“Simon. I look nothing like Richard!”

“You’re right.” His lips quirked with amusement. “You’re much more interesting.”

“Oh fuck off.”

Interesting was for things you found abandoned and liquifying at the back of the salad drawer in the fridge. On no planet was that a compliment. Not when you were being compared to a chiselled temple of manly perfection who had graced the cover of Men’s Health explaining how his muscles had muscles, on more than one occasion.

“Sev and I discussed it. The lighting and the camera angles make it very difficult to tell what’s going on. It’s all just skin, really. You both have dark hair. You’re both⁠—”

“White? Because, honestly, that’s the only thing we’ve got in common.”

“Well.” Simon gave me a once over, way too slow; my entire face exploded with heat. “I was going to say muscular, but it certainly helps you’re both very pale.”

Read: must sit in the shade. Do not eat shiny red apples.

Did he not realise the cinch we’d have to get into to make any new film halfway believable? Christ, of course he did. He’d starred in the first one. It wouldn’t be anything to him, would it? He only wanted to mop up the disaster.

Simon pursed his lips. “The thing is, Ben, it really was very sweet of you to come to the rescue – but we’re trying to torpedo the juiciest story most of the tabloids have come across for at least six months. And they’re going to need a teensy bit more than our insistence it was actually someone they’ve never set eyes on before, or they’re never going to swallow it.”

Over his shoulder, through the window, a little scrap of bright blue sky flared up between the roofs of the houses, and the colours throbbed too deep and dark and vibrant.

Sweet. Simon thought I was sweet. The patronising shit.

Puppies were sweet. Puppies, and kittens, and idiots who made ineffective gestures that were never going to work because they hadn’t thought it through, and weren’t remotely close to sexy. Better luck next time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

I straightened up, full on Alexander technique, squeezing everything I had out of my very last half inch of height.