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Sasha stared at Marco’s bold scrawl in disbelief. When she looked up, the women smiled and started pulling clothes off the hangers.
‘No—wait!’
‘No wait. Twenty minutes.’
‘But … where am I going?’ she asked.
The stylist shrugged, picked up a green-sequinned dress barely larger than a handkerchief, and advanced towards her. Sasha stepped back as the tiny woman waved her hand in front of her.
‘Off.’
With a sense of damning inevitability … and more than a little thrill of excitement … she let herself be pulled forward. ‘Okay, but definitely not the green.’
The stylist nodded, trilled out an order in Mandarin, and advanced again with another dress.
Twenty minutes later Sasha stepped from the cool, air-conditioned car onto another red carpet. This time, without Marco, she was even more self-conscious than before. On a warm, sultry Singapore night, the cream silk dress she’d chosen felt more exposing than it had in the safety of her hotel room. At first glance she’d refused to wear the bohemian mini-dress because … well, because it had no back. But then the stylist had fastened the draping material across her lower back and Sasha had felt … sexy—like a woman for the first time in her life.
Her hair was fastened with gold lamé rope, her nails polished and glittering. The look was completed with four-inch gold stilettos she’d never dreamt she’d be able to walk in, but she found it surprisingly easy.
Romano appeared at her side, his presence a reminder that somewhere beyond the wild flashes of the paparazzi’s cameras Marco was waiting for her.
All the way from her hotel she’d felt the emptiness receding, but had been too scared to acknowledge that Marco had anything to do with it. Now she couldn’t stop a smile from forming on her face as the loud boom of fireworks signalled the start of the rock concert.
The VIP lounge teemed with rock stars and pop princesses. She tried to make small talk as she surreptitiously searched the crowd for Marco. Someone thrust a glass of champagne in her hand.
Half an hour later, when a Columbian platinum-selling songstress with snake hips asked who her designer was, Sasha started to answer, then stopped as an ice-cold thought struck her. Was Marco even here? Had she foolishly misinterpreted his note and dressed up only to be stood up?
The depths of her hurt stunned her into silence.
She barely felt any remorse as the pop star flounced off in a huff. Blindly she turned for the exit, humiliation scouring through her.
‘Sasha? You’re heading for the stage, right?’ Tom grabbed her arm and stopped her.
‘The … the stage?’
‘Your favourite band is about to perform. Marco had me fly them out here just for you.’
‘He what?’ A different kind of stun stopped her heart.
‘Come on—you don’t want them to start without you.’
A thousand questions raced through her brain, but she didn’t have time to voice a single one before she was propelled onto the stage and into the arms of the band’s lead singer.
Torn between awe at sharing the stage with her favourite band, and happiness that she hadn’t misinterpreted Marco’s note after all, Sasha knew the next ten minutes were the most surreal of her life. Even seeing herself super-sized on half a dozen giant screens didn’t freak her out as much as she’d imagined.
She exited the stage to the crowd’s deafening roar. Tom beamed as he helped her down the stairs.
‘Have you seen Marco?’ Sasha attributed her breathlessness to her onstage excitement—not her yearning to see Marco de Cervantes.
Tom’s smile slipped and his gaze dropped. ‘Um, he was around a moment ago …’
She told herself not to read anything into Tom’s answer. ‘Where is he?’
‘Sasha …’ He sighed and pointed towards the roped-off area manned by three burly bodyguards.
At first she didn’t see him, her sight still fuzzy from the bright stage lights.
When she finally focused, when she finally saw what her mind refused to compute, Sasha was convinced her heart had been ripped from her chest.
