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‘You mean I’m wearing a dress.’
‘No, I mean you look amazing,’ Alicia said firmly. ‘Doesn’t she?’ She turned to the tall, fair-haired man standing behind her. ‘Philip, this is my best friend—the very talented, soon-to-be-discovered filmmaker, Mimi Miller. Mimi, this is Philip. The love of my life and a perfect saint.’
Mimi squeezed her friend’s hand. This was what she loved most about Alicia—the way she spoke from the heart. Anyone else would be hiding their feelings, trying to play it cool, making a joke, but Alicia had always been unashamedly open and honest.
Philip stepped forward. ‘Hi, Mimi.’ He kissed her lightly on both cheeks. ‘Alicia talks about you so much I feel like I already know you.’
‘And it didn’t put you off coming to lunch?’ She smiled at her friend. ‘You’re right—he is a saint.’
‘Hardly!’ Philip laughed, and then he turned towards Alicia, his eyes softening. ‘Alicia’s the saint. She makes the world a better place, and I’m the luckiest man alive.’
Mimi nodded. ‘Yes, you are,’ she said quietly.
But her pulse was beating out of time and she felt a familiar ache in her chest. Would any man ever say those words to her?
It seemed unlikely. She’d only ever really loved one man, and he had made it so dauntingly clear that his interest in her had been nothing more than a moment of indiscretion to be swiftly forgotten that she had decided there and then that she was not ready for love. Maybe she never would be if it involved making herself vulnerable to such unbearable hurt.
Her jaw tightened as she remembered how for a couple of hours she’d let herself believe that her youthful fantasy of love might become reality, only for Bautista Caine to trample her heart and her pride into dust.
Even now, nearly two years later, she could still picture his face as he had stared straight through her, despite having kissed her just an hour earlier with an intensity that had left her blinded, breathless and dazed.
She could feel herself being sucked towards the familiar vortex of unanswered questions.
Why had he kissed her?
No, why had he kissed her like that?
With such fierce, consuming hunger.
And why hadn’t he come back?
Had she been too eager? Too clumsy?
Her heart balled like a fist.
It had hurt so much. It still did, if she let herself think about it, and what made the pain a thousand times worse was him being her best friend’s older brother, for that meant she had no one to confide in.
Her stomach tightened.
She’d have liked to pretend that she hadn’t said anything to Alicia purely out of love, and a desire not to put her friend in the middle, but part of her had been afraid. She knew what it was to be cast out into the darkness, and she hadn’t been willing to risk losing Alicia as she had lost everything else.
And anyway, there had been too much other stuff going on—important stuff. Charlie and Raymond had been arrested and their two families had been torn apart, so she’d hardly been in a position to just call up her friend and discuss not sleeping with her brother.
But now was not the time to be dredging up that particularly dismal part of the past, she told herself firmly. Her best friend was here in London, and she wasn’t going to let anything ruin that.
Sitting down, she glanced admiringly around the restaurant. ‘This is such an amazing place.’
‘Never mind that. I want you to tell me everything you’ve been doing,’ Alicia said, laying down her menu. ‘Starting with your film.’
Stalling for time, Mimi picked up her water glass. There was depressingly little to say. Like everything else she touched, it had fallen apart—all her effort and hopes turning to dust just as they always did.
It was true that she had made a film—a short, largely improvised black and white movie about a group of girls on a night out in London—and, incredibly, she had managed to find a distributor for it. Only that had been nine months ago, and she was still struggling to get it released. And, frankly, the chances of that ever happening seemed to be getting less and less likely.
She felt a twinge of tension in her shoulders.
When filming had begun, both her lead actresses had been desperate to grab some arthouse credentials, but since then they had signed on to a high school movie franchise, and now their lawyers were blocking her film’s release on the grounds that their clients had only made the movie as a ‘favour’ to her.
It wasn’t true. The real reason those actresses didn’t want to see the film released was that some of their ‘improvised’ comments were not very PG, and they didn’t want to damage their new, fresh-faced images.
