Usually, it was a minor barrage. Theatre actors tended to get only the surface interest from the paps, who congregated outside overexposed celebrity events. They ranked somewhere between minor reality stars and radio personalities on the saleable news scale. The increased harassment was one of the reasons she had thought twice about pursuing roles in television.
Thanks to her escort, she was getting her first taste tonight of what it meant to be prime real estate in the banner news headlines. And she was not enjoying it. Nor, she had to admit, was Richard, to judge by the grimness of his face as they pushed forward from the car. The valet whisked the Ferrari away, and he followed its progress as if he suspected an illicit joyride might take place. His fingers were iron-tight around hers, the skin of his hand surprisingly rough and calloused. She couldn’t imagine him doing manual labour. Or even the dishes. He growled a warning in the back of his throat when a heavily built photographer advanced close enough that she felt his moist breath against her ear.
Her feelings of empathy were limited. It was not lost on her that if Richard didn’t make the paps’ job so easy by losing his temper left, right and centre, they wouldn’t flock around him like starving seagulls.
With her free hand, Lainie held down her skirt against the brisk wind. She had read somewhere that the Duchess of Cambridge had weights sewn into the hems of her dresses, which seemed like sound common sense. The last thing Lainie needed was a wardrobe malfunction. She was wearing her lucky knickers with the hole over her left bum cheek. The evening ahead had seemed a miserable enough prospect without adding Spanx into the mix.
“Would you keep up?” Richard muttered in her direction, and she barely resisted the urge to pull a face in response. There was something horribly provocative about the knowledge that one irresponsible gesture would set off a rippling wave of flashes, like blowing into a pool of water and causing a tidal wave. It perversely made her want to misbehave.
A teenage YouTube star arrived to pandemonium from young fans, which diverted most of the camera attention. Lainie let out a deep breath and released her skirt to catch her handbag before it dropped from her arm. It contained her phone, and her favourite sister-in-law had strict instructions to call with a fake emergency if prompted by text. She had promised to appear at the Pink Ribbon benefit with Richard; she had no intention of remaining by his side for the entire evening if he proved his usual intolerable self.
At least it was for a good cause, she thought gloomily, as Richard gave another impatient pull on her arm.
“Stop it,” she hissed, and then smiled at the bouncers as she handed over her pass. “You’re not hauling around a bag of golf clubs.”
Richard also produced his pass but dispensed with the smile. A muscle flexed in his jaw, but he said nothing until they were inside the hotel foyer. “I don’t carry my golf clubs,” he eventually remarked. “That’s what a caddy is for.”
First eye roll of the night.
The hub of voices in the room was almost as loud as the throngs of paparazzi outside, only here the shouted demands were replaced by shrieks of recognition and social giggles. Lainie was an adamant city girl, but for a second she thought wistfully of a quiet spot in the countryside, where the only noise came from birds and trickling water.
And probably wasps, heavy machinery, meatworks and cattle trucks, she acknowledged a moment later with a faint smile. The peaceful haven of her imagination had more in common with Lark Rise to Candleford than the twenty-first century. Occupational hazard: too much time spent amongst artificial sets, slight loss of grip on reality.
Richard handed her a cocktail glass from a waiter’s passing tray, and then ruined the polite gesture by frowning in the direction of her breasts and asking, “Did your stylist choose that?”
She took a very large gulp of fruit-laced vodka. “I don’t have a stylist,” she said grimly, resisting the urge to make self-conscious tugs and adjustments to her dress. Which was fine. It was a perfectly simple LBD with a classy amount of cleavage.
Richard sipped gingerly from his own glass, looking into it as if he suspected lacings of cyanide. He must have been quite good in Hamlet, she noted absently.
“Have you considered hiring one?” he asked, in tones of friendly interest.
Thousands. Thousands of pounds for Shining Lights.
She put a mental heel on her growing irritation and ground it into the very fancy parquet floor.
She tried not to imagine Richard’s face was under there also.
“Darlings!” Greta French arrived in a wash of air kisses and perfume. The chat show matriarch was the only three-dimensional human Lainie had ever met who actually addressed people she had neither slept with nor conceived as “darling.”