Authors: Sarah Manning

Unsticky (65 page)

BOOK: Unsticky

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Grace tried to think of a plausible comeback that didn’t mainly consist of ‘You fucking wanker!’ screamed over and over again, until she realised that this was one of the rare occasions when she could go with the truth. The truth was actually her friend. ‘I had lunch with Alex,’ she flung at Vaughn triumphantly, and he froze. ‘Remember how I was absolutely forbidden from doing that? Well, now I know why. In fact, I know all sorts of things about you and the women you have your little agreements with.’

‘I was always honest with you about our arrangement and how it would work,’ Vaughn said icily, folding his arms. ‘And I fail to see how—’

‘Bullshit! You made out like you were doing me some gigantic favour, lifting me out of the fucking gutter where you’d found me - but you were just using me to get to Noah! I wasn’t even your first choice! And now you’re chucking me because Noah wants nothing to do with you. All this time, you were just pretending that you cared about me!’

Grace had started crying, though she’d sworn she wouldn’t. Vaughn looked like she’d coshed him on the head with the heavy glass paperweight on the coffee-table, and his hands hung limply at his sides. It gave her time to finish her speech which had been much more succinct and tear-free when she’d rehearsed it in her head. ‘I’m not going to wait around for a month when I can’t stand to be in the same room with you. I’m done. I’m finished. We’re over!’

‘I didn’t tell you about my other attachments . . .’

‘Mistresses!’ Grace screeched now because all her carefully rehearsed speeches had abandoned her and she was considering inflicting some physical damage if Vaughn continued to act like she was being completely unreasonable. ‘Call them what they were. Bangs for a fucking buck, and I bet what you paid them in allowances was a fraction of what you got in commission from the artists they threw at you.’

‘Do not scream at me, Grace,’ Vaughn suddenly snarled. ‘I’m not in the mood for your cheap theatrics. Stop it,
now
!’

It shocked Grace out of her cheap theatrics so effectively that she bit her tongue as she clamped her mouth shut.

‘I made you certain assurances about how our partnership would benefit you, which they have. My arrangements with previous partners really aren’t any of your business.’ Vaughn had the nerve to sigh in this long-suffering, put-upon way, like he couldn’t believe Grace’s temerity. ‘Really, you’ve never understood how this was meant to work. It was a very simple arrangement but you always make things more complicated than they need to be.’

‘It got complicated the first time we had sex,’ Grace gritted in frustration because Vaughn had reined himself back in, was as implacable as ever. ‘I remember all those assurances you made, and never once did you mention the fact that I was just there as bait. Noah didn’t want anything to do with you so you tried to throw me in to sweeten the deal. Why did you get so angry when you thought I’d fucked him? Wasn’t that part of your masterplan? Or was it some reverse psychology bullshit that I was just too stupid to—’

‘Grace,
Grace . . .
’ She was startled out of her rant, when Vaughn took her hands that had been flailing about wildly, so he could tug her towards the sofa. She didn’t want to sit down next to him, his fingers still entwined with hers, because she wanted to pace angrily and gesture with her hands, but she found herself sitting so close to Vaughn that their thighs touched and he could stroke the hair back from her hot, angry face.

‘I told you not to touch me!’ she choked, but Vaughn ignored her, his hand slipping around to the back of her neck so he could start kneading the truly humungous tension knot for which he was solely responsible.

‘You’re very special to me,’ he said in such a quiet voice that Grace had no choice but to lean closer so she didn’t miss a word. ‘And that hasn’t changed. When I first saw you, I wasn’t thinking about how useful you could be to my Machiavellian plans to take over the art world. I just thought how pretty you were and how much I wanted to kiss you.’

‘Yeah, I bet you say this stuff to your other women,’ she said, wriggling her shoulders so she’d be free from Vaughn’s treacherous hands because art dealer was just a fancy word for salesman and Vaughn was a really good salesman. She was sitting in a £5 million house that was a testament to how gifted he was with the hard sell.

‘You’re nothing like my other women. That’s the whole point.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Maybe you should have stuck with your blonde thirty-somethings who knew how the game was played and when to keep their mouths shut. Sorry, Vaughn, you picked the wrong girl this time.’ Grace forced herself to slide away from Vaughn so she could glare at him from a safe distance of twenty centimetres.

‘They didn’t drive me to despair on a daily basis,’ Vaughn sighed, tipping his head back. ‘I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t talk about our others.’

‘I didn’t have anything to talk about, just a succession of creeps who treated me badly,’ Grace said bitterly. ‘Who dumped me within three months - and big whoop! - I made it all the way to seven months with you! I want you to tell me the truth. Tell me the reason you’re dumping me has nothing to do with Noah or Young British Artists or . . .’

‘It is what it is. You know I was - I am - attracted to you, but I can’t let that factor into my business decisions.’ Vaughn wouldn’t look at her as he trotted out this statement, like he’d spent hours rehearsing his monotone delivery.

‘You utter bastard!’

‘I’m getting very bored with this,’ Vaughn said, and Grace didn’t know if that was another reason or if he was talking about her constant swearing. ‘We had a few good months together and now it’s time for us both to move on to new projects.’

‘Oh my God, you’ve already got someone else all lined up,’ Grace hissed incredulously, on her feet in an instant so she could loom over Vaughn for a change with her hands on her hips. ‘No way am I sticking it out for another month so you can sweet-talk some other poor bitch into signing one of your contracts.’

‘Talking of contracts, Grace,’ Vaughn cut in coldly, ‘you walk out now, I will sue you for breaching yours.’

‘That’s not fair!’ she exclaimed.

‘Life
isn’t
fair,’ Vaughn retorted, and he sounded disturbingly like her grandmother. ‘It’s over when I say it’s over.’ Then he stood up in a jerky, clumsy movement like he couldn’t wait to get away from her. ‘You were happy enough to sign the contract at the time, just remember that. We’ll have any further discussions once you’re done with the hysterics.’

Vaughn stalked out of the room with an angry toss of his head. If he’d had another X chromosome, it could even have been called a flounce.

chapter thirty-seven

Vaughn avoided her all night, which was cool with Grace. If he wanted to sulk, then he could just get on with it. She had plans of her own, things to do, people to see - except Lily was really put out when Grace called her before eight. She was even more put out when Grace said in an urgent voice, ‘You
have
to meet me for breakfast and you absolutely
have
to come on your own.’

Lily was now nearly eight months’ pregnant and didn’t want brunch in some fancy shmancy Highgate café with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and freshly squeezed orange juice. They had to meet at a greasy spoon on Junction Road so she could satisfy her cravings for bacon on a soft white roll smothered in ketchup that came from a red plastic tomato.

‘He’s dumping me,’ Grace told Lily as she watched her trying to manoeuvre her hand to her mouth without dripping ketchup everywhere because Lily had the most ergonomically rounded bump Grace had ever seen. It didn’t even look as if she was pregnant, but like she’d shoved a beach ball under her TopShop maternity dress for a laugh.

‘Why is he dumping you?’ Lily asked. ‘I thought everything was going really well.’

‘He’s a bastard. A conniving, scheming bastard,’ Grace spat, though she didn’t really want to go into any more details and then have to listen to Lily’s variations on the theme of ‘I told you so’.

‘What did he do?’ Lily breathed, settling back for some lurid tale to add to the huge volume that was
Grace’s Adventures in Dating
.

‘He’s given me a month’s notice. How fucked up is that? Like, he’s dumping me, but in thirty days’ time and I’m just expected to suck it up and deal or he says he’ll sue me for breach of contract. I mean, what the fuck?’ Even with pretty much everything edited out, it was still a world of wrong.

‘Oh, Grace.’ Lily looked up at the ceiling and Grace knew she was trying to come up with a silver lining. ‘I know you said you were into him and the sex was good and, my God, that house, but you knew it wasn’t going to last for ever. You both agreed that it was an arrangement, not a love affair.’

‘I know I did. But you can’t live with someone and have little in-jokes and iron their shirts and not feel something for them, and all the time he was just playing me and—’

‘You iron his shirts?’ Lily looked appalled.

‘Only when we go away. He can’t pack for shit and then he hates unpacking too so everything’s scrunched in his bag for ages and it’s just wasteful to pay the hotel Housekeeping to do it.’ Grace bristled under Lily’s incredulous stare. ‘What? I happen to like ironing.’ She slumped over the table. ‘When he found out about all my debts and paid them off, I thought he’d changed. I thought that
we’d
changed, but—’

‘Hang on! He paid off your debts?
All
of them?’ Lily wilted slightly as Grace glared at her. ‘Didn’t that make you feel weird? Like you had a “Sold” sticker slapped on you?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Kind of, but mostly I was just relieved and he was so unbelievably nice about it; he wouldn’t let me say thank you or try to pay him back. So, I started doing little things to show him that I was grateful. I’d cook him dinner and buy him little presents, and I did his bloody ironing, and the whole time he must have been laughing himself sick about how pathetic I was.’

‘He was the pathetic one, taking advantage of you like that. Why shouldn’t he pay off your debts? I’ve seen his house; he’s loaded. I bet he only did it so he could lord it over you and make you do stuff you didn’t want to. Sex stuff,’ Lily added furtively.

‘No, it wasn’t like that. Not the sex stuff,’ Grace mumbled. But now when she thought about it, had Vaughn really changed into a caring person or was it just that she’d been so humbled by gratitude that she’d started toeing the party line and hadn’t given him cause to revert back to his Alpha bastard behaviour? Or maybe it was then that he’d really decided to put the squeeze on Noah and he’d needed Grace on side to make that happen. Grace put her head in her hand and groaned because she didn’t know what to think or to believe any more. All that she knew was that the last four months, the so-called best months of her life, had been the most flimsy of illusions.

‘Gracie, everything’s going to be OK. God, if he were here right now, I’d have a thing or two to say to him. What a complete wanker,’ Lily sniffed. Any lingering doubts that Grace had about the state of their friendship were gone. There was no judgement, no lectures on how stupid she’d been - just absolute belief that Grace was the injured party and Vaughn was overdue an arse-kicking. ‘I never liked that bastard, ever since he ruined my special day.’

‘He’s not all bad,’ Grace said quietly, because for some unfathomable reason she didn’t want Lily to think quite so badly of Vaughn. ‘He might have spun me a line but he also put up with a lot of my drama.’

As someone who’d had to put up with a good deal of Grace’s drama in the past, Lily refrained from saying anything. Really, there wasn’t much she could say, apart from the one thing that all good friends were contractually obligated to say in these circumstances. ‘Well, I hope it doesn’t work out as badly as you think it will. And if it does, you have first dibs on the sofa if I haven’t given birth by then.’

When Grace got back to Hampstead that evening, after thinking up many pointless fashion-related tasks to delay leaving the office, she was relieved that there was no sign of Vaughn. She sped up the stairs for the safety of the guest suite and decided that reorganising her closet and maybe even starting to pack would be a great way to channel some of her restlessness.

She’d just reached for the first hanger when Vaughn tapped on the door.

For a moment, Grace contemplated telling him to piss off, but she wanted to see what mood Vaughn was in before she showed her hand.

‘You can come in if you want,’ she called out.

BOOK: Unsticky

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