You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (44 page)

And that was the other thing that had made Mandy McIntyre a multi-millionairess: within five minutes of being introduced, eight out of ten people thought she was the nicest person they’d ever met.

Neve was no exception. For the second time that evening she held hands with someone who wasn’t Max and let Mandy lead her around the bar like a little lapdog to be patted and petted. In fact, she did meet Mandy’s Shih Tzu, Gucci, who was being held by Mandy’s fiancé. Darren Stretton was gangling, tongue-tied and didn’t have that much to say for someone whose right foot was insured for £2 million. Neve did manage to establish that he was ‘over the moon about getting married to our Mandy’. He and Mandy shared a long, affectionate look, which was interrupted by the arrival of Darren’s team-mates, who all shook Neve’s hand politely and didn’t seem that bothered that she could barely stammer her way through the introductions. As it was, she wished, like she’d never wished for anything, that Douglas, Celia and especially Charlotte were here to see her surrounded on all sides by eleven men wearing shades, designer suits and buckets of expensive cologne. ‘You see?’ she’d say. ‘There is some cool in me, after all.’

Except, Neve wasn’t being cool. She was gawking and blushing like a twelve-year-old girl at a Jonas Brothers’ concert and it was a relief when Mandy took her hand and dragged her over to meet her gran and her great-aunt and Wendy, who used to live next door before the McIntyres moved to Alderley Edge.

Neve was trying to politely defend herself against allegations that everything in London was horribly expensive, which served Londoners right for being so up themselves, when Mandy took her hand again. ‘I want Neve to meet the girls,’ she explained, yanking a grateful Neve away. ‘Sorry about that. My nan will only go as far south as the Trafford Centre, and then she moans and groans about the state of the loos. Now, let’s go and find the girls and you haven’t even had a drink. There should be some champagne knocking about but I need to ask someone how many calories there are in a glass.’

‘Seventy-five,’ Neve said, without even having to think about it.

‘God, you’re so smart,’ Mandy trilled, leading Neve to a raised seating area at the back of the bar. ‘Here are the girls. Neve, this is my sister, Kelly, and my best friend, Tasha, and my other best friend, Chelsy, and Emma, who’s also my best friend and Lauren, who’s my best friend
and
my PA. This is Neve – Max’s Neve.’

Mandy’s five best friends were arranged on a black leather sofa and two armchairs. They looked Neve up and down, with faces that weren’t completely unfriendly, but weren’t exactly welcoming either. Neve knew that all her worst fears had been confirmed: Kelly, Tasha, Chelsy, Emma and Lauren were cut from exactly the same cloth as Charlotte.

They were all tanned with long, flicky, super-shiny hair, and the only thing smaller than their skirts were the teeny tiny clutch bags adorned in gilt hardware and logos that even Neve could recognise: Gucci, Louis Vuitton and yes, Fendi, except that didn’t seem quite so funny now when she was standing in front of them wearing a big foofy dress that was more Mother of the Bride than arty, cool Girlfriend of the Bride’s ghost-writer.

‘I’m going to get some champagne. Come on, guys, budge up,’ Mandy demanded and Kelly, Tasha and Chelsy (or was it Emma?) grudgingly shifted so there was a tiny gap on the sofa that wasn’t going to accommodate Neve’s forty-three-inch hips.

‘It’s OK,’ she mumbled, perching uncomfortably on the arm of the sofa and hoping that she wasn’t sticking her bottom in someone’s face. ‘I can sit here.’

‘So, you and Max, then?’ Kelly queried, tossing her long, streaked hair away from her face. Neve counted at least five different tones in her highlights and marvelled at the sheer level of grooming on display. It must take them
hours
to get ready. ‘How long have you been hooking up?’

Was hooking up the same as dating? Neve wasn’t sure. ‘Well, we’ve been seeing each other for just over two months.’

‘What? Speak up. I can hardly hear you.’

Neve repeated herself at a volume that had to qualify as a bellow and the five of them nodded and conferred amongst themselves. ‘When did Max hook up with Shelly then? Wasn’t that long ago, was it?’

‘Well, it was after Ricky but before Bryan. And she was with Ricky for Christmas but Bryan took her away to the Seychelles for Valentine’s Day, so it must have been January.’ They all looked at Neve who had no option but to sit there with a frozen face while they thought it appropriate to discuss exactly when Max had been having sex with some other girl who wasn’t her.

‘You can say what you like about Shelly but she’s really gorgeous and she always pulls the fittest blokes,’ Kelly piped up in defence of her morally-lacking friend who’d been kicked out of the wedding party for shagging the wrong kind of footballer, then selling her story to the tabloids. ‘I always thought she and Max would be perfect together.’ She gave Neve another searching look, which verged on incredulous. ‘How did you and Max meet anyway?’

‘Through my sister,’ Neve bit out, accepting a glass of champagne from Mandy, who’d hopefully come to her defence.

‘Neve is the smartest girl I’ve ever met,’ Mandy informed her friends, who looked singularly unimpressed. ‘She’s got a degree from Oxford and Max says she’s got more books than anyone he’s ever known
and
she knew how many calories there are in a glass of champagne without having to look it up on her iPhone first.’

That last point was greeted with murmurs of approval as Mandy pressed on. ‘You have to be extra nice to Neve ’cause she doesn’t know anyone except Max,’ she announced, plonking herself down in the gap between her sister and Tasha. ‘So, Neve, what are you doing tomorrow morning?’

Mentally girding myself for the prospect of having to spend an afternoon at a spa with your friends
, Neve wanted to say, but she just flailed her hands and spilled champagne down the front of her dress. ‘Um, I don’t know. Max said something about …’

‘He’s got to have a meeting with my agent about our next book,’ Mandy told her sweetly. ‘So you’re coming to our last bridal boot-camp session. We’re doing it in the grounds of the Country Club where the spa is and it’s where we’re having the reception. It’s dead gorgeous. I really wanted to get married in a castle but we couldn’t find a nice one that was near Manchester and I was
gutted
but then my dad said—’

‘Mandy! We’ve been doing bridal boot camp for months.
She
probably won’t be able to keep up with us,’ Chelsy interrupted. ‘Do you really want to have to go at half speed for the last boot camp when you still need to lose another two pounds before Saturday?’

Mandy bit her lip and Neve could see her hesitation. Her innate goodwill was being sorely tested by the demands of fitting into a designer wedding dress.

‘It’s all right,’ Neve said quickly. ‘I can just do my usual workout in the hotel gym.’

‘You work out?’ Kelly’s sculpted eyebrows disappeared into her fringe. ‘Really?’

‘Well, yes, a few times a week but not in a group, with a trainer, and I don’t—’

‘That’s perfect then,’ Mandy sighed in relief. ‘Neve can do the bridal boot camp and hang out with us all day.’ She stood up. ‘I have to go and rescue Darren. I think Gucci’s being traumatised by all the noise.’

Neve watched her walk away with dismay. She craned her neck to see if she could spot Max in the crowd and was wondering if now would be a good time to make her excuses when Lauren tapped her on the knee.

‘I need to talk to you about your spa treatments,’ she said brusquely, as she held up her iPhone. ‘I’ve got you down for a pampering facial, a leg wax, but the waxer’s got an extra half-hour free so she said she’d do your bikini line too.’

‘Oh, that’s very nice, but—’

‘But I need to check whether you want a luxury pedicure or a medi-pedi?’ Lauren looked expectantly at Neve.

‘Um, what’s a medi-pedi?’

‘You don’t know what a medi-pedi is?’

The five of them looked appalled. Outraged, even, as if there was no point in owning a lot of books if you didn’t even know what a medi-pedi was.

‘A luxury pedicure will be fine,’ Neve said woodenly, and it was silly and she was over-reacting because she’d had much worse treatment from much meaner girls than this, but she could feel her bottom lip trembling and she had to stop herself from blinking, because the next time she blinked, she knew the first tears would start to trickle down her face.

‘Then we’re heading back to town to get our hair and faces done but they haven’t got time to do anything more than give us a wash and blow dry and—’

‘That’s fine. I have to go now and find Max.’ Neve was already getting up and almost falling off her heels in the process. ‘It was very nice to meet you all.’ She didn’t wait to hear what they had to say about that, but tripped down the three steps and frantically scanned the room for Max.

He was right where she’d left him, standing at the bar, and just seeing his lovely, easy smile as he talked to someone was like coming home to a warm flat after walking through a snowstorm.

Neve began to fight her way through the crowd, all set to launch into a tirade about how vile Mandy’s friends were and she was not, repeat not, boot-camping with them or Spa-ing with them either, come to that. If Max had to find a doctor who’d write her a sick-note, then so be it. But as she got nearer to Max, even using elbows when she really had to, Neve saw that he was still talking to Bill and Jean. Jean had her arm tucked through Max’s, her head tilted to catch his every last word. Then when he got to the end of his speech, Bill clapped him on the back, maybe a little too hard, because Max rocked back on his heels, but it broke Neve’s heart a little.

She was probably being too fanciful, that’s what her mum would say, but looking from the outside in, it occurred to her that Bill and Jean really were Max’s honorary parents, or as close as he had. This wasn’t just a work event for him. He’d been invited by people who cared about him and she didn’t want them to say, ‘Lovely to see Max, but that sulky girlfriend of his was a real piece of work,’ when they left on Monday morning.

There was nothing else to do but suck it up and get through tomorrow even if it killed her – she wouldn’t put it past those horrible girls to put something toxic in her hot wax. What did those scary LA publicists say to Max when he was requesting shoot time with their celebrity clients? It was one day out of her entire life.

Max looked over, caught her eye and waved. He said something to Bill and Jean, who both smiled, and there was nothing else to do but paste a grin on her face and walk towards them.

‘You have exactly the same look that Keith gets when I’m taking him to the vet,’ Max remarked when he pulled up in front of the Alderley Edge Country Club, which was an ugly Victorian building that looked like a very ornate gingerbread house. ‘I thought you liked working out.’

‘I do,’ Neve said, trying to mask the unease she felt as Max switched off the engine. She’d prayed that he’d crash the car somewhere along the A34; not badly enough that anybody got fatally injured, but she’d have been perfectly happy with a broken leg. ‘I’m fine. I’m just tired.’

‘Ah, so that’s what’s bothering you,’ Max said knowingly as he nudged her arm. ‘Make it up to you tonight, I promise.’

‘Make what up to me? It’s not that,’ she sighed, as light finally dawned. The night before, she’d left Max in the bar to have ‘one more for the road’. ‘I don’t expect
that
every night.’

It had been another two hours before he’d finally stumbled back to their room and woken her up by falling over his weekend bag. Then he’d staggered over to the bed and tried to start something, which he obviously had no intention of finishing because he was so drunk that he couldn’t even take his own clothes off. Neve had pulled him out of bed, undressed him, helped him to brush his teeth, then left him to do the rest himself. He’d ended up spending the night on the sofa, because he hadn’t been able to make it back to the bed.

‘What’s the matter then?’ Max asked, a hand on Neve’s chin to turn her face towards him. ‘What are you so scared about?’

‘I’m not scared of anything,’ she declared shakily.

‘You can’t pull that crap with me any more. I know you too well now,’ Max said, with just one squeeze of lemon juice in his voice. ‘I know that Mandy’s mates are, well, they’re a bit … you don’t have much in common with them, but after they’ve jawed on about designer handbags and fake tans for a couple of hours, you can keep them entertained by telling them what a great boyfriend I am.’

‘I think they’re already up to date on that topic,’ Neve said scathingly, and she hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with Max, but the good intentions from the night before were wearing thin. ‘I think your mutual friend, Shelly, hit the highlights for them.’

‘Is that what this is all about? I never went out with Shelly.’

‘So I heard.’ Condescension dripped from every syllable and it wasn’t just that picking a fight with Max was a great way to take her mind off the ordeal that lay ahead, it was also because of the amount of time Neve had spent last night thinking about the infamous Shelly. She only had a handful of facts to go on: she’d slept with Max as well as two Premier Division footballers, she was really gorgeous according to Kelly McIntyre, and she was a girl who had no problem with sharing details of her sex-life with the readers of the Sunday tabloids.