Fast Friends Read Online Free PDF Page B

turn up, I swear I will .. .
    When the doorbell rang Camilla
thought for a moment that it was an hallucination. Then she realized that the other guests had stopped talking and that Jack had
turned pale, pausing in the act of
pouring a drink as if someone had pulled his plug out.
    ‘Super, just in time,’ she heard herself saying. The
incredible confidence with which the words came out both amazed and impressed her. Stuff you, Margaret Jameson, she
thought happily, for looking at your watch every three minutes and whispering to your husband out of the corner of
your nasty, narrow mouth. My friends are here and they’re going to
impress the hell out of you.
     
    Chapter 3
    ’Oh well,
here we go,’ murmured Roz as Camilla’s silhouette advanced towards them and the
front door was flung open.
    ‘ Cami, you look wonderful!’ she said with a quick hug and
a smile. ‘I’m so sorry we’re late but I was held up at the television studios
and then when I went to meet Lou she was in the middle of a slanging match with a photographer from the Express and I
simply had to wait and see who won. Have we held everything up?’
    ‘ Of course not!’
Camilla looked so happy to see them both that Roz almost felt guilty.
She hadn’t lied, but neither had she mentioned the fact that they and the
photographer had sunk two bottles of champagne in order to celebrate his
defeat. ‘Come in and meet everyone – we’ve
got time for another drink before we eat. Lou, shall I take your coat?’
    Loulou slid out of her studded
leather jacket and adjusted the wide
neckline of her gold lame top. In a tight black leather mini skirt, seamed
stockings and stiletto heels she looked both incongruous
– angel turned tart – and stunningly beautiful. Camilla felt a thrill of
triumph just wondering what Margaret Jameson would make of her.
    Roz, too, was spectacular in suede jeans and a man’s white
dress-shirt, her dark hair slicked back from her face so that her wayward features were enhanced to feline
proportions. As Camilla led the way back into the sitting room – the
expectant hush told her that their every word had been overheard and
rapaciously stored for retelling at future parties – she felt the sudden crazy
urge to fling open the door and announce proudly that the prodigal daughters
had returned.
    It was going to be all right, Jack decided with
considerable relief. Roz, the bitch, was
behaving perfectly and had met his eyes without even a flicker of
recognition when Camilla had proudly introduced them to each other. And Christ,
she looked beautiful tonight. Roz and Loulou
were like night and day, one so
mysterious and dark and the other so ethereally fair. He couldn’t tell whether Loulou had been briefed on
the situation; she, too, greeted him with absolute decorum. He watched
for a second as Loulou sucked an ice cube with an unconsciously provocative
gesture, then hastily looked away once more as a prickle of sweat caught
against his shirt collar. God, if he wasn’t already
sleeping with Roz, he could quite easily have been tempted to make a
serious play for this gorgeous friend of hers.
    ‘So you three girls were at school together,’ said
Margaret Jameson, who loved to dominate dinner party conversations and who was in her element here, with the famous Roz
Vallender at one end of the table and
the gossip columnists’ darling, Loulou Marks, at the other. She could
hardly wait to name-drop at the next bridge
club meeting on Thursday and fully intended to squeeze every last drop of newsworthiness from tonight’s dinner.
    Roz smiled bleakly, toying with a
mushroom on her fork and
Camilla, realizing that Roz wasn’t intending to answer Margaret’s rhetorical
question, rushed blindly in.
    ‘I look so much older than Roz and Lou, I expect,’ she
said hurriedly. ‘And they’re both so
wonderfully slim, of course, whereas I put on stones when I had
the children, although even when we were at school I was much bigger than