qualifications?’
Amber shook her head. ‘You’re joking! The school I went to wasn’t famous for getting its pupils through exams.’ Her voice was wry. ‘If it kept them out of the remand centres and off the streets, it considered that it had done a good job!’
Paul scanned the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘But you didn’t join the Allure agency until you were almost twenty, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So what does a girl of sixteen with no qualifications do?’
‘She gets a job living in. Hotels, usually. You can always find a job in a hotel. I’ve been a chambermaid and a receptionist. I’ve worked behind bars and I’ve waited tables. The money is lousy, but at least you can get yourself a room in central London.’
‘Smart girl.’ The journalist refilled his glass. ‘And you made the most of the city, did you?’
I tried. I did everything that was free—so I knew all the art galleries and museums like the back of my hand.’
‘Exciting times,’ murmured the journalist sarcastically.
‘Those bits I loved,’ Amber defended staunchly. ‘And I started reading, too. Devouring books which filled in the education I’d missed.’
‘Then what?’
Amber shrugged. ‘Too many people kept telling me that I had a beautiful face—’
‘And that was a problem?’
She shook her head. ‘No, of course it wasn’t a problem—I’ d grown up seeing real problems, and having a sympathetically proportioned face certainly didn’t qualify! But after a while it becomes a little difficult to ignore, especially when the novelty of having your own place wears off. The hours at the hotel were long and tedious, and the money was lousy, and all of a sudden my poky little room began to look less like a palace and more of a prison.’ And there had been more men to fight off. Rich, slick businessmen whose rooms she’d cleaned, who’d thought that their fat wallets and fat stomachs would make them appealing to a young girl with only her looks and her natural intelligence as assets.
The whirr of the tape recorder was the only sound in the room. It was a hypnotic sound. ‘Go on,’ said Paul smoothly.
It was strangely cathartic to be able to talk so honestly about her past. Amber narrowed her navy eyes and let the words come spilling out, shuddering as she remembered the corpulent company director who had asked her to become his mistress!
‘I found myself looking into the future,’ she said slowly. ‘And I realised that, if I wasn’t careful, then I was consigning myself to a life of drudgery just like my mother’s had been. Only things were different for me. I wasn’t a widow with two children—I didn’t have to live like that I was limiting my horizons for no other reason than that I feared my attraction to the opposite sex.’
The journalist gave a cynical laugh. ‘So you really threw yourself in at the deep end by getting hooked up to a man like Finn Fitzgerald?’
Amber shook her head. ‘I didn’t get “hooked up” with Finn for ages. First of all, I went along to the Allure agency—’
‘What made you choose Allure? You’d seen a picture of the owner, right?’
‘Wrong. I had no idea that Finn existed—I just knew that Allure was the biggest and the best agency in London, and the most central. I walked in, and...and...’
‘And?’
It was difficult to put into words just how she had felt when she had first set eyes on Finn. She had been dressed to kill. Or so she had thought. Her sister had told her that if she was planning to visit a modelling agency, then she had better do something dramatic about her appearance.
So she had.
Out had gone the stark pony-tail and the layered clothes. The amber-gold hair which had given her her name had been washed and crimped, so that it had blazed around her shoulders like a pleated golden cloud. But she had committed the cardinal crime of the novice where her make-up was concerned. She had borrowed bright blue eye-shadow and boot-black mascara and shiny cyclamen lipstick and had ladled them on freely. If she had had a best friend, then the best friend might have told her that she resembled a pantomime dame. But there had been no one other than Ursula, and her sister had had even less idea about make-up than she had.
Her clothes had been her own—bought specially for the occasion. A skirt which had been too short and a blouse which had been too tight. Market clothes, both of them—and as cheap as you could buy. It made her shudder now to think what she must have looked like. She had tottered into the Allure office on high, squeaky shoes which hurt her feet, and...
‘And?’ prompted the journalist again.
Amber sighed as she remembered the impact of first meeting Finn. Of meeting the kind of man she never would have thought existed, not in real life. Not in her life, anyway...
Her heart picked up speed as she remembered. ‘I walked into the Allure office and Finn Fitzgerald was sitting there, dressed entirely in black. Black polo-neck sweater. Black jeans. Black hair. And his hair was all ruffled. There was just something about him—I can’t describe it. Something which drew your eye to him, and only him—no matter who else was in the room. As though he had a special, inner illumination all of his own. He was—’ She bit her lip as she tried to think of a way to describe Finn.
‘The sexiest thing on two legs?’ Paul Millington suggested. ‘Testosterone personified?’
Amber burst out laughing. It was an outrageous way of putting it. But true. ‘Well, yes,’ she conceded. ‘But his appeal goes much deeper than his good looks. He’s very charismatic.’
‘Well, that goes without saying!’
‘Mmm,’ agreed Amber dreamily. ‘It does. Anyway, he was sitting at this circular desk, talking into the phone, with pictures of the most beautiful women all over the walls behind him. I nearly walked out at that point.’
‘Why?’
Amber shrugged. ‘Oh, it all looked so daunting—he looked so daunting. I felt like a fish out of water.’
‘So he took one look at you, and he said...?’
Amber took a mouthful of champagne. This part of her recollection still hurt, despite her ability now to see the humour in it. And the truth. ‘He put the phone down and looked at me for what seemed like an awfully long time, and said that if I started wearing high white stilettos, then I would probably make a reasonable amount of money—’
The journalist frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I, at first. It was his idea of a joke, you see. Implying that I looked like...like...’
‘Like?’
‘A streetwalker,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘He said that?’
‘Implied that.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I told him that his eyes looked like traffic lights—’
‘Traffic lights?’
Amber giggled. ‘Well, yes. His eyes are green, you see—very, very green—only this time they were red as well. He’d had a terrible bout of flu, apparently—first time he’d ever been sick in his adult life. Everyone there said what a terrible patient he had made.’
‘I can’t imagine anyone saying something negative about Finn Fitzgerald’s looks. That must have been a first. Did he mind?’
‘No. He laughed. Just threw back his head and laughed, and said, “Touché,” and everyone stopped what they were doing and just stared at me. At first I thought they were staring because I must have looked such a state. It wasn’t until much later