Most Beautiful, the Sexiest American or the Most Significant Style Icon Since Marilyn Monroe, the supermodel existed in fear of her crown being snatched.
Other women were perpetual and dreadful threats. Minty recalled a gallery opening they had been invited to last year, from which Tawny had demanded to leave almost immediately. She never admitted it, but Minty knew. Another woman at the function had been enticing male attention: Celeste Cavalieri, the Italian jeweller. Celeste’s allure was at the other end of the spectrum from Tawny’s: she was thin and petite, with a pixie crop of sable hair and deerskin-brown eyes. Celeste’s beauty was quiet. It did not shout from the rooftops and it did not flaunt or strut. It did not even know itself.
Celeste hadn’t noticed the attention—let alone cared. Tawny couldn’t bear it.
‘Did Jacob come on to you?’ Minty asked now, keeping their exchange on safe ground.
‘Yeah.’ Tawny polished off the vodka. ‘Course.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I can’t remember.’
But that was a lie. Tawny remembered every word. Sometimes she replayed it in her mind and it turned her on so much that she had to vanish into the nearest toilet cubicle and plunge her fingers into her knickers until she came.
‘If you’re so hot on Mr Lyle,’ Tawny commented, ‘he’s all yours.’
It stank of bullshit. The thought of Minty Patrick receiving Jacob’s attentions was unthinkable. Jacob had been enamoured by her, by Tawny; his tongue had practically been hanging out of his mouth. Tawny knew he was a blatant, shameless womaniser, the kind of arrogant that, while you sussed it, was irritatingly appealing, and she recalled the flutter of interest when it emerged he’d once referred to university campuses (Jacob’s preferred haunts for checking out fresh talent, business or otherwise) as ‘cam-pussies’, for the sheer number of girls he bedded. This sort of thing ought to send women screaming for the hills, but somehow, with Jacob’s swag, had them screaming in their beds at night with a dildo vibrating between their legs.
Tawny was the fairest of them all—and she planned to make Jacob work for it.
‘We’re going.’ She grabbed her purse.
‘What? Already?’
‘Tell JP to send a car.’
After another toilet refreshment, the women took the elevator down to the street. It was a cold night and Tawny wrapped her fur tighter as they were ushered into a hovering car. Deliberately she faced away from the road opposite. The only downside to her beloved Tower Club was its neighbouring joint, the gritty, grimy Rams & Rude Girls Dancing Bar. As usual, the memories clung on, dripping poison.
Tawny had been a different girl when she had first arrived in New York.
Another life. One she could never, ever go back to.
She’d had nothing and no one. Running from Sunnydale, the hick town where she’d grown up, Tawny Linden had been an ugly duckling desperate to make something of her future. Maybe she would become an actress, or write a film script, or find a rich boyfriend. Instead, she had been picked up by Nathan, a man who made his living skulking the subway and collecting waifs and strays like old coins.
Beyond her lank hair, train-tracks and wide, trusting eyes, Nathan had seen Tawny’s potential. Bar work, he’d sold it as. Good pay. The start of a new chapter …
She should go with him, he said. He would look after her.
Nathan certainly did—and then some. He looked after her every morning. Every night. Every hour in between, until she was sore and ragged and weeping …
Tawny Linden had been powerless to leave. She could not go back. The Rams was the closest thing she had to a home and, over the coming months, as her beauty surfaced and her duckling became a swan, she began to bat for the big league.
That was when the competition really got going.
It was always a question of which Rams girls the punters wanted that night, who was prettiest and who they were prepared to pay most for. That was how the girls earned their keep. From the beginning Tawny understood she had to be the chosen girl, always, every time—she had to be the hottest, the most willing, the sexiest and the best—in case the Rams decided she wasn’t bagging the dollars and fired her ass out onto the street. She’d have ended up a hooker, just another sunken-eyed junkie begging for dimes. OK, the work wasn’t easy—the men she was forced to service, the things they had made her do—but it was a damn sight better than that.
Thank Christ she had gotten out when she did.
‘You OK?’ asked Minty. ‘You look like you saw a ghost.’
Manhattan rushed past. The Mercedes was warm, the seats plush. Tawny lit a cigarette and opened the window, flicking the butt with red-painted talons.
‘I’m better than OK,’ she said. ‘I’m Tawny Lascelles.’
Minty gave a nervous laugh.
‘No kidding,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you always been?’
But Tawny didn’t reply.
Celeste Cavalieri held the diamond up to the light. It twinkled and dazzled between her fingers, a plum-sized explosion of brilliance. She angled it, examining the way it refracted and dispelled the gleam, her eyes trained to hunt out the tiniest imperfection. The clarity was superb, a fifty-two carat Peruzzi with faceted girdle. Bright white.
She would never consider lifting a piece such as this, but the magnetism was always there. It wasn’t about the value, or even the object itself—it was simply the thrill of the steal. Once, Celeste had taken a comb from a woman’s open bag, next to her at an exhibition. Once, she had slipped from a Paris department store with a silk scarf folded away in her purse. Once, she had removed a silver-plated espresso cup from a bistro in Bruges. It didn’t matter what it was. It mattered that she took it.
‘Are you nearly done?’
Celeste jumped. She turned to the museum overseer, who had popped his head round the door. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled, ‘you startled me.’
‘It gets quiet in here, huh.’
‘Sure does.’
He returned her smile. ‘Let me know when you’re ready?’
Celeste nodded. The door closed behind him and she exhaled.
Never again! But every time was the last. Every time she swore she was through. Celeste Cavalieri was revered, a trusted asset to the world’s richest families. As if she had to push that trust, a dare, to see how far it would strain …
She touched the bracelet on her wrist, ruby and silver. Her first ever steal, from a castle in Hungary. She could see it now: buried deep in the forest, its turrets rising like a drawing in a fairytale. The owner had been an ex-banker, living there with his son. Their names escaped her now. Strange people. The son had a stammer.
Celeste had been summoned to value a painting of the banker’s deceased wife, commissioned to the finest artist of the decade. A portrait of a woman, hung dourly in the castle’s Great Hall, the oil thick and dingy and the features encased in shadow …
A channel of cold seeped down her spine.
Carefully, reverently, Celeste replaced the museum diamond in its casket. The jewel shone as a nugget of treasure on the ocean floor, seductive and dangerous.
Exiting the building on Central Park West, she was met by a bustling hive of rush-hour workers and sky-facing tourists. As she hailed a cab, her attention was caught by a bizarre headline on a nearby newsstand. She did a double-take, scarcely