Christmas at Tiffany's Read Free

Lammermuir estate as he paced solemnly back and forth across the lawn.
    She wondered whether Wiz would be able to get here early. She’d said she would try. Wiz ’d tell it to her straight. After all, she was her go-to friend up here, her rock, her lunch companion and closest confidante – the one who’d taken her under her wing when she’d first arrived, not yet twenty-one, fresh from the air-conditioned climes of expat living in Hong Kong and new to the nuances of grouse-moor farming.
    She looked down at the trio of childhood friends who were sitting together in a gaggle on the floor, examining a heap of shoes that had been upended from one of Anouk’s many bags. Their friendship had been arranged practically before their births. Their fathers had all been CEOs of the multi-national cosmetics conglomerate Neroli – Kelly’s for the Americas in New York; Anouk’s for Europe, excluding the UK, in Paris; Suzy’s for the UK in London; and Cassie’s for Asia in Hong Kong. Before the girls were even born, their mothers had all been good friends, meeting regularly around the world for coffee and shopping trips as they accompanied their husbands to AGMs and conferences. And when the girls had been born, all in the same year – surely a collaboration by their mothers? – the friendship was handed down a generation as they shared crèches, rattles and nannies. Their parents couldn’t have been remotely surprised when, aged thirteen, the girls mounted a pressure group to be sent to the same boarding school in England, and they’d enjoyed five blissful years together, as close as sisters, sleeping in the same dorm, playing in the same lacrosse team, swooning over the same boys . . . until Cassie had blown it.
    Perhaps ‘blown it’ was too harsh, but she’d always had the feeling that by marrying Gil so early, she’d popped their sealed bubble. She’d met him at the Grosvenor House Ball in London and he’d swept her off her feet, not just with his extraordinary confidence and intelligence, but more particularly with his voice: crystal-cut with a whisper-soft burr. She would do anything for that voice – it had seduced her away from her virginity, taken her away from her friends, made her wait for the baby she yearned for . . .
    There was a knock at the door.
    ‘Cassie?’ Talk of the devil.
    Cassie’s eyes widened in panic. He couldn’t see her looking like this – half-dressed in a nightie over her ‘grubby’ underwear with no make-up on.
    The girls clearly had the same thought and sprang up off the floor to group around her like a footballer’s wall, just as Gil peered in. He took in the scene of desolation – the empty cake box, the half-drunk bottles of champagne, the piles of shoes, the dresses on the beds and the huddle of women, two of them in identikit towelling robes and hair turbans.
    ‘I thought I’d find all of you in the one room together. Heaven forbid you should get ready in your own rooms,’ he quipped.
    He stepped into the room, looking relieved that everyone was ‘decent’. He was already dressed for the festivities, wearing a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket and trousers in the family’s dress tartan. His sharp, hawkish features – which always looked so intimidating in his barrister’s gown and wig – were softened by the anticipation of the night’s revelries.
    ‘You’ve put me in the Faerie Room, Gil,’ Suzy said accusingly, hands on hips. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten that’s the one that’s haunted. You weren’t the only one who didn’t sleep a wink on your wedding night.’
    Gil laughed softly at her allusion to the lap-dancing pole the girls had put up in his room. ‘I’m sorry Archie couldn’t make it this weekend. It would have been good to see him.’
    ‘Well, you’re not as sorry as he is,’ Suzy replied on behalf of her errant husband. ‘Camel racing with clients in Abu Dhabi is not his definition of a good time. The poor boy’s terrified. I had