Up Close and Personal Read Free Page B

loosen up once he gets to knowyou.’ She wrapped her arm round his waist. ‘I’ll take you on a guided tour later, if you like. There’s tons to show you.’
    ‘I bet there is; I can’t wait to see it,’ Dante said, trying to sound as if he meant it. He knew he should be excited about the prospect of exploring his new home, but instead all he felt was a sense of being hopelessly out of his depth.

2
    It was lunchtime in Loxwood High Street and Chez Gaston was bustling with life. Sitting at one of the restaurant’s coveted window tables was journalist Yasmin O’Brien. The exotic product of an Irish father and a Malaysian mother, she was tall and olive-skinned, with glossy chestnut hair and startling green eyes. Since making her entrance, five minutes earlier, Yasmin had drawn plenty of admiring glances, but she was too engrossed in her mobile phone to notice them. She’d just received a text from her current lover, David, a fellow journalist, who lived in London. They’d met at a press conference in the city and, after some flirtatious small talk as they waited for the conference to begin, David had invited her to join him for dinner that evening. Dinner became a nightcap at Yasmin’s hotel and so on to bed. They’d been seeing each other for nearly two months now – though, given the distance between them, their dates were usually confined to weekends.
    In the beginning, things had been great. Just lately, however, David had grown clingy and now here was a text demanding to know why Yasmin wasn’t coming down that weekend. Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she punched out a brief reply, promising to call him that evening. She’d break the bad news to him then. Even for someone as single-minded as Yasmin, dumping a lover by text was a no-no.
    The text safely despatched, she leaned back in her chairand smoothed a hand over her Miu Miu pencil skirt. The designer suit had cost her the best part of a month’s wages, but it had been worth every penny. Whenever she wore it, she felt powerful, invincible even. Not that she wasn’t pretty self-assured already, but just occasionally she needed an extra boost of confidence, especially when it came to dealing with some of the Sunday Post ’s curmudgeonly hacks, who resented her rapid rise through the ranks.
    Yasmin had wanted to be a journalist for as long as she could remember. After graduating with a first in media studies, she’d joined a local free sheet as an unpaid intern. Six months of making tea and photocopying followed before she landed a proper job as the editor’s PA. By her own admission she was a useless secretary, too busy looking over the reporters’ shoulders and bombarding the features editor with ideas to take dictation. Within a year, she was working as a junior reporter on the showbiz desk of a well-regarded evening paper. Equipped with a socialite’s charm and a racehorse’s stamina, Yasmin rose steadily through the ranks until, at the age of thirty-one, she defected to the Sunday Post , becoming the first female showbiz editor in the paper’s long and proud history – not to mention the youngest.
    Yasmin checked her watch; her friends were running late. Feeling bored, she pulled her compact out of her handbag and flipped it open, checking her teeth for lipstick marks. The face that stared back at her looked tense – which, given her current workload, was hardly surprising. Sighing, she snapped the compact shut. When she was stressed, there was only one remedy and, with the soon-to-be-dumped David miles away in London, she was going to have to seek a cure closer to home.
    Looking up, she saw Gaston himself standing at her table. ‘Good afternoon, Mademoiselle O’Brien. What a pleasure it is to see you – as always,’ he lisped. ‘And may I say how lovely you’re looking today?’
    ‘Thank you, Gaston,’ Yasmin replied, though she knew his compliment was meaningless, given that he took the same toadying tack with all his rich and/or