She simply held her face up to him, staring unblinkingly while he steadied her chin with one hand and used the other to tidy up the locks that had strayed from their clips and pins.
“Don’t you have any gel or spray?” she asked, slightly regretting having to break the look of fierce focus in his eyes. It was unsettling in a way to have this amazing man concentrating on her so intently—but also more exciting than anything she could remember. More than roller coasters, skinny-dipping, sneaking wine coolers into the youth club, her first kiss, all the sex she’d ever had, getting the call from Elite. More than anything.
“You’ll be fine,” he tutted, fixing a clip to the side of her head and reversing a little to examine his work. “That’s tidy now.”
She put her hand to the coiled sweeps of hair. It did feel right.
“But what about my eye?”
“Do you have any of that skin stuff you rub in? What’s it called?”
“Foundation? Concealer? Actually, yes, I do have a concealer stick.” Laura fished it out of her purse. He popped the lid off and waved it dangerously near her eye. She recoiled but he grabbed the back of her neck and held her in position. His hand was firm and warm on her nape; the pads of his fingers felt like rough velvet pressing into her skin. He might do this if he was going to kiss her. Was he going to kiss her?
Her lips hung open and her breath was escaping in uncontrollable little sighs while he worked at blotting out the signs of the fracas. He applied the concealer gently, careful not to hurt the bruising areas, almost too lightly to be felt, but he was doing a very thorough job, underneath the socket and then at the crease and then gliding gently over her eyelid, with his glacial blue stare boring into her.
“Hmmm,” he murmured. The tip of his nose was a fraction of an inch away from hers. “Not sure it’s working.”
It’s working for me. But she didn’t say it. “I can’t get photographed for the local rag with a massive black eye,” she mourned. “What are we going to do, Rocky?”
Laura put a hand on his knee and he flinched, just a little.
“You’re my guardian angel. Guardian angels always have a plan.”
“Laura,” he said. She loved the way he said her name, especially the touch of hoarseness in his voice. “I’m trying to help…”
“I know you are.” She could see the top of a pair of sunglasses peeking out of his jacket pocket. She reached forward to swipe them and put them on. Not perfect—far too big—but better than being the object of salacious gossip all the way along the parade route. “You don’t mind, do you? I’ll give them back to you afterwards. And I owe you one. More than one.”
Rocky shook his head. “What will you do if I decide to collect, Laura?” he asked, and for a moment she could not breathe or think.
“Anytime. Collect anytime,” she said, not quite able to string the words together properly.
“I will. Come on, then. Let’s go and find the First Aider and get some antiseptic on that elbow.”
Outside the lorry cab, they snapped back into their real selves—the bad boy biker and the Carnival Queen—as if the vehicle was some kind of Narnia-style gateway to a different reality.
Laura put on her sash and tiara, posed for photographs, did a couple of local radio interviews, chose a replacement for Tiff, and then did the long and boring trip along the seafront, moving at a funereal pace past hordes of scruffy dirty-faced kids and their fat slobs of parents. She waved at them automatically, whilst looking at Rocky, riding slowly on his flashy red bike, his body fitting those tight leathers to mouthwatering perfection. She felt on edge, alive, shiny with possibility. She was going to find Rocky and give him his sunglasses back and then…what then? Oh, anything could happen.
But when the procession ended, she was held up by bloody hacks from the Gazette and various snotty kids wanting their photographs taken with her, and by the time she was able to escape from them and from Daddy and from her friends, Rocky had gone.
Laura spent the next few weeks trying to track him down. She looked for his head and shoulders over every crowd, checked the side of every street for his streamlined beauty of a bike. Sometimes a figure in leathers would pass her, but it was never the figure she was looking for. Sometimes she thought she saw a flash of blue eye or a hank of black hair, but they were always on the wrong person.
Then the day came. It was August Bank Holiday Monday, the fag end of the season, but the sun was out and the beach was heaving. Laura was taking advantage of the high temperatures to keep her tan topped up, lying on a sunbed, reading a trashy book alongside a couple of friends when the roar of a motorbike
engine caused her to sit up and crane her neck around to the seafront—a reflexive reaction these days.
It was his bike. It was him. Pulling up outside the Fairview Hotel. She could see flashes where the sun glinted off his polished chrome fittings, and by the time she had jumped off her sunbed, grabbed a sarong and galloped up the beach, he was inside the building.
The Fairview was a large bed-and-breakfast place with a public bar on the ground floor and a few tables outside; it used to have a smart reputation but had gone steadily downhill since Laura’s childhood and was distinctly seedy now.
Laura shuddered a little on walking into the bar; it seemed that the manager was pretty lax about enforcing the smoking ban and the place was blanketed in curling blue smoke. A gaggle of ugly poor people stood at the bar, but Rocky was not among them. She returned to the reception area—nobody was on the desk. He must be in one of the rooms. She ventured farther back, glad of her flip-flops on the dirty carpet, trying not to inhale the rank odour of stale frying that hung in the air. Voices were coming from the breakfast room, loud, male and somewhat belligerent. One of them was Rocky’s.
“You knew the terms. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
Laura stood by the half-open door, peering in at the scene. Rocky and another biker type were standing over a sweaty-looking man in a dining table chair, who didn’t look very happy to be there.
“The insurance company aren’t playing ball,” said the seated man in a strangulated tone. “I’ve been on and on to them…”
His voice trailed off—he had seen her.