Guilty Pleasures

‘Now, ma cherie. What are you wearing to the party?’

‘What? Oh, I haven’t decided …’ said Cassandra, still lost in thought.

‘Well perhaps I can help,’ said Guillaume with relish, tearing the layer of plastic off the package. Cassandra gasped.

‘For you,’ smiled Guillaume. It was a beautiful sculpted tulle gown, the very same show-stopping gown Guillaume had used to end the catwalk show, except this version had been created in the most glorious pale biscuit colour, its neckline sprinkled with delicate seed pearl embroidery. She reached out a finger to touch the beading.

‘Lesage?’ she said recognizing the work of the great French artisan house.

He nodded and she beamed. The colour was the perfect complement to her skin.

But it was more than that: this was a dress that would be fêted by journalists in thousands of column inches and be worn by A-list stars on the red carpets of the Oscars or Cannes – except they wouldn’t be the first to wear it. Cassandra Grand would be, even before it had its official debut at Guillaume Riche’s Autumn/Winter collection.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, ‘just so, so, beautiful!’ Carried away by the moment, Cassandra dropped her guard and embraced Guillaume, kissing him on both cheeks.

‘And it will fit perfectly.’

Cassandra smiled. She knew it would. It would fit her lithe body perfectly and it would fit her new plan perfectly, her new plan which started tonight.

‘Maintenant,’ screamed the sexy blonde, grabbing onto the bed-sheets.

‘Sure thing, baby …’

Tom Grand had dropped French as soon as he could at Shrewsbury school and he could barely remember how to say hello let alone decipher the ramblings of someone in the throes of orgasm, but he didn’t need a dictionary to know the girl currently astride him was having a good time. Her small tits, glistening with sweat, were jiggling up and down as she slid herself along his cock, twisting her pelvis to grind her springy bush into him. Frankly, she was a wild-cat. Her name was Sophie. She was French, an actress, and when he had met her that afternoon in a café in the Bastille, where she’d been drinking espresso and painting her fingernails black, he’d suspected she’d be a right goer. He hadn’t minded that she wasn’t the most groomed girl he had ever seen. She had stringy blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and had been wearing a green parka coat and flip-flops despite the cold. But she had a delicious way of holding her cigarette, a filthy laugh and beautiful, dark, flinty eyes. Almost immediately he’d wanted to take her back to his swanky room at the super-chic Hôtel Costes. It was being paid for by Rive magazine and he wanted to make full use of the mini-bar and room service. But Sophie wasn’t impressed and besides, she wanted to feed her cat. So before Tom knew where he was, they were in bed in her tiny one-bedroom apartment in Montmartre improving Anglo-French relations.

Sophie lifted herself off him, stroking her clitoris with the tip of his throbbing cock. When Tom could stand it no more he grabbed her hips, pulling her back down so that they were rocking in tandem harder and faster until they both came together in a spine-jolting explosion that made Tom cry out so loudly, it made his throat hurt.

‘You’re fucking good,’ he said finally, exhaling deeply and collapsing onto the mattress.

‘Good at fucking?’ she replied in rather rickety English.

Tom laughed.

‘Yes, I suppose that’s exactly what I meant,’ he said, propping his head up on the pillow and thinking that if it hadn’t been for his mother he’d be halfway to India by now. He’d been finally evicted from his Camden flat for non-payment of rent just before Christmas and while he’d managed to extend his time in London looking up old girlfriends, he’d finally accepted his fate and moved back in with his mother just before Saul’s funeral. When the chance of a trip to Goa came along-his friend Mungo said he could get him work at an ‘amazing’ full moon party – Julia had given him such a hard time about it all that when Cassandra had asked him to DJ at some do in Paris he’d quickly accepted. He knew his mother would have put her up to it, but he was slightly less angry when Cassandra had indicated that she could introduce him to fashion show producers and other people who might finally get his music career going. Plus, Rive were putting him up at the Costes, which was never a chore.

Although he and his sister weren’t particularly close – Cassandra was too wrapped up in her shallow little world to really care about anyone else – every now and then she would throw him a bone. His mother and his friends were forever reminding him how lucky he was to have someone that connected and that powerful as a sibling, but Tom didn’t see it that way. Yes, he had a wardrobe full of Dior Homme suits, Tom Ford shirts and Bill Amberg bags, none of which he had paid a penny for. His friends called him the best-dressed loser in town and that was exactly the point. Every opportunity Cassandra gave him, simply fuelled his sense of inadequacy and every job he fucked up just showed him up in sharp contrast to his sister’s brilliant career. He used to think that he was just as creative as Cassandra and that he just hadn’t found the right outlet yet, but at 26, finding himself jobless and back at his mother’s, well, maybe he wasn’t really good at anything. Still, at least he was successful with the ladies.

Suddenly he remembered the party and sat up.

‘Shit! What time is it?’ Predictably, he didn’t have a watch.

Sophie shrugged. ‘Perhaps 9 o’clock.’

He was due at the Rive party at 10 p.m.

‘Bugger. How far is the Marais? I have to be at this party for ten.’

Sophie’s apartment was up eight flights of stairs in a run-down block overlooking Sacre Coeur. She shrugged again. ‘Ten minutes. Maybe.’

He pursed his lips. He wasn’t exactly sure where Montmartre was but he had a clue it was in the north of the city. The Marais was also on the right bank but closer to the Seine. Fuck it, he had to trust the local when she said it was close by, didn’t he?

‘Are you sure about that?’

Sophie didn’t even bother to shrug this time, simply rolled towards him and took his nipple between her lips.

‘Ooh,’ he smiled to himself, ‘no reply necessary.’

He put his arm behind his head and watched her slide off the futon.

Light poured in from the illuminated Sacre Coeur behind them. She had a beautiful long body, a slim, sinuous back and smooth round buttocks that looked like marble in the half-light.

‘Do you want some … ’ow do you say in English – GHB?’ she said, fiddling with a glass vial on her cluttered dresser.

Tom guffawed. ‘Shit, you get better all the time.’

Then he froze. There was a head poking round the bedroom door.

‘Allo.’

Tom sat up and grabbed the duvet to cover his exposed body.

Christ! Who’s this? He thought in a panic, imagining all sorts of knife-wielding boyfriend scenarios. Then he got a better look at the intruder. Hey, she’s a corker.

‘This is Sabine,’ said Sophie distractedly.

Sabine was even more startling than Sophie, her black hair looked as if it had been cut with a pair of shears into an uneven bob, but her face was exquisite enough to take it. She walked into the room holding a ginger cat which Tom could see had three legs.

Sabine saw Tom looking and smiled. ‘She fell from the window there onto the street. She survived so we call her Lucky.’

He liked this one too.

‘Er. Who is she?’ he asked, turning to Sophie. ‘Your flatmate?’ It was, however, a one-bedroom apartment.

‘My girlfriend,’ she said casually putting the GHB into a small tumbler of water and handing it to him before lying naked across the bed.

Blimey, thought Tom, I can’t remember getting a hard on again so quickly.

Sabine put the cat on the floor and kicked off her shoes before joining them on the bed, reaching over to kiss Sophie gently on the lips.

‘What time did you say it was again?’ said Tom, in no rush to leave.

Sabine looked at her watch. ‘9.15.’

The Marais was only ten minutes away Tom thought to himself as he moved forward to lie beside Sophie. She reached towards him and curled her black-tipped fingers around his hand and Tom knew that, for a short while at least, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Giles Banks, Rive magazine’s editor-at-large, stepped from the limousine outside the gorgeous Parisian hôtel particulier and offered a hand to the woman still in the car. As one pale caramel Manolo heel hit the pavement, even Giles, who had no interest in the opposite sex, recognized that she was a magnetic beauty. Dozens of flashbulbs went off like firecrackers. He stepped back out of the line of the cameras, knowing that nobody wanted a picture of him. This was Cassandra’s night. The final part of a quartet of big nights held during the international collections that had seen her host parties in New York, London, Milan and Paris to celebrate Rive’s tenth anniversary. Sure, Giles himself had been the one she had entrusted to organize the parties and it had been a mammoth operation pulling in every contact to make sure every A-list star in town was going to be there, but tonight it would still be Cassandra at the centre of everyone’s attention. So far the parties had all been enormous successes. The supper in New York, in a yet-to-be-opened restaurant in the Meatpacking District. In Milan, Cassandra’s good friends, the Count and Contessa of Benari, had lent her their pocket-sized palazzo on the shores of Lake Como, while in London she had taken over Spitalfields Market for the night, draping the vast Victorian warehouse with white silk. They had all been very, very exclusive with invitations strictly specifying ‘No plus ones’ and they had all been a triumph. His efforts had been worth it.

Giles was aware that his boss had a difficult reputation; she was the most demanding and particular woman he had ever met, but she was also brilliant and had been good to him: very good. He had learnt so much from her, been given so many opportunities and in helping transform UK Rive he now had an international reputation as one of the most talented fashion journalists in the world.