And Rupert owned the rest.
All those people who had fawned over her, pretended to be her friend, there wasn’t one she could trust or be sure was genuine rather than someone on his PR company’s payroll.
As for her mother…
She had no one and, run as hard as she might, nowhere to go. Her legs were buckling beneath her, lungs straining as she headed instinctively for the sparkle of Christmas lights and crowds of shoppers in which to lose herself, but she couldn’t stop.
In moments her pursuers would be on her and she didn’t need the dropping temperature, the huge white flakes that had begun to swirl from a leaden sky, to send a shiver up her spine. Then, as she rounded a corner seeking the safety of the crowds of Christmas shoppers, she saw the soaring asymmetrical glass pyramid of Hastings & Hart lighting up the winter gloom like a beacon.
She’d been in the store just the day before on a mission from Rupert to choose luscious Christmas gifts for his staff. Giving the gossip mag photographers who followed her everywhere their photo opportunities. It was all there in the files.
The plan to keep her fully occupied. Too busy to think.
The store seemed to mock her now and yet inside were nine warm and welcoming floors, each offering a hundred places to hide. Within its walls she would be off the street, safe for a while, and she flew across the street, dodging through the snarled-up traffic, heading towards the main entrance, slithering to a halt as she saw the doorman guarding the entrance.
Only yesterday he’d tipped his top hat to her in deference to her chauffeur-driven status.
He wouldn’t be so impressed by her arrival today but, dishevelled and limping, he would certainly remember her and, pulling her coat tidily around her and shouldering her bag, she teetered precariously on her bare toe as she slowed down to saunter past him, doing her best to look as if she was out for a little shopping.
‘You’ll find footwear on the ground floor, ma’am,’ he said, face absolutely straight, as he opened the door. And tipped his hat.
Scanning the ground floor from his bird’s-eye view, Nat’s attention was caught by two burly men in dark suits who’d paused in the entrance. They were looking about them, but not in the baffled, slightly desperate way of men trying to decide what gift would make their Christmas a memorable one.
Men didn’t shop in pairs and he could tell at a glance that these two weren’t here to pick out scents for the women in their life.
He’d seen the type often enough to recognise them as either close protection officers or bodyguards.
The doorman, well used to welcoming anyone from a royal to a pop star, would have alerted the store’s security staff to the arrival of a celebrity, but curiosity held him for the moment, interested to see who would follow them through the doors.
No one.
At least no one requiring a bodyguard, just the usual stream of visitors to the store, excited or harassed, who broke around the pair and joined the throng in the main hall.
Frowning now, he remained where he was, watching as the two men exchanged a word, then split up and began to work their way around the glittering counters, eyes everywhere, clearly looking for someone.
Make that a charge who had given her bodyguards the slip.
In the main hall, mobbed in the run-up to Christmas as shoppers desperately tried to tick names off their gift lists and stocked up on exotic, once-a-year luxuries, Lucy had hoped that no one would notice her. That once she was inside the store she’d be safe.
She’d been fooling herself.
She did her best to style it out, but she hadn’t fooled the doorman and several people turned to look as she tried—and failed—to keep herself on an even keel. And then looked again, trying to think where they’d seen her before.
The answer was everywhere.
Rupert was Celebrity magazine’s new best friend and his and her—mostly her—faces had been plastered over it for weeks. Their romance was news and cameras had followed her every move.
Everything she’d done, everywhere she’d been was a story and, as she tried to ease through the crowd, eyes down, she knew she was being stared at.
Then, from somewhere at the bottom of her bag, her phone began to belt out her I’m In Love With a Wonderful Guy ringtone.
Could anything be any less appropriate?
Or loud.
She might as well put a great big sign over her head, lit up and flashing ‘Dumb blonde here!’
Hampered by the file, she hunted for the wretched thing but, by the time she’d dug it out of the bottom of the bag, it had gone to voicemail. Not for the first time.
There had been half a dozen missed calls while she’d been making her escape and, as she looked at it, it beeped at her, warning that she now had a text, adding to her sense of being hunted.
She had to get off the ground floor and out of sight—now—and, giving up on the attempt to look casual, she kicked off her remaining shoe—after all, if she was four inches shorter she’d be less noticeable—and stuffed it, along with the file, in her bag.
As far as she could recall, the nearest powder room was on the third floor. If she made that without being discovered, she could hole up there for a while, lock herself in a cubicle and think. Something she should have done before barging into that press conference.
Avoiding the glass lifts and escalators—her red coat was too bright, too noticeable and the people following her had been close enough, smart enough to have figured out where she’d gone to earth—she hurried towards the stairs.
It was a good plan. The only problem with it was that by the time she’d reached the first floor she had a stitch in her side, her legs felt like jelly and her head was swimming from the crack on the temple.
For a moment she bent double as she tried to ease the pain.
‘Are you all right?’ A sweet lady was looking at her with concern.
‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a stitch.’ But the minute the woman was out of sight she slithered behind a floor-to-ceiling arrangement of silver and white snowflakes that had been constructed in the corner where the stairs turned. Safely out of sight, she sank down onto the floor and used her free hand to massage her ankles, which were aching from the strain. She pulled a face as she saw the state of her foot. Her shredded tights. But there was nothing she could do about that now.
Instead, she leaned back against the wall to catch her breath, regarding the state-of-the-art all-singing, alldancing phone that had so quickly become a part of her new life with uncertainty.
It held all her contacts, appointments. She dictated her thoughts into it. Her private diary. The elation, the disbelief, the occasional doubt. And it was her connection to a world that seemed endlessly fascinated by her.
Her Facebook page, the YouTube videos, her Twitter account.
Rupert’s PR people hadn’t been happy when they’d discovered that she’d signed up to Twitter all by herself. Actually, it had been her hairdresser who’d told her that she was being tweeted about and showed her how to set up her own account while waiting for her highlights to take.
That had been the first warning that she wasn’t supposed to have a mind of her own, but keep to the script.
Once they’d realised how well it was working, though, they’d encouraged her to tweet her every thought, every action, using the Cinderella hashtag, to her hundreds of thousands of followers. Keep them up to date with her transformation from Cinderella into Rupert’s fairy tale princess.
Innocently