‘It’ll just be a dinner,’ he assured her. ‘All you need to do is smile and look pretty and pretend that you’re going to be the perfect engineer’s wife.’
Of course, that was going to be the problem. He’d eyed Allegra critically. She’d been dressed in a short stretchy skirt that showed off her long legs, made even longer by precarious heels. ‘Maybe you’d better wear something a bit more...practical,’ he’d said. ‘You don’t really look like an engineer’s wife.’
Allegra, of course, had taken that as a compliment.
‘I don’t mind going along to the dinner with you,’ she said now. ‘I may not be much of an actress, but I expect I can pretend to love you for an evening.’
‘Thanks, Legs,’ said Max. ‘It means a lot to me.’
‘But...’ she said, drawing out the word, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously; he never liked the sound of ‘but’. ‘...there is just one tiny thing you could do for me in return.’
She smiled innocently at him and his wary look deepened. ‘What?’
‘No, your line is, Of course, Allegra, I’ll do whatever you want. Would you like to try it again?’
‘What?’ he repeated.
Allegra sighed and squirmed round until she was facing him. She tucked her hair behind her ears, the way she did when she was trying to look serious, and fixed him with her big green eyes.
‘You know how hard it’s been for me to make my mark at Glitz?’
Max did. He knew more than he wanted, in fact, about Allegra’s precarious foothold on the very lowest rung of the glossy magazine, where as far as he could make out, emotions ran at fever-pitch every day and huge dramas erupted over shoes or handbags or misplaced emery boards. Or something equally pointless.
Allegra seemed to love it. She raced into the flat, all long legs and cheekbones and swingy, shiny hair, discarding scarves and shoes and earrings as she went, and whirled out again in an outfit that looked exactly the same, to Max’s untutored eye.
She was always complaining, though, that no one at the magazine noticed her. Max thought that was extremely unlikely. Allegra might not be classically beautiful but she had a vivid face with dark hair, striking green eyes and a mobile expression. She wasn’t the kind of girl people didn’t notice.
He’d known her since Libby had first brought her home for the holidays. Max, callous like most boys his age, had dismissed her at first as neurotic, clumsy and overweight. For a long time she’d just been Libby’s gawky friend, but she’d shed the weight one summer and, while it was too much to say that she’d emerged a butterfly from her chrysalis, she had certainly gained confidence. Now she was really quite attractive, Max thought, his gaze resting on her face and drifting, quite without him realising, to her mouth.
He jerked his eyes away. The last time he’d found himself looking at her mouth, it had nearly ended in disaster. It had been before he’d met Emma, a moment of madness one night when all at once things seemed to have changed. Max still didn’t know what had happened. One moment he and Allegra had been talking, and the next he’d been staring into her eyes, feeling as if he were teetering on the edge of a chasm. Scrabbling back, he’d dropped his gaze to her mouth instead, and that had been even worse.
He’d nearly kissed Allegra.
How weird would that have been? Luckily they’d both managed to look away at last, and they’d never referred to what had happened—or not happened—ever again. Max put it out of his mind. It was just one of those inexplicable moments that were best not analysed, and it was only occasionally, like now, when the memory hurtled back and caught him unawares, a sly punch under his ribs that interfered oddly with his breathing.
Max forced his mind back to Allegra’s question. ‘So what’s changed?’ he asked her, and she drew a deep breath.
‘I’ve got my big break! I’ve got my own assignment.’
‘Well, great...good for you, Legs. What’s it going to be? A hard-hitting exposé of corruption in the world of shoes? Earth-shattering revelations on where the hemline is going to be next year?’
‘Like I’d need your help if it was either of those!’ said Allegra tartly. ‘The man who wouldn’t know fashion if it tied him up and slapped him around the face with a wet fish.’
‘So what do you need me for?’
‘Promise you’ll hear me out before you say anything?’
Max swung his legs down and sat up as he eyed Allegra with foreboding. ‘Uh-oh, I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this!’
‘Please, Max! Just listen!’
‘Oh, all right,’ he grumbled, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘But this had better be good.’
‘Well...’ Allegra moistened her lips. ‘You know we have an editorial conference to plan features for the coming months?’
Max didn’t, but he nodded anyway. The less he had to hear about the workings of Glitz, the better.
‘So the other day we were talking about one of the girls whose relationship has just fallen apart.’
‘This is work? Gossiping about relationships?’ It didn’t sound like any conference Max had ever been in.
‘Our readers are interested in relationships.’ Allegra’s straight, shiny hair had swung forward again. She flicked it back over her shoulder and fixed him with a stern eye. ‘You’re supposed to be just listening,’ she reminded him.
‘So, yes, we were talking about that and how her problem was that she had totally unrealistic expectations,’ she went on when Max subsided with a sigh. ‘She wanted some kind of fairy tale prince.’
Princes. Fairy tales. Max shook his head. He thought about his own discussions at work: about environmental impact assessments and deliverables and bedrock depths. Sometimes it seemed to him that Allegra lived in a completely different world.
‘We had a long discussion about what women really want,’ she went on, ignoring him. ‘And we came to the conclusion that actually we want everything. We want a man who can fix a washing machine and plan the perfect date. Who’ll fight his way through a thicket if required but who can also dress well and talk intelligently at the theatre. Who can plan the perfect romantic date and sort out your tax and dance and communicate...’
Max had been listening with growing incredulity. ‘Good luck finding a bloke who can do all that!’
‘Exactly!’ Allegra leant forward eagerly. ‘Exactly! That was what we all said. There isn’t anyone like that out there. So I started thinking: what if we could make a man like that? What if we could create a boyfriend who was everything women wanted?’
‘How on earth would you go about that?’ asked Max, not sure whether to laugh or groan in disbelief.
‘By teaching him what to do,’ said Allegra. ‘That’s what I pitched to Stella: a piece on whether it’s possible to take an ordinary bloke and transform him into the perfect man.’
There was a silence. Max’s sense of foreboding was screaming a warning now.
‘Please tell me this isn’t the point where you say, And this is where you come in,’ he said in a hollow voice.
‘And this is where you come in, Max,’ said Allegra.
He stared at her incredulously. She was smiling, and he hoped to God it was because she was winding him up. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘Think about it: you’re the ideal candidate. You haven’t got a girlfriend at the moment...and frankly,’ she added, unable to resist, ‘unless you get rid of that