Free Beautiful People by Wendy Holden Page A

mother came up.
        And she had positively purred when he had finished telling her how he had walked round Muswell Hill all night, unable to speak, after seeing her performance on DVD as Nora in a celebrated seventies production of A Doll's House transposed to an S&M Amsterdam brothel.
        "It said everything about the condition of women," he had told Angharad hotly, and she had pushed back her still-beautiful-butgreying wild, black hair from her still-exquisite high-cheekboned face and gazed at Niall with dark-eyed rapture.
        Niall would get there, Darcy felt certain. He was just taking some time to break through, that was all. His Scottish looks, coupled with the fact he actually was Scottish, meant that TV drama offers of Scottish policemen, Scottish drug-dealers, Scottish pimps, Scottish alcoholics, Scottish wifebeaters, and, on one occasion, a Scottish corpse, regularly came his way. But these were hardly the parts he was looking for, and he was determined not to be pigeonholed. Or "Macpigeonholed," as he put it. Hopefully the Hamlet audition tomorrow—or today, Darcy realised, it being one in the morning— would bring him what he deserved.
        Darcy now tiptoed into the bedroom where Niall lay sleeping. She smiled at how incongruously rugged and masculine he looked in Anna's enormous, rather princessy bed.
        Absorbedly, Darcy stretched out a hand over the thick, dark-red curls that, when he was standing, flowed almost to Niall's shoulders and lightly touched the reddish-brown brow. She traced the jutting nose with its rounded end and brushed the red-gold stubble on the determined cleft chin. She half-wanted him to wake, to open the big, pale-blue eyes that she had, when they had first met, laughingly told him were the colour of boxes from Tiffany's. "Are they?" he had replied in his Glaswegian growl. "I wouldn't know."
        But Niall slept on, his left arm bent under his head, his hand only just visible beneath the hair. Darcy smiled as she saw the scrolled silver tops of the Celtic rings he wore on every finger of this hand like a Caledonian knuckle-duster. The white-blonde lashes, each one tipped with a fleck of brownish-red, remained pressed against his white and freckled cheek. Even when she skimmed the flat of her hand over his pale, broad chest with its red-gold hair, he did not wake. Noticing the shiny, purple hollows just south of his closed eyelids, she decided to leave him alone. Working on the building site was, she knew, exhausting, and he had had Hamlet to learn on top of it.
        He was sleeping in a particularly horrid and ancient T-shirt, she noticed indulgently, a dirty, white one with a St. Andrew's flag on it that she had nagged him many times to get rid of. But she loved the fact Niall utterly lacked vanity. Unlike some men she had known, he never blow-dried his hair, used fake tan, or visited a salon for any reason other than to meet her.
        In a corner of the bedroom, Anna's little white-and-gold telephone suddenly shrilled. One in the morning, Darcy realised, glancing at the ornate ormolu clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. Who on earth could this be?
        Had something happened to her mother? Her father? Panic seized Darcy's throat as she answered.
        "We haven't spoken," came the booming voice of Mitch Masterson. "But I'm the agent representing you in Hollywood, and I'm calling with some very good news."
        Darcy felt an uncharacteristic wave of annoyance. It was late, and she was tired. If this was someone's idea of a joke, it was not very funny. She had not even realised she was represented in Hollywood. Her London agents, a pair of exuberant, eccentric, and much-powdered old ladies who had been her parents' and, towards the end of Anna's career, her grandmother's agents before that, seemed to have enough problems representing her in London.
        Darcy had stuck with them out of a sense of loyalty and history, but she had been sent