Free Flawless by Tilly Bagshawe Page B

level, Diana O’Donnell was nodding absently at the South African woman talking to her, wishing she were anywhere but here. Brogan had insisted she come tonight, practically marched her here at gunpoint, but all she could think about was the tiny fertilized egg that was right now working its way out of her body, unable to cling onto life. The doctors were forever telling her not to personalize things.
    “Don’t think of it as a baby, Mrs. O’Donnell,” they said. “It’s really only a tiny ball of cells, nothing more.”
    But to Diana it was much, much more. It was a child; her child. Each of those tiny fertilized specks contained within it the entire sum of her hopes for the future. Losing one felt like having her heart ripped out, and it got worse every time.
    “I said to Michael the day I married him,” the South African woman was saying in her piercing Afrikaans accent, “I said, ‘Michael, I don’t care how many diamonds you sell, or how many millions you make. I will
not
share my bed with your
bloody
mobile phone.’ He’s pretty good about it most of the time, but you know what the New Year’s like in our business: hectic, hectic, hectic.” She laughed, looking to Diana for affirmation, and Diana dutifully laughed back.
    “Is Brogan addicted to his BlackBerry as well?” asked the woman, grabbing a passing waiter and helping herself to a caviar-and-quail’s-egg blini, which she dispatched into the recesses of her ample stomach in under a second. She really was a remarkably unattractive girl, thought Diana. Like a female sumo wrestler, if female sumo wrestlers got to be sponsored by Ungaro. Then again, her husband, a squat toad of a man deep in conversation with Brogan, was no oil painting either.
    “BlackBerry addiction is the least of my husband’s problems,” rejoined Diana, sadly. Then, realizing she might have said too much, added, “But all successful men love their work, don’t they? I think that great, overwhelming drive must be part of their appeal.”
    Downstairs on the ground floor, an eight-piece jazz band struck up the first chords of “Night and Day.” A few brave couples drifted idly onto the makeshift dance floor, but most remained glued to the various bars, raising their voices to be able to continue their conversations about how much x stone sold for at auction, or exactly what the markup was on some of the more outrageous Tiffany pieces.
    “You’re paying for the name, of course,” Danny Meyer was explaining to a busty television actress, the star of NBC’s latest mobster drama, as he handed her a mojito. “Half of these pieces are semiprecious, but the prices are gemstone all the way.”
    “You think you can do me a better deal?” the girl asked flirtatiously. He was a little short, but she adored his confidence andhad already decided that his North London accent was the sexiest thing she’d heard in years. He was definitely more interesting than the standard-issue New York suits who usually asked her out.
    “Sweetheart, trust me; I can do you a
much
better deal. I’m purely a diamond man myself, but I work with some of the best private jewelers in the city, real craftsmen. Any of this lot, half price,” he said, sweeping his arm in the general direction of the glass cases surrounding them, much as a market trader might wave away a competitor’s inferior stall of bananas.
    “Don’t believe a word he says.” Jake, vulgarly resplendent in a cream Miami Vice suit with a big seventies collar, pink shirt, and silver Sean John silk tie, appeared behind his brother like a grinning ghost. “He’ll rob you blind soon as look at you, won’t you, Dan?”
    “Annalise, this is my twin brother, Jake,” said Danny, rolling his eyes melodramatically. “And if you can trust a man in a suit that loud, you deserve to get done over.”
    “Hi,” said Annalise, thinking how much she would enjoy being “done over” by Jake or Danny, or perhaps even both of them together.