Bad Brides by Rebecca Chance Page B

bargain.
    To her own surprise, Tamra, who had barely picked up a book in her life before, was finding all this literature utterly absorbing. She was almost sorry to turn off the audiobook when the Flying
Spur pulled to a halt outside the discreet mechanical gate around the corner from her Chelsea mansion. Teodor, the very efficient Slovak chauffeur, pressed the remote that activated the gate,
sliding the car down the passageway that led to her own private parking garage below the house.
    ‘Thank you, Teodor,’ Tamra said as he held the door open for her. ‘Once you’ve cleared the drink and food from the car and taken it to the kitchen, you and Marta can have
the night off.’
    ‘Thank you, Mrs Maloney,’ Teodor said politely, and stood waiting, hands folded, as Tamra walked over to the garage lift; he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing anything so crass as
beginning to clean out the Bentley until his employer was on her way up to her three-floor, thirty-room mansion.
    The opulent master suite –
mistress suite
, Tamra liked to call it – of the Chelsea mansion which Lady Margaret McArdle, Tamra’s newly made British friend, had
nicknamed the White House, spread across a large part of the third floor. Like Tamra, Lady Margaret was perpetually irreverent, one of the many common factors that had made them fast friends. When
Tamra had first come to London, she had, in true nineteenth-century style, hired an indigent aristocrat, a divorcée who had manoeuvred her short marriage to a baronet into writing puff
interviews for
Hello!
,
Tatler
and
Majesty
magazine, and was regularly engaged to chaperone rich Americans around London, introducing them into society.
    But as soon as Tamra and Lady Margaret had met, at the bar at the House of Lords reception after the Berkeley Dress Show, the first official event of the London débutante season, the two
women had bonded instantly, snapping together like magnets. The American newly minted multi-millionairess from Kewanee, Illinois and the Duke’s daughter with the bluest Anglo-Irish blood
running in her veins were sisters under the skin, bawdy women who could drink most men under the table without blinking an eye. They could have run a bar in the heyday of the Wild West as a team,
and managed the brothel upstairs too.
    So the baronet’s divorcée was now distant history, and Lady Margaret McArdle was Tamra’s BFF: they were practically joined at the hip. Tamra had been very amused by the
‘White House’ comment, and it was never more apt than in the ‘mistress suite’, which comprised not just the huge, pristine white bedroom, but two walk-in dressing rooms for
summer and winter wardrobes, a fur closet, and two bathrooms – because it could certainly not be assumed that a couple who shared a bed would ever want to share a bathroom. Both were walled
and floored in almost-translucent Tuscan grey-veined marble, with walk-in rainforest showers, gigantic travertine sinks and, to Tamra’s great pleasure, sunken jacuzzis: she loathed the
fashion for freestanding baths in the middle of the room. Where did you put your soap? Your body brush? Your glass of champagne? Your waterproof vibrator? Even your book?
    Because Tamra was genuinely surprised by how much pleasure she was taking in reading ever since she had come to London. She had never had time before to stop and smell the roses, had been way
too busy driving from one pageant to another, coaching her daughter, calculating strategies by which they could save a buck or two; and then, after marriage to Ken, she had thrown herself into
learning the ropes of the cut-throat world of the fracking industry, Ken her enthusiastic guide. There had barely been a book in the whole sprawl of their entire Florida home, apart from maybe
Warren Buffet’s authorized biography and a couple of Tom Clancys.
    But now, I really love books. Who the hell saw that coming? I honestly think folks in Kewanee would be as surprised to see me