The Pearl Necklace by Geraldine O'Hara Page A

just been blown
up—they’d been at the stage where they were a bit soft, the party having ended
three days ago—but they’d been mine. Now, I sported a pair fresh from surgery,
which didn’t seek my armpits to hide in when I was lying down.
    Crap. I
really had made a bit of a mess of things, and all I could do about it was
grizzle to myself until the contract was up.
    “Nerves,”
I said to the hairdresser. “Yes.” Except I wasn’t suffering with nerves, more
that this whole situation was getting on them.
    I stood
and walked out into a corridor, registering the bodyguard standing beside the
door. It was the fella who floated my boat and made me go squiffy in places he shouldn’t. I didn’t surreptitiously ogle him like I usually did,
though. I had to find a toilet where no one but Joe Public could hear me
weeing. There was something refreshing about the prospect of doing that over
knowing, if I’d used the loo in the dressing room, that the hairdresser would have had to stand there while a concerto resembling Niagra Falls played out.
    I strode
down the hallway on too-high black heels that rubbed the backs of my feet and
squashed my toes. Wincing, I tried to appear as though everything was fine so
that the bodyguard, who was undoubtedly following me, wouldn’t ask, as he
usually did, if I needed anything. Oh, he was a very nice man, and I fancied him something rotten, but an affair
with him, no matter how much I fantasised about it, wasn’t going to happen. He
was just doing his job. No way on this earth did he fancy me too.
    “Do you
need anything, Miss Hillary?” he called.
    “No thank
you,” I said, swaying my arse a bit, hoping his view of it was enhanced by the
tight black jeans I’d painted on myself earlier this evening. “And I’ve told
you before, please call me Sasha.” I smiled
to myself at the way his voice had sent shivers down my now-knobbly spine and a
splash of God-I-want-sex to my clit.
    “I can’t
do that,” he said, coming abreast of me.
    “Well,
that just bloody stinks,” I said, tottering along, checking at all the doors in
the hope I’d see a sign on one of them of a bald woman in a skirt with her arms
sticking out to her sides and her legs akimbo. No feet, no hands, just
round-ended limbs.
    No such
sign was in sight, so at the end of the corridor I turned right into another,
getting the feeling this TV centre was a maze designed to keep all the stars
inside.
    “Just like I’m not allowed to call you by your first name,” I said, glancing
across at him and smiling with my non-whitened teeth. “And come to think of it,
I don’t even know what that is.”
    He gave me
a closed-mouth smile in return and didn’t offer me his name, so I had a good
look at him to see if I could match it to who he appeared to be. Brawny—had to
be for his job—wide as a bloody barn with muscles stacked upon muscles beneath
his black suit and crisp white shirt. His dark hair, a short back and sides but
with a trendy longer piece at the front that he waxed upwards, wasn’t anything
I’d be able to run my fingers through while he fucked me against the wall. That
was just one of my daydreams about him, one of the many I entertained while
sitting bored out of my wits in between guest appearances. Those visions passed
the time nicely.
    “You look
like a Henry,” I said. “Or a Mark. Maybe even a
Justin.”
    “I’m not two
of those,” he said, grinning.
    “So which
one are you? Won’t you tell me?” I stopped walking and stared at him, hands on
hips, and cocked my head. “Please? I won’t ever use it.” I smiled. “Not when
anyone else is around anyway.”
    He shook
his head. “It’s not a name I’m fond of. Just choose whatever you think suits me
best.”
    I studied
him. Henry, Mark or Justin? I didn’t go for any of
them. “Bob. I think I’ll call you Bob.” He wasn’t to know that would work well
when I was in bed using my BOB, that I could actually
cry out when coming. Oh,