Fame by Tilly Bagshawe Read Free Book Online Page A

him for a full year now.
    Wow. A year of my life.
    It felt like twenty.
    Michel was so wise. So good. So capable. Tish Crewe was capable herself, very much head-girl material, and she admired this trait in others. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Michel also looked like a younger version of George Clooney, complete with sexy, two-day stubble growth and smouldering coffee-brown eyes. Nor that he was so good in bed, Tish had had to restrict the lovemaking during their brief, six-week affair to Michel’s apartment, afraid that she might make so much noise at home that she would wake up Abel, her adopted five-year-old son, and scare the living daylights out of him.
    It wasn’t Michel’s fault. He’d been honest with her from the beginning. ‘I don’t do commitment,’ he told Tish bluntly, the night they first kissed on the bridge over the Crisul Repede in Oradea’s old town. ‘My work is my passion. If you’re looking for something serious, I’m not your man.’
    Tish had assured him she was not looking for something serious. After four years of almost total celibacy, living in a city that still looked and felt as dour and grey and lifeless as it had under communism, the idea of some fun, especially the kind of fun that Dr Michel Henri was offering, sounded utterly perfect. Since founding her own children’s home three years earlier, and particularly since adopting her darling Abel, Tish barely had enough time in the days to eat and shower, never mind indulge in a sex life. I deserve some fun , she told herself. Why not?
    But of course she’d had to go and spoil it all by falling in love with him. Fool , she told herself, but then how could one not? When Michel took up with a pretty orthopaedic surgeon from Médecins Sans Frontières a few weeks later, Tish’s heart was crushed like a bug. It had taken every ounce of her self-control to hide the worst of her anguish from Michel himself. But to everyone else who worked with her, it was painfully obvious.
    ‘He’s not worth it, you know.’ Pete Klein, the head of one of the American NGOs, had been watching Tish gaze longingly after Michel’s retreating back in the hospital car park a few weeks ago.
    He is to me , thought Tish, but she forced a professional smile.
    ‘Hello, Pete. How are you?’
    ‘Better for seeing you, my dear.’
    A kindly, born-again Christian in his early sixties, Pete Klein had decided to make it his personal mission to find the lovely Miss Crewe a suitable husband. She was, after all, a gorgeous girl. Not gorgeous in an obvious, long-legged, modelly sort of way. No, Tish’s beauty was of an altogether more wholesome variety. Slight and naturally blonde, with a long nose, strong, aristocratic bone structure and a glorious wide, pale pink mouth that Pete had seen express every emotion from compassion to courage to delight, Tish had a natural, make-up-free charm to her that a certain type of man would give his eyeteeth to come home to every night. As Tish’s schoolfriend Katie had once accurately, if tactlessly, put it: ‘You’re Jennifer Aniston, Tishy. Guys like Michel always go for the Angelinas in the end. You’re too nice.’
    Pete Klein didn’t believe a person could be ‘too nice’. Nor could he see what on earth wonderful young women like Tish Crewe found attractive in good-for-nothing fly-by-nights like that slimy Frenchman Dr Henri. Forget Doctors Without Borders. Michel Henri was a Doctor Without Scruples, and he’d hurt poor Miss Crewe badly.
    ‘You should have dinner with my friend Gustav,’ Pete told Tish.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know, Pete …’
    ‘Yes, yes, you must,’ Pete insisted. ‘Lovely young man, from a very nice family in Munich. Just started working for us. Brilliant with computers,’ he added, with a wink that made Tish wonder if this was intended as some sort of double entendre. Except that Pete Klein didn’t do double entendres. He did earnest and avuncular and kind.
    So, ‘too nice’ to say no, Tish