Farm Fatale by Wendy Holden Read Free Book Online

details now, while Jorgen's setting up the next shot," Bella interrupted with a dazzling smile. "Could I just ask you, Miss Villiers, where you met your husband? Did I hear something about the foyer of his bank when you were working as a receptionist?" She held out the Dictaphone in Samantha's direction.
        Samantha looked thunderous. "Certainly not. We met on a film set."
    "How tremendously exciting. What was the film, Miss Villiers?"
        Samantha paused. This was a tricky one. It had been undisputedly a masterstroke, while sitting behind the reception desk of his bank, to tell the recently divorced vice president that she was an actress and had taken the job to research a role about a receptionist who rises to become the bank's first female president. Guy had been so captivated by this explanation—as well as Samantha herself—that the film's continuing failure to materialize had never seemed to occur to him.
        "I can't recall it immediately," Samantha said eventually with a tinkling laugh. "One learns as an actress to—as Hamlet put it— shrug off the mortal coil of each part as it is finished in order to don the new. At the moment, I'm so utterly consumed by my latest challenge, the part of Christabel, that I have no emotional space for anything else…"
        "How terribly interesting, Miss Villiers," Bella gushed. "And who exactly is Christabel?"
        "A femme fatale." Samantha tossed her hair. "Helen of Troy, Anna Karenina, Cleopatra. An irresistible siren who unleashes the forces of uncontrollable lust everywhere she goes. With far-reaching consequences."
        As Bella opened her mouth, Samantha held up a commanding hand. "I'm not at liberty to reveal any more about it, I'm afraid. The part is in development."
        Bella picked up her Dictaphone again.
        "In the Villierses' hall," she murmured, "one table is almost hidden by a bowl of polished Chinese stones, a vulture's feather, two porcupine quills, and bunches of tiny dried lotus-flower seeds tied with a ribbon of steel beads. Intricate? Yes. Affected? No. Original and interesting? Absolutely…"
    ***
    "My God, those people ." Rosie shook her head and stared disbelievingly out the window as, shoot finished, they sped away from Roland Gardens in Bella's vast black four-wheel drive.
        "Par for the course, sweetie." Across the black leather-swathed gear lever, Bella's profile was tranquil. "Judging from the Polaroids, the shoot will be a great success. I'm sure the editor's going to want to use it as soon as possible, given that the Radical Minimalist look's probably not going to last long."
        Rosie looked at her watch. The shoot had taken eight hours. Her nerves felt as frayed as the deliberately unfinished edges of the hessian cushions she had spent the afternoon arranging in piles meant to look as if carelessly tossed by someone with an unerring sense of style. Unfortunately, with every toss, the cushion pile had looked more erring, less stylish, and increasingly frayed at the edges. Still, at least she would get paid for helping, and, infinitely better, she would soon be in the country and hundreds of miles from Samantha Villiers and anyone remotely like her.
        There had been neither time nor opportunity to discuss the great news with Bella until now. "Mark's agreed to move to the country," she told Bella triumphantly.
        Bella swerved to avoid a meandering drunk on the Cromwell Road. "Really? He didn't seem all that keen on it at dinner, I must say."
        "Things change," said Rosie enigmatically. She didn't have the energy to go into detail about the column. Nor, for the moment, did she have the details. "We're about to start the hunt for the perfect cottage," she added.
        "Oh, well," said Bella reassuringly. "Never mind. Just think of all that lovely tweed and cashmere you can wear."
        "Or fur ." Rosie cast a meaningful glance at Bella's coat. "I just don't know how you can