The St. Tropez Lonely Hearts Club by Joan Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

with readers of celebrity magazines. But today she wasn’t in the mood to take ‘selfies’ with her fans and brusquely got rid of a couple with a dismissive wave.
    Aware of the tourists’ curious glances, a young waiter threw a white napkin over her nether regions as Lara sank even further into her seat, holding the vodka glass up to shield her face. ‘So,’ she whispered, ‘if he wasn’t with someone else, where the hell was he?’
    ‘Lara, calm down. He was just with me in Paris on his way to his singing lessons and I promise there was no slut, stupid or otherwise. I have a tail on him all the time.’ Maximus had been getting an extra stipend from Lara for a private detective service, one so discreet it was like a phantom, which in fact it was.
    ‘So, where are those photos you promised?’
    ‘What? They didn’t send them yet?
Merde
, those idiots! I will demand they send them immediately or else I promise you they will be fired!’ Firing was Maximus’s best expedient for getting out of a ruse – and he always knew how to end a con before it backfired. ‘But, my dear, there is nothing incriminating in them.’
    ‘Maximus,
Maximusssshh!
’ Lara stared at her cell phone. ‘Are you still there . . .? What was I saying?’ Lara’s short skirt was riding up to her waist now as she slid down almost horizontally.
    Realising she was almost completely exposed, she pulled down her skirt, no mean feat holding a glass of vodka, and suddenly her vision gained a new perspective – she’d never noticed the ceiling at Sénéquier before. It was a nice ceiling, freshly painted white. She dropped her cell phone and gazed, in mesmerised admiration, at a fat bumblebee lazily circumventing the ceiling.
    ‘Madame.’ A waiter – whose pity had clearly overwhelmed his Gallic sensibility for
laissez faire
– sidled up, picked up her phone, and suggested maybe he could help hoist her back up to a sitting position.
    ‘I’m just resting,’ Lara replied curtly, then wailed piteously to the bumblebee on the ceiling, ‘Oh, what am I to do?’
    ‘Madame?’ The waiter was confused that this famous socialite seemed to be engaging in conversation with him, although she wasn’t looking at him. He bent closer, staring, fascinated by her artificially enhanced features. Face job, nose job, boob job, nail and hair extensions and, underneath the shades that had slipped halfway down her face, weird turquoise contact lenses . . .
which part of her was real?
he wondered.
    His colleagues behind the bar sniggered. This had happened to all of them at one time or another – François, the rookie waiter, was about to get hooked into an endless conversation about Lara’s love trouble with Fabrizio. An hour wasted just for taking pity on the poor creature. Tips would be lost due to the unenviable task of dragging Lara back to her flat on Rue des Ponches.
    A deep voice from her phone suddenly boomed, ‘LARA? LARA! ARE YOU STILL THERE?’ Maximus’s voice reverberated off the rafters of Sénéquier, chasing the bumblebee away and startling Lara out of her reverie. She pressed the ‘end call’ button in a daze and her focus was suddenly wrenched back to her phone, which started ringing almost immediately.
    ‘Who on earth is calling me at this time of day?’ she snapped at a surprised François. ‘Don’t they know it’s impolite to call before noon? And what happened to Maximus? Wasn’t I just talking to him?’ Lara’s eyes swam in and out of focus.
    François picked up the phone and handed it to Lara. She mumbled, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and then, overwhelmed, blacked out and almost fell to the floor. François caught her just in time.

    François wasn’t as stupid as some people thought. He knew all the gossip about the trampy Lara Meyer: a rich bitch who drank like a fish and, when in her cups, stupid as a sheep about men, especially her gigolo, Fabrizio Bricconni.
    ‘I’ll take her home,’ he insisted as the manager,