Millie, noticing Pierre, moved the phone away from her mouth, raising her eyebrows in question.
“Are you still planning to wear the dress Laura is making for you?” Pierre askedsotto voce.
“Of course.”
“So, you’re definitely not wearing some designer gown?”
“Certainly not. Why do you ask?”
Pierre chewed her lip; she didn’t want to get Nicole into trouble with Millie. “I just wondered because Nicole had been planning to order something from Vivienne Westwood.”
Millie rolled her eyes. “She was adamant that we had to have a back-up dress. In the end, it was easier to let her order it than argue.”
That explained it.
Pierre hurried back outside to tell Liam.
“You’d better ring Laura,” she finished, “before she sees this and believes it.”
He looked uncertain. Then he shook his head. “No, you call her — you’re friends.” He hurried away, leaving Pierre alone.
Honestly, what’s wrong with everybody?She huffed a breath dialling Laura’s number.
More to the point, what was wrong with Nicole?
The answer came to her ten minutes later as she ran up the stairs to the office.
Twenty-Four
The door was half-open, and she could see Nicole in there talking to Gabriel. “I’m not Dr-bloody-Adam’s secretary,” Nicole was saying.
“Then don’t answer the phone,” Gabriel replied.
Pierre couldn’t see him so he must be sitting at the desk where they’d been working all day.
“I have to; half the world is calling me.” Nicole sounded very annoyed. “He just swans off to some hospital and we’re all supposed to deal with his personal life. I wonder if his precious Laura knows the secret he’s keeping from her.”
“Nic, no!”
There was the sound of a chair grating and Gabriel came into view. He faced Nicole. “It’s none of our business. Stay out of their private life.”
“Someone should tell her.”
“No!” he said again more emphatically, just as Pierre reached the door.
“This is not over,” Nicole said, and turned to go. Pierre had to step aside because Nicole looked like she would walk right over her if she had to.
“What happened?” Pierre asked him when they were alone.
“Nothing.” He went back to the screen. Clearly whatever it was had made him angry and he wasn’t going to talk about it.
Everything inside her wanted to shake Gabriel and ask him how he could have even considered spending his life with such a woman. No doubt he saw a side to Nicole that none of them could. Maybe her good side was really lovely. On the other hand, didn’t everyone appear lovely when they wanted to? Even Joseph Stalin must have been charming to his friends. In Pierre’s opinion, if you really wanted to know what people were like, you had to see what they did when they werenottrying to be nice. When they were self-serving.
And Nicole had just flooded social media with lies about Millie’s wedding dress, either to discredit Laura, or hoping to create a false impression to use later. In America, who was going to know what dress Millie actually wore?
And what about Laura? What about her reputation as a designer? The credit would go to Vivienne Westwood, and to Nicole for securing a named couturier. Laura wouldn’t get any credit at all.
Pierre watched Gabriel work, correcting the light balance on one of the images. Surely, he deserved to know the truth about Nicole.
