Read After the Last Dance for Free Online Page A

actually smell the money. ‘Platinum Bar,’ she announced, grabbing Leo’s hand and dragging him towards the bank of escalators. There was a gleam in her eye that hadn’t been there before. ‘I’ll do the talking, darling. You just watch for my cues.’
    Yeah, this was going down in the annals of all the wild nights that Leo had ever known. Number one with a bullet, eclipsing even the night he’d found himself on stage in front of fifty thousand screaming fans in Tokyo to introduce his best mate from art college’s band. The aftershow had turned into the kind of drug-fuelled orgy that Leo thought only happened to members of poodle-haired cock-rock bands of the late eighties.
    Or the night he’d flirted with a French girl in the Williamsburg bar where he was working between commissions. After closing, they’d nicked two bottles of vodka, walked all the way to Central Park and talked about life, love and what made them cry. Watched the sun rise. Kissed like it was the end of the world. He’d woken up the next morning on a bench, one of New York’s finest shaking him back to bleary consciousness. The French girl had stolen all his money, except a ten-dollar bill on which she’d scrawled
Je t’aimerai toujours
in lipstick.
    This night was shaping up to be beyond all those other nights, and all because he’d had nothing better to do than get married to a beautiful woman because it would make a great story.
    If you didn’t have great stories, then you were living half a life.
    And the story Jane was spinning to Tom and Paula, Barbara and Hank was a tale of triumph over adversity, laughing through the tears, love over the barricades.
    â€˜I can’t believe the airline lost
all
your luggage,’ Barbara gushed. She and her husband, tubby, silver-haired Hank who looked as if he’d been shoehorned into his tuxedo, were in Vegas with their best friends Tom and Paula to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversaries. Within five minutes, Jane had gleaned that the four of them had been best friends since high school, had even got married together – ‘that’s one of the most adorable things I’ve ever heard’ – and Tom and Hank owned a very successful chain of winter sports shops.
    Barbara and Paula, who never missed an episode of
Downton Abbey
, were enthralled as Jane told them Leo had been cut off by his family, who were such old money that his grandfather had been an equerry to one of the King Georges, for marrying Jane, who was a nobody. ‘My folks think that if your family aren’t listed in
Burke’s Peerage
, then you’re beyond the pale,’ Leo admitted cheerfully, because he was her straight man. The Ernie to Jane’s Eric. The Desi to her Lucy. ‘Love is more important than being heir to a dukedom, right?’
    The two older women sighed and even Tom looked a little misty-eyed. Barbara patted Leo’s hand. ‘It’s like something out of a novel. You nearly a duke, Jane an orphan…’
    â€˜Oh, orphan is such a dramatic word. Honestly, the car crash happened years ago,’ Jane said, but then she stared off into the middle distance and held it for three long beats until a waiter approached with a huge bottle of champagne. It wasn’t a Methuselah but it might have been the next size down. A Nebuchadnezzar? ‘Oh no, you mustn’t. It’s terribly, terribly sweet of you, but really we can’t, can we, baby?’
    Leo shook his head. ‘Couldn’t possibly accept this,’ he said stuffily. ‘We appreciate the gesture, but absolutely not.’
    Jane cast her eyes down, shoulders drooping ever so slightly, and sighed.
    â€˜Now, you listen,’ Hank said rather forcefully. ‘We’re going to toast you two kids and you’re going to have a drink with us whether you like it or not.’
    â€˜Darling, what do you think?’ Jane asked Leo as