Maid for Advertising - Susie Tate Page 0,48
near her.”
The smiles fell from the boys’ faces as I saw my message sink in.
“You boys are on that stage with her - that means you have a responsibility to look out for her. If something doesn’t seem right. If you see a threat, any threat, you get her out of there, okay? I’m trusting you.”
“Baby,” Urvi said softly in my ear as her hand wrapped around my upper arm. “Calm down, you’re scaring them.”
“S’okay Urvi,” said the lead singer I’d christened Long Beard. “We’re up to the job.”
“Yeah,” Dreadlock Wearer said. “Totally, man. We’re so on it. I’m only, like, half as stoned as I would normally be right now. We’ll totally Kevin Costner the shit out of this. Don’t you worry.”
I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment, praying for calm as I felt Urvi move in front of me and put her hands on either side of my face again.
“Breathe,” she whispered. “Relax. I’ll be fine.”
I let out a breath and rested my forehead on hers for a moment before she brushed her lips against mine again and moved away towards the bloody idiots I was letting her perform with.
As soon as her back was turned I pointed my index and middle fingers at my eyes and then my index finger back at the boys. Man Bun had the grace to show some concern and I watched him visibly swallow. The others grinned and gave me wonky thumbs up. The close protection officers followed them up to the stage and I made my way back through the crowd to find Rahul and complain about his sister’s cavalier attitude to her security – one topic on which we were in complete agreement.
A deafening roar came at me from all sides as I made my way through the close-packed bodies and I glanced up at the stage. A smiling Urvi had taken her place front and centre of the stage with the Ferret’s Testicles either side. Her beautiful face was lit up with a huge smile as she shouted into the mic: “Hello London!”
Once I’d made it to Ben and the Radias the first chords of Urvi’s guitar filled the air and everyone fell silent. I looked back up to the stage just as she closed her eyes and opened her mouth to sing the lyrics which the nation had been singing for the last six weeks since she hit the number one spot in charts all over the world.
“Thank Christ you didn’t back down on the stage security,” Rahul muttered in my ear. “Don’t know how you managed to get her to agree but –”
“Er, I wouldn’t say she agreed so much as didn’t really know that was the plan,” I told him and he slapped my back in approval.
“Well done, mate,” he said, happy once again that I was looking out for his little sister. Urvi told me that he’d always been overprotective but since the year and a half of estrangement and then learning about her diabetes, that had gone into overdrive. She worried that it was fuelled by guilt, but I thought it was much more to do with the fact Rahul hadn’t appreciated how lucky he was to have a sister like Urvi, and still felt the pain of having nearly lost her. (Urvi had tried to spare them the details of how poor her diabetic control had been, but I had no such qualms – I’d laid out for the Radias in no uncertain terms the problems that she’d had to face on her own). Even though her health was much better now and the monitor had revolutionised her diabetic control, it was clear the whole family still worried. Her mum sent food every week – curries she thought were diabetic friendly, but unfortunately were very much not. I ended up eating a lot of curry, not that I was complaining.
“Ugh, the old man’s gone again,” Rahul muttered, amusement threaded through his voice. I looked over at Urvi’s dad to see he was staring at his daughter on the stage with moist eyes. A small hand slapped me in the stomach and I looked down at the furious face of Urvi’s four-year-old nephew.
“Up!” he shouted. “Wanna see Auntie!”
Well aware that the little nutcase would keep slapping me until I complied with his request, I hoisted him up onto my shoulders where he proceeded to bounce excitedly and wave frantically at the stage. I exchanged a beleaguered look with Ben who was next