“Indie film,” he confirmed, turning away to pull on his discarded jeans, as if he didn’t care whether I looked at the script or not. Even though the line of his shoulders said he did care, very much. “I get sent scripts all the time. Doesn’t mean anything.”
I debated putting it down and ignoring it. If he’d asked me to, I certainly would have. But there was something about his elaborately casual reaction that broadcast the importance of this script. And as much as he’d admitted wanting to get to know me after seeing me in the dog park, the feeling was entirely mutual. I desperately wanted to know Ian, the real man behind the star, and my intuition told me that this script was a piece of the puzzle.
“What’s it about?”
Voice muffled by the T-shirt he pulled on over his head, he said, “It’s a history of a famous mural in East London that commemorates the Cable Street Battle. Bunch of anti-fascist protestors clashed violently with police in nineteen thirty-six. It was a shitshow. We love to act in this country like you Yanks are the only ones with a race problem, but those Black Shirts in England before World War II were plugged into all sorts of hysteria and hatred for immigrants.”
He shook his head, jaw tight.
“We’ve got our own problems. And they haven’t gone away—the script goes back and forth between the actual battle and the fight this group of activist artists had to put up to get the mural completed in the early eighties. It’s been vandalized multiple times over the years. With the way this country is going? I’d say this movie feels pretty fucking timely.”
“That sounds like a story that needs to be told,” I said honestly. Internally, I was reeling a bit. I didn’t think I’d ever heard gruff, stoic Ian Hale say that many words at a time about anything.
He shrugged. “Maybe, but not by me. I don’t do indies.”
“You were making notes on the script,” I pointed out. “Are you interested in doing this one?”
“No time.” He bent down to pluck my underwear from the floor and twirled the scrap of lace around one finger. “Get your kit on, I’m starved all of a sudden.”
“What do you mean, no time? I’m sure any director would be willing to work around your schedule for the chance to have you in his movie.”
“Her,” he said absently. “Director’s a woman. And my schedule with the Mount Olympus movies—it’s too tight. I need to stay available for the studio. Can’t get distracted.”
There it was again, that tone to his voice that made it sound like he was speaking someone else’s words. I pressed my lips together and caught my panties when he tossed them to me. I didn’t trust myself to start this conversation without coffee and on a very empty stomach, so I prioritized getting dressed and trying to corral my curls into something approaching manageable.
Once we’d sorted out our respective caffeine delivery systems, I settled into the kitchen table chair with one bare foot propped up on the seat and watched Ian crack half a dozen eggs into a pan of sizzling butter. Roxanne lounged at my feet, queen of the under-table domain, and alert to the imminent possibility of dropped crumbs. A tray full of chipolata sausages sputtered and spat in the oven. The toaster popped up four slices of golden bread, and Ian flipped them onto a plate with one hand while he seasoned the eggs with the other. My stomach grumbled happily.
Part of me wanted to soak up this unexpectedly domestic scene and enjoy my well-earned breakfast in peace. But at heart, I was a writer. I liked to dig into things and find out more. And no subject had ever interested me more than Ian Hale.
“When you say you can’t get distracted from the Mount Olympus movies,” I began, “is that something you believe or something your agent told you?”
The spatula clattered briefly against the pan. “Bugger. Roxanne has nothing on you, and she’s a fucking bulldog.”
“Knowing how much you adore Roxanne, I’m going to take that as a compliment.” I gave him a sharp-edged smile that softened when he cast me an unhappy glance over his shoulder. “Ian. You said you preferred for your women not to know you—until I came along. Well, I’m here now and I’m telling you straight out. I want to know you. We don’t have to start with work stuff, but we have to start somewhere. And right now, your work is a thing I already know is stressing you out.”
Ian was silent for a beat, focused on sliding the cooked eggs out of the pan and onto the plate with the stack of toast. I waited, as patiently as I could, while he buttered the toast and went to the fridge for three different jars of jam. The sausages came out of the oven blistered and glistening, and joined the eggs and toast on the plate. I was starting to feel a little faint.
He brought the mounded platter of food over to the small table, along with a couple of forks. “This looks amazing,” I told him. “Thank you.”
“Eat,” he said tersely, before striding out of the room.
No use trying to batter down the impenetrable wall around Ian Hale’s secrets without proper sustenance, I reasoned, grabbing a sausage and biting into it with a snap. Salty, sticky with grease, utterly delicious. Call me a weirdo but God, I loved English food.
I was trying to choose between strawberry jam, gooseberry preserves and orange marmalade when Ian came back in, carrying a squat, squashy-looking armchair. He plunked it down across the table from me and said, “Try the marmalade. It’s got whiskey in.”
Sold. I slathered a piece of toast and took an enormous bite while Ian forked a couple of eggs onto his slice of bread and doused the whole thing in brown sauce before devouring it in four bites. For the next ten minutes, there was no conversation beyond groans of approval and requests to pass the brown sauce back and forth.
I was just finishing my second piece of toast, savoring the golden sunshine sharpness of the gooseberry jam, when Ian said, “You’re right, you know. Phillip is the one who told me not to get distracted. He’s working on a deal for three more Olympus movies, and he doesn’t want any conflicts.”
Suddenly alert, I put down my toast and dusted the crumbs off my fingers. Apparently taking that as a signal that the buffet was closed, Roxanne came to her feet and clicked out of the kitchen to find a patch of sunlight to nap in.
“Your agent doesn’t want you to branch out,” I mused. “Because he works on commission and the Olympus movies make the biggest bank?”
Ian shrugged and speared the last chipolata with his fork. “He’s owed.”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. “Owed. Ian. I have an agent too—a literary agent, but still. My agent is my partner, my colleague, but absolutely not my boss. I supply the books, she makes the connections with publishers and negotiates the deals. It’s a two-way street. I don’t owe her anything.”
Ian closed his eyes for a heartbeat, a breath, during which I could almost sense him weighing out how much information to share. How deeply to let me in. I bit my lip and refused to push, but I did reach across the table to fold my fingers around the rigid tendons of his wrist, simply to let him know I was there and listening.
When he blinked open his eyes, they were dark with memories and secrets. “That’s true for you, but it’s not true for me, Mallory. I owe Phillip everything. This house, my career. My life.”
I sucked in a breath to argue, but he turned his wrist under my hand and pulled back enough to tangle our fingers together.
“I don’t mean that figuratively,” he said, as if the words were being ripped out of him, simultaneously urgent and reluctant.
The intensity of his gaze rooted me to my chair. I sensed that I was very, very close to hearing something Ian had never spoken about to another living soul.
“I mean,” he said hoarsely, “in a very real sense, Phillip Mowbray saved my life. And a lot of shit can be said about Ian Hale, and has, but it’ll never be said that I’m a man who doesn’t pay his debts.”
Chapter Nine
“Ian,” I said, my chest aching. Our fingers were white-knuckled in their grip together. We were poised at the edge of a rooftop with only one ano
ther to cling to for support.
Ian blew out a shaky breath, voice catching on the frayed end of it. “I told you I’ve always been lucky. Which is true, as far as it goes. I shouldn’t have survived my childhood. Loads of my mates from back then didn’t. The estate where I grew up—it was bad. Dangerous. Violence, thefts, gangs.”
He paused and I tried to swallow around the constriction in my throat. I knew what he meant when he said “estate”—and it wasn’t a lovely country house with acreage around it. He meant a tenement, a slum. Poverty-stricken people crammed together, living on top of each other in a situation that became a kind of pressure cooker for violent crime. “I hate that you grew up afraid. I hate that you ever felt unsafe.”
His hand spasmed around mine, but he looked me dead in the eye and said, “No, sweet. I wasn’t afraid. I was one of the bad ones. People were afraid of me, because I was bigger and stronger than most of the other lads. Most of the grown men too. My mates and I—we weren’t the only ones that made that place a hell. We weren’t even the worst, maybe. But make no mistake, Mallory. I was a devil, not an angel.”
From the way he stared me down, I was certain he expected me to pull away, to condemn him somehow. But I couldn’t. “Ian, I don’t know what you did to survive when you were younger. I’m sure you made mistakes, and maybe they were terrible ones with terrible consequences. But that’s not who you are now.”
“No?” The corners of his mouth tilted up, but I’d never seen anything look less like a smile. “You think because I shed the skin of my past like a snake and slithered out of that life, I’m not still poisoned by it?”
“Then make amends,” I said fiercely. “Work for change. I don’t know, do that movie about the anti-fascists and tell the story of how art can honor the fallen and challenge the present and remind us of what matters.”
He came to his feet in a rush of restless power and ran both hands through his hair. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t. If Phillip Mowbray hadn’t caught me trying to nick his car one night, or if he’d handed me over to the Met instead of giving me an audition, I’d be dead right now. The path I was on, the people I ran with, the shit they had us doing out on the streets . . . I would not have survived. Or worse, I would have. And it would’ve been worse, Mallory, because in order to survive I’d’ve had to become a true monster.”
“But you didn’t,” I argued. “And you can’t know what would have happened.”
“My father is in prison, hopefully for life. My mother left when I was nine. My older brother lost a knife fight. My best mate started sampling what he was dealing and overdosed.” Ian recited his litany of personal tragedy grimly, pacing back and forth across the kitchen like a prowling tiger. “It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict what my future would have been without Phillip Mowbray.”
“It wasn’t all him! Your talent and your drive and your passion and your hard work—that’s what got you here.”
“Don’t forget my face and my body. Those were my real ticket out, because that’s what Phillip Mowbray saw that stopped him from calling the police on a vicious little thug like he would’ve done if he’d had any sense. But he didn’t.” Ian sank to sit on his heels beside me, one hand gripping the arm of the chair tightly. “And because of that one bit of luck, I’m this version of myself. I got to keep whatever scrap of a soul I came out of that life with. That’s worth a lot to me, Mallory.”
I couldn't argue with that, no matter how much I wanted to. “It’s a beautiful soul,” I told him quietly. “Thank you for telling me all that.”
“You had to know. I should’ve told you last night. You’ve the right to know what you’re getting in bed with.”
I could barely breathe. All my fears and doubts and insecurities suddenly felt so tiny, insignificant, in the face of Ian’s torment.
“I know who you are,” I told him, low and fierce. “You’re not a silver screen idol to me anymore. You’re a flesh and blood human being who has made mistakes and learned from them, who has a past and secrets and pain—but also a future that can be whatever we want it to be. You’re a man I could love, Ian Hale.”
He closed his eyes briefly, his big body tilting toward me as if pulled on the tide. In the next instant, his arms had wound round my hips and his face was pressed against my belly.
I made a sound in my throat that hurt. My arms came up to wrap around his head and clutch him to me.
“I need you,” Ian rasped, his hold almost bruisingly hard.
“You’ve got me,” I whispered back.
I let him pull me down to the kitchen floor to cover me with his body, and I showed him with mine, in every way I could, that I meant it. And in the back of my head, I tried not to be terrified of how true it was.
This man had me. I was his, body and heart and mind and soul. For as long as he wanted me.
The truly frightening thought that flickered behind my closed eyelids, as he protected us both and then sank into me to the hilt with a harsh groan, was that it no longer mattered if Ian kept wanting me. If this all went south, I wouldn’t be able to turn this feeling off and reclaim myself by running away to another continent the way I had with Tony.
If Ian was ever done with me, I would be wrecked. And it was already too late to do anything about it.
The next few days passed in a haze of sex. We barely left Ian’s beautiful house. Bobby the chauffeur left with the key to my flat and returned with a wriggling, ecstatic Pilot and a suitcase full of my stuff.
Even still, Ian was true to his word and I mostly wore him, or his clothes, for days on end. Pilot and Roxanne played and ate and slept together as naturally as if they’d been littermates. I hadn’t put on pants that zipped in days, and I’d memorized the phone number of Feng Shang Princess, the Chinese takeaway spot a block away.
By silent agreement, we tabled further difficult conversations about the past—and about the future too. There was something intoxicating about living entirely in the present, moment to moment, and discovering exactly how much I could enjoy another person’s company.
Of course, we talked. We shared little stories, intimate details of past relationships, the names of our first pets. I told him all about my family, which he soaked up like a flower growing in parched earth. He especially loved hearing about my exploits with Samantha, and claimed he couldn’t wait to meet her.
In fact, Sam was the only person I’d spoken to other than Ian in days. Well, not counting thanking Bobby for the run to my flat, and my daily calls to order the seafood fried rice in XO sauce that I was now addicted to.
“We’re both between projects,” I reminded Sam on our video call, leaning my head against the back of the low-slung lounge chair and enjoying the brisk chill of the late fall afternoon. I turned my head far enough to get a hit of Ian’s salt-smoke scent off the rolled collar of his cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, which engulfed me like a comforter. “Ian’s expecting to be called in for reshoots on the last Olympus movie any day now, but nothing yet so the only time we spend apart is when he meets his trainers at the gym. That’s where he is right now.”
“Are you writing?”
I squirmed in my seat a little and avoided looking at the screen of my phone. “I’m still in the planning stages.”
“Which means you haven’t even opened your laptop.”
That stung, especially since I already felt hideously guilty that I hadn’t been back to take advantage of my amazing British Museum access since that first day. “I don’t have a contract for this book. It’s not as if I’m under deadline!”
Sam snorted, her pretty features twisting with wry, older sister amusement. “Right. Why work if there’s no deadline?”
“I’ve always said I’m like Calvin from the comic strip. It’s not that I work best under pressure, it’s that I work only under pressure.”
That usually got at least a grin out of Samantha, but this time she just glanced away. I sat up straighter in the chair, my feet bracing fi
rmly against the ground. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
She huffed out a breath. “Nothing. Just. I don’t want you to get too wrapped up in all this, Mal. Ian sounds great but . . .”
“But what?” I demanded, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks. “Don’t get too attached, because someone like Ian Hale obviously can’t be serious about someone like me?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Sam insisted. “At all. But Mal, it’s been a week! And you’ve basically moved in with him! Don’t you think that seems a little intense?”
I subsided with a sigh. “Intense is a good word for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a mistake. I care about him, Sam. I think . . . God, it sounds impossible when I even think about saying the words, but I think this could be something real. Something good. Something that lasts.”
On the tiny screen, I saw my sister’s eyes fill with tears, which she quickly dashed away with the heel of her palm. A determined smile didn’t quite erase the persistent lines of tension around her eyes. “That’s that, then. Go for it. Don’t worry about anything else.”
I frowned. “Wait. What else should I be worried about?”
Sam froze for long enough that I half wondered if we’d lost our connection. “Nothing. That’s what I’m saying. Enjoy the new-romance glow! You know, stay holed up a while longer. Forget what I was saying about work. The world will still be there waiting when you and Ian are solid and ready to face it.”
Something about her brisk, cheery advice chilled my soul. “Samantha. What is going on.”
She scrunched up her face. “Okay. Okay, maybe you need to know.”
Worst-case scenarios—Mom was sick, Dad was sick, she was sick, oh God—raced through my head. “Tell me right this minute!”
“The tabloids figured out who you are. There are photos from that night you went out to the dog place last week—pretty hot ones too, good work, sis—and they’ve gotten a lot of play. Like, a lot a lot.”
Naughty Brits: An Anthology Page 33