by Liz Fielding
He should have told her the truth then. Given her the choice of walking away. But he couldn’t risk losing her. Any more than he could let her walk away now.
Useless at emotion, he’d utterly blown his first attempt to keep her from leaving him. Now he was using what he knew, the techniques he’d learned in the boardroom, in an attempt to save his marriage. It was, he’d rationalised, not that different from planning a takeover, albeit one that might turn hostile at any moment.
The first requirement was information. He needed to know what she was thinking. What was driving her.
Had she, out there in the Himalayas, pushing her body to the limit, reached deep and found a hitherto unsuspected inner strength? Was that why he’d felt so threatened by the trip? Why, from the first moment it had been mooted, he’d behaved like some Victorian husband demanding obedience from his wife.
Too late to see that he should have abandoned business and gone with her. Right now, all he could do was hang in there, show her that she needed him, whether she knew it or not.
Decorating, for instance. What on earth did she know about decorating? How hard it was?
He’d banked on the fact that she’d be grateful for the help and when he’d seen that she’d opted to the safer distance at the top of the ladder, knew that short of coming down and throwing him out this morning, she was stuck with him.
His first mistake.
But then, almost as if she’d taken pity on him, he’d got an unexpected reprieve and since then it had gone as well as he could have hoped. Better…
In fact it was just as well that his hands were still under cold running water. It would have been so easy to go with the moment, take it from there.
He had felt the reciprocal heat in that exchange, a charge that on any other occasion would have carried them to bed. This time, he knew, that wouldn’t be enough.
A company, its directors, staff had to be courted, won over, to want what he was offering. He’d never courted Belle. What had happened between them had been instant, a conflagration.
Now, he sensed, he needed to go back to the beginning, do what he hadn’t been able to do then. Keep his head. Be patient. Somehow make himself say a word that had been deleted from his dictionary. That he wasn’t sure he understood. Except if the pain he was feeling, if the emptiness in his life had a word, then it could only be filled by Belle.
Easier said than done. It took a supreme effort of will to keep his hands from reaching out to her, keep them from cradling her face, from holding her as he slipped the buttons on her jeans. Stopping her protests with his mouth as he dipped his fingers into her warmth, watching as her eyes darkened until the only thing on her mind was him, buried deep inside her.
Not this time.
Patience…
After what felt like a year but was probably no more than a couple of seconds, Belle looked away, took a step back and, before she could put into words what she was plainly thinking-that he should go-he said, ‘I’ll put together a package for you to think about.’
And, instead of suggesting he pick up some sandwiches and coffee from the café across the road, he stuck to the practicalities.
‘Do you know how to prepare the woodwork?’ he asked.
‘Pre…prepare…’ She took a breath and the fact that she was forced to swallow before she could speak gave him hope that she had felt the same urgency, the same need. ‘Wash with soft soap, sandpaper, undercoat, gloss,’ she said quickly.
‘You always were hot on preparation.’
People thought that she winged it on her programme every morning, that the apparently off-the-cuff chatter came easily. He knew the hours she put in every day, studying the people she was going to interview, the subjects she was going to cover, so that it looked that way.
‘The woman in the shop gave me a leaflet explaining it all.’
‘Right. Well, I’d better be going.’
‘Thank you for your time. My manicurist will be eternally grateful,’ she said, easing her neck.
He clenched his fingers into his palms to stop himself reaching out to knead out the creases. Patience…
‘If you need anything-’
‘I can manage.’
‘I can see that.’ Then, ‘You’ve got an awards dinner on Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’ She pulled a face. ‘I didn’t think you’d remember.’
‘It’s in my diary. I’ve told Manda you’ll be picking up some of your stuff. Or is there going to be a new dress to go with your new look?’
‘I’ve already invested in a very old one. I’ll pick it up after work on Monday, if that’s convenient?’
While he was at the office. ‘Manda should be home. If not, you’ve got your key.’ Then, fighting the urge to offer himself, ‘You have an escort?’
‘Jace offered…’
He nodded. Her agent’s presence at her side at the biggest industry event of the year wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. ‘Paul is free for the evening so if you’d like him to drive you-’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Thank you. I’ve made my own arrangements.’
He dug in his pocket for his keys, just about managing to stop himself from saying any of the things that were fighting to trip from his tongue. Keep it to a casual, ‘Fine. Well, good luck.’
‘Thank you.’
So formal. So distant. And, before he knew it, he was standing beside the van he’d borrowed from the office janitor.
He glared at her convertible. It was a declaration of independence. Of separation. He wanted to have it towed away, put in a crusher, reduced to a cube of metal. But what good would that do? Belle had made it very clear that it was her business, not his and maybe he should be taking notice of that. Give her space to stretch her wings. Test herself. Doing what his sister had been so incapable of. It occurred to him that he should be helping her find her feet, not trying to knock her off them, keep her dependent upon him.
He had intended to turn up tomorrow, find something else to do. Maybe he needed to wait for her to ask for his help.
As he rounded the van to the driver’s door, he realised he wasn’t the only one looking at it as if it were a hate object. A girl, stick-thin, her fair hair streaked with green and wearing clothes a charity shop would shun, was glaring at it too. It undoubtedly represented everything she didn’t have and he wondered if she was planning to break in or just take out her envy on the immaculate bodywork.
‘What are you staring at?’ she shouted when she saw him looking at her.
‘My wife’s car.’
Belatedly he realised how possessive that sounded. Belle did not belong to him. He did not own her.
He transferred his feelings of protection to her car.
‘If you were thinking of breaking into it, I’d advise you to think again,’ he said.
For a moment the girl defiantly stood her ground before, quite deliberately placing a hand on the door and setting off the alarm. Only then did she turn and flounce away.
Belle appeared at the window. She said something but, although her mouth was moving, the words were obliterated.
He mimed an instruction to toss down her keys so that he could kill the alarm and, by the time she’d joined him, it was all over.
‘I hope that isn’t going to happen every time someone gets within breathing distance,’ she said.
‘No. It was just some girl with green hair wanting to make an impression,’ he said. He reset the alarm, locked up and handed back her keys.
‘Take care, Belle,’ he said, then, with the briefest touch to her arm, he climbed into the van. He drove around for a while, hoping to spot the girl. There had been something about that little scene that had seemed…staged. He didn’t believe in it any more than he believed in Belle’s documentary.
Her twitchiness when she’d thought he was looking at her laptop last week, the way she’d jumped when an email arrived, had suggested something else entirely.
Something that might explain everything. Tha
t could offer him a measure of hope.
She’d been looking at adoption sites and one answer had leapt into his mind and refused to go away. If Belle had been a teenage mother, had given her baby up for adoption, the child could well be coming up to an age where it was possible to search for, contact his or her birth mother.
Was that what this was all about? Was she waiting, hoping for a call from a child she’d surrendered to a couple who couldn’t have one of their own? How ironic that would be.
And he wondered too about those silent calls.
Her stiff back as she’d determinedly ignored them, the way her brush had stopped working as her invitation to leave a message came to an end, the beep. The slump in her shoulders as there was yet another hang-up.
Had her family disowned her? Did people still do that? It would explain why she never talked about them.
It would explain so much more than that.
But why she’d married him was not the issue.
It was the fact that she’d assumed he would disown her too, once he knew the truth, that she didn’t trust him enough to share her secret, her loss, that was painful beyond imagining.
Awards dinners were not a new experience for Belle. She’d even been nominated before, although admittedly not for the top honour. But arriving on her own, walking down the red carpet into a barrage of flashlights without Ivo at her side was a very new, very lonely experience. One that her agent’s presence did nothing to assuage.
Thank goodness for the dress. Strapless cream silk, worn with a bronze lace evening coat that hung from her shoulders to spread in a demi-train, brought gasps from the crowds gathered on the pavement to see their favourites arrive.
And at her throat she wore the choker of large freshwater pearls, each nestling in its own crumpled gold and diamond cup, that Ivo had bought for her birthday the year before. It was stunningly modern and yet as ageless as the dress she was wearing. She’d forgotten about jewels, would have gone without rather than call Ivo, but he forgot nothing and had sent his chauffeur over on Monday night with the contents of the safe. He clearly expected her to keep them, but she’d picked out what she’d needed for the dinner and sent the rest back, citing security.
The dress, the jewels, were not enough.
In front of the cameras she was fine. It was easy to reduce her audience to one imaginary old lady, nodding off in an armchair. In public, faced with real people, she always expected someone to shout, ‘Fake!’ To expose her. Show her up for what she really was.
Without Ivo’s steadying hand beneath her elbow, Belle had to fight down the urge to run, to escape all those eyes, all those cameras, reach deep for a smile as she forced herself to walk slowly along the carpet, stop to exchange a word with someone she recognised, respond to the calls of the photographers and wave in response to the calls of ‘good luck’.
Call back, ‘Thank you’, when someone shouted, ‘Great hair!’
She even managed to blow a kiss directly into the lens of her own network’s news camera as it tracked her progress.
She told herself that Daisy might be watching.
Ivo, she knew, would not be. Beyond the financial and political news, he had no interest in television.
He had, however, sent her creamy hothouse freesias with a card inscribed simply with his name.
Just ‘Ivo’. Not ‘Love…’, or ‘Thinking of you…’. Not his style. He had, however, written it himself. Had spoken to the florist personally. His PA would have sent a basket of red roses. Miranda, more imaginative, would have scoured the hedgerows for deadly nightshade-but they would have been exquisitely arranged.
Ivo had sent her freesias the morning after their first night together, when they’d made love as if the world were about to end. An odd choice-they were the flowers a man might have sent to his bride-but exotic hothouse blooms would have been too obvious and he had never been that.
She slammed a door shut on that thought.
It wasn’t a romantic gesture she told herself. It was the gesture of a man who, when he wanted something, was prepared to take infinite trouble to acquire it. Knew how to make surrender feel like triumph.
She thought he’d let her walk away, maybe even be glad that she’d taken the decision, but he was there every minute of the day, not just crowding her thoughts, but physically present. Checking that she was coping. Turning up to help her decorate, even. And that confused her too. It was as if he was saying, ‘I’m fine with this…’, ‘I’m just helping you move on…’
It didn’t feel like that, though.
Or maybe it was just that she didn’t want it to be like that.
Bad enough that she’d rushed home on Monday. She might have fooled herself into believing that it was Daisy she was desperate to hear from, but the disappointment when Ivo had not dropped by with her post, when he’d sent Paul with her jewels instead of coming himself, had been just as keen as the lack of a response from her sister.
Ivo was watching the news, knowing that after the serious stuff they’d show the celebrities arriving earlier that evening for the awards dinner. As Belle took Jace Sutton’s hand and stepped from the car, looked up, smiled into a barrage of flashlights, he could scarcely breathe.
Had he expected, hoped that she might look a little lost? As if she was missing him? On the contrary, she looked utterly self-possessed. Stunning. And, as she turned to the camera, blew a kiss, he was the one who was lost…
There was a tap at the library door and, as he flicked off the television, his housekeeper said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Grenville, but there’s a police officer looking for Mrs Grenville.’
The evening was interminable. Ivo’s absence was not remarked upon; in the self-absorbed world of television, Jace Sutton, full of industry gossip, secrets, made a much more entertaining, and useful, contact.
Dinner, endless awards, gushing speeches, washed over her in a blur. When the man who’d given her that first chance-setting her on the path that ended here-at last read out the list of nominees for the final award of the evening-Television Personality of the Year-then opened the gold envelope and smiled as he read out the winner’s name, it took a moment for her to realise that the name he’d read out was ‘Belle Davenport’.
That it was her.
That she would have to walk up to the stage and somehow thank everyone who’d ever so much as made her a cup of tea for making her success possible.
Far too late to regret wanting to prove to herself that she could do this on her own and wish she’d pulled a sickie.
It took a while to make it to the stage. So many hands reached out to her that could not be ignored. Eventually she mounted the steps, took the trophy, turned to acknowledge her audience and the room stilled.
She looked down at the trophy in her hand and blinked back tears that she’d been fighting all evening. ‘This trophy has my name on it, but it isn’t really mine. It belongs to everyone who makes Breakfast With Belle the kind of programme people switch on every day. Susan, who meets me at four-thirty with a cup of Earl Grey and a smile. Elaine, who works magic with make-up. No, honestly, it’s true. I do wear make-up…’ There was laughter. ‘It’s unfair to pick out names, but look at the list tomorrow morning when the titles roll. Every one of them should have their name inscribed on this award, because it takes every one of those people, doing their job behind the scenes to make me look good. It belongs to the people they live with too, their partners who are disturbed at four o’clock every morning and who never get a decent night out because we have to be in bed by nine o’clock every evening.’
‘Lucky Ivo Grenville,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed, giving her a moment to recover.
Ivo, standing unnoticed in the doorway watching her, saw her smile, too.
‘Lucky Belle Davenport,’ she said with feeling when the laughter subsided.
For a moment he thought she’d seen him, but then he realised that she was seeing no one. That she wasn’t speaking for effect, but
from the heart.
‘Oh, Belle. What have I done to you?’ he murmured. A waitress was standing within touching distance, but she didn’t hear; she was totally enraptured by the woman standing on the stage.
‘Some of you already know that this next week will be my last “on the sofa”.’
There was a rustle, whispers, a shocked ‘No…’
‘It’s time to move on, but I want to thank all of you for watching, for supporting me over the years. Please be as kind to whoever takes my place.’
Belle, unable to say another word, simply raised her trophy in acknowledgement of the applause. In front of her was a sea of faces but there was only one who would have made this moment memorable.
And as if the need, so powerful, called up the man, she saw Ivo standing by the door, looking at her. The only person in the room not smiling. Not applauding.
She walked down the steps and, ignoring the outstretched hands, she walked towards him until the applause died away to silence and she was close enough to touch him.
Not an illusion conjured up out of her need, but real, solid.
He wasn’t in evening dress. Fine rain misted his hair, the shoulders of his long overcoat, and belatedly she realised that he hadn’t turned up to witness her big moment. That he was here because there was something wrong.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Not here.’
And her stomach lurched as, face set, he took her gently by the arm and led her out of the banqueting hall, down the stairs and into the lobby, past photographers caught with their lens caps on. The doorman was waiting by his car and she was in her seat before they recovered.
‘What is it?’ she demanded again as Ivo slid in beside her behind the wheel. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The police are looking for you. For Belinda Porter. They went to the flat and a neighbour explained who you are, that you were probably at home with me.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘No. I’m sorry to have ruined your evening.’
He was looking at her as if he knew, she thought. Knew that all evening she’d been fighting the need to reach out, find his hand. Then she realised that it wasn’t his absence he was apologising for, but dragging her away from the celebrations for the award she was still clutching.