Flawless

by Tilly Bagshawe

  Scarlett laughed too. For the first time in months, work problems seemed blissfully far away. Sitting here, flirting with Magnus, they didn’t even feel particularly important.

  “You must meet Clementine,” said Caroline, tugging Magnus away from her daughter with a force belied by her tiny frame. “She still needs a partner for The Dashing White Sergeant, don’t you Clemmie?”

  Magnus dutifully performed two dances with the girl, who was nice enough but had an ass the size of Washington, not to mention two left feet, before slipping back to rescue Scarlett from the clutches of the apparently unstoppable Hamish.

  “Jeez,” he said, once he’d finally pried her free. “Is your mom always that pushy?”

  “Oh yes,” said Scarlett ruefully. “And controlling. She as good as forced me to wear this awful thing tonight.” She looked down at her dress in shame.

  “Why didn’t you tell her to take a hike?” said Magnus. “I mean, no offense or anything, but you’re not twelve.”

  He was quite right of course. It was ridiculous the way she let Caroline walk all over her.

  “I know,” she sighed. “I suppose the truth is I can’t face having it out with her. I know you Yanks believe in getting everything out in the open, but we Brits are far too repressed for that. If we see something unpleasant, we tend to bury it. Life’s easier that way.”

  “If you say so,” he said, reaching out and touching the fabric of her dress just where her waist narrowed below the bodice, rubbing it between his fingers so that the cheap taffeta crinkled like a crisp wrapper. It was intended as a jokey gesture, but Scarlett jumped as an unmistakable spark of raw attraction flew between them.

  “Is there somewhere…quieter…we could go?” Magnus whispered hoarsely.

  Scarlett nodded frantically. She wanted him so badly the dress was in danger of melting from the heat of her body.

  “We shouldn’t leave together, though. I’ll slip off to the bathroom and meet you at the foot of the kitchen stairs in five minutes.”

  It was ten minutes before he finally rejoined her, panting as if he’d just gotten back from a battle zone.

  “OK, so your mother really has a problem,” he said, looking over his shoulder as if she might be on his tail as he spoke. “She was shoving me at this one girl, Fiona? I swear to God, the woman was practically unzipping my fly!”

  Scarlett giggled. “Come on,” she whispered. “Follow me.”

  Taking him by the hand, she led him through the maze of corridors and narrow, winding stone staircases that made up the rabbit warren of Drumfernly’s upper stories. After much twisting and turning, Scarlett led him into a neat, virtually empty bedroom.

  “This your room?” he asked, admiring the view of rolling moonlit parkland from the single window while Scarlett bolted the door.

  “No,” she said. “Someone might come looking for me there. This is one of the old servants’ rooms. We hardly ever use this part of the house. Hence the dust.” Coming up behind him, she dragged one finger along the stone window ledge, leaving a trail in the thick, gray layer of grime like a miniature ski track through dirty snow. Turning around, from one mesmerizing view to another, Magnus pulled her into his arms.

  “You’re like Rapunzel in her tower,” he said, pulling out the tortoiseshell hair clip at the base of her neck and allowing her glossy river of hair to ripple down her back.

  “What does that make you?” sighed Scarlett, closing her eyes in delight as she felt his cold hand on the zipper at her back, releasing her from the confines of the hated dress. “Prince Charming?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he whispered, planting a kiss on the hollow beneath her collarbone as the dress slithered to the floor. “I’m flying back to America tomorrow. Believe me, I wish I weren’t, but…I have to be honest with you. I can’t promise happily ever after.”

  “That’s OK,” said Scarlett equally seriously. “I’ll take happy now.”

  Being more of a cotton Gap panties girl than a Victoria’s Secret siren, she never normally wore matching underwear, but tonight by some miracle (hooray!) she’d actually put on one of her sexier combos: a pale-pink lace strapless bra with matching barely-there panties and hold-up stockings. Magnus, however, was too intent on removing them all to pay much attention to the detailing. Her body beneath the frumpy dress was a revelation—a little on the skinny side, perhaps, but curved in all the right places. Her breasts, as round and soft as twin peaches, were the same milky white as Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, the freckles across their tops like loosely sprinkled chocolate powder. As for her lower body, quite apart from its sheer length—she was almost as tall as he was, and most of that was leg—she was as toned and taut as a long-distance runner. There wasn’t a hint of cellulite on her cute, boyish butt, and the paradise of skin between the tops of her stockings and lace trim of her underwear was as firm and unsullied as a baby’s.

  Scarlett’s enthusiasm seemed to more than match his own. Tearing off his shirt, oblivious to the popping buttons, she began running her hands all over his torso, reveling in the size and strength of him, her fingers probing his chest hair and tracing the lines of his pectoral muscles like a blind sculptor trying to memorize form and texture.

  “I might be a little out of practice,” she mumbled between kisses, as he pushed her back onto the bed. “It’s been a long time since my last relationship.”

  Magnus grinned, scooting down the bed and peeling off her stockings with his teeth. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not like confession. You don’t have to tell me when your last time was.”

  Scarlett giggled.

  “And besides, this is not a relationship. So just lie back and enjoy yourself.”

  Which was exactly what she did. He was an astonishingly skillful lover, by turns slow and teasing, strong and hungry. At one point, while he was going down on her, she found herself wondering whether he was one of those people who could tie cherry stems with their tongues, an image that made her laugh so hard she almost couldn’t come. Most men would have taken offense at being laughed at at such a delicate moment, but Magnus was incredibly relaxed and confident enough to take her lack of inhibition as a compliment.

  Afterward, she insisted on returning the favor, taking his hard, ramrod-straight dick into her mouth despite his protests that he’d really rather just make love to her.

  “Honestly,” she said, her treacle-dark hair spilling over his tensed stomach as she licked slowly around the tip of his cock, “I want to.”

  Feeling him in her mouth, literally tasting his desire for her, was the biggest turn-on of all. Deep down she’d never lost the insecurity about her looks that she’d had growing up. She wasn’t the sort of knowing, sophisticated, sexy girl who could lure a man in with a provocative look or a flash of her short skirt, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been with a man who wanted her as much as Magnus plainly did. Certainly she’d never been with one even half as good-looking, or as fantabulous in bed, as he was.

  In the end, they made love into the small hours, collapsing at last only when neither of them had an ounce of physical energy left in their bodies. They were far enough away from the Great Hall not to be able to hear noise from the party, and only the occasional distant grumble of one of the last departing car engines broke the still calm as they lay side by side, staring contentedly up at the ceiling.

  “Isn’t it funny how free you can be with one-night stands?” said Magnus. “Almost as if not knowing the other person makes it easier to be yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Scarlett truthfully. “You’re my first.”

  “Oh, God, sorry,” he frowned, propping himself up on one elbow. “I hope…I mean, I didn’t mean to offend you. Tonight meant something to me, it really did. It’s just—”

  “Relax,” said Scarlett, smiling and laying a finger gently across his lips. “I’m not offended. You live in Seattle; I live in London. You’re a lawyer; I’m an artist. We both work all the hours God send
s. It would never work.”

  They relapsed into silence.

  “I’m happy I met you tonight,” said Magnus at last, just as Scarlett was drifting helplessly off into sleep. “You’re an incredible woman.”

  “Thanks,” she said drowsily. “So are you. An incredible man, I mean. Not woman. Definitely an incredible…man.”

  The last thing she remembered was Magnus’s smile as he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. When she woke in the morning, he was gone.

  Caroline, needless to say, was livid about Scarlett’s disappearing act.

  “I don’t believe it!” she exploded, when Scarlett shuffled dreamily in to breakfast the following morning in an ancient dressing gown of Hugo’s she’d found stuffed in the back of the spare-bedroom cupboard, and started helping herself to tea from the pot. “Where the hell have you been all night? Cameron almost sent out a search party.”

  “Really? How sweet of him to have almost cared,” said Scarlett, taking her cup of tea to the opposite end of the table where her father sat, and wishing him a happy birthday. “But as you can see I’m fine. How was the rest of the party?”

  “Terrible,” said Caroline, melodramatically. “Poor Hamish Sainsbury didn’t know what to do with himself after you ran out on him.”

  “Really?” said Hugo absently. “He seemed to be having rather a good time with Lettie Gillingham when I shuffled off to bed. Glued to one another like a couple of barnacles, they were.”

  Scarlett grinned at her father, who grinned back. Hugo Drummond Murray had never quite shared his wife’s passion for marrying their only daughter off to the nearest chinless laird with a heartbeat.

  “First you make a fool of yourself, and us, with those obscene advertisements of yours,” said Caroline furiously. “Then you embarrass Daddy and me in front of all our friends by running off in the middle of your own father’s seventieth.”

  “It wasn’t the middle,” protested Scarlett. “Plenty of people left before we did…I mean, before I did,” she corrected herself hastily. But her mother wasn’t buying it.

  “And to cap it all, after all the trouble I went to, inviting decent, single, eligible men for you to mingle with, you spent the entire evening with that ghastly American, who mysteriously vanished at exactly the same time you did. People aren’t stupid you know, Scarlett.”

  “Some people are,” said Scarlett with a meaningful look, taking a piece of buttered toast from her father’s plate and biting into it, spraying crumbs everywhere. “There’s nothing ghastly about Magnus, believe me.”

  Closing her eyes for a moment, she smiled, reliving the touch of his hand on her body and the brush of his stubble against her cheek.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. He’s married, you know,” spat Caroline.

  If she was looking for a reaction from Scarlett, she wasn’t disappointed. All the color drained from her face.

  “No. He can’t be. Daddy? D’you know anything about this?”

  Hugo frowned at his wife. He loved Caroline, but he wished she didn’t always have to put the cat among the pigeons.

  “I believe,” he said slowly, “that he’s separated. That’s what Jane said, anyway. Separated, about to be divorced.”

  “In other words, he is still married,” reiterated Caroline, before stalking off, slamming the kitchen door behind her in twinsetted fury.

  “She’ll get over it,” said Hugo, once she’d gone. “Nice chap, was he, this Magnus fella?”

  “Very. I mean, I thought he was,” Scarlett corrected herself. Her mother might have been stirring the pot—separated and married weren’t quite the same thing—but it was rather suspect of him not to have mentioned his wife, ex, or whatever she was, at all.

  Hugo shuffled his paper awkwardly. “Might he be, you know…a prospect?”

  “I’m afraid not, Daddy,” said Scarlett kindly. She knew it worried her father that she was still unmarried. Being single at twenty-eight seemed positively spinster-like to his generation and class. It bothered her to think of Hugo, old and lonely at Drumfernly, fretting about her future, egged on in his fears by her meddlesome mother. “Apart from anything else, he’s already on his way back to America. And I have my work here.”

  “Ah, thinking of work,” said Hugo, relieved to have a chance to change the subject—the ground felt shaky beneath his feet whenever he found himself drawn into topics other than fishing, shooting, or hunting—“a Mrs. Minton called for you at the crack of dawn this morning.” He handed her a slip of paper with a London number on it. Scarlett felt her heart leap into her mouth.

  “What did she say? Is Boxie all right?” she asked, panicked. If anything had happened to that dog, she’d never forgive herself.

  “Dunno. Your mother took the call,” said Hugo. “But I think she said it was something to do with your shop. Wanted you to ring her back urgently, apparently.”

  “If it was urgent, why didn’t somebody bloody well wake me?” barked Scarlett, her nerves making her snappy as she grabbed the cordless kitchen phone and started dialing.

  “None of us knew where you were,” said Hugo reasonably. “I’m sure it’ll be all right, darling. Probably just a customer grumbling about an order or something.”

  But looking at her ashen face a few minutes later as she put the phone down, it was clear that things were very far from all right.

  “What is it, poppet?” he asked gently, laying a gnarled, weatherworn hand on her shoulder. “Can I help?”

  “It’s Bijoux,” said Scarlett. “There was a break-in last night. They took everything, then threw in a couple of gas bombs on their way out. It’s gone, Daddy. The shop’s completely gone.”

  It was three days before the police forensic teams had finished combing the site for evidence and another four before the insurers were satisfied and the painstaking cleanup operation could begin.

  Standing in the burned-out shell of the shop floor in the late afternoon with a nervous Boxford sniffing around at her heels, Scarlett struggled not to cry. Only a thin line of orange tape and a couple of plastic cones separated what had once been her beloved storefront from the street outside and the streams of gawkers peering into the wreckage. She knew people meant well, but it still felt wrong and intrusive, like having strangers turn up to your mother’s funeral and demand front-row seats with the family. These people would never know how much the place had meant to her, how many of her hopes and dreams had been contained within these charred and ravaged four walls. Since it had happened, she’d tried to be strong and practical—she had to be, especially dealing with the police—but inside all she wanted to do was curl up into a ball and sob.

  The flight back from Scotland had taken an age. In a complete daze, wrenched from the unexpected joy of her night with Magnus, who apparently wasn’t quite what he seemed after all, then plunged into the full-on horror of what was unfolding in London, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other, never mind deal with the impossible staff at British Midland when she got to the airport.

  “I’m afraid that flight’s completely full,” the girl at check-in had informed her chirpily, relishing the word “completely” to an almost sadistic degree. “To be honest, I’m not even sure if we can get you on the three o’clock, not at this late stage.”

  “Please, this is an emergency,” babbled Scarlett. “Perhaps someone would be prepared to give up their seat, if I paid them?”

  “Oh, good gracious no,” said the girl. “We couldn’t possibly ask any of our customers to do that.”

  “Surely there’s something you can do?” said Scarlett desperately.

  Matters hadn’t been helped when Caroline, who adored a good drama and had insisted on coming to the airport with Scarlett and Hugo, piped up: “Oh, come on darling, it’s hardly an emergency, now is it? The thieves are already long gone, and it’s not as if you aren’t fully insured. Why don’t we go and have a nice lunch somewhere on Princes Street and do some shopping and you can hop on a plane tonigh
t?”

  The ensuing slanging match had been so loud and protracted that in the end the check-in girl “discovered” that they did in fact have one remaining seat and, having fleeced Scarlett for a full-fare ticket in upper class, let her on the plane. But any relief Scarlett felt was to be short-lived.

  Nothing in Mrs. Minton’s tearful phone call had prepared her for the carnage that met her eyes when she walked into what had once been Bijoux. At first there was nothing to see but soot-blackened walls and gray dust an inch thick coating every available surface. It was as if a tiny, localized volcano had erupted right where the counter used to be, spewing destruction in every conceivable direction. But as the forensic team showed her, beneath the gas-bomb damage, what had taken place was not the smash-and-grab job it appeared but a slickly executed, professional raid.

  “None of the glass was smashed by hand,” said the young inspector from the serious robbery squad that first evening, trying to maintain his professional detachment—it wasn’t often he got to deal with women as beautiful as Scarlett. “These panes shattered from the heat of the fire and the debris from the collapsing ceiling. When they took the jewelry, each lock was meticulously picked. They knew what they were doing. Your safe was decoded on site—they didn’t take it with them—and your Banham’s alarm system was professionally disabled. Great pains were gone to not to leave any bio traces behind.”

  “Bio traces?” Scarlett looked confused.

  “Fingerprints, hair, body fluids,” said the inspector, trying not to notice the way her breasts swelled with emotion beneath her gray cashmere sweater. “Of course, that was what the bombs were for, to destroy anything they might have left. But from what we can tell so far, it was an unnecessary precaution. Even the relatively undamaged areas are clean as a whistle.”

  An unnecessary precaution? thought Scarlett with a shiver. It was only thanks to the quick response of the London Fire Brigade that no one had been killed.