It’s my turn to raise an eyebrow at him. ‘I think you’ve had too much Calvados.’
His smile is relaxed and his cheeks are flushed. ‘Yeah, I think I have too.’ Words don’t match actions as he picks up the bottle and takes another swig before handing it over.
I feel the warmth of the brandy flushing through me. I’m not sure which one of us is swaying but things are definitely moving.
‘Pretty sure this is not how you’re supposed to enjoy Calvados,’ Jules says, his voice rougher and lower than usual with the drink. ‘You’re supposed to sip it slowly and savour it or mix it with something.’
‘Well, it was a gift, it would be rude not to try it straight away, we haven’t got anything to mix it with, and I don’t know about you, but it’s not something I want to savour. It’s rank.’
He laughs and glugs from the bottle again, shuddering as he hands it back to me.
I do the same, trying not to gag. ‘This is disgusting, why are we drinking this?’
‘I don’t know but I don’t need any more.’ He takes another swig from the bottle as he says it, making me laugh at the irony.
I don’t know how but somehow I’ve ended up sprawled on the sofa with my head on Julian’s lap, looking up at him, trying to count what might be the first hints of grey hair in his stubble.
‘Do you think Kat and Theo packed up their stalls together?’
His eyes are heavy-lidded and his cheeks are even more flushed than they were earlier. ‘They’d better bloody well have. The pair of them are infatuated with each other. We had to do something to force their hand.’
‘Aww.’ I reach up and, well, I intend to tuck his hair back but I miss and end up clawing a hand down his face. ‘You’re an old romantic at heart, aren’t you?’
‘Nope. No romance in me whatsoever. I’m dead inside.’
‘You are not.’ I think of how sweet he can be. He always opens doors for me, carries things for me, reaches things off the upper shelves of cupboards to save me standing on a chair. He’s been just as invested in Theo and Kat as I have, and that line he gave Theo about rainbows was something straight from the heart of a poet. I poke him in the chest harder than I intend to. ‘Go on, I’ve shared with you, your turn to share with me. How come a gorgeous guy like you hasn’t been snapped up yet?’
‘I’m not into relationships.’
‘Come on, you’ve got to give me more than that, Jules. I gave you the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. You said something before about a bad break-up…’
He looks down at me and narrows his eyes. ‘I’m way too drunk for this sort of manipulation.’
Even so, he takes another swig and sighs. ‘Fine. I was with someone for years… lived together, we weren’t engaged but I was saving to buy a ring and propose. That was it as far as I was concerned. Marriage, kids, the whole family thing. I had a normal job, a sensible car, maybe I was too young to be that settled. And she fell out of love with me. She got cold and distant, she would literally cringe if I went to kiss her, I’d put my hand on her arm and she’d pull away, and I got home from work one day to find she’d moved back in with her parents.’
I pick up one of his hands where his arm is draped across me, lift it with both of mine and slot my fingers between his. ‘And?’
‘And she hurt me so badly that I’ll never let anyone else get close enough to do it again, ever.’
I feel a bit sick at that. Or maybe it’s all the booze.
‘Was there someone else?’ I ask. Jules is sweet and kind, everything he does has a tenderness to it. I can’t imagine anyone cringing at his touch.
‘You know, I’d actually prefer it if there had been. It would’ve made it easier. But no. It was just me not being good enough.’ He sighs and takes another swig. He offers the bottle to me but I shake my head, more interested in what he’s saying.
‘I was fat and lazy,’ he continues. ‘Dull and boring, and old before my time. She said that every day she spent with me was sucking the life out of her.’
‘That sounds like more of a problem with her than you.’
He shakes his head.
It suddenly answers so many questions about him. Why he wears his body like a suit of armour. Why he uses it to hide the person inside who he thinks isn’t good enough. Why his version of suiting up is stripping down. Why it’s a shield that he only puts down when he’s comfortable.
‘This is when you got the car?’
‘I kind of had a mid-life crisis early. I bought the stupid car, starved myself to lose weight, let my short sensible haircut grow, hit the gym, and forced myself into doing stupid things to prove to her that I was interesting. I hate heights and I did a bloody bungee jump just so I could stick a video of it on Facebook and hashtag: lovin’ life.’ He does a drunken version of the hashtag symbol with his hands and slots his fingers back between mine. ‘I’d never hated anything more in my life. I had nightmares for months after doing it.’
‘Did it work?’
He shakes his head. ‘Are you kidding? She totally ignored me, and ages later, after I’d been scouted at the gym and done my first shoot, I posted the pictures online, and she wrote a comment that said something like “you can change the outside but you’ll always be fat, ugly, and boring on the inside”, and I just realised I’d never be good enough, no matter what I did.’
‘The comment said something like that or those exact words because you repeat it to yourself every day?’
He takes another swig of drink. ‘I don’t need to repeat it, it’s imprinted in me forever.’
I’m too drunk to stop myself hugging him. It’s pretty awkward from this position and I have to launch myself half up and half forward and sort of flop onto his chest, but he squeezes me, and I slide my arms around whatever bit of him I can reach. Everything’s spinning so much that I’m not even sure what part of him I’m hugging, but hopefully it gets the point across. I want to say something but I know it will come out a tipsy, inarticulate mess, and Jules deserves better than that.
I let go of him and settle my head back in his lap. I find his hand and slot my fingers into his again, the Calvados giving me courage I wouldn’t usually have. ‘You really let that put you off relationships for life?’
‘Any relationship I have will end the same way. Anyone who likes me now only likes what’s on the outside. As soon as they get to know me, they’ll realise I have the personality of a dead sloth. It’s easier to withdraw than to keep being someone I’m not. I’d rather be alone than constantly afraid of the day someone else realises I’m draining the will to live from them.’
‘Are you serious?’ I ask, suddenly feeling abnormally weepy.
His answer is another swig from the bottle, and when he offers it to me, I gulp some more down too. If he notices, I’m crying because I’m drunk, not because it’s physically impossible to hug him as tight as I want to hug him and I can’t find the words to say what I desperately want him to realise. Whoever his ex was, it was her fucking loss.
I suddenly can’t keep my hands off him. I reach up and tuck his hair back, I graze my fingers across his stubble, and smooth the lines out of his forehead. It’s like an apple-brandy-soaked magnet is pulling me up and the same one pulling him down. My hands slide into his hair, his are tangled in my falling-down ponytail, his hand on the side of my face, his thumb brushing my skin gently, and I close my eyes and let the wave of lust run through me, knowing I’m about to kiss him, and that I’ve wanted to kiss him for far longer than I can admit.
His woody smell is all around, tinged with the smell of Calvados that we’ve both managed to spill down ourselves from drinking lying down. Everything is warm and his arm is solid rock where my hand is clenched around it. Time moves like treacle as we hover against each other, his forehead touching mine. So close that his stubble brushes my chin, and I’m almost scared to breathe in case I ruin the moment.
‘Sorry, I can’t,’ he mumbles, p
ulling back so quickly I feel like a wobbling candlestick after the magician has ripped the tablecloth away.
He flops back on the sofa and slides his fingers into mine again. He closes his eyes and rests his head on the backrest. He makes no move to push me away so I settle my head back into his lap and pout at the ceiling.
‘I don’t want us to be a drunken regret in the morning,’ he says without opening his eyes.
‘Wouldn’t be a regret,’ I mutter, aware that I sound like a five-year-old whose mum has refused McDonald’s for dinner.
‘‘Course it would. You think I’m a git and I’ve just told you something I’ve never told anyone before. We’re both vulnerable and we’ve downed almost a whole bottle of Calvados between us. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and think anything we did tonight was a good plan.’
I mutter something unintelligible at the ceiling.
‘Besides,’ Jules whispers, his accent making a delicious shiver run through me. ‘I don’t want to be drunk when I kiss you because I want to bloody remember it.’
‘Well, when you put it like that…’ Something melts inside me, and if I didn’t need to pee so badly, I’d hug him again.
I’m dizzy when I stand up and Jules’s arms instantly lock around my waist but he’s no steadier. We walk into the coffee table and stumble over the sofa, and I’m not sure which one of us is trying to manoeuvre the other one. He grins down at me drunkenly and we’re either swaying on the spot or the room’s rocking.
My arms are looped around his neck and my whole body is pressed up against him, solid muscle but floppier tonight, everything about him as warm and soft as his hoody. I reach up and tuck his hair back, my fingers brushing the shell of his ear and trailing down. ‘You have really sexy earlobes.’
He lets out a snort of laughter. ‘Earlobes?’
‘Mmm hmm.’
All I know as we stumble towards the stairs is that I like his arms around me and I don’t want them to not be there.
We manage a few stairs before we trip over our own feet and end up sprawled in a heap halfway up the staircase.
Julian grunts as I land on top of him. ‘Okay, I’m done. We’ll sleep here. It’s comfortable.’
I fall asleep in the most uncomfortable position I’ve ever been in, lying half upright on the stairs with my face smushed into his neck, his stubble grazing my forehead, the smell of his aftershave all around me, and it’s nowhere near as uncomfortable as my empty bed at home.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Whoever thought sunlight and rooms without curtains were a good idea needs to be slapped. When I claw my eyes open, I’m upside down on top of the bedcovers with no recollection of how I got there and Jules is nowhere to be seen. I stumble across the landing to the bathroom for a wash and change and to clean my teeth, because I’m pretty sure something that’s been dead for several years has taken up residence in my mouth overnight.
It’s much later than I thought it was by the time I get downstairs, feeling marginally less like the walking dead. There’s a brown paper bag of croissants and a loaf of crusty white bread on the table inside the door, and a note from Kat that reads, ‘the fact neither of you are up probably means you opened the Calvados last night – hope you enjoyed!’
I think I might hate Kat.
Jules must’ve brought them in and the front door is unlocked when I step outside, unsure of whether I want to look for him or run away and hide. I can remember what he said last night, how close we came to kissing, but most of what I said to him is blurry. Did I tell him he’s got sexy earlobes? Who tells someone their earlobes are sexy? There are forty rooms in this place, surely it would be easy enough to avoid him for the rest of time? If I get a good hiding place now, he’ll never find me. That might be better than having to face him again.
Even as I think it, the strains of his voice reach me from the garden and I slip my shoes on and walk around the side of the château. Maybe I’m still drunk because his voice doesn’t even sound that bad. Maybe it’s because he’s quietly singing to himself, not screeching out the most irritating songs known to man at three in the morning.
He’s not singing to himself. When I get round the back and Jules is in view, I realise what he’s doing. He’s on his knees with a trowel, shovelling earth into a pot around the tree he bought yesterday and patting it down with his bare hands.
And he’s singing ‘Grow For Me’ from Little Shop of Horrors. To the plant.
I stand there watching him, not hiding but knowing he hasn’t seen me, and I wonder if this six-feet-tall Scottish muscle man would be offended if he knew I thought he was literally the most adorable thing in the world.
‘Do they?’ I ask when he adds the final layer of soil to the top of the pot and pats it down. ‘Grow for you?’
He turns around on his knees, squinting up at me. He grins and his face flushes. ‘Yeah. It’s kind of my thing. I think it brings me luck with plants. They seem to like it.’
‘Well, at least we’ve proved that plants are tone deaf. Either that or they start growing to get away from your voice.’
‘Ha ha.’ He pokes his tongue out at me. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’
‘Dead,’ I say. ‘You?’
‘Oh, I’ll be fine as soon as they stop the jackhammer drill in my skull and someone turns off the sun.’
‘Look, Jules, about last night…’
He holds his hand up. ‘Don’t. It was fun but we’d both had too much to drink. You don’t need to read anything more into it. I’m still a git, and now I understand why you don’t trust me, and now you know why I’m like I am—’
He’s cut off by a car horn tooting and the crunch of gravel as someone pulls in. We both walk round to the front of the château to see a black car in the courtyard.
‘Oh, don’t tell me…’ he says as the door opens and a pair of strappy gold stiletto heels arrange themselves on the stones. They’re followed by a pair of the smoothest legs I’ve ever seen.
‘Shit!’ Jules says, and I look up at the sudden horror on his face. ‘It’s my agent.’
I watch as a tall, slim woman folds herself out of the car and slams the door behind her, looking up at the château with a sneer on her face that says she’d be more impressed if she’d swallowed a wasp.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Julian panic before. ‘How the fuck did she get here? Shit, look at the state of me.’
‘You look fi—’
He’s already ripping his hoody over his head. He balls it up and thrusts it into my arms. ‘My hair!’ His hands go to his hair and try to frantically pull it back. ‘Glasses! Shit.’ He pulls his glasses off and folds them up. ‘Fuck, can’t see anything.’ He reluctantly puts them back on.
‘Jules, calm down,’ I say but he doesn’t hear.
He’s trying to pull his vest over his head too when the woman spots us.
‘JuJu! Dah-ling!’ She wafts a hand in our direction and starts tottering across the courtyard.
‘JuJu?’ I say in disbelief.
‘Fuck,’ he says, yanking the vest back down. Apparently he gets sweary when he’s panicking. I’ve never seen him look so worried. He’s still trying to smooth his hair down, but everything about him is suddenly stiff and ill at ease.
‘Kinzi,’ he says, pasting on a false smile that looks like he’s baring his teeth rather than smiling. ‘What are you doing here? How did you know where I was?’
‘I was in the area to meet a client,’ she says with a plummy accent. ‘As you’ve been ignoring my phone calls, I had to stop by and catch you in person.’
She puts her hands on his bare shoulders, her red nails dig into his skin, and I have no right to feel as annoyed as I do by the sight of them there. She air kisses him on both cheeks, making a noise but never touching, and then steps back and looks him up and down.
I feel uncomfortable under her gaze and it’s not even me she’s appraising. She hasn’t looked at me
once yet.
‘Why are you wearing so many clothes, JuJu? What are you hiding under there?’ She pokes at his stomach with a pointed fingernail. ‘Have you put on weight? And what’s with the hair? Why are you wearing those glasses? Are you being funny?’
‘My mistake,’ he says. ‘I grabbed them thinking they were sunglasses.’
‘Well, they don’t suit you, don’t ever wear them to a job, will you?’ She wags a long red fingernail in front of him, in much the same way she’d probably tell a dog off for vomiting in her slippers. Not that she looks like the kind of person who wears slippers. Or likes dogs.
I feel myself prickling towards her. This is exactly why he drinks protein shakes he can barely swallow and wears contact lenses even when they’re uncomfortable.
‘Just a joke, Kinzi. I wouldn’t have put them on if I’d known you were coming,’ he says through gritted teeth.
The woman finally turns to me. ‘He’s got such a weird sense of humour.’
I love his sense of humour, and I feel indignant and bloody incensed that she’s dared to come here and insult it. I’m about to say something when she waves her Louis Vuitton bag at me to get my attention. ‘Be a dear and fetch me a glass of water, would you? Chop chop!’
Julian steps in and pushes the bag back to her. ‘This is Wendy. She’s not a bloody maid, she’s my… friend.’
I blush even though there’s no reason to.
Kinzi looks me up and down like I’m something she’s just found in a toilet. ‘Oh.’ Her tone says I may as well be a toad.
‘This is Kinzi, my modelling agent,’ Jules says. I don’t bother trying to shake her hand or air kiss her. She doesn’t look like she wants to get any nearer than ten paces to me either. ‘I didn’t know she was coming, particularly because I never told her where I was.’
‘I had to do a little digging, JuJu, seeing as you will keep ignoring my phone calls.’
‘My phone’s been out of signal.’
I glance up at him. I know he’s lying.
‘The whole time?’ she demands. ‘Did you miss the daily voicemail messages and dozens of missed calls too? Have you checked your email?’
The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters Page 25