Solo

by Jill Mansell

  In the end, because there was no way he could miss his nine o’clock meeting with an extremely influential American businessman in Bath, and because she had mentioned last night that the friend who had driven her to the party had left and she wasn’t sure she had enough money on her to pay for a cab home, Ross stuck a rolled-up fifty-pound note into the top of the almost empty champagne bottle he had brought up to the room with him last night. Placing it on the bedside table, he scribbled a note and rested it against the bottle.

  Then, still wishing that he had the nerve to kiss her awake, make love to her all over again, and tell her what last night had really meant to him, he took what clothes he needed from the wardrobe and soundlessly left the room.

  Sorry, urgent business meeting—had to go. Please feel free to call room service for breakfast. And please do leave your phone number—I will call you. R.

  PS Money for cab home.

  The wages of sin, thought Tessa, poking the rolled-up fifty-pound note into the bottle and watching it slowly unfurl as it soaked up the dregs of the champagne. That he had felt obliged to leave money for her just about said it all.

  • • •

  Holly’s dark-green sports car screamed to a halt outside Tessa’s cottage at midday, as Tessa had known it would.

  “So what happened to you?” Holly, incapable of wearing anything so mundane as jeans and a sweatshirt, looked like an explosion in a flower bed. The scarlet, violet, and pink jacket and dress were new and had obviously cost a bomb. Tessa suspected that she’d been misery-buying, which meant all had not gone according to plan with Max.

  “I had a headache,” she said, clearing a pile of unprimed canvases off the sofa and gesturing to Holly to sit down. “I couldn’t find you to tell you I was leaving.”

  “What time was that?”

  Tessa pretended to think. “Tennish? I caught a cab.”

  “Lies!” exclaimed Holly triumphantly. “I drove back here at eleven thirty and you weren’t home then.”

  “Must’ve been asleep.” Tessa turned away, gathering up a pile of old newspapers and carrying them through to the kitchen.

  “Sweetie, I threw stones at your bedroom window.”

  “I wondered why it was broken.”

  “Tell me, tell me,” begged Holly, following her into the tiny kitchen and cornering her against the fridge. “You’ve met someone gorgeous. Who is he?”

  “What happened with Max?” countered Tessa, stalling for time. Holly grimaced and plucked meaningfully at her new clothes. “The bastard cost me three hundred pounds. He was charming for almost ten minutes and then he introduced me to this French girl, Dominique something-or-other. She’s a doctor, for heaven’s sake. The next thing I knew they were dancing together and I was left holding up the wall. And she had a tattoo on her thigh,” she concluded with disgust. “No doubt Max spent the rest of the night investigating it at extremely close quarters.”

  “It’s a very nice dress, anyway.”

  “And it’s very nice of you to say so, my dear.” Holly shook her head, smiling. “But as a way of changing the conversation, it sucks. Now tell me this instant who you spent the night with, Tessa Duvall, or there’ll be very big trouble indeed.”

  Chapter 3

  The day Tessa sat down and ate four banana sandwiches was the day she realized she was pregnant. For twenty-seven years she had hated bananas with a vengeance.

  It was a shock, but not a huge shock. Incredibly, the subject of contraception simply hadn’t crossed her mind at any stage during that fateful night in September. Not until the following day—when Holly, to whom she had steadfastly refused to name names, had made some flip remark about condoms—had she realized what a risk she had taken. After that the possibility that she might be pregnant had remained just that: a niggling but distant possibility. It couldn’t happen to her, she kept telling herself; they’d only done it once. And for some bizarre reason she was also convinced that the year of celibacy preceding that night would somehow count in her favor.

  But the weeks had passed, nothing had happened, and the realization that what she had feared might happen had actually happened had been a gradual one—like slowly being poisoned with arsenic.

  Tessa cursed herself for her stupidity. Knowing that she should put that night out of her memory hadn’t helped at all. Despite everything she had ever heard about Ross Monahan, and knowing exactly what a terrible reputation he had, she had been unable to get him out of her mind. Despite all her efforts to the contrary, she kept remembering his laughter, his dark flashing eyes, his absurd sense of humor, and the way he had managed to persuade her that he really wasn’t as bad as she’d been led to believe…

  Which was all so much bullshit, of course. When she was being logical she recognized that much at least. And above all else, Tessa was logical. When it came to the crunch, she could rationalize the situation with bone-chilling practicality.

  She and Ross were poles apart. Queen Victoria and Mick Jagger would have been a more likely proposition than Ross and herself.

  There was no way on earth that they could ever be a couple.

  It was just going to be so hard; forgetting someone not exactly forgettable was difficult enough, and now she was going to have a permanent reminder…

  Remembering now how close she had come to revealing the identity of her one-night stand to Holly, Tessa shivered with relief. At least she had that to be grateful for. Holly was congenitally incapable of keeping a secret for more than thirty seconds. Going to bed with Ross had been an incredibly stupid thing to do, and having been caught out like this was humiliating beyond belief. The identity of the father of her child was something Tessa was quite definitely going to keep entirely to herself.

  • • •

  The two Christmas trees flanking the reception desk shimmered like belly dancers every time anyone walked past them, hundreds of silvery strands reflecting rainbows of light from the spectacular chandelier suspended above them.

  Holly adored Christmas and all its decorations, but today she was too excited even to open the latest window in her Advent calendar.

  She had been shocked to the core yesterday when Tessa had said over lunch, “Oh, by the way, I’ve got a bit of news for you.” So shocked, horrified and amazed in fact that she’d needed a large brandy to steady herself.

  Tessa, on the other hand, had been completely in control. Amused by Holly’s extravagant reactions, she had smiled and explained quite simply that she had had two weeks in which to get used to the idea, and now that she had she was looking forward to it. It wasn’t necessarily going to be easy, but she would cope.

  It was typical of Tessa, of course, to put on this brave front and to dismiss with an airy gesture any suggestion that things might not be that easy. She was a survivor, the most fiercely independent girl Holly had ever known, and the last thing she would do was panic.

  Over fettuccine alle vongole and a glass of red wine, Holly had tried and failed to discover the identity of the father. To her eternal frustration, Tessa just shook her head and dismissed him as easily as she had dismissed her other problems. He was a complete one-off, she insisted; there was absolutely no question of him being contacted and informed of the situation.

  Tessa wasn’t the least interested in slapping a paternity suit on a virtual stranger and dragging him through the courts in pursuit of money. This was her baby and her responsibility, and she would manage perfectly well on her own.

  Privately, Holly had thought her friend crazy. Aloud, she had declared expansively that she would do anything she could to help.

  And in the middle of the night a wonderful idea had come to her. Hugging it to herself, amazed by her own brilliance, she had hardly been able to wait to get to work this morning. Any minute now Ross would appear, and she would pounce on him before he had a chance to get into his office. Holly unthinkingly scrawled an extrav
agant doodle down the left-hand margin of the signing-in register and smiled a secret, congratulatory smile. She’d always adored the sound of the word entrepreneur, and now here she was practically being one!

  • • •

  “So, you have a friend,” said Ross, struggling to make sense of Holly’s excited babble and wishing he’d managed to catch more than three hours’ sleep last night. “A friend in need. Is usually a bloody nuisance,” he added, collapsing into the chair behind his desk and indicating that Holly should also sit down. Neither her alarmingly yellow dress nor her rather overpowering perfume were doing his hangover much good.

  “Well, Tess isn’t,” she informed him proudly. “She’s lovely. And that’s the whole point—you’ll be helping her, and she’ll be doing you a favor at the same time. She really is an extremely talented artist.”

  “And you want us to display her work in the hotel,” said Ross, trying to slow Holly down. “If she’s so great, why doesn’t she sell through an art gallery?”

  Holly could see that her boss wasn’t yet functioning on all cylinders. With exaggerated patience she said, “She does, of course she does, but the only people who go into galleries are those who want to buy paintings.”

  “Ye-es.” This was where he began to lose track. “Holly, you couldn’t run and get me a cup of coffee…?”

  “In a minute.” If Holly knew anything, it was how to press home an advantage. She was going to make the most of his fragile state while it lasted. “The point is, if Tessa has her pictures hanging on your walls, they’ll be seen by people who hadn’t planned on buying anything! So when they see them and fall in love with them and then realize that they can buy them, they’ll be even more pleased than if they’d wanted a painting in the first place. Don’t you see…?” She shook her head, urging him to understand. “Everyone likes to say they saw something and simply had to have it. It’s a wild, romantic gesture. It makes them feel dashing and spontaneous!”

  “OK, OK.” Ross put up his hand to stop her. “And what exactly do we get in return, apart from wild guests making romantic gestures all over the place and probably getting themselves arrested into the bargain?”

  “Ten percent,” replied Holly promptly.

  Ross had never needed a cup of coffee more badly in his life. “We’re not having bloody price tags on them,” he grumbled, weakening.

  “Heavens, no! Just a discreet notice on the reception desk,” Holly soothingly assured him. She was already planning to tell the guests about Tessa’s paintings whenever they strayed within a twelve-foot radius of her desk.

  “And I’d have to see her work first before I agreed to anything.” He was privately both surprised and faintly intrigued that Holly, with her wealthy background and razzle-dazzle social life, should be such great friends with a pregnant, poverty-stricken artist. He had met one or two of her friends before, and if he’d offered them a stick of charcoal they’d have been more likely to try to smoke it. “So, who is she? Would I have heard of her?”

  “God no,” declared Holly. “She’s not the least bit interested in the kind of socializing I do. We’ve been best friends since we were eight, when her mother came to work for my mother, but to look at us you’d never think it. She’s the exact opposite of me.”

  “In that case, I like her already,” said Ross with a halfhearted attempt at humor. “At least she might have the decency to bring me a cup of coffee.”

  “She’d be more likely to call you a lazy bum and tell you to make your own,” Holly replied. “You couldn’t charm your way around Tessa like you do with everyone else. She won’t tolerate bullshit.”

  Somewhere in the depths of Ross’s memory a distant chord was struck. But it was too distant to pursue; Holly was rattling on again, moving in to close the deal. “In fact, I did manage to drag her along here to Max’s party a couple of months ago,” she continued, jiggling her knee up and down in her anxiety to hear him say yes, “but she didn’t stay long. You probably wouldn’t have noticed her…”

  Ross stopped thinking about coffee. For a few seconds he actually stopped breathing. No distant chord this time; instead, he heard a bloody great gong.

  Staring at a point on the wall beyond her, he ran through in his mind Holly’s earlier words: “She’s the exact opposite of me… She won’t tolerate bullshit.” And: “I managed to drag her along to Max’s party.”

  Christ, it had to be her. It had to be.

  “So?” Holly clicked her fingers to regain his attention. “Can I tell her it’s on?” Ross, she thought, was really in a bad way this morning. He was looking positively shell-shocked.

  “No, you bloody well can’t. Was this her idea?” His hangover forgotten, he was trying to make sense of it all. Or even some of it.

  “Of course not!” Holly glared at him, indignant and proud. “She doesn’t have a clue about any of this. I told you, it’s my own plan. She only told me yesterday that she was pregnant, and I came up with this brilliant idea last night.”

  “This baby,” said Ross, wondering at his ability to sound merely curious when the question he was about to ask could have such earth-shattering repercussions. “Who’s the boyfriend?”

  “Oh.” Holly flicked her wrist, a gesture of disdain. “No boyfriend. He was simply a one-night stand who disappeared off the scene. In fact, it’s a bit of a coincidence because apparently it all happened on the night of Max’s party…”

  Chapter 4

  The Grosvenor House Hotel, supremely elegant and swarming with the celebrities who had descended upon it for the occasion, was coping admirably with the invasion.

  Max, who had cowritten the screenplay for a film nominated for several awards today—including best screenplay—wasn’t coping well at all.

  It was the kind of glitzy, self-congratulatory, showbizzy affair that made him wonder why on earth he hadn’t stuck to his guns and said no. He didn’t want to be here. He was too busy to be here. And who gave a damn anyway, whether he was here or not? In a room containing six hundred guests, did one more or less make any difference?

  He was later to come to the conclusion that it did.

  Francine Lalonde, voluptuous star of dozens of films, both French and English, chose that precise moment to make her customary late entrance. Up on the stage a gray-haired young man was receiving his award for best costume design from an older, balder man, but no one was paying any attention.

  “Oh hell,” drawled Francine Lalonde in the husky, laid-back tones that had helped to make her famous. “They bloody well started without me.”

  Max, despite having written on numerous occasions about love at first sight, had never seriously entertained the idea of such a dubious philosophy. It simply wasn’t feasible. How, after all, could you fall in love with someone you didn’t know?

  But quite suddenly, blindingly, he understood. He just knew that whatever the other person said, thought, felt, or did would be absolutely right.

  And when Francine Lalonde, catching his eye, first winked at him, then insinuated her way toward his table, he knew too that everything she did would indeed be right.

  “I’m afraid I’m making a disturbance,” she whispered, sliding into the vacant seat on Max’s left and winking at him again. “I’d better be quiet before I am told off.”

  Seldom if ever stuck for words, Max simply nodded. It was all he could manage to do. He had seen several of her films over the years and had admired her beauty in a detached way, but nothing could have prepared him for this real-life encounter. She looked like a perfect, just-ripe fruit and smelled of honey. Her glossy chestnut hair, elongated sherry-brown eyes, and pouting coral lips made a gentle mockery of the stick-thin blonds who tried and failed to acquire the kind of sexual allure that was only ever born, not made. Not for Francine Lalonde the artificial aids employed by so many in their pursuit of glamour; her hair swung at her shoulders, free of hair spray,
she wore no flashy jewelry, and her plain apricot silk dress molded to the feminine curves of her body rather than vice versa. She was a real woman. She didn’t have to try.

  Max, by devastating contrast, felt like a fifteen-year-old all over again.

  His state of tongue-tied bliss, however, couldn’t last. Francine Lalonde was one of the guests of honor at this ceremony, and her place was at one of the far more prestigious tables at the front, close to the stage. But as the organizer arrived to bear her off, she turned to Max and briefly covered his hand with her own.

  “Such a shame, they are taking me away,” she murmured. “And you look so clever, so interesting. I do enjoy a man who is clever. Bonne chance, m’sieur…”

  The rest of the ceremony passed by Max in a blur, with only brief flashes of exquisite clarity. From his position at the back of the room he was no longer able to see her, but when she stepped onto the stage amid thunderous applause, first to present the award to the most promising young actor and then to receive her own for best actress, he felt himself holding his breath, concentrating on her every word and smile, and willing the moment to prolong itself indefinitely. His mind raced as he sought for some way to see her again. He had to see her again. And he also needed to ensure that the second meeting would captivate her to such an extent that it would automatically be followed by a third…and a fourth…

  “Where are you going?” hissed the man on his right, the director of the film Max had cowritten. “They’re just about to announce Best Film—you can’t leave now!”

  “Sorry,” said Max, sounding anything but. “Emergency. I have to go. Good luck…”

  • • •

  The ceremony, dragging on and over-running as such ceremonies invariably did, finally ended just before five thirty. By the time Francine had exchanged greetings and air-kisses with a hundred or so old colleagues and distant friends, she was more than ready to fall into her waiting limousine and contemplate with pleasure a quiet evening back at her hotel. A hot bath, a relaxing drink, an expertly administered massage maybe, or…