Solo

by Jill Mansell

  “That’s a ludicrous idea,” intercepted Ross, enraged at Tessa’s Victorian attitude.

  “Not so ludicrous. Holly went to a smart school, filled with suitably highborn potential friends. They wanted the best for her. Happily, Holly refused to have her friends chosen for her, and her parents knew better than to try to change her mind. They were my first-ever customers, and the paintings they bought when I was twenty still hang in their sitting room today. When Mum died two years later they offered me a home.”

  “Which you refused, naturally.”

  “I was an adult. I was quite capable of looking after myself,” replied Tessa in matter-of-fact tones.

  Ross shrugged. “I’m surprised you didn’t share an apartment with Holly.”

  “Oh, she suggested that, of course, but I couldn’t have afforded to pay half the rent on the kind of place Holly could bear to live in, and I wouldn’t allow her to subsidize me. So, I found this cottage—I rent it from a farmer who lives further down the valley—and made it my home. I’ve been here five years now.”

  “And you manage to support yourself by selling your work? Why haven’t you sold these?” Ross gestured toward the paintings on the walls. “I’d like to buy the party picture. May I?”

  “I manage to support myself now,” she told him with a self-deprecating shrug. “Just about. But until last year I was doing odd jobs here and there, to pay the rent. I worked as a charlady for a while, then as a croupier in the Royale Casino in Bath. I did a bit of waitressing, a lot of babysitting and a terrible, six-week stint as a tour guide for visiting Japanese and American tourists. I thought I’d go blind. All those flashbulbs…”

  “I’m impressed,” said Ross, smiling at the expression on her face. “But I’d still like to buy that painting. Very much.”

  “Not for sale, I’m afraid. I gave them to my mother. When she died I found I couldn’t bear to part with them, so they stay here. Sorry.”

  He shook his head, dismissing her apology, then brightened.

  “But I can commission you to paint something for me. You’d agree to that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course.” Tessa allowed him a glimmer of a smile. “What was it you wanted, a portrait of Antonia Seymour-Smith?”

  Here it came, thought Ross. He might have known that she would get around to the subject of Antonia sooner or later. How to wreck a perfectly good evening in three seconds flat, he thought bitterly. She must have been taking lessons from Max.

  “Look,” he said in his most reasonable voice, “I’m sorry about what happened at the hotel, but as I tried to tell you at the time, it was only a casual affair. She meant—she means nothing to me. If you hadn’t constantly refused to see me, I would never have gone to her house on Christmas Eve.”

  Tessa, having listened patiently to his reasoning, now shook her head.

  “I wasn’t accusing you of treachery—of being unfaithful to me, if you like—and that certainly wasn’t why I left. I’d made it quite plain to you that we had no relationship. As a free agent you could do whatever you liked, with whomever you liked…”

  “Then why the bloody hell did you leave?” demanded Ross, by now thoroughly perplexed.

  “Watch my lips.” Leaning toward him, speaking slowly and carefully, Tessa repeated: “You can have an affair with whomever you like. But you don’t even like Antonia—by your own admission she means nothing to you. And that’s what I find so bizarre, the fact that you can carry on an affair with someone for whom you have no feelings. Particularly,” she added a moment later, just as Ross opened his mouth to protest, “when she’s so obviously besotted with you.”

  “But she isn’t besotted with me,” he retaliated. “We both know it isn’t that kind of relationship. She has her husband, I have my…friends, and now and again we arrange to meet. No complications, no awkwardness, and no harm done.”

  “But it was awkward on Christmas night,” Tessa reminded him, “because Antonia may have set out believing that she wouldn’t allow herself to fall in love with you, but it didn’t work out that way. Sooner or later emotions were bound to come into it, because for some reason women are like that. And now they have, for her. She’s involved and you’re not. It’s all going to be messy and difficult and very, very sad.”

  Something in her tone of voice aroused Ross’s interest.

  Forgetting for the moment that he was supposed to be defending himself, he said, “This is something you’ve had experience of. You’ve been through it yourself.”

  Tessa silently marveled at his stupidity. He really, really didn’t have a clue.

  “No,” she said, touching the rim of the crimson candle that flickered between them and experiencing that momentary flash of pain as melted wax ran over the tip of her finger, then rapidly cooled and hardened. The pain subsided as quickly as it had come. “No, I haven’t been through it myself. I’m far too smart to get involved with that kind of man.”

  • • •

  When he rose to leave shortly afterward, Ross gave her a decorous kiss on the cheek—the kind of kiss one offered a shriveled maiden aunt—and thanked her formally for dinner. Tessa, stiff with restraint, fought down the humiliating urge to slide her arms around him and stood instead by the door with a fixed smile and fists clenched tightly behind her back.

  Not until Ross had left and she had returned to the sitting room did she see his keys still lying on the coffee table, next to the burned-down crimson candle. Snatching them up, she raced back to the front door. Barefoot, she ran down the snowy path. The dark outline of Ross’s figure was only just discernible fifty yards further along the lane.

  “Your keys!” shouted Tessa, gasping as an icy blast of air hit her lungs. “Your car! What are you doing?”

  The dark silhouette stopped, turning to face her. “Your keys,” replied Ross. “Your car. And I suppose that what I’m doing is trying to prove to you that I can occasionally be a gentleman.”

  “But it’s your car,” repeated Tessa, dazed and dismayed. “It’s a Mercedes.”

  In the darkness, Ross was smiling. “And you’d set your heart on a Lamborghini,” he said consolingly. “I’m sorry.”

  “But this is ridiculous…” she protested through chattering teeth. Her feet burned with cold, and it even hurt to breathe.

  “It’s a damn sight less ridiculous than the idea of you skidding around in the snow on a bicycle.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, do shut up, Tess.” Ross was also frozen. Being a gentleman was bloody hard work, and he only possessed so much self-control. The sight of Tessa, with her blond hair gleaming in the moonlight and her feet ridiculously bare in the snow, was almost too much for him. Raising one hand in a farewell salute, he turned to leave. “And if it makes you any happier,” he added, sensing that she was still standing there behind him mouthing “buts,” “I’m not doing it for your sake. We do have a child to consider, after all.”

  Chapter 9

  Holly, arranging a vast bowl of pink tulips in reception, was so deeply involved in planning her campaign—code-named Get Max—that she didn’t notice Grace, wearing a slightly shorter-than-usual uniform and rather too much coral lipstick, slip into the manager’s office with a tray. She was so engrossed that she also failed to observe Dr. Timothy Stratton-Staines from Room Seven as he made his way briskly out to his car with a small leather suitcase in his hand.

  Having come to the reasonable conclusion that Max simply wasn’t susceptible to love at first sight and that after this length of time he had come to regard her merely as a receptionist rather than as potential love interest, Holly had decided that a properly planned campaign was what was required. Max needed a bit of helping along, and she had all sorts of tricks up her sleeve. It wasn’t cheating, she’d explained to Tessa when she’d outlined her plans; it was simply a matter of making Max realize that there was more to her than met the
eye, and that basically he just didn’t know what he was missing.

  Which was why, having done a bit of serious research, she was at this moment wearing a blindingly efficient navy-blue suit from Jaeger and a plain white silk shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. Her legs were encased in opaque, dark-blue stockings and matching low-heeled pumps, and her hair was pulled back in a bun so tight that her temples ached. Incapable of showing a bare face to so much as the milkman, she had been forced to compromise with the makeup, limiting herself to smoky gray eye shadow, subtle lipstick, and scarcely any blusher at all.

  In Holly’s own opinion she looked an absolute fright, but she had paid a great deal of attention yesterday to Caroline Mortimer, Max’s high-flying and ruthlessly elegant literary agent, when she had arrived to have lunch with him. In her late thirties, Caroline Mortimer had real cheekbones and a ballerina’s svelte figure. She had probably invented power dressing single-handedly. Holly had taken in every detail, noting the severity of the beige suit, the matching beige fingernails and lip gloss. The immaculate dark chignon was a work of art, and apart from a matte-black watch, her hands were bare of jewelry.

  As far as Holly was concerned, Caroline Mortimer looked positively alarming. Max, on the other hand, had appeared to find her irresistible. It surely wasn’t necessary for him to put on an act with Ms. Mortimer, after all; he was successful enough not to have to feign adoration in order to win favor. This led her to the inescapable conclusion that Max actually liked women who dressed in that dynamic manner. Certainly he would never have lingered over a three-and-a-half-hour lunch and disappeared up to his apartment with her for a further two hours—supposedly to discuss his work-in-progress—if he didn’t find her attractive.

  Holly had been shocked rather than upset at the time, somehow imagining the relationship between author and agent to be sacrosanct, comparable to that of doctor and patient, with actual sex forbidden.

  But the perfect chignon had shown slight but definite signs of wear and tear when Ms. Mortimer had finally left the hotel, and now all Holly had to hope was that her own transformation might—please God!—have a similar effect upon Max. She certainly hoped so; this bloody awful outfit had cost an absolute bomb.

  • • •

  Ross was sitting at his desk and was busy on the phone when Grace tapped on the door and entered the office without waiting for his reply. Then, apparently overcome by her own daring, she hovered halfway between the door and the desk, paralyzed by indecision and clutching her loaded tray as if it were a dead animal.

  “Any car, Mike,” said Ross into the phone, raising a questioning eyebrow in Grace’s direction but receiving no response. “Well, you know what I mean. Anything decent, maybe another Merc. Maybe a Lamborghini? No, no, not part exchange… It’s gone to a friend. Yeah, I just felt like a change.”

  Grace had already observed that Ross’s car was missing from its customary position at the head of the graveled driveway. Dazzled by her own daring—her stars had said that this was a day for taking chances—she waited for him to conclude his conversation with Mike Donnelly, who was a great friend of Ross’s and who owned the smartest car showrooms in Bath, and finally managed to place the heavy tray on the edge of his impressive, overcrowded leather-topped desk.

  “What’s this?” said Ross, leaning back in his chair and frowning. “Do I have a meeting with someone?”

  “No… W-well, I don’t think so,” stammered Grace, her cheeks reddening. “I don’t know. I just thought you’d like some coffee and something to eat.”

  Ross was struggling to remember her name, a facility that normally came easily to him. But this young girl, so quiet and normally so colorless—although at the moment she was positively scarlet—was someone whose identity currently eluded him.

  To compensate for this lack, he gave her a dazzling smile.

  “Of course. What a marvelous idea. I usually have to beg Holly on bended knees for coffee, and she thinks the whole world takes it black, without sugar.”

  “I thought…” said Grace, quite overwhelmed by his smile. “I thought that maybe I could bring you a tray every morning. Just coffee and toast, maybe…or if you’d prefer a proper breakfast, I could always—”

  “Just coffee would be fine,” interjected Ross, who never ate breakfast. “But yes, that sounds great.” The phrase grace and favor sprang into his mind, and quite suddenly it came back to him. When he had interviewed her a couple of months ago the thought of that same phrase had made him smile.

  Leaning across the desk, he poured himself some coffee, adding plenty of cream and sugar. “Thank you, Grace. Excellent idea.” Then he sat back, pulled a folder from the pile on his desk, and flipped it open.

  Realizing that this was a gesture of dismissal and at the same time breathing in the faint but intoxicating scent of his aftershave, Grace went for it.

  “I’ve got a car,” she blurted out, further emboldened by the fact that he’d actually remembered her name. “If you needed a lift I could drive you anywhere you wanted to go.”

  Ross glanced up, amused. He may have struggled to recall her name, but he was well acquainted with her car, having noticed it in the hotel parking lot a few weeks ago. It had been necessary to have a quiet word with Hugh Stone, the deputy manager, about shifting rust heaps like Grace’s unprepossessing little Fiat to a less conspicuous parking area behind the kitchens. A week ago he might have passed a scathing comment in response to such an offer—he needed to get to Manchester and Grace’s car didn’t look as if it were capable of crawling further than the end of the drive—but quite suddenly he recalled Tessa’s own biting remarks as she had reminded him that not everyone was able to afford the sporty, prestigious models he took so easily for granted.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said, smiling at the young waitress and noticing for the first time the abbreviated hemline of her skirt. “But Max has a spare. I’ll use one of his for a couple of days until Mike comes up with something for me. Just one suggestion,” he added, as she turned to leave. Grace swung back, her face pink and eager, her heart pounding.

  “Yes, Mr. Monahan?”

  “The uniform.” He nodded at her thin legs. “We don’t want to raise the blood pressure of our male guests too drastically, after all. Maybe it could be returned to its usual length…?”

  • • •

  Max wasn’t having a good day.

  Yesterday, by contrast, had been extremely satisfactory. Caroline had brought him up to date with the sales figures of his latest novel and was forging ahead with her negotiations for a lucrative contract with the Americans for the film rights to last year’s bestseller. She was as slick with money as she was in bed, and Max had spent a thoroughly enjoyable day witnessing both attributes to the full.

  Which only served to accentuate the difference between then and now. Sitting down as usual at eight thirty to confront his laptop, he had been irritated beyond belief to discover that nothing was going according to plan. A glitch in the computer had wiped two entire chapters from disc. He had discovered a fatal flaw in the plot. His normally effortless fluency had deserted him. And, to add final insult to injury, the coffee percolator had blown a fuse.

  Since working without a constant supply of decent black coffee was a physical impossibility for Max, he stormed downstairs in a less-than-sunny mood in search of a replacement percolator and—hopefully—inspiration.

  What he found, on the phone in reception and deeply involved in a conversation obviously not connected with business, was Holly. Max frowned, unable to decide whether she looked more like a spinster librarian or a strippergram dressed up to look like a spinster librarian.

  Holly, who had been rabbiting on about bikinis and the price of flights to Barbados, skidded to a halt in midsyllable the moment she spotted Max, started gabbling instead about the availability of The Grange’s honeymoon suite, and slammed down the phone ten
seconds later. As she opened her mouth to speak to Max, it rang again. Propping himself against the desk he listened, his frown deepening, as she informed the caller in brisk tones that no, every room in the hotel was currently full and that maybe he should try The Royal instead.

  “Max!” Having replaced the receiver for the second time, she gave him the benefit of her dazzling smile. Then, remembering her newly adopted image of sleek sophistication, hastily modified it to a mysterious semismirk. “Max, how may I help you? If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re looking a trifle harassed.”

  “A trifle harassed?” he echoed, disbelief temporarily overcoming his irritation. What in heaven’s name was Holly up to now?

  She blushed. It was the first time he’d seen her blush, probably because it was also the first time he’d seen her without a face caked in makeup.

  “Sorry, Max. What’s up?”

  “You tell me. When I looked out of my window a few minutes ago I saw that chap with the terrible toupee leave the hotel, complete with suitcase. Isn’t his room free?”

  “Dr. Stratton-Staines? He hasn’t checked out.” Holly tried not to sound as sickened as she felt. The good doctor might wear an ill-fitting wig, but he had devoted his life to helping young children stricken with cancer, otherwise she would never have agreed to let him pay his bill at the end of the week when his new checkbook arrived, instead of in advance as hotel procedure demanded.