by Corri Lee
She averted her eyes from mine. “Mr Ryan owns this salon, Miss Tudor.” Crap. Spluttering, I ran my fingers through the tresses I’d been growing for years. It was almost a veil that protected me and he wanted to strip me of it just so he didn’t look like he’d had to hire a woman to put up with his shit for a night. Not only that, he’d brought me to a place where my opinion would be overruled. How could he switch between personalities so effortlessly and without warning?
Somewhere along the way, the emerald on my left ring finger caught the light and reflected in the mirror, reminding me of the promise I’d made when I accepted it. Eyes fixed on the glittering green gem, I shook my head and caught the reflection of Calloway’s impatient expression behind me in my peripheral vision. “Give me one good reason why your opinion on my image is more important than mine. One single good reason why I should make myself feel uncomfortable in my own skin on your say so.” He didn’t have one, but his silence somehow still argued with me, so I stood, brushed the creases from my shirt and made to leave.
“Emmeline.” The sound of my name being snapped out hit me like the crack of a bullwhip.
Spinning around, I very brazenly gave him the finger. “Nobody dictates to me, asshole. Maybe you should go and pick up some whore off a street corner to be your date tonight, and maybe I’ll go on my own looking like hooker Barbie and see which one of us really gets more respect.”
A collective sharp intake of breath filled the salon along with deathly quiet—every stylist had stopped in their tracks and their clients watched the scene with rubber-necked fascination. The scene I was causing. As soon as I realised that, I withered a little on the spot and backed out towards the door.
What the hell was I doing? I was supposed to be representing my family and instead I was throwing silly bitch fits in the middle of Manhattan over a hair cut.
You’re honouring a promise to not change for anyone else. Don’t try and kid yourself into thinking Blaze doesn’t exist in your life anymore.
“Emmeline.” I didn’t still when I heard Calloway repeat my name, softer this time, but that didn’t deter him from following me outside and grabbing my hand as gently as he could. “Emmeline, I’m sorry. I was tactless.”
“You said I’m going to look like a prostitute tonight if I don’t cut my hair.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. New York is critical, my sweet, and I don’t want you to feel like you’re being judged at this benefit.”
“Well, it can’t be any worse than feeling like the only friend I have on this stupid continent is judging me in there!”
Sighing, Calloway pulled me around to curl up against him and pressed his lips into my hair. Miserably, I let him, because I liked his company. “I’m sorry, okay? The crop was a suggestion, not an order. The dress is great, so are you—if anything you’re going to overshadow me.”
The penny dropped. He was almost certainly one of the most gorgeous head-turning faces in New York and between my image and the speculation surrounding me, I’d be detracting some of that limelight from him. His need to be centre of attention wasn’t limited to the building he worked in.
“We’ll find a new dress,” I acquiesced, muttering into his lapels. While I didn’t know for sure what his ‘issues’ were, I knew that sometimes you had to make concessions for troubled friends and indulge the vices that kept them level. “But next time you bully my hair, we’re going to have a problem.”
“The next time you call my continent stupid, I’m getting you deported.”
With smiles, we re-entered the salon and Calloway sat quietly by my side while Leoni gave me the trim I’d been wanting, not looking too disgruntled that he’d been called out on his crappy behaviour in public. The shy stylist looked at me with admiration as she worked, visibly less twitchy than she had been with her boss breathing down her neck.
When he left briefly to take a call, she admitted that she was delighted—yes, ‘delighted’—to see someone finally stand up to him in spite of his status, and confessed that it wasn’t the first time he’d put her in such a ‘shituation’. Exactly how much didn’t I know about Calloway Ryan?
With my curiosity piqued, I made no argument to finding a new dress for the evening in the more expensive boutiques of the Garment District, not even when he’d insisted on paying. My desire to know the cost or designer was dampened by the itch-like urge to get home to my laptop.
The typically modest, knee-grazing, cowled necked dress hung from a hook in the town car I let him call for me when we finally parted ways. It didn’t cover all that much more flesh than the cocktail dress but for the sake of a peaceful evening, I didn’t pretend that it wasn’t as demure as a nun’s habit.
With only an hour to get ready, I left my laptop to power up and hit the apartment landline answering machine to play while I took a quick shower with the bathroom door open. I could only just hear the messages over the jets of water, but it didn’t seem like I was missing much more than brief verbal confirmations of emails that had been forwarded to my inbox.
Until I heard the frantic warbled of my mother.
“Oh, Emmy, love, it’s awful! The press, oh goodness! They’ve jumped on the bandwagon of assumption and... well... Darling, your father emailed you some screenshots of pages that have gone live over here in the past hour or so. We’re doing some damage control to get them taken down but... Oh, love, get onto The New York Times!”
Bemused, I wrapped myself up in a towel and set the coffee machine to work before finally sitting down at my laptop. Forty-seven unread emails made me wince, actively discouraging me from taking another ‘me’ day. Four from Henry were marked urgent, and to my amazement, one from Daniel had landed in my inbox too. I hadn’t heard from him in such a long time that I pounced at the correspondence, secretly prepared for a healthy dose of chastisement for taking off without warning.
Princess!
Haven’t you been causing mischief over in The Big Apple! Tell me the sushi is amazing and we’ll be on the next flight over.
I hear you’re working miracles over there. I never doubted for a second that you could, and I hope New York is giving you the breather you need. Chris and Esme are sulking, obviously, but it’s not about them. Jonathan and I are just worried that you’ll have a saga over there and you’ll have nobody to look out for you. Promise me you’ll let me know if you need us.
You’ve probably had the tearful phone call from Ivy already, but the media has done a whoopsie. You might want to check out the image I attached. It’s been taken off the interwebs thanks to Henry, but plenty of people have seen it. You have my word that this is the worst.
Love you
Mr Divine (I know you love it)
Unnerved by the casualness with which he’d written, I clicked on the email attachment. All the colour drained from my face when my screen filled with a picture of Calloway and I stood on the path outside the salon that afternoon, with an indiscreet zoom shot of my left hand gripping his lapels.
Black Widow?
Multi-billionaire’s daughter Emmeline Tudor is pictured wearing an engagement ring in New York with America’s bad boy Calloway Ryan just weeks after breaking her engagement to Blaze. It can’t be his sparkling personality...
Seemingly able to win the hearts of all untouchable men, how many rings will Tudor, 22, collect before she finds a diamond big enough to match her impossibly high standards?
Ouch.
With morbid fascination, I clicked through the links Henry had sent me, wincing at the speculation that Calloway and I were officially betrothed. I’d been expecting the assumption that we were an item after the benefit that night, but this had been blown amazingly out of proportion.
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I stood and sidled over to the door when the front desk buzzed up and left it off the latch, not taking my eyes away from my laptop. There had been so many cameras at Cornelia Alexander’s mixer the night Blaze had ‘proposed’—how could they not know that this was th
e same ring?
The logical solution was to take it off. It was something I should have done weeks ago; taken it off before I left and put it somewhere for Blaze to collect. But somehow, I just couldn’t bear the thought of not wearing it. It was so much more than just a ring. It was a promise—my promise.
Try and justify it with that ‘promise’ excuse all you want. You know that taking it off would mean you’re not his anymore.
Ignoring Fat Emmy, I tugged the ring off my left ring finger and tried it on the right hand, growling at myself when I found that not one other single finger on either hand would let the white gold hoop sit comfortably.
“Emmeline?” Calloway stuck his head around the open door and frowned at me. “You’re not dressed.”
“Have you seen this?” I pointed to the laptop. “My family are going ape shit in London. One date and New York tells the world that I’m marrying you.”
“Ah, good old paparazzi.” He stepped in and sat down at the laptop, obstructing my view of the nightmare articles. Trying not to be distracted by how great he looked in a tuxedo, I grabbed my dress from it’s garment bag and darted into my bedroom.
The bitter sweet memory of Blaze dressing and preening me haunted me as I struggled to apply my makeup with any finesse and brush my hair into something red carpet worthy. Apparently no matter where I was in the world, I would always suck at vanity.
Calloway stood when I walked back into the lounge and followed me into the kitchen, offering a whistle as an appraisal for my appearance. Well, at least I had his vote. “Your family are kicking British media ass?” I nodded, pouring myself a very large cup of coffee complete with a splash of cream liqueur. “I’ll take care of it on this end. You’d think they’d know that I’d make a big deal of an engagement though. Not sure I appreciate the asinine assessment of my personality , either Whoa!” He thumped my back when I swallowed my coffee the wrong way, caught off guard by him using an expression I’d once used in conversation myself—minutes before we first met. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I choked, dabbing at my watering eyes. “Excessive enthusiasm for caffeine. Ugh...” The remains of my coffee—which as it happens wasn’t an awful lot after one long, life affirming swig—were thrown down the sink in a sulk. New York had lost just a small modicum of its charm for the whole media escapade and my will to go and schmooze with it’s richest inhabitants had waned significantly.
“Emmeline...” Calloway pouted as though sensing my mood. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll set them straight and this will soon be old news. What is it you Brits say? ‘Tomorrows chip paper’.” With a reluctant smile, I gave him a sly look that said I still hated the shituation but he’d won me over. He responded with a high-voltage smile and approached me slowly until his hands were caging me against the work surface. “Emmeline.”
It was the longest time I’d gone without sex in four years and just the way he said my name set my heart racing along with my libido. It wasn’t enough that he just looked like a purely sexual creature, he had to make sure I felt it, too.
All of it. Pressed up against me, feverishly hot and rock hard.
“Cal.”
“You look edible.”
“We have to go and be important and charitable. You can eat me later.” My eyes widened as blood pooled in my cheeks. “Oh! Oh, God. I meant—”
Exactly what you said. Anything for validation.
Calloway laughed and backed off, gaze lingering over the tell-tale throbbing vein in my flushed neck. “You’re right, we do have places to be. Are you, uh...” He hooked a finger around the arm of my glasses and pulled them off my face. “... wearing these tonight?”
“Of course. I only take them off if I’m planning to get fall down drunk and all things considered, I don’t think that’s a good idea tonight.” There were only so many uncomplimentary headlines I could stand to have my face underneath in one day, and the idea of being portrayed as Henry Tudor’s money-hungry, black widow, promiscuous daughter with a drink problem made my blood run cold.
“You have no others?” I arched a brow questioningly and watched Calloway transform from a man so confident to a man so awkward. He scrubbed a hand over his face and cleared his throat, visibly steeling himself for another fight. “They make you look kind of dorky.”
I gasped theatrically. “J’accuse!” And then shook my head with a laugh as I turned to rinse out my used cup. Oddly, my tendency to be a bit of a slob had vanished and I’d become so engrossed with keeping the apartment tidy that it was verging on obsessive. “I am dorky, Cal. My only regret of leaving London is that I had to leave all my comic book collectables in the flat.”
That’s crap and you know it. You regret everything about leaving London.
“Comic books?” He wrinkled his nose. “You think you know a person...”
But he didn’t really know me at all. We’d shared the same air briefly for three days in my entire life and everything he thought he knew about me was little more than Internet rumours and hearsay. Nothing had been discussed about my past earlier that day and nothing erring on serious proven or explained. We were relative strangers.
“It’s a great look on you,” Calloway went on, “but there are others that may not feel like your um, dorkiness, is something to be celebrated.”
“Officially no fucks given for other people’s opinions on my prescription frames,” I snapped, turning to him stiffly to grab my glasses from his hand. “Are we going?”
“Emmel—”
“Say my name again and I swear to god, you’ll find out why we Brits enjoy such a poor reputation.”
Wrapping his hand around my wrist, he slid the other across my shoulder to my neck and nudged my chin up with his thumb. “Emmeline,” he whispered, and dipped to press his lips to mine.
It was all I needed to lose my mind. The relief of being that close to someone again washed over me and flooded me with a sense of calm and purpose. From the moment I’d left London, all I needed was to feel like I belonged to someone and Calloway gave me that with his kiss.
But you don’t belong to him.
I didn’t care. With a moan, I ran my fingers up into his hair and tugged gently, feeling my body bow into his. He tasted sweet and kissed with the same economy he exercised when he walked—like every movement had been previously calculated to ensure optimal results. It might have seemed clinical and unfeeling if he wasn’t so damn efficient.
A buzzing between us forced an end to the moment—an end that came with our surprised heavy breathing. “That was—” Cal gaped at me, cheeks pink and eyes bright.
“An ice-breaker?” I asked sweetly, pretending that I wasn’t as flustered as he was even though the evidence was in clear view on my face. If his phone hadn’t buzzed, I probably would have had him on the kitchen table and to hell with the benefit. It was some kiss, without a doubt, and there was no way to deny that we had some kind of crazy sexual chemistry. “Is that our car?”
He grunted distractedly, “Limo,” and smoothed down his hair, handing me back my glasses without touching me. The heat seemed to evaporate from him and he looked almost lost. It was the same look I’d had when Blaze had taken me in that changing room on Oxford Street and I knew that I wasn’t mirroring it.
“Cal...”
“Do you have a jacket?”
I shook my head, moving to try and catch his eye. “I’m British; I’ll be fine.”
“Suit yourself.” Turning his back on me, Calloway paced straight out of the apartment leaving me feeling like a fool. What did he want from me and would I be able to provide it? If that reaction was anything to go by, I didn’t think the forecast looked good.
The limousine journey gave us a chance to nurse the distance between us. I scanned through the rest of my unread emails on my phone, happily blanking out the sound of Calloway snapping down his at some poor sucker bearing the brunt of his bad mood. Ignoring what sounded like instructions to dissipate the media shitstorm surrounding us,
I wrote a reply to Daniel’s email that I hoped would put him at ease.
Danny Divine,
This is a list of shits I gave today.
.....
.........
That’s right. Zero. New York is great in that respect. Work is keeping me busy and I’m doing fine, I promise. Tell the silly bitches I love them and it wouldn’t kill them to send their own emails once in a while. You know they’ll take it wrong if I contact them first.
Of course the sushi is amazing. All the food is amazing. Get on a plane now; I miss you!!
Don’t worry about the Calloway Ryan thing. He’s in the process of sorting it now. No doubt there’ll be a new story about us on the front page tomorrow because we’re going to a benefit together, but it will be short lived. Trust me. As gorgeous as the guy is, this is a house built on sand.
As soon as I can, I’ll visit. I know you understand why I can’t put a date or timeframe on this. And I appreciate you not mentioning him. I love you more than life, please remember that.
Emmy
Most of the email was a lie designed to be a platitude; I wasn’t always ‘fine’, I didn’t really want him to visit and I had no intention of ever going back to London. As much as I didn’t like to be lonely, I liked to be alone. While there was no doubting that I missed Daniel, his arrival would bring with it memories too painful to relive, especially seeing as the last time I’d seen him had proceeded an afternoon of being fucked stupid by the man who’d driven me away.