A Scandalous Engagement

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Well,’ he pointed out, swirling the glass around in his hand and then gulping down a generous mouthful, ‘here’s what we can’t do. We can’t take the article back.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very helpful!’ Jade bit out sarcastically. ‘Any more gems where that one came from?’

  ‘And getting into a state about it isn’t going to change that fact,’ he carried on equably, as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘And spare a thought for me! What about my name? The City will be buzzing with this story by tomorrow morning. Business acquaintances will be phoning to find out whether the rumour’s right or not! Not to mention all those leggy models and actresses who did their utmost to bring me to heel at the altar!’ He grinned, and when he saw her thunderous expression said piously, ‘According to the article.’

  Jade decided that she needed that drink after all. She snatched the glass from the table, gulped down enough to steady her nerves, and afforded him a long, withering look. ‘How did they get hold of this crazy story? If you hadn’t seen fit to concoct the thing in the first place, we wouldn’t be here now!’

  ‘I didn’t hear you bellowing the truth from all four corners at the time.’

  ‘I tried, but you railroaded me into silence!’

  ‘Ah! So it’s all my fault now?’

  ‘Yes.’ She could say that without a flicker of conscience because from where she was sitting the whole mess was of his making. ‘And you still haven’t answered me. How did they get hold of our so-called engagement?’

  He shrugged eloquently. ‘Who knows? Maybe there was a reporter staying at Tom’s place who recognised me and overheard the situation…’

  ‘There were no reporters there.’

  ‘How do you know? As far as I know, they don’t have their occupation tattooed on their foreheads.’

  Why, she thought sourly, wasn’t he taking this seriously? He had more to lose than she had. She doubted any of her acquaintances would have come across the article, and if they had she would have no trouble shrugging the whole thing off as the usual fabricated journalism, too busy itching for a story to pay any attention to the truth. She had no family to telephone hurriedly and explain, and no close friends who might take mortal offence at being the last to know a succulent titbit. Curtis, on the other hand…

  The thought bucked her up, because she knew that underneath the cool exterior he would be desperate to put any such tales of engagement to rest, especially ones linking him to Miss Average UK.

  ‘I had no idea you were notorious enough to feature in gossip columns,’ she informed him tartly.

  Another expressive shrug. ‘I’m rich, eligible, not yet decrepit…’

  Jade’s response was to toss the newspaper on the ground by the chair with scathing contempt. She shifted her legs from under her, wriggled her toes in their socks to get the blood circulation moving and adopted a more elegant pose with crossed legs and fingers linked primly on lap.

  ‘Of course,’ he mused, ‘I’m more often featured in the business section…’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Because in addition to being blessed with looks and wealth, you’re also razor-sharp in all known financial circles?’

  He looked amazed that she had managed to spot the truth so quickly, and she clicked her tongue in irritation. What she personally found pretty stupendous was that nowhere in the article was his giant-sized ego mentioned. A huge oversight on their part, as far as she could see.

  ‘There,’ he said soothingly, ‘didn’t I tell you that a drink would help? You look a lot better now.’

  Jade thought that what she could do with the remainder of her drink that would really help would be to fling it at his head. Instead, she reached over for the glass, drained the contents and felt pleasantly warm inside.

  She decided that he had been right after all. No good getting hot under the collar over what was already in print. Let him find a way out of it. He wouldn’t be so calm and collected when the implications of the story started hitting home. In fact, he hadn’t looked nearly so cool an hour previously, when he had stormed into the kitchen waving the damned paper about like a demented preacher on his pulpit. Oh, no, it had been only her rattled overreaction that had served to calm him down, because his amusement at her response was greater than his worry over what had been written.

  ‘So what are we going to do? Or perhaps I should say you. After all, as you correctly pointed out, you’re going to be the one fending off all the nosy calls from ex-girlfriends and business chums.’ She sat back with an expectant expression on her face. Expectant and superior, which was how she felt now that things had been put into perspective.

  ‘Good question.’ He appeared to give the dilemma a great deal of thought. Much frowning, narrowing of eyes, slight shakes of the head. Very ham actor, she thought, from her newly gained position of lofty indifference.

  ‘What do you suggest…?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She flicked several non-imaginary specks of pastel sharpenings from her jeans and realised that not only were her fingers grubby from the colours but that her face would also bear the undignified and tell-tale signs of someone who had spent hours in front of paper using various charcoals, sketching pencils and oil pastels.

  ‘Whether we’re so-called engaged or not is no skin off my nose! I won’t be the one having to wriggle out of the lie. The people at art college don’t tend to scour gossip columns in tabloids!’ Put that in your pipe and smoke it, she thought with relish.

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘Nope. You forget, I don’t have a reputation to consider. I’m invisible, whereas you are not.’

  ‘Well, now, that puts a different complexion on things altogether.’

  Jade, who had been on the verge of smacking her lips in sheer pleasure at the thought of seeing him wriggle like a worm on a hook, sat up a little straighter and frowned.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it would actually suit my interests quite well at the moment to be engaged…’

  ‘What?’ Confusion brought a rush of hectic colour to her cheeks.

  Curtis wasn’t looking at her. He seemed to be ruminating, his mind a million miles away, his eyes half closed and speculative.

  This was the last thing she had expected. Appalled horror, perhaps, but certainly not this.

  ‘I’m in the middle of a very sensitive deal at the moment,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘Japanese company.’ He said this as though she should automatically follow his convoluted thought processes, and when she glowered at him with open incomprehension he continued to elaborate. ‘Very big on honour,’ he explained, getting up and flexing his muscles, then walking across to the concealed bar to pour himself another drink. ‘Mr Akiyama, particularly, is very much the family man. He’s made references to my bachelor state and my reputation as world-weary playboy with amiable acceptance, but I know he would feel easier at the thought of doing business with me if he knew that I was as much into family values as he is… Put it this way: he kind of sees this deal as one family firm doing business with another family firm…’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Who’s to say what’s ridiculous when it comes to another nation’s culture?’ Curtis said sanctimoniously.

  ‘I mean,’ Jade explained patiently, even though she felt on the verge of losing her rag altogether, ‘it makes no sense. Are you telling me that huge Japanese companies refuse to do business with overseas firms unless they’re headed by good, honest men with two point two children and a wife tidily at home keeping house?’ She gave a snort of pure disbelief.

  ‘Actually, his isn’t a huge company. It’s just vastly profitable.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to find another fiancée for the job.’

  ‘But I thought you said that it was no skin off your nose whether you were in print as being engaged to me or not.’

  Jade stared at him speechlessly, stunned and amazed at the unexpected turn
in the conversation. Just when she had managed to get her self-control into some sort of order and things had been rolling along in a pleasantly predictable fashion, with little left for her to do but watch as his smugness at dealing with the situation spilled over into dawning awareness of the messy inconvenience of something he had personally generated, whether he cared to admit it or not, she found that the rug had been yanked from under her feet.

  It wasn’t bloody fair! Hadn’t he turned her life upside down enough already without enmeshing her further? She wanted to get him out of her system, not conspire to keep him there so that he could carry on choking up her arteries! From planning to leave his house the minute she got back to London, here she was, caught up in a charade which he was now proposing to prolong because it suited him!

  ‘Maybe I misheard,’ he offered, with an inclination of his head as he waited for her response.

  ‘Maybe Mr…Mr…’

  ‘Akiyama…?’

  ‘…didn’t read the article! It was only a few lines long…’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Do visiting Japanese pore over the gossip columns in tabloids when they’re in a foreign language?’

  He gave another of those galling who knows? shrugs. ‘Even if he didn’t, he deals with enough various people in the company to be filled in in no time at all. And I can tell you this: if I then have to launch into an explanation of the truth, with all its little twists and turns, then there’ll be no deal.’

  ‘But at least you wouldn’t have lied to the man.’

  ‘Only a small white lie.’

  ‘A bloody whopper,’ Jade broke in, in a raised voice.

  ‘Besides, if we go along with it then the whole thing will subside into silence after a few days, and no more will be mentioned in the press on the subject. It’ll all die a death. Be replaced by some other item of trivia that will capture the imagination. A week at the most and we can both retreat from an uncomfortable situation without having the need to deny anything.’

  Jade fell back on telling him that the whole thing was ridiculous, but her voice sounded thin and unconvincing. Somehow she had managed to tie herself into knots, or rather she had let him tie her into knots without even realising it.

  She remembered when they had been at Tom’s, the overt touching that had been done to make their little white lie more convincing. She imagined Curtis touching her again, as another charade was enacted, and to her dismay found that the thought was more palatable than the prospect, which she had faced in the past day, of never seeing him again.

  ‘I shall be having dinner with Mr Akiyama and his wife tomorrow evening,’ he said smoothly. ‘Naturally they would be delighted to see you. And we can take things from there…’

  ‘Take things from there…where to?’

  The situation now seemed to be moving along with bewildering speed. Her heart was knocking against her rib-cage and she could feel the blood rushing around in her veins.

  ‘One or two client dinners…’

  ‘I thought you said that in a week the whole thing could be swept under the carpet…’

  ‘In a week the public will have forgotten about us. As far as business acquaintances go it may take a little longer…’

  Jade’s eyes widened into unfocused alarm. Path One, which she had envisaged earlier and which had seen him leaving the country for good, had now been joined by Path Two, which saw them thrown together in an awkward pretence for the sake of outside eyes. Which of the two alternatives was worse?

  In her heart, she knew which one, but she resolutely fought down the desire to submit to his plan even though she knew that she had stupidly talked herself into it in the first place.

  ‘We’ll have to get a ring,’ he said, breaking into her tormented thoughts with an observation that had her snapping hurriedly back to the present at the speed of light.

  ‘What for? I didn’t wear one in Scotland.’

  ‘Because Tom knows me,’ he said, in a voice that implied that no further explanation was deemed necessary. ‘But…’

  ‘But a ring…?’ she croaked.

  ‘Nothing too elaborate,’ he soothed. ‘Just some old family heirloom…’

  ‘Old family heirloom?’ Wasn’t that the definition of ‘elaborate’?

  ‘You look a bit green round the gills,’ he said, concerned. ‘Better have a bit more of that drink of yours.’

  Obediently, Jade gulped down the rest. Two strong gin and tonics, a drink she was quite unaccustomed to having, and things shifted obligingly into some kind of perspective, twisted though it was.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling that I’ve been manipulated?’ she asked gloomily. The alcohol had taken the edge off her fire. Now she was simmering away gently and was dismayed to discover that the thought of a couple of weeks in Curtis’s company, far from filling her with dread, gave her an illicit thrill. As though she had somehow bought time, even though common sense repeated what it had initially told her, that buying time with Curtis Greene was not a good idea. She would only pay for it later.

  If he had never mentioned the fact that he would be leaving the country for good, it would never have occurred to her that what she really needed was to get her fill of him before he left. That simple aside, and all its nightmarish sense of accompanying loss, had been sufficient to shift the emphasis of her emotional state from determined into desperate. Or so it seemed, as she absent-mindedly took a third glass from him. At least this one, she thought, sipping at it, was half the strength of the previous two. On the fringes of her mind she wondered whether he had been mixing these drinks particularly strong so that he could verbally outwit her, but the thought was so silly that she shoved it back into immediate obscurity.

  She would enjoy the next week or so, savour the treacherous thrill of being in Curtis’s company even if it was under false pretences, and, since her heart was as in deep as it could get, it surely couldn’t do much more to her frame of mind.

  How wrong that logically argued illusion turned out to be.

  Dinner with Mr Akiyama and his wife turned out to be a mere taster of how Curtis’s presence could knock her for six.

  There was no overdone touching, no romantic whispers into her ear, but enough brooding, steamy looks to send her pulses soaring, and at the end of the evening, when his fingers intimately traced the contours of her spine through her dress, she found herself having to prop herself against the doorframe to shake her host’s hand as they said goodbye. The taxi ride back was an agony of wanting that had her bolting to her bedroom just to try and escape.

  Then came a series of client dinners. His social calendar seemed suddenly full to bursting point, and her days took on the heightened hue of someone living in a rarefied atmosphere. Away from the public eye he was the model of the perfect gentleman, allowing her all the freedom she wanted to dodge, keeping his distance, at least physically, although his charm and wit reluctantly forced a response out of her whenever they found themselves alone together.

  In company, it was a different matter. He was not averse to being shockingly suggestive in his attentiveness. Every touch made nonsense of her nightly litany to call the whole thing a day. On two occasions, when the client functions were held in the less formal arena of one of London’s select clubs that featured music and dancing, they danced together, their bodies sinuously entwined, his hand pressing into the small of her back while their legs, moving as one, generated enough erotic images in her head to bring her to the point of collapse.

  They were now into week three, and their social agenda showed little sign of diminishing. Tonight they were going to supper with four business associates. Smart but casual. She was now dressed, smartly but casually, in a figure-hugging heather-coloured wool dress which skimmed her thighs and, with high shoes, made her legs look longer than they were. She had already shamefully acknowledged to herself that she was beginning to get a taste for dressing up and socialising, two things she had never had much interest in.

  More than
once it had occurred to her that that was simply because with Curtis around the simplest and most tedious of events became a playground of furtive looks and weak but thrilling craving. Her body trembled like a leaf in a breeze every time he touched it, even though his touching was confined to public places, and to that, too, she was becoming addicted. Too late, now, to try and stop the rollercoaster ride. But she wasn’t sleeping with him. She had stayed true to those principles, if nothing else.

  He had told her that he would fetch her at eight-thirty promptly, and she was waiting for him in the hall when she heard his key being inserted into the lock.

  He opened the door and looked at her for a few seconds, his body perfectly still.

  ‘That’s new, isn’t it? The colour suits you.’

  Jade didn’t know what to say to this, so to fill in the embarrassed silence she reverted to her old friend, the frown.

  ‘Where are we going tonight?’ Ignore compliment, something she specialised in, was next on the menu, but disturbingly he walked into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Nowhere. We’re eating in. I’ve brought a Chinese takeaway.’

  ‘But I thought you said that…’ she began, floundering nervously at this change of events.

  ‘We were going to be wining and dining with my associates, but I cancelled it.’ He produced a bag from behind him like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat. ‘In favour of something a little less strenuous.’ He divested himself of his jacket and began loosening his tie, undoing the top buttons of his shirt, rolling up the sleeves. Jade watched his movements with the fascination of someone being hypnotised.

  ‘I think it’s time we talked,’ he said quietly. He looked at her so intently that her nerves stretched like taut elastic into panic.

  ‘What about?’ she squeaked.

  ‘Us.’

  This was the beginning of the end. She could feel it in her bones. After the whirl of social events, they would now conveniently begin tapering off, and finally he would be able to say that things just hadn’t worked out. The Japanese deal had been done. She was now surplus to requirements. The cold fear which had gripped her when she had first faced the prospect of his departure returned with renewed vigour, thrilled to be back in the game.