by Imelda Evans
She was ashamed of herself and horribly aware that she wasn’t even close to achieving the effortless sangfroid that she wanted to take back to Paris with her.
Maybe this fling business was too much for her. Or maybe she’d been engaging with it too much. Perhaps what she really needed to do was pretend that Josh wasn’t there at all. At least, not as a man. Maybe she needed to think of him as a . . . what did the celebrities call their non-boyfriend escorts? A handbag! That was it. He was a very presentable handbag. Something gorgeous to get her through the night and that could then be returned to the wardrobe.
She knew that this was a sensible approach, because it made her feel calm and settled, like her best plans did. And yet . . . she couldn’t ignore Josh. Sitting next to him, she felt she had never been more aware of anyone in her life. His scent, the warmth of his body, the curve of his cheek as he turned to talk to Clare; even his hand, long and wiry, lying on the table near hers, tortured her. It would be so easy to hold that hand, to lean against him, to press her leg against his and to take comfort from his presence as she would if he were really hers. But he wasn’t. And he wasn’t going to be. He was just a gorgeous, wonderful, fun guy, who had stumbled into the path of the crazy mess of a woman she was at the moment and who didn’t deserve to be drawn in any further than he already had.
So, she would drink. Alcohol was the answer. It would deaden her nerves and ease her embarrassment now and make her forget later. That was her reasoning, anyway. In her eagerness for some help to make it through the evening, it didn’t occur to her that drinking hadn’t achieved any of those ends so far tonight.
In her defence, there was plenty of temptation on offer. While she and Josh had been away from the table, the choice of nerve-deadeners had increased considerably. As well as the riesling she had started on, there was now a crisp sauvignon blanc, a mellow, wooded chardonnay, a soft merlot and a gutsy shiraz to be getting on with. Kate silently blessed Jo, who had somehow managed to get a bottle of each variety, instead of the one-of-each-colour that they were supposed to have, and settled down to a serious appreciation of the collection.
She also decided that the less time spent looking at Crystal across the table, the better. Accordingly, she took every opportunity she could to leave and mingle with other, less problematic classmates. It wasn’t hard to do. The formal part of the evening, such as it was, seemed to have ended with the main course and people were circulating as though there were no such things as set places.
Sometimes she took Josh with her and sometimes Jo did, if there was someone she thought he’d remember. But, wine-fuelled as Kate was, she was aware that the constant meeting of new people, whom he would likely never see again, couldn’t be that fascinating for him. So mostly she took pity on him and left him talking to Clare’s husband, with whom he seemed to get on and who seemed similarly content to remain seated as his more gregarious wife flitted about the room.
It was as Kate was coming back from one of these sorties, skirting the DJ who was setting up on one side of the commodious dance floor in front of the stage, that she realised that leaving Josh unattended might have been a mistake. In her absence, Crystal had seen an opening, pinched her seat and was leaning in towards him, all tumbling hair and cleavage and predatory smirk. And Josh was smiling at her.
Kate skidded slightly on the polished surface of the dance floor as a jolt of pure fury exploded deep inside her, seared a path through the comfortable fuzziness brought on by the wine and burst into fireworks in front of her eyes.
How dare she? Josh was hers. Okay, not really, but that message didn’t seem to have got through to her possessive gene. Until now, she hadn’t realised she had one of those, but Josh seemed to have drawn it out. It had sprung to vigorous life when Crystal had tried her manoeuvring earlier and now it seemed fully grown and flowering – in bright, bright green.
Who the hell did Crystal think she was? Did she really think she could get away with this? Did she really think Kate was still the helpless mouse of ten years ago? Kate thought she’d laid that ghost to rest at the start of the night. Apparently not. Well, she’d do it now. It was time for this mouse to roar.
Impelled by outrage, Kate stalked, in a way she could never normally have managed in such heels, until she was close enough to hear their conversation. She was fully expecting that what she heard would stoke her fury. And it did, but not in the way she expected.
Crystal, for all her simpering body language, wasn’t getting a word in. Josh was holding forth, in a way Kate was beginning to see came naturally to him, on yet another incident from her high school days. A funny one, or at least he seemed to think so. But that wasn’t how she remembered it. For her, it was right down in the vault with the memory of the Year Twelve formal. Except this one hadn’t happened at school, so none of her schoolfellows, apart from Jo, knew about it. Until now.
She stopped behind him and his audience, far from sure that she wanted to join them while they were listening to this story. Her first impulse, indeed, was to get as far away as possible. But the sight of Crystal, leaning ever closer as he spoke, rooted her to the spot.
He was telling the story well, she had to give him that. Clare, her husband and Matt were listening and smiling, and as for Crystal, she was hanging on every word as though she were a downtrodden Tibetan and he were the Dalai Lama.
Then he delivered the punchline – and his audience literally fell about laughing. From her position behind him, Kate couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to. She could hear how much he was enjoying himself. He was playing his small audience the way Yehudi Menuhin played the violin. He had them in the palm of his hand and he loved it!
Kate felt her heartbeat roaring in her ears as she discovered the answer to the question she’d asked Jo in the ladies. It wasn’t true. He didn’t really care for her. If he did, he’d know how much she hated making a fool of herself. He’d know that she had sworn Jo to secrecy so no-one would know just how much of an idiot she’d been over that stupid rabbit and he wouldn’t have done this to her. But he had. He had taken the opportunity she’d given him to play to an audience and run with it. It was all show. It must be, or why would he humiliate her like this?
Well, she might have given him the opportunity, but she didn’t have to put up with him running with it to this extent. Stepping forward, she reached around Josh, forcing Crystal to sit back sharply, and put her hand on his.
‘Listen, darling,’ she said, raising her voice over the sound of the DJ beginning to ply his trade. ‘They’re playing our song! Come and dance!’
With a flair for play-acting that Kate couldn’t admire as much as she had earlier, Josh smothered his surprise at this interruption and rose gracefully to accompany her. Kate was sober enough to know she was being rude but drunk enough not to care. And she was mad enough to positively revel in the filthy look she got from Crystal as she dragged Josh away from her clutches.
By the time they made it to the dance floor, it was already packed. Someone had briefed the DJ, and he had started with a medley of number-one hits from their final year at school, which was drawing people from their chairs to the dance floor like ants to a picnic. Pulling Josh into the crush, Kate put her hands on his shoulders and pulled herself up so she could whisper into his ear.
‘We need to talk.’
In reply, he plucked her right hand off his shoulder with his left, put his right hand on her back and pulled her into what a dim memory of dance lessons past told her was a tango hold. Although in dance class it had never been quite this . . . tight. In Josh’s version, they were plastered chest to chest as though they were sharing one skin.
Kate tried to put her sudden breathlessness down to the air being knocked out of her. But she knew he hadn’t pulled her that hard. It was the feel of him, hard and warm, soaking through her dress and into her libido that was making breathing suddenly an act of will rather than something she could take for granted.
He leaned the tiny extr
a distance it took for his mouth to be near her ear and spoke.
‘What do you want to talk about?’
For a moment, as his warm breath goosebumped its way down her neck and strayed into her cleavage, she quite forgot. Then he spun her into a theatrical, back-bending dip, people nearby clapped and she remembered.
‘Is everything a performance for you?’
It was more breathless than she would have liked, but he must have heard the undertone of anger. He snapped her upright so he could look her in the eye – although he still had to look down to do that. It would have been easy to look away without being at all dramatic. Their difference in height was such that all she had to do was look straight ahead and she’d be looking at his shoulder, not his face. And if he’d looked straight ahead, he would be looking over her head at whoever was behind her. But she held his gaze and he hers. Until he slid his hand up her back and pulled her upper body closer so he could speak into her ear again.
‘It is when I’ve been asked to play a part. Is that a problem?’
Yes. Yes, it was, when it messed with her head, her body and her heart. But how could she explain that on this crowded dance floor, with so many ears flapping? And how could she even think straight enough to try when he was holding her so close?
The answer came when he twirled her out of his arms into a spin almost as dramatic as the dip. It was as if he was showing off deliberately, to bait her. But that just made her more determined to get some answers from him. She didn’t normally seek confrontation, but nothing about this night was normal. She hadn’t completely forgotten that she had decided not to be alone with him, either. But she was angry enough – and, frankly, drunk enough – to make neither of those considerations seem important. She had to have this out with him and, at the furthest stretch of her arm, just before he swung her back to land on his chest again, she spotted something that might help her do that.
Behind the DJ, out of sight of most of the room, but accessible with a little manoeuvring, was a door she remembered from her stage crew days.
Pulling away from him, she reversed her hold on his hand and started boogieing her way towards the DJ, towing him behind her.
If anyone asked, she intended to say that she was going to request a song. But by then the dance floor was so crowded that they were able to reach her destination more or less unnoticed, except as another bump in an already very bumpy environment.
If it had been locked, she might have lost her nerve, but luck was on her side, in this at least. Screened by the DJ, she turned the handle, slipped through, pulled Josh in behind her and shut it behind him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The room ran under the stage and was exactly as she remembered it: full of flats, props, backdrops and all the assorted paraphernalia of theatre productions. Still towing Josh, she eased her way carefully past cardboard trees and canvas buildings until she found a clear spot near the back of the room, where there were some boxes that looked as if they would bear their weight. Shoving Josh, none too gently, onto one of them, she rounded on him, hands on hips.
‘Right. I need some answers. Exactly what is all this about for you?’
She glared at him, but the effect was plainly not what she was hoping for, since he looked more amused than anything.
‘What is what all about, Kate?’
‘All of it! The flashy dancing! Raving about how gorgeous I am! Telling stories about what I was like in school! Going on and on about the wonder of Kate! Telling everyone how in love with me you are. Were. Whatever! All of that! What do you think you’re playing at?’
Josh looked confused.
‘I rather thought I was being complimentary – and helpful.’
This set Kate back a little. Now that he mentioned it, it did sound a bit ungracious to be giving him a hard time for saying nice things about her. Especially when she had asked him to. Kind of. Kate felt telltale itches rising in her skin as reason and emotion wrestled for control of her body.
‘I asked you to come with me – well, I let Jo ask you and that’s the same thing. And yes, I asked you to pretend to be my fiancé. I did. I probably shouldn’t have. It was dumb. And it wasn’t fair to you. But I couldn’t bear . . .’
To feel as though nothing had changed. To feel that she was back at square one. To feel that she was more Crystal than Belinda.
‘I wouldn’t have agreed if I wasn’t happy to do it, Kate.’
‘And I’m grateful! Don’t think I’m not. I wanted to get the better of that cow and you helped me do that.’ She paused to scratch frantically at her arm and the emotion seized control of her mouth. ‘But what about the rest? Why did you have to make up all those lies about me? About us? I didn’t ask you to do that! I didn’t ask you to hold my hand, or kiss me, or dance with me like . . . like . . . like we were having sex standing up! I didn’t ask you to pretend so well that —’ That she had almost believed it herself. Until he’d made fun of her. ‘I didn’t ask you to share things that I’ve spent the last dozen years trying to forget. I didn’t ask you to use me as an excuse to show off to a captive audience. And I definitely didn’t ask you to enjoy it so much!’
As her pain-and-wine-fuelled anger mounted again, Kate had been getting closer and closer to Josh, until, with her last words, she was standing over him. So she had a close-up view of the dumbfounded expression on his face – and of the change when it contorted into a scowl.
For a moment, he sat there, glaring at her; then he stood up and Kate took an involuntary step backwards, as she realised again how tall he was.
‘I’m sorry. I knew you weren’t interested at the time, but I wasn’t aware that you’d been trying to forget me for twelve years.’
He was talking nonsense.
‘What?’
‘Isn’t that what you just said? You’re mad at me for reminding you that I was in love with you twelve years ago because you’ve spent all the time we’ve been apart trying to forget it! I didn’t realise I was so repulsive.’
Abruptly, he turned and took a step away from her, nearly knocking her over in the process. In his anger, he seemed too big for the crowded room, and Kate couldn’t help noticing that his hands, so lean and elegant at rest, looked much more substantial when clenched into fists.
Kate didn’t know what she had expected. She had been too preoccupied by her own feelings to consider his at all. But it wasn’t this. Suddenly, she felt the need to sit down. She sank onto the box he had vacated and stared at his back while she tried to collect her thoughts.
‘Are you saying that all that was true?’
Josh turned back to face her, still scowling.
‘What?’
Kate swallowed a bigger-than-goldfish-sized lump that had appeared in her throat. Where was a glass of champagne when you needed it?
‘All that stuff you said about . . . before. When I was at school. Was that . . . true?’
Josh’s hands uncurled and the scowl faded from his face.
‘But I thought you . . . Are you saying that you think I made all that up?’
‘Yes? No? Maybe?’ Kate shrugged miserably.
Josh scratched his head.
‘Kate, I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. You must think that I am the best bullshitter in the known universe. Do you honestly think I could have made all that up on the spur of the moment? Or do you think I went into training for tonight? Do I have to remind you that, until this morning, I didn’t even know you were in the country?’ He paused, for another deep breath, then sat down on the box next to hers and looked her in the eye.
‘I thought . . . Obviously, I thought wrong. And I’ve upset you. Which I didn’t mean to do. So, for the record, let me be clear. Everything I said tonight is true. Or mostly, anyway. Obviously, we aren’t actually engaged. And I’ll admit I exaggerated a little, to make it a better story. But it was all based on what really happened.’
‘Truly?’ Kate asked, still not quite ready to believe.
&nbs
p; ‘Truly.’
Kate gulped down another throat lump.
‘So . . . you really did fall in love with me when I was fifteen?’
‘I really did.’ He smiled at her. ‘But do you really need to ask? I always thought you knew!’
Kate gave him a look.
‘How could I know? Why would I ever suspect that you would be in love with me? When you were so . . .’ She pulled up just in time to stop herself spelling it out: wonderful, sophisticated, interesting, gorgeous.
‘So what, Kate?’
‘Much older,’ she replied, in what was possibly her first ever successful comeback to teasing. Being an only child hadn’t given her many defences against it. Josh smiled, acknowledging the squashing, and answered the question.
‘Didn’t you wonder why I hung around all the time when you were at our house?’
‘Jo and I thought that was because your mum made you promise to look after us when she wasn’t there. Or because you were bored.’
He shook his head.
‘No, that wasn’t it. Well, now that you mention it, I probably was bored, but that’s not why I hung around.’
Kate shook her head, too, at the ridiculous, tragic drama of teenagers. If this was true, they’d both been blind. Too caught up in their own insecurities to see what was under their noses. But she wasn’t quite ready to share her side of that blindness. Not yet. There were more questions that needed answering.
‘And you really left the country because of a broken heart? Broken over me?’
Josh grinned at her. ‘That’s one of the places I exaggerated a little. I didn’t leave because it was broken. I left because I was restless and wanted to see the world and I had the money to do it. But it was definitely at least a little broken. I didn’t make that up. Come on, Kate . . . would I lie to you?’