The B4 Leg

by Various

She put her hand flat against his bare chest, over his heart. His muscles instantly tensed against the violent longing that leapt within him.

  ‘Meaningless sex?’ He had meant it to sound sardonic, a mocking reference to that night back in the hotel in England, but the bitterness in his voice cut through the soft shadows between them like razor blades.

  She didn’t flinch. When she replied her voice was soft and thick, like velvet, and it wrapped around him. ‘Yes, if you want to put it like that. Meaningless sex.’

  Outside the staccato whirr of the helicopters was getting louder. Luis looked towards the window, panic and despair welling within him.

  Forgive me, Rico, he thought bleakly. Forgive me, but understand this…I haven’t broken my promise…

  Standing over Rico’s coffin the night before the funeral he had made a vow to give up the casual meaningless sex with women whose names he barely knew.

  And he had.

  The thing that frightened him now was that this was something entirely different.

  Chapter Twelve

  EMILY wrote to Oscar.

  She began by writing Dear Daddy, because that was how she and her sisters had always addressed him, but something about the childish term sounded odd now. Swallowing her misgivings she plunged on.

  I know from Luis that you won’t be surprised by the address at the top of this page. He tells me that he has been in touch with you several times since I met him by chance in London. I’m grateful to him for that. At the time I thought I was managing everything perfectly well when actually I wasn’t thinking straight about anything at all, and I didn’t stop to think how worried you must have been.

  She stopped here, the nib of her pen poised above the velvety surface of the palace notepaper. That wasn’t quite right either. She had realised how worried he would be, but the truth was she’d been too angry with him to care.

  How selfish and childish that seemed now.

  She continued, smiling a little as she wrote Luis’s name.

  I’m grateful to Luis for so much. Amongst other things, he has enabled me to see how badly I behaved towards you after Mia arrived. Looking back now I’m ashamed of how judgemental I was, and how immature and naive. I hope that you’ll forgive me, and that Mia will too. I’ve written to her separately—is she still staying with you at Balfour?

  Suddenly it struck her how long she’d been away. Not so very long in terms of weeks and months perhaps, but in terms of everything that had happened. When she’d left it had been winter, and her mother’s presence had still filled the house. If she went back now would she find that Lillian’s spirit, the gentle serenity she always brought to a place, would be gone too?

  A tear fell onto the page and she quickly blotted it, starting to write again.

  I’m here, as I’m sure you know, to teach ballet to Luis’s niece, Luciana, whose parents were so tragically killed in a helicopter crash last year—I’m sure you remember. At first she didn’t talk much at all—about that or anything else—but as I’ve got to know her better she’s opened up a lot more, and I now think that one of the saddest things about what’s happened is that she didn’t really feel close to her parents or loved by them. It has made me realise how lucky I was to have you and Mum and to be so loved and protected. So much so that in some ways I was unprepared for the real world, like the princess in the tower in the fairy story you used to read to me when I was little. I suppose I never thought about what would happen when the time came—as it inevitably must—to leave that tower and go out into the big bad world, and it’s been harder and more painful than I could have imagined. But it’s also been…

  Here she stopped again, not knowing how to convey on paper, to her father, the bittersweet rapture of the past few weeks. Sweet because Luis had freed her from the fears of losing control, of not being perfect, of being overwhelmed by the forbidden desires she had always known lay just below the surface. He had, ironically, brought all of these fears to fruition, but in doing so had shown her that she didn’t have to be afraid or ashamed any more.

  But the bitter edge came from knowing she couldn’t touch him in the same way that he touched her. That while she had opened herself up to him completely, there was still a part of him that he kept hidden from her. Hidden and locked and barred.

  With a sigh she looked back down at the page in front of her:…wonderful, she finished, lamely. Biting her lip she began to write more quickly, suddenly wanting to get the letter finished and in the post to Oscar.

  I’m also dancing properly again—another thing for which I have Luis to thank. I am taking part in King Marcos Fernando’s Silver Jubilee celebration, performing as a soloist with the Brazilian National Ballet. I’m doing a pas de deux from Giselle, and Luciana is doing a little dance from The Nutcracker. I was wondering if perhaps…

  She frowned, her usually neat handwriting beginning to slope.

  …you might think about coming over to watch it? I know that the King is an old friend of yours from way back and I gather that he’s not in the best of health so you shouldn’t put off coming if you want to see him again…

  She looked at her watch. She had been longer than she’d thought and the car would be waiting to take her to Santosa’s Grande Teatro. Moistening her lips with her tongue she plunged on, not wanting to think too hard about what she was writing in case she lost her nerve.

  Of course, what I’m really saying is that I want to see you, so badly. I’ve missed you so very much.

  Hastily she finished, tears blurring her eyes as she signed off with her love and wrote the familiar address, just as she had done every Sunday night for all those years when she’d been away at ballet school. Then she scooped up the thick cream envelope, along with her bottle of water and towel for the rehearsal, and went down to leave it on the post table in the hall, before she could change her mind.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  Luis eyed his father cynically. ‘Coming from a man in your condition, that is disturbing.’

  King Marcos Fernando gave a snort of wheezing laughter that threatened to dislodge the oxygen tube beneath his nose. ‘That’s more like it,’ he huffed, when he’d recovered enough breath to speak again. ‘A spark of the old Luis. I haven’t seen enough of that these past few months.’

  ‘No, well it would hardly have been appropriate to be sitting here cracking jokes while you’re—’

  ‘On my deathbed? Why not? It might have taken my mind off things a bit. Far too much time to lie here and think. And worry. About you mainly.’

  ‘You and the rest of the royal household,’ Luis said levelly, looking out of the window of the private clinic onto a severely well-maintained garden filled with gaudy flowers. ‘Tomás and Josefina are on tran-quilisers at the thought of me taking the throne.’

  ‘Well, it was a role you were never supposed to have.’ Never the most tactful of men, illness and a sense of time running out had made King Marcos more blunt than ever. ‘You’re not made for it like Rico was. It won’t be easy for you like it would have been for him.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  The king ignored the undisguised sarcasm in his second son’s tone. ‘It’s an observation, not a criticism. Anyway,’ he said shortly, resting a blue-veined hand on a pile of newspapers on the table over the bed. ‘You seem to be doing everything right these days—taking an interest in the charities, sounding suitably concerned about your decrepit old father, managing to keep your sexual adventuring out of the papers…’ He looked across at Luis shrewdly. ‘Where’s the catch?’

  Luis kept his tone and expression deliberately blank. ‘What do you mean?’

  His father shifted in the bed, wincing momentarily as he knocked the tube that was dispensing colourless fluid into the back of his hand. ‘There’s always a catch with you,’ he said breathlessly. ‘When you were at school I worried most about you when your reports were good, because that always meant you were up to something and working extra hard to cover it up.’ He stop
ped to take a deep, wheezing breath, his eyes narrowing as he remembered. ‘Like the term you seduced the headmaster’s daughter. When he told me you were going round every night for extra Latin tutorials I knew that something wasn’t right.’

  Luis smiled blandly. ‘It wasn’t his daughter, it was his wife. But anyway, you needn’t worry this time. I’m behaving impeccably.’

  ‘That’s why I’m worried.’ King Marcos Fernando picked up a paper from the top of the pile and unfolded it with shaking, frail fingers. Luis felt a tiny pulse of electricity shoot through him as he found himself looking at the picture of him kissing Emily beside the car at the opera house. ‘This was your most recent indiscretion, and it was three weeks ago,’ his father remarked gruffly, scowling down at the picture. ‘Virtually a lifetime by your standards. Oscar Balfour’s youngest, isn’t she?’

  ‘Emily. That’s right.’ With heroic effort Luis tore his gaze away from her upturned face in the picture, but it remained imprinted on his mind anyway. ‘She’s here teaching Luciana ballet.’

  ‘Good.’ His father eyed him suspiciously. ‘Well, take her out again. You look like you enjoyed it and the press loved it. You have to be careful all this charity work and hospital visiting doesn’t make you look too dull. The public won’t like that either.’

  Luis got abruptly to his feet, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he strode over to the window and stared unseeingly out over the dispiritingly perfect garden. ‘Don’t you ever stop thinking of things in terms of how they look?’ he said with quiet resignation. ‘Or what people think?’

  ‘No. That’s our life. In our position that’s what counts.’ From the bed behind him his father’s tone was brisk, containing an echo of its old autocracy. Then he added, more thoughtfully, ‘This Emily…You’re not in love with her, are you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  The response was instantaneous. Automatic. Meeting his own reflected eyes in the window Luis felt a hollow pang of self-disgust.

  ‘Thank God for that.’ King Marcos’s voice was breathless with relief, as if Luis had just denied being a serial killer. ‘Love is not for us, Luis. You have to marry, of course, and you have to produce an heir, but you look on that as a business deal. A merger, if you like. Love will only make you miserable.’

  ‘How romantic’

  ‘Romance?’ The king made a contemptuous noise. ‘Leave romance to Hollywood and fairy tales. The reality of being royal is accepting that you lead a double life. There is business. And there is pleasure. You work hard and you make sacrifices for the business, but you enjoy as much discreet pleasure as you can on the side. If you stick to the rules no one gets hurt.’

  The sunny room suddenly felt unbearably hot. Luis could feel a pulse beating in his temples as he slowly turned round to face his father in the bed.

  ‘It’s not always that simple though, is it,’ he said quietly, leaning back against the windowsill. ‘You might want it to be, but it isn’t. My mother got hurt.’

  As he said it he felt both surprised and oddly relieved. This was forbidden territory, but suddenly Luis knew he had to explore it. He had spent the past fourteen years trying not to think about what had happened, but as Emily had made him see, it had influenced his life and led him down paths he might not have taken if Cassia Cordoba hadn’t fallen asleep in the bath and never woken up.

  Against the pillows his father’s ashen face was hard. ‘Yes, but not by me. She got hurt because she broke the rules.’

  ‘How?’

  The small silence that followed was filled by the rasping wheeze of the king’s breathing. And then he said, ‘By falling in love.’

  The pulse had increased to a drumbeat. Luis pressed his fingertips absently and fruitlessly against the side of his head, trying to quieten it. ‘With someone else?’

  ‘Yes.’ King Marcos sighed and looked at Luis with eyes full of regret. ‘She wasn’t really cut out for royal life—she was too emotional and sensitive—but she was beautiful and came from a good family, so…’ He let the sentence trail off with a shrug of his frail shoulders. ‘Anyway, things were fine for a while, but then she fell in love with a racing driver.’ Luis flinched. ‘Their affair went on for years, until he was killed in a race and…’

  ‘She killed herself.’ To his own ears his voice sounded hoarse and strange.

  ‘Effectively, yes.’ King Marcos’s sigh seemed to shake his once-magnificent body to its core, again placing the oxygen tube in jeopardy. ‘As you know the official story was that she banged her head in the bath. An accident.’

  Luis had known that, but he had also understood without ever being told that his mother’s death was somehow inextricably linked to the small brown bottles of pills she carried with her at all times, sliding them from her bag and slipping them swiftly between her lips so often that it never seemed strange. That was how he remembered his mother—vague, distracted, unhappy. Absent even when she was there. The emotional, sensitive girl described by his father sounded like someone else altogether.

  Like Emily.

  ‘No, no, no! Is too late!’

  The music came to an abrupt halt, as the exasperated voice of the director echoed across the stage. Emily bent her head, her hands on her hips, breathing hard. It was the third time she had mistimed the leap, and she could hardly blame her partner or the director for beginning to lose patience.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at Adriano, who tossed his head and scowled. Tall, Byronically brooding and romantic, the Brazilian National Ballet’s principal male was the perfect stereotype of an arrogant danseur.

  ‘You maybe have—’ he broke off, scowling as he tried to find the right phrase ‘—overdo it?’

  ‘Yes, I probably have been overdoing it a bit.’ Emily bent down, ostentatiously massaging the tops of her legs to hide a sudden secret smile. Not in rehearsals though. Last night had been particularly exhausting, even by Luis’s standards, and the ache in her thighs had nothing to do with grands jetés and everything to do with grande passion. ‘Anyway, let’s do it again,’ she called to the director.

  Adriano gave an imperious nod, and said something in incomprehensible Portuguese to Thiago, the diminutive director striding theatrically back towards them as the music started again.

  Santosa’s Grande Teatro was a building of crumbling grandeur and inadequate air conditioning. Emily could feel the sweat running down her spine as she took her opening position for the pas de deux and stared out into the darkness of the auditorium beyond the hot lights. She felt edgy with nerves and the pressure of not screwing up again, and rising up onto her toes she felt the muscles in her inner thighs protest.

  Suddenly the memory of wrapping her legs around Luis’s waist as he held her and entered her, standing up, came back to her. Oh, God, she thought weakly, trying to force her mind back to the present as her body was shot through with flame, how ironic that Luis had put the passion back into her interpretation, but perfection and precision seemed to have gone out of the window.

  Discipline, focus, control. Arms, feet, spine. Ruthlessly she centred her attention, balancing herself for the leap. This time the timing was exact, and Adriano caught her, his hands spanning her midriff as he lowered her gently back onto her pointes.

  They held the pose as the pas de deux came to an end, their chests rising and falling in unison. Pressed against the muscular arc of Adriano’s body, Emily felt light headed for a moment as she recalled the way she and Luis had eventually fallen onto the bed, breathless and exhilarated, her flushed cheek pressed against his damp skin, her whole body spreadeagled over him.

  The music finished. ‘Perfeito!’ cried Thiago, springing forward with an expansive sweep of his arms, while from the auditorium behind him came the sound of clapping.

  He whirled round in surprise and affront at having his rehearsal interrupted. Emily squinted out into the gloom and saw someone get up from a seat about halfway back and step into the aisle. Someone tall, and broad shouldered, with the arro
gant, loping, predatory walk of a tiger.

  Or a wolf.

  Thiago’s outraged squawk ceased abruptly, and became apologetic and ingratiating as Prince Luis came forward into the lights. Adriano sprang away from her as if she were red hot, backing off and simultaneously bending into a deep bow. ‘Your Highness…’

  Luis nodded curtly, his face oddly expressionless.

  ‘Forgive me for intruding on your rehearsal.’ His voice, even when speaking such bland courtesies, made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. ‘It’s coming together.’ His gaze flickered briefly in her direction and heat bloomed beneath her skin. ‘Sehora Balfour is doing well.’

  ‘Sim,’ Thiago agreed with a sigh, ‘plenty of—how you say it?—paixão.’

  ‘Passion,’ Luis translated neutrally. In the footlights his eyes gleamed gold, and a muscle twitched above his jaw.

  Thiago planted his hands on his hips and looked at Emily appraisingly. ‘But only a week to performance, so we must take that passion and add to it precisão.’

  ‘Not today.’ Luis shot Adriano a cool glance. ‘I have to take Senhora Balfour away, I’m afraid. Important business.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? Is it Luciana?’

  Across the table Emily’s blue eyes were clouded with anxiety, but Luis took a sip of coffee before answering. They were sitting in a tiny dark bar, in a little side street off Santosa’s main square. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but Luis had known the owner for many years and trusted him to keep the paparazzi out. At a table by the door his two bodyguards drank coffee and failed to look inconspicuous.

  ‘No, Luciana’s fine.’ He put the cup back on the saucer with a clatter and ran his hand over his unshaven jaw. He felt tense and edgy with unfamiliar emotions that he was sickeningly aware of but couldn’t bear to examine. The feeling reminded him of when he’d come off a motorbike a few years ago—those few moments of watching the blood seeping through his shirt, feeling the pain but not wanting to look at the wound. ‘I just came from visiting my father.’