by Karen Swan
‘And that’s when you freak out?’ Archie grinned, throwing a wink over to Cassie. His colour was, if not fully returned to its ruddy glory, at least an encouraging pink, but he had lost half a stone and it felt strange seeing him with sharper angles when everything about his personality was rounded and soft. ‘I take it Cassie’s not allowed within half a mile of it, then.’
‘I’m not going to argue with him about it, Arch,’ Cassie shrugged. ‘He’s going anyway. What’s the point?’
‘I’ll be back in three months, which is the same as the Arctic trip, except I’m being paid almost double. What’s not to like?’
‘Just the sustained threat of imminent death for every moment of every day of those three months. Other than that, Mum’s totally on board, so to speak,’ Suzy quipped. It was Henry’s turn to roll his eyes.
‘So, any word on when you can go back to work?’ Cassie asked Archie, pointedly changing the subject.
‘Well, not for a month, at least. We’re going down to Cornwall, where I can benefit from the “fresh air”,’ Archie said in a resigned tone.
‘I don’t know why you’re saying it like that,’ Suzy huffed. ‘You’re signed off work until September at the earliest, and London is no place to recover – all the noise and people and traffic and pigeons and—’
‘Pigeons?’ Henry laughed. ‘How on earth are pigeons going to impede his recovery?’
‘Everyone knows guano is a health risk, and Arch needs fresh air and open views, somewhere he can sleep with the windows open at night, a garden he can sit in.’
‘We have a garden here,’ Archie pointed out.
‘Yes, with Easigrass and a Wendy house. You need somewhere with real grass and flowers.’
Archie rolled his eyes, making his views on the matter clear, but said nothing.
‘Archibald Valentine McLintlock, don’t give me that look,’ Suzy said in her sternest voice, and making both Cassie and Henry laugh as they always did when Suzy used his full name. ‘After the fright you gave me last week, you jolly well owe me a quiet month in which you promise not to die.’ She looked up at her brother. ‘And that goes for you too.’
‘Understood,’ Henry said with a salute and a wink.
‘So when are you going?’ Cassie asked, feeling thoroughly despondent. First Henry was disappearing on her and now Suzy and Arch too?
‘This weekend, we were thinking.’
‘Oh brilliant!’ Cassie said, throwing her hands up in the air. ‘That’s just what I need. All of you doing a disappearing act on me for the summer.’
‘Come with us. There’s masses of room. You’ve been to Butterbox Farm, right?’ Suzy said.
Cassie shook her head. ‘I feel like I have, though. You’ve told me about it enough times.’
‘Seriously? You’ve never been down?’ Suzy asked in astonishment, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. ‘Oh yeah, I suppose you were always back in Hong Kong when we went. God, we had such amazing summers down there, didn’t we, Henry?’
A light came on behind Henry’s eyes. ‘Sure did.’
‘You’ve got to visit.’
‘Sure, thanks,’ Cassie nodded with a sigh. What else was she going to do with her weekends?
‘Oh, has Gem got hold of you yet?’ Henry asked his sister. He saw Suzy’s quizzical expression. ‘What? We speak on the phone.’
‘And what’s the latest with Lord?’ Suzy’s sarcasm was evident.
‘Laird,’ Henry reproved. ‘And you can ask her yourself when she rings – or at the party next week, whichever’s soonest.’
‘What party?’ Archie asked, looking as alert as a spaniel on the peg.
‘Nothing you need to know about,’ Suzy said quickly.
‘The team’s send-off party. The sponsors are hosting it for us at the Blind Pig in Soho,’ Henry said at the same time.
‘Really?’ Archie grinned, clapping and rubbing his hands together.
‘Arch, no!’ Suzy intervened. ‘You are recuperating. Over my dead body are you—’
‘Woman, my best man slash best mate slash blood brother is about to fly halfway round the world to set sail on the high seas on a pile of water bottles. If you think I’m going to miss out on buying him a farewell beer, think again!’ he said loudly.
Suzy’s mouth opened and then closed again, no sound coming out – Archie never raised his voice. Henry gave a small cheer and even Cassie was tempted to whoop, but Archie had eyes only for his wife, his hand reaching for hers. ‘But after that, my darling,’ he said in a softer voice, ‘you can whisk me off to the ends of the country and sit me in a deckchair with a hanky on my head for as long as you like. I won’t complain once, I promise, not even when you make me drink that.’ His nose wrinkled in distaste at the now-tepid green tea, which looked like a witch’s potion from a Walt Disney film.
‘I’m going to make you drink a lot of that,’ Suzy said crossly after a moment.
‘I don’t doubt it. And I’ll be all the better for it, I’m sure.’ He tipped his head down, his eyes trying to make contact with hers and refusing to gloat in his rare victory.
There was another short pause. ‘Well, you’re not having a beer.’
‘I don’t want one, Duchess. I just want to buy one for this fellow here.’
Suzy sighed, casting her brother a hateful stare. ‘You have a lot to answer for,’ she grumbled, just as Archie grabbed her hand and tugged her over to him, pulling her down onto his lap and enveloping her in a bear hug that made even her smile.
Chapter Eleven
Cassie stood on the balcony, looking in at the party and watching as it pulsed without her. Flashes of the copper bar glinted back at her as the crowd constantly moved and shuffled, the leather chairs pushed towards the walls to make an impromptu dance floor. Henry was in there somewhere, laughing, charming, schmoozing, in his element, his formerly tattered ego now fully restored to beautiful, reckless invincibility. Usually, she could see his head above the crowd, but he was moving among fellow giants tonight – why were all sailors so tall? – and she hadn’t caught sight of him for almost an hour now.
Her mood continued to fall and she turned away to face out into Poland Street instead. Unlike everyone else in the room, she found it hard to celebrate her fiancé disappearing round the world for three months, but she was seemingly alone in that opinion. Everyone seemed so delighted by the expedition – the crew, the backup teams, the sponsors especially so, it seemed, now that Henry was on board, but she just wished they were back at the flat, the two of them sharing a bath and eating supper on the bucket before rolling around in bed till the sun came up.
But there had been no getting out of this: tonight was as much a promotional event to drum up press as it was a send-off and Henry was contractually obliged to attend. Just as he’d been obliged to have countless meetings getting to know the team, charming the sponsors, running through the technical specs and navigation charts, getting the insurance set up . . . They’d scarcely had a moment alone together since he’d signed the contract.
The mood had been sedate to begin with, as Beau and Henry – both rakishly handsome in team navy blazers and chinos – worked the room as a unit, shaking hands, dishing out Hollywood-ready smiles and whipping up interest (much to Cassie’s alarm) by bigging up the risks they faced. But no party that had Beau in it – or with a cocktail list that counted thermonuclear daiquiris in its number – was ever going to remain tame, and a hedonistic atmosphere had taken hold as the crew began to party hard, as if to make up for all the nights they wouldn’t be on dry land. Newspaper photographers prowled the room, aiming their lenses at the prettiest girls and richest-looking men, and Cassie had seen for herself how valued Henry was in the team as the money men behind the trip vied to have their photo taken with the action heroes.
Cassie sighed, feeling out of the loop as she stood alone, waiting for Suzy to return with their fresh drinks. She well knew that more wine had simply been the excuse Suzy needed to move through the crowd
and spy on Archie, who was clearly delighted to be back in the fray again.
‘Hey, hey, hey! Here she is. I knew she had to be hiding around here somewhere.’
Cassie’s stomach dropped as she heard Beau’s distinctive cut-glass vowels aimed at her, and a moment later he was in her face. Quite literally.
‘How are you, gorgeous?’ he asked, swooping an arm round her waist and kissing her hard on the cheek, his stubble rasping against her skin.
She pulled away with a look of undisguised contempt – his unpleasantness was only amplified with alcohol, it seemed – and matters weren’t improved when she clocked Luke standing beside him, quietly watching on, a whisky in his hand.
What was he doing here? Were they joined at the hip?
‘I had to come over and personally thank you for what you’ve done for me.’
‘I haven’t done anything for you, Beau,’ she said stiffly.
‘Au contraire,’ he winked. ‘I thought the whole shebang was going to go down the tubes when Freddy bailed on me last week. Two years we’ve been working on this project. I won’t even bore you with the hassles we endured from the sponsors – wanting guaranteed media, carrying us over into their next year’s marketing spends because some fuckwit in accounts thinks they’ve overspent on paperclips. And then, just when we’ve got our ducks in a row, Freddy goes and almost ballses everything up ’cos he can’t keep it in his pants and now his woman’s about to drop a sprog.’ He shook his head as if in despair, before a too-bright smile split his face. ‘But then, don’t you know, I remember my old mucker walking into the bar last week, looking just as bloody good as he did ten years ago, while the rest of us are withering into broken old men. I guess it’s true what they say about a good woman.’
He winked at her again, but Cassie refused to respond in any way, shape or form. She intended to freeze him out of her personal space.
Not that it was working just yet.
‘Henry may be the man of your dreams, Cassie, but he’s the man of mine too, trust me. Bloody experienced sailor, tried and tested in extreme conditions – South Pole expedition in 2008, wasn’t it?’
She nodded, and glanced at Luke again.
‘Strong as Popeye, doesn’t drink all the booze on the first night and could charm the tail off a mermaid. Not that we’ll be asking him to charm anything off anybody, you’ll be relieved to hear.’ He winked again.
She turned to go; she’d had enough already. ‘Excuse me.’
But Beau caught her hand. ‘Wait a minute, pretty lady. You don’t have a drink. Let me get you a drink. What would you like?’
‘Nothing from you.’
His eyes glittered and she knew they understood one another. ‘You’re sure about that?’
‘She said no, Beau,’ Luke interjected, firmly removing Beau’s hand from her arm but with a matey smile. ‘Look, Amy’s over there looking for you. Why don’t you . . . ?’
Beau looked back into the crowd. ‘Shit, yeah . . .’ he mumbled, staggering off with an exaggerated gait and leaving her alone with her supposed ‘rescuer’. Only, he was just as bad. She already knew that. His gallantry was wasted on her.
‘Sorry about that. He’s drunk,’ Luke murmured.
‘You don’t say,’ Cassie said sarcastically, turning away from him.
‘How about you? Having fun? I could get you that drink . . .’
She stared back at him – a thousand words, most of them rude, running over her face – before she turned away again. ‘Just leave me alone, Luke.’ Politeness in front of others had kept the smile on her face when they’d met at the polo two weeks ago, but she owed him no such courtesy now.
They were silent amid the noise.
‘Look, Cass, I don’t blame you for hating me,’ he said after a minute, dropping the game and getting to the point. He tried to catch her attention with his gaze, but she simply turned away further still. ‘I was an asshole, I know that.’
More silence. She wouldn’t look at him. She wouldn’t.
‘But surely you know why I did it? You must have understood, even if you couldn’t forgive?’
Understood? She whirled back to face him. ‘What justification could you have had for doing what you did? You betrayed me in the worst possible way. You took something that was private between us’ – her hands had folded over her heart – ‘and showed it to the world. Him!’
He stepped towards her. ‘Yes, because I loved you, Cass. I was mad about you. I couldn’t . . . accept that what we had was over. I was trying to hurt you back, to get your attention.’
‘Well, you got that, all right. And my contempt besides.’
Her rocky words bounced off like pebbles on a giant. ‘You walked away so easily, without even a backwards glance.
‘No,’ she refuted. ‘Not without a backwards glance. I was miserable for a long time in Paris, but I had to go there. You knew that.’
‘All I knew was that you chose to leave.’
‘You could have chosen to wait. Did that ever occur to you? It would only have been for a few months, but it had to be “now or never” for you, didn’t it? Your ego couldn’t bear that I might even be able to leave you.’
He blinked at her, his hazel eyes steady, discerning. ‘And who says you would have come back? Look at you now, already engaged to another guy. When did that start, huh? Did you meet him just a few weeks later in Paris, or was it a few months later in London?’ His eyes roamed her face, but she looked away, refusing to answer. She didn’t need to explain her history with Henry to him. She didn’t need to explain herself to him at all. ‘Well, either way, it wasn’t long, I know that much. You were never coming back to me. I knew it even if you didn’t.’
She swallowed and they fell quiet again, the party thumping all around them like a giant heart. Was anyone watching them? Was Suzy? Henry? Arch?
‘Listen . . .’ he said, his hand reaching towards her, but she flinched and he took it away again. More silence and yet a running commentary in her head – all the things she’d wanted to say to him back then and hadn’t. ‘I don’t want to fight. That isn’t why I’ve come over. It was a long time ago now. We’re different people. You’ve moved on; we both have, and believe it or not, I’m actually really happy that you’ve found what you were looking for. Henry seems like a good guy. Beau can’t stop raving about him.’
Cassie wished she’d been looking at his face when he’d said that – had the words almost choked him? – but she continued looking out onto the street below.
‘I’d really like to call bygones on this whole thing. Accept my apology, Cass. I’d like us to be friends again.’
She turned to face him, her hip leaning into the cold stone. ‘But we were never friends, Luke.’
He stared back at her, both of them remembering exactly what it was they had been to each other. ‘Maybe not, no. But . . . maybe we could learn to be.’
From the corner of her eye, Cassie saw Suzy approaching, her arms held high above her head as she moved through the crowd with the wine glasses. Beau was just behind her on the dance floor, making an obscene gesture behind her back, and Cassie remembered again his final lascivious words to her at the polo. Even now they made her skin crawl. He had seen her at her most intimate, a privilege he should never have enjoyed – and it was all because of the man standing before her now.
She looked back at him coldly. ‘I don’t think so. Anything that was between us you killed off a long time ago.’ And she walked away, meeting Suzy just inside the French doors.
‘Holy crap! Isn’t that—’ Suzy asked in surprise as she clocked Luke, just as Cassie grabbed her by the elbow and steered her away to another corner of the room. She had met Luke when she and Anouk had sprung a surprise visit on her in New York.
‘He’s still staring,’ Suzy said without moving her lips, handing over her drink and clinking it with hers. ‘What the hell’s he doing here?’
‘He’s a friend of Beau’s.’
‘Ugh, that f
igures.’
Cassie arched an eyebrow. ‘You know Beau?’
‘He’s a dim and unwelcome ghost from the past.’ Suzy looked sheepish. ‘And I may have snogged him once after one too many snakebites at a university ball.’
‘Oh, Suze, you didn’t!’
‘I’m sorry. I was visiting Henry for the weekend and . . . well, it was a terrible lapse of taste and judgement.’
‘At least tell me he’s an atrocious kisser.’
‘Mmm, yes, about that . . . Wish I could,’ Suzy sighed with a shake of her head. ‘Still, he’s an utter git. I can’t believe Henry’s hooked up with him again.’
‘Well, hopefully three months in a tiny cabin with him will finally make the scales fall from Henry’s eyes.’ Cassie took a sip of her drink, surreptitiously checking Luke wasn’t still watching, but he had disappeared from sight – hopefully the room and country too. ‘Did you find Arch?’
‘Oh yes. He’s supervising the Drink While You Think.’ Suzy rolled her eyes, pointing to the nucleus of fun in the room. Archie’s red hair, even redder under the lights, flicked about like the Olympic flame as Cassie watched Henry cheering on someone out of sight from her position. She was sure he couldn’t have seen Luke here. He wouldn’t be smiling anywhere near as widely if he knew her ex was in the building.
‘What are they trying to do?’ Cassie asked, puzzled, just as the crowd parted momentarily and she glimpsed through the gap in the crowd a dazzling blonde-bobbed girl with a brilliant smile. ‘And who is that?’
‘Who?’ Suzy craned to see. ‘Oh, that’s Amy, the co-skipper, Henry’s opposite number.’
‘Henry’s got an opposite number?’ Cassie murmured, watching as Amy gripped her hair with one hand, her eyes scrunched shut. She was clearly trying to think of something as everyone chanted a countdown to her. ‘I thought Beau was the other co-skipper.’
‘Nope. He’s the expedition leader.’ Suzy dressed the titles with faint scorn before noticing her friend’s anxious expression. ‘Hey, don’t worry about her. She’s one of the boys apparently. They all love her.’