Public Scandal, Private Mistress

by Susan Napier

  Reminded of her obligation, Veronica allowed herself to be led to the big wooden staircase, past the gutted ground-floor bathroom, where Miles was already back at work, grouting a stretch of blue ceramic tiles in the huge sunken tub.

  ‘No rest for the wicked!’ His eyes crinkled over the top of his paper breathing mask as they poked their heads in to view the progress, Sophie wrinkling her nose at the strong chemical smell of adhesive.

  Sophie’s room was bigger than her one at home, she reported as Veronica admired the high, beamed ceiling and dark, polished wooden floor offset by white walls and a pretty lavender-motif bedspread on the double bed, which matched the curtains on the two windows, one looking out onto the kitchen courtyard, the other the garden and one corner of the pool.

  ‘Gran says that this can be my room every time I come to stay,’ said the girl, explaining the origins of the rocks and ornaments she had collected since she had arrived, and arranged in neat rows on the chest of drawers. As Veronica sat on the bed Sophie opened the towering oak wardrobe that stood in the corner and proudly showed off the neat collection of clothes that only took up a small corner of the cavernous interior.

  ‘Be careful you don’t fall in and end up in Narnia,’ Veronica delighted her by commenting.

  ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is one of my favourite stories—I love all the Narnia books!’

  Throwing herself onto her stomach on the bed beside Veronica, she gave her an oddly assessing look before seeming to make a decision. She wriggled forward to hang upside down and drag a bulging, square book from under the bed.

  ‘This is the scrapbook about Luc I’ve been making,’ she said shyly, hauling it up onto the bed and opening the patterned cardboard cover. ‘I brought it over to show him. See—Mum gave me all the old cuttings she had about him so it starts when he was still at school.’ She turned the pages of yellowing newsprint. ‘Whenever we see his name in the papers or on the Internet, or he sends me stories about himself from overseas, I paste them in. And I stick in some of his letters and the things he sends me, like programmes and cool autographs and pictures of him with famous people. He was real impressed when he saw it. He said I could be his official biographer,’ she said proudly. ‘That means I can write the story of his life. I think I might be a writer, like Mum, one day. I’m good at collecting information and I always get A for my essays.’

  ‘Not a builder, like Dad?’ murmured Veronica, dying to snatch the treasure-trove and pore over the fascinating contents.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be big enough,’ Sophie said seriously. ‘And I’m a bit clumsy at doing fiddly things. Luc says it’s because my brain is too busy concentrating on important stuff.’

  Veronica’s attention was caught by a crumpled loose page sticking out at the back of the book, her heart accelerating as she realised it was from an English equivalent of the French tabloid she had picked up on the train, and featured a very familiar strip of photographs.

  ‘I haven’t had time to stick this one in yet,’ Sophie said, tugging it free and smoothing it carefully on top of the scrapbook. ‘Ashley bought the paper at the airport and it’s been stuffed in her luggage, so I’ll have to iron it first.’

  ‘That’s Max Foster.’ Sophie’s stubby finger unnecessarily identified the pugnacious Scottish action-film star in the top photo. ‘Luc got me his autograph last year. And, see—there’s Luc squidged between him and that blonde lady—’

  A very beautiful blonde lady, Veronica amended. The first two photographs of the trio at a restaurant table were murky and pixelated, as if snapped by a cell phone in low lighting, others of the two men in a wild scuffle were better lit but blurred by movement—specifically the big fist mashing into Luc’s half-obscured face. Wild-eyed Max Foster hogged most of the camera, looking like a dissipated copy of the macho characters the forty-five-year-old actor played on the big screen, and notoriously carried over into his turbulent private life.

  It was no wonder she hadn’t recognised Luc at a glance, Veronica thought as she stared at the dark, grainy pictures. As well as being slightly out of focus in most of the shots, he was dressed with alien black-tie formality, and against his inky jacket his pony-tail was invisible, leaving his hair looking as if it were cropped short.

  The accompanying text tagged Luc variously as a ‘secretive tycoon’ and ‘mystery millionaire’ reputed to be a ‘long-time close friend’ and ‘frequent private companion’ to Elise Malcolm, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of a rising star in the House of Commons. Andrew Malcolm’s demands for strong moral leadership and emphasis on his own stable home-life, incorruptible principles and squeaky-clean background were rapidly building him a political power-base, and his attractive, Oxford-educated wife was considered one of his vital social assets.

  According to the copy, Max Foster had been ‘off his face’ when he entered the restaurant of the small and exclusive Mayfair hotel to join Lucien Ryder at his table. But when the ‘fuming millionaire’ took exception to offensive remarks about Elise Malcolm he followed the actor to the restroom and their ‘furious slugfest’ had spilled out into the hall, only ending when hotel security staff had pulled the two angry men apart.

  There was a great deal of speculative innuendo about the words that had given such offence, and what the ‘elusive financier’ and his ‘distraught companion, nervously fingering her wedding ring’ had been doing having a late-night supper in a restaurant that catered solely to hotel residents and their invited guests. Much was made of the fact that, since rumours of the incident had begun swirling nearly a fortnight before the photographs had surfaced in the press, Andrew Malcolm had been conspicuously silent about the state of his ten-year marriage.

  Careful to avoid libel by actually stating it, the paper was inviting the inference that Foster’s drunken antics had blown the whistle on Luc’s long-standing affair with Malcolm’s wife.

  ‘Does Luc know you’ve got this?’ Veronica asked carefully, fighting a sudden urge to tear the thing into a million separate pieces. Sophie was too young to read between the lines of the report—to her it was just a story about a fight Luc had with a famous film star.

  But Sophie surprised her. ‘Of course he does,’ she said. ‘I already showed him the whole scrapbook. Mum doesn’t want me to put this in, but Luc said that would be like censorship—if I’m going to keep a record of his life then it should be a proper one that shows the bad as well as the good. He said a biography isn’t true to life if it doesn’t show a person warts and all…’

  But this was a rather large, ugly and disfiguring wart, Veronica thought unhappily. The kind of painful blemish that could create scandals, wreck careers…and break hearts.

  No wonder Luc hadn’t wanted her to know about it. She half wished now that she didn’t, but it was too late to turn back the clock.

  Just as she was lecturing herself not to jump to damaging conclusions on flimsy evidence from a tainted source the way she had over Karen, she looked up to see Luc in the doorway, and couldn’t help her guilty start at his realisation of what she and Sophie were holding.

  His smile died, his face turning to carved granite, and to Veronica’s despair the shimmering skein of invisible awareness that had vibrated between them ever since Paris suddenly winked out of existence.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANOTHER flash of sheet lightning and warning grumble of thunder made Veronica jump nervously as she put her hand to the weathered wooden door at the top of the narrow flight of stone steps. The sky had been growing progressively darker since lunch-time, thickening cloud turning the usual azure to a very deep mauve, and now the distant flashing and crashing that had been rolling around for the last half hour was rapidly moving too close for comfort. Back in New Zealand thunderstorms were short and sharp, heralded by driving rain, but although the swirling breeze had picked up a little, it still felt hot and dry against her skin.

  She was unprepared when the unlatched door swung open at the pressure of her t
ouch. She peered into the dim interior, her tentative knock on the thick door-post producing only a soundless thud.

  ‘Luc?’

  She could see a couch and several chairs arranged around a stone hearth at one end of the room but no sign of any human occupant. She leaned a little further and caught sight of the corner of a large, rumpled bed. She cleared her throat and raised her voice.

  ‘Luc? Are you in there?’

  Suddenly the whole world behind her lit up with blinding brilliance and almost simultaneously an ear-splitting roar of thunder rattled her bones. With a cry she threw herself inside.

  ‘Luc!’

  There was still no answer, and, trembling from mingled fright and apprehension, she edged further into the room. He could be in the bathroom, she thought, eyeing the door on the other side of the bed, which was slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of tile and tub. She couldn’t hear any sounds from within, but her ears were still ringing from the thunder.

  ‘Luc, are you there?’ She raised her voice to a level he couldn’t fail to hear, but there was still no response.

  He was unlikely to be far away if he had left his outer door open and a couple of uplights on, she reasoned, wincing at another horrendous crash. She saw a few fat spots of rain hit the flagstones but the brief spatter stopped almost as soon as it started. Regardless, she certainly wasn’t going to step outside again while the storm remained directly overhead.

  She shivered in spite of the heat. She had an excuse for coming here but it was pretty thin, so perhaps she should indulge her curiosity while she had a chance.

  She looked around, coming to the conclusion that Luc was organised without being obsessive—unlike her ex-fiancé, who had always insisted on everything being in its rightful place. There were one or two items of clothing and several books casually strewn around but apart from the unmade bed everything else looked tidy. Perhaps he had been taking a siesta, because the standard fan beside the bed was still rotating its whirring face back and forth, stirring up the sultry air above the king-sized mattress. Against the wall beside the wardrobe was a large desk on which his open laptop sat, next to a neat stack of papers and bound documents anchored by Luc’s distinctive silver cell phone.

  Unfortunately her own still hadn’t recovered from its heatstroke, but today she had at long last managed to have a proper conversation with her sister. Now at least they both knew where they stood.

  To her surprise Karen had sheepishly confessed to her idiocy over Luc with little prompting, although casting herself more as a dazzled innocent than a seductive man-chaser. Veronica generously forgave her the face-saving explanation, although they both knew that Karen was very far from being an innocent—having been sexually active much earlier than her older sister, often teasing Veronica for her old-fashioned attitudes about love and romance.

  As usual, Karen had got her way—she was going to stay in Nassau before linking up with Melanie about where and when to resume her job.

  But this time Veronica, too, was getting exactly what she wanted: freedom to make her own choices, unfettered by responsibility for her sister.

  If only she could work out what those choices were.

  In the frustrating two days since Luc had seen her with Sophie’s scrapbook she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him alone. Now, whenever they ventured out on some Melanie-inspired jaunt, either Zoe or Sophie were invited along.

  Veronica was beginning to get an inkling of what the tabloid press meant when they called him ‘elusive’. Even when he was physically present Luc had an infuriating ability to make himself inaccessible—to withdraw into himself while remaining seemingly relaxed and sociable. He had also taken to vanishing into his room for long sessions on his laptop, although Melanie saw nothing unusual in his behaviour.

  ‘Luc claims he’s much more laid-back than he used to be, but he can never stay away from work for long,’ she had sighed to Veronica when they encountered each other on the regular morning trek to the boulangerie. ‘He’d be lost without that computer of his—it’s practically grafted onto his body.’

  ‘And I wonder where he gets that from!’ humphed Zoe from her daughter’s other side. ‘You’re supposed to be on a break, too, and yet here you are sneaking in all this “research” and look at Miles and that bathroom—talk about a busman’s holiday!’

  So it was only Veronica who saw anything dramatically different in Luc’s manner over the past two days.

  He was being polite to her…and she hated it!

  She was also bewildered. She understood that Luc might not have wanted to say anything upsetting in front of Sophie, but later she had expected him to be angry or acidly defensive—or at the very least to laugh off that newspaper cutting as the toxic piece of gutter journalism it was, but instead he had arrogantly declined to react at all, leaving Veronica suspended in an emotional limbo.

  Veronica picked up the sterling silver pen that lay beside the laptop, noting the engraved initials on the side of the barrel. It must have been a gift, she mused, because, given his love of privacy, she couldn’t imagine Luc buying himself anything that advertised his identity, even via a discreet monogram.

  The pen was heavy and cool in her hand, the ballpoint already extended for work. She could picture Luc at the desk, his clever face taut with concentration, his strong fingers cradling the monogrammed shaft as he made the spiky, closely written notes on the lined pad next to the computer. In a silly impulse worthy of Karen, she couldn’t resist tearing off the top sheet of a small, square memo pad and bending over to write a few experimental words with his expensive pen, enjoying the smooth, sensuous glide of the fine black tip.

  ‘Leaving me a note?’ The clipped question was punctuated by another blinding flash out the windows and instant clap of monstrous thunder.

  Veronica jerked upright, choking off her scream as she saw Luc kick the outer door closed and dump an armload of clean laundry obviously rescued from the clothes-line on a nearby chair. He was barefoot, wearing pale chinos and a faded grey Oxford University tee shirt spotted with a few drops of rain. When he bent to pick up a fallen shirt Veronica quickly thrust the little square of blue paper into the back pocket of her snug white denim shorts.

  ‘Or perhaps you were searching my room for something else,’ he said, heavily sarcastic. ‘Some compromising piece of information that might confirm your worst opinions about me? Or something you might be able to hawk to the tabloids—I understand they’re offering substantial sums for tell-all stories about me, and you could sell them a whopper, couldn’t you?’

  His toxic sarcasm was music to her thunderstruck ears. Finally, she had caught him sufficiently off-guard to get past that cool barrier of politeness and the connection between them was suddenly back, full-force, awareness of his seething energy slamming into her with the power of a physical blow.

  ‘No, actually I was looking for you. I called out, but there was no answer—’

  His insolent sneer was reflected in the sullen rake of his dark eyes. ‘So you came in anyway.’

  If that wasn’t calling the kettle black! thought Veronica.

  ‘I wanted to get in out of the storm—I’ve always hated thunderstorms…’ She shivered as white light strobed through the gap in the half-drawn shutters. ‘I thought you might be in the bathroom. I…I was just trying out your pen,’ she said lamely, holding it up. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘It was a graduation present, given to me when I got my first degree.’ He raised his voice over the next roll of thunder as he strolled over to pluck it from her hand.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask who gave it to me?’ he challenged with sharp antagonism.

  She sensed a trap and decided that there was no avoiding it. She shrugged, her shoulders sliding against the thin silk of her short-sleeved blouse. ‘Elise Malcolm?’

  His black brows snapped down over his quarrelsome eyes. ‘How the hell could you possibly know that?’ he demanded furiously.

  She tossed her head, the fie
ry glints in her hair sparking defiantly in the artificial glow from the uplights. ‘I didn’t—it was just a lucky guess. That newspaper said you’d known each other a long time.’

  He glowered at her mention of the tabloid. ‘We were at Oxford together.’

  ‘Really?’ Veronica held his gaze steadily, even though her heart stuttered at the taut statement. ‘Together’ had a totally different connotation from ‘at the same time’.

  ‘Well, all I can say is that she obviously has good taste.’

  His eyes narrowed and she realised her unintended double entendre had momentarily thrown him. She could see him silently debating whether she was referring to him or the pen. His hand clenched around the silver barrel.

  ‘Don’t you want to ask why she gave it to me?’ he ground out, his voice thick with frustration at her refusal to cooperate.

  ‘You just told me—to celebrate your graduation.’ Her calm acceptance seemed only to inflame his already dangerous temper.

  ‘Because we were sleeping together!’ His harsh truth exploded in her ears like another crash of thunder as he threw the pen onto the desk. ‘Elise and I pretended to be just friends but we were secretly at it like rabbits every chance we got. Isn’t that what you wanted to know?’

  Were. The word sank into her consciousness and she clung to it like a lifeline. He was using the past tense. She allowed the certainty to saturate her awareness. But she had waited a moment too long to respond.

  ‘What’s the matter? Not shocking enough? Haven’t I given you enough salacious detail?’ He swooped like a hawk on her hesitation, revealing the savagely offended pride that was at the core of his bitter fury: ‘That’s why you came snooping around up here, isn’t it? You want to know if I’m the adulterous bastard they say I am—’

  ‘No—that’s not why I—’

  ‘Well, you’re not the only one who can go on a snooping expedition,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘You have quite a lurid recent past yourself, don’t you, Veronica? Let’s see what I came up with…’ He leaned over the desk to punch a key on his computer and the screen-saver dissolved into an Internet search page. Another couple of clicks and Veronica was mortified to find herself staring at Neil Ordway’s web-page, the one that had lately caused her so much hassle and unwelcome attention. On it he was promoting himself as a candidate on the reality TV show Second Chances in which people who were rejected in love tried again to win over the partner of their choice, with the help of a ‘romantic adviser’ and an intrusive camera crew following their every date.