The Socialite's Secret

by Carol Marinelli

  People were right—he should live closer.

  Except, as he looked over at Scarlet, he wouldn’t change where he lived for the world. At least she’d had some time away. He just wished he could have given some more.

  He had called ahead before he’d left and had spoken with Lorna, who was back for her night shift.

  ‘David should be in soon,’ Lorna said.

  ‘It’s not David I’m ringing for,’ Luke said. ‘Lorna, I’m bringing Anya’s daughter in. Could we use the direct theatre lift?’

  There was a very long pause as Lorna resisted asking any questions. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Do you know the code?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’ll see you shortly, then.’

  His filthy Audi moved unnoticed into the car park and they took the elevator up to the ground floor, where they headed straight to the central column.

  There they took the service lift straight up to Theatre and then another up to ICU. Instead of arriving in the corridor, as the other elevators did, they stepped straight onto the ward.

  To their credit, the staff there gave him no more than a slight wide-eyed look as Luke came over to the desk with Scarlet.

  ‘Hi, Scarlet.’ Lorna smiled. ‘Your mom’s been asking after you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why don’t we go somewhere a little more private?’ Lorna suggested, and glanced over at David, who nodded.

  ‘I’ll be there in a moment.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Luke offered, but Scarlet shook her head so he stood there as Scarlet and Lorna headed off.

  ‘I’m not sure what’s going on between you two,’ David said, ‘and I don’t need to know.’

  ‘Thanks.

  ‘You need to know this, though,’ David said. ‘She’s about to walk into the lion’s den.’

  ‘I know she is.

  Scarlet sat and listened to Lorna, who explained that her mother was doing a lot better but was insisting that she be moved elsewhere. ‘She’s not being very cooperative,’ Lorna explained gently. ‘And she’s also extremely angry.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘With everyone,’ David said as he walked in, and Lorna looked up and smiled. ‘I want her to stay here and I’ve told her that but she wants to be moved. I’ve told her that can’t happen yet.’ He was honest with Scarlet. ‘I’ve dragged out a couple of procedures and told her it wasn’t possible till late tomorrow but I can’t force her to stay.’

  Scarlet nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s very insistent that she leaves.’

  ‘Anya can be exceptionally difficult,’ Scarlet said. ‘I’m very sorry—’

  ‘Scarlet,’ David interrupted, ‘you have nothing to apologise for.’

  And she took a breath because she knew he wasn’t just telling her that she didn’t need to apologise for her mother’s behaviour tonight.

  This wasn’t her fault.

  Scarlet told herself that as she stepped behind the curtains and saw her mother lying there.

  Lorna stayed with her but it wasn’t pretty.

  It was her fault apparently, and basically Anya told her that if at first she didn’t succeed then she would try and try and try again because she could not live without her daughter by her side.

  Luke had always thought that he was the strong one.

  It had been an assumption of his that was summarily squashed when, after a few minutes of Anya’s ranting, he heard Scarlet’s clear voice.

  ‘I’m going to go now, Mom. I love you. Please, get well.’

  Scarlet walked out and straight to the elevator then she turned as if she’d forgotten something and thanked David. ‘And can you thank Lorna?’

  ‘Of course,’ David said. ‘Are you happy for me to call Luke with any change?’

  ‘Please,’ Scarlet said.

  And that was it.

  They stood in the elevator and made their way back to the underground car park, and Scarlet felt as if she might jump out of her skin.

  ‘Can I drive?’ Scarlet said suddenly.

  ‘Of course.’ Luke handed her the keys and Scarlet climbed into the driver’s seat.

  ‘She blames you,’ Scarlet said, ‘well, when she’s not blaming me.’

  ‘I heard,’ Luke said. He didn’t really know what to say here but he tried. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused a rift...’

  ‘A rift?’ She gave him a very wide-eyed look that told him he was a master of understatement and then turned her head to look over her shoulder as she reversed out. ‘And do you really think any of this is your fault?’

  Wisely he said nothing.

  ‘What?’ Scarlet challenged the silence. ‘Why do you have to be responsible?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Why do I?’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘No,’ Scarlet said, and she briefly looked at him as they waited for the barrier to lift. ‘I was always going to leave, Luke or no Luke.’

  ‘It’s left here,’ Luke said, as she missed the exit.

  ‘Not tonight it isn’t.’

  She drove out of the hospital as if they were being chased by the paparazzi and then he found out that, despite several prangs in her past, Scarlet could actually drive, and rather fast!

  There was somewhere she needed to be. Scarlet had known it the very second Luke had broken the news to her.

  It had been the place she’d intended to run to that awful morning and it was the place she was taking him now.

  ‘Am I being kidnapped?’ Luke grinned.

  He didn’t blame her in the least for wanting a drive.

  ‘Yep.’ She looked over at him. ‘So go to sleep. I don’t want to talk.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS A long drive, a very long drive through the night and she liked it that he didn’t question her about where they were going and that after a while he slept.

  God knew, he hadn’t all week, Scarlet realised.

  She read the signs, and the roads were very narrow and hilly, more so than she remembered. The hedges and stone walls loomed close but finally they had arrived and she pulled into a small deserted lookout and stared out at a waning moon and an angry black ocean.

  The water looked a lot like she felt, cold and churned up and too dangerous to explore, but she wanted the man who was stretching out beside her to know her some more.

  And so badly she wanted to know what went on in his head too.

  Luke was so closed off and it had taken meeting his parents to realise that his guarded nature didn’t just apply to her.

  ‘Where the hell...?’ Luke asked as he opened his eyes. The wipers were going full pelt but were still battling against the rain and the windscreen was fogging up.

  ‘Devon,’ Scarlet said.

  Luke looked at the dashboard clock. It was five in the morning and pitch-black. The wind was howling, the sea was rolling black and white.

  ‘I’ve dreamt about being here for a very long time.’

  ‘Was it warm and sunny when you did?’ Luke asked.

  Scarlet shook her head. ‘Nope.’ It really was the place of her dreams but she had never dared to hope that she would ever be here with Luke.

  They got out and Scarlet went into her bag and put on the horrible flat shoes he had bought her and then she put the giant bag over her shoulder. ‘Leave it in the car,’ Luke suggested, but Scarlet shook her head.

  They didn’t walk down to the beach, more the wind blew them onto it, and they ran hand in hand along the pebbly shore beside the roaring water.

  Scarlet was angry, more angry and upset and terrified for her mother than she knew how to be, and Luke got that. He had heard her mother’s cruel words and had seen Scarlet’s calm exit but knew she was bleeding on the inside.

  ‘I hate her. I love her but I hate her,’ Scarlet said.

  ‘Did you tell her that the other night?’

  Scarlet nodded.

  ‘You are allowed to say how you feel. What
she did with that information was her choice.’

  ‘You’re allowed to say how you feel too,’ Scarlet said, ‘but you don’t.’

  ‘I know.’ He pulled her right into his jacket and held her.

  ‘What if she dies because I don’t go back?’

  And there was the reason that, in this, he didn’t offer his thoughts, because one day that might well happen and he did not want to have influenced her choice.

  He did not want, years from now, for there to be another reason for deep regret that came between them.

  ‘If you do go back, will it change things?’

  It was all he could offer and Scarlet tried to picture herself back home in LA and her mother well, simply because she was there by her side.

  It hadn’t worked so far.

  For twenty-five years, being by her side hadn’t worked.

  ‘Do you know,’ Luke said, and with his words he offered her no easy solution but acknowledged the hell her decision must be, ‘with this wind, if you scream and face out to the water, no one will hear you?’

  ‘Oh, they would,’ Scarlet said, because the scream that she held inside was so loud it might split the channel they stared out at.

  Luke shook his head. ‘They won’t.’

  And so she did. Scarlet screamed and swore and kicked at the stones, and she was like the witches that she’d read flew over these parts, and it helped.

  It really did.

  And when her throat was as dry and as sore as it had been the morning she’d found her mother, the morning she had found Luke again, he took her in his arms and he held her.

  They swayed to the sound of the waves and moved to their own tune, and against his chest the world felt better. With her in his arms, despite the darkness, the world seemed brighter.

  And so they danced, and cared not if anyone was watching.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘LET’S GET BACK to the car,’ Luke suggested.

  Neither were dressed for the weather and both were frozen but Scarlet had other ideas and she took his hand and, shivering wet, gulping in cold air, she started walking along the beach.

  With purpose.

  They came to a small track and walked up it, arriving at a dark cottage. Luke frowned as she went into her bag and took out some keys. ‘Scarlet?’

  ‘I’m not breaking in.’ Scarlet smiled through chattering lips. ‘I want to show you something.’ She pushed open the door and turned on a light, and Luke looked around and there, by the sofa, was a large bag.

  ‘This is why I didn’t get to see my mother go on stage that night.’

  ‘What are you telling me, Scarlet?’ Luke asked. ‘Or, rather, what aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘A lot.’

  There was a fire in the grate and she went to light a log with the matches provided, which didn’t work, so he took some paper and scrunched it up beneath and kept feeding it till the log took.

  And, because it was Scarlet, she stripped off, right down to her knickers, and Luke rolled his eyes but also stripped down. He couldn’t be bothered to spread his clothes out so he threw them, suit and all, to shrink in the dryer and put a towel round his hips.

  He didn’t even bother to bring one for Scarlet.

  She’d warmed some milk and made drinks and now sat by the fire. He went and sat beside her.

  Luke was very used to asking patients their pain score from one to ten.

  If there was such a thing as a want score, he’d be demanding knockout drugs now, because for all the times and opportunities they’d had to evade things with sex, this was the biggest challenge he’d met. But tomorrow her mother left and Scarlet might not be with her and he was here in the space she had fought for, in her terribly complex world.

  She needed help, not his want.

  ‘How long have you had this place?’ Luke asked.

  ‘I booked it a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to leave for years,’ Scarlet admitted. ‘Since I was about fourteen. I just never knew how. I ran away when I was sixteen and I got as far as a bar.’ She looked at him. ‘I didn’t know how to start, who to turn to,’ Scarlet admitted. ‘Then we had that night together and as terrible as things turned out I knew then that I had to do it. I started looking into ways when Mom said she was going back on tour. I’ve been squirrelling money away for this place. I’ve got it for a month. That’s why I missed being there when she went on stage. I took a car the hotel provided and brought my stuff here.’

  ‘Did your mum know?

  ‘I told her that I wasn’t going to be returning to America with her.’

  ‘You could have got in touch with me, Scarlet. I’d have helped.’

  ‘I know that you would have. I actually told Mom that I would be looking you up, I thought it might be a bit of a false lead...’

  That hurt but, Luke conceded, not as much as she was hurting right now so he let it slide.

  ‘Even though I know what might happen to her, I’m not going back with Mom,’ Scarlet said. ‘I’m not cutting her out of my life for ever, but...’

  She’d made her decision and had made it by herself, and instead of it hurting that she didn’t need him, he was proud of the strongest woman he knew.

  ‘I can’t live like it any more. I’ve got this knot in my chest that I thought was normal until the night I spent with you. I honestly thought that was how life felt. I’m twenty-five, Luke. It shouldn’t be called running away but that’s what I feel like I’m doing to her...’

  And he’d always held back. Luke had known she had to come to her own decision but he knew what a difficult one it must be for a woman who had never known anything other than the twisted love she’d been shown.

  ‘You’re not responsible for...’ he attempted, and by reflex he felt her shoulders stiffen beneath his fingers. ‘I’ve never run away,’ Luke said. ‘But I did skip school once.’

  ‘Rebel,’ Scarlet said, and her eye-roll suggested, what would he know?

  ‘It was for me.’ Luke smiled at her sulky expression. ‘We took a train to London and went to the movies.’

  ‘Did you get caught?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Luke said. ‘Well, I ended up telling my mother...’

  ‘You confessed!’ Scarlet grinned. ‘You are so damn...’ And then she stopped because he just looked at her and he had told her something very few knew.

  Not his brother or sister.

  Nor his friends.

  And certainly not girlfriends, because Luke’s parents had warned him about sharing the truth.

  ‘On the train back we were all fooling around and I looked over and I saw my father with a woman, getting off...’

  Scarlet frowned.

  They spoke the same language but it was so open to miscommunication that even Luke smiled. ‘Not getting off the train, getting off with each other. Making out.’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘No.’ Luke shook his head. ‘I went to another carriage and my friends followed. They never knew why I moved. I said I thought I’d seen an aunt.’

  ‘You never said anything?’ Scarlet checked, but then she knew she had said the wrong thing.

  ‘Not at first. The next weekend I told my father that I’d seen him and that if he didn’t tell my mother, I would.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Luke nodded.

  ‘There were some terrible rows and after a couple of days he moved out. Marcus was about seven and Emma was five so they didn’t really see it, but in the evenings my mother fell apart. She hit the bottle, cried her eyes out. One night I told her that she needed to go to bed. Do you know what she said?’

  Scarlet just looked.

  ‘This is all your fault.’

  ‘For making your father tell her?’ Scarlet checked, and Luke nodded.

  ‘I realised then she hadn’t wanted to know. I thought I was doing the right thing. I’d want to know, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I’d know!’ Scarlet said.

  ‘She blamed it all
on me. He did too. If I’d just shut up, none of that would have happened. After that I just stayed back. People can blow up their lives, do what they want. I’ll fix them as much as they want to be fixed but I don’t give unsolicited advice. Never again.’

  She trusted him.

  For the first time ever, she absolutely trusted another person.

  Not more than she trusted herself, though.

  He wasn’t her safety net but it made the tightrope that she walked just a touch more steady.

  ‘Can I ask you what you think I should do?’

  Luke had held back for all the right reasons and for much better reasons he stepped in now.

  ‘It isn’t your fault. No matter what she says. It isn’t. Change what you can,’ Luke said, ‘nurture the things that make you feel better. Follow your dreams and if that means you head to Africa...’ He watched the reddening of her cheeks as he had one very special morning, and he’d been right—there were secrets in that pretty head. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you would be a brilliant midwife.’

  It was worth so much.

  ‘How can I be?’

  She didn’t feel she deserved it, Luke realised.

  ‘Do you remember that nurse who was there for you? Was she perfect? I’ll bet she didn’t just sit with you, Scarlet. She brought some of her life, her experience to the bedside, and you’ve got a whole load of that.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ She didn’t get it, she just couldn’t imagine Luke talking with someone and spilling out his life.

  ‘In my own way,’ Luke said. ‘I don’t jump in, I don’t judge. It doesn’t suit all my patients but for the ones that it does, they’ll wait to see me.’

  ‘I’d wait to see you.’ Scarlet smiled. ‘I used to think you were all like Vince.’

  ‘Is that why you screwed your nose up when I said I was a doctor?’

  Scarlet nodded. ‘I hate that man so much. I was so happy when I found out that he’d only come on board when I was three. I used to worry that he was my father.’

  ‘Do you know who your father is?’

  ‘No idea,’ Scarlet said. ‘Nor does she.’

  ‘Does it hurt, not knowing?’

  ‘It used to,’ Scarlet said. ‘I had this notion that one day he’d come looking for me. By the time I got a bit older I’d worked out that, given my mother had no idea who it was...’