by Jessica Hart
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I want to stand up on a chair and shout obscenities, just to see what everyone would do!’
It was such a relief to know that he found all the tastefulness a touch oppressive too that Lucy laughed. ‘Or run away and jump in a fountain,’ she suggested.
‘Or dance on the table in a smoky bar.’
They smiled at each other, enjoying the images, enjoying each other’s company as the constraint between them was forgotten for the moment.
‘Tell me that the party for the paediatric unit isn’t going to be like this,’ said Guy.
‘It isn’t going to be like this,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s going to be fun.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Something indefinable changed in the air between them as their eyes met, and Guy put out a hand. ‘Lucy-’
‘Guy, how nice to see you!’
Startled, they both turned to see a dark, svelte woman, so beautifully groomed and so elegantly dressed that Lucy immediately felt crumpled.
‘Saskia!’ Guy kissed her cheek, then turned to introduce Lucy. ‘This is Bill’s daughter, Saskia Sheldon. Saskia, my fiancée, Lucy West.’
‘I heard you were engaged,’ said Saskia warmly. ‘Congratulations! You must tell me all about it.’
Lucy let Guy do that, and watched the two of them as they talked. They made a good couple, she couldn’t help thinking, both witty, intelligent, good-looking and charming. She really wanted to dislike Saskia, but she found herself admiring her instead and feeling deeply inadequate in comparison.
It was clear that Saskia was what Meredith would call a serious person. She was clever, attractive, successful, interesting and what was worse, she seemed genuinely nice. As Bill Sheldon’s daughter, she evidently came from the same privileged background as Guy, but Lucy gathered from the conversation that she was a successful corporate lawyer in her own right.
Guy ought to be with a woman like Saskia, Lucy realised dully. She was surprised that he couldn’t see it for himself. How could he look at her standing next to Saskia and not compare them? On the one hand, a mature, capable, beautiful woman, and, on the other, herself: scatty, cheaply dressed, unqualified, not a single accomplishment to her name. You look all grown-up, Guy had said and, although she had been pleased at the time, now she wondered if it meant that he normally thought of her as an adolescent, someone young and silly instead of the competent twenty-six-year-old she could be if she tried.
It was time she grew up.
The evening seemed endless. Lucy smiled brightly and chatted and longed for it to be over. It was a huge relief when Guy suggested they go.
‘Are your shoes up for a walk?’ he asked when they got outside. ‘It’s too nice an evening to go straight home, and I could do with a bit of air. Do you mind?’
They headed through Covent Garden and down Long Acre into Trafalgar Square, not touching, not talking much either, but Lucy was intensely conscious of Guy by her side, of his easy stride, of the familiar set of his shoulders and the hard, exciting angles of his face. The fuzzy light from streetlamps cast a protective blur over everything, hiding her expression, and her blood hummed with awareness and a kind of sadness. She couldn’t imagine many more occasions when she would be alone with Guy like this.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Guy said as they walked down the steps in front of the National Gallery. ‘I know tonight wasn’t much fun, but you did brilliantly. You charmed the pants off Bill Sheldon and his crusty old cronies. I was proud of you, even if you’re not really my fiancée.’
‘I felt horribly out of place,’ Lucy confessed. The evening had been a depressing reminder of just how little she belonged in Guy’s world.
‘You didn’t look it,’ said Guy. ‘You looked fantastic.’ He stopped at the bottom of the steps and Lucy faltered to a halt as he turned to face her where she stood, a couple of steps above him so that their faces were on the same level. ‘You still do,’ he said.
His voice, very deep and very low, set Lucy’s heart drumming painfully in her chest, and the look in his eyes made her pulse boom so thunderously that she could barely hear. Trafalgar Square was thronging with people, even at this time of night, and there was a steady stream of traffic heading down to Big Ben, but standing there on the steps Lucy felt as if the two of them were quite alone in the heart of the city.
‘Th-thank you,’ she stammered, only to catch her breath as Guy reached out and put his hands at her waist to draw her down the last step towards him.
‘I’d really like to kiss you,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all night, ever since you opened the door wearing that dress. No, longer than that. Since the last time I kissed you. Can I kiss you again?’
‘I don’t…don’t think that…would be a very good idea,’ Lucy managed with difficulty. She had forgotten how to talk properly. Her voice was staggering up and down the scales, and she kept taking a breath in the wrong places so that her words came out sounding most peculiar.
And all the time Guy’s hands were sliding warmly around, pulling her into his body, making it even harder to think.
‘Why not?’ he murmured, kissing the side of her neck, and she shivered.
‘Because…because…’ Lucy’s senses were reeling and her mind seemed to have given up on the effort required to string a few coherent words together.
His lips were drifting tantalisingly along her jaw. ‘That’s not a good enough reason,’ he said, teasing laughter rippling through his voice.
‘Why kiss me, then?’ she asked unsteadily.
‘Because…because…’ His mouth was very close to hers now. ‘Don’t you want me to?’ he whispered.
That was unfair. He must know that every fibre of her was screaming Yes! Yes! Kiss me now! Kiss me for ever! Lucy swallowed. ‘It’s not that, it’s just…’
‘That you don’t want to admit that you do want me to?’ Guy murmured against her mouth, and Lucy couldn’t hold out any longer.
‘Yes,’ she said, and felt his lips curve in a smile the moment before they possessed hers.
She melted into him, winding her arms around his neck and parting her lips so that she could kiss him back the way she had longed to do. It was bliss to be able to taste him, to tangle her fingers in his hair, to press against all that lovely, lean, muscled strength while her body sang and her senses spun and everything in her screamed out for more.
‘Lucy,’ said Guy breathlessly as he came up for air. ‘Lucy…’ He took her face between hands that were not quite steady, his eyes dark and urgent. ‘Come back to the flat with me.’
Lucy was trembling. ‘No,’ she said and that tiny word was one of the hardest things that she had ever had to say. ‘No, that really wouldn’t be a good idea.’
‘Are you going to pretend that you don’t want to again?’ he asked, frustration edging his voice.
‘No,’ she said shakily. ‘There’s not much point in denying that I want to, but I’m not going to. We’re working together, Guy. I’m leaving soon. What’s the point in getting involved?’
‘We could have a good time together.’
No, because I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you.
But of course Guy wasn’t going to say that. She wasn’t the kind of girl he would marry. She was a fun girl, a girl to have a good time with. A temporary kind of girl who had temporary jobs and temporary boyfriends and moved on.
Now temporary wasn’t enough-now she wanted forever.
Furious with herself for having hoped for even a nanosecond that he would say that he loved her, Lucy pulled away.
‘You were the one who told me I should grow up, Guy. You said I could be more than a party girl. You told me I could change,’ she said. ‘Well, I have, so don’t complain now because you’d actually rather I still just cared about having fun. It’s too late for that now.’
CHAPTER TEN
LUCY took a deep breath and knocked on the door of Guy’s office
.
‘Come in.’
He was sitting behind his desk when she went in, looking distant and abstracted, but the blue eyes sharpened at the sight of her.
‘Lucy,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
She hadn’t been alone with him since he had taken her home from Trafalgar Square, and the kiss had never been mentioned again. Lucy had tortured herself all weekend, imagining how things would have been if she had gone home with Guy as he had wanted, but she knew that she had made the right decision. It would have been wonderful, and, yes, they might have had fun for a couple of weeks, but when the party was over, what then? She needed more than fun now.
‘Sheila said that you could spare me a couple of minutes.’ Her heart was lodged high and tight in her throat, making it hard to speak.
‘Have you got a problem with the organisation of the party?’
‘No…well, yes, in a way…’
‘We’d better sit down, then.’ Guy got up from behind his desk and gestured her to the sofas.
Lucy perched on the edge of one, her hands clutched together to stop herself reaching for him, and let her eyes rest on his hungrily. There was an uncharacteristically strained look around his mouth and he looked as if he were sleeping as badly as she was.
She had hardly seen him since the Sheldons’ party. She had been genuinely busy, sending out cleverly worded invitations, cajoling caterers, confirming marquees, chasing up entertainers, rethinking decorations and intriguing the media, but the plans for the fund raising party had also been a good excuse to avoid Guy. On the few occasions they had met, they had been meticulously polite to each other and Lucy had hated it. Only desperation had brought her to him now.
‘What is it?’ asked Guy, settling opposite her.
Lucy drew a steadying breath. ‘I’m going to have to go back to Australia,’ she said baldly.
He went very still for a moment. ‘Now?’
She nodded miserably. ‘As soon as possible, yes.’
‘Can’t it wait? It’s only a couple of weeks until the party. I need you here to make sure it all goes off the way you’ve planned. It’s too late to get in yet another person,’ he said, a spark of anger in his eyes. ‘You can’t walk out on me now, Lucy.’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said wretchedly. ‘But this is something I have to do for Meredith.’
‘For Meredith?’ Guy frowned. ‘What’s this about?’
‘I went to see Richard yesterday,’ she told him. ‘They’re letting him go home soon, and he was talking about Meredith. He does that quite a lot. Last night, he went on and on about what a good friend she was and how much he missed talking to her, and I think-I’m sure-that if she were here, he’d realise that she’s the one he really loves.
‘And Meredith loves him,’ Lucy went on, desperate to make Guy understand. ‘She says she’s over him, but I know that she isn’t. If only she could come back, I know they would get together and she could be happy. Meredith deserves that more than anyone. She won’t come back as long as I’m here, though, and I’m afraid that if she waits too long, Richard will get on with his life. That nurse, Mairi, is already sniffing around.’
The words were tumbling out of her now and Lucy made herself stop and draw a breath. ‘I thought about this all last night. I’ve thought and I’ve thought…I know I’ll be letting you down,’ she said desperately, ‘but I owe Meredith so much. If I go back to fulfil my contract with Hal, she’ll be able to come home, and she’ll have a chance to be happy. I have to do that for her, Guy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’m sorry, but I did promise Hal that I would go back before Meredith could leave.’
‘I spoke to Hal the other day when he rang Ma to see how she was,’ said Guy after a moment. ‘He told me that Emma and Mickey had gone back to Sydney.’
‘Yes, Meredith emailed me that, too. But Hal still needs a cook.’
Getting to his feet, Guy prowled over to the glass wall and stood looking out at St Paul’s. ‘What’s this really about, Lucy?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘So it’s not about Kevin?’
‘No,’ she said, startled that he even remembered Kevin. ‘I realised a long time ago that I was just in love with the idea of him. He was a kind of fantasy figure, I suppose. It wasn’t real.’
The tension in Guy’s shoulders relaxed and he turned round. ‘Then tell Hal how you feel,’ he said. ‘I know him. He’s not going to want you back unless you really want to be there, and now that Emma and Mickey have gone he’ll be able to manage without you. Ask him if he’ll let Meredith come home. Tell him why.’
‘What about my promise?’ said Lucy uncertainly.
‘You promised to make the party fun, too,’ he reminded her with a faint smile. ‘It won’t be unless you’re there.’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m sure someone else could take over.’
‘It’s too late for that.’ Guy shook his head. ‘No, I need you here. I’ve put a lot of trust in you, Lucy. I know you’ve been working really hard and that you’ve got some great ideas. You can’t just walk out now. There’s also the issue of our so-called engagement…or have you forgotten that?’
‘Perhaps it’s time we called it off,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m sure people must have noticed that we haven’t been spending time together.’
‘They think we’re making a big effort to keep our personal and professional lives separate. They probably all imagine that we’re spending fabulously romantic evenings together. Only you and I know that’s not true,’ he said in a dry voice.
Lucy’s eyes dropped first.
‘Look, it’s only another couple of weeks,’ Guy said. ‘Ring Hal and see what he says. If there’s a problem, I’ll talk to him, but I want you here to make sure that party is a success and that we can build that paediatric unit for Michael. It’ll mean a lot to my mother if we can raise enough money to do it soon.’
‘And the engagement?’
‘Let’s agree to have an argument there, after which I’ll tell anyone who asks that it’s all off. That was your suggestion, after all,’ he said with a glimmer of his old smile. ‘After that, you’re free to go where you like, do what you want. But the party comes first. It’s time for you to finish something, Lucy.’
Fireworks exploded above Lucy’s head in a dazzling display of colour and noise, and she smiled at the oohs and aahs that rose around her. Even the most jaded sophisticate found it hard to resist a firework display. There was something so…celebratory about the whoosh and the bang and the burst of sparkling light.
‘So this is where you are.’
The sound of Guy’s voice sent Lucy’s pulse whooshing upwards along with the fireworks and she turned to see him, immaculate as ever in a dinner jacket and bow-tie. She had been aware of him circulating amongst the guests, smiling, welcoming, making everyone he spoke to feel an essential part of the party, but she had deliberately avoided him.
She had worked so hard to make the party a success and she was pleased, of course, that it had exceeded all her expectations, but with the fulfilment of that promise came the dull realisation that this was the end. After tonight, she would no longer have a job at Dangerfield & Dunn. That stupid pretence that she was engaged to Guy would be over and she would have no further excuse to see him at all.
And now here he was, and she was going to have to find a way to say goodbye.
‘I’ve been looking all over for you,’ said Guy.
‘I’ve been behind the scenes mostly,’ said Lucy.
‘Well, whatever you’ve been doing, it’s worked. You’ve done a fantastic job. Everyone keeps telling me what a great time they’re having, and the Chief Executive of the hospital can’t wipe the smile off her face. I thought you’d be good, but I didn’t realise you’d be this good.’
Lucy swallowed. ‘Thank you for giving me the opportunity to organise it.’ Her voice sounded high and stiff. ‘I’ve learnt a lot about events
management.’
Guy looked at her. She was wearing the little black dress that she had worn to the Sheldons’ party. It brought back bittersweet memories, but she could hardly leave it sitting in the wardrobe just because he had kissed her. It was Lucy’s only smart dress, and it was special. She had wanted to wear it tonight when she said goodbye.
Her throat tightened horribly at the thought, and above their heads the fireworks exploded in a spectacular finale, then fizzled out. Like her time with Guy, she thought painfully.
‘You look beautiful,’ said Guy suddenly. ‘You shouldn’t be hiding out here. Come and dance.’
‘No, I…’ Lucy couldn’t bear to smile, to laugh, to pretend any more. She was going to have to say goodbye some time. Better to do it now, in the dark. ‘It’s so hot in those marquees,’ she said. ‘I’m enjoying the cool.’
‘OK,’ he said, his eyes never leaving her face. ‘Shall we walk for a bit?’
She nodded. Just say it, she told herself sternly. Say, It’s time we said goodbye, Guy. It won’t be so hard. But she couldn’t unlock her jaw to get the words out.
They walked around the gardens in silence for a while, Lucy desperately storing up memories of the way he moved, the way he turned his head, the tilt at the corner of his mouth.
‘Hal told me you rang,’ said Guy at last. ‘He said Meredith had come home.’
‘She did, yes, but that was another thing I got wrong,’ said Lucy bitterly. ‘It turns out that Richard isn’t in love with either of us. He’s more interested in that sneaky little nurse.’
She hugged her arms together, remembering her dismay when Meredith had told her what had happened at the hospital. ‘I thought I could make Meredith’s dream come true but it was all for nothing,’ she said sadly. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have waited until I was sure, instead of raising her hopes like that.’ Lucy bit her lip. ‘I keep thinking that I’ve learnt how to be responsible, but I keep getting things wrong.’
