She dropped the card into his wine glass, where it fell with a plop and then bobbed like a miniature, sinking, gold Titanic.
Then she got up, a slim figure in silver, and walked out. She passed the waiter carrying their pudding on her way to the door.
‘Put it on his head,’ she advised the startled man. ‘It’s the hardest surface in the room.’
Of course, they made it up the next day, after spending a miserable night apart.
And, of course, he forgave Penny her impertinence and she forgave Ryan his arrogance. But the damage had been done, and the subject of her independence had become a bitter wrangle between them.
Over the rest of that summer, their quarrels intensified. She was on a roller coaster, with no brakes and no control over her ups and downs.
Things had become very complicated by early autumn.
She was being drawn inexorably into the current of Ryan’s life, whether she liked it or not.
Penny was learning a lot more about Ryan’s work—and about the man himself. She was starting to understand that the sums of money he dealt with were astronomical by any terms. It was impossible not to be overawed by the cool way he dealt with so much money, so many personalities, such large and complex projects.
But she also felt that he was loading more and more unwelcome responsibility onto her shoulders.
She loved making his world beautiful. It was in her blood to arrange flowers and dinners and parties, and make sure everything was as graceful as she could make it.
But beneath the beautiful surface, everything had to run with military precision, and that was often her responsibility.
Catering for the very wealthy and the very famous was hardly easy. These were people used to the very best of everything. Whether it was true or not, Penny always felt that the slightest mistake would be detected at once, the smallest lapse would be glaringly obvious. It was a strain.
It wasn’t just the apartment and the table and the flowers. It was she herself who was on show each time. Ryan’s partner. The woman at his side, who chatted easily with the great and the famous.
It never seemed to occur to him that it was not easy for her to measure up to some of the most beautiful and fashionable people in the world.
If she ever brought her insecurities up, Ryan would laugh them away, telling her she was lovelier than any movie star, more enchanting than any of them.
‘You’re like a midsummer rose compared to hot-house orchids,’ he told her.
‘But I feel so drab, Ryan. It’s so hard sometimes.’
‘You’re natural, my darling. Everybody adores you, can’t you see that?’
Yet Ryan also insisted that she should buy new clothes to fit her new lifestyle. A midsummer rose she might be, but he wanted her dressed like the hot-house orchids. Though her personal style had always been laid-back, she found her cupboards filling with designer garments and accessories.
Out went her jeans and T-shirts and in came silks and cashmeres. Her everyday jewellery went, too, replaced by expensive gifts from New Bond Street. Intoxicating as it was to be given diamonds, Penny felt that the prettiest bracelet could weigh like a shackle at times.
He also nudged her into changing her hair. She had worn her deep red hair long and untidy for years. He took her to one of the top hairdressers and it was sculpted into a shorter, more elegant bell, which needed to be carefully blow dried each time she washed her hair.
Nowadays, when she looked in the mirror, she saw a woman she hardly recognised. Not Penny the student, not Penny the laughing, light-hearted free spirit—but a poised, assured woman, whose clothes and jewels lent her the polish of wealth, whose smiles were as carefully manufactured as though they had been designed by computer and cut into her face by laser.
She had given up the fight in one other respect, too. She no longer kept up the pretence of going back to her flat any longer. Her life was at the Knightsbridge apartment. That also meant she had lost all the friends she had made since coming to London. Which, of course, suited Ryan just fine.
He had despised them anyway.
By now, most of his close friends had accepted her as a fixture. She had formed warm friendships with some of them, especially with Lucinda Strong, the beautiful, middle-aged actress whose work she had always admired, and with one or two others. With some, however, she found relations a strain.
She was falling into the role that Ryan had apparently designed for her—the beautiful organiser, making sure that there were always lovely flowers, superb food, great music in Ryan’s life. Entertaining his friends and spending his money. Lots of money.
The more she entered his world, the smaller she felt. She wished that it could be just the two of them together sometimes. She longed for a life with Ryan that didn’t include celebrities and business partners, that wasn’t demarcated by airline flights and parties and meetings. She wanted to curl up with him in bed and eat chips out of a packet and not have the phone ring or the computer chime out its message that Ryan had mail.
But that very seldom happened.
In November, they went to Milan together for four days.
Ryan had long since persuaded her to take back the disputed gold card, and she used it to buy him a leather jacket at the Armani men’s boutique.
They were staying in a stylish old hotel with a view of the great square and the cathedral. The four-poster bed was an invitation to lovers, and when they came back to the room, loaded with expensive parcels, she flopped down on it with a sigh.
‘Now I know what the phrase “shop till you drop” means.’
‘This is a hard city to resist,’ he commented. ‘Want some lunch?’
‘Not sure if I can manage anything after all those wonderful cream cakes we ate!’
‘You disappoint me,’ he grinned. ‘I thought you little Devonshire girls lived on clotted cream.’
‘Only if we want to turn into little Devonshire cows.’ She ran her hands down her flanks. ‘I’ve put on so much weight since we came here. Italy is purgatory for dieters.’
‘You shouldn’t be dieting all the time.’
‘If I didn’t, how would I fit into all those smart outfits you insist that I wear?’ she demanded.
‘In fact, you could do with fattening up,’ he said, looking down at her with smoky eyes.
‘Yes, you’d turn me into a roly-poly pudding if I let you. And then I wouldn’t fit into any of my clothes. And then you’d get tired of me and look for a thin girl.’
‘I’ll never look for any kind of girl but you,’ he said, kissing her.
‘What, with all those starlets languishing around you?’
‘Who needs starlets when I have the moon?’ he smiled, slipping off her shoes.
‘Oh, such a very pretty speech, Sir Ryan!’
‘And such a very pretty foot, Lady Penelope,’ he murmured, kissing her feet.
She wriggled as he sucked her toes. ‘Don’t do that; I’ve been walking around all morning—I’m sure my feet aren’t very fragrant!’
‘But I adore the way you smell and taste.’
‘Nobody could adore a fat girl with sweaty feet.’
‘Is that the way you think of yourself?’ he asked. He kissed the soles of her feet gently. ‘You’re so beautiful, so delicious, don’t you know it’s an honour to kiss your damp little toes?’
Sexy as it was to have him kiss her feet, Penny pulled her legs away from him and hid her toes under one of the packages. ‘You can have my damp little toes back when they’ve been in the shower!’
‘Your insecurities are showing,’ he sighed. ‘When they’ve been showered, they won’t be nearly so interesting.’ He rose. ‘I need to make a couple of calls. Check the room-service menu and order anything you feel like. I’ll just have a coffee.’
He went to the next room and picked up the phone. Penny opened the windows on to the balcony, letting in the roar of the Milan traffic and the big-city smell. It was true that she was incessantly dieting the
se days. And always concerned about her appearance and the way she smelled.
She had never worried about those things before. She’d always thought of herself as a self-confident woman. Now she worried that her hips, always a little wider than the standard, were starting to burgeon like a Breughel peasant—or that her legs, always sturdy, were turning into tree trunks.
It was not altogether her fault. The exquisite ladies in the shops where she bought her clothes had a knack of making her feel constantly overweight. Asking for a size twelve invariably brought the raised eyebrows. I think we only have this in a ten, madam, but I’ll check.
God forbid that she should need a fourteen.
It was so warm, almost muggy, that she pulled off her dress.
Wearing only pistachio-green underwear, she sat on the bed cross-legged, and started opening her purchases. Italian shops seemed to know how to package everything in the most graceful way; you couldn’t buy a slice of tart from a cake shop without it being carefully enfolded in waxed paper and tied with a ribbon, complete with a loop for your finger.
She had taken the gold card for a romp this morning. Milan, as Ryan had said, was a hard city to be thrifty in. Mostly, she had bought presents for other people. The big expense of the morning had been Ryan’s leather jacket from Armani. It was a shade of silver-grey that made his eyes even more striking.
She slipped the jacket over her own shoulders, luxuriating in its sleekness. The leather was so soft that she could squeeze it in her fingers like a handful of butter. Just the sort of sexy, sensual garment that suited him best—in her opinion, his wardrobe was much too conservative.
She rubbed the yielding lapel against her cheek, closing her eyes as she inhaled the rich smell of brand-new leather.
‘Wow.’
She looked up to see Ryan leaning against the door, watching her with sultry eyes. She giggled. ‘Sorry. I can’t resist the feel and smell of new leather. I must have a kink.’
‘There are no kinks in you,’ he said softly, coming to her with the streamlined grace of a hunting animal. ‘You are as smooth as cream.’
‘Not high-fat cream, I hope,’ she murmured, lying back as he climbed onto the bed and looked down at her.
‘Double Devonshire cream,’ he said, touching her throat with his tongue. ‘And I’m a greedy cat who’s going to lick you all up.’
‘More like a Bengal tiger,’ she said, running her slender fingers down his cheek. ‘I thought you had important people to phone?’
‘There’s nobody more important than you, my darling.’ He took her in his arms and started kissing her face, devouring her mouth, her cheeks, her eyelids. She arched her neck and he kissed the hollow of her throat, a favourite place he always loved to kiss. She ran her fingers through the thickness of his hair, losing herself in the scent and feel of him. ‘I dreamed of you for years,’ he whispered. ‘And now I’ve found you.’
Her heart was pounding wildly. Whatever the problems between them, his physical effect on her was always like a match tossed onto hot gasoline. She pulled him onto her, her thighs parting.
She did not bother to take his new leather jacket off—and he did not bother to take her panties off, merely pulled them aside so he could enter her. They made love for a long time, looking deep into one another’s eyes, taking unashamed, pagan pleasure from one another’s bodies.
Each time they approach their climax together, he would deliberately hold back, slowing the tempo down—so that, when they began again, it was ever more intense, ever more profound.
At the end, Penny was crying, as she sometimes did when it had been very intense. He held her tightly, and they lay together, listening to the roar of the traffic in the piazza below their window.
CHAPTER NINE
BUT by the time they got back to London, the argument between them had flared up again, and it was as though they had never even been friends, let alone lovers.
‘Why won’t you move in with me?’ he demanded angrily, as they drove back from Heathrow Airport. The argument had begun because she had asked him to drive her back to her digs for the night, rather than to the Knightsbridge apartment. ‘What’s the point of your keeping up that shabby little bedsit when you could be living comfortably at my place?’
‘The point isn’t comfort,’ she snapped. She was tired and irritable. The flight back from Italy had been bumpy and there had been long delays at both ends.
‘Would you mind telling me what the point is, then?’
‘It’s preserving my independence, Ryan. Without a little bit of autonomy, I can’t have any self-respect.’
‘That’s just silly,’ he retorted. ‘We’ve just spent a heavenly few days in Milan together. Why can’t we go home together?’
‘Well, I need to tidy my place up,’ she said. ‘Water my plants. Do some dusting. And check my postbox.’
‘There won’t be anything to eat in your flat.’
‘Oh, I’ll walk down to the Chinese takeaway. I don’t mind.’
‘Penny, I’ll wait while you do your chores. Then I’ll take you home and we’ll have an early supper and a glass of wine, and go to bed together.’
‘It’s your home, Ryan, not mine,’ she said, looking out of the window at the stream of traffic moving through the twilit streets. The London sky looked smoky, with a Victorian feel, though the haze was due to motor cars these days, not chimneys.
‘It should be your home, too. Everything I have is yours, you know that by now.’
‘But I haven’t earned any of that. I realise I’m being selfish. I just hoped you would understand. I know you’ve just given me a wonderful trip to Milan, but I need to be on my own for a while.’
‘Is my company so irksome?’
‘Ryan, I love being with you. It’s not that. I just need time to get my damp little toes back on the ground, can’t you understand that? You’re used to living at high speed. I’m not. You probably want to be off to Rio tomorrow. Or Moscow.’
‘Neither,’ he said. ‘But we do have to be in Paris again next week.’
‘Paris! You make my head spin!’
‘I always make plenty of time for us to do movies, museums, shopping. It should not be a hardship to go to Paris.’
‘It wouldn’t be—if I had any choice in the matter. But I don’t! I just get my orders. “Pack for Paris, we leave at 0800 hours.” Sometimes I think I’d rather go down to the chip shop under my own steam than fly to Paris under yours.’ She knew it was a rude thing to say, but she was angry with his domineering manner, and wanted to assert herself. She was rewarded by seeing the anger in his eyes as he glanced at her.
‘Penny, you’re impossible.’
‘Ryan, it was just the same with Tom—’
He thumped the steering wheel of the car in frustration. ‘I am not Tom! Can’t you get that into your head?’
They were in a thoroughly bad mood with one another when they reached her digs. He walked her up the stairs to her room, carrying her bag and her Milan packages.
She let herself in and switched on the light. The place looked so dreary and lonely, such a world away from Ryan’s luxurious apartment, that she almost lost her resolve. She had to fight to keep her expression neutral.
‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘Won’t you change your mind and come home with me?’
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said to Ryan. ‘I do appreciate it, I really do. But I’ll stay.’
Ryan was looking around the joyless room, which smelled of having been shut up for too long. ‘I hate leaving you in this place,’ he said.
‘I’m happy here,’ she lied. Happiness was not what she sought here—it was peace. She opened the letter box that was fastened next to her door. A thick sheaf of envelopes fell out, each bearing the seal of a different university—the results of her enquiry letters of the week before.
Ryan watched her with narrowed eyes as she picked them all up. ‘What’s all that?’
�
��I’ve sent for prospectuses from some universities.’ She felt and looked shamefaced. She had not mentioned the prospectuses, to avoid an argument. Now she was caught red-handed.
‘Prospectuses? You’re going back to university?’
‘I haven’t decided anything, yet,’ she mumbled.
‘Penny, I don’t understand you,’ he said grimly.
‘I know you don’t,’ she replied. ‘I’m fully aware of the fact that you don’t understand me!’
‘Aren’t you happy with me?’
‘I’m happy with you. I’m not happy with the lifestyle I’ve somehow acquired.’
‘And this is your escape?’ he asked, gesturing at the sheaf of letters in her hand.
‘It’s much more than an escape. Can’t you see that?’
‘Why so many?’
‘I wrote to these places to find out if there are part-time courses in the subjects I want to do. That way, I can get temporary work and pay my way through. If I can do that, I can fulfil both of my goals at the same time.’
‘And leave even less time for me.’
‘That’s a very selfish way of looking at it.’
‘Penny, I’m in love with you,’ he said, and his tone suggested that if he could do so, he would cure himself of that love in a heartbeat. ‘How can I live without you? I work in London. What am I supposed to do if you go off to the Midlands or Scotland? See you once a month, once a term? Is it selfish to hate that thought?’
‘It will only be for a while,’ she said. ‘When I’ve got my degree, I’ll be back.’
‘Unless you’ve fallen for another professor in the meantime,’ he commented drily.
‘Ryan, that was unworthy of you,’ she snapped. ‘You know I will never meet a man anything like you.’
‘Then why do you want to run away from me?’
‘It isn’t about you, it’s about me.’
‘Now which of us is being selfish?’ He shrugged wearily. ‘OK. I won’t browbeat you any longer. Enjoy your fish and chips.’
Ruthless Husband, Convenient Wife Page 9
