by Kate Hardy
That clarified something in Nick’s head. The woman might think that she was embarking on some crazy hedonistic lifestyle, but she had no idea what she was letting herself in for. He had met sufficient movie producers in his time, thanks to his history of dating women in the modelling or acting business, and he knew that kindly, thoughtful and caring were not adjectives commonly used to describe them.
‘Did you bring a jacket?’
‘You are not taking me home.’ Rose looked around desperately for her sister. ‘Anyway, you can’t bring a date and then abandon her. How is your girlfriend going to get home?’
‘Wait right here.’
Rose had no intention of doing any such thing. She tripped along behind Nick and reached her sister just as he was explaining the need to deliver Rose back to the house unless Lily was on her way out. Which she wasn’t, never mind the pointed looks and contorted gestures Rose was delivering behind Nick’s back.
‘I’ve got to stay until the last person leaves,’ Lily said gaily, ignoring her sister. ‘Only polite. And Cat can’t possibly go yet. Not when I’ve just introduced her to Joe Carr here. Can you, Cat?’
Rose had never seen anyone truly wriggle on the horns of a dilemma, but Cat did now. She was obviously furious at the thought of her date clearing off with another woman, even though the woman was no competition, but the prospect of networking with someone from the film industry who might prove useful later down the line was irresistible.
She did the best she could under the circumstances and all credit to her, Rose thought nastily, she did it well.
‘Call me,’ she purred to Nick, and then reached forward to pull him towards her. From behind, Rose watched the slender pale fingers with perfectly painted long red nails comb his dark hair and, from what she could see, he was thoroughly enjoying the kiss.
The sight made her feel sick to her stomach. What further proof could she have that he had forgotten her? Wearing a sexy black dress and flirting madly with people whose names she could barely remember suddenly struck her as very sad.
Lily, she noticed, was staring at her, and Rose composed her features into bland indifference, which was the stance she maintained as Nick ushered her out of the club, fetching her jacket en route, and into the sharp early morning air.
His driver was waiting outside and she climbed into the back seat of the car in silence.
‘So…’ Nick slammed the door behind him and turned to her ‘…you’re suddenly very quiet.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘We still have a conversation to finish.’
‘What conversation?’ Rose looked at him with a sigh. ‘We don’t have anything left to finish, Nick. We’ve both moved on.’
Nick frowned at her. ‘Which doesn’t mean that I don’t still have…’ feelings for you. Except that there was something somehow significant about saying that. So he avoided it. ‘A sense of responsibility towards you. After all, Rose, we were lovers, whether you like it or not.’
‘And now you’re scratching another notch on your bedpost. If it makes you feel better, I absolve you from all responsibility towards me. I don’t need your misguided sense of duty, Nick. You employed me because you were Lily’s friend and you felt sorry for me when I was in a financial mess. Now you feel sorry for me because—’
‘I don’t feel sorry for you,’ he snapped sharply.
‘Then what? I don’t want you to involve yourself in my life.’
She slid her eyes over to him. Earlier, she had felt tipsy and mellow and just that little bit out of control. Right now, she couldn’t have felt more sober. ‘Do you always feel as though you’ve got to look out for the hapless women you’ve been involved with?’
‘You consider yourself hapless?’
‘I consider myself…changed…’
‘So you said earlier.’ Nick’s voice was acid. ‘I wasn’t sure whether or not to be flattered by the adjective you used for me as useful.’
No, he wouldn’t be. Useful wasn’t exactly a sexy term. It was probably also a little too close to used for Nick’s liking, but Rose didn’t care because wasn’t that what he did with all the women who littered his life?
‘And people don’t change overnight, Rose. You can’t suddenly turn into a woman who lives life on the edge. You’ve never been that kind of woman. You remember telling me how much Tony and Flora turned you off the idea of taking chances because of the lifestyle they chose? They wanted you to want adventure. Instead you found your adventure in books.’
‘Yes, and now I’ve decided that they were right after all. I’m too young to bury myself in books when there’s a whole world out there waiting to be lived.’
‘And you intend to live every minute of it in revealing clothes.’
‘So what if I do? What business is it of yours? You’ve rescued me once. There’s no need to make a habit of it.’
The driver was at long last approaching the house and Rose located her glittery handbag and tucked her jacket a little tighter around her shoulders, ready to sprint from car to front door in the shortest possible time.
The frame of the redhead’s fingers clawing into Nick’s hair repeated itself endlessly in her head, like a snippet of film viewed in slow motion.
‘I’m not trying to rescue you,’ Nick grated, leaping out of the car as soon as it had stopped.
‘Don’t let me keep you.’ Rose turned the key in the lock, pushed open the door and smiled sweetly at him.
The woman was crazy, Nick thought. Had she no idea what sort of temptation she presented to a red-blooded male? Wearing a dress like that with everything on display? Her cleavage was just a teasing reminder of her succulent breasts, which he considered outrageously hugged by the thin, stretchy fabric. If she was his, he thought, there was no way that he would let her out of the house looking like that.
‘You’re not getting rid of me that quickly,’ he growled, pushing the door wide open with the flat of his hand and stepping inside the house before she could shut the door in his face.
Rose spun round and folded her arms. ‘We have nothing to say to one another, Nick.’
‘You’re not to leave the house dressed the way you were tonight.’ Where the hell had that come from?
‘You’re telling me what I can wear?’
‘For your own good.’ He flushed darkly and walked away from her incredulous expression, into the sitting room where he prowled restlessly before perching against the bay window so that he could look at her framed in the doorway.
‘For my own good?’
‘Stop parroting me,’ Nick said irritably. He failed to see why she would stare at him as though he had taken leave of his senses when, as far as he was concerned, he was being perfectly reasonable and pretty decent.
‘You may think you know what you’re letting yourself in for, but you don’t,’ he informed her bluntly, and Rose’s mouth fell open a fraction further. So it was fine for him to practically make love in front of an audience with a bimbo who seemed to have an allergy to fabric, but he still found it perfectly acceptable to lecture her about her dress code and her general code of behaviour.
She had never known anything so hypocritical in her life. She opened her mouth a few times to say something and instead succeeded in giving a goldfish impression.
‘Not only is it dangerous for you to dress like that because you’re giving off all the wrong signals, but you’re dressing for the wrong crowd anyway. Half the men there were gay and the other half would put Casanova to shame when it comes to scruples.’
‘And since you don’t fall into the gay category, Nick, we both know which one you belong to.’
‘We’re not talking about me.’
‘No, we’re talking about double standards. Maybe I’m in search of an unscrupulous man. Have you considered that? Maybe my Big Change involves taking a break from the safe guy and just seeing what the grass is like on the other side.’
‘You know you don’t mean that.’
‘
Really?’ Rose fumbled in her bag and whipped out the business card on which Ted Splice had written his various numbers. She waved it in the air as if proving her point, as if one small piece of cardboard were actually a key to the gates of wildness, adventure and scandal. As if she would ever, in a million years, seriously consider dating a man whose nickname was Splice.
‘I didn’t tell you this, but Ted and I are going out…on a date…next Saturday to…’ She named the first restaurant that came into her head, which, unfortunately, was a cheap and cheerful pizza place not a hundred miles away from where she lived. ‘And who knows what might happen once we’ve finished eating?’
CHAPTER NINE
THE advantage to the cheap and cheerful pizza place lay in its size. It was vast and, at eight thirty on a Saturday evening, brimming with families.
Nick hadn’t intended to end up there. In fact, for the better part of the week he had told himself that he had more important things to do than to waste time on one highly infuriating woman. If, he piously concluded, she wanted to hurl herself into the party scene, then she could damn well live with the consequences, and consequences there most certainly would be. If she paraded her body with a type like movie producer Ted, then she might just as well have Available stamped across her forehead in large neon lettering.
Especially with this Ted character, about whom he had managed to source some information. The man had been in and out of rehab like a yo-yo, which was not exactly a notable event in the world he lived in, but Nick could not think of Rose seriously dating a guy like that. In fact, he had discovered that he couldn’t think of her seriously dating any guy without feeling ferociously possessive.
Possessive over a woman.
The notion, when it first trickled into his head, was so unbelievable that it bordered on amusing. He had never been a possessive man, had never been jealous, had prided himself on his controlled approach to relationships.
Six days down the line, there was nothing amusing about it. He thought of the man’s oily hands stripping Rose of her skimpy black dress, unhooking her bra, feasting his eyes on her big, beautiful breasts and felt sick.
He should never have allowed what they had to finish. That was the problem. Things that ended prematurely became unattainable objects of desire simply because basic need hadn’t been sated. He had thought himself in control of what they had and only now realised that what they had had been controlling him.
But still. Going to the pizza place had not been an option. He had just somehow found himself driving over there well before she and her date were due to arrive, found himself taking the quietest and least noticeable table at the very far corner of the room where he was half shielded by an oversized plastic plant in drastic need of dusting. He found himself doing all this and it was almost as if his head had no say in the matter.
The pizza he ordered for himself as he waited was surprisingly good. The wine slightly less so, but nevertheless drinkable.
By eight-thirty, when neither Rose nor her date had yet arrived, he was smugly contemplating the very satisfying theory that Ted the movie producer had stood her up. He imagined her sitting bleakly in her sitting room, wondering whether or not to text, knowing that this was the first nail in the coffin of her new lifestyle.
She might even, he thought with a kick of real pleasure, be glumly admitting to herself that he, Nick, had been right after all to warn her off the man.
This was such a pleasing fantasy that he almost missed them. Feeling a little ridiculous because of his cloak-and-dagger tactics, Nick watched them through the fronds of the plastic plant, watched them taken through to a table uncomfortably sandwiched between two families with exuberant kids.
She had steered away from wearing anything revealing, but, instead of finding this acceptable, he darkly decided that she looked even sexier in her short grey skirt, her too-short grey skirt and neatly tailored blouse. She could almost have been going out to work except for the two top buttons of her shirt, which were undone. Nick was pretty sure that if he noticed that little detail, then so did Ted the reformed producer. He couldn’t actually see the man’s face because Ted had his back to him, but it was easy to imagine those beady little eyes flicking rapaciously over her body while he tried to work out the fastest way of getting her into bed.
Nick tensed and he finished his glass of wine and signalled the waitress over so that he could order something else. Coffee and dessert, because now he was condemned to remain where he was or risk being seen on the way out.
Not that he had plans to leave until they did. He sat back and folded his hands on his stomach and watched.
Rose, sitting on the opposite side of the room, was glumly regretting the impulse that had led her to this place.
She had reacted to Nick’s horrible, patronising attitude towards her a week ago by fabricating a non-existent date with a man who had been flattering and pleasant enough for a couple of hours but several thousand light years away from someone she would ever have considered going out with.
In fact, there had been no need for her to telephone Ted at all, but she had been prompted into doing so for all the wrong reasons. Hurt at seeing Nick with another woman, anger that he should dare tell her how to live her life having done such a comprehensive job of ruining it, and a stubborn feeling that if he warned her against Ted, then she would damn well go out with him because the last thing she needed was Nick Papaeliou’s misguided good intentions.
She had been tormented by the thought that he and his leggy redhead had probably chuckled at the silly little woman in the short black dress who was clueless to the ways of the world. That, as much as anything else, had driven her to pick the phone up and dial one of the several numbers Ted had left with her.
She had said she would be going to Angelo’s Pizza Emporium with Ted Splice and she would go to Angelo’s Pizza Emporium with him if only to prove a point to herself. That she was a free woman, liberated from the chains of fear that had kept her anchored all her life. Nick, she had decided as she had got dressed earlier, making sure to wear clothes that wouldn’t give Ted the wrong impression, might well turn out to be just the first in a long line of many.
She had been tempted to telephone Lily on the other side of the world and inform her of this new departure, a whole brand-new set of moral codes, but Lily had failed to show the appropriate disgust at Nick’s high-handed behaviour at the party and had just laughed when accused of not coming to her rescue. She had departed for America still clinging to the belief that everything was going to be fine, just wait and see.
Now, sitting in the pizza emporium, which was truly an emporium and one that seemed unnaturally full of rowdy children, Rose was in danger, not of dodging Ted’s wandering hands, but of nodding off through boredom.
Ted was not only very, very fond of the sound of his own voice and enchanted with all the funny stories he had up his sleeve, but he had also confided, on the way over in the taxi, lowering his voice, as if the cab driver could care less, that his inclinations were not entirely of the straight variety.
Of course, he adored women, but…
Rose had nodded and resigned herself to an evening of listening to Ted’s anecdotes and looking at her watch.
At least the place was big so that they could manage to avoid a falsely intimate setting, and once or twice, as she nibbled at her pizza and salad, she actually found herself laughing at some of the wild things he had to say.
Apparently he found her cool and refreshing because she was such a good listener.
‘If you were a guy,’ he paid the highest compliment, ‘then I’d be wining and dining you and inviting you back to my place to…’
‘Look at your etchings?’
Which brought them right back to square one, the main subject for the evening, Ted himself, and his trials and tribulations as an artist before he had discovered his true calling behind the lens of a camera.
It was a little after ten by the time Ted asked for the bill.
> ‘Been a bit of a waste for you, hasn’t it?’ he said sheepishly. ‘I should have let you know…told you where my preferences lay…’
Rose laughed and impulsively reached across the table and held both his hands in hers. ‘I just don’t understand why you don’t come out of the closet. It’s the twenty-first century, after all, and you work in a world where it’s pretty much the norm, anyway.’
‘Oh, it’s my mum, babe. Don’t think she’d be too hip to the idea and, well…she’s getting on a bit…Gotta play the respect card, man, gotta play the respect card.’
‘Well, if this helps at all, I was playing a part that night as well.’
‘You mean…’
‘Oh, no! Not that.’ Rose threw back her head and laughed, then she leaned forward and whispered confidentially, ‘I’m actually a closet introvert. But last Saturday, I dressed to impress and played the part.’
‘Well, now we know each other’s wicked secrets, I think we’re going to be friends for life.’
It was turning out to be an okay evening after all, Rose considered as they stood up, and when he slipped his arm around her waist she was quite happy to nestle against him and not at all offended when they parted company on the pavement outside, after promising that they would meet up again, maybe in a couple of months time, because Ted’s schedule was ‘like hectic, man’.
She washed her face, kicked off the high shoes and changed into her very un-wild gear of grey track-suit jogging bottoms and a sloppy tee shirt with a faded picture of Minnie Mouse on the front.
Heartbreak had, at least, had one good side effect. Her eating habits had changed. She had lost her appetite and it had conveniently failed to return so as she sat down to finish what remained of the evening in front of a bowl of carrot sticks and some low-fat dip she rested safe in the knowledge that the pizza was not going to be accompanied by a great slab of comfort-eating chocolate.
It took her fifteen minutes of surfing the channels before she landed on one that was watchable.
