“The feeling was mutual, believe me. Before she died, she told me she approved of me, but she made me promise her something.”
Reese clasped her hands. “I’m almost afraid to hear it.”
“In essence she told me she’d seen everything from her vantage point as an actress, and, on the whole, she worried that if both people in a marriage were actors, it was hard to make it work.
“I told her I had other aspirations in life and would only continue to play the part of Fabio until I’d made enough money to get me started in business. That reassured her. However, she was still concerned about you.”
“But she knew I wouldn’t stay with acting!”
He eyed Reese soberly. “She was dying, Reese. She feared her death might be too hard on you after losing your parents. She worried you would stay with acting because it was something you knew, something comfortable. Though I didn’t like to admit it, her fears made a great deal of sense to me.”
Again there was quiet before Reese asked in a tremulous voice, “What did she make you promise?”
“That I would do nothing about my feelings for you unless you left acting of your own free will. She wanted you to carve out your own destiny, whatever it was, without any influence from me.”
A hand went to her throat. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” Her eyes impaled him like lasers. “So if I hadn’t left the show-”
He shrugged his shoulders with unknowing elegance. “Then I wouldn’t have left either. It was my only way to have my cake without eating it, too. Tell me something, Reese. What made you decide not to renew your contract?”
She half turned away from him. “After Aunt Lilian died, my heart wasn’t in the show. She made it fun and exciting. It was something we could do together that brought us so close, but without her I realized it wasn’t for me. So I held on until I could leave without causing more upheaval than necessary.”
His jaw hardened. “Obviously you didn’t live for those moments when we could be on the set together. You weren’t like me, eager for the work day to start so I could hold you in my arms. Because of you I had a reason to get up in the mornings. The worst part of the day was having to get in my car and drive away from you. The weekends were a living hell for me.”
Reese swung back toward him. “They were for me, too!” she cried, hot faced. “You want to talk about pain? I knew I was in love with you after the first day of being with you on the set. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
“I told Aunt Lilian how I felt. She warned me it happened to every actress who was given a role opposite an attractive costar. A kind of in love with love thing. It would pass.
“But it didn’t pass, Alex. My love for you deepened. Talk about living for every day. Once you started coming to the condo, I prayed you would stay and talk to me, be with me. Alone. It never happened.”
“Now you know why,” he said in his deep voice.
“Because you never sought me out, I knew I had to leave the show. I couldn’t take loving you like I did, knowing I meant nothing to you. In fact I’d just decided to break my contract when Aunt Lilian suddenly took ill and died. After her funeral I realized I needed to stay on until renewal time came up. It wouldn’t have been fair to walk out.”
“I agree.”
“But these last few months…” She shook her head. “They’ve been a literal hell for me, too.”
Lines marred his handsome features. “When I heard you were leaving the show, I asked Stan to write some new lines for you so we could be married surrounded by all our friends. I wasn’t about to let you get away from me. Not after waiting an entire year for you.”
Her eyes filled with tears, making them shine like deep blue pools. “Elaine said she thought it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard of in her whole life.”
His heart skittered all over the place. “What I’m concerned about is what you think. No one else matters. Do you want to stay married to me?”
She started moving toward him with a mysterious smile on her lips. He’d never seen that exact look on her face before.
“For how long?” she demanded.
“Into the afterlife and beyond.”
“Alex-”
He felt her arms go around his neck, felt her luscious mouth search avidly for his. Their legs tangled. Exquisite pleasure-pain shot through his body that this woman was really his at last.
“I love you, Reese. I’ll live wherever you want to live, support you in any way you wish. Give you all the children you want. You’re my life.”
“You’re mine.” She moaned the words before they began kissing each other into oblivion.
For twelve months they’d given each other kisses and embraces day in and day out on the set. But it was nothing like this total communion of mind, soul and body.
Without conscious thought he carried her into the bedroom and followed her down on the mattress. The warmth, the beauty of her took his breath.
Before any more time passed, he reached in his robe pocket and slid a ring on her finger.
Her eyes shone like pulsating stars as she lifted her hand to look at it.
“It was my grandmother’s. My grandfather gave it to me with the charge that I find a woman to bring home.” He kissed her long and hard.
When he lifted his mouth he whispered, “How would you like to get on a plane to Greece tomorrow? I want to take you home for a week.”
“There’s nothing I’d love more,” she whispered back against his lips. “You don’t know how many times I’ve dreamed of traveling there with you. The pictures you painted. Your memories. I’ve forgotten nothing you’ve ever told me.”
His response was to crush her in his arms. “I’d give anything if they could have met you.”
She covered his face with kisses. “I know how you feel. My parents would have adored you. But right now I’m just thankful Aunt Lilian was an actress. Otherwise I would never have met you.”
He groaned as he followed the sensuous curve of her lips with his finger. “Don’t think about it. I can’t comprehend life without you now.”
“Nor I, darling,” she cried, smothering him with kisses. “I’m so thankful we’re already married. It was perfect. Trust my amazing husband to plan out such a fantastic wedding. There was a very special feeling on the set today. It felt like we really were getting married. The pastor was so solemn. Now I know why.”
“I had to twist his arm.”
She smiled at him. It was a woman’s smile, full of mystery and the knowledge of the ages. “Obviously not too hard. Aunt Lilian would have loved every second of it. In fact I have to believe she was looking on.”
“I’m sure of it,” he agreed as he buried his face in her glistening black hair.
Reese had always been a giver, but her response to him now made him thank God he’d been born a man.
His grandfather had been right. “All things come to him who waits.”
His wife was all things to him. The long wait was over.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S BLIND DATE
Jessica Hart
CHAPTER ONE
‘COME on , Mum…we’re going to be late!’
‘I’m coming, I’m coming…’ Nell scrabbled feverishly through her bag, checking to see that she had everything she needed. She had been so forgetful recently, and it had all been such a rush this morning that if she wasn’t careful she would have to go to the meeting this afternoon without any make-up on, and that was the last thing her confidence needed right now.
Ah, there was her comb. At least she’d be able to do something about her hair when she got to the office. Now, where was her cosmetic bag? Had she left it in the bathroom after all?
‘Mu-um…’ sighed Clara.
‘I’ve got to get myself a decent bag,’ Nell muttered to herself. ‘I can’t find anything in here… Oh!’
She broke off in consternation as the bag slipped from her grasp and landed with a splat on the doorstep, spilling keys
and pens and tissues and lipsticks and the odd coins that always seemed to be lurking in its depths onto the path.
Clara bent to help pick them all up. ‘Mum, what is the matter with you at the moment?’ she asked, ten going on forty-five. Anyone would think that she was the mother, and Nell her awkward child. ‘You’re not usually this muddled.’
‘I’m not that bad, am I?’ asked Nell absently, shoving everything back into her bag. There was that compact mirror she had been looking for everywhere.
‘You lost your keys the other day.’
‘That could happen to anybody,’ Nell protested as they headed down the pavement at last.
‘And when you came to pick me up at Charlotte’s the other day, you went to the wrong house although you’ve been there millions of times.’
‘The doors were the same colour.’ Nell tried to defend herself, but Clara hadn’t finished.
‘And you forgot that Sophie was coming last Saturday.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised before Clara could come up with any more examples of what a bad mother she was.
Her daughter was right, though. She wasn’t usually this vague. ‘There just seems to be a lot to think about at the moment,’ she tried to explain. ‘I’m not really settled into my new job yet.’
It was true that moving jobs had been more stressful than she had imagined, but that wasn’t the real reason she was so unsettled at the moment, was it? Deep down, Nell knew that what had really thrown her was being reminded about P.J. after all these years.
It was all Thea’s fault. Nothing had been the same since she had got in touch with P.J.’s sister on some internet site. There was no need for people to go contacting old school friends, Nell thought crossly as she waited with Clara at the lights. It just made you remember all the things you had tried so hard to forget for the last sixteen years.
P.J. was part of her past. He had gone to the States, she had stayed here. They had both moved on. She hadn’t thought of him for years. Well, not very often, anyway.
Sometimes she didn’t think of him for weeks at a time.
But now he was back.
‘Guess who’s back in town?’ Thea had said, bursting with news, and Nell had been taken aback at the way her heart had clenched at the sound of his name.
‘Janey says he’s been incredibly successful,’ Thea told her. ‘Something to do with electronics. We should have known. He always was a bit geeky, wasn’t he?’
‘He wasn’t geeky,’ Nell objected, annoyed. ‘People just used to say that because he was clever.’ She defended him, just as she had all those years ago.
‘I wish we’d known just how clever,’ said Thea. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t stick with him, Nell. According to Janey, he’s practically a billionaire now.’
P.J., a billionaire? Nell couldn’t get her head round the idea. In her mind he was still the P.J. she had loved, a bit gawky, very young and very lanky, with that thin, intelligent face and the unexpected smile. The thought of him as a thrusting tycoon was vaguely unsettling. It didn’t fit with her image of him at all. She had always pictured him as a scientist rather than a businessman.
But then, she had never imagined that she would become a struggling single mother, either.
‘Janey says that he’s not with anyone at the moment,’ Thea went on, oh so casually. ‘You should get in touch.’
‘That would look subtle, wouldn’t it?’ Nell said sarcastically. ‘Hi, P.J., I haven’t been in touch for sixteen years, but I’ve just heard that you’re incredibly rich, so I wondered if you fancied meeting up?’
‘You could say that you’d just heard that he was back in London,’ Thea suggested. ‘You wouldn’t need to mention the rich bit.’
‘No, and of course P.J. would never guess that I knew that he had all that money, him being so stupid and all!’
Thea sighed. ‘It wouldn’t be like that with P.J. It’s not as if you’d be a remote acquaintance coming out of the woodwork. You were engaged once, after all.’
‘That just makes it worse!’ said Nell, recoiling from the very idea.
Her sister looked at her speculatively. ‘It’s a shame. You two were always good together. Still, maybe Janey will tell him that you’re divorced, and he’ll get in touch with you.’
Nell doubted it very much. P.J. had been nicer about Simon than she deserved, but no one liked being rejected, and presumably now that he had made his millions he had no trouble finding a girlfriend.
Good luck to him, she thought. He deserved his success, but his life and hers were worlds apart now. It was nice to know that he was well and successful, but there was no point in thinking about him anymore, she decided. She would put him out of her mind completely.
Absorbed in her thoughts, Nell didn’t realise that the green man was beeping at the lights until Clara dug her in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Mum!’
Nell started, and let her daughter bustle her across the road. Really, she must pull herself together. She was supposed to be looking after Clara, not the other way round.
Clara was eyeing her thoughtfully as they turned down a side street. They had walked to school so many times now that they followed the route automatically. Nell was sure that she could do it in her sleep.
‘Are you nervous about your date tonight?’
Nell sighed. She had been so busy thinking about P.J. that she had forgotten all about her blind date. ‘I wish I’d never agreed to go,’ she grumbled. ‘I don’t know why I let you and Thea bully me into these things!’
‘It would be nice for you to have a boyfriend.’
‘Clara, I’m thirty-seven! I’m too old for boyfriends.’
‘You’re not,’ said Clara loyally. ‘You’re not much older than Thea, and she’s just got married.’
That was unarguable. Her sister had been thirty-four when she’d met Rhys, and ready to give up on ever finding the right man for her.
‘Sometimes you just have to wait for fate to put the right person your way,’ said Nell, thinking that fate had done the best it could twenty-one years ago. It wasn’t fate’s fault that she had been too young and too silly to recognise the right person for her.
Not for the first time she wished that her daughter weren’t quite so interested in adult relationships. It was hard to explain some of the complexities to a ten-year-old, but from a very small child Clara had been fascinated by people and why they behaved the way they did.
She had been hardly more than a baby when her father had left, and took having divorced parents in her stride, but Nell really wanted to give her the example of a loving relationship, so that she could see that it was possible for adults to live together and be happy. That was the main reason why she had let Thea talk her into making an effort to meet men again, but so far her blind dates had not been a success, to say the least.
There had been Neil, who had, according to his own confession, thrived on a double life, Nick with the appalling table manners, Paul who had talked about himself all evening, and Lawrie, the latest disaster, who had spent the entire date describing his red sports car, apparently believing that it would be enough to make any woman fall at his feet. Thea had assured her that tonight would be different, but Nell wasn’t convinced.
‘I never really had boyfriends even when I was young,’ she told Clara now. ‘I married your father when I was twenty-one and before that there was only-’
She stopped. Somehow she had ended up back at P.J. It was uncanny the way all her thoughts seemed to lead back to him, in spite of the fact that she had decided so utterly and definitely that she absolutely was not, no way, going to think about him anymore.
‘Oh, look at that puppy,’ she said quickly as a scatty Labrador with huge paws and an eager expression gambolled along the pavement towards them, towing its owner in its wake.
‘Ah-h-h…cute…’ Clara cooed and let the puppy slurp at her fingers, quivering in ecstasy at all the attention, but the moment it had been dragged on its way she fixed a beady look on
her mother, who had just begun to hope that she had been successfully distracted.
‘Only who?’
‘Only who what?’ Nell prevaricated. Clara was a darling, but sometimes she could be just a little too perceptive and persistent for comfort.
‘You said you’d only had one boyfriend before Dad,’ Clara reminded her.
‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ she said as carelessly as she could. ‘Just a boy I knew at school.’
‘What was his name?’
‘P.J.,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘What, like in pyjamas?’ said Clara, unimpressed.
‘Yes.’ Nell was conscious of a slightly defensive tinge to her voice. She had thought of P.J. as P.J. for so long that the initials no longer seemed odd to her.
‘Why was he called that?’
‘His real name was Peter John Smith,’ she explained. ‘He used to say that using his initials was the only way he could make himself sound interesting.’
Clara looked puzzled. ‘Was he really boring, then?’
‘No, he wasn’t boring.’ Nell couldn’t help smiling as she shook her head. P.J. had been a lot of things, but never boring.
His image rose before her, long and lanky, with that humorous, beaky face and eyes that were blue and very alert. P.J. would never have made it as a model, that was for sure, but he had been kind and clever and funny, and everybody had liked him.
‘He was…nice,’ she told Clara. ‘He was very easy to talk to. We had good fun together.’
The other girls had mooned over the better-looking boys in the year above, but P.J. had been much more fun. And it wasn’t as if he had been exactly ugly. He had had a stubborn jaw and laughing eyes and an unexpected, slightly lopsided smile that would suddenly make him seem much more attractive than he actually was.
Without meaning to, Nell sighed. If only she couldn’t remember him quite so vividly.
‘What happened?’ asked Clara. ‘Did you have a fight?’
‘No.’ Nell hesitated. It was hard to explain what had happened when she couldn’t even explain it to herself now. ‘We’d been going out since I was sixteen and he was seventeen. We’d been away to different universities and…well, I suppose we’d started to grow apart.’
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