‘When?’ she asked, matter-of-fact.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Well, there you go, then!’
He clenched his hands at her sudden dismissive attitude.
‘It’s the States, Jen. It’s not the moon. I’m not disappearing off the face of the earth. There are phones. There’s Skype. And I’ll be back.’
‘Of course you will. Next time your work demands it. I’m sure I’ll read about it in the papers.’
Her tone was don’t-care.
She turned her back on him, dropped the ball of clothes on the bed and stood momentarily naked except for her panties, shrugging her way as fast as she could into a T-shirt. He could be across the room with her in three quick strides, sliding his hands around her to cup her breasts, kissing the back of her neck. It took huge willpower not to do exactly that, to use sex in that way he was used to—to divert a woman from anything with more depth and importance. But he didn’t go. He didn’t know where he wanted this … this thing between them to go, but he suddenly realised he wanted more from her than just sex. And to pitch them at that level now would, he instinctively knew, be a huge mistake.
Now wearing T-shirt and panties, she hauled a suitcase out from under her bed and crossed the room to the bureau, pulling open drawers, gathering up clothes and belongings. He crossed the room and shut the lid of her suitcase, stood between it and her.
‘Will you quit packing for a minute?’
She took a deep breath and stood still, a T-shirt in each hand. Her expression was one of sad resignation and his heart lurched.
‘I don’t want this to be it between us. Don’t you understand?’ he said. He made an effort to curb his tone. In his determination to make her understand his temper was fraying. ‘I know the situation isn’t perfect. We’ve both got huge demands on us, on our time. But I want to carry on seeing you.’
‘For what? A couple of dates? Or are you after an easy date whenever you happen to be in town? Call me up and I’ll drop everything and be there? Is that it?’
‘Jen, I know why you’re acting like this. You’re cutting me out because you think you know me. You’re judging me, judging us, by a million stories you’ve read about me in the press. And that’s not fair. I’m serious about this. Don’t you think you at least owe me the chance to show you that?’
She looked at him, eyebrows raised.
‘How do you plan to do that?’
He thought her tone had warmed up slightly, almost imperceptibly. Maybe at last he was getting through to her.
He took a deep breath. He couldn’t quite believe what he was about to suggest.
‘I fly out tomorrow to LA. Spend today with me. And at the end of it, if you still want out, I won’t argue with you. Your damn article can wait one day.’
‘You think spending one day in bed with you is enough to convince me you’re serious about me?’
‘Not you, no,’ he said. ‘But then you’re not run-of-the-mill, are you? Get showered and dressed. We’re going out.’
‘The M4?’
She glanced at the motorway sign. The main route to her home village.
‘I thought you were talking me out of going home. Trust me, my mother won’t thank me for turning up out of the blue with a guest in tow. She’ll be up to her elbows in pastry, making the famous Brown mince pies. Or, worse, she could be stuffing the turkey.’
‘The M4 doesn’t just serve Littleford, you know,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the road.
Light snow was falling against the windscreen, but it was deliciously snug in the Maserati with its seat-warming gadgetry and perfect climate control.
She caught on.
‘We’re going to Bristol?’
‘We’re visiting my parents,’ he said. ‘The Hammond Christmas drinks and nibbles. You’d better brace yourself.’
Jen sat in silence as he took the Bristol slip road, mulling over what this could mean. She’d challenged him with this, hadn’t she? With taking her to meet his family? Was Alex proving a point? Nervous butterflies pinged around her stomach.
It seemed the bonkers British weather hadn’t put off the traditional last-minute rush of Christmas shoppers. The roads to the town centre were stuffed with traffic, which finally began to ease as they headed for the Downs and Clifton.
‘I should warn you they’re likely to be a bit narky,’ he said as he pulled the car into a wide avenue lined with snow-dusted trees. They came to a standstill outside a beautiful three-storey townhouse. ‘On account of the fact I haven’t visited for a while.’
She crunched across the frozen gravel driveway behind him. He rang the bell.
‘How long is “a while”?’ she asked as the front door opened and a man stepped into view.
Alex shrugged. ‘Eighteen months-ish.’
‘More like two years,’ the man said.
He had to be Alex’s father. The resemblance was strong. Sixty-ish, he had the same thick hair, though it was steel-grey, and glasses. Alex had his green eyes.
And then they were surrounded. Alex’s mother appeared from nowhere, petite with a short light brown haircut to match her elfin features. Alex made an apologetic face at Jen over her head as she dragged him into an enormous hug. There was a brother, there was a small niece and nephew who hung off Alex’s legs, there was a grandma sitting in a high-backed chair by the fireplace, and there were uncles, aunts and cousins. A total of four generations of the Hammond family.
Cheesy Christmas music was belting out from somewhere within.
The rich exterior of the house didn’t match the inside. It was stuffed to breaking point with mismatched furniture and no surface was left uncluttered. There were ornaments and knickknacks everywhere she looked.
‘I bought them the house seven years ago,’ Alex said as they were ushered through the hall. ‘Not long after I got my first big break. Took me ages to persuade them to move out of their old house, and when they eventually did they told my interior designer to get stuffed and basically moved the interior of their old place as it was.’
In the corner of the sitting room there was an enormous fake Christmas tree, festooned with a combination of hideous baubles and homemade ornaments that spelled the word family in a way that nothing else at Christmas quite did. A threadbare fairy perched on the top, well past her best but clearly there for years to come based on sentimentality instead of appearance.
Alex was subjected to an inquisition from the entire family that he clearly deserved and took calmly in his stride.
‘Good of you to finally show your face,’ his father said when they’d been each been given a glass of cranberry-red Christmas punch.
Yep, there was definitely an air of narkiness.
‘I’ve invited you and Mum to visit me in LA loads of times,’ Alex protested. ‘Tried to persuade you to come and have a holiday. You never take me up on it.’
‘You know your mother is afraid of flying. And I don’t hold with that foreign food. It doesn’t agree with me.’
Everywhere Jen looked there were framed pictures of Alex with his younger brother, growing up. There was an enormous table groaning with quiche, sausage rolls and sandwiches. Good hearty food, not the one-bite-and-it’s-gone canapés she’d been served these last few weeks.
The argument went on.
‘Would it kill you to phone your mother once a week? Or even once a month? I know your every move, Alexander Hammond, I read the red-top newspapers. I know when you’re in this country, skulking in London, not bothering to nip down the M4 for an hour or so to see your family. And then just this morning there’s a picture of you smacking someone at some racetrack. Off the rails! Are you on drugs?’
Alex held both hands up to ward him off.
‘No, I am not on drugs! And I was staying out of the way because I wanted to protect you lot from all that.’ He turned to Jen. ‘The press hounded them when I broke up with Susan,’ he explained. ‘They’d follow my mother when she walked down the street, b
arking out questions.’ He looked at his parents. ‘I didn’t want that for you again.’
‘We’ve taken more grief than that in our time,’ his mother snapped. ‘When our Michael got caught shoplifting I couldn’t hold my head up in the supermarket for weeks. A few gutter press weren’t going to bother me after that.’
‘What’s shoplifting, Daddy?’ Alex’s six-year-old niece piped up.
Michael threw his hands up. ‘Oh, cheers, Mum. Trying to be a role model here and you bring that up.’
As the day progressed and the punchbowl emptied things slowly began to thaw. As darkness fell Jen stood in a corner of the warm kitchen watching Alex deep in conversation with his father and brother.
‘You’re the first girlfriend he’s brought home in a long time,’ his mother said, joining her. She topped up Jen’s glass, then her own.
‘I’m sure it’s just because work keeps him away so much.’
A pause and an unconvinced smile.
‘Come and let me show you something.’
Jen followed her out of the kitchen.
There was an enormous ball of mistletoe suspended from the doorway into the sitting room, and Alex’s eccentric uncle Norman seemed to be hanging around it rather more than necessary. He flashed her a toothy smile as she sidled past him into the room.
‘I’m amazed to see him,’ Alex’s mother said as they sat down on the sofa. ‘He has no need for us any more. We’re lucky to get a phone call now and then. He’s got all he needs—all those rich friends. There’s nothing here that he wants to come back for.’
Jen shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. He misses you. He misses this.’
She was fascinated. It had always been just her and her mum. Her grandparents were long gone. She envied him the warmth, the buzz of it. You’d never be on your own with a family like this.
Unless you took yourself out of it. Which was what he had done.
‘I’ve kept all the cuttings from his career.’
She produced a groaning photo album. Jen forced her face to keep a smile on it as she flipped through a few pages. It was full of tabloid pictures of Alex with various models and starlets. Here was Alex on the red carpet with a gorgeous redhead. And here he was cavorting in the surf somewhere tropical, with Viveca Holt of all people.
Photos of ex-girlfriends. Exactly what you needed to boost your ailing confidence when you met the parents for the first time. Not.
‘Fabulous!’ she exclaimed, smiling so hard her cheeks ached. ‘And have you seen all his films?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘We’ve got all the DVDs.’
Alex’s mother leaned in conspiratorially and added in a stage whisper, ‘Some of them are a bit dull, to be perfectly honest, a bit too arty for us. Still, I’d never tell him that. It’s brilliant that he’s won all those awards. Graham and I prefer more of an action film, like that Faith trilogy. We love those—have you seen them?’
As they said their goodbyes Alex bandied about promises of regular visits and phone calls. In the silent warmth of the car on the drive back to London Jen wondered if he’d meant them. Or whether the whole day had really been about proving a point.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rule #8: When you’ve snared your millionaire, gradually introduce him to the real you one step at a time.
‘WHY did you take me to meet them?’
Alex stared into the fireplace for a moment. She was curled warmly against him on the sofa in the den, back in his apartment. The room was lit only by the soft glow of the fire and the coloured lights on her little Christmas tree. She followed his gaze, watched sparks flying from the logs into the velvety darkness. Two glasses of wine and the remains of scrambled eggs on toast lay on the coffee table to the side of them.
‘I wanted to show you my roots,’ he said. ‘You were so determined to accept the newspaper view of me as a playboy, and I don’t blame you. I’ve never tried to correct it either publicly or privately. To be honest I haven’t cared either way what was written about me.’ He glanced at her. ‘Not until now.’
‘Why now?’ Her heart beat faster as she waited for his reply.
‘I want you to know what I’m really like. Not the press image. The real me. If you’re going to do a bunk I want it to be because you’re not happy with me, not some illusion.’
‘Why haven’t you seen them for so long?’ she asked. ‘They were so delighted to see you I thought you were going to be lynched, and you obviously love them all to bits.’
He took a sip of his wine.
‘Part of it was the demands of work keeping me away. I wasn’t lying to them about that. But it isn’t the only reason.’
He sighed.
‘After Susan left it was just such a reminder of what I was missing, seeing them all. My brother became a dad, something I could never see happening for me after she went, and it became easier somehow to just stay away. They’ve never been excited by what I do. Not when I was a kid starting out and not even when I became a success at it. Michael’s given them grandchildren. He sees them all the time. Those are things they can relate to. His life is real to them.’
He ran a hand distractedly through his hair.
‘I think they see me in the newspapers and wonder who the hell I am. When I see them they act like I think I’m better than them. I sometimes think they’d have been happier if I drove a taxi for a living or worked down at the docks.’
She could see his agitation in the tensing of his shoulders and was touched. If today had been about proving to her he was serious, it hadn’t been an easy gesture for him to make.
‘But what conclusion did you want them to make? You’ve encouraged them to think that way by staying away so much. They think you’re ashamed of them because you don’t see them.’
He flinched, and she knew she’d touched a nerve, but she wasn’t about to back down.
‘I can see where you’re coming from,’ she said. ‘They’re happy in their own little bubble. Flying halfway round the world fills them with dread. But it isn’t that they aren’t proud of you. It’s just that they’re so in awe of the world you live in.’
He was shaking his head. She put a hand on his arm.
‘Your parents own all your films, you know,’ she said. ‘They’ve got them all, every single one, on DVD. I saw. And your mum subjected me to a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. You in the arms of half of Hollywood. I was expecting baby photos and I got you frolicking in the surf with Viveca Holt. They’re your biggest fans, you idiot. Just because they don’t really understand what you do it doesn’t mean they aren’t proud of your achievements.’
A pause. He watched the fire.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘You should see more of them.’
‘I know.’
‘That Christmas tree is a shrine to your childhood,’ she said.
He grimaced.
‘I know. It’s hideous. Sorry.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I like it. That’s the kind of Christmas tree I want to have one day. You can keep those ludicrous black trees with minimalist lights and those deconstructed turkey dinners. It’s like wearing designer clothes and not caring if you look like a moose as long as they cost a fortune. Christmas at your parents’ has been fine-tuned over years and years. It actually has something concrete behind it instead of vacuous self-importance.’
‘So your Christmas tree will be festooned with tat?’
‘Decorations made by toddlers do not fall into the tat category.’
He laughed, gave her a squeeze.
‘I thought you were aiming for editor-in-chief of Vogue.’ His tone was neutral, almost deliberately so. ‘How are you going to fit family in with that?’
‘This isn’t the Dark Ages. I know you think it’s impossible to mix business with family life but I don’t agree. I definitely want kids one day. You just need to be good at juggling and working as a team. Women are fabulous at that kind of thing.’ She pointed an emphatic finger at him. ‘Yo
ur big problem is you think it has to be all or nothing. Anything less than white-picket-fence-two-kids-and-a-dog-perfection doesn’t cut it for you. But, like I told you before, there’s more than one way to crack a nut. As long as both parents are never away for work at the same time, maybe downsize their hours a bit, delegate more, cut down on travelling. There’s loads of ways you could make it work.’ She leaned forward, picked up her wine glass and took a sip. ‘I intend to have it all. Nothing’s going to stop me.’
‘I guess I thought the way things were with your father and your insane sense of ambition, that you weren’t big on family.’
‘I’m not right now. But give me a few years working my way up and family is next up.’ She paused. ‘My father is irrelevant.’
He glanced her way. ‘Is he?’
She leaned against him for a moment, savouring the warmth of him, the feeling of security his closeness gave.
‘Almost doing a bunk this morning was about me, too,’ she said. ‘Not just about you.’
He moved sideways a little so he could see her face.
‘It’s not you, it’s me?’ he said, eyebrows raised. ‘You don’t have to spare my feelings. I just want you to be honest with me.’
‘Remember when we talked about false names for my article and you suggested I use my father’s surname?’
He frowned.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, the fact he’s a waste of space wasn’t the only reason I didn’t use it. I didn’t want to draw attention.’
‘How do you mean?’
She took a deep breath.
‘My father is Dominic Armstrong.’
She waited. The fire spat softly in the background.
‘You don’t mean the Dominic Armstrong? The—’
‘The media giant,’ she finished for him. ‘Yes.’
He looked sharply down at her, his interest clearly buzzing. Of course it was. She met his gaze, ready for the questions.
Secrets of the Rich & Famous Page 14
