Plus, he wants more kids, ASAP, and he keeps nagging on about getting started. I must admit I did make a promise on that one – I said we’d try for a houseful. But I ate like a starving pig when I was knocked up with London and I’m still not ready to go through that slog of diet and exercise and How I Got My Bikini Body Back photos for the tabs again quite yet . . .
Caroline stopped, staring at what she had just written. What was she thinking? Where on earth was she going with this? For starters, the book was supposed to stop at Lexy and Frank’s triumphant wedding, not cover their marriage at all. Today’s writing session had started out really well, with a flow like a river in spate; it was out of sequence, of course, a section that would come towards the end of the book. But Caroline had already learned that it was best to let Lexy talk about whatever subject she wanted to that day; that was how she came out with the most personal, revealing information, like her fear of turning into a three-by-three or a four-by-four.
God knew what Lexy would think of that particular line when she read it over. But over the fortnight that she had been working on the book, Caroline had discovered that her employer did not react badly when faced with her own words turned into prose. Lexy was no hypocrite. She wouldn’t deny that she’d said something shocking or self-revelatory after knocking back plenty of white wine with a slice of lemon: at the worst, she would comment, with an easy shrug: ‘Cut that bit. My fans won’t like it.’
Well, her fans certainly wouldn’t appreciate Lexy confessing that she was refusing her husband both the kids and the dogs he wanted! Additionally, this information had not all originated with Lexy. Although Caroline was not interviewing Frank for the book, she had already forged a rapport with him. The cook/housekeeper prepared lunch every day for the household at one, and when Caroline knew Frank would be at home that day, she made a point of setting her alarm twenty minutes before so that she could put on some make-up, brush her hair, apply some eau de toilette, before heading down for, hopefully, a rendezvous with him.
That was by no means the only time they spent together, however. As Caroline was staying there during the week to make a push on the novel, she had already shared a pizza with him and the kids several times on the nights that Lexy was out in London. And, chatting over lunch, or clearing up as the nanny put the kids to bed, it was very natural that Frank should mention his wish to expand his family and get a couple of dogs, fill the house with activity, have his wife home more than a few nights a week . . .
Caroline pushed back her chair and stood up. She needed to reset her brain, get Frank’s perspective out of it and Lexy’s back in. Crossing the living room of her suite, she stopped in front of the picture window, staring out at the breathtaking view. The chainlink ferry that crossed between the Sandbanks peninsula and the Studland nature reserve on the other side of the narrow mouth of Poole Harbour was making its way over to their side of the water, the clanking noise of its mechanism now so familiar to Caroline that she no longer noticed it. Far out to sea, a much larger boat was heading away from the English coast, making for one of the Channel Islands or for Cherbourg. It was beautiful, hypnotic, the sight of the ferries voyaging back and forth as fishing boats, sailing yachts and motorboats wove around them in a slow, gracious saraband.
In high season, Frank had told Caroline, she would be amazed at how full the waters around the coastline became, how packed the beaches were. But it was early spring, still chilly, and the sea was more steel-grey than blue. The sandy shores of the nature reserve, across the harbour mouth, were only sparsely populated by dog walkers and the occasional jogger.
That should be me, Caroline thought suddenly. I should be out there every day, getting fit. Toning up. Losing weight. I need a break from work anyway. I’ve obviously got onto the wrong track . . .
Before she could talk herself out of it, she went into the bedroom and pulled on her trainers. Though she had bought them at Sports Direct, she had never actually used them for any form of exercise; she had no idea if they were even running shoes. But if she could walk in them, maybe she could run in them too? God knew she wouldn’t last long at it!
Caroline was already wearing tracksuit bottoms and a loose T-shirt. Perfect exercise wear: ironic again that she was dressed for it, that nowadays everyone wore loose-waisted exercise gear while rarely using it for the purpose for which it was intended. But it meant that she couldn’t delay by making excuses about not having clothes in which she could work out. Grabbing a fleece top and some change for the chainlink ferry ticket, she made her way from the guest suite along the corridor to the main wing of the house and down the central staircase.
As she came down the stairs, Frank was crossing the hallway, fresh from a vigorous workout session in the basement gym. He was lightly sheened with sweat, his curls damp; his pecs, delineated by his tightly clinging Under Armour T-shirt, were swollen and pumped, the nipples pointed. He must have been lifting weights. Caroline stopped in her tracks, clinging to the rail of the staircase for support at the sight of Frank’s body so very clearly outlined by his tight workout gear, the healthy flush on his tawny skin.
‘Hey!’ he said with a friendly smile, pulling off the towel round his neck and wiping his face down with it. ‘You going out?’
Caroline hesitated. With Frank standing in front of her, a perfect physical specimen, she was embarrassed to admit what she was planning. It was like a five-year-old informing Albert Einstein that she had just learned how to add two plus two.
Ooh, she thought, that’s a nice little line! I should remember that!
She was finding, after a fortnight of doing very little else but eat, sleep and write, that clever one-liners or observations kept popping into her head, funny little comparisons that were perfect for the book. It was as if she had been tuning up an engine she’d rarely used before, working it, oiling it, so that it ran more and more smoothly, turning over by itself now without help, throwing off creative sparks.
‘I was going to go for a run,’ she blurted out.
‘That’s great!’ Frank’s eyes lit up. ‘Good for you! I didn’t know you ran, Caroline.’
‘I don’t,’ she admitted. ‘It’s my first time.’
‘Wow. Brilliant. Are you going to use the treadmill?’
‘No. I’m going over to Studland so I can run along the sand.’
Frank’s heroic effort to keep his face straight made her heart sink to the soles of her cheap trainers.
‘Don’t put me off!’ she heard herself begging. ‘I want to do this! I’ve got it into my head and if I don’t go and do it now, I might never manage it!’
‘I got it,’ Frank said gravely, draping the towel around his neck again. ‘Okay, can I give you two pieces of advice?’
‘Um, yeah. But please don’t scare me . . .’
Caroline was fidgeting like a restless horse, wanting to get going before she lost her nerve.
‘Stretch your calves a lot before and after,’ Frank said, walking over to the front door and gesturing to her to follow him. ‘You can hang off the edge of the stairs on the ferry going over and coming back. Have you got a watch?’
Caroline shook her head. Frank unfastened his own and handed it to her.
‘Walk fast for five minutes to warm up,’ he instructed. ‘Run thirty seconds, walk for two minutes, repeat. Try to do that for half an hour if you can. If you need to run for a shorter time, okay, but make sure you alternate actual running with the walking, even if you only manage a few steps. Then walk for at least fifteen minutes afterwards, as slow as you want, to cool your muscles down and stop lactic acid buildup. Can you keep all of that in your head?’
Caroline nodded.
‘And when you get back, come and find me and we’ll get you stretched,’ Frank finished, crossing the hall to open the door for her like the gentleman he was.
Yeah, that is not going to happen, Caroline thought, even as she smiled at him and stepped outside into the fresh, cool spring air. No way is Frank getting his
hands on my bulgy, sweaty, post-exercise body.
She walked briskly along the pavement of the curving road towards the tip of the spit of land where the Ferry Hotel stood next to the sloping dock of the ferry. Lexy was fond of unleashing her wit on the subject of the hotel, which she felt, considering how smart Sandbanks was, needed a full revamp; she described it with great relish as ‘Fawlty Towers designed by Travelodge’.
The ferry was coming in, a local bus sitting on its deck; it was still amusing to Caroline to see a double-decker being ferried across the water. A line of cyclists in tight Lycra and cleated shoes had formed already, waiting on the dock, ready to ride a big loop around the nature reserve. Caroline followed them onboard and obeyed Frank’s instructions, putting her toes on one step and hanging her heels down below to lengthen her calf muscles. Then she did a stretch she’d seen runners perform, standing on one leg, grabbing the heel of the other and pushing it as tightly into her buttock as she could.
She felt the pull at the front of her thighs, one after the other, and was pleased with herself. She could do this. She was ready. She was going to time herself just as Frank had suggested. After all, how hard could it be to run for just thirty seconds at a stretch, with a generous two-minute walk to recover each time? The watch was heavy in the pocket of her tracksuit bottoms, still warm from his body. She had heroically resisted the urge to lift it to her nose and sniff Frank’s sweat on the leather strap. She was a grown-up woman out for a run, not some stupid teenager crushing on a married man.
The links of the chain groaned heavily, pulling taut as the ferry reached the far side of the harbour mouth. The cyclists pedalled off down the road; the beach was right there, on the far side of a low sandy wall. In a few steps Caroline was on the sand, walking briskly to warm up. She could totally do this.
Only a few minutes later, she knew that she couldn’t. Not at all. Merely walking fast left her breathless, and by the time it came to running she was panting like a dog. The wind whipped slices of sand off the top of the beach and drove them into her face as if she were moving across the Sahara in a scirocco. It made it even harder to catch her breath, because every time she breathed in she inhaled grains of sand with the salty air.
Additionally, it had dawned on her almost immediately that she had entirely failed to consider the issue of adequate support for her breasts. Even in her full-coverage bra, they were bouncing around like a pair of melons in a thin mesh bag. It was so uncomfortable that she had to press them to her chest with her hands to stop them moving as much as possible, her palms not big enough to contain them, their sheer weight making her realize how much excess flesh she was carrying around, why it was so hard for her to move fast.
Not being able to use her arms to help propel her forward made jogging even more difficult. In no time at all, Caroline was both winded and coughing.
No wonder Frank had been trying to control his expression! She had seen people on TV shows running with seemingly effortless ease along Santa Monica Beach, barefoot, hair blowing in the wind, but the reality was slogging along as if wading through mud, her feet dragging, the flanges on the bottoms of her trainers struggling to work free with every step. The thirty seconds of running slowed down to twenty, the two minutes of walking lengthened to three, then four. Whenever the inexorable watch display told her it was time to run again, she wanted to cry with sheer misery.
To add insult to injury, the beach was much harder to traverse than it looked from the far side of the water. It was impossible simply to run, or walk, along it. Rivulets of water remaining from high tide trailed from the low dunes right down to the water’s edge, wide enough in many places to make it impossible for Caroline to jump over the broad gullies. She had to go right up to the dunes, hop and skip around the channels and puddles of water, the effort truly painful when she was running and needed to keep moving. She knew, from the way other people on the beach tactfully averted their gazes, that she looked ridiculous. A chubby madwoman, holding her own chest, clumsily trying to ford the pools of standing water at a stumbling run.
Eventually she noticed a little path rising up through the thick grass of the dunes. At least that would be easier to run on than a deep layer of sand that yielded beneath her feet and made every step much harder to manage. Chest heaving, every breath by now a sharp wheeze of agony, she scrambled painfully up the side of the dune and found herself in front of a mauve-painted stake in the ground with a small sign on it indicating that it was a ‘heather path’.
Alas, the heather path brought its own set of challenges. Yes, the terrain was much easier to run on, but the path was so narrow and bumpy that her feet kept getting caught in the grass that bordered it. She was terrified of twisting an ankle, having to limp back to the ferry landing, her first attempt at exercise ending in utter humiliation . . .
The intervals of jogging became speed-walking, and the walking itself slowed practically to a standstill. She had turned around to retrace her route when she was about halfway, but she hadn’t calculated for the fact that she was moving so much more slowly now. The fifteen minutes of cool-down stretched into thirty, maybe even more; she couldn’t bear to look at the watch, to fully take in how long she had been lumbering through this landscape of waist-high heather in bloom, the wind turning the grasses into a rippling sea. It seemed to take forever for the road which led to the ferry landing to come into view.
Caroline knew she shouldn’t stop moving. Frank had mentioned the lactic acid issue. So she shifted from one foot to another repeatedly while waiting for the ferry, as if she had drunk too much Red Bull and couldn’t stand still. Her entire lower body felt as if it had been beaten with hammers, her lungs were on fire, and a glimpse of herself in the wing mirror of a lorry waiting to drive on board showed that her face was both turkey red and sallow in unattractive patches. Her hips were aching badly, and when she made it off the ferry at the Sandbanks side she found herself limping back to Lexy and Frank’s mansion as gracelessly as if she had advanced osteoporosis, fighting the urge to burst into tears at how out of shape she was.
It took her last shred of energy to climb the marble stairs that led up to the front door, leaning heavily on the balustrade. Her only hope was that she could get back to her room and into the shower before Frank could see the state she was in.
So when the front door swung open as she was fumbling for her keys, she screamed in shock and clapped her hands to her face in a vain attempt to shield her ugly blotched skin, dripping with sweat, from the sight of the man about whom she was now fantasizing on a nightly basis.
Chapter Nine
‘It’s an ambush!’ Frank said, beaming. ‘I didn’t trust you to come back and stretch on your own!’
He had showered and changed into jeans and a V-neck sweater, worn without a T-shirt underneath, the scent of ferns and bergamot from his body wash rising from his warm golden skin.
‘I feel so awful,’ Caroline whimpered. ‘I can’t breathe and I’m all sweaty.’
‘Great – that means you really did it – you went for it! Good girl! Go have a quick shower and put on something loose. Even pjs are fine if you don’t have a change of workout gear. I’ll wait for you in the gym to show you some basic stretches, otherwise you’ll stiffen up like a piece of board. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Don’t make me come up there and get you!’
Only a man as well-intentioned and as much in love with his own wife as Frank could have threatened, even jokingly, to haul a young woman staying in his house out of her own bedroom. He stood back and watched her crossing the hall to the lift, looking back in mortification to say:
‘I can’t go up the stairs . . . it hurt so much coming up the entrance ones . . .’
Frank threw back his head and laughed, a full-throated laugh that held no hint of mockery.
‘We’ve all been there!’ he said reassuringly. ‘Feel like you’ve got iron rods shooting up into your bum cheeks every time you take a step?’
‘That’s exactly what
it feels like,’ she said as the lift doors opened.
‘Don’t worry,’ Frank said. ‘We’re going to stretch out your glutes. It’ll really help. And I can teach you how to do it on your own after a run if I’m not around.’
Caroline was horrified at the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. She did cry a little as she stripped off her sodden clothes. The mottling on her face reached down her neck all the way to her collarbones, and her hair had frizzed up unattractively. She looked like a madwoman, a bag lady, and the fact that her bra, under extreme stress, had partially given up the struggle to support her breasts only added to that impression. At least she could change into a fresh one after the shower, and she tightened the straps to pull her boobs as high as was feasible . . .
‘Okay!’ Frank said, as she limped out of the lift and into the gym. ‘You’re in pain, but that’s fine. It’s normal. No pain, no gain. We just have to minimize it as much as we can, and work on your flexibility so you don’t tear anything. You’re bound to stiffen up, and that’s where you’re most at risk of damaging yourself. Let’s start with that glute stretch.’
Caroline promptly found herself lying on her back on an exercise mat, the ankle of one leg crossed over the knee of the other, the leg folded as if in a half-lotus yoga position; her other foot was resting high up on Frank’s thigh, pressing firmly into it as he stood in front of her. Her foot was close enough to his crotch that she couldn’t even look at it; Frank had anchored it there without a hint of embarrassment, as befitted a professional sportsman who had spent decades being stretched out by a whole bevy of coaches and physios.
‘Okay,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m going to lean in. I want you to take the stretch in your bum and hip as much as you can bear it. If it goes into your knee, tell me and we’ll back off. Knee bad, bum good. Got it?’
Killer Affair Page 9
