Act Like It

by Lucy Parker

  The boy persisted. “But you could be a pirate?”

  Technically, he had been a pirate, although he suspected the kids were after a more interestingly bloodthirsty performance than was required by Gilbert and Sullivan. He eyed the plastic sword that the other boy offered, and shrugged. He’d worked with less convincing props, and he was in the mood for wielding a weapon. And thanks to the past weeks of work on The Cavalier’s Tribute, his swordplay wasn’t too rusty.

  The children grinned from ear to ear when he threateningly brandished the sword. The female pirate, who looked a lot like Lainie, growled and took a violent stab at him with her own weapon. It was lucky the room was childproof, with no breakables on display.

  “You’re the baddie,” the first boy informed him bossily.

  “Again, that seems to be the general consensus.”

  The swordfight continued amidst rising giggles, and did a surprising amount toward working off his bad temper. He fielded off an enthusiastic slice and creased his face into another angry scowl, much to his opponents’ delight. Eventually—naturally—the Lainie-look-alike declared herself the victor, for no other reason than that she wanted to be.

  Amused, Richard lowered his sword in surrender. He heard a deep chuckle. Turning, he was slightly embarrassed to see Lainie’s father watching the game.

  “Fence at Oxford, did you?” Simon Graham asked, grinning.

  “No, but I’ve had good motivation to practise recently. Attempting to skewer Will Farmer.”

  Simon’s amusement visibly increased. He studied Richard. “So, you’re Franklin Troy’s son. You’re not much like him, are you?”

  Richard’s half smile faded. He rubbed the back of his wrist over his sweaty forehead. Looking down at the sword in his hand, he flipped it around, extending the handle for the kids to take. “I hope not.”

  * * *

  Lainie stood in the doorway to the kitchen, biting down on the edge of her thumbnail. Richard nodded and responded to something that her dad said. He was still flushed and ruffled after his impromptu playacting with the kids. She’d almost dropped a plate when he’d started channelling Captain Hook. At least three members of her family had obviously given him the thumbs-up. She couldn’t help remembering the last time Will had been with her family. Like Richard, he’d looked as if he’d wandered into the monkey cage at the zoo, but he’d been even more hopeless at hiding his discomfort. And he definitely hadn’t bothered to muck about with her nieces and nephews. He’d spent most of the time on his phone. Probably texting Crystalle, in hindsight.

  “I so knew it.” Sarah’s voice was smug in her ear.

  Lainie removed her thumbnail from her mouth long enough to respond. “Did you? I didn’t.”

  She still wasn’t sure quite how this had happened. How, in a matter of weeks, she had ended up...

  “Totally smitten,” Sarah said. “Both of you.”

  “I am,” Lainie admitted. She reached down and clasped her sister-in-law’s arm, holding it for support. “I don’t know about him.”

  He was still snarky, sarky, snobby Richard Troy. But sometimes—

  “Lainie. Last month, the man would barely have recognised you if he fell over you, outside the theatre. Today, he came to your parents’ house for a baby’s birthday party, put up with your brothers acting like something out of a Tarantino movie, and let a bunch of lunatic children attack him with plastic swords. He’s a goner.”

  She affectionately pulled Lainie’s hair, much as Richard had done earlier, and went to corral her offspring.

  Lainie felt strangely tongue-tied and shy of Richard as they put on their coats, ready to leave. His knuckles brushed her nape when he automatically reached out to pull her hair free of her collar. She looked at him and then quickly away.

  “Tig?” His fingers closed loosely around her wrist. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said, still not looking at him.

  “Lainie—”

  “Bye, Lainie. See you later, Mr. Troy.” Phil, her oldest nephew, gave her a one-armed hug as he passed. She belatedly lifted a hand to squeeze his shoulder. She had to stretch up to do it. He was almost as tall as Ryan now. “Oh, happy birthday to you too, by the way,” Phil said, and Lainie’s head snapped up in time to catch Richard’s faint grimace.

  “Birthday app,” Phil explained, raising his phone. He pushed open the front door with his elbow, making a face at the drizzling rain outside “Your name came up on the celebrity list when I was uploading some photos of Coop. Meant to say something before, but I forgot. Hope the rest of the day is a good one.”

  He departed with another casual wave, and Lainie stared at Richard. He looked annoyed.

  “It isn’t your birthday, is it?” she asked apprehensively.

  His frown deepened. “Well—” he said reluctantly, and she released a sharp breath.

  “Why didn’t you say something? We could have done something to celebrate.”

  “You’ve just answered your own question.”

  “You’re exasperating.”

  In the car, she kept one eye on the passing streets while she checked her email and Facebook. She’d been linked to a new gossip article. They’d been papped leaving Richard’s house.

  “Why is it,” she demanded, scrolling through the photos, “that you look good in every single photo, and I look borderline okay in one out of ten?” They stopped at an intersection, and she held the iPad for him to see. “Look at that. It’s like James Bond and something out of Fraggle Rock.”

  He didn’t bother to turn his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You could have told me my hair was doing that.” She glanced up. “Wait! Stop at Sainsbury’s, please.”

  Richard shot her a look. “Why?”

  “Because I need to buy stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  Fortunately, there was one single advantage to having grown up surrounded by large and irritating men. She knew how to effectively end a line of questioning. Employ the dreaded tampon. “Oh, you know. Women’s stuff.”

  He flicked the indicator without another word. He waited in the car while she sped into the supermarket, hugging her coat across her chest and ducking her head against the rain. When she finally emerged, staggering under the weight of her bags, he looked bored and irritable. She dove thankfully back into the passenger seat and ran her fingers through her damp hair, trying to smooth down the frizz. Her clothing smelled strongly of wet wool.

  Richard turned around and stretched to look into the backseat. “So, by ‘women’s stuff,’ you actually meant your entire weekly shop.”

  She flipped down the overhead mirror to check that her mascara was still attached to her eyelashes. “Well, I figured since we were here...”

  The comment he muttered under his breath was uncomplimentary and mildly offensive to her sex in general, but she’d taken ages to make up her mind in the bakery section and he’d been waiting in the car for over half an hour, so she kindly let it go.

  Neither of them could cook much more than tea and toast, so they also stopped to pick up takeaway for dinner. She wanted pizza. He wanted Thai. They compromised with Moroccan.

  They were going back to her flat for the night, since her landlady was away for the weekend and Lainie was on cat-feeding duty again. Richard carried the bulk of the shopping bags up the stairs for her and then seemed confused about what to do with them. Obviously, his housekeeper usually did the supermarket run. When he frowned down at a packet of dishwasher cubes and tried to put them on the biscuit shelf in the pantry, she firmly removed it from his hand.

  “You could do me a favour and go down and feed Cat Richard,” she suggested tactfully. She wanted him out of the way for a few minutes anyway. “The food is in Mrs. Talbot’s fridge. You can give him the rest of the can. And make sure his water bowl is topped up.” She assumed a helpful expression. “The water is in the tap. You just hold the bowl underneath and turn it to...”

  He nipped he
r earlobe with his teeth in retribution.

  When she heard his footsteps going down the stairs, she quickly put away the frozen food and then went hunting through the rest of the bags for what she needed. She left the boring things to put away later. Clearing room on her limited bench space, she set out the peach-and-apricot pie she’d bought. A dessert from a boutique bakery would probably be nicer, but she’d never have got away with that side trip. Besides, she highly doubted that Richard had ever eaten a supermarket dessert, and everyone should have a new experience on their birthday.

  She was pushing candles into the top crust when he reappeared.

  “I swear to God, that cat was smirking at me. What are you doing?” He halted in the doorway, staring at her handiwork.

  “Putting in your candles. I’m going with three on one side and five on the other, because I think the crust will collapse if I try to stuff in all thirty-five. You shouldn’t be so old.”

  There was a long silence. She looked sideways at him. His face was completely blank.

  “It’s a pie,” he said at last.

  She stood back to admire it. “You don’t like cake.” He’d turned down the Victoria sponge someone had brought into the theatre for Theresa’s birthday last week.

  “No. I don’t.” Slowly, Richard walked over to stand at her shoulder. He looked down at the birthday pie. “What’s with the M&M’s?”

  “I needed something to spell out ‘Happy Birthday’.”

  “Does chocolate go with fruit pie?”

  “Chocolate goes with everything.” She bit her lip as she looked up at him. She was a little more apprehensive than she was prepared to let on. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re slightly insane.” He suddenly pulled her close to him and pressed a rough kiss to her temple. “Thanks.”

  She wrapped both arms around his lean waist and rested her forehead against his chest. “Happy birthday.”

  The pie was actually fairly tasty. They ate it with forks straight from the serving plate, sitting on the floor of her small lounge. It didn’t really go with the chicken tagine, but she’d eaten far stranger combinations during her student days. Her stomach lining had been trained the hard way with months of pot noodles and post-clubbing kebabs.

  Not for the first time, she wished she had an open fire. The heat pump kept the room warm, but it wasn’t as conducive to doing sexy things on the rug. Richard was sprawled on his back, one arm tucked beneath his head, his shirt riding up. The pastry calories probably wouldn’t venture anywhere near his flat belly. Genetics played a mean game of favourites. She was lying on her stomach. She was well aware that he could see directly down her top, and her cleavage tended to look better from this angle than when she lay on her back and her boobs slid toward her armpits. Problems of the naturally top-heavy, as her sister-in-law had rudely put it.

  She contemplated just rolling on top of him and seeing how things progressed, but decided in favour of the pie, for the present. She’d been too on edge about exposing Richard to her family, and vice versa, to eat much at the party. Propping her chin on one hand, she reached with the other to skewer a mushy piece of apricot. As she chewed, she eyed him thoughtfully. “So, how horrifying was today, on a scale of one to ten?”

  “I had a better time than you’re likely to have next Sunday, at Westfield’s house.” Richard folded back his other arm, and his biceps flexed invitingly. She determinedly ate another mouthful of stewed fruit. “Your family is very...you.” He smiled faintly. “Open. Friendly. Talkative.”

  “Loud, demanding and bossy?” She extracted a red M&M from the remnants of the pie and put it in her mouth. Richard lazily opened one blue eye and followed the sweet’s progress.

  He contemplated her lips. “Your family obviously love you a lot. I’m glad you have people who watch out for you.”

  And who watched out for him? She hesitated. “Richard...”

  “Mmm?” His eyes were closed again.

  “How did your mother die?”

  There had been no details on Wikipedia, only the bare fact that Anna Troy had passed away two years after her husband. There were a lot of photos of her taken just prior to her death, when she’d been linked to an Italian racing car driver. The images had firmly established the origin of Richard’s dark, sculpted looks. It was the similar jaded look in her eyes that had affected Lainie most. Anna had been in the arms of a smiling, super-hot man, surrounded by dozens of laughing people, and she’d looked lonely. She’d probably died lonely.

  Hannah had died alone, despite the fact that her hands had been held tightly, but she hadn’t died lonely.

  Lainie didn’t want Richard to live lonely.

  He was quiet long enough that she regretted asking, but he did eventually answer. “Ironically, she did die of a heart attack. The postmortem revealed an arterial blockage.”

  “Did it happen in England?”

  “In Italy. She’d been seeing an Italian. I think he genuinely grieved for her, to give him credit.” He sat up suddenly and shoved a restless hand through his black curls. “They weren’t exclusive, though, and could go days without seeing one another. The coroner thought she’d been lying there for about eighty hours before her body was found.”

  “That’s awful.” She reached out to him. Very lightly and gently, she spread her fingers on his abdomen, and he put his hand over hers. “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I. Sorry for her, mostly. I really hardly knew her. She wasn’t a particularly good mother. I’m sorry she died like that, and that she never seemed to get much happiness out of her relationships.”

  Lainie scooted closer and curled up next to him, sliding her hand across his chest in a hug and touching her nose to his cheek. He bent his arm to hook loosely around her neck.

  There was a heavy weight to the silence, in contrast to the lighthearted sensual thrum of a few moments ago.

  Geez. Way to rain on his birthday.

  Unable to just sit there while he had that look on his face, she carefully released him and got to her feet. Walking across to the table, she opened her bag and rifled through it to find the DVDs.

  “I got us a movie,” she explained, holding up the first of the cases.

  “Is it a romantic comedy?” he asked suspiciously, and she tried to imagine his reaction to Pretty Woman or While You Were Sleeping. He would probably disapprove of the idealization of prostitution in the former. The latter might be good for her conscience. She and Richard had originally faked their relationship, but it had been with reluctant mutual consent. At least one of them hadn’t been in a coma at the time.

  “I do have high expectations for the comedy, yes.”

  “What is it?” He sounded even more suspicious.

  “You’ll probably guess from the theme music.” She turned on the TV and started the DVD player.

  She looked at him between lowered lashes when the disc began to play. It was a makeshift copy, so there were no menu options. Alas. She would have paid a great deal for behind-the-scenes special features.

  It took less than five seconds for his entire body to stiffen. “What the f—” He snatched up the plastic case, turning it over to see if there was anything printed on the front. His eyes—intensely blue, incredulous and wrathful—snapped to hers. “Where the hell did you get this?”

  “Shh!” she said, grinning. “You’re on. Oh, my. Sexy pompadour, Troy.” Richard lunged for the remote, and she held it out of his reach. “No way. Student Richard Troy, strutting his stuff with the T Birds? I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”

  Richard’s expression was beyond price. “Where,” he repeated, dangerously, “did you get it?”

  “Victoria knows a lot of people at Oxford. I caught her in a good mood, and she called in a favour. Someone scavenged in the drama archives. And struck gold, I have to say. Did they have to sew you into those jeans?”

  “Off. Right now.”

  “And miss you doing the finger-pointing to ‘Greased Lightn
in’? Not a chance in hell.” Still grinning, she held up the other DVD. “If it softens the blow, I had Mum burn this to a disc. Behold my sixteen-year-old debut as Ado Annie in Oklahoma! I didn’t even edit out the part where my sash catches on a wagon wheel and I fall into a wooden trough. Fair’s fair. And I promise I won’t leak yours to the tabloids next time you piss me off.”

  Richard’s younger self pulled out a comb and ran it through his slick bouffant of hair in slow motion, and she tried really, really hard not to laugh. The current incarnation had lost his implacable cool. His cheeks were burning bright with colour.

  A bit of summer lovin’ commenced on the screen, and he winced. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He took the other disc from her hand and held it up menacingly. “This had better be embarrassing. I mean complete and total humiliation.”

  “I’m singing ‘I Cain’t Say No,’ I have hair extensions and braces, and it was a single-sex school so my love interest was played by a fifteen-year-old girl, who was just about concussed by my left boob during the finale. It ain’t good.”

  “Fine. Let me know when it’s on, and you won’t mind if I answer a few business emails in the meantime. You can sit on my lap and block the TV.”

  “Check us out. Compromising and everything.”

  He staunchly ignored the rest of his adolescent performance, but looked reluctantly amused as he typed into the iPad with one hand. His other hand played with the ends of her hair. And she had the pure joy of hearing him laugh heartlessly when her own teenage self flounced and pouted her way across the stage.

  In bed that night, she lay on her side, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his bare chest as he slept. A light scattering of black hairs trailed down his chest, circling his flat nipples, and she followed them with a fingertip. Lowering her head, her hair slipping down to pool on his skin, she touched her lips to his in a whisper of a kiss. He murmured her name, but didn’t wake. When she rolled over, sliding her arm under the pillow and closing her eyes, she could still feel his body, warm against her back.