Back in the Headlines

by Sharon Kendrick

  His words rang out with cruel aristocratic clarity and something inside Roxanne seemed to shrink and die as she saw the imperious look on his face. He was doing it again, she realised. He was pulling rank—telling her that he was important and she wasn’t. He just couldn’t help himself—that was his default mechanism. No matter what she said or did, she was just some little woman who couldn’t wait to get her hooks into him. Well, he was wrong if he thought she could ever tolerate life with such an arrogant tyrant as him.

  ‘I think you flatter yourself, Titus—if you really think I’ve been plotting how to get you up the aisle.’ She paused, wondering just how big she could make the lie. Whether she could bring herself to say something so fabricated that it would bring the whole affair to a conclusive end. ‘As far as I was concerned, it meant nothing at all to me. It was just a fling, that’s all.’

  ‘Nothing?’ he repeated incredulously, because women didn’t do this to him. He was the one who did the leaving.

  ‘That’s right. And a very enjoyable fling, I must say. We’ve both had them before and we both know when they’ve run their course—which this one most definitely has. So I’m going. Vanessa’s got my bank details—if you could make sure that the money I’m owed goes in my account, I’d appreciate it.’ She sucked in an unsteady breath. ‘I’m not sure whether you count what happened between us last night as overtime, but—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Roxanne!’ he bit out furiously. ‘Will you stop this?’

  ‘I’ve stopped.’ She held up her hand for silence, the way she’d done at the party just a few short hours ago—only this time she had an audience of just one. ‘There’s nothing more to say and I’d like to go back to London as quickly as possible.’

  His heart was pounding heavily in his chest, as if he’d just been running a race. ‘If you walk out of that door—then it really is over,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Titus.’ Meeting his eyes with a defiance she wasn’t sure she could hold onto for much longer, she gave a short laugh. ‘I understand perfectly.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE London house seemed unusually quiet—and unusually cold—as Titus let himself in. Maybe the heat of the Kenyan sun was responsible for the chill he felt on his skin as he put his passport and bags down in the hallway. Or maybe it was something to do with the fact that last time he’d been here, it had been with Roxanne. When he’d been in control and felt in control as he’d fed her antibiotics and glasses of water. When he’d thought he was doing her a favour by taking her up to Norfolk and offering her a damned job.

  What he hadn’t anticipated—nor ever could have anticipated—was that she would leave behind a memory which was proving infuriatingly difficult to shift. Even a complete break in the baking African heat didn’t seem to have made a dent in it. He marched into the drawing room, poured himself three fingers of whisky and took a large mouthful.

  Damn her!

  The day after his party—when she had followed through with her dramatic threat to leave—he had booked himself on an impromptu safari trip to Kenya. He had figured that some winter sun was just what he needed to forget her. That and the undeniable thrill of watching nature from a close but safe distance. It had been a while since he’d visited Africa and the country was as beautiful as he remembered. He’d thrown himself into an exhausting round of activity. He’d ridden horses—and camels. He’d fished, he’d walked and he’d eaten beneath the stars. And, politely but very firmly, he had rebuffed the advances of a beautiful American heiress who was staying in the same camp.

  What else could he have done when Roxanne’s face was continuing to haunt him—appearing in his fractured dreams with alarming regularity? Sometimes he would waken, his body screaming with tension as he wondered whether the threat of some natural predator outside his tent had caused his senses to be so instantly alert. But no. The only threat was the turbulent nature of his thoughts and a sense of impatience that he couldn’t manage to rid himself of her seductive memory.

  He walked over to the phone to see that the message box was completely full and he yawned. They could wait. He would take a long shower followed by a good night’s sleep and tomorrow he would tackle the work which had built up in his absence. He wanted to prolong his vacation by one more evening—because hadn’t one of the best things about it been the complete lack of modern amenities? No phone. No computer. No TV. Life was certainly simpler without the constant interruptions of modern life.

  But habit made him switch on his mobile phone to see that it was also full of messages from numbers that he didn’t recognise. It started ringing immediately and he saw that it was Guy Chambers, who had treated Roxanne when she’d had pneumonia. Could Guy also wait until tomorrow?

  Maybe not. He sighed, knowing that he couldn’t keep the world at bay for ever. He clicked the connection. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Titus?’

  ‘Funnily enough, I do usually answer my own phone.’

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘I took a safari trip to Kenya. A kind of late birthday present to myself.’ Titus frowned. ‘Why, should I have checked with you first?’

  There was a brief silence. ‘Have the press been in touch with you?’

  ‘No. Why would they?’

  ‘So you haven’t seen the Net?’

  ‘No, thank God. I’m happy to say that I haven’t been near a computer for an entire fortnight.’

  ‘I think perhaps you should.’ Guy’s voice sounded more than a little strained. ‘Try typing “Marilyn + Duke’s totty” into YouTube and see what happens.’

  Titus froze. ‘What the hell’s going on, Guy?’

  ‘I think you should ask Roxanne,’ said the medic. ‘It seems that maybe she’s trying to resurrect her career on the back of her association with you.’

  With an angry little snarl, Titus cut the connection and went immediately to his study, staring out of the window as the computer fired into life, barely noticing that the winter drabness had been broken by the monochrome splash of the snowdrops which carpeted the oak tree.

  His mouth was dry as he tapped in the bizarre key words, until a rectangle appeared on the screen with the frozen image of Roxanne at its centre. He pressed on the arrow and the image began to move—all blonde hair and scarlet lips and that incredible glittering body looking almost as if it were naked as she sang. He heard the husky and very sexual inflection as her voice lingered on the words Duke of Torchester. With a growing feeling of nausea he watched the clip all the way through, registering that it had received over a million and a half hits. And then he clicked onto the search engine and typed in the words Roxy Carmichael + The Lollipops—and it all began to make sense.

  There were thousands of items about Roxy singing at his party. There was speculation that they were lovers—confirmed by an unnamed guest at the party claiming to have seen the two of them disappearing into Titus’s bedroom. But most damning of all was the news that The Lollipops’ Sweetest Hits had shot up the charts and that there was now a very real possibility that the group would re-form.

  Titus was so angry that he slammed his fist down on the sycamore surface of the desk, only just missing the inlaid Sèvres porcelain which had made his acquisition of this rare piece so difficult.

  How dared she?

  How dared she?

  He wanted to blaze round and confront her, until he realised with a start that he had no idea where she lived or even where her father lived. That Roxanne Carmichael lived an itinerant life, which only reinforced her general unsuitability to be anything other than a member of his staff.

  But the gypsy-like quality of her existence made him momentarily pause as he tried to get his head around the instability of her lifestyle. What must that be like? he wondered. To have known such fabulous wealth until the crackpot investments of her father had left her with nothing. No money and no real place to call home. Until he forced himself to remember how ruthlessly she had exploited th
eir relationship and his anger made him pick up the phone.

  After speaking to someone at his club, he quickly hired a private investigator and by the following afternoon he had the information he needed. She had a live-in job, working as a chambermaid at the Granchester Hotel. Her hours were from six until midday and then she spent a further two hours, between four and six, turning down the guests’ beds for the night. Her room (537) could be found on the fifth floor of an anonymous-looking block at the back of the hotel complex.

  It almost killed him but he forced himself to wait until she had finished work, damping down his natural inclination to storm round there and demand that she be removed from her shift and brought to see him immediately. That was what he would have done in the past, he realised. Been unable to wait. Used his status to have the rules bent for him. So what had changed?

  In the grey and drizzly early evening, he drove to the back of the hotel and, shortly after six, saw a familiar figure appear through a side door and make her way through the car park. She was wearing some kind of hat, the brim shielding her strained features, and she hugged her jacket close to what looked like an alarmingly slender frame. He felt his heart leap in his chest but he sucked in a deep breath until he had composed himself, reminding himself that she had used him as ruthlessly as any woman could use a man.

  He gave her ten minutes while he listened to the news—the stories of bombs and rebellion not really registering as the minute hand ticked slowly around his watch. And then he locked his car and made his way over to the tower-block, riding up in the utilitarian grey metal lift to the fifth floor.

  His thumb paused over the doorbell of number 537 and he realised that a jumble of feelings was making him feel … angry. No, it was more than anger. It was uncertainty, too. What if she wasn’t alone? What if that pale and supple body was currently writhing underneath another man? Viciously, he jammed his finger hard on the bell and then had to wait so long for an answer that he began to wonder whether the investigator had got the right apartment.

  And then she opened the door and Titus found that just seeing her again made his first snarled accusation die on his lips. And he couldn’t for the life of him work out why. She’d lost weight again. Far too much weight. And her eyes were looking at him with an expression he couldn’t make out. Was it guilt? he wondered grimly.

  So why was his heart beating with all the frantic irregularity of a man who had just been confronted by a goddess? Yes, she wore a dress and a pair of boots, which emphasised her amazing legs. But it was a very ordinary dress. Nothing special. What was it about her which made him seem to lose a grip on his sanity whenever she was in the vicinity?

  Her tongue was sliding over the surface of her bare lips as if she was summoning up the courage to say something and he thought he had never seen her face look so pale and so bleached.

  ‘What are you doing here, Titus?’

  He walked straight past her, his eyes rapidly searching the boxlike accommodation of bedroom and bathroom until he walked into a drab sitting room—relieved to find it empty. But his trembling rage remained.

  ‘I’ve come for some sort of explanation.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence by feigning ignorance, Roxanne. We both know why I’m here. Surely there must have been part of you which had been expecting this?’

  Slowly, she nodded, because, yes, she had. Only she’d thought that he might come looking for her sooner—ready to spill out the rage which she could see was contorting his aristocratic features. Yet his anger now seemed almost inconsequential because all she could think was how infuriatingly alive he looked—this most vibrant and powerful of men. His skin was deeply tanned and it made his brilliant grey eyes gleam like moonstones. The aching in her heart came back, stabbing painfully beneath her breast. He must have been away, she thought as she registered the healthy glow of his skin—which was probably why this inevitable confrontation hadn’t happened sooner. But seeing him again was far worse than she had ever imagined it would be. It brought back memories of what it had been like to lie in his arms. It made her recall the time when he’d bought her those beautiful mauve gloves. The times she’d stroked her fingers through his tawny-thick mane of hair. She shivered, knowing that she needed to get rid of him. Before she did something stupid—like begging him to make love to her just one more time …

  She cleared her throat. ‘You’re talking about the video clip?’

  ‘Yes, I’m talking about the video clip! The video clip which seems to have been seen by half the world!’

  ‘Or by one and a half million inhabitants of the world to be more precise,’ she corrected tiredly.

  ‘Don’t try and get smart with me,’ he said furiously. ‘Just tell me when you decided to do it. Was it before or after you slept with me? I guess it must have been afterwards—because the story wouldn’t have had legs if we hadn’t been lovers.’ Lovers. The word seemed to ring round the room and mock him. As if there had been anything like love involved in what had happened between them, when all the time she had clearly been using him as collateral. Safeguarding her future with a gem of an idea—a publicity coup to end all publicity coups.

  ‘Is that what you really think?’ she questioned woodenly.

  ‘It’s not a question of what I think, Roxanne—it’s a question of what I know. You gave a very fine and sexually loaded performance in front of a lot of very influential people and you got someone to film it.’

  ‘But I didn’t know it was being filmed!’ She met the disbelieving elevation of his eyebrows and suddenly she couldn’t bear him thinking that she could cold-bloodedly exploit him like that. ‘I borrowed the costume from someone I’d known in my Lollipop days—because I could never have afforded to hire something like that. They had it couriered down from London and when they found out what the address was, they realised …’

  Her words tailed off with embarrassment and Titus iced a disgusted stare at her. ‘What did they realise, Roxanne?’

  She swallowed. ‘That you lived there. And that this could be a perfect marketing opportunity. So they hid in the house and when I came on to sing, they … they filmed it.’

  Titus nodded. ‘So not only have you made me a laughing stock,’ he said, in a cold and deadly voice, ‘but you’re telling me that you also posed a security risk by letting some stranger into my house?’

  Roxy shook her head. This was worse than she’d ever imagined. She had been prepared for his fury—she had almost wanted it. Because hadn’t her own rage almost equalled his? When she had discovered what they’d done she had felt exploited, exposed and picked over—as if a colony of vultures had stripped her bare. But she could see from the iciness of his grey eyes that it would be a waste of her time to try to convince him of that. Titus believed what he wanted to believe. What he’d always believed. That she was a low-end kind of person—deserving of sex, yes, but not of the consideration he might show to a woman of his own class. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have listened to her side of the story instead of first condemning her?

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ she questioned tiredly.

  ‘I want you to admit that you used me.’

  There was a moment of silence as her indignation struggled to break free. Used him? Why, she had loved him. Loved him as she’d loved no other man, nor ever thought she could. Loved him even though she’d struggled not to—until her feelings had won out over common sense. The injustice of it all began to bubble up inside her until she told herself that maybe it was easier this way. If he went away from here believing that she was a taker, then he would never come back. Because the alternative would be to convince him of her innocence and then what?

  They would kiss and make up. They would have passionate sex—probably right here in this institutional little apartment. And once the gilt of all that exciting make-up stuff had worn off, reality would set in. There was no possible future for them—there never had been and there never would be.
Titus would look for a way to escape and she would be left nursing a heart even more wounded than it felt at this moment.

  But if he stormed out of here, convinced of her duplicity …

  ‘Yes,’ she said woodenly. ‘I used you. I used your ducal status and high-profile party for publicity purposes. It was an opportunity too good to resist. Are you satisfied now, Titus? You’ve had my confession in full and you can just shut the box on all your memories of me and pretend that I never existed. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather you did it elsewhere. I’m going out.’

  From the swirl of his confused thoughts, he felt as if he were in the midst of some unspeakably bad dream as he took in her long legs and the knee-high boots.

  ‘Is it a man?’ he questioned sourly.

  She drew a deep breath. You can do this, Roxy. You can convince him you’re the woman he thinks you are. ‘I’m afraid it is,’ she said quietly.

  Titus flinched as a wholly unexpected stab of pain dwarfed even the fierce crushing of his ego. For a moment pride urged him to haul her into his arms and to kiss her and then demand to know whether any other man would ever make her feel the way that he did. Would ever make her moan with pleasure, the way that he did.

  But wasn’t that an arrogant thing for him to think? Was it really so inconceivable that for the first time in his life he had met a woman who didn’t consider herself lucky to be on his arm? A woman who had decided that he had behaved unfairly towards her during their liaison? Maybe she’d met a man who wasn’t keeping her hidden away because of the vast social gulf which existed between them. Maybe it had been his own behaviour towards her which had made her decide to exploit him.

  He felt a twisting sensation in his gut. He wanted to say sorry but something stopped him and he couldn’t quite decide whether that was because it was too late, or because saying sorry had never come easily. So instead, he nodded. Shrugged his shoulders as if to acknowledge that the best man had probably won. It was the most exemplary display of cool good manners he’d ever exhibited and, wryly, he thought that his mother would be proud of him.