by Heidi Rice
Ruby pulled her arm out of his grasp as he lifted his other hand to flag down a taxi.
‘But aren’t you going to go backstage?’ she asked, confused now and a little flustered.
The show had been incredible. Helena Devlin was a living legend for a reason. She’d told stories of her days in the theatre and on film, performed everything from Shakespeare to Lin-Manuel Miranda and told a host of hilarious anecdotes. Ruby had been awestruck throughout.
‘Why would I do that?’ Luke said before sticking his fingers in his mouth and letting out a piercing whistle, just like he’d done all those weeks ago in front of Ryker’s office.
A black cab appeared from nowhere and braked in front of them. Again.
How the bloody hell do New Yorkers do that?
‘To congratulate her? To thank her for the tickets?’ Ruby offered as he gave the address of The Royale to the cab driver. ‘To tell her how fabulous she was?’
Luke opened the cab’s passenger door. ‘She already knows how fabulous she is. And the backstage area will be packed with her fans and sycophants. It’ll take us an hour to get anywhere near her. And I’ve got something much better we could be doing.’
The husky tone rippled through her.
Well, okay, then.
‘Jump in,’ he said, raising his arm towards the cab like Prince Charming directing Cinderella into her carriage. ‘Come on, Ruby, scoot.’
A rather impatient Prince Charming.
She climbed into the cab.
‘I still think it’s a bit rude not to even acknowledge we were there, and we enjoyed it,’ she said as Luke climbed in beside her. Although she wasn’t sure he had enjoyed it that much. He’d fidgeted throughout, which was unlike him.
‘Fine, I’ll do it now.’ He yanked his phone out as the cab accelerated away from the curb.
Ruby watched, increasingly appalled, as he opened WhatsApp, selected MOM, typed in a string of clapping hands emojis, tapped send, then switched the phone to sleep mode and shoved it back in his pocket.
‘Luke! That’s not a proper thank you. It’s not even a proper acknowledgement.’
‘Sure it is, my mom loves emojis.’
‘But won’t she be hurt? That you didn’t go and see her in person?’ Ruby asked.
He grasped the handle as the cab turned the corner on to Waterloo Bridge. ‘Ruby, if you want to meet my mom, why don’t you just say so …’
‘B-b-because …’ She spluttered, trying to come up with a believable lie. ‘This isn’t about me wanting to meet her.’
He didn’t blink.
‘All right, maybe it is a bit about me wanting to meet her.’ She tried to look contrite. ‘But why don’t you want me to meet her?’
Just when she thought she’d won the argument, he leaned across the seat, captured her cheek and drew her face towards his.
‘That’s kind of obvious,’ he whispered, blocking out the view of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and replacing it with a much more exciting one. ‘I’m busy.’
His mouth covered hers, his tongue taking advantage when her lips parted on a gasp of surprise and need.
They were all the way to the Palace of Westminster before she had a chance to get another word in edgewise. But by then, she’d completely forgotten what they were talking about.
Glancing at the partition, Luke finally released her and settled into the seat. ‘We better chill out before we shock the driver.’ Taking her fingers in his he lifted them to his lips and buzzed a kiss into her palm. Her heartbeat stumbled.
‘So you liked the show?’ he asked absently, not meeting her gaze.
‘I loved the show. Didn’t you?’ she fired back, determined not to ask all the questions she really wanted to ask.
After coming down from the blast of euphoria earlier – when she hadn’t been summarily dumped as expected in Brynn’s – Ruby had gotten a grip and figured out why. Tonight was an exercise in avoidance.
The mad dash to get to the National in time for curtain-up, and the show itself had made it impossible for them to talk about anything important. And she’d figured out why a while ago.
Their time together was nearly over, maybe not tonight but certainly soon. And Luke didn’t want to say so.
She had figured out the truth from Luke’s impatience, the fidgeting, the strange decision to invite her to a place she knew he would usually avoid. He’d been photographed by the press, they both had, some enterprising hack was bound to figure out who she was eventually, which meant he wouldn’t be able to continue working at The Royale much longer.
But of course, that didn’t matter if he was about to leave the country.
As she’d watched Helena Devlin weave her magic over an audience of her peers from the Cottosloe’s stage – she’d come to terms with the reality. And promised herself, whatever happened, she wasn’t going to ruin the little time they had left together.
The fact Luke seemed so determined to keep things light made her heart stutter as his thumb stroked the back of her hand and they sped along Chelsea Embankment.
This was hard for him, too, and somehow that was enough. All this was ever meant to be was a moment – or rather several moments – out of their real lives. They could never have been a real couple, and not just for the reasons she’d told Jacie.
Luke Devlin was a billionaire property developer, the son of two Hollywood icons. Breathtakingly handsome and a master of the dark arts in bed. He was so far out of her league it was ridiculous. But more than that, despite all the great sex they’d had, all the intimate conversations, all the midnight feasts and shared breakfasts and lengthy discussions about everything from dry rot to flying monkeys, Luke was the most emotionally unavailable man she’d ever met.
She had a better idea of why that might be now. But she wasn’t in the right place to change him, and she very much doubted she was the right person.
They’d become accidental bonk buddies. And while she was desperately sad that would soon come to an end – and she knew she would miss him terribly, when no one turned up on her fire escape after dark – she refused to fall to pieces. Which meant no deep and meaningful conversations to make him uncomfortable, or her feel too needy.
He stared out of the cab’s window, his thumb rubbing across the knuckles he’d kissed, his profile tense. He was waiting for her to ask about ‘them’.
So she searched her mind for something to say that didn’t involve ‘them’.
‘What happened between you and Ross Bartlett on the set of Life’s a Bitch?’
He turned towards her.
‘Is it juicy?’ she asked when he simply stared at her.
‘Yeah, it’s real juicy,’ he said.
‘Then you need to ’fess up. You owe me.’
‘How do you figure that?’ he said, but his lips quirked with relief.
‘You refused to introduce me to you mum. I could have dined out on my meeting with the great Helena Devlin for decades so I want something to compensate me. Juicy gossip about Bartlett might just cover it.’
He choked out a rough laugh. And her pulse did a giddy little back flip.
‘You’re such a movie nut,’ he said, the gruff affection making her smile. Once upon a time, coming from Luke, that would definitely have been insult. If nothing else, Luke’s opinion had softened about a medium she loved and he had been taught to hate, thanks to his association with her and The Royale.
Matty would be proud of her.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Now cough up.’
She wanted their last nights together to be joyful. And sexy. Not sad and tense. If that meant keeping the conversation shallow, so be it. And to be fair, juicy gossip from the set of a cult nineties romcom wasn’t a bad parting gift.
‘You’re sure you want to have all your illusions about Barlett shattered? Because I’m not taking responsibility.’
‘I am okay with having my illusions shattered, now tell the story,’ she said.
His shoulders relaxed as he spoke int
o the darkness, his tone one of jaded amusement. ‘Okay, just to give you some background, during a shoot my mom always insisted on having us with her. That meant paid tutors and nannies when I was a little kid, but as Mom’s career tanked, the producers were less willing to fork out for that kind of support. When she made Life’s a Bitch with Barlett her movie career and his were already entering the end zone, which meant she had to pay for the babysitters. It was a micro-budget movie shot on location in the summertime in some podunk town in Georgia.’ He sighed. ‘We had been stuck at the location all day watching mom getting tied to a post over and over again and the au pair mom had hired – a local college student called Melanie Schultz – had forgotten to come get us and take us back to the hotel.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Mom sacked Melly the next day when it turned out she’d been getting high with one of the grips and passed out in his trailer.’
‘Stop talking about Melly and tell me about Ross Bartlett,’ she said.
‘It’s not that juicy, don’t get too excited.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said, waving him on.
‘Okay, so I’d put Jack and Becca to bed in the bedroom of my mom’s trailer. And I was reading my Incredible Hulk comic in the back, wondering where Melly was and when Mom would be finished shooting so we could go back to the hotel, when I heard a commotion outside. Then both my mom and Bartlett came crashing into the trailer. Not expecting us to be there, they didn’t see me. They were arguing loudly, in that theatrical way actors always argue – as if they’re on Broadway instead of in real life.’
‘Do they?’ she asked.
He simply looked at her as if she were impossibly naïve.
Okay, point taken. ‘What were they arguing about?’
‘Who knows, they probably didn’t even know. It was foreplay.’
‘Foreplay?’ she said, suddenly feeling impossibly naïve.
‘Sure, my mom’s a card-carrying fan of great make-up sex – which means she generally has a lot of shouting matches with the guys she’s screwing.’
‘There’s a card for that?’
‘Stop interrupting, do you want to hear my juicy Bartlett story or don’t you? The press would pay a fortune for this stuff,’ he said, then frowned. And she suddenly wondered if he was thinking he’d said too much.
She let out a weighty sigh. ‘I would never sell anything you tell me. Ever.’ She crossed her little finger over her heart. ‘Pinkie swear.’ She paused. ‘Well, unless it was about Babs and Bob, then I might have to sell just a little bit. Because you know, that’s public need to know stuff.’
‘I only ever met Babs once.’
‘You met Barbara Streisand, why the heck didn’t you say so?’
‘Which story are we on here?’
‘Okay, okay, forget Babs for now, but we will be revisiting that, just so you know.’ She gulped. ‘Fine, so your mum and Ross are arguing. Foreplay arguing. Then what happened?’
He grinned, the teasing glint in his eye unmistakable. ‘Actually I’m not sure I should tell you, it’s kind of sordid.’
‘How sordid? Fifty Shades sordid or Human Centipede sordid?’
‘Is there anything in your life that doesn’t have a movie reference?’ he asked, sounding exasperated.
‘No,’ she said, unapologetically. ‘Now answer the question, because Fifty Shades sordid I can cope with … Human Centipede not so much.’
‘It’s sort of between the two.’
‘Fine. Go on, I’ll cope.’
‘All right, so they’re arguing, and then he drags her over his knee, pulls up her skirt, rips down her panties and starts spanking her. I thought he was hitting my mom. I was freaking out. Should I tell him to stop? My mom had always told us never to sass her co-stars, because that was her job I guess.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I stood there and watched, getting more and more anxious and upset. And then it all started to change. She’d been screaming and then she started moaning. And, well … he ended up screwing her like a freight train against the sideboard. I thought she was dying, that he was killing her. I finally got up the guts to run out of my hiding place. I kicked him really hard in the nuts, started yelling at him to stop hurting my mom.’
He chuckled, the sound harsh. And her insides twisted.
What a hideous thing for a child to witness.
‘Poor Ross,’ he said. ‘I bet he didn’t get an erection for months. No wonder he ghosted me this evening, he’s probably still got PTSD from the incident …’
Ruby pushed out a laugh, trying to see the funny side. ‘What did your mum do?’
He shrugged, still smiling at the reminiscent. ‘She was furious. After Bartlett ran out of the trailer with his tail between his legs, literally, she didn’t stop yelling at me for about twenty minutes.’
‘She shouted at you?’ Ruby asked, appalled. How could Helena have been angry with her son when he had been a frightened child?
‘Yeah, she was royally pissed,’ he said, letting out a harsh chuckle. ‘And also kind of embarrassed I guess, although not as embarrassed as I was.’
‘I can’t even imagine,’ she replied, trying to see the humour in Luke’s story. But she couldn’t. No wonder he didn’t like the movies or anything associated with them – he’d lived behind the curtain, from an early age, and it hadn’t been pretty.
‘You know what still bugs me about the whole sorry episode though?’ he added, the amusement no longer reaching his eyes.
She could think of about a million things that were bugging her. ‘What?’
‘I was trying to help her. I actually thought Bartlett was going to kill her,’ he said.
‘Precisely, she should have given you a medal not gotten mad. You were just a little boy and you were trying to protect her.’
He looked puzzled then he smiled, one of those cynical twists of his lips she recognized from a month ago. ‘Yeah, maybe in a Disney movie.’ He laughed, the sound so bitter it gave her chills. ‘I wasn’t a little boy. I was eleven years old. No I meant, why the heck did I try to stop him when I was so damn mad with her that evening? I’d seen a group of local kids shooting hoops on a court across from the set after I’d tucked Jack and Becca into bed, and I’d been jealous and frustrated. I wanted to go hang out with them. But I couldn’t because I had to look out for my kid brother and sister. Why did we have to be dragged all over the country when I wanted to stay in one place? Why couldn’t I go to a real school? Why couldn’t I tell anyone who my old man was? I just wanted to be a normal kid like those kids were, doing normal kid stuff. And it was my mom’s fault I couldn’t. So why did I intervene when I thought Bartlett was hurting her?’
‘Because she was your mother?’ she offered, saddened by the confusion in his voice. ‘And because you’re a naturally protective person? And a good guy.’
His brows lifted. ‘Why would you think that, Ruby?’ he said, sounding genuinely perplexed by her observation. ‘I’m not a good guy, I always look out for number one.’
She thought of his brother and sister, who he’d put to bed that night, even though, like any eleven-year-old, he had been desperate to play basketball with the other kids. And she thought of The Royale, and how much better it looked than it had close to six weeks ago – the new paint and expertly repaired plaster work, the working toilets and no-longer leaky radiators … Even the boiler in her flat, which hadn’t packed up once since the day he’d repaired it.
‘And that’s never going to change. Because I don’t want it to,’ he said, and she could hear the warning in his voice.
He wasn’t selfish. He shouldered responsibilities rather than shirking them, responsibilities that weren’t even his, and had done ever since he was a boy. But she could see by the guarded expression he wouldn’t believe her if she told him so.
And anyway, this conversation wasn’t really about his mom, or Ross Bartlett or even that little boy who had done the right thing in a trailer in Georgia all those years ago,
and been punished for it.
What this conversation was really about was his imminent departure – the elephant in the cab that had been squeezed between them all night. The one thing he couldn’t talk about because if he did he would have to talk about them, when he was determined to believe there was no them.
For her, there was a them, there would always be a them, these few brief weeks something she would look back on for the rest of her life with joy and affection and no small degree of regret. And for that reason she refused to sour it now with a load of ‘what ifs’ that would just create more of the melodrama he hated.
She couldn’t change his mind about what was right for him, especially as those decisions had been made long before she ever met him.
The cab stopped at the curb outside The Royale and the cab driver hauled back the privacy screen. ‘That’ll be forty-five quid, mate.’
Luke unclicked his belt and reached into his pocket.
Ruby pulled a twenty pound note out of her purse.
‘Don’t even …’ He tugged a credit card from his wallet, added a tip into the cabbie’s card reader, ran the card down the reader then tapped in his code. ‘Tonight is on me.’
She nodded, having lost the will to argue with him. ‘Thank you.’ She shoved the twenty back into her purse.
He jumped out and took her arm, then slammed the door shut and bracketed her hips with his hands. He pressed his face into her hair, found the rioting pulse in her collarbone as the cab drove away.
‘Let’s go to bed. Talking about Ross banging my mom has got me horny.’
Ruby laughed, the teasing kisses making her skin sizzle and burn. ‘That’s a bit kinky.’
‘I know, I’m trying real hard not to dwell on how kinky.’ He lifted his head, then grasped her hand.
He drew her down the alleyway at the side of the building. Reaching the back, he jumped up and grabbed the fire escape ladder. Levering it down, he began to climb, with her hand still grasped firmly in his.
After they’d reached the first level, he hauled the ladder up behind them and locked it in place. Then he led her to the second level.
Shoving up the window at the back of her flat, he climbed inside and then reached out to help her through.
