So Now You're Back Page 34

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, the magenta on his cheeks darkening.

  ‘But before the no-kissing rule takes effect …’ Lifting on tiptoes, she held his cheeks in her palms. ‘I want you to know, you’re the best kisser I’ve ever met, and I’m completely bonkers about you.’

  She pressed her lips lightly to his, mindful of his swollen mouth, keeping the kiss tender, and chaste, but filling it with all the affection she felt.

  His hands settled on her waist, making her feel ridiculously cherished.

  ‘Same,’ he murmured as they parted.

  Her heart soared.

  The shy smile he sent her turned to a wince as he touched his fingers to his split lip. ‘Ouch.’

  She laughed and took his hand. ‘Come on, we better go talk to my mum and Aldo, before Aldo explodes.’

  After she had led him up the outside stairs to the car and watched Aldo nearly knock him flat, she shared a secret smile with her mum.

  She hadn’t messed up. And she would do everything in her power not to mess up in the future. Because she was the Trey Whisperer now.

  Chapter 25

  ‘The most important thing is not to over-whip the cream.’ Halle scooped the fragrant Baileys-scented cream onto the thin base of chocolate sponge, aware of the camera panning in for a close-up. ‘Because as much as we all love butter, cream is always preferable in your chocolate roulade.’

  She let the babble effect take over as she scored the sponge at one end and wound the roulade in a perfect pin-wheel twirl of chocolate, cream and Christmas indulgence.

  After another close-up, the director yelled ‘Cut’ in her earpiece. The studio silence turned into industrious noise as the crew sprang into action to get ready for the re-set.

  Della, the hair and make-up girl, rushed over wielding her powder puff. ‘Just a quick dab to get the shine.’

  ‘Is it just me or are the lights especially hot today?’ Halle remarked as Della powdered her nose and forehead and then whipped her trusty comb out of the tool belt hung round her waist and began arranging the wayward strands of Halle’s updo.

  She smiled at Halle. ‘That’s the problem with doing your Christmas Special at the beginning of August.’ She spread her arm, indicating the array of ornately wrapped presents with nothing inside them dressing the counter of the country kitchen they were using for the shoot. ‘It feels so wrong.’

  Halle took a steadying breath, trying to tune out the sound of Bill, the floor manager, directing the two cameramen for their next shot. A runner arrived holding a finished and dressed chocolate roulade aloft, which had been made to Halle’s specific recipe in the prep kitchen next door. He placed it on the antique table the props people had dressed beside the towering beribboned Christmas tree in the farmhouse’s front parlour.

  Halle flicked through the script in preparation for her final piece to camera while Della continued fussing with her hair, knowing she’d probably forget the lot as soon as she started speaking and end up winging it as usual.

  Christmas in August was a hazard of her job, especially with her new book, The Best Family Christmas, due out in October. They needed to get a jump on her Christmas Special so they could access edited clips and release them on YouTube to publicise the book launch.

  ‘Perfect,’ Della remarked, assessing her work. ‘You’re good to go.’ The make-up girl clasped Halle’s hand. ‘It’s going to be another hit. You look lush.’

  Halle smiled, her nerves a lot steadier than usual despite being in the midst of a take. Because performing for a TV camera had one indisputable advantage. By heaping on pressure in the here and now, the pressure to perform professionally and entertainingly on the director’s cue and not curdle her whipped cream, the one thing she didn’t have time to do was think about Luke.

  It had been two weeks now since their return from Tennessee. Two weeks since he’d walked out of her kitchen door, and although they’d had a few stilted email conversations about Lizzie—and their daughter’s momentous decision to apply to art college in Paris—that had been the sum total of their communication.

  And it was killing her.

  She missed him. She wanted to see him. To chat and tease and, OK, yes, she might as well admit it, to lick along the line of his happy trail until his belly muscles quivered.

  She needed his relaxed, much more pragmatic approach to relationships, and parenthood, his ego-boosting advice, not to mention the chance to gaze at that buff body, in various states of dishabille. And know that it was hers, to do with as she wished.

  But every time she’d come close to picking up the phone, on those nights at home after Aldo was in bed and she could hear Lizzie saying goodbye to Trey at the door, their conversation muffled and confidential and full of that unstated sexual tension that hummed in the air between them, she’d stopped herself.

  He’d given her an ultimatum, a stupid false ultimatum that had been entirely unnecessary. Between him and her kids. She could see now that she’d blown the whole punch-gate incident out of proportion. Trey had come back to work a week later, the day after they’d all attended his mother’s cremation in the imposing surroundings of Kensal Green Cemetery. Despite the hollow exhaustion wrought by grief, Trey appeared unharmed by Luke’s unprovoked attack and eager to return to work. Even his lip had healed.

  Luke had also contacted Lizzie and invited her to visit him in Paris in a couple of weeks to check out colleges. Lizzie had accepted the invitation enthusiastically and, from what Halle could gather, not a lot of grovelling had been involved. Even Aldo seemed to have forgiven Luke, peppering her with a load more questions about Lizzie’s dad, all of which had been curious and keen rather than resentful.

  But even so, Halle couldn’t bring herself to make the first move. And she knew, deep down, it had nothing to do with punch-gate, or the ultimatum or her children’s reaction to him. Deep down it had to do with trust and accountability and equality in their relationship. And all those boring things she’d ignored the first time she’d fallen so heavily for Luke.

  She’d always been the one to make the first move. The one to make the most compromises. Because she’d always loved him more than he had loved her. Or that was how it had felt at the time. She knew now there had been tangible reasons for that. That Luke as he was at seventeen, at twenty even, had been incapable of trusting anyone enough to love them fully and openly with no holding back because of the hideous insecurities of his childhood. But that didn’t alter the fact she couldn’t be the one to do the chasing again.

  If she was, she would feel compromised—maybe not now, maybe not even in a month’s time, but the inequality would be a part of their relationship again. She had to be able to trust him fully and completely. She had to know that he cared enough about her to put in the effort to make this work. And she couldn’t have that if she was the one who made the first move.

  In some ways, it might seem stupid and juvenile, a layover from their past. A tit-for-tat form of one-upmanship. But that was the way she felt. He’d told her he wanted more. But if he had really meant that, if he had really wanted to try, surely he could have contacted her and asked her again, properly.

  Unfortunately, the only problem with Halle’s Last Stand was that it required Luke to make the first move. And, after two whole weeks of virtually no contact, she was beginning to believe that she would be waiting around forever. Much as she had done once before.

  As they shot the final set-up and Halle waxed lyrical about the magical quality of family Christmases, whatever type of family you had, the melancholy of the past fortnight began to overwhelm her. Would she be wrapping presents alone again this Christmas Eve while her kids were in bed? Why did that make her feel bereft, when it never had before?

  The director called it a wrap, and she thanked everyone before slipping away as the sound technician, Jeff, started to chop up the three different roulades they’d had baked for the taping to share among the salivating crew.

  Clare, the wardrobe girl, ha
nded her a change of clothes as she headed out to the trailer they’d set up for her round the back of the farmhouse in Cambridgeshire. Sweat gathered under the armpits of the heavy velvet dress she’d worn for the Christmas Special as she walked through the farmhouse’s kitchen gardens, the sunshine blazing through the orchard of pear and apple trees.

  She closed the trailer door and dropped the summer dress wrapped in dry-cleaner’s plastic on the small daybed, then crossed to the dressing table. After firing up the kettle, she clicked on her laptop and checked her emails.

  Her heart bobbed into her throat as she scrolled through everything that had come in since yesterday and spotted the subject line ‘Monroe Article for Review’.

  But the flash of hope, of anticipation, died when she realised the email didn’t come from Luke, but from his agent, Stan Chalmers.

  She opened the email, scanned the contents. The article Luke had written was attached. The article on their couples’ retreat in Tennessee. The one he’d promised her he’d give her a chance to review.

  The melancholy, which had been sitting like a lump of unleavened dough in her belly for a fortnight, swelled to epic proportions. She grabbed a couple of tissues from the dispenser and blotted the thick camera-friendly mascara to stop it running down her cheeks in rivulets and making her look like a victim of the Black Death.

  Bloody hell. How come he can still turn me into a gibbering wreck with one careless act?

  She sniffed. But she knew this act wasn’t careless. It was deliberate.

  It wasn’t an act of betrayal. She’d always known he would write this article. That this had been a job for him, first and foremost, not an excuse to take a soggy, fraught trip down memory lane. And end up having too much make-up sex.

  But somewhere along the way she’d hoped, stupidly hoped, that what he’d blurted out two weeks ago meant he had become as invested in their future as she had. But, obviously, all that talk about taking things further, doing more than just bonking each other senseless for old times’ sake had been just that. Talk. Said on the spur of the moment so she’d let him stay.

  And here was the evidence, sitting in an email attachment. An email attachment that he hadn’t even been thoughtful enough to send to her himself.

  Slowly and methodically, she used the eye make-up remover and then her cleansing creams to remove the pancake foundation and eye gunk that Della had applied four hours ago. She peeled out of her Christmas dress, stepped into the trailer’s tiny shower cubicle and had as long a shower as was possible standing under the feeble, lukewarm spray.

  After changing into the muslin dress, she brewed herself a cup of mint tea. Then took the laptop, settled on the trailer’s narrow plaid upholstered couch and pressed the download button on the email attachment.

  The blue monitor line filled as the article downloaded.

  So this was finally the end? Not just of her and Luke and their chances for a future together, but the end of all those foolish hopes that had once burned so brightly between them and, despite all the mistakes, all the hurt, all the anger and all the misconceptions over the past sixteen years, had come out of hiding in Tennessee.

  She felt an odd sense of detachment, the melancholy dulled to the low persistent ache of a loss too huge to really comprehend as she clicked on the attachment.

  Then she read the opening lines of Luke’s article:

  When you trash the one relationship in your life that means everything to you, it’s human nature to try to find a way to justify that. To make excuses, to push the blame elsewhere, to persuade yourself this relationship was never as important as you thought. Pride, past mistakes, bad luck and even recreational sex can all be brought into play to keep you from acknowledging the incontrovertible truth: that you were the one who trashed it, and you need to be the one to fix it. This is the story of how, during eleven days in Tennessee this summer—with some extreme help from Jackson Monroe’s Couples’ Resolution Retreat—I finally figured that out …

  Twenty minutes later, Halle snorted dramatically into the last of her tissues as she read the final lines.

  Monroe’s retreat is based on what appears to be a simplistic, completely unscientific and apparently entirely intuitive method. And obviously there’s no guarantee it will work for everyone. But if it can make someone like myself realise the magnitude of what he’s chucked away not once, but quite possibly twice, and bare all in an article in Vanity Fair, it’s got a lot to offer those of us who are dumb as a rock.

  I just hope to hell it didn’t work its magic on me too late.

  Wiping her eyes with the wadded-up tissue, Halle grabbed blindly for her mobile phone and keyed in a message to her PA.

  Mel, I need to get from Cambridge to Paris, TODAY.

  Then she texted her daughter.

  Lizzie, can u & Trey hold the fort this evening? I’m making a flying visit 2 Paris 2 proposition ur father!!

  She laughed delightedly when Lizzie’s reply popped onto her phone two seconds later accompanied by a pair of clapping hands surrounded by confetti.

  OMG! Way TMI Mum!?! But g4i! xoxo

  Chapter 26

  Luke scribbled a note on his pad, propped the pen behind his ear, then carried on typing, inhaling the fragrance of freshly baked filou, strong coffee and the acrid echo of a thousand cigarettes that still clung to the wooden booths in Café Hugo despite the smoking ban introduced in 2008.

  He came here often to work, the quiet of his apartment somehow much more disturbing than the chattering hum of other people’s conversations, the clatter of cutlery and crockery, the light slap of shoe leather on marble tiling as the waiters hurried past with trays of patisseries. Of course, he’d been here even more often than usual in the past two weeks. Ever since returning from London and the Punch-Up at Halle’s Kitchen Corral.

  Because in the past fourteen days, the silence in his apartment had become unbearable.

  He gulped down another shot of the cooling coffee and eased back in the booth. Before clicking away from the document he was working on—an ‘Insider’s Guide to the Hidden Treasures of the Marais’ for National Geographic magazine—to check his emails. For about the two millionth time in the past eighteen hours.

  He cursed as the two new messages turned out to be a subscription circular and some spam about Russian mailorder brides.

  Just what I need—a hook-up with Olga from Omsk—to turn my personal life completely to shit.

  He deleted the messages, flagging Olga as spam so his damn filter could stop doubling as the demon matchmaker from hell, then stared at his empty inbox.

  Eighteen hours since he’d poured out his heart in a magazine article, in one last desperate attempt to make amends for all his mistakes, both old and new. And no word from Halle.

  So that was it, then. She’d finally washed her hands of him. Of them. Who could blame her? He flexed the stiff fingers of his right hand, still feeling the phantom ache in his knuckles that had healed over a week ago.

  Unfortunately, there was no way to heal what he’d done. Not just charging into her home and behaving like a lunatic—his fingers curled into a fist, or rather behaving like his old man, and smashing his fist into some poor kid’s jaw because of his own shortcomings as a parent. But also issuing that nutjob ultimatum.

  He could have waited. He should have waited, for Halle to talk to the kids. But instead of behaving like a grown-up, he’d panicked and tried to put Halle on the spot. All those insecurities from his childhood had risen up to strangle his sense of proportion, not to mention the self-awareness that had been forged in fire after his breakdown, years of therapy and eleven life-changing days in the Smoky Mountains.

  He rested the back of his head on the booth and examined the yellowed cornice on the ceiling.

  No wonder she no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. Some soul-searching, lots of extreme sports activities, too much hot-tub sex and a heartfelt article for Vanity Fair wasn’t going to atone for the never-ending list of fuc
k-ups he’d subjected her to over the years.

  Especially if he kept right on fucking up.

  He heard the tap of heels approaching the booth but ignored them to click back on his work document. Probably just one of the waitstaff come to refill his coffee cup.

  ‘Merci,’ he murmured, not bothering to look up as the girl stopped by his booth.

  But instead of filling the cup, the waitress slid into the booth opposite him. His head came up, and he blinked to try to dispel the apparition sitting across from him.

  Halle smiled back at him, her cheeks flushed, her soft blonde hair secured in that habitual knot and her magnificent cleavage displayed temptingly above the bodice of a snug summer dress emblazoned with mutant sunflowers.

  ‘Hello, Luke,’ said the apparition.

  He groaned. He was having some sort of psychic freak-out brought on by weariness and stress and bone-deep regret. But he had no clue how to stop it.

  ‘Hi, Halle,’ he replied, deciding to humour it. And himself. If delusions were the only way he could carry on a conversation with her, then he’d take them.

  His gaze tracked down to her cleavage and the plump flesh that he’d explored at his leisure in Tennessee. Blood pulsed into his groin and he wondered vaguely, exactly how psychotic you had to be to get a boner from a hallucination.

  As if in slow motion, she lifted a dark leather purse and pulled out an iPad. She placed the tablet on the table, keyed in the code, then turned it the other way up and slid it across to him until he could read the standfirst of his Vanity Fair article on it.

  Cool, so far, so totally certifiable.

  ‘I thought I should come and tell you in person,’ Dream Halle said, sounding super-real now and making him doubt his sanity even more. ‘I’m not going to let you publish a word of this.’ Damn, he could even smell that delicious floral scent of summer flowers and vanilla essence. As hallucinations went, this one was actually pretty hot.