Always and Forever (33 page)

I must have been out of my mind to have dinner with you.

Thank you for a nice evening, but goodbye.’

He reached out and grabbed her wrist gently, but firmly.

‘Don’t be like that,’ he said, ‘please.’

‘Should I scream and demand the police be cal ed because you’re holding me against my wil ?’ she said.

‘You can go if you want,’ he said softly, and his dark eyes raked over her face, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t. I want to get to know you, Cleo. Can’t I do that? Maybe we do come from different places, but so what? Can’t Manhattan and Carrickwel have a merger too?’ It sounded so ridiculous that she had to laugh and she sat down on her seat again.

She knew when she was beaten. ‘OK, you win, you’re a big eejit but you win.’ ‘What is this eejit thing everybody keeps saying?’ Tyler said. ‘Mmm,’ said Cleo thoughtful y, ‘it means wonderful, wise person …’

‘Bul shit,’ he laughed ‘you’re kidding me again, right, like with those Irish translations? You do not get me a second time,

Miss Mal ey.’

Cleo winced at the fact that he stil didn’t know her real surname. She couldn’t tel him now. She’d tel him later.

They went out again on Sunday evening, this time to the cinema, although Cleo found it hard to remember much about the film - she was so completely aware of sitting close to Tyler, holding his hand. It felt wonderful.

She knew it wasn’t just a physical attraction: she liked him, she liked the way he laughed, liked the way he gently teased her, liked the way he was interested in her. It seemed a strange thing to admit, but she felt as if she’d known him for years. He might have a ruthless streak in business, but there was another side of Tyler Roth too. A side she loved seeing. Tyler was due to fly to Galway on Monday morning for the property auction, and Cleo was miserably aware that their little romance was coming to an end. He’d go back to his world, she’d stay in hers, and his line of girlfriends in every city would claim him again.

Would she be the Dublin girlfriend? No, Cleo didn’t want to be just another number in his phone. That wasn’t enough.

The more time she got to spend with him, the more she fel in love. And she was in love with him. She was sure of that.

She wouldn’t have believed it possible to fal in love with someone so quickly if it hadn’t happened to her.

After the cinema Tyler asked her to come back to his suite for a nightcap. Against her better judgement she agreed. ‘I want to say goodbye properly,’ he’d said.

‘I hope you don’t think that saying goodbye properly means bouncing up and down on the bed,’ Cleo reprimanded him sternly to hide how miserable she was feeling.

‘Hey, do I look like that sort of guy?’ Tyler teased, as he hailed a taxi.

Cleo had never been in one of the hotel’s penthouse suites.

She’d seen many of the other bedrooms, but there were only four penthouse suites and on the day she’d had her orientation tour, they hadn’t been included. Tyler’s suite was every bit as grand and luxurious as she’d imagined.

McArthur’s Hotel prided itself on simple but classy interior decor. Your feet sank into the carpets, your body sank into the huge, velvety couches and she was pretty sure that the rest of you would sink deliciously into the linen sheets too.

‘Nice room,’ she said nonchalantly, as she walked around admiring the white roses in the simple, square vase on the low coffee table.

‘Yeah, it’s lovely,’ Tyler said, ‘real y beautiful.’

And she liked him for that, for not being so used to richness and luxury that he thought it was normal. If only he’d seen the cramped bedroom she was sharing with Trish at the moment. ‘What would you like to drink?’ Tyler said, taking off his jacket and laying it on the back of a chair. He was wearing an open-necked shirt that revealed a tiny triangle of dark skin at

the neck. Was there anything sexier than that little bit of a man? Cleo moistened her lips.

‘Mmm, I’d love some tea actual y. Camomile would be nice.’ Camomile would help her sleep and she wasn’t sure if she would when she got home because she was so wound up after the excitement of the day.

He sat on the edge of the armchair and picked up the phone to ring housekeeping.

He ordered two camomile teas, which was sweet, Cleo thought. Most guys hated it. Nat used to say it tasted like something you’d sweep up from the backyard, though he’d tried it to please Cleo. How different he and Tyler were, she reflected. Nat was a pleaser, a puppy dog of a person, while Tyler was aloof and aggressively leonine, and first impressions would suggest he wouldn’t want to please anyone but himself. Yet here was this Alpha Male trying to please her. There was something incredibly attractive and seductive about that. And he’d be gone soon. Cleo felt herself sink a little on the inside. ‘So,’ he said, and sat down on one end of the couch. She was sitting on the other end. It was a big couch.

‘So,’ she said back, smiling at him.

‘Do I look as though I bite?’ he said, patting the space between them.

‘You mean you don’t?’ Cleo said.

He grinned and slid up beside her. ‘We’re probably rushing this,’ he said, ‘but you know I’m flying to Galway tomorrow and off to New York the day after that …’

‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed gravely. ‘You need to get to first base before you go.’

‘It’s not like that,’ he said, and he actual y looked offended.

‘You’re not that sort of girl, Cleo, and I’m not that sort of guy.’ ‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ she said, suddenly serious. She didn’t want to get hurt, not by Tyler. She didn’t want to be the Nat person in this relationship: trusting and naive, not able to see reality and mortal y wounded when the blow came.

‘Forget what you’ve heard,’ Tyler said harshly. ‘People talk about me, they’l talk about you, that doesn’t mean they know anything. I don’t mess around with women and I don’t mess women around,’ he said, and he looked so serious that Cleo had an urge to run her fingers along the side of his face to smooth away the lines.

‘What are you thinking?’ he said, leaning disturbingly close.

And she laughed. ‘I was thinking the service in this hotel is outrageous because you ordered our tea at least five minutes ago and there’s no sign of it.’

‘There is definitely a job for a woman of your capabilities in Roth Hotels,’ Tyler said.

‘So that’s why you’ve brought me up here?’

‘No,’ he said, and he moved infinitesimal y closer. He put one arm around her and Cleo felt that heat of excitement again. They were so close now, she could feel the warmth of his body. ‘That’s not why I brought you up here,’ he said,

‘and if you believe it is, you must think this is the strangest job interview ever.’

She grinned. ‘I thought you brought me up here because you liked me,’ she said, ‘and I came because I like you,’

she added. ‘I’m glad,’ he said softly, and then his mouth was upon hers and their arms were around each other, his hands moving over her. It was like nothing she had ever known before - none of the fumblings with Laurent in Bristol, no kissing with any other boyfriend, nothing. This heat, this excitement was something new, something special, something entirely to do with Tyler. She moaned his name and pul ed him closely to her as his mouth moved to the curve of her jaw, to the soft place under her earlobe, down her neck, touching her gently. And suddenly, Cleo knew that she wanted to rip al Tyler’s clothes off, have him rip al her clothes off and to make wild love there and then. Have him touching her, caressing her, saying her name … ‘We shouldn’t,’ he said, breathing heavily.

‘I know,’ she said, and at the same time his fingers were fumbling with the wrap ties on her cardigan and hers were undoing the buttons on his shirt.

‘It’s a mistake because it’s too soon,’ Tyler was saying, his hands tenderly skimming over her skin as if he couldn’t get enough of her.

‘I know, too soon, too soon …’ Cleo added, her face buried in his hair, her fingers touching the plane of his muscled chest. ‘We real y ought to wait,’ he said.

‘Absolutely,’ Cleo said, her hands feeling his heart pound in his chest.

The phone rang: a blistering shriek that Cleo had never realised the phones in McArthur’s could make until that precious moment.

‘Shit,’ said Tyler, and he pul ed away.

‘Shit,’ said Cleo, hurriedly pul ing the front of her wrap top together.

He picked up the phone. ‘Hi. Yeah, sure, no, no problem,’

he said. ‘It’s only eleven here, so I guess it’s what, five, four back home?’

He sat down at the desk, pul ed a pad towards him and started to write, shooting an apologetic glance at Cleo and mouthing, ‘It’s urgent.’

She held a hand up to say no, it’s fine, and got up and went into the bathroom to tidy herself up. Her mouth looked bruised and swol en in the mirror, her pupils were dilated and her hair was a wild tangled mess. Yes, she looked like she had just been kissing wildly on a couch.

She used Tyler’s mouthwash and ran her fingers through her hair to try to tame it. There was no comb. Tyler’s dark hair was so shorn he probably never used one. She peered into his toilet bag to see what sort of unguents and aftershave he used. It felt intimate, but they’d just been kissing after al , which meant that it was probably just this side of acceptable.

She came out. Tyler was stil on the phone and he looked at her and rol ed his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed. He put a hand over the phone. ‘Crisis at head office, got to deal with it.’

‘That’s OK,’ she said.

Of course, the camomile tea would choose then to arrive and the person who delivered it would have to be a member of staff that Cleo knew. Xi, a beautiful Chinese girl, smiled in surprised confusion when Cleo opened the door.

‘Hel o,’ Xi said.

‘Hi,’ said Cleo, feeling her face go hot. ‘Thanks, Xi,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I’l take it, thanks.’ She didn’t have any money for a tip, but anyway wouldn’t it be crass for a member of staff, who was improperly in a guest’s hotel bedroom, to tip another member of staff? Who knew? Etiquette books didn’t cover that situation.

She poured her tea, and some for Tyler, left it beside him and then ambled round the suite, looking at things. He had a travel chess set out on the coffee table amidst the papers and magazines and she wondered who his opponent was because he was mid-game. She sat down and flicked through the magazines. Under a society magazine she found a folder with architect’s beautiful y coloured pen and ink drawing on the front. It was sideways, so she turned it round to look at it. It was oddly familiar. And then she realised - it was the Wil ow Hotel. An architect’s drawing of her home, but much improved and vastly bigger. Only the facade of the house was the same, though it was cleaned up: there was no wisteria climbing untidily al over the portico, no cracked stone urns outside the door. It looked beautiful.

Cleo sank back into the cushions and flicked through the loose pages in the folder. She didn’t care whether Tyler saw her or not, although he appeared too preoccupied on the phone to notice. There were several aerial photos, along with architect’s sketches and three-dimensional computer drawings of how the Wil ow would look when it was a grand Roth Hotel - for that was what was written in elegant script to one side of the drawing on the front - the Carrickwel Roth. Much bigger, much more imposing, much more beautiful than before. Her family home and her birthright, looking every bit as wonderful as she knew it could. Except this time, she wouldn’t be involved.

Cleo’s hands were shaking when she put the bits of paper back into the folder and replaced it on the coffee table, with the magazines on top. Tyler was in another world now, talking, writing and gesticulating on the phone. He hadn’t touched his camomile tea. Bloody typical, he’d only said he wanted it so he’d get her into bed. She was sure of it. A liar and a corporate raider, Cleo thought angrily. The town house developer who had supposedly bought the Wil ow was obviously a front for Roth Hotels. Her family had betrayed her by sel ing up in the first place but Roth Hotels had betrayed them al with this underhand dealing. Cleo was sure her father would have kept the Wil ow running, no matter what, rather than sel to another hotel group. Was that how Roth bought their valuable sites by pretending to be someone other than a vastly rich hotel group? Was the Galway land sale a front for another purchase, some other little hotel on the verge of breakdown with an owner who might sel to a local developer but never, ever to Roth Hotels?

Tyler put his hand over the receiver. ‘Hang on, Cleo, won’t be long. Us New Yorkers have no concept that the rest of the world is in different time zones,’ he joked.

She didn’t even look at him. She couldn’t bear to, not now.

Because she had liked Tyler Roth, real y liked him.

Thank God she hadn’t told him her name was real y Malin.

It would be too humiliating for him to find out that she was a part of the family who had owned the Wil ow and who had run it into the ground. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She took a long, steadying gulp of her camomile tea, gathered up her things, and walked to the door.

Tyler was so busy on the phone that he never noticed Cleo walk out of his life.

For a week after Alex had told her it was over, Daisy stayed at home doing her grocery shopping on the internet and nipping out to the corner shop every couple of days for things like chocolate. She didn’t bump into anyone she knew there: they wouldn’t have recognised her, anyway.

With a basebal hat pul ed over unwashed hair and huddled into an old sweater of Alex’s that stil smel ed of him, she was unrecognisable. He’d taken nearly al of his clothes when she’d been in Diisseldorf, lots of his possessions too.

He’d left only the big things, like the TV they’d bought together and a few pictures. The apartment looked bleak without al the little things that had made it his home.

Sitting on her own in misery, Daisy didn’t answer the phone, although she jumped every time it rang in case it was Alex. It never was. The machine got al the cal s: from Mary to see how the ‘flu’ was, from Paula, from Daisy’s old friend Fay, and once, from her mother, saying she was going on holiday to Prague this summer with Daisy’s aunt, who was recuperating from an operation. Her mother liked talking to the answering machine and had far livelier chat with it than she ever had with Daisy. Answering machines never had their own opinions and just listened.