Artistic License (15 page)

Sophy blinked.
Yikes
. Evidently the claws were out and they were still in the cocktail portion of the evening. She stood tensely at Mick’s side, her nails digging into the stem of her wine glass. She despised situations like this in general and she was discovering it was exponentially worse when someone that you loved was involved. Loved. Liked. Cared for. She wasn’t quite ready to mentally tackle that point yet and she thought it was best to keep her focus on the immediate scene.

Here there be dragons.

“It’s like you said at the time, Dad,” said Marcus softly. He hadn’t bothered to get up at all, but continued to lounge in an armchair, one foot dangling negligently in an Italian leather loafer. In looks, he was a tanned, slightly less faded duplicate of his father. They both had profiles that wouldn’t be out of place on an ancient coin. The entire family, with the exception of Mick, was actually quite similar in appearance: a coterie of sleek, aristocratic greyhounds against Mick’s grizzly bear brute strength. Physically, he dominated the room. The Hollisters were all tall – she felt like a lone Lilliput in a land of Gullivers; even the shorter doctor had a good six inches on her – but Mick was at least a head taller and considerably wider. She suspected that any sort of personal disadvantage would not sit well with men like Michael and Marcus Hollister. The elder brother proved it by going on in silky accents, “A wise man plays to his strengths. Mick has two working fists.”

And no functioning brain cells, was the clear implication.

Sophy stiffened. For a moment, her anger was far, far stronger than her shyness. She opened her mouth to retort and Mick’s fist closed gently around her forearm. She looked up at him and he shook his head once, just slightly. Her fierce breath subsided in a rush. The whole point of her being here was to try to make the weekend as easy on him as possible, to return the favour for his many acts of caring and kindness to her. She would take her cue from him and, in this instance, keep her mouth shut.

But… Mick was a top security consultant. He had a commerce degree and a portfolio of apparently successful investments. He had served his country in the military, for God’s sake. He seemed like the dream son to her. What more did his family want? A knighthood? A royal marriage?

She was completely at sea in the undercurrents here.

The atmosphere was no more cordial at dinner. When they had taken their seats around a beautiful antique dining table, set with white linens and candles, a server appeared from the kitchen. An actual servant. Like they were in a period film. The whole evening was starting to feel a bit surreal. A basket of warm artisan bread was passed around and Mick’s mother, playing the helpful hostess, placed a lightly steaming roll on his plate, scattering crumbs across the surface and effectively rendering it useless for him with his condition.

He clearly wasn’t likely to confide in his family, so Sophy could give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they didn’t know about the Coeliac Disease, but she suspected it was more likely they’d either forgotten or didn’t care enough to educate themselves. Without a word, she picked up her own clean plate and switched it with his. A faint warmth touched his eyes.

“Are you still based in London?” Michael Hollister asked abruptly.

This was supposed to be Marcus’s celebration dinner, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed that it was turning into an interrogation of his younger brother. His lips were turned up into a repellently smug sneer, like a reptile basking in the sun.

“I still have the flat in London,” Mick said evenly, accepting a platter of roast lamb from the server with a polite acknowledgment and offering it first to Sophy, then Hayley and his mother. “But there’s a lot of travel involved as our team accompanies William Ryland on his business ventures. We’re on assignment in Queenstown at the moment.”

“Dare we hope that you’re picking up some business acumen by second-hand exposure?” asked Marcus silkily. “Or is it all guns and glaring?”

Sophy could cheerfully have leaned over and stabbed him with her fork. And there were at least six to choose from.

Amazingly, a smile twitched at Mick’s mouth and his dimples appeared in a brief flash.

“Oh, there’s a little more to it than that,” he said, and he glanced sideways at Sophy. “You never know what kind of situations are going to fall at your feet.”

She quirked an impudent brow at him and for a moment it was as if they were alone at the table.

Mick’s father gave a dismissive sort of snort and sliced vigorously into his lamb.

“Damned nonsense,” he muttered, and a slight tightening of Mick’s lips was his only reaction.

The single most uncomfortable meal of Sophy’s life continued in a similar vein. The Dark Side of the Hollister family took it in turns to make comments and ask questions that ran the gamut from uninterested to openly aggressive. Mick replied like an emotionless automaton, which she knew he was
not
, and only rose to something approaching anger on two occasions. The first was in her own defence, when his mother made a slighting remark about the moral behaviour of artists – “Not, of course, meaning
you
, Sophia.” He had responded sharply and his mother had subsided immediately with an almost nervous glance at him.

Sophy, too, managed to keep her cool and remain silent, unhappily aware of the inadequacy of her passive support. She couldn’t help feeling that had their situations been reversed, Mick would have silenced all of her opposition with a few short, pointed sentences.

At one point, Michael questioned her about her sculpture and she stumbled and mumbled something about the upcoming competition and Mick’s role in her piece. There had been a stupefied silence at the notion of their brawny offspring acting as a model, eventually broken by a hastily smothered snicker from his sister, whom Sophy had long since written off as a complete pill.

She was more exasperated than anything else by then. She gave up. His family were a bunch of incurable blockheads. Mick seemed to share that view; his entire game plan appeared to be to keep cool, not ruffle the waters and get the hell out as soon as possible. Unfortunately there seemed to be about twenty-five different courses and most of the mouths around the table were too full of bile and snark to make much progress in chewing.

They were finally done with the dessert, slices of obscenely delicious chocolate cake for those not intolerant to wheat or fattening foods, which basically came down to Sophy and Marcus, and Mick excused them from the liqueurs in the drawing room. Sophy tried not to let an actual audible sigh of relief. Frankly, she thought he would be far better off heading back to his hotel room with an enormous bottle of Scotch.

Lest their escape from the lair be too easy, Michael took immediate offense at their reluctance to continue the emotional battery over a postprandial sherry. He launched a full-scale offensive at Mick, seeming determined to provoke him into retaliation, and failed to raise his son’s ire until he ended with disgust, “Good Christ, between you and your sister…”

It was as if Mick literally froze at her side. Suddenly she was standing next to a human popsicle. He took one step forward and his voice was brittle with anger.

“Don’t you d – ”

The moment that he moved, his mother reacted as if she had been prepared for such an action all evening. She flung an arm between her husband and her son, and glared at Mick almost defiantly. Her suspiciously plump, carmine lips were trembling. She was…frightened.

Sophy stared at her in astonishment.

Annabel was
afraid
of her son.

She was staring at Mick as if she expected him to just let loose, turn a sickly shade of lime and start tearing off his shirt with his fists.

Mick
.

Mick, whom Sophy was absolutely certain would be voluntarily stripped of his service medals before he would ever use unnecessary violence against another person.

And this was his
mother
.

Totally bewildered, she looked up at Mick and flinched. There was an expression there of almost unbearably tragic resignation. It was the most dominant emotion over the hurt and justifiable exasperation. She tucked a firm hand through the crook of his arm and felt him jerk slightly against her. He made no other movement.

Sophy scanned the row of Hollisters, standing shoulder to shoulder, facing off against them.

Next move: pistols at fifty paces.

“Thank you for dinner,” she said at last, lamely. “It was delicious.”

And easier to stomach than the company.

There really didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

Chapter Eight

The bride looked more like she was waiting for a bus than anticipating her vows. She kept shifting from one foot to the other and peering impatiently at the clock on the back wall of the church. Her obvious agitation had garnered a degree of interest among the bored-looking teenagers in the side pews, who were probably hoping that she was going to do a last-minute bolt.

From his unwelcome position in the family pew – his father was all about keeping up appearances – Mick studied his imminent sister-in-law. She was a fairly young blonde with a sharp chin and a stroppy expression, and he knew absolutely nothing about her except that her father was a backbench Member of Parliament who had insisted on an iron-clad pre-nup. Score ten points for Sean. The ceremony appeared to be keeping her from something more important. Holding her hands loosely in his, Marcus had the sleepy-eyed, slack-jawed countenance he always displayed after a hangover.

What a picture of wedded bliss.

A strand of silky brown hair brushed his collar and he glanced down at Sophy, sitting quietly by his side, one knee jiggling slightly. She was wearing another new dress, a silky blue-green fabric that draped distractingly over her breasts and thighs, and one of those silly things that women attached to the side of their heads at weddings and racecourses, as if they’d lost ninety percent of the hat on the way in. He had looked down at her several times since they’d arrived at the churchyard, ridiculously feeling as if he was making sure that she was still there and hadn’t subsided bashfully through the floor. She was so bright and funny when she was among friends that he already tended to forget how uncomfortable she was around strangers. He was constantly taken aback when his wise-cracking companion got out of the car or entered a building and suddenly seemed to shrink in both size and personality. He suspected that very few people knew the real Sophy.

The Minister was clearing his throat, thumbing through pages in his Bible. The bride and groom had gone with the traditional vows, which seemed a wise move. Marcus had delivered some spectacularly bad speeches in his time, when given free rein to improvise. There were good reasons why their father had pushed him into finance rather than the law. It was easier to spout nonsense in a boardroom than in a courtroom.

Mick sighed and moved his neck a fraction, trying to ease the muscle tension in his shoulders. He’d slept badly the night before; he usually did after dealing with his family
en masse
. On an individual basis, they could occasionally be tolerable. They all tended to be influenced by pack mentality and fed off one another when they were together. It was less amusing to be an ass without an audience. Although he and Marcus rarely had a civil word for one another regardless and his mother stringently avoided him. She seemed determined to believe that he had a loose fist and a hair-trigger fuse on his temper.

Christ, if he hadn’t snapped after thirty-one years of arguments, misunderstandings and petty digs, he wasn’t likely to start throwing punches at this point.

None of which made the whole situation any less bloody embarrassing when it was exposed to an outsider.

Neither he nor Sophy had spoken much when they’d left his parents’ house the previous evening. She had sat in the car, gazing thoughtfully out the dark window at the city lights, until they’d reached her hotel and she’d paused in opening the door to ask him if he had a mini-bar in his own room. She’d then sympathetically advised him to make use of it and cheekily promised to hold back his hair the next morning if he over-indulged.

Smiling faintly now, he rubbed a hand over his closely-shaved head.

He was grateful that she seemed to appreciate when silence was more healing than confession. She was one of the most sensitive, introverted people in his life; in many ways, her personality was radically different to his own, but nobody could better understand his need to sometimes be alone with his thoughts, to wrangle things through by himself.

The officiant had pronounced the happy couple husband and wife. Mick rose to his feet with the other three hundred guests, many of whom would be peripherally associated with his parents’ social interests and were unlikely to have even met Marcus and Emily. He found it difficult to believe that any of the people wiping at sentimental tears were intimately acquainted with the couple.

He did, however, genuinely hope that things worked out for his brother this time. He would be perfectly content to think of Marcus living out a congenial existence, at a distance insurmountable by car. Preferably in a different time zone.

As her veil brushed past him, he saw the new bride snatch her fingers from Marcus’s grip.

He wasn’t overly optimistic.

“How can anyone have this many friends?” Sophy whispered to him as they filed out of the church into the flower-bedecked courtyard. Her eyes were darting about, taking in the scene, widening when she recognised faces that had been reproduced in women’s magazines, but she kept her head and body quite still, as if trying not to attract notice. She made a startling contrast to the majority of the people around them, most of whom would all but cease to exist if they were locked in a room by themselves for any length of time. The creed of society: attention was everything. It was not an environment Mick had ever admired. Crowds tended to make him edgy for an entirely different reason. He doubted that Sophy’s wandering eye was scanning for concealed weapons. “Especially when they’re such a dick,” he heard her add under her breath, and a slight huff of laughter escaped his chest.

“They don’t,” he replied, putting a hand on her waist to steer her through the throng, resisting the urge to let it stroke down to her hip. “There’s no way that Marcus knows who even a tenth of these people are. Both sets of parents would have wielded an iron fist over the guest list. There’s no better opportunity to socially network.”

“Oh,” said Sophy, dodging back against him as a woman in violently purple silk barrelled past her like she was running for a penalty shot. “How romantic.”

The reception was kicking off straight away in the ballroom of a central city hotel, located conveniently close to both Sophy’s lodgings and his own. He figured a duty appearance for an hour or so would clear his familial obligations for this round. He doubted that Sophy would push to stay longer. She already looked as if she was slinking off to a public hanging. Her own, to judge by the facial enthusiasm.

She was enthralled by the decorations in the reception hall, though, where somebody had gone overboard with candles, Christmas tree lights and spiky flowers that probably cost almost as much as the diamonds hanging around the bride’s neck. Sophy immediately pulled out her digital camera and started taking close-up shots of wine glasses draped in crystal beads. He had no idea what women did with that sort of photo. Did they seriously ever look at them again?

“Oh, crap,” Sophy muttered, setting the camera aside to dig through her bag. A pack of tissues, a lipstick, her keys and various other items appeared on the table at his elbow. The bag was large enough and messy enough that she could have smuggled a small child in it. If she’d lost something, he anticipated her finding it approximately next Thursday. “I forgot to bring my phone. Damn it.”

“Do you need to make a call?” he asked, already reaching into his pocket for his own.

“No,” she said, looking bothered. “But I never come to things like this without my phone. That way if I find myself standing around with nobody to talk to, I can always fake text.”

He turned a laugh into a cough when he realised that she was serious.

“Would you like to hold on to mine?” he asked, keeping his face deliberately bland. He held it out between two fingers and she took it at once.

“Yes. Thanks.”

She was holding it to her chest like a kid clutching a teddy bear.

Mick was still grinning when he headed across to the bar to pick up a couple of glasses of champagne.

“The black sheep returns,” drawled a voice, and he turned to look at Marcus, who was draped across the mahogany counter. He also had a glass in each hand, but didn’t look inclined to share. A passing observer would be forgiven for writing him off as the token family soak rather than the man of the hour. “You seem to be enjoying yourself.”

“And you might want to slow down,” Mick returned coolly, propping an elbow against the bar as he studied his brother’s flushed face. Not the image of connubial bliss, by any means. Had their relationship been even a fraction less ugly, he might have been concerned. Sophy, for one, would probably bleed her heart out over the most obnoxious sister. His nature was obviously less forgiving. He found it hard to do better than indifference. “Or your wedding night might be even more disappointing for your bride than her demeanour would suggest.”

Marcus released a breath through his nose and eyed the champagne in his glass thoughtfully.

“I do so enjoy when we’re away from the mater and pater,” he drawled. He glanced over at the table where Sophy still sat, the phone in her hands. Mick followed the flicker of lasciviousness in his brother’s look, feeling his body tense. Sophy, oblivious to their regard, had the furrowed brow and engrossed look that usually accompanied her immersion in a book. From zero to reading in sixty seconds. “And the little woman, of course. It’s so much more interesting when the gloves come off, don’t you think?” He tipped his glass to Mick in a mocking salute. “Feel free to take a swing, won’t you? It can’t be healthy, I’m sure, to constantly repress any violent inclination.”

Mick shook his head. He felt a combination of pity and disgust as he met Marcus’s glinting gaze.

“I’m not sure what screws with your head the most. That I’m nothing like our father,” he said, “or that you’re everything that he is.”

And he turned his back and walked away.

***

The arrival of the first course finally diverted the attention of her verbose neighbour. Sophy let out a silent sigh of relief. She’d been nodding and smiling along to a lecture on the infant vaccination scheme for twenty minutes. She was fairly sure that she approved of the scheme in theory, but in logistical, halfway drunk detail, she hadn’t the faintest idea what the woman was talking about.

Mick had disappeared to get them drinks half an hour ago and the last she’d seen of him, he’d been waylaid by a crowd of cheek-kissers.

Steeling herself, she abandoned the dull safety of the table and ventured into the chattering hoards to look for him. The combined pitch of voices and laughter had become a sort of unified hum, rather like having an agitated bee inside her ear. Clinking glass and the thumping beat of music completed the universal sounds of a party.

She stood for a moment, looking around and feeling more than usually awkward. A man came up to her, leaned close and tried to make himself heard over the commotion. He asked a question about the guest rooms upstairs, of which she only caught the tail end. She had no idea whether he was genuinely seeking information or making an uninspired pass at her, so she gave an awkward shrug in return and slipped quickly away.

She finally found Mick near the entrance to the ballroom, engaged in conversation with a tall, attractive woman in her sixties. He was relaxed and smiling, which had been such a rarity in his familial environment that she blinked and hung back uncertainly. Mick caught sight of her and immediately held out a hand, his face creasing in a spontaneous grin. Her stomach did a little pleased flip. Putting her fingers in his, she allowed him to pull her into his side and wrap a friendly arm around her.

“Aunt Caroline,” he said, “this is Sophy James. Sophy, this my aunt, Caroline Hollister.”

Sophy extended her hand and was taken aback to be pulled into a hard, impulsive hug. The affectionate genes were obviously passed down the Hollister family tree in sparing but highly concentrated quantities.

“Sophy,” said Caroline warmly, clutching her upper arms to look searchingly into her face. She seemed to be satisfied with whatever she saw there, as her eyes disappeared into a web of happy creases. “Wonderful to meet you. I’ve just been hearing that you braved the lion’s den last night.”

This was so close to Sophy’s own analogy that she blushed slightly.

“Don’t let my brother put you off,” Caroline went on. “Our father was a gem of a man and despite Michael’s failings, look at the son he produced.” She smiled at Mick. “We don’t spring from entirely rotten roots.”