Christmas Nights (34 page)

‘Y
OU’RE
really going to go ahead and do it, then—take the job, despite… everything?’

Looking up from the pudding mixture she was stirring, Heaven Matthews grimaced at her best friend and nodded emphatically, confirming, ‘Yep, Janet, I’m really going to go ahead and do it.’

‘Well, I can understand why,’ Janet Viners acknowledged. ‘Anyone would, and after the way Harold Lewis treated you—after what he did to you—he certainly deserves to receive a taste of his own medicine!’

‘Oh, he will,’ Heaven said fervently, the stern look on her small, heart-shaped, vivacious face not really masking the pain Janet knew she was still suffering from the traumatic events which had so catastrophically affected her life. ‘He quite definitely will,’ Heaven averred, adding quietly, ‘Revenge, so they say, is a dish best eaten cold. We shall see. In this instance the proof of the pudding will quite definitely be in the eating—his eating, not mine. He always was a greedy pig, and not just for food.’

The smile which had brought into prominence the pretty dimples on either side of her generously curved mouth had faded again and as she watched her Janet reflected
sadly on how much the last months had sapped her friend’s normal joie de vivre and how rarely she had heard the infectious happy laughter that had always been such a wonderful part of Heaven’s personality. The fact that she was the kind of person—woman—who was loved and valued by all those who knew her only made what had happened to her seem all the more unbelievable, all the more unpalatable—if Janet was to follow Heaven’s humorous habit of using food metaphors and clichés in a tongue-in-cheek fashion to illustrate her conversation and to underline and emphasise her passionate love of good food.

Not that you would ever know it from her enviably slender figure, Janet acknowledged wistfully as she contrasted her own much plumper frame with Heaven’s delicate sylph-like figure.

Even when they had been at school together Heaven had been determined that one day when she was grown up she was going to be famous for her cooking.

Some months ago when Janet had reminded her of that childhood dream Heaven had given her a bitter smile and said painfully, ‘Well, I was nearly right, wasn’t I? Only instead of becoming famous what I’ve become is infamous… infamous, notorious and unemployable…’ And her strikingly beautiful dark blue eyes had filled with painful tears which, true to character, she had dashed impatiently away. The last thing that Heaven was was the kind of person who wallowed in self-pity, despite the fact that right now she had every reason to feel sorry for herself, Janet acknowledged, reflecting on the events of the last eighteen months.

A promising career totally ruined, her life turned upside down by the media interest the whole affair had
created, and as if that wasn’t bad enough poor Heaven had also had to live with the fact that no matter how often she protested her innocence there would always be those who were going to disbelieve her.

‘Who’s going to want to employ me as a private cook now?’ she had demanded bitterly some months earlier, when Janet had called round to find her friend busily trying to compose an ad for the classified pages of certain magazines.

‘Even if my name wasn’t recognised then sooner or later my face would be. I doubt there’s a hostess in London who hasn’t heard about the cook who tried to steal her employer’s husband.’

‘Are you really sure you’re doing the right thing?’ Janet tried now to counsel her friend gently. Perhaps because Heaven was so petite, too naively inclined to believe the best of everyone and she herself was so much taller, so much more wary, despite the fact that they were both the same age—twenty-three—Janet had always been inclined to be protective of Heaven.

They were standing in the kitchen of a pretty Georgian town house in Chelsea. Heaven’s father had inherited it from his great-aunt who had in turn inherited it from her parents, so there was a good deal of family history attached to it. Too much for the house to be sold, and since there was no way that Heaven’s parents were going to uproot themselves from the comfortable Shropshire village to which they had retired her father had suggested that Heaven should live there rent-free until she could restore some sort of order to her shattered life.

‘After all,’ Janet continued, ‘you’re starting to build up quite a nice little business for yourself and—’

‘Selling puddings through the classified ads and at country fairs,’ Heaven interrupted her in self-contempt. ‘Janet, I’m a trained cordon bleu cook. Making home puddings…’

‘It’s a living,’ Janet reminded her gently.

‘It’s an existence,’ Heaven corrected her. ‘If Dad wasn’t allowing me to live here rent-free…’

‘Have you thought of looking for work abroad, somewhere…?’

‘Where no one knows me?’ Heaven supplied for her, shaking her head. ‘Perhaps I should, but I haven’t. This is where I want to work, Janet. Here… London… my home… the place where I should be able to work, where I would be able to work if it wasn’t for that rat Harold.’ Angry tears filled her eyes. Determinedly she blinked them away. ‘I was just beginning to make a proper name for myself. I would have made a name for myself if that creep hadn’t gone and destroyed everything I’d worked for and…’

Heaven put the mixing bowl to one side and gave Janet a woeful look as she pushed her fingers into her already tousled dark curly hair.

‘I’m sorry to be such a wet lettuce, Jan, but you know…’

‘Yes, I know,’ Janet agreed sympathetically.

‘I just wish that Lloyd was earning enough for us to be able to employ you,’ she added with a grin. ‘He keeps complaining that he’s getting sick of microwave cooking. I think, of course, he’s using that as an excuse for getting me to go to his parents’ for Christmas. Not that I mind. I get on really well with his family. Have you made any plans yet? After all, it’s only next week…’

Heaven shook her head.

‘Mum and Dad have offered to pay for me to fly out to Adelaide with them. They’re off to spend Christmas and all of January with Hugh.’

Hugh, as Janet knew, was Heaven’s married brother who lived in Australia with his wife and children.

‘Why don’t you go with them?’ Janet urged her. ‘Who knows? You might even find you like it so much that you decide to stay there.’

‘Shipped off to Australia, like the family black sheep?’ Heaven countered painfully. ‘No… that isn’t what I want, Jan, even if the days are long gone when someone in disgrace was sent away from home. I feel that if I run away now people will think I’m running because I’m guilty, because I was to blame for the breakup of Harold’s marriage, because all those things he said…’ She stopped and gulped in a steadying breath.

‘I was not having an affair with him,’ she told her friend fiercely. ‘And even if he hadn’t been the completely loathsome and reptilian thing that he is I still wouldn’t have been tempted… not with another woman’s man. That just isn’t me, Jan… Mind you, some of it was my own fault,’ Heaven admitted with what Janet privately considered was far too much generosity; she had her own opinion of Harold Lewis and it wasn’t good—creep was far too kind a description of him, so far as she was concerned.

‘I should have guessed what lay ahead when he pretended he didn’t have enough cash to reimburse my travelling expenses when I went for the initial interview, but I was still green then and the job seemed such a good one. Residential, with summers with the family in Provence and the opportunity not just to cook for him and his wife and the two girls and do all their private
entertaining, but also to cook for his business lunches and dinners as well…’

‘I do understand how you must feel,’ Janet consoled her. Heaven gave her a small smile.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rant and rave at you. It’s just the unfairness of it all that gets to me still. He deliberately used me, set me up, lied about me by pretending that we were having an affair to Louisa, his wife, so that she would walk out on him, so that he could then divorce her and get away with keeping the house and hardly give her any proper settlement. She’s the one I should be feeling sorry for…’

‘Have you seen anything of her since?’

‘Since I so publicly got the sack and my name and my supposed role in their divorce, not to mention his bed, got so much media attention?’ Her pretty mouth twisted. ‘No, not really. Oh, she did try to make amends; she apologised for the fact that I’d been dragged into things and she told me that she recognised with hindsight just how cleverly she’d been tricked into believing I was having an affair with her husband.

‘Apparently he’d been dropping hints about “us” virtually even before I’d gone to work for them and had, in fact, insisted on employing me above her head; and he’d then gone on to deliberately arouse her suspicions and undermine her by letting her think that he was attracted to me.

‘You’d never think he was virtually a millionaire, would you—not after the way he’s been so mean with Louisa?’

‘Sometimes the richer a man is the meaner he is,’ Janet pointed out.

Heaven grimaced in distaste. ‘If you ask me Louisa
is well rid of him, and I suspect from what she hinted at that she has started to feel the same way since their divorce. She did say that she had tried to tell her friends that Harold had lied about me and about my role in the break-up of their marriage, but let’s face it, no one is really going to believe her.’

As she saw the way Heaven’s expressive eyes filled with sad tears, Janet felt her own eyes fill up in sympathy.

It wasn’t just her job she had lost, Heaven reflected inwardly as she determinedly pulled the pudding mixture towards her and started to finish a fresh batch of puddings. The money she was earning from the small classified ad she had taken, offering ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’s traditional figgy puddings by post’, had brought her a much needed small income even if she was beginning to get sick of the sight and smell of her very saleable and mouthwatering puddings.

No, it wasn’t just the job she had lost. Not even Janet knew about those delicate, fragile private hopes that had begun to grow after Louisa’s brother had casually asked if she would like to take up a spare ticket he had for one of London’s newest plays.

Jon Huntingdon, Louisa’s brother, was an eminent financial consultant. Tall, dark-haired and suavely handsome. He had set Heaven’s all too vulnerable heart beating just that little bit too fast the very first time she had been introduced to him by Louisa, several days after she had first taken up her new job. Unmarried and in his thirties, Jon Huntingdon was almost too swooningly male, too darkly handsome, with a heart-melting sense of humour betrayed by the twitch of his mouth as he gently teased Louisa’s daughters, his nieces.

Heaven had prepared for their date in a fever of excitement; she had even cajoled an early birthday cheque out of her father in order to splash out on a new outfit. A Nicole Farhi dress and jacket, the dress a silver shimmer of thick matt jersey cut in a halter-neck style and supported simply by a thin silver collar.

She hadn’t really needed to see the appreciative male gleam of sensual pleasure in Jon’s eyes the evening he had picked her up to know that the dress looked good on her, but she had enjoyed seeing it there none the less.

After the play had ended he had taken her out for supper at a small French restaurant she had never even heard of, but when she had ordered and tested the French onion soup she had known that his taste in good food was as impeccable as his taste in well-made clothes.

After dinner he had driven her home, parking his silver-grey Jaguar discreetly in the drive of the Lewises’ house and then switching off the lights.

Heaven, who had been awaiting this moment ever since he had made his casual invitation to take up his spare ticket, hadn’t been sure if it was exhilarated excitement that was churning her stomach so nervously, or pure fear.

She had been out with good-looking men before, but she had never previously met anyone who’d affected her as quickly and overwhelmingly as Jon had done, and she had known even then, with that heart-deep instinct that all women possessed, that he was a man who could be something very special in her life… perhaps even be the man.

And then he had kissed her.

Briefly, decorously, unthreateningly… the first time!

After the world had stopped turning around her, after
she had stopped feeling like one of those small figures in a child’s toy snow storm, he had kissed her again.

And she had responded, totally unable to stop herself from letting her emotions show.

‘I’m not used to this,’ she told him shakily and plaintively when he eventually released her.

‘Do you think I am?’ he countered rawly before drawing her back into his arms. ‘You smell of cinnamon and honey, and everything good that was ever created,’ he told her huskily as he breathed in the scent of her with heart-rocking sensuality, ‘and I could eat you—every tiny last bit of you.’

He didn’t do that, but he certainly kissed her again, deeply, lingeringly, like someone relishing every mouthful of a delicious meal, parting her lips and tasting her mouth as though he were enjoying some sweet, juicy-fleshed fruit.

There wasn’t anything else. He didn’t make any attempt to touch her more intimately, and, despite the way he had aroused her, irrationally she was glad… glad of the fact that already he liked her enough, cared enough not to want to rush things, to gobble down the pleasure she knew instinctively the two of them could share.

‘I have to go away tomorrow,’ he whispered to her as he held her face and kissed her gently on the mouth a final time. ‘Business in Europe. But once I get back I’ll be in touch…’

But of course he hadn’t been, she mused now. She hadn’t been there for him to get in touch with. The storm had broken two days later, and she had gone to ground, with Louisa accusing her of having an affair with her husband and him having admitted it. Refusing
to listen to Heaven’s denials, Louisa had left her husband, taking their two children with her.

Although he had strenuously denied it Heaven had had a pretty shrewd suspicion that it had been Harold himself who had leaked the story to the press. The initial story had quickly turned into a nationally covered media debate on Heaven’s supposed treachery in having an affair with Harold—a debate which had left her reputation in tatters and her self-esteem so low that she had been more than grateful to accept her parents’ suggestion that she leave London and stay with them until the fuss had died down.