Four Temptations (4 page)

§

I had never really seen Simon Darby in that way before. Or, at least, I had never quite put all the clues together, all the little signs. He was tall, slim, with strawberry blond hair and eyes that were a piercing pale blue. He was charming, funny, intelligent, and he had the kind of physique that good clothes just hung off, as if they had been made for him to wear.

Others saw him that way – he had never been short of female company, although, for some reason, they never seemed to stick around for long. It was as if he fended them off, distanced himself from them; as if there had always been something else occupying that space in his life.

Some
one
else.

Me.

I had never, consciously, thought about all of this.

I had been blind.

Or I had blinded myself.

He was just Simon Darby.

An old acquaintance, a part of the backdrop to my life.

My husband’s best friend.

My lover.

Simon Darby.

I
really should have known better. I’d be the first to admit that.

Doomed relationships? Volatile lovers who can never make things work together? So many fights the admittedly fantastic sex just isn’t enough in the end (although it takes the longest time to really be sure about that when the sex is so good)? Temptations that should really be ignored, because how could that particular relationship ever stand a chance?

Tell me about it.

I’ve been there, seen it all. Written the book and sold the movie.

And maybe that’s the problem.

§

I’m Maggie Nolan and I write.

I write novels based on the experiences of my friends and, predominantly, myself. Novels that leave no stone unturned. Just as the sex in my stories is explicit, so too is the scratching beneath the emotional skin. I try to tell it as it is.

He’s Brandon Tyne and he writes, too.

He writes for the
New Yorker
and
Granta
. He writes books about his travels, and about the food and drink he discovers along the way; he writes about the people he meets and fights with and sleeps with. He likes to tell it how it is.

Both of us really should have known that a relationship between us would never work out.

But sometimes the truth isn’t so obvious when it’s right in front of your nose, is it?

§

You learn from your mistakes, though. You learn that even a mistake is not a bad thing if you’ve gained from the experience. Also, you learn when to call it a day.

And you learn that – no matter how much your memories may have become rose-tinted – the past really should remain in the past.

§

Brandon always had a default charm about him. There was something about that lazy Texan drawl and the spark that could appear in his eyes at any time that would disarm anyone. He was tall and rake-thin, with salt and pepper hair and small, wire-rimmed glasses that gave an intellectual edge to his slightly weather-beaten good looks.

I've never known anyone who manages to combine that innocent charm with a sharp glint of mischief in his look quite as well as Brandon does.

And the bastard was doing it all over again.

§

The smiles, the little possessive touches, the unguarded comments. The
flirting.

Did he even know he was doing it, or had he finally learned to relax in my company again? By that logic, had he finally stopped caring, if he was able to relax with me again?

We were at the annual Abel and Riley soiree, the kind of event where I was always going to run into Brandon, given that, in Jimmy Abel, we shared a literary agent and we were two of Abel and Riley's hottest properties.

Drinks and canapés with a mix of writers, journos, editors, bookstore buyers, TV people, publicists and more; it was the kind of event that reminded me I really am a proper writer. I'd become accustomed to this kind of thing in the last couple of years, since
Leaving Lulu
had hit the bestseller lists and the movie rights had sold to Hollywood (although I must say I’d never seen Lulu as an Anne Hathaway type, but hey).

Abel and Riley loved to wheel me out for these things, and generally I was happy to play along. It’s how the business works, and it had never harmed my career that I was easy company and even easier on the eye: tall and curvy in a way that I know from experience men love.

I was there with a drink in my hand, laughing at something inane that the little guy from an American bookshop chain had said. Unusually for me, my heart really wasn’t in it this evening. On the back of the movie deal, my second novel had secured a massive print run, with all the attendant publicity that brings. There was even coverage in the broadsheet press and the BBC in the lead up to next week's publication of the book; trashy was the new high-brow, apparently, and my work was the exemplar. I took that as a grudging compliment.

And, against this rather frenetic backdrop, I was trying to keep my head down and concentrate on the next book. Oh for a quiet life.

The little bookseller had said something else and for a moment there was an awkward silence as he waited for some kind of response. I laughed – the safest option, given that he’d been trying to crack jokes for the past five minutes.

“And then she said–”

He was interrupted by a tall figure leaning into the too-small space between us, pulling an eyes-wide-open expression of surprise and saying, “Excuse me for interrupting, but may I just say...
Wow!
”

And with that, Brandon Tyne took me by the elbow and steered me smoothly away from the somewhat less than stimulating bookseller.

“Thanks, Bran,” I said. “I was in danger of gnawing my own arm off to stave off the boredom.”

“No really,” he said. “I meant every word of that ‘wow’. You sure haven’t lost it, Maggie.” Then he gave that rakish grin that would make a woman forgive anything, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. The scent... the touch... So familiar and yet simultaneously like some distant memory of a dream.

“It’s only been two years, Bran.”

“An eternity without you.”

That way of his. The way you could never tell if he was joking or serious, or what the balance was between the two. He was the kind of man who hid behind jokes, but whose humor always had serious depths. He was impossible to read, and he knew that and played on it, and somehow that was all part of the charm.

“Stop it, Bran, okay?”

“I would if I knew what ‘it’ was, babe.” He shrugged and smiled and I wanted to punch him. “So,
Words of Love
. Out next week, right? Jimmy sent me an advance reading copy. I like. I was surprised to see that there’s so much
us
in it. I like that, too, I think.”

“What part of ‘stop it’ don’t you get, Brandon?”

“You sure have come a long way, babe.”

Was he deliberately reminding me of my debt to him, or was that just an innocent observation? Either would have been in character.

Back then I’d been freelancing as a copywriter, doing a spot of promotion for a TV series by some American journalist I’d never heard of. Name of a river. Brandon Tyne,
The Traveling Foodie
. Not quite a cookery show, not quite a travelogue, but somewhere in between. I’d ghostwritten features for various women’s mags and blogs, pitching him as a bit of a sexy rascal, the kind of man it was okay for a married woman to have a thing for. Indeed, the kind of man it was almost obligatory for a married woman to have a thing for: if you didn’t, you just weren’t normal.

He’d done that thing, the chat, the spark, the little touches. He’d said he liked my writing but I wasn’t naïve enough to actually believe that. I didn’t mind the flattery, though: the flirting, the attention from a man I’d helped put at the centre of everyone else’s attention.

Much to my surprise, he’d been serious about my writing. He kept telling me I should write books, and he'd told his agent, Jimmy Abel, all about me.

The first I knew was a call from Jimmy, asking if I had anything available. Thinking quickly, I’d said I was working on a novel based on a magazine piece I’d written recently. It was about a young woman called Lulu who used her charms to make her way in the world. He asked to see the piece and I emailed it to him, thinking that even if he was interested literary agents were notoriously slow, so I would have plenty more time to think about it and write some more.

He called back that afternoon, asking to see the book.

“I might need a couple of weeks,” I told him. “It needs a bit of a polish.”

“Cool, cool. So tell me, by ‘a bit of a polish’ do you mean you haven’t actually finished a first draft yet?”

There was something about his voice that put me at ease. “Well,” I said, “if by ‘haven’t actually finished a first draft yet’ you mean I don’t have much more than a chapter where I’ve been trying to turn that magazine feature into fiction, and lots of post-it notes, then yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

He’d laughed, which I took as a good sign. Then he said, “Just send me whatever you can, whenever you can. I’m keen. I think we could do things with this.” Which I took as an even better sign.

§

So... Brandon and his flirting. And he really was flirting.

“That scent,” he whispered in my ear as we chatted to another of Jimmy’s authors. “Didn’t I buy that for you?”

“It’s soap.”

It was actually Madame by John Paul Gaultier, and yes, Brandon had introduced me to it. Call me a heartless bitch, but I hadn’t seen any reason to dump the scent just because I’d dumped the man.

“It’s okay. I just needed an excuse to lean in close like this,” he said, leaning in close to whisper into my ear again, one hand resting briefly on the small of my back.

That was the moment...

Up until then I’d been vaguely amused by his behavior, but now... now I realized he might just be serious, and what’s more, I liked it.

Yes, I know, I should have known better than that. I write about this all the time: relationships that work and those that don’t. I think I’m a pretty good judge of this kind of thing, and Brandon and I was a thing that had had its chance and been found wanting.

But that touch, on the small of my back. The look in his eye when he met my surprised look. That leaning in to whisper in my ear thing.

God but that all worked for me!

It was the same old chemistry. It was why there had
been
a Brandon and me in the first place. It was–

They were talking, Brandon and the author whose name I suddenly didn’t care that I’d forgotten. Looking at me for a response. That was the second time this evening that I’d lost track of a conversation. So unlike me.

Brandon had taken his hand away and, more than anything else, I wanted his touch again. I needed it. There was no denying a feeling so strong, no amount of logic that would argue successfully against that kind of need.

He met my eye again, and it was clear that he knew it too.

He steered me away to one side of the room. “Maybe we should–”

“What?” I interrupted. “Slip away from here? Find somewhere private? Was it a knee-trembler or a quick blow-job you were after, Bran? You always were the big romantic.”

“You can be so cruel sometimes,” he said, a mock hurt look on his face. “I do love that about you.”

“You can be an incorrigible bastard,” I replied. “And I tell you, I’m not so in love with that about you.”

“That old chemistry, eh?”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

Funny how I could switch from feeling so hot for him that I really would have slipped away from the party to this: the kind of exchange that was stuck uncomfortably somewhere between joking and bickering. In our time together, that balance had steadily tipped until every exchange had at least an undertone of fight to it and now I was reminded of all that had been wrong about us.

The moment was gone.

It was stupid, and I knew it was stupid. Even to lapse for a minute and enjoy his attention. Stupid.

§

“Please tell me I didn’t just see what I think I just saw...”

“Jimmy, darling. If you tell me what you think you just saw, I’ll be able to say whether you really saw what you think you just saw or if what you just saw was something else entirely.” I smiled sweetly, and snagged another glass of cheap Chardonnay from a passing waitress.

“I’ll tell you what I want–”

“What I really really want?”

“Shall we start this again?”

“Let’s. Jimmy darling, such a lovely do again. Thank you so much.”

Jimmy took a deep breath. He had that schoolboy look on his face, like he was trying to contain some private joke and struggling not to break out into an almighty big grin. His dark eyes met mine, then jumped away again in that way of his. I’d always suspected this nervousness in his manner was something of an affectation; you don’t get to be one of the most powerful literary agents in the country if you’re a tongue-tied Bambi.

“Maggie,” he said, in that gentle Dublin lilt. “How lovely. Now, tell me. That wasn’t what it looked like, was it?
Please
?”

“Did it look like two of your favorite clients chatting over a drink? Because if so, then it was
just
what it looked like.”

“Good. Because if it wasn’t just two clients having an innocent chat over drinks then it looked like two people who split up pretty damned acrimoniously a couple of years ago breathing a little life back into the embers, and we all know where that leads to, don’t we, Maggie?”

“Aren’t we getting just a little melodramatic, darling? ‘Acrimonious’...?”

“Okay, I concede. You’re the wordsmith, I’m just the guy who sells your shit to Hollywood. If you say ‘acrimonious’ isn’t the right word for a break-up where everyone gets dragged into the fighting and mud-slinging and then you divvy up your friends and everything else between you, then I’ll bow to your specialism.”

Had Brandon and I really been that obvious this evening? And just when I’d almost convinced myself it had been little more than an innocent moment of fun.

“We didn’t divvy up
you
, Jimmy.”

“Like I say, I sell your shit to Hollywood. I’m like the kid with shared custody. Okay, Mam?”

I punched him on the arm, probably a little too hard.

“So, talking of selling my shit...”

§

He called.

Of course the bastard called.

There was no denying now that it hadn’t been an idle moment of fun, a lapse into flirting simply because we were more comfortable with each other now at these kinds of events.

“Hello there, gorgeous.”

“I’ve got a mudpack on and my hair in rollers,” I said.

“Oh I do love it when you talk dirty, babe. You going to tell me you’ve got those big granny knickers on, too, you big ol’ tease?”

I was in my office, feet up, laptop resting on my thighs. It was mid-afternoon and I’d added three paragraphs to the book, and then deleted two of them. I was in one of those kind of moods. I didn’t want distracting. Or maybe I did. I didn’t know. I never claimed to be easy, now, did I?