Glittering Fortunes (24 page)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

D
ON
’
T
STRUGGLE
, I’
VE
got you
,
I’ve got you
...

Strong arms encircled her. The voice was carrying her across miles and miles of wide blue sea. She wanted to see who it was but the light was too painful, and she already knew because she recognised that voice. It had never left, it had always been there, and she was afraid that if she opened her eyes it would dissolve in the wind.

Flat, cool sand as it spread wide beneath her back. Muffled, hard-to-hear calls. A hand was cradling her head; it was hot and she was cold.

‘Can you hear me?’

There it was again. Yes, she could hear.

A mouth was on hers, soft and warm, bringing her back to life.

Chapter Forty

S
HE
COUGHED
UP
water, a salty cupful that splashed on to the sand. Charlie wrapped a blanket round her, rubbing her shoulders to bring up the rest.

The circle poured forward, frantic with concern.

Is she OK?
What does she need?

Give her space.
She’ll be all right.
She’s in shock.

A dark-haired girl burst out of the crowd and fell to her knees, pulling Olivia into a hug. ‘Thank God you’re all right,’ she cried. ‘I thought you were dead.’

The rest of the surfers were clambering in from the water, rushing to see what had happened. The pretty boy led the charge, exclaiming when he saw her, ‘Jesus Christ, Oli; what were you thinking?’ He wedged his board in the sand, confidence restored, flicking his crop of blond. ‘I knew this was way out of your league.’

‘And I know she’s way out of yours,’ said Charlie menacingly. ‘Back off before I make you.’

‘All right, mate...’ Addy scowled at the darkly sea-swept man before him, then realised who he was and with it the bluster dissolved.

‘She was the only one who rode it,’ put in Beth, scanning the ring. ‘Notice how none of you boys stepped in to help.’

‘It was quite the dramatic rescue,’ supplied Thomasina Feeny, her face bloated with envy at the sight of handsome, heroic Charlie Lomax bounding into the sea, powering through a swell of currents and dragging out Chopped Liver. Why didn’t that sort of thing ever happen to her? She was so much prettier, for God’s sake!

‘You didn’t even
stand up
out there,’ Thomasina muttered tightly to her boyfriend. ‘How embarrassing! Couldn’t you at least have made an effort?’

‘You try doing it, then,’ Addy retorted grimly.

Charlie guided Olivia’s face round to his. ‘Are you OK?’

Dazedly she nodded. ‘Is it really you?’

He wiped a streak of sand with his thumb. ‘Yes. It’s me.’

Into her green eyes he fell without fear of the drop.

Olivia Lark. His Olivia.

He had never kissed nor been kissed quite so tenderly. She tasted sweet, of the deep, deep quiet of the sea.

‘Done playing the hero yet, old bean?’

A familiar snarl broke them apart. Charlie stood. The circle around them split, and Cato could be seen through the rift, charging towards them. His brother’s hair was wild, his expression more savage than Charlie had known it in twenty-six years of savagery. Close to, it was apparent he’d been drinking: his eyes were rimmed, the flesh sallow and flaccid.

In the distance, a raft of photographers was trickling down to the bay. Cato’s emergence from Usherwood had brought them out like rats from a sinking ship.

Charlie opened his mouth to speak, to ask that they take this somewhere secluded, but before he could Cato pushed him. The thump was hard, and momentarily winded him. He fell backwards on to the sand.

‘Happy now,
brother
?’

Their tide of onlookers shrank back. There was an unusual aura about Cato, one that at first Charlie couldn’t put his finger on but then it fell into his hands, slippery as a fish. Cato was afraid. His defences were stripped. Vulnerable, not invincible: he could be broken, his armour melted, unveiling the skin beneath.

‘I had a visit from Fiona Montgomery this morning,’ Cato rasped, his face twisted and grey. ‘Very enlightening, it was. She came looking for you, but with a little gentle persuasion I managed to squeeze it out of her.’

Charlie’s eyes flicked to the advancing paparazzi.

‘Go home, Cato,’ he said. ‘You’re attracting attention.’

‘She told you the truth...’ Olivia spoke. ‘Didn’t she?’

Charlie turned to her. ‘What truth?’

‘It’s not the truth, you fucking bunch of idiots.’ There he was, the Cato they knew. ‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you, to save you the indignity of believing that trout’s heap of total and utter fucking bullshit. You’ve been deceived enough, old boy; don’t let them do it to you again. It’s a lie; do you hear me?
A
lie.
’

The cameras were having a field day. Images clicked and flashed, and a new declaration rose from the crowd, a man’s voice, low and clear.

‘No, it isn’t.’

A ripple travelled through their audience. Cato’s head twitched like a bird’s, searching for the source of the treachery.

Slowly the man stepped forward, his arms held out. Charlie knew the man, and yet until this moment hadn’t known him at all. His expression was sore with longing and apology. Cato stumbled in the sand, his face leached of colour.

‘Stay away from me,’ he hissed. ‘You stay the
fuck
away from me.’

Charlie looked from one to the other. The man was close now, in spite of his brother’s caution, and with each tread Cato seemed to flag, he seemed to mislay for whom or what he was fighting for, weakened in the shadow of this gentle approach.

In a last-ditch kick against the facts, Cato pitched a swing. It was ill-judged and drunkenly chaotic, but in any case his target was too fast.

The man caught Cato’s fists in his own and held them. In that moment of locked, silent combat, the curtain lifted. There it was.

His brother’s mouth, his brow, the bridge of his nose. The chin, the lips and the curve of his shoulders... Bright as day, there it was.

Cato had never come up against Richmond like this. He had never been reduced by Richmond to his lesser self, rescued of all his nonsense and bravado.

With this man, his brother was a boy.

Charlie’s past, his present, his future, spun before him on the roll of a dice.

In Ben Nancarrow’s eyes blazed a fury that was years in the melding.

Cato buckled to the sand. His father caught him and held him up.

Epilogue

One month later

I
TALY
IN
SEPTEMBER
was beautiful.

Olivia opened her eyes to the warmth of unbroken sunshine. A
gentle breeze drifted in through the shutters of their Tuscan
pensione
, scented like lemons and the sharp green of
freshly cut grass. The day rolled out before them, endlessly perfect.

Standing, she slipped on one of Charlie’s T-shirts and went to
the veranda. Bountiful fields stretched before her, studded with slender Cypress
trees. She stretched and caught his aroma on the material: the heat of his
body.

On the table her sketchbook bulged with drawings. Since
arriving she had captured everything her imagination had latched upon: the wide
landscape aglow in the setting sun; an isolated church buried in the hillside;
an elderly shopkeeper going about his daily business; a group of children
playing football in the square...and Charlie, always Charlie, whom she could
draw for ever.

She turned to the bed. His chest was golden, his dusky hair a
mess. Not wanting to wake him, she crept outside and breathed the air.

The trip had been his idea. If they were going to start
again—with the cove, with Usherwood, with everything—-they had to do it right,
and that meant putting some sliver of distance between now and the future. Over
the summer Charlie’s world had been thrown upside down, and while in some sense,
with Fiona’s input, it had been righted, they accepted that it would be for ever
changed.

In the end, Cato had borne the brunt of their mother’s deceit.
Despite his behaviour Olivia couldn’t help feeling pity. All his life Cato had
sought to prove himself to a man who had turned out to be nothing to him, and
the Lomax anchor nothing but a temporary float. Without his inheritance, Cato
was lost.

He had returned to the States to live. The press had gone wild
for the illegitimacy story, splashing the Lustell beach pictures across every
tabloid, and a keen-eyed passer-by’s phone footage making waves on YouTube. In
it Cato could be seen on his knees, his father’s arms around him. Fans embraced
it as an emotional, long-lost reunion, testament to the happy ever afters
peddled by the movie industry, but they would never know the journey that had
led them to that point.

As far as his fledgling relationship with Ben Nancarrow went,
that was anyone’s guess. Reports had sailed over that Ben had been spotted with
his son in an LA restaurant. Olivia hoped they were true, but common sense told
her better. Thanks to Richmond Lomax’s threat all those years ago, staying out
of the spotlight was a skill Ben had perfected for life. Irrespective of the
years he longed to make up for, he couldn’t fit in with Cato’s world. As men
they were poles apart.

Since the revelations, Cato too had shied from the limelight.
Charlie was confident this was a short-term arrangement, and that Cato would
tend his wounds for a while before coming back fifty times stronger. Olivia
searched for a tone when he spoke of his brother, some mean or uncharitable
inflection, something that betrayed Charlie’s own narrow escape, but there was
none. He said that his past with Cato was behind them. It was over. He had said
what he needed to say. Cato knew where he was if he wanted to see him: they
still shared Beatrice, they were still brothers...

And Usherwood was still Cato’s home.

So, it seemed, was Caggie Shaw, who was becoming something of a
celebrity herself over in LA. Word had it she’d been offered her own cookery
show on a top lifestyle network; a sexy British schoolmarm-type affair with a
splash of
Nigella
finger licking. Her rumoured
dalliance with the man himself, inflamed after a string of enigmatic comments
given to the press by ex-girlfriend Susanna Denver, had Caggie pegged as the
definitive cougar. Olivia remembered the cook making breakfast at Usherwood and
was bemused by it. She’d never guessed her affection for Cato ran so deep. Then
again, they had been sleeping together since he was a teenager—for both of them
their longest, and probably most meaningful, relationship.

Once, Caggie had been a replacement for his mother; now she was
a replacement for his past. Cato had to hold on to something.

Susanna, meanwhile, was set to embark on her first major film
role in years. Her chick-flick days had limped on to bloody stumps, and this
venture, her team promised, would mark a shift in audience perception. Directed
by movie colossus Howard Brice, it was tagged for mega things. Olivia had been
pleased to see her hook up with a British producer, and even more when Susanna
had been snapped with her happily smiling six-year-old in a New York park. Thorn
had now been officially unveiled as a part of her life, and was expected to
spend his school holidays there. At last Susanna was facing up to her
responsibilities, and with it had filled an absence that no man or movie role or
ten-thousand-dollar gown could ever hope to.

Olivia leaned on the balcony. She closed her eyes and pictured
the autumn approaching at home, her mother’s caravan covered in leaves: her
favourite time of year. Wherever she went in the world, Lustell Cove would
always be the place she yearned for. They had only been gone three weeks, but
she was excited to get back.

She couldn’t wait to see Beth. For days after the Surfathon her
friend had barely left her side, worried Olivia was about to develop post-event
hypothermia or choke on some remnant of seaweed. Beth was in awe of Charlie, and
never got tired of relaying the story of how he had bound unthinkingly into the
ocean, tearing off his shoes and shirt and ploughing into the waves. ‘That sort
of thing just doesn’t
happen
in real life!’ she’d
swooned, and Olivia had to admit it was kind of amazing. Beth wasn’t short of a
bit of romance herself, and was blissfully loved-up with Sackville.

Olivia confessed to a twinge of smugness when she pictured
Thomasina and Lavender watching the rescue. All through school they had mocked
and derided her, and finally she’d had her moment. Bizarrely Addy and Thomasina
were still together, though according to Beth they were constantly at war. He
had sacked off his acting plans and instead was pursuing a modelling career, in
true Addy style making a beeline for Serendipity Swain in case she could provide
him with a useful inroad. Apparently Thomasina felt threatened by the company he
might be keeping and was attempting to get her own foot on the fashion ladder,
which automatically meant that Lavender was doing the same. Daddy Feeny was
paying for the best portfolio money could buy.

She was pulled from her thoughts by a trail of kisses being
planted along her neck. Charlie’s strong arms looped round her waist.

Melting against him, she smiled.

The house would be waiting when they got back, it and the dogs
ably looked after by a reinstated Barbara. For the first time he could look
forward to Usherwood’s future. Days before they had left for Europe, an
anonymous benefactor had donated an astonishing slug of money to the estate,
enough to cover everything that Charlie had been working for years to achieve.
It could only have been Barnaby Cartwright.

‘I could get used to this,’ she said.

‘Good.’ The word was muffled against her shoulder. ‘Now come
back to bed.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Time you let me kiss you.’

She turned into his embrace. The kisses she had known before
could never come close. Charlie Lomax’s kiss was sublime.

As he led her back inside, she thought only of the promise of
the days to come. They would take things slowly. Charlie had been persuaded to
take up the offer of an exhibition (as it turned out, Sackville had approached
him before Beth had a chance to put in a word), and as for Olivia’s own artistic
endeavours she had a tough call to make. A friend’s museum had contacted her,
suggesting to her a residency. It would mean relocation back to London, at least
for a while. She hadn’t told Charlie. Occasionally he would slip when he spoke
of the estate, talking of ‘we’ and ‘us’ and catching himself and retracting it.
To think of her life there was both exciting and terrifying. Even in her wildest
dreams she could never have imagined it.

There would be a world to occupy and inspire her, the gardens
and the house endless muses. A world to love in Charlie alone.

After the day of the rescue, he had taken her back to
Usherwood. In a case in the library, undiscovered by Cato in his clear-out, had
been a wrapped parcel.

‘
This is for you,’
he’d said,
holding it out.

Olivia had unpacked it. It was the plate she had seen in Cley:
the grey-green paint that had drawn her on the afternoon with Thorn and the
crabs and the sunburn.

The movement on the waves and the lifting, invigorating spray,
it was just the same: the same as the day they had laid her father to rest.

‘
I
saw how much you fell in love with it,’
Charlie had
told her, looking deep into her eyes. ‘
And that was when I
fell in love with you.’

He kissed her now as fiercely as he had then. Olivia held him
close, Charlie Lomax, her Charlie, her lover and her friend, and knew she had
unlocked the secret.

* * * * *