In Want of a Wife? (14 page)

‘You’re blowing this out of all proportion.’

‘Don’t you dare say that!’

‘What did Jessica say to your sister? No—hold that thought. I’m going to get you another drink.’

Lizzy opened her mouth to protest because she was anything but a drinker, but the thought of that pleasantly numbing effect caused by the wine was enticing. She watched, her nerves all over the place as he stood by the bar commanding attention in that way he had—the same way he had managed to command attention from a bunch of random seven-and eight-year-old kids he had never met in his life before who were, generally speaking, distrustful of any adult figure of authority they didn’t know. It was just the way he was.

‘Now. Talk to me.’ He sat back and looked at her while Lizzy cradled the wine glass in her hands and stared down at the gently swirling liquid.

‘I honestly don’t see the point of going into all of this.’

‘Humour me.’

‘Jessica told her that Nicholas had decided to leave Crossfeld. He had finished everything he had set out to do and there was no need for him to remain any longer. He hadn’t said a word to Rose about leaving. She just showed up in the morning to find that he had disappeared.’

Louis’s mouth tightened. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what Jessica’s take on that would have been. Far more than Eloise, she had disapproved of her brother going out with ‘a nobody’, as she had described Rose.

‘It’s not like Nicholas to behave like that.’

‘It might be, considering you and his entire family had been working on him for the entire time you were at Crossfeld!’

‘We’ve been through this.’

‘So are you saying that you met Rose, saw for yourself what kind of person she was and so decided to take back everything you had said to Nicholas about not throwing his hat in the ring with a gold-digger?’

Louis looked at her with some discomfort. It was an emotion he was not accustomed to feeling but neither could he lie about the situation.

‘Didn’t think so,’ Lizzy said bitterly. At the back of her mind there played even more miserable and humiliating thoughts of what else Jessica had said to Rose.

‘Has your sister been able to get through to Nicholas or has she just spoken to Jessica?’

‘What’s the point of her calling Nicholas? Anyway, she’s not much up to doing anything at the moment. She’s gone back to her job, and it’s best for her to put the whole thing behind her and get on with her life. There’s nothing to be gained from pining for a guy who was never really interested in a serious relationship.’

‘So speaks the voice of wisdom. In case you’re interested, I might have spoken to Nicholas when I first arrived at Crossfeld, but after that I left it to him to make his mind up about what choices he wanted. I might look out for his welfare, but I’m not into running other people’s lives.’

‘Are you telling me that
I
am?’ Lizzy shot him a fulminating look from under her lashes and scowled.

The woolly hat was off and her hair was all over the place from where she had yanked it. Her huge brown eyes were narrowed on him with antipathy and her full lips were thinned into a line of disapproval. Still Louis was fascinated by her face, by the angle of her slender body as she leaned towards him, by the way she managed to spit self-righteous fury yet look sexy at the same time. Was that why he was finding it hard to obey his natural instincts and walk away from this scene? He hated scenes; he loathed histrionics of any kind.

‘Jessica said that Nicholas is destined to marry your sister. Apparently it’s been an understanding for years.’

‘Nicholas? Marry Giselle?’ Louis was momentarily distracted from the temptation to smooth that unruly hair away
from her face, even if he risked getting his hand slapped away for doing it.

‘She also knows … knows that you and I … About us.’

Louis stilled and his fabulous eyes narrowed onto her unsmiling, flushed face. ‘She told you this, did she?’

‘She told Rose. Poor Rose didn’t have a clue what to say. She was really thrown into the thick of it. Did you tell Jessica about us?’ That had been playing on her mind for days. Had he and Jessica shared a confidential little chat about her behind her back? The look of stunned incredulity on his face killed any such notion and she felt slightly ashamed for having thought of it in the first place.

‘I’m insulted that that should ever have even crossed your mind.’

Lizzy blushed and shot him a defiant look which he met head-on until she muttered a reluctant apology.

‘What’s that? I can’t hear you.’

‘I suppose I might have mistakenly suspected the worst of you,’ she admitted grudgingly, playing with the end of her braid, twirling it round nervous fingers. ‘But you can’t blame me.’

‘And that would be because …?’ Louis sighed impatiently. ‘Freddy Dale spins you a woeful yarn about an inheritance I’ve supposedly contrived to steal from him, and you believe him. Jessica sees fit to inform your sister that Nicholas has scarpered because he was just out to use her, and you blame me. Then she informs Rose that she knows about us, and you immediately think that I’ve told her.’

‘Yes, well …’ An unsettling realisation washed through her like a stirring tsunami. She felt safer blaming him, safer thinking the worst of him, because if she didn’t then she would open a door to emotions she wouldn’t know how to control. She had slept with him and she wasn’t a girl who was into one-night stands. She had slept with him and it had felt right, because underneath all the bravado she was drawn to him in
ways that terrified her. He made her feel alive. The second she had ground to a gravelly stop on that bleak, deserted road and interacted with him, she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head. He had taken up residence there; it didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t fight it.

So what did that mean? Lizzy felt suddenly faint. She wouldn’t contemplate having feelings for him. At least not
those
kind of feelings—the kind that grabbed you from behind and made you smile because the world was suddenly a bright place and anything was possible.

Those were the kind of feelings that were reserved for the guy she would eventually fall in love with.

‘I should go,’ she muttered with a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach.

‘No way.’

‘You can’t tell me what to do!’ But her voice lacked conviction.

‘I seem to remember you enjoying it the last time I told you what to do.’

In bed.
Lizzy went bright red. ‘And that won’t be happening again.’

‘What won’t?’

‘Me. You. Us. In bed. That.’

‘Because I’ve reverted to being the bad guy?’

‘You were always the bad guy. Okay, maybe not as bad as I originally thought.’ She was dismayed when he took her hand in his and began toying with her fingers. By the time she had got her wits about her sufficiently to snatch her hand away, she knew that it was just a token, transparent gesture, and he knew it, too, judging from the half-smile on his face.

‘She told Rose that I was a complete idiot for getting involved with you,’ Lizzy admitted in a rush. ‘Not that I’m
involved
with you. But a fool for having slept with you. I had to drag that out of Rose, and she was as tactful as she could be with her replies, so I can’t imagine how much more insulting

Jessica was face to face. She said that we might imagine ourselves to be something big in a tiny little, unimportant village in the middle of nowhere, but that there was no way that you would ever consider any kind of relationship with someone like me. Someone
like me!
She said that you and she had an understanding.’

Louis narrowed his eyes. Priority one as soon as he walked out of this place would be to sort Jessica out once and for all. He had been lenient with her, had tolerated her flirtatiousness, but her vendetta against the Sharp family had obviously mushroomed out of control.

‘And even if you
don’t
have an understanding,’ Lizzy continued, gathering momentum now that she had started, ‘I’ve decided that I don’t want anything to do with you. Rose is out of Nicholas’s life and I want you out of mine, which is why I didn’t pick up any of your calls.’

She took a deep breath and willed herself to continue because now that she had started she would finish. ‘I know that I’m attracted to you; I’m not going to deny that. But I’ve had time to sit and think and work out that I’m just not the sort who can throw herself into a passing fling just because the sex is good. And you’re not the sort of guy who can throw himself into a full-fledged relationship, not with someone like me, even if the sex is good. You have that
perfect criteria
of yours and I’ll never fit it. So we’re at an impasse.’

Louis, only now surfacing from the task that lay ahead of dealing with Jessica, focused on the one word that really stuck in his throat and refused to budge:
impasse.
When it came to women, the thought of being rejected, as he had been at Lizzy’s hands, was almost as unthinkable as the thought of her informing him that they had reached an impasse.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’
Lizzy was utterly taken aback by the speed with which he had caved in to her long, heartfelt speech. He had been phoning and texting her every single day they had been
apart. Good Lord, they had made love with tenderness and passion only about a week ago, and now here he was, acting as though it was no big deal that she was telling him that they couldn’t go on. What did that mean?

‘What else would you like me to say?’ Louis asked smoothly. ‘You’ve made your mind up and I respect that.’

‘Good!’

He watched her bristle and knew that, whatever it was he wanted from this woman, his freedom wasn’t one of those things—but he wasn’t going to dwell on the why and wherefores of that conclusion. She still distrusted him and he could understand why. He would have to gain her trust; although he was adept at pretty much anything he cared to set his hand to, he suspected that his talents when it came to subtle and careful wooing might be a bit on the rusty side. They certainly hadn’t been pulled out of the cupboard for as long as he could remember.

‘Although I think you should know that I intend to phone Nicholas and find out what exactly is going on. I also intend to finally and conclusively set Jessica on the straight and narrow. Maybe,’ he mused, ‘I’ll find her something to do in one of my companies. She’s done nothing since she got her degree, and as we all know the devil makes work for idle hands.’

‘You’re going to have a word with
Nicholas?’

‘I’m not in the habit of accepting everything at face value. I intend to get to the bottom of his so-called desertion, if only for my own personal satisfaction.’

‘You—you don’t have to do that,’ Lizzy stammered.

‘Oh, but I do. And don’t you think Rose would want to know? To hear the full story rather than the abbreviated Jessica version?’

‘I … I think she’s just focusing on getting on with her life now.’

‘Because you told her that that would be the right thing to
do? Because you decided that pride was the most important thing at stake?’

‘No!’ Lizzy protested vehemently. She suddenly felt as though the solid ground beneath her feet had abruptly given way to quicksand. ‘Because that’s the best way of recovering. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with Nicholas in due course.’

‘I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to get in touch with her himself.’

‘Well, here’s the thing—she’s changed her mobile-phone number.’

‘More pearls of wise advice from you?’

Lizzy shifted uncomfortably because his voice was mild and non-judgemental.

‘No matter,’ Louis continued, watching the shifting play of embarrassed colour shadow her face. ‘You’re trying to protect your sister and I can understand that. When I first went to Crossfeld, part of my brief there was to try and protect Nicholas.’

‘You’re being nice to me. Why?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be? We were very intimate, after all,’ he was driven to include.

Lizzy cleared her throat and attempted to greet that aside in a businesslike fashion.

‘I also should tell you that I have every intention of honouring my decision to make a contribution to your school.’ He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs, steepling his fingers and looking at her seriously over the tips of them. ‘I liked what I saw.’

On safer ground, Lizzy allowed herself a small smile. ‘That’s not what some of the teachers say. We try and do at least three fundraisers every year—one at Easter, one at Christmas and one just before the summer holidays—but there’s a limit to how much money we can make.’

She had a vivid memory of him in the playground, herding the little kids together so that he could involve them all
in whatever game he had thought up on the spot. Yet again, her blinkered stereotype splintered to reveal an unsettling three-dimensional man who defied the categories she was so keen to put him into. ‘The parents can only afford so much and no more.’

‘And yet there’s still an upbeat spirit amongst the teachers.’

‘You noticed that, did you?’

‘I notice everything. In big business, it pays to do so.’ His dark eyes settled on her face, making her hot and flustered, although just at the moment there was no way that she could somehow pick an argument as a means for riding over the disturbing sensation. She hated thinking that he had found it so easy to walk away from her, but he was being so decent, and so damned uncharacteristically
generous,
that she couldn’t possibly be anything but impressed.

‘I’ve made an appointment with your principal, but I’ll want you to show me around the school.’

‘I’m not sure. Anita might want someone more senior to show you around the school.’

‘I’m the potential benefactor. I get to choose.’

Lizzy felt a tingle of delight race up her spine but there was no way that she was going to allow him to see what was a very human reaction, all things considered.

‘Now …’ He drew her in to the conversation, his voice soft and persuasive. ‘Tell me what sort of things I should be looking out for. But first, does this place do food? No? Probably better if I move my car, anyway. I know a cheap and cheerful Italian in Chelsea.’