Married By Christmas (25 page)

‘Hold on a second, honey,’ Charisma said, pushing herself off from the wall where Liv had told her to stay. ‘I get that you’re defending your friends here, and I like it. But you’re not the boss of me, and that’s my husband there. I might not have seen him in a very long time, I might not have wanted to, but you don’t get to just tell me to skedaddle until we’ve had words.’

Charisma walked over to Tom and took a long time looking him up and down.

‘You look good, Tom,’ she said, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry I inappropriately kissed you. I was a little drunk, and a lot more pleased to see you than I thought I was going to be.’

‘It’s fine,’ Tom said, shrugging awkwardly. He smiled at her. ‘You look good too, Charisma. Although I’m sorry we’re still married.’

‘It’s not all your fault. It’s not like we didn’t both have plenty of time to sort it out.’ Charisma smiled warmly. ‘Every time I thought about doing it, over the years, I’d look back at the time we spent together and realise that it was the happiest I’ve ever been with a guy. I was just waiting to be that happy again before I finally let my last little connection to you go. What’s your excuse?’

Tom pressed his lips together, before admitting, ‘I forgot about it. And actually I didn’t ever think we were legally married until quite recently. Sorry.’

For one moment, Charisma’s big brown eyes were filled with sadness, but it was a moment so fleeting that if you hadn’t been looking for it, like Anna had, you would never have known that it was there. Charisma laughed, slapping Tom hard on the shoulder, tossing her hair back as she turned to smile at Anna.

‘Well, then, am I pleased you’re marrying this little firecracker, because if we’d left it up to your lazy ass, then I would never have seen you again, eight years older, with quite a lot less hair, and I would have pined for you for at least another eight years.’

‘So you will sign the papers then?’ Anna asked her. ‘Without any games or attempts to get Tom back by taking your top off?’

‘Look,’ Charisma said, the persona she’d been wearing all night dropping off her as easily as a tie-at-the-sides thong, ‘I won’t say I haven’t thought about you, Tom, or wondered if I should have just walked out on you the way I did. Sometimes over the years I have dreamed about what it might have been like if I’d stayed. But I didn’t stay, and actually, having seen you fight, I’m glad I didn’t. You are way too British for me. But I’m glad I’ve seen you again. And met Anna, and this cool scary chick here. I’m not evil, I just couldn’t resist pranking you a little bit, Anna. Of course I’m going to sign the papers. And then, you know what, I’m going to get on with my life, just the way I planned it.’

‘Then thank you,’ Anna said, managing a smile at the beautiful woman who’d just solved all of her problems in one fell swoop. ‘You didn’t have to be so helpful.’

‘Oh, darling,’ Charisma said, dropping a light kiss on first Anna and then Tom’s cheek. ‘I was never going to stand in your way. Now, you rock god, you can buy me a drink. That girl might be scary, but she’s way too short to scare me sober.’

With one last long look at Anna, Miles took a breath, found a smile, picked up his guitar and walked past Tom, towards the door.

‘Come on, babe,’ he said to Charisma, ‘let’s go start a country sing-song in the bar of the Algonquin.’

‘Take your time,’ Liv told Anna and Tom just before she closed the door behind her. ‘Not that you need me to give you permission to take your time. I mean take as long as you need … I mean … See you later!’

Anna and Tom were alone at last, and although it had only been a few days since they had last been together it felt like an age, almost like another life since they had been intimate. And as Anna stood there, looking at the man who she’d once been so certain was better than she ever could have deserved, she wondered if she had done the right thing by coming to New York to save their Christmas wedding day. Because one thing could not be denied, she was a very different person now than she had been when she boarded that flight.

More than a year and a half they had been together, but there was so much they still didn’t know about each other, even now. There was so much that Anna felt she still didn’t understand about Tom and there were certainly things that Tom didn’t know about her, especially not the new and hard-to-understand feelings that Anna felt whenever she was near Miles. Or the odd sensation that she had that the two of them had become closer, understood each other better in less than forty-eight hours together than she and Tom had in all the time they’d been together. It was Tom who hadn’t thought to tell her about Charisma until it was almost too late and Tom didn’t know the truths and secrets that she’d so readily told Miles. Yet this was the man she was moving heaven and earth to marry in a few days’ time, and Miles would soon be in the grip of his exciting new life and she wouldn’t even be an afterthought for him. All of this was artificial, Anna reminded herself sternly. A set of extraordinary events, taking place in her snow globe, a fragile little bubble that had nothing to do with the real world. In the real world she was going to marry Tom, and that was what she had to stay focused on, because apart from anything else she was certain that Miles wasn’t sitting in the bar, brooding over her.

‘I’m sorry I hit Miles,’ Tom began, cutting across her train of thought and breaking the silence between them. It was obvious that he thought that was the last bone of contention between them. ‘It’s just that you left, almost without saying goodbye, without giving me a chance to think about what was happening.’

‘There wasn’t any time to think!’ Anna said. ‘Sometimes you just have to act.’

Both of them were very aware that that didn’t sound at all like the normal sort of thing Anna would say.

‘Fine, but you haven’t answered any of my calls since you got here or tried to call me. And then when I walk in and there’s a man here … in your bedroom, and you’re really drunk, and you don’t normally get really drunk, and then suddenly there’s Charisma, who I haven’t seen in years and … I just couldn’t work out what was happening. I don’t blame you for wanting to punish me, but I overreacted by taking it out on Miles.’

‘I wasn’t trying to punish you,’ Anna said, her hands hanging limply at her sides, when she knew she should be reaching out to her fiancé, pulling him into an embrace. ‘I just … I needed a bit of space. I know I should have called you as soon as I got here, I meant to. But, I suppose I was more shocked about Charisma than I realised, and then I found her photo on the internet when
you
said there was nothing, and it felt like if you hadn’t been straight with me about that, what else had you lied about?’

Tom dropped his gaze to the floor. ‘I didn’t mean to lie to you, I was trying to protect you.’ He finished the sentence uncertainly, unsure that Anna would buy it. ‘I knew how much it would hurt you if you saw photos of Charisma in all her glory. I was worried that you wouldn’t understand, but she is my past. I decided nearly a year ago now that you are my future, the rest of my life. And I’m not the sort of man who goes back on his promises, even if I am the sort of man who has messed it all up really badly.’

‘Miles said you were protecting me,’ Anna said. ‘Miles made a lot of sense about a lot of things, actually.’

‘Did he?’ Tom rubbed his hands through his hair. ‘I guess I just don’t know what to think about you hanging out with another man, Anna. In your hotel room, behind my back.’

‘And I guess I don’t know what to think about you being secretly married to another woman and then even when you do tell me, mainly because I made you tell me, by following you, not telling me everything!’ Anna retorted, finding herself increasingly sober. ‘I
guess
I don’t really know what I think about
that
. I guess I’m still angry about it, and worried that it’s changed things between us and maybe that’s why …’

She had been about to say that maybe that was why she was having confusing reactions to Miles, but she stopped herself just in time.

‘Maybe that’s why I didn’t call you, or answer your calls.’

‘Nothing has changed between us,’ Tom insisted, taking a step towards her. ‘Please, Anna, it hasn’t. I know I handled it all wrong. I know that. But that doesn’t mean everything can’t go ahead as you planned, does it? You’ve done it, you’ve found Charisma, you’ve made the wedding possible, and now, because of you, everything can be exactly like it was before. We can get married on Christmas Eve, Anna!’

Anna’s gaze slipped to the window where earlier Miles had drawn back the blinds to make the most of their panoramic view. It felt like the city was crowding round on the other side of the glass, peering in, to see what happens next.

Anna wondered why it was that she wasn’t rushing into Tom’s arms and kissing him madly, the way a girl should be doing when a boy has done such a good job of making a romantic declaration. And yet she was still there, her arms still hanging at her sides, no longer aware of her torn dress, nowhere near ready to embrace him. Tom took another step closer, and Anna resisted the urge to back away.

‘Anna? Come on, please,’ Tom pleaded, sweetly, with those Labrador eyes that Anna had never been able to resist before. ‘Look, I know I landed a massive bombshell on you out of nowhere. And I know I was less than supportive about your idea to come out here and look for Charisma. I know that I was wrong about that. But, darling, I’ve been so cut up about it. Liv will tell you, we’ve been together the whole time since you left. She’s been brilliant helping me make sense of it all. If she hadn’t been by my side through all of this, I don’t know what I would have done. It wasn’t that Charisma was a secret, it was just that she was from a life, another universe, where I don’t exist any more. The person I was then with her, he doesn’t exist any more. That made sense in my head, although admittedly the relevant authorities probably wouldn’t take the parallel universe excuse as a valid reason for committing bigamy.’

Tom stopped himself talking, taking the final few steps between him and Anna.

‘Can we put this all behind us now?’ he asked her, as if he were offering her a once in a lifetime deal. ‘Pick up our lives where they left off?’

‘Yes.’ Anna nodded, mustering a weary smile, because, really, there was no other answer but that one. It was the answer she had given him almost a year ago when he’d proposed, and no matter how confused and churned up her feelings were right now, it was a commitment she was determined to abide by, and knowing that suddenly made everything else seem wonderfully simple.

‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘After all we’re getting married in a few days.’

Smiling, his expression flooding with relief, Tom closed the last few inches between them, and took her in his arms, holding her body close against his. Anna looked up into his lovely eyes, his kind familiar face that had become so important to her over the last year and a half, and waited to feel even a tenth of the electricity that had surged through her when Miles’s lips had brushed against hers for that fraction of an unexpected moment.

The fact that it didn’t come didn’t mean anything especially, she decided with detachment, as Tom pressed his lips against hers, gently opening her mouth with his tongue, in what had become his familiar kissing routine. It was only that she had gotten to know Tom well, that their kind of intimacy was solid and real, absent of the sort of, probably one-sided, sexual tension that being holed up in a hotel room in New York at Christmas might artificially create between two people. Concentrating very hard, Anna made herself stop thinking about anything except Tom, aware of exactly how important this moment was.

This was the moment the lovers reunited after hitting some serious bumps in the road, this was the moment when Charisma, and Miles, and last-minute flights that separated them by thousands of miles, were long forgotten, the moment that everything fell into place and they became one again.

Relaxing her body, Anna finally wound her arms around Tom’s neck and kissed him back. She let her chin tilt back as his mouth travelled to her jaw and her neck. Closing her eyes, she sighed as the stubble of Miles’s dark beard tickled her neck, and his hand, his beautiful, clever guitar-playing hand, caressed and cupped her lace-covered breast, running his thumb over her nipple until she moaned. And then Anna remembered this wasn’t Miles she was kissing, it wasn’t Miles touching her that way.

Panicking, she pushed Tom away as if it was Miles himself she was rejecting.

‘What?’ Tom asked her, with some dismay, flustered and clearly in a state of arousal. Suddenly self-conscious, feeling like she was betraying someone, but not exactly sure who, Anna covered herself, crossing her arms over her chest, to keep her dress in place, half turning away from Tom to hide her confusion.

‘I thought we were OK now?’ Tom said. ‘Are we not OK now?’

‘We are,’ Anna said, ‘Of course we are, it’s just …’

This couldn’t be happening, she couldn’t come all this way to save her wedding to Tom to suddenly transfer her affections to the first man she bumped into, that was just not the sort of thing that sensible, careful-never-to-put-a-foot wrong Anna Carter would do. It was the sort of thing her mother would do though, Anna realised. Rip everything that was supposed to be solid and good apart on a whim or a fad, because she never did grasp the importance of seeing things through, least of all parenting her only child. Anna simply would not allow herself to be that person. Whatever stupid feelings might suddenly be manifesting themselves now, they had to be repressed and stamped out at once, because Anna would not let this happen to her now, at this point in her life when almost everything was just as she had planned it to be, her careful, vital life plan, that was all that stood between her and the world of chaos that she had escaped.

It was Tom she loved, Tom she wanted, Tom she would marry. She knew that when she had got on the plane to New York, and she was certain that as soon as she was out of this heady city, as potent as a field full of poppies, then everything would fall back into place. Stealing herself, she went back to her fiancé and put her arms around him.