Married By Christmas (26 page)

‘It’s just … they’re all downstairs, and I bet they’re waiting for us. It feels weird that we are up here, as if they would know if we were … you know.’

‘You want to wait for a better moment.’ Tom nodded understandingly. ‘Yes, you’re right. It would be kind of wrong to abandon Liv with two virtual strangers, after everything she’s done. And I’m pretty sure if I leave her around that Miles for too long he’ll try to seduce her too.’

‘Oh Miles is all wrong for Liv,’ Anna said with determined casualness, as she let go of Tom and walked towards the bedroom. ‘The last thing she needs is to fall for a man who’s about to go off around the world and make a career of having women throw themselves at him.’

‘Really?’ Tom said with a touch of jealousy.

‘Yes, that was why Miles was here, for his chance at a big break, and he got it too. A whole new life is about to start for him.’ Anna paused, realising that there were not very many more hours left until the last minute that would tick away to the moment where she would never see Miles again. And just then, standing in her ripped dress in a suite in the Algonquin, it made her feel excruciatingly sad. ‘Anyway, let me get changed and let’s go down and join them. After all Charisma is still your wife.’

‘Anna, I thought …’

‘We are fine,’ Anna told him. ‘Honestly, everything is fine. I’m joking!’

Anna was very clear about what she had to do next.

‘We get the papers back,’ she said to Tom. ‘We watch as Charisma signs them and we get the first flight back home. The sooner we are back where we belong in the real world the better.’

As Tom waited in the other room for her to find another dress, Anna slipped off her ruined frock and hugged it against her chest for a moment as she took several deep breaths. A few more hours and she would be safe again, her carefully ordered life would be back on track and Miles would be miles and miles away, out of her life for ever. All she had to do was to get through the next twenty-four hours and it would be as if Charisma or Miles had never happened. She would leave them both – and any residual feeling she had for Miles – behind as she and Tom headed home.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright!’

Distracted by her attempt to glue on her first ever set of lash extensions, Anna paused and looked over her shoulder to where Charisma Jones was lying on her bed, having consumed most of a bottle of pink cava, in readiness for Anna’s belated hen night. It still came as a shock to Anna that Charisma had not disappeared from her life as neatly as she’d predicted, but then she did only have herself to blame for Charisma’s presence.

‘Why are you here again?’ Anna asked her, shaking her head. It had been three days since they had arrived back from New York en masse, three days since Anna had said goodbye to Miles and somehow acquired herself a former wife as a wannabe bridesmaid.

‘Because
you
invited me,’ Charisma said, sprawling herself all over Anna’s lovely cream quilt like she was on a
Playboy
shoot. ‘Because once you had my signature on your papers you flung your arms around my neck, said, thank you so much, Charisma, you’ve been amazing, I know, why don’t you come to the wedding?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t actually mean it,’ Anna said. ‘I was merely being polite. I thought you were far too busy being a sexually confused nun to pay a fortune for the last flight out of New York before Christmas and come and move in with me.’

‘Pah, that pile of crap was never going to make me famous,’ Charisma said cheerfully, opening Anna’s bedside drawer and peering inside. ‘Funny, I felt sure this would be where you kept your vibrator. Anyway, when you offered, I decided it must be fate. London, this is where it’s at – the West End, Lloyd Webber,
Les Miserables
bastards! I want me some cool Britannia.’ Charisma pushed herself up on her elbows, tipping her head on one side to regard Anna’s futile attempts to wear fake lashes, one of them now glued rather securely to her cheek. ‘You know what, it’s a shame I signed those papers. I’d have found it much easier to get work if I was married to a Brit. Maybe it’s not too late to recind …’

Anna picked up her tinsel halo headband provided courtesy of Liv and threw it vaguely in the direction of Charisma, who, giggling, hung over the far side of the bed to scoop it up off the floor, revealing her bare behind.

‘Can I just say,’ Anna said, ‘that before we go out that door you are putting on panties. This is England, we do things properly here. In underwear, mostly.’

‘All right, guv’nor, keep your drawers on,’ Charisma said in the terrible cockney accent that she had insisted on using with almost everyone she had encountered since she had moved herself into Anna and Liv’s flat.

‘Apples and pears. Chim-chimmeny, what a palaver!’ Anna couldn’t help laughing. If there was one thing she could say about her unexpected house guest it was that she was very entertaining. And although it was true that Anna had impulsively invited Charisma to the wedding, there were mitigating circumstances.

The morning after Tom and Liv arrived in New York, Anna had woken up early in bed with two other girls – Liv and Charisma. Liv had taken the middle spot in the king-size bed, to prevent any more brawling, and Anna could tell by looking at her best friend that she was only pretending to be asleep, which meant she didn’t want to talk. They still hadn’t talked properly since Liv had arrived, and Anna knew she was cross with her, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. So, deciding that she had enough on her plate to deal with and desperate for a breath of fresh air and some strong coffee, Anna had pulled on a pair of cream leggings, a deep-green sweater dress, grabbed her coat and, after stopping to stick a note on the suite door explaining where she was, crept out of the room and made her way down to the lobby and out into the bright, freezing morning.

The snow had stopped falling sometime in the night, which had to be good news when it came to booking a flight home, and the sky was a vivid blue, domed above the looming tops of the skyscrapers, like a bell ready to ring out for Christmas. Shuddering against the cold and wrapping her scarf around her neck, Anna headed for a coffee shop across the street that she and Miles had passed a few times since they had arrived. It didn’t take long for her to notice as she stood in the queue that Miles was already present, sitting in the furthest corner of a booth, picking a paper napkin to pieces. Just the sight of the back of his head was enough to send her heart thundering away and for a moment Anna considered pretending that she hadn’t seen him, turning around and going in the opposite direction, but then she told herself it was foolish. Her crush on Miles had to be faced and sent packing. There was no real reason to hide from him, no real reason at all. And after all, this was her chance to say goodbye.

‘Hello,’ she said, a little tentatively as she approached him. ‘Mind if I join you?’

He looked so sad, even when he smiled and nodded, that Anna thought at once that something must have happened.

‘What is it?’ she asked him, concerned. ‘The band haven’t changed their mind about you, have they?’

‘No, no not at all, they’re very keen. I’m just …’ He ripped open a tube of sugar and poured it into his coffee, then discarded the wrapper with at least four more that he’d already opened. ‘Oh, you know how it is when you finally think that you’ve got everything you ever wanted and then you find out there’s something else you want even more?’

He looked up at her on the last word, and the look in his eyes took Anna’s breath away.

‘You mean that your new career as a world famous rock star isn’t enough?’ she asked him in a very small voice, terrified but desperate to know what he was going to say.

‘I don’t think anything will ever be enough if I don’t have you,’ Miles said.

Anna gasped in a breath. Did he really just say that? Did he mean it, or was it just another symptom of their little snow globe Christmas fantasy where nothing was quite real and everything was edged in glitter?

‘Pardon?’ Anna managed to say, just about.

Miles smiled wanly. ‘Oh ignore me. It’s because I’m artistic – we artistic types are never happy. Still, I will be able to write some great songs about how I came to New York for a career and met an incredible girl who was about to get married to someone else. I can see a life of doom-laden miserable music ahead of me, just what NYRD fans love.’

‘That’s funny,’ Anna said carefully, ‘one of the things I always liked about you was your cheerfulness, even when you’d almost killed me with a kiwi you were remarkably chipper.’

The two of them smiled at each other, challenging the other one to hold their gaze.

‘There are a lot of people in our hotel suite, aren’t there?’ Miles said. ‘It feels sort of … wrong. I suppose I got used to our own little snow globe, and then along comes Tom and Charisma – and your mad mate – and they shake it all up.’

‘You think of us in a snow globe too?’ Anna asked, sensing something dangerous building in the air between them, like the promise of a storm just before the thunder rumbles.

‘Anna, I’ve got to say it,’ Miles said.

‘Don’t, please.’ Anna was suddenly scared. ‘I don’t want you to say anything.’

‘But I have to,’ Miles said. ‘I know it won’t end well, not for me, anyway, but I can’t let you go without saying what we both know is true …’

‘You could you know, it would be absolutely fine.’ Anna looked away from him, towards the door, expecting Tom to come through it any moment, having found her note and decided to go and join his fiancée for a coffee, not expecting for one moment that she would be engaged in a secret tryst.

‘Something’s happened between us, Anna,’ Miles said, sliding his hand across the table so that just the very tips of his fingers were touching the very tips of hers. And even that slightest of contacts made Anna close her eyes and catch her breath. ‘Look at me, please.’

With some force of will, Anna opened her eyes and looked into Miles’s, terrified and enraptured by the naked desire that she saw there, a desire she knew was clearly visible in her own.

‘When I’m anywhere near you,’ Miles told her, his voice low and urgent, ‘I long to touch you, to wind my fingers in your hair, to kiss you, to hold you close enough to be able to feel the beating of your heart against my chest. But it’s not just your incredible beauty and your amazing body that make me feel that way about you, Anna, and I have
never
felt this way about anyone. It’s what’s inside, behind the hair and the outfits, the girl who hides behind all the certainty and plans. You let me see a little glimpse of the real you, and in that second I knew you were the girl for me. What you don’t seem to realise is that nothing frightens you, Anna, you who’ve had so many reasons to be afraid, that’s what made me fall for you.’

‘Everything frightens me,’ Anna said, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘You sitting here, saying these things to me frightens me, more than I can say.’

‘But you want me to say them, don’t you?’ Miles asked her. ‘I can see it in your eyes – you have feelings for me too.’

‘Miles,’ Anna breathed. ‘I’m getting married … I can’t just …’

‘I know, I know,’ Miles said. ‘And I’m not trying to stop you, I’m not. But if I let you go to your wedding without telling you how amazing you are, how much better and more special than you think or know you are, then … I could never forgive myself for not letting you know how very much I want you, Anna, how very much I long for you. I just had to say it. I don’t expect you to run into my arms. I just hope you know that you deserve to be happy and I really hope you are with Tom. Although it’s hard to accept that any other man could make you feel as happy as I know I could.’

Anna looked at their hands, grazing each other on the tabletop, and thought of her mother, closing the front door quietly so that she wouldn’t wake Anna up when she walked out on all the promises she’d made her. A pair of beautiful blue eyes and a touch that set her alight was not reason enough to turn her back on Tom.

‘I’m getting married, and you are going round the world,’ she said.

‘I know,’ Miles said. ‘And I know I can’t ask anything from you, or kiss you goodbye but …’ Miles leaned across the table, a little closer to her, his eyes so magnetic that Anna found herself mirroring him, as the tips of his fingers ever so lightly ran the length of hers. ‘But if I could kiss you, Anna, then I would trace the outline of your beautiful mouth with my fingertips. I’d hold your waist, fitting my hand into the curve of your hips, and I’d pull you close against me so you could feel exactly how much I am burning for you. I’d put my lips against yours, so soft and warm, and, once we started kissing, I know I wouldn’t be able to stop, that if I kissed you for a million years, it still would not be enough. If I could kiss you goodbye, Anna, it would be the kind of kiss that you would never be able to walk away from and neither would I.’

Abruptly, Anna drew her fingers away from his, breaking the hypnotic connection that buzzed in the air between them.

‘Miles,’ she repeated, trying desperately not to picture what he’d described, not to feel his lips on her skin, his hands in her hair. ‘I’m getting married in a few days. I’ve been planning getting married on Christmas Eve since I was nine years old and it’s happening, despite everything that has been thrown at me, it’s happening. And the man I’m marrying, he is a good man. The only man who’s ever been able to put up with the mess that I am. And I can’t … even if I do feel …
things
around you – strong, strong
things
, I can’t be the sort of person who would throw away everything I’ve got with Tom for … what? We know nothing about each other, not really.’

‘I’m not asking you to leave Tom for me,’ Miles said, so bluntly that it caught Anna off guard. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you, Anna. I know that you need certainty and nothing could be less uncertain than what might happen next between us. I’d never ask you to risk all of that for me.’

‘Oh,’ Anna said. ‘So you are not asking me to leave Tom for you, then? Just to be clear? It’s just that … well then, why all this talk of kissing?’

‘I needed you to know how much you moved me,’ Miles said. ‘How much you mean to me, right in this moment, and that I don’t think any man has to “put up with” you because any man would be lucky to have you in his life. And if you weren’t about to get married then you bet your life I’d be asking you to run away with me. But even though I’ll be thinking about you for a long time, Anna Carter, I would never try to break you and Tom up now.’

Anna had pushed her coffee away untouched, as it dawned on her that what Miles was really saying was, in an exceptionally erudite way, that he quite fancied her and if she’d been free he’d have given her a spin, seen how it worked out. Feeling foolish and hurt, tears suddenly prickling at her eyes, she stood up abruptly.

‘Right, well, thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks for letting me know. I’d better get back now, go and see my fiancé.’

‘You don’t get it do you?’ Miles asked her, rising out of his seat as she left. ‘Is it that you
want
me to steal you from Tom, is that what you want?’

‘No,’ she said, turning back to look at him. ‘No, that’s not what I want. All I want is to get married on Christmas Eve just like I always have since I was a little girl. Thank you for everything, Miles. I truly do hope you have a nice life.’

It was only when she arrived back at the hotel after that last meeting with Miles that she’d discovered that Tom had taken a cab to the bar they’d been at the night before and recovered the annulment papers. As a result, she returned to the suite to find that Charisma had signed the papers without any drama at all. It felt like fate telling her what she should do and she had been so relieved to have that one decision taken out of her hands that she had invited Charisma to the wedding on an impulse, and incredibly Charisma had accepted.

‘Round yon Virgin …’ Charisma gestured at Anna as she uncrossed and re-crossed her legs
Basic Instinct
-style. ‘Who should lighten up …’

‘Cab’s here!’ Liv popped her head round the door, resplendent in a little Christmas fairy outfit, her face and hair covered in glitter, a pair of net wings bouncing chirpily on her shoulder blades.