River Deep (28 page)

‘It’s stomach-churning,’ Maggie told Pete. ‘Apparently Christian is the only one who’s ever loved her for herself. Which begs the question, if she’s so bothered about her inner beauty, then what’s with all the cleavage, huh? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want anything too alcoholic. I’ll just have a tequila.’

Pete suppressed a smile.

‘Better make that two tequila slammers, mate,’ he told the barman before turning back to Maggie. She had climbed up on to a bar stool and he joined her. ‘That’s quite something though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘If Christian makes her feel like that, he must really mean a lot to her.’

Maggie picked up her shot glass and downed the tequila with neither the salt nor the lemon nor the slam. In the interests of equality, Pete followed suit and indicated to the barman to set up two more.

‘That’s what
I
thought.’ Maggie’s voice rose with indignation. ‘In fact, you actually saved my life. I was about to give up on the whole bloody shambles and let her have him. And then you turned up and she was practically clambering over the table to get to you. She’s obviously psychotic or something. What do you think? Do you think she’s got that borderline personality whatsit?’ Maggie asked Pete seriously.

Pete couldn’t help laughing.

‘Let’s pause for a moment,’ he said, ‘and consider which one of you made up a pretend name to infiltrate the other one’s life in the hopes of getting her to chuck your ex-boyfriend? Let’s face it, Maggie, if there was a national bunny boiling contest, you’d win it. Hands down.’

Maggie gave him her best fiery, black-eyed look as she sank the second tequila, and Pete found his heart rate increase unexpectedly. He took a deep breath and gripped the side of the bar. Sometimes, he’d discovered over the last week, something Maggie would do, some tiny gesture, would seem to sort of pull at him. It was last night that had really done it. He shouldn’t have let her into his fantasy. He had to get a grip and just put the whole thing down to experience. And tequila.

‘Look,’ he said, making himself look directly into Maggie’s dark eyes. ‘Why don’t we make these our last tequilas for a while and just have a nice sensible, alcoholic beer, OK? Otherwise we’ll both be ratted in about five seconds and forget what we’re supposed to be doing here.’ Pete realised he wished they
could
forget what they were doing there and just get drunk and have a laugh instead. Just for once, he’d like Stella to be surgically removed from his head and his heart so that he could go two heartbeats without feeling her absence, see what the world might be like if he didn’t love her. But somehow the hopelessly needy never get a night off.

Maggie agreed reluctantly and took the bottle of Hoegarden that the barman produced as if by magic. She gazed at the label despondently.

‘Do you think I should serve this at The Fleur?’ she asked Pete, taking a sip.

‘Probably. Falcon wouldn’t be pleased, mind.’

Maggie brightened as she thought of The Fleur.

‘Ah yes, I know, but I’ve had an idea what to do about Falcon and his crew and Mrs Kim. There’s a pool room past the ladies, with its own bar. We haven’t had it open in years – never any point, not enough customers. It’s got its own street entrance and everything. I thought I could keep that open while the refurb is going on, keeping a little bit of cash trickling in, and then maybe I could keep it going as a sort of niche bar. You know, an authentic pub bar, with the real ale and the strong bitters and the smelly carpets. And then the main area would be a lighter, grown-up sort of bar with good food served from twelve till ten. What do you think?’ Maggie’s eyes had begun to glitter as she talked. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it sounds fantastic. I don’t know much about running bars and all that, but I think it could work, and I think it’s good of you to think of the existing clientele, all three of them.’

Maggie smiled warmly at him, it felt good to have someone’s approval for her plans, she realised. In fact, Pete was the first person she had discussed them with, and it was a relief to have them met by enthusiasm, even if it was uneducated. Had she been talking to Christian, she would have been holding her breath with apprehension, waiting for him to come back with a whole ream of ‘constructive criticism’, comments and his own suggestions, until all of her ideas had transformed magically into his.

Maggie felt a moment of panic and loss. What if she did get it wrong? What if her ideas really weren’t any good? After all, Christian had never taken her too seriously whenever she’d made suggestions for Fresh Talent, at least not at the time, although sometimes she’d see them being put to use somewhere down the line. Whatever people thought about Christian, he was damn good at what he did. Maggie wished desperately that he was there with her now, that the whole of the last few weeks had been some terrible dream. She had to remain focused on what she needed, and she needed Christian. All the other ups and downs of the last few days were nothing but the emotional fallout from his absence in her life. When she had him back, everything else would settle down again into the nice peaceful English tranquillity she so treasured. Not this heated wild-goose chase involving coffees with a blonde sex bomb and beers with a … well, a blond sex bomb. Maggie had her faults, she knew that, but sustaining any kind of deception was not one of them, and the pressure was starting to get to her.

‘You do realise,’ she said sternly, ‘that we’re going to have to wait here until Paul shows up and sees us in person. I mean, he might have clocked us on the CCTV, but I really need to make sure that he actually sees us –
together
.’

Pete nodded, and directed a pointed look at the listening barman in the hopes that Maggie would be a little more discreet.

‘Anyway,’ he said, smiling so that the blue of his eyes seemed to glow, ‘I can think of worse ways to spend my evening.’

A little fazed by his billboard attractiveness, Maggie took a deep and determined swig from her bottle of beer with practised aplomb.

Pete suffered a sudden flashback to his rampantly inappropriate thoughts about her in the early hours of this morning. The sensation of lust jolted through him at speed, freezing his smile on his face as he desperately tried to cover up his reaction to the split-second parade of images. He turned on his stool to face the bar and glanced in the mirror that ran along behind the bottles of spirits. He didn’t look too guilty, he noticed, and thanked Christ it was so gloomy in the bar. He took a moment to get a grip on things. OK, so he’d been celibate for a few weeks now, and OK, so Stella was far away, but this sudden onslaught of attraction for Maggie was completely out of place and out of character. What’s more, it had to be based on nothing more than his bottled-up libido struggling to be free; any other explanation would be crazy. There had hardly ever been other women – not even one-night stands – between bouts of Stella. The only person who had come close to meaning anything to him had been Cindi, and that was more or less because she had been so persistent and nice that he’d given into her more with affection than passion. Even she had been swept away in one gesture by Stella.

If he’d handled these separations from Stella before, why was he experiencing these kinds of
physical
feelings now? Maybe because somehow, this time, when his separation from Stella should have felt temporary, it felt more permanent than ever, Pete realised. Maybe because somehow these new feelings made him wish it
was
permanent. Pete finished his beer and ordered two more. He couldn’t let Maggie see the impulses she was stirring up in him. For one thing she would run six thousand miles in the opposite direction, and for another, even if she didn’t run, he liked and respected her too much to cross that line. In the short time he’d known her, he found he liked being in the company of a woman who wasn’t constantly poised to break his heart. He couldn’t put her deliberately into the crossfire there would be when Stella came back. If Stella came back.

‘Are you OK?’ Maggie asked him. ‘You seem a bit rattled. If it’s all this crap …’ she gestured at the empty bar, but Pete knew she meant their own complicated lives … ‘you know, we could just go home. You don’t have to hang around being kind to me, really. In fact, maybe we ––’

Pete shook his head firmly and turned back to face Maggie.

‘No,’ he said categorically. ‘No, it’s not you. I just had a moment, you know. A Stella moment.’

Maggie nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. I had a Christian moment a while back. God, we’re pathetic, aren’t we?’ she smiled weakly. ‘So tell me about your housemates? Any good gossip?’

Pete grinned. ‘Well, Angie’s avoiding Falcon. Falcon’s avoiding solid foods and suffering from the mother of all hangovers. And I’ve been lying on my bed and …’ Another unbidden image of Maggie flickered in his mind’s eye. ‘Missing Stella like crazy,’ he said quickly. It felt strange saying those words and realising that, for the first time ever since Stella had first crash-landed into his heart, they were actually untrue. It had to be some kind of Star Trek-style anomaly, some blip he’d get over anytime soon. Pete forced a laugh. ‘It’s a good job Angie says she’s not in love with Falcon, otherwise the Sarah thing’d really cut her up. I know what it’s like to see the person you love with someone else in front of your eyes.’

Maggie tipped her head a little to one side. ‘Do you?’ she asked him.

‘Oh yeah.’ Pete gave her a wry smile. ‘A couple of years back Stella took a fancy to this bloke I worked with on Dougie. She sat me down one night and told me that she had to explore her impulses and give in to her attraction to him, otherwise she’d grow resentful and it would weaken our relationship …’

Maggie’s jaw dropped. ‘She expected you to sit back and let her shag some other bloke under your nose? Someone you knew, when you knew about it?’ Maggie couldn’t decide if Stella was pure evil or a manipulative genius. Or maybe a manipulative evil genius. ‘You didn’t agree did you?’ she asked him, scandalised. Even she, willing as she was to be walked all over in the cause of standing by her man, thought that was going a little too far.

‘No!’ Pete said with gusto. ‘I got on my high horse and said it’s him or me. She picked him. For two weeks they were all over each other, and I mean, not just round his place or hers but everywhere I looked. My local, the bus stop outside the offices, in the studio. They never gave it a rest. It was a nightmare. I nearly packed it all in then.’ Pete remembered the night he’d more or less decided to leave Leeds for good and try something new somewhere new, but Stella had had other plans for him. ‘Then one morning she came into work and found me. She said she needed to talk, and pulled me into this empty editing suite. She shut the door behind her and locked it, and as she described every detail of her sexual encounters with him she … stripped.’ Pete looked at Maggie’s shocked face. ‘Oh God, sorry, is this a bit too much information?’

Maggie shook her head, mute with astonishment. For reasons she didn’t want to speculate on too closely she was feeling rather jealous of Stella.

‘Well, we, er,’ Pete coughed. ‘Right there on the floor on the editing suite. Anyway, halfway through we realised that there was someone banging on the door tying to get in – it was so funny. We were laughing, but like really turned on at the same time, trying not to, you know, make any noise …’

Pete checked himself elaborating any further, not quite believing that he’d just told Maggie all that stuff. Somehow, telling it to her made it seem a whole lot less exciting and erotic than it did when he went over it in his head.

‘So anyway, when we’d finished she got up and got her clothes on, all in her own good time, like. She opens the door and there’s this bloke she’s been seeing standing there open-mouthed. Stella hates to be cornered or pushed into anything. She just looks at him, gives him this little shrug and goes, “Look, I’m sorry and everything, we’re finished, OK? I’m back with Pete.” And she walks out, leaving me and him staring at each other, like either one of us is remotely hard! In the end he walked off, slamming the door shut in my face. When I got home that night she was waiting for me as if nothing had happened.’

Pete smiled at the recollection.

‘It sounds mad, but I loved her then more than I ever had, even though in the end she got what she’d wanted all along. She had her fun with him, and I was there waiting for her when it was all over. God, do I sound like an idiot?’

‘I’ll say!’ Maggie couldn’t contain herself, despite their tacit agreement. ‘Jesus, are you
sure
you love her, Pete? I know I’m not the one to be throwing stones or whatever, but good God, the woman sounds like a, like a …’

Maggie couldn’t think of anything bad enough.

‘Pete,’ she said finally, ‘have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, Stella might be stringing you along until she finds someone better or richer or just new? I mean, I know you blokes love all that sexy slutty stuff, but –’ her gaze swept up and down the length of him – ‘look at you. She could go round the world fifteen times and never find anyone nicer or sweeter or let’s face it, better looking than you!’

Maggie flushed, realising she had maybe said a little too much with a little too much conviction.

‘I don’t know about that.’ Pete blushed, touched by her concern. ‘Yes, I do think that she might be a lot of those things, but most of that’s bravado – it’s just show. She needs me, she needs someone to rely on. And until very recently, being in love with her has always seemed to eclipse that. And she can be so sweet, Maggie, so loving. It’s like some kind of amnesia, it makes you forget all the pain.’

Maggie shrugged. ‘I do know how you feel, although until Louise, Christian was pretty much a model boyfriend. More of a husband, really. But I’m serious here. Do you really not notice the string of women that fall in your wake? You could have anyone, and by the law of averages, at least one of them would have to be a nice person who deserved you!’ Maggie clamped her mouth shut and opened it straightaway. ‘I’m sorry, no sooner have we made a pact to help get each other’s lovers back than I’m telling you to give her the heave-ho. What do I know, eh?’