The Goddess Rules (26 page)

“Bubbles or oil?” he asked in between long kisses to her neck.

“Either. Both. Don’t mind,” she said as she slid her hand down his back and dipped it under the waistband of his jeans, where she let it rest for a moment or two, lightly stroking his skin.

“Bubbles,” he said. “Spare your blushes.”

“I don’t blush.” Kate wanted him to go on kissing her neck all night. Until he slipped the strap of her bra off her shoulder, anyway.

“You might,” he said as he unbuttoned her shirt with both hands, all the while kissing her on the lips again.

“This is purely on medical grounds, this bath, right?” she asked. “So I don’t get an infection and die.”

“Yeah, it’s a vital procedure,” he said as he continued to undress her. And yes, she was beginning to blush, especially as her skirt fell to the floor and he unhooked her bra very deftly.

“For which I need to be naked.” She smiled.

“It’s better that way. Clothes tend not to work underwater.”

“Right,” she said, and realized that she was standing there in nothing but her knickers. “Now turn around.”

“Do I have to?” Louis’s grin collapsed.

“Go and find a book to read to me,” she instructed. After which he gave her one last kiss on the lips, shot a very meaningful look at her bare boobs, and did as he was told.

The second he left the room Kate whipped off her knickers and leapt into the bath. The water was much too hot for her but she’d be buggered if she was going to wait around for the cold water to run. She took deep, scalded breaths, especially as she immersed her bleeding knees into the water, but the alternative—hanging around butt-naked and undignified in front of Louis, who was still comfortably clad in jeans and a sweater—was not an option.

“Byron or the
News of the World
?” he called out from the sitting room where he was madly scrabbling for something interesting. He may have been fantasizing about this moment for years but his imagination hadn’t made it as far as what reading matter he might amaze her with. In fact, he’d never gotten much beyond the running water and her nipples in the steamy bath, he thought with satisfaction as he rummaged through his newspaper rack.

“Byron, of course,” Kate called out. Though she hoped she wasn’t missing an especially salacious revelation about David Beckham in the paper.

“Okay.” He pulled down his school copy of
Byron’s Collected Poems.
“Can I come back in now?”

“As long as you don’t read ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ ” Kate instructed him as he went back through the flat, which was never going to win awards for most private space in England.

“
Don Juan
?” he asked dubiously.

“Sure.” Kate was now carefully covered with strategic banks of bubbles. “The only thing missing . . .”

“Is me?” Louis asked hopefully as he walked back in the door and settled down on the loo seat with his poetry.

“Is a drink. I think I’m in shock.”

“So am I.” Louis looked at the woman in his bathtub, with her shoulders peeping above the water, her ponytail dark and wet at the end and her knees poking out of the bubbles.

“I’ll get us both a brandy.”

“Good idea.” Kate nodded and closed her eyes as her scratches and grazes were soothed by the water. “But could you make mine a whiskey?”

“Done.”

“You can stay if you like,” Louis said as he passed Kate a towel and watched her ascend from her bath as if she were Venus. He’d read a couple of stanzas of Byron and then the two of them had gotten sidetracked with the idea of Italy. Then a Greek island. By the time Kate’s skin had turned pink and wrinkled, they’d escaped to live on four continents and more cities than they could remember. They’d gotten lost in so many dreams of where they’d like to travel together and treasures they’d like to see and sipping hurricanes in New Orleans and marveling over Canova’s tomb in Venice. There seemed so much that they wanted to do, so many dreams to be lived, that Kate’s mind was as light and heady as the bubbles in her bath.

“I’m going to go,” she said as she kissed him. “There’s a lot to take in.”

“Too much?” he asked with a concerned look.

“No, just so much to do and so many plans to make.” She laughed. “You know that’s a lifetime worth of stuff we’ve just committed to, don’t you?”

“Sure do.” He gave her a hug and breathed in the smell of her wet hair.

“I’m glad,” Kate said as she circled her arms around his waist. “I can’t think of much else I’d rather do than hang out with you. For a while.”

“I’ll call you a taxi before you go too far and say something you regret.” He laughed. “You don’t give much away, Kate Disney, did you know that?”

“I’ll try to be more open,” Kate said, knowing he was completely right. That was partly Jake’s fault and partly just the way she was made. “But I’ll get better. I promise. If you help me out a bit.”

“Deal.” He took her hand and shook it. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Chapter Nineteen

Kate arrived home and found not another brown envelope on her doormat—but Jake. He was sitting on his jacket and smoking a cigarette.

“I only want to take you to dinner, angel,” he said dejectedly when she emerged from the shadows of the garden and into the light spilling through the window from her bedside lamp.

“Jake. What are you playing at? It’s three in the morning. I’ve had my dinner.”

“Tomorrow then.” He sat up straighter but made no attempt to stand.

“No.”

“You look beautiful. Where’ve you been?” He looked at her with awe, as though she were some goddess of the moon.

“Out.” She walked past him and opened the shed door. He tumbled slightly but quickly righted himself. Then he stood up and began to follow her in the door.

“Jake, you don’t get it, do you? You can’t come around here anymore.”

“Did you get my songs?” He clearly thought she was Little Bo Peep and he was one of her sheep.

“I liked your songs. I always liked your songs, Jake. But they weren’t the problem. Now please please leave me alone. There was this whole three-year window in my life when I would have been thrilled for you to follow me around. But now it’s closed and I’m not thrilled.”

“I want to give you something.” He gazed imploringly at Kate as she shrugged off her shawl and dropped her bag onto the bed.

“Jake, do you want me to scream for Leonard?” she threatened. He smiled and leaned in close to her; for once he didn’t smell of whiskey. He just smelled of Jake.

“Angel, Leonard sleeps like the dead and Mirabelle Moncur’s gone out with her boyfriend on his motorbike. I saw them leave.” Amazingly he didn’t even try to lunge and kiss her. He stood up straight and looked remarkably earnest for Jake.

“You’re creepy. Stop hanging around.”

“I’d like to give it to you tomorrow night. Please have dinner with me? I promise not to do anything you don’t want to,” he said so seriously that Kate started to laugh.

“Jake, you’re mad. Now go.” She put her hands on his chest and pushed him like a bulldozer toward the door.

“You don’t have to throw me out. I’ll go. But for old times’ sake you have to say yes.”

“No.”

“Kate?” he pleaded.

“The old times only count if they were good.”

“Okay. The time I took you to Morocco,” he said in a flash and watched her face. She remembered them lying on the bed for hours in the afternoon and talking and then sex.

“I came downstairs in the hotel after my siesta and caught you trying to persuade the chambermaid to give you her phone number.”

“Glastonbury.”

“Mud and tears.”

“Venice?”

“Gondolas and tears.”

“Kate, give me a break.”

“I did. We broke up.” She pushed him another two feet toward the door. “I want to go to bed.”

“Just say you’ll have a drink with me then. Tomorrow.” He looked fresher than any daisy Kate had ever stepped on. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry and she was exhausted. Plus, she wanted to lie on her bed, stare at the cobwebs on the ceiling, and think about Louis and the way he’d touched her. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

“Okay. A drink. Tomorrow. But only one.”

“I love you, Kate,” he said as he lifted her hand and kissed it.

“I hate you, Jake.”

“I’ll pick you up at seven.” He smiled like a child with a new bicycle and let himself out.

Kate flicked her shoes across the room. One hit the wall and the other landed in the sink. Two men had told her they loved her in the space of a week. She looked out the window and saw that Mirri had left her light on. She thought of her tearing around London on the back of Jonah’s bike and smiled. She also wondered whether anyone at all would have told her they loved her if Mirri hadn’t arrived in her life. There was definitely something of the lucky charm about her. Kate leaned back on her pillow and felt something hard under her head. Before she’d even looked at it she knew it was another of Jake’s songs.

“Bloody hell, Jake. What are you trying to do to me?” she complained as she went to take it out of its envelope. Then she thought of Louis. She remembered how incredible it had been with her face buried deep in his navy-blue sweater and instead of looking in the envelope she Frisbeed it across the room. This time her aim was better than her shoe flinging—it landed squarely in the bin with a gratifying tinny thud.

“Where you belong,” she said firmly then pulled off her dress and crept under her duvet.

“I’ve never been so busy in my life,” Kate told Tanya the next day as they sat on a bench by the river and sipped cans of ginger beer on Kate’s lunch break. She had run into Louis briefly this morning as she padlocked her bike up outside the studio. He’d been with some huge-deal guy from the gallery so he’d only been able to wink at her discreetly as he walked by, engrossed in a heated debate about the Chapman Brothers’ latest piece.

“Well, I knew if I didn’t hike down here to see you I might forget what you looked like.” Tanya scowled jokingly. “So what have you been up to?” she asked. Kate’s eyes widened.

“Oh, just work.” She grinned then added devilishly, “And Louis.” Tanya looked confused.

“Working for Louis?”

“No. Working
and
Louis.”

“No.” Tanya sat back.

“I don’t know what it’s all about yet. Just that I went to dinner at his place last night and we kissed. I feel so safe with him, Tan. But not boringly safe. Terrifyingly, excitingly, breathtakingly safe. If that makes any sense.”

“Yeah, I think so.” Tanya nodded. She looked as radiantly pretty as ever in a simple butter-yellow shift dress with a diamond necklace at her neck. Her hair fell in blond waves about her creamy cheeks, but her eyes were sunk into deep rings of translucent blue—suggesting that she and Robbie still hadn’t had any luck in conceiving and the strain was taking its toll. Kate hadn’t asked if there was any news, simply whether she and Robbie were okay. Tanya had stoically replied that they were fine, though he was going to his mother’s alone this weekend, clearly because the incessant baby hounding was too much for Tanya to cope with, though a weekend in London with its ubiquitous, hip mothers with push chairs who littered the pavements and cafés and organic food stores of the city was enough to make anyone depressed. Whether they wanted desperately to have a baby or not. “So what on earth happened?”

Kate filled Tanya in on every detail of her slow-burning affair with Louis, though it was obviously as hard for Tanya to see him in the role of romantic lead as it had been for Kate.

“But it’s Louis. I mean, I suppose he is fantastically sexy, in that baggy-jeans-around-the-bum, artistic way,” she said thoughtfully. “And he does go out with the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen.”

“Like who?” Kate was instantly insecure, though she was fully aware that it was true.

“Well, once we saw him at this drinks party at Saatchi’s.” She dipped into her horrible-looking sprouting salad with a plastic fork. “He was with this girl who I honestly thought must be some airhead actress because she was fluffing around practically wearing underwear and then when he introduced her she turned out to be the Middle East correspondent for Radio Four.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry. But that’s not the point anyway. Do you want to go out with him?”

“I don’t know. I want to be with him. Every minute I want to be with him. And I want him to kiss me and look at me and chat to me and take me out.”

“So you want to go out with him then?” Tanya spelled it out for Kate, who chewed on her lip and thought about it.

“I do, don’t I?”

“Yeah, you do,” nodded Tanya.

“Right. So what do I do about it?”

“I suppose you tell him. Isn’t that what he’s waiting for?”

“Well, sweetly he doesn’t seem to be waiting for anything but if I think about it, yes, that’s what he’s waiting for. An answer of some sort anyway.”

“Perfect. Then tell him tonight. Ask him if you can see him and then tell him. God, he’s been waiting ten years for you. It’s so incredible.” Tanya completely forgot her own problems for the moment and rested her head back on the bench to feel the sun on her face.

“I know. I’ll do it,” Kate said excitedly. Then gritted her teeth as she confessed, “I just can’t do it tonight.”

“Why not?” Tanya opened her eyes and looked lazily at Kate.

“I’m doing something else.” Kate screwed her face up tight.

Tanya thrust her head up and looked Kate in the eye. “You are not?” she said menacingly.

“I am,” Kate replied sheepishly. “He wouldn’t get out of my shed. It was three in the morning and he’s been sending me songs all week.”

“It shouldn’t matter whether he’s been sending you fleets of Rolls-Royces, beluga caviar, and Scottish castles, you should have told him to piss off.”

“I did.”

“What, ‘Piss off, Jake, and by the way can we have dinner tomorrow?’ ” Tanya’s eyes were filled with venom. Kate always underestimated the strength of her friends’ disapproval of Jake until she was confronted with it.

“Look. I’ll have a drink with him and then come home, okay? You might think that I’ve still got a soft spot for Jake but I haven’t. It’s over.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Tanya was playing devil’s advocate.

“You don’t need to, I promise. I’m not remotely tempted by Jake. There’s so much water under the bridge since then,” Kate said. Tanya looked forbiddingly at her, praying that she was telling the truth.

“So how’s the house hunting going?” Tanya put her protests to one side for the moment.

“I’m going to see the place in Primrose Hill tomorrow morning. Do you want to come, since Robbie’s in the country?”

“Yeah, I’d love to. Maybe we can have lunch afterward?”

“It’s a deal,” Kate said, and tossed her empty sandwich packet into the bin beside her. “How’s everything going by the way?” she asked. Just because she couldn’t
not
ask. The subject of baby making always sat between them like an albatross until one of them brought it up. And it was always better once it had been said. It was, after all, such a major, overwhelming part of Tanya’s life that it was too odd not to bring it up.

“Things are fine. I’m doing a round of IVF so I’m being completely weird with the hormones. Mostly with poor Robbie. Though I did go out and buy an amazingly short miniskirt last week because I’ve reverted to being a hormonally rampant fourteen-year-old. So at least there’s something in it for him.” The girls laughed. Then Tanya looked anxiously at Kate. “If I get my period next week then it hasn’t worked. And I’m trying not to think about it ’cause I know the stress won’t do me any good but I can’t help it.”

“Fingers crossed” was all Kate could say. Tanya smiled. “So how short’s the skirt exactly?”

“Short enough for me to only have worn it in the bedroom on my own so far,” she said. “And before you ask, I won’t lend it to you for your date with Jake.”

After Tanya’s practically allergic reaction to Kate’s going out for a drink with Jake, she decided not to bother telling Mirri of her plan. She couldn’t face the same onslaught and besides, it was irrelevant, because the last thing she really wanted to do tonight was see him. She did, though, have to go home and talk to Mirri about last night’s conversation about Nick Sheridan. Mirri had helped Kate so much and now there was a chance that she might be able to give something back. Even if it was only the encouragement Mirri needed to find Nick. But when Kate got to the house Jonah was there, sitting on the bottom stair, chatting to Leonard.