The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (27 page)

We are so close that there’s nowhere to look except straight back at him. ‘Thank you,’ I murmur.

The golden locket falls free. Pierre balances it on the pad of his little finger.

‘From Gustav? Thought so. His own special method of branding you. This amazing hair of yours, though.Unbelievable what those bastards used to do, hacking it off when you were a kid.’ He releases the locket, eyes raking over my face now. The rescued strands of hair still curl round his fingers. ‘Polly told me. Those people should have been lined up and shot.’

If this is a tentative rapport between me and Pierre, it’s now or never. Polly has entered the conversation yet again, so it needs to be said. I sip my sharp citrus drink as a delaying tactic.

‘Pierre. I know you keep trying to derail me, but I need to know that you’ll do the right thing. She’ll be on the phone as soon as I leave here, but please, don’t make me be the messenger. Just be straight with her and tell her what you just told me. In a kinder way, if you can manage it.’

I sense rather than see his annoyance, the stubborn shift of his body on the seat, but I’m ready for it. I decide that sitting close like this is the best way to corner him.

‘Will your desire to continue working for me be affected by my answer?’

I tilt my chin. My eyelashes are heavy with mascara still. My hair is sticky with hairspray, one or two pins still in place, but I have to get myself together now. Back into the character of Serena Folkes.

‘It depends on the answer. I have to support my cousin so I’m going to have to work out how to balance this, but my ability to work for you remains the same.’

He laughs. He has the same wariness as Gustav, the same narrowing of the eyes as if there’s a caveat to his laughter and he’s not prepared to give himself up wholly to it. I realise I may have the upper hand. A horrible little voice inside me wonders if my straight-talking cousin Polly challenged him enough. Living with Pierre must be like living with a jumping jack.

‘I don’t want to say anything to jeopardise this reunion with Gustav’, he mutters hoarsely after a pause, twisting the stem of his glass in those strong fingers. ‘This could turn him against me again.’

‘Why would issues with you and Polly have anything to do with Gustav?’ I hitch myself a little, wallowing clumsily in the deep velvet sofa. ‘Who is this other woman, Pierre?’

‘That’s where Gustav comes in. Because all roads lead back to him. And thence to Margot.’

Pierre looks steadily at me, but he’s not smiling now. We’re still too close. In fact, the sumptuous cushions seem to be tipping me back towards him, but I can’t move. I don’t want to break the fragile new confidence I feel we’re approaching, but by forcing him to speak about Polly, and now Margot, we’ve veered into dangerous rapids.

‘So Margot
is
still affecting you, just as Polly feared?’ I keep my voice very low, unaware until too late that it sounds husky and seductive, too. ‘Is that why you even have a dancer in your troupe who looks like her?’

‘Be careful, Serena. You’re imagining things. We don’t want you becoming paranoid as well.’ Pierre glances away from me just then. Lifts his hand in greeting to someone on the other side of the room who has hailed him. ‘I thought you’d grasped what goes on in that theatre. Those dancers make a living out of assuming a false persona. They are painted, dressed, they move, they act, with the sole purpose of becoming someone else. So if by chance they resemble someone real, well, maybe I directed that girl to act that way, but ultimately that’s all in the eyes of the beholder.’

He crosses one leg over the other and I glance down at the strong thighs, the way the fabric of his trousers is slightly stretched as he rocks his foot up and down.

‘You can understand why I got that impression though, can’t you? She was even wearing the same flowers in her hair as Margot carried in her wedding bouquet.’ I hitch my dress up irritably. ‘You’re making me feel a fool.’

‘The Miss Havisham look always makes for good drama. Look, we’re all in a state of flux. Me, you, Gustav, Polly.’ Pierre shakes his head at me. ‘Real life is tough enough, Serena, without superimposing things that aren’t there. Why do you think I have loved theatre all my life? I told you before. And it’s not just because of my scars. Because it’s an escape. I can surround myself by fantasy, illusion.’

He waves his hand around in a florid, airy-fairy gesture and I have to snort at the pretension. ‘I have to admit you were in your element on stage earlier. But don’t dodge the issue. How has Margot ruined things with you and Polly?’

Pierre’s hand slaps down on his leg. ‘Polly went in head first, as soon as that awful showdown in the London gallery was over. Questions, questions – she could see how monumental that fight was. She thought I was behaving badly towards Gustav, which I was, you all know the reasons, but to understand what happened afterwards she wanted to know everything about Margot. And I mean everything.’

I frown, glance away from him towards the other guests milling about, chatting quietly. How many of them have a Margot haunting their lives, I wonder? ‘Polly said it was the other way round. She said that it was you who went crazy, who brought Margot into every conversation. It was like she was in the room with you. In bed with you.’

Pierre starts shaking his head before I’ve finished. Puts his empty glass down on the carved wooden table in front of us. ‘She shouldn’t have started it. Because the more I told her about Margot Levi, the larger she loomed and the smaller Polly Folkes became. Polly’s got it all going on, or she would if she wasn’t getting so petty and tiresome, but Margot’s a force of nature, Serena. She changed me from a boy to a man in just a few tumultuous months, however corny that sounds, and she could probably do it all over again. And what will really hurt you to know is that it was all the more intoxicating knowing that she’d come straight from my brother’s bed to mine.’

He covers his eyes with his hand and is quiet for a moment. Every instinct I have at that moment makes me want to thump him, but I rein it in.

‘That was more than five years ago. Polly is here now. Margot isn’t.’

Pierre lowers his hand. I wonder what he was hiding just then, because there is only a curious blankness in his eyes. ‘Polly has become invisible to me. Just like all the others, in the end. You see, there was something else unique about Margot.’

‘I don’t want to hear how phenomenal in bed she was.’ I put my hand up like King Canute trying to stop the wave before it drowns me. ‘Please, Pierre. Maybe that’s enough.’

‘Tough. You have to hear this. Margot is one of only two women in my life who hasn’t recoiled at the sight of my burns.’ Pierre picks up one of the tealights in its little crystal holder and holds it up very close to his face. ‘You are the other.’

Is it my imagination, or has everyone suddenly left the room? The voices, the music, the chink of glasses from the bar, everything reduces to a low hum. Pierre looks at me, still holding the crystal holder, which casts flickering lights into his eyes.

‘Me?’ The word comes out in a long gasp. I swallow, and feel the sweat pricking under my hair. Under my arms. Inside the flimsy bodice of my dress. I shouldn’t be sitting so close to this man.

‘I’ll never forget it, Serena. The look in your eyes when you saw my scars, or rather the
lack
of any reaction. The other women all try to hide the horror, to shrug it off, but by then it’s too late. They can’t hide the disgust, the regret. They’re not sure how to handle me. I can see their eyes, casting about for the quickest way out. Any idea what that can do to a man’s ego? Any surprise that I keep going through women like Chinese takeaways because I’m constantly looking for The One? Polly came closer, except that she failed that test the first time, too. I tried to get past that, make a go of it, but then there was you. You were so calm, and unfazed. You didn’t know it, but that just highlighted how wrong Polly was for me. Unfair, but true. And you looked deeply, genuinely sorry.’

I take the crystal candle holder gently out of his hand and put it down on the table beside our empty glasses. I run my finger towards his neck, not quite touching the scar which snakes up out of his collar.

‘You know why I understood something about the turmoil inside you, even though it’s so different from my own? Because outward, physical scars are like the harm people can do to you inside.’

‘Very philosophical. Very deep.’ Pierre Levi catches my hand where it’s hovering over his neck. His hands are big and warm and his fingers start to curl round mine. ‘You mean your family?’

‘They weren’t my family. They were strangers who happened to find a baby abandoned on a doorstep, and were stupid and high-minded enough to take me in. But not sensible enough to give me up when they couldn’t bond with me. But yes. They barely left a physical mark but sometimes I wish they had, instead of all the nastiness they left inside me.’

‘I’ve touched a nerve. But I’m not sorry to discover a vulnerable petal beneath that stubborn exterior. We may be more alike than you think.’ Pierre brings our joined hands to my mouth as if to hush me. ‘No nastiness in there now, Serena. You’re impossibly beautiful, inside and out.’

I blush as I feel my lips damp against his fingers, and, as the voices in the room start up again, grow louder and more insistent, I realise how this must look. Me being wooed in a deep velvet sofa by a devilishly handsome man who looks just like my boyfriend.

I push his hands away and reach for my scarf, trying to wind it round my neck as some kind of protection even though I’m too hot. I scrabble the scarf between my fingers like an old lady plucking at her shawl.

‘And that’s why Gustav is so lucky. His life, so different from mine. Not just because he gets to take you to bed every night.’ Pierre keeps looking at me. ‘Disrobing in front of a woman would never be a problem for him. He came out of that fire virtually unscathed, at least on the outside. Is it any wonder my admiration of him has always been tinged with jealousy?’

Pierre has triggered a longing for Gustav so physical it gives me a kick inside. I want to be lying on his chest, touching the torso tapering to that slim waist and sexy hips, stroking that line of black hair running from his solar plexus over his smooth, flat stomach, wandering like a tease down into his jeans.

It’s a wake-up call, too.

‘So Margot was unfazed by your scars, just like me, but surely that’s because they gave her something to lie about, and helped her to steal you away?’ I’m returning his stare as the images and scenes play out in my mind. ‘And, scars or no scars, you are still the spitting image of Gustav, which must have made it easier for her.’

‘To exchange one Levi for the other, you mean? So if she could do it in the blink of an eye, so could you, Serena. You like being with me. Come on. Relax. I won’t bite. Unless you ask me to.’ Pierre’s voice is a soothing hiss, like the snake in
The Jungle Book.
His hands are round my neck to pull the scarf away again, brushing his fingers against my skin. ‘I can see I’m going to have to work bloody hard to tempt you away from Gustav.’

‘You won’t ever succeed, Pierre Levi. So don’t even try.’ I try to wrench myself away, but he has me by the hair now, so subtly that no one else can see. I can’t ignore the insistent tugging at the tiny sensitive roots. ‘Let’s get this conversation over with. What happened to you and Margot after Gustav chucked you out? And what did you mean, a few tumultuous months? I assumed, and I know Gustav did, that you were together virtually until you met Polly.’

Pierre lifts my hair away from the scarf and murmurs into my neck. ‘It won’t help you, and it won’t help Polly.’

‘Call it curiosity. And it may well kill the cat. But if I’m ever going to get the spectre of Margot out of my head maybe hearing this from you will be a start. I know I’ve replaced her in Gustav’s life, but for Polly’s sake I just want to know what she had that Polly and those other discarded women don’t.’

‘I think you know already. Margot had to be pretty sensational to keep a man like Gustav enthralled.’ Pierre raises the menu to summon a waitress and orders two new cocktails. ‘For me it was macho triumph that to pay him back I’d conquered my brother’s wife, right under his nose. But she was the one who conquered
me
. I guess that’s the effect she had on him, too, in the early days. Anyway, from that moment I was hers. Whether she intended that or not, she was stuck with me. Even in the cab careering down Baker Street, away from Gustav, she was straddling me. All over me like a wild cat. I was always hard when she was around. I’m hard now, talking about it.’

There’s a sudden silence between us.

He shrugs. ‘I told Gustav a slightly edited version of this when you left us in the bar the other night. Well, I didn’t tell him that I still get hard talking about it, obviously. That’s just for your benefit.’

‘No wonder he didn’t tell me much about your conversation.’

‘So, the elopement. Well, there was me thinking she’d whisk me to Heathrow, perhaps fly to Lugano, but we went to a hotel in Holland Park. Hardly the great escape, but the staff greeted her like an old friend. Certainly didn’t blink when she dragged in this rumpled, overgrown schoolboy.’

‘Another life she’d already set up,’ I muse quietly, as the thought strikes me. ‘She was already planning her escape.’ Pierre rubs his hair into unruly tufts.

‘She took me up to this room painted black, with a huge four-poster bed, all black satin sheets and drapes. She’d glimpsed my burns back at the house, told me that spectacular lie about Gustav starting the Paris fire, so I was already hers for the asking, but this was the first time she’d had the leisure to study them properly. I was young, Serena. Totally different from the man you see before you. I thought my brother was a monster. She was my world from then on. First love? I think so. Obsession? Certainly. I’ve never been able to put a label on my emotions, but I knew she was the woman for me when, like you the other night, she just studied my skin for a moment, and then kissed me. Every scarred inch.’

I bite my lip. The power of that gesture to a bitter kid like him isn’t lost on me. Somewhere deep inside I’m wishing someone had done that for me a long time ago. Kissed away the scars.