The Runaway Princess (8 page)

Leo laughed. “Well, I don’t want you to miss that.”

Why did you just give Leo a mental image of a dancing pensioner? Even if his laugh was making my chest feel ticklish?

“Wednesday’s fine, though,” I said quickly. “If you’re free? Wednesday’s the new Thursday in our house.”

“I can definitely be free on Wednesday,” said Leo. “It’s a date.”

Date. He’d said
date
.

“What sort of garden do you have?” I didn’t know why I’d dragged the conversation back to business—maybe because I was desperately trying to displace the dancing pensioner with a knowledgeable horticultural-expert woman. “So I can sketch out some plans?”

“Oh, it’s just a small one,” said Leo, and I thought I detected a tiny note of embarrassment. “You know, city garden.”

“I do know—I’m really good at making the most of small spaces.” I could already see it in my mind’s eye, the pretty mini-garden in the sky. Maybe some potted figs in containers, or tumbling climbers pinned to brick walls. He had no need to feel embarrassed—any garden in London was a luxury. “I’ve done a few rooftop vegetable patches recently—they can be low-
maintenance
, and some people find it therapeutic, watching things grow. If you make a sketch of your garden and bring it, we can talk about light and shade and soil.”

“Sounds great. So, is half seven good for you? We can have a drink and grab some dinner, if you have time.”

“That would be lovely.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Leo paused, then added, as if he wanted to prolong the conversation, “How did the apology gift go? I suggested that actions might speak louder than words.”

“Um, not great.” I wasn’t sure how much I could say without being rude about Rolf. “The action being suggested was a bit … adult-oriented. Flowers might be nicer? I can recommend a book on the language of flowers, if it’d help.”

“I like that. What’s the international flower language for ‘I’m sorry for being a loudmouthed idiot’?”

“A Venus flytrap.”

Leo let out a loud, slightly guilty snort. There was some
office
-type noise at his end, and I heard someone speaking. “Okay,
listen
, I have to dash, but we’ll firm up details closer to the time. Have a great weekend!”

“And you!”

And that was it. Simple. Date arranged, nice chat, no embarrassing moments apart from the Zumba thing, but he’d laughed at that.

Heat was spreading through my chest, in direct contrast to the numbness in my nose and ears.

Badger stared at me, and I realized I was grinning like a loon at a dead wisteria.

O
bviously, I spent the next four days agonizing about what to wear, with only brief pauses to agonize over what to say—all about a million times harder because I was too embarrassed to tell Jo I was off on a date with the friend of the idiot who was now filling our flat with orchids. I didn’t want to give Rolf the faintest chance of making it a double date, for one thing.

My social life didn’t usually require much effort on the wardrobe front. Thanks to the fact that Jo and I were both skint most of the time, dinners out in London were limited to the pizza place round the corner; our local pub, the Nightingale Arms; and
all-you-can-eat
Indian buffets in Tooting with Ted, who fancied himself as something of a curry connoisseur. I got the feeling Leo wasn’t going to book a table at any of those locations, so I wasn’t feeling very confident about my usual jeans and a top.

Plus, it was still a business meeting. I’d prepared some color sketches of garden ideas—a white garden, a cottage garden, a neat little raised-bed complex—and was actually quite excited about creating something new. What did top gardening experts—who wanted to appear subtly sexy—wear?

In the end, since I couldn’t consult Jo herself for fear of getting into a whole can of worms, I fell back on the What Would Jo Do? reasoning, and went for my black dress. I rarely spent money on clothes, but Jo had virtually pried my debit card from my hands at a Harvey Nichols sale. She’d been right to make me buy it. My Reliable Black Dress scooped me in at the right places and skimmed over the wrong ones. It was one of those secret weapon dresses that you could literally go anywhere in, depending on whether you pulled on boots or killer heels.

I put my one pair of killer heels in my bag, just in case, and set off in my flats.

I arrived in Berkeley Square at seven thirty, as Leo had texted me earlier, and immediately saw him waiting exactly where he’d said he would be, on the park bench opposite the Bentley car showroom.

He looked smart. Really smart. Before he could see me, I ducked behind a postbox and pulled on the heels.

I straightened up, butterflies swarming in my stomach, and banked this moment in my mental scrapbook for later. On the bench a very,
very
attractive man was waiting for me, dressed in a proper navy coat, his tawny-blond hair shining in the streetlight. I thought he was checking his phone, but on closer inspection I realized he was reading a Kindle.

That just put the cherry on the cake. A man who read, when no one was even looking at him.

Unaware of the reaction he was creating just by sitting on a bench reading, Leo shot back his coat sleeve to check the time, and glanced hopefully in the direction of Green Park Tube station. I didn’t want someone else snapping him up, so I hurried across the square as quickly as I could in my unfamiliar heels, hoping he wouldn’t look up too soon and witness the giveaway wobbling.

Nerves hit me when I was nearly there. So far, the two times we’d met had been very much on my turf. Now we were on his, and I wasn’t even sure my shoes were totally on my side. But when he realized the irregular clacking noise heading his way was me, Leo’s face lit up with a smile that crinkled the corners of his blue eyes, and something warm pushed aside the nerves.

“Hello!” he said, putting one hand on my arm as he got up to kiss me on the cheek.

I nearly swooned at the sudden closeness of his skin, and his subtle cologne, and the roughness of his coat collar, all at the same time. Every single one of my senses felt as if it had been turned up to eleven, and then had a neon-lit brass band marched through.

“Yes, hello!” I started, but he’d gone for the other cheek in a Euro double kiss, and I mumbled awkwardly into his beautiful sharp cheekbone, “Oh, sorry, um, yes, hello!”

“Sorry, sorry!” he said, and for a moment we sort of held each other at arm’s length, bobbing heads.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said to fill the unsettling silence, “I never know how many kisses to do. One, or two—or none! We don’t do kisses back home. Our family doesn’t really do kisses, we’re more the hearty-slap-on-the-back type. Um, I don’t mean we don’t
kiss
each other
ever
,” I corrected myself, in case he thought I didn’t want to be kissed at all. “Just not all that, you know—”

“Just that you don’t go in for all that
mwah-mwah
stuff,” Leo suggested. “Quite right, too, it’s awful. Hate it. I’ve got friends who do four.”

“Four?
Really
? Are they English?”

“Ha! No, they’re not. Rolf’ll do up to six, if he can get away with it. More, if the girl isn’t resisting. He just carries on until she shoves him off.”

I snorted, which wasn’t very ladylike, but Leo didn’t seem to mind.

“So, um, where are we headed?” I asked.

He gestured toward the towering Georgian townhouses that surrounded the tree-lined park. If you could ignore the two lanes of traffic circling it, Berkeley Square was quite a romantic spot, not too far from Green Park in the
art-galleries-and-designer-boutiques
part of London. Lights were twinkling in the windows, and the sky was unusually clear behind the lines of old plane trees that crisscrossed the square.

“I thought we could eat round here, if that’s okay with you?”

“It’s fine with me,” I said as we started walking. I was nearer his shoulder in these heels than I had been in my trainers the last time we’d met. “I like Berkeley Square.”

“Really? What about it, in particular?” Leo sounded interested. “Are you into art galleries?”

“No, it’s the trees. Don’t laugh,” I added, because my thoughts on London trees tended to make even Ted snigger. “I love the squares in London where the trees are as old as the buildings—or even older, like the buildings have had to fit around
them
. I like imagining where the roots go, how far under the ground they stretch.”

“Uh-huh.”

Leo hadn’t sniggered, so I carried on. “I imagine them touching the Underground tunnels, and winding round wine cellars. I know they don’t, obviously, they’re not that deep, but I always loved those cross sections of London we had in history lessons. Roman roads, and medieval pottery shards, and plague pits, and tree roots joining them all up.”

“That’s a very poetic way of looking at it.” We were at the pedestrian crossing now, and Leo put out a hand to stop the taxi that was trying to cut across us. It stopped at once, and I felt more special than usual as he waved me across first.

“It’s a known fact that trees cut down on crime too,” I went on, in case I was sounding too flaky. “And they’re natural air filters too. Beautiful
and
useful!”

“Like the city’s lungs,” said Leo. He glanced across at me. “I sometimes think that when I look out of my office window—how green London is between the buildings. How green it must once have been when it was all villages.”

I stopped.
I
often thought that. “Do you? Honestly?”

“ ’Fraid so. I like to imagine the villages around the church spires. Before the streets joined them all up into one big sprawl.” Leo nodded, then pretended to wince at the geekiness of it, and I laughed, and felt something tingle between us.

“Did you know,” I said, eager to get my fact in while we were still in the square, “that that plane tree there is worth seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds?” I pointed to a thick tree in the corner, gnarled and leafless but still dignified, like an old soldier watching the houses. I mean, I was second to no woman in my love of trees, but that was an
incredible
amount of money.

“How do they work that out?”

“It’s down to age, and size, and how many people benefit from it being there. That plane’s been there since the storming of the Bastille. Since George Washington became president.” I could never quite get my head round that. “It’s a living thing, isn’t it? Imagine what it’s seen!”

“Well, quite. I mean, all
sorts
goes on round here. …”

Leo had stopped walking to look back at the tree, then turned to me. His mouth was curled into a half smile at one corner, and he seemed genuinely intrigued. “That is the most interesting fact I’ve heard today, by quite a long stretch.”

I started to say, “Oh dear, was it a bad day?” but I stopped myself in time. That was a compliment.
Take the compliment, Amy
.

We smiled, goofily, at each other for a second; then he waved his hand toward a door with a canopy over it. “Shall we go in?” he asked. “Unless you’ve got any more good tree facts for me?”

I was confused for a moment—it looked like someone’s house, not somewhere we’d go to eat.

Leo couldn’t live in Berkeley Square, surely? No one
lived
here, it was all embassies and offices! My panic crept back. Was this some royal residence of Rolf’s? Was I wearing the right outfit?

“Are you all right to eat here?” he asked.

I blushed. I had absolutely no idea where we were. “Um, I don’t really know the restaurants in this part of town.”

“It’s actually a members’ club,” said Leo. “I thought it would be quieter, and to be honest …” He looked momentarily ruffled. “My secretary booked somewhere a bit … loud. I share her with a much more, uh, flamboyant fund manager, and I don’t think she’s worked out that I’m not really into restaurants where they set fire to your drinks
and
your dinner.”

“Me neither,” I said, as if I went to those sorts of places all the time and hated them. I hadn’t been to a members’ club either. Wasn’t that something to do with lap dancing? Surely not. …

I made an effort to channel Jo, and smiled broadly. “This sounds great!”

“Good,” said Leo, and waved me down the stairs.

*

T
he staircase led into a narrow lobby, lined with framed paintings like a country-house hotel. It was discreetly lit and thickly carpeted, and the door was swung open by an invisible hand. As we stepped in—Leo letting me go first, butterflies now ricocheting round my chest in lead boots—a coat-check girl shimmered forward to greet Leo with a smile.

“Hello!” she said, as if they were old friends.

“Hello, Frida,” replied Leo with a courteous nod. He helped me off with my coat and handed it to her, pocketing the ticket himself.

“Good evening, sir!” The maître d’ seemed to know him well, as did the waiter who showed us to a corner table, and I sat down, holding in my stomach and clenching my thigh muscles at the same time, but bathing a little in the warmth of Leo’s welcome.

Dad would make a lot of that, I thought. He was always going on about how you could tell a man by how he treated waiters. Sadly, none of my meager selection of boyfriends back home had taken me to dining establishments where there
were
waiters.

I frowned. Actually, maybe that was the point Dad was trying to make.

“You look wonderful, by the way,” said Leo, as he slid into the chair opposite. “What a great dress.”

“This? Thanks!” I could feel my face heating up.
Don’t say you got it in a sale
. “I got it in a sale.”

Shut up, Amy. Shut up, Amy.

“But thank you,” I added, encouraged by the admiring look he was giving it. “It’s my favorite.”

“I can see why. Very chic.”

I glanced around, trying not to look too obviously at the other diners. Some of them seemed quite familiar, but again I steeled myself not to say anything. The trouble about living in London, I’d found quite early on, was that it was all too easy to accost—say—a regular cast member of a national soap opera in Tesco and insist on saying hi, thinking it was a familiar face from your Zumba class.

My buttocks clenched of their own accord at that particular memory. I did
not
want to make that mistake in front of Leo.

“So …” I said, desperately trying to think of something witty and charming to say, but Leo helped me out.

“Tell me more about your gardening business,” he said. “Have you got a favorite part of London you work in?”

I found it easy to talk about gardening, and Leo asked questions as if he was really interested in the answers. I told him about how I loved bringing pockets of the countryside into concrete balconies, and how bees kept the whole natural world turning with their pollen removal business, even in town. He told me how his late grandmother had been a keen gardener, and how he didn’t have much time, since he worked long hours, but always tried to take his grandfather to the Chelsea Flower Show. After a few minutes, I forgot to be nervous, and even eased off my pinching heels under the table.

We talked and talked, and while we were talking Leo ordered a bottle of wine without bothering to check the wine list, and I barely noticed the waiter pouring it. We were still talking when the waiter appeared at Leo’s shoulder and coughed, right in the middle of my story about Ted’s attempt to clip a box hedge into an acorn, which had ended up as something very different and us being fired.

“Excuse me, sir.” The waiter’s face was tight with awkwardness.

Leo reached quickly across the table and touched my arm. “One second,” he said, and I didn’t say anything because a bright flicker of electricity had just sparkled across my skin where his fingers had touched it.

The waiter bent down to mutter in Leo’s ear, but I could hear every word. “There’s a gentleman at the door who is claiming to be you. I realize, of course, that he’s attempting to gain entry by deception, but what would you like me to do?”

Leo frowned quickly, then understanding seemed to dawn.

“A dark-haired man?”

The waiter nodded. “And he has a small party with him.” He coughed discreetly. “Of two young ladies. We do have limits about guests, as you know. …”

Leo glanced at me and his blue eyes were heavy with apology. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’ll be Rolf.”

“What?” My skin crawled. Not just because I couldn’t cope with Rolf’s personality crashing into our lovely easy conversation, but because if he saw me, he’d tell Jo. And Jo would demand to know what I was doing out with someone I hadn’t told her about. And Rolf might demand to know what Jo had done with his fancy underwear, and I’d probably blurt out what we’d done with it, and how Mrs. Mainwaring and Dickon had had an almighty row about—