Rent A Husband (20 page)

But the memory of Darcy’s eyes looking up at him on the bed in Marilyn Monroe’s bungalow keeps him silent.

The car stops outside her house and Forrest pays the driver, squares his shoulders and walks up to the front door.

58

Eric Royce is a closet watercolorist.

Not even Darcy knows his dark little secret, and he keeps his messy daubs hidden in the upstairs room that he has come to think of—pretentiously he knows—as his
studio
.

He took to painting when he went sober, on the advice of a counselor who told him to get an interest, a hobby, something that would focus his mind.

Walking past an art supply store in the Beverly Center Eric saw watercolor paints and brushes in the window and impulsively went in and bought everything he needed to become a rotten painter.

He favors seascapes and often snaps pictures during his walks on the beach to use as reference for his watercolors.

The process of making these clumsy paintings soothes him, takes his mind off work and the occasional tempests in his private life.

Today he is painting to forget what he has come to call
The Darcy Situation
.

He loves his friend dearly and has hated watching her pain and torment these last months.

Eric’s motives for engineering a collision between Darcy and Forrest were good, but—as he splashes cerulean blue into the sky of his painting—he fears that he has introduced a complication that her life doesn’t need.

And this business with Porter is worrisome.

Porter Pringle is a snake and it’s all Eric can do not to hurry off down to the coffee shop to watch Darcy’s back.

No, she is mistress of her own destiny
, he decides.

She would be justly furious if he interfered.

So he carries on painting, making a hash of the waves frothing on the shore.

Taking a break, his brushes soaking in a jar of water, Eric hears the sound of a car in the street, and when he peers out the window he sees a taxi stop outside Darcy’s house.

Eric watches in astonishment as Forrest Forbes marches up the pathway and rings Darcy’s doorbell.

Ducking away from the window, Eric grabs his phone and dials Darcy’s number.

When he gets her voice mail he doesn’t leave a message and—usually the most decisive of men—he has no idea what to do next.

59

When Porter stands up out of his Mercedes, Darcy, observing him through the window of the coffee shop, can’t help feeling a surge of emotion.

Anger, yes, and hurt, but also—undeniably—a love that seems almost as old as she is.

And Darcy can’t suppress an unwanted flare of hope when she sees the care he has taken with his clothes.

He’s wearing the lightweight linen suit that was her gift to him on his last birthday.

His cotton shirt, buttoned to the collar, is one of her favorites.

His gleaming tassled loafers were bought at Darcy’s urging on a trip to London.

Porter spots her and smiles, even more handsome now than when she met him a lifetime ago.

When he strolls into the coffee shop (only Darcy able to detect the very slight limp that comes from his bad knee, the injury that ended any dreams of a pro-football career) Carlotta McCourt tugs at his sleeve.

“Porter, how wonderful to see you.”

“Always a pleasure, Lottie,” he says, but he doesn’t linger and comes on over to where Darcy waits.

She stands and he plants a kiss on her cheek, that Porter scent—musky, spicy and very masculine—triggering far too many old memories.

“Let’s get out of here, Port,” she says.

“Why?”

“I feel like a walk on the beach,” she says, but she wants to get away from the toxic presence of Carlotta.

“Hell, Darce, I’m not dressed for the beach.”

“You can take your shoes off, Porter. A little beach sand won’t kill you.”

She leaves money on the table, waves to Billy and heads for the door.

Porter has no option but to follow her.

They cross the road and slip past Peggy’s Diner and then they’re on Long Beach, the sky turning from blue to orange.

Darcy steps out of her flip-flops and leaves them lying on the sand.

Porter, looking less than pleased, slips off his shoes and socks and follows Darcy onto the endless stretch of beach, empty but for a couple of surfers.

60

Carlotta McCourt is crestfallen when that little bitch Darcy leads the gorgeous Porter Pringle out of the coffee shop, toward the beach.

How cunning of Darcy to take him out there.

Carlotta is not a beach person.

She loathes the sand, finding it itchy and abrasive to her feet, and the ocean is greasy and polluted.

The only water she can tolerate is in her bathtub, after it has been treated with her many potions.

So, she is left marooned in the coffee shop, while the most gossipworthy event in the last while is taking place tantalizingly close by.

She raises her hand and clicks her fingers at the dopey Billy Bigelow.

“Another coffee, Billy. Black as night.”

Carlotta sits staring out the window and as she watches the usual small town parade she’s struck, suddenly, by how empty and useless her life is.

Her fat, ugly, husband will get fatter and uglier.

And older.

Her gruesome twins will clump off into their stolid, boring lives and—no doubt—produce gruesome children.

The thought that she will, at some point in the very foreseeable future, be a grandmother gets Carlotta’s heart racing, and she feels a panicky sweat on her forehead.

A
grandmother!

When Billy arrives with her coffee she seriously considers asking him for something alcoholic.

But, no.

She has an image to preserve.

It would not do for the town to whisper about Carlotta McCourt driven to hard liquor after seeing Darcy and Porter Pringle stroll off into the sunset.

So she sips her coffee and tries to recalibrate her attitude.

And then, just like that—as if a magic wand has been waved—all her worries disappear when she sees a tall, gorgeous hunk of manflesh stride into the coffee shop, and she understands that the gossip gods are orchestrating everything perfectly.

She stands. “Mr. Forbes,” she says. “How nice to see you again.”

The man blinks at her, no recognition in his eyes.

She extends her hand.

“Carlotta McCourt. We met at the Ball.”

“Ah, yes.” He gives her hand a rather perfunctory shake. “I’m looking for Darcy Pringle. You haven’t perhaps seen her, have you?”

“Oh, I have, I have,” she says, relishing the sweetness of this moment.

“Was she here?”

“She was, until but a minute ago,” she says in her best Blanche du Bois purr.

The man barely manages his impatience.

“And where is she now?”

Carlotta wags her talons in the direction of the ocean.

“I do believe she is taking a walk on the beach.”

Without bothering to thank her Forrest Forbes hurries out of the coffee shop and jogs across the road, ignoring a couple of irate horns, and disappears in the direction Darcy and Porter were last seen heading.

Carlotta sets off in pursuit.

Scratchy sand and dirty ocean be damned, this is not something she is going to miss.

61

When Porter slips his arm through hers as they stroll along the beach, Darcy doesn’t pull away, allowing herself to feel the familiar warmth of his body.

God how she has missed him.

Get it together, girl
, she tells herself, and she frees her arm from his.

“So, Port, what is it that you want to discuss?”

“I really just wanted to see you, Darce?”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I miss you.”

She laughs. “Aren’t you far too occupied to miss little old me?”

“You don’t just erase twenty years, Darce.”

She stops, looking up at him.

“Oh, but that’s exactly what you did.”

“I never meant to hurt you.”

“Come on Port, you’re not a fool. Didn’t you think that bedding your bimbo assistant and then dumping me for her would hurt just a teensy-weensy bit?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Of course you are,” she says, walking away from him.

He catches up with her and when he tries to take her arm she pushes his hand away.

“Darcy,” Porter says, “I never realized how tough my life would be without you.”

She shakes her head at his audacity.

“What, doesn’t Paige organize your closets and keep the shoe trees in your loafers?”

“Darce . . .”

The breeze picks up and she brushes a strand of hair from her face.

“Why are you doing this, Porter? Coming up here today to open wounds that have just started to heal?”

“Maybe I still have feelings for you.”

“Really?”

She injects as much scorn as she can into her voice, but her traitorous heart yearns for him, and she feels tears welling in her eyes.

He shrugs. “I do. For years you completed me.”

“You’ve really got to watch some newer movies, Port.”

“I mean it.”

She walks again, trying distance herself from the weakness within as much as from Porter, blinking away those tears.

He is beside her again.

“I did things I regret, Darcy.”

Porter puts his hands on her shoulders.

Darcy doesn’t shrug them off, and the late sun shows her his green eyes and his easy smile, and when he draws her toward him she doesn’t resist, and before she knows it she feels his lips on hers.

Her eyes close and she returns the kiss and Darcy forgets everything that has happened in this last, awful year.

62

When Forrest ducks past the diner and sees the blue water stretching out toward the horizon, seagulls wheeling in the darkening sky, he is reminded of Emily Yates, of the moment she had emerged Botticelli-like from the waves.

Why is the memory of that painful summer haunting him today like a portent?

He pushes the recollection from his mind and heads toward the beach, anxious now to find Darcy Pringle, to end this silly, messy, humiliating—and positively
adolescent
—love sickness.

When he found himself stranded outside her house, the garage door yawning on an empty interior, he felt both foolish and agitated, and realized the absurdity of what he was doing.

He’d jumped on a train without thinking, driven by this crazy desire to be with Darcy.

What if she were out of town?

That’s what cell phones are for, bozo
, he reminded himself.

But he was thwarted, again, when he dialed her number and was left listening to her voice mail.

Forrest considered banging on the door of Eric Royce’s house to see if he knew where Darcy was, but he couldn’t bear subjecting himself to the TV hack’s smug condescension.

Then he remembered Darcy telling him that each day she frequented a coffee shop in the main road of Santa Sofia.

So Forrest walked back toward town, sweating in the late afternoon sun, his shirt sticking to his back by the time he arrived at the Book & Bean—even in his disheveled and confused state he still found time to cringe at the name.

He thought all hope was lost when the coffee shop was empty save for a woman as over-painted as a Reeperbahn street walker.

It took Forrest a few moments to recognize her as Darcy’s nemesis, and when Carlotta sent him off in the direction of the beach, he wondered if this was a lie, part of some ruse to keep him and Darcy apart.

Stop being paranoid, for God’s sake.

Get a grip, man.

Forrest trudges over a low dune, sinking to his ankles in the sand, and sees the beach spread out below, washed in the rosy hues of sunset.

And he sees the unmistakable form of Darcy Pringle walking alone on the sand, her hair blowing in the wind.

“Darcy, hello!” he shouts, but the breeze throws his words back at him, and Darcy doesn’t hear.

Forrest, once again feeling that he has stumbled into an absurd romantic comedy, fights his way down the dune, scuffing and sliding, still calling Darcy’s name.

Then he sees that she is not alone, that a man has caught up with her.

A broad-shouldered man in a suit.

Porter Pringle.

And as Darcy falls into Porter’s arms and kisses him, Forrest relives the heartache and humiliation he felt in that boathouse on the Hamptons all those years ago.

63

For once Poor Billy Bigelow is utterly blameless.

He’s standing on the sidewalk outside the florist holding a bunch of flowers, waiting for a gap in Santa Sofia’s modest version of rush hour, when a man comes hurtling around the corner and collides with him, sending the blooms flying into the gutter.

When the man pauses long enough to mutter an apology, Billy knows he has seen him before, but can’t remember where.

It is only when Poor Billy kneels to gather the flowers—the florist’s neat arrangement destroyed—and shove them back in their cellophane wrapping, that he realizes that the disheveled sprinter (his hair almost as untidy as Billy’s, his shirt glued to his body by sweat) is the debonair man he saw at Darcy’s house the night before the Spring Ball.

The man who’d flashed a pitying smirk at Billy in his moment of abject humiliation.

Billy spends little time pondering the circumstances that have left the man in a state of such disarray, all his concentration is on trying to make the little bouquet look as presentable as possible, then he hurries across the road and thunders up the stairs to Brontë’s room.