Rent A Husband (8 page)

“Congratulations,” Forrest says.

“Why, thank you.” Porter squirts soap onto hands and washes them. “I notice you never bid, Mr. Forbes?”

“Oh, I don’t believe in meddling in tribal rituals foreign to me.”

Porter flicks water off his fingers, quite deliberately splashing Forrest’s face.

“Is that how you see us? As tribesmen?”

“Merely a figure of speech.”

Porter crosses to the wall where he yanks a loop of towel from the dispenser. Forrest is amused to see that the man is
battling
to contain
his rage.

Forrest dries his hands under the hot blower and nods to Porter.

“Enjoy the rest of the evening.”

Porter sticks out an arm and blocks Forrest’s way.

Forrest, still
feeling
the pain of the recent beating, knows he is in no shape to take this moron on.

And the painkillers, lack of food and too much sticky champagne have left him lightheaded.

“I’m on to you, Mr. Ivy League,” Porter says.

“Are you now?”

“Word is that you met Darcy up at some vineyard in Napa?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

Forrest is relieved to see an elderly man entering the washroom.

“Evening, Porter.”

“Evening, Earl.”

“Very generous as always,” the man says.

Porter grunts and when Forrest prods at his arm he lets it drop, but he dogs Forrest’s heels, whispering in his ear.

“This whole thing stinks.”

“Yes, maybe they should throw a few more of those little balls into the urinals.”

“Listen you smug bastard, I know what’s going on.”

“Really?”

“That little fairy Eric Royce organized this, didn’t he?”

“You’ve lost me, old boy.”

“I think you’re playacting,
old boy
. I know my Darcy, she’d never get involved with someone like you.”

“She’s hardly your Darcy any longer, is she?” Forrest says as lightly as he can.

“I’m going to put the word out, smartass. You’ll leave here tonight with your tail between your legs.”

As he walks away Forrest feels Porter Pringle’s eyes on his back, and he realizes that he has underestimated the man.

A small town oaf he may be, but a shrewd one.

Carlotta McCourt, fanning herself with a menu, watching couples lumbering around the dance floor, thinks she’s dreaming when somebody takes her arm and she turns and looks up into the face of Porter Pringle.

“May I have the honor of this dance,” he says.

“Oh, Porter, of course,” she stammers, back in high school again, her braces getting in a tangle every time she sees to-die-for Porter in his football gear.

Porter takes her onto the floor, and leans in close.

For one crazy, wonderful, second Carlotta thinks he’s going to kiss her, and her eyes are already closing, her lips puckering, when he whispers, “You don’t like Darcy much, do you?”

Her eyes blink open and she stumbles.

Porter keeps her afloat with a strong arm at her waist.

“Why do you say that?” she says.

“C’mon, Lottie, it’s okay. I’m on your side?”

“You are?”

“Yep. And I know something that I think you’ll find very interesting.”

“You do?”

“Uh huh.”

“What?”

“This guy, this Forrest Gump character who Darcy has dragged here tonight, I think he’s a fake. I think it’s a set up to get back at me.”

“Really? He seems very attentive to her.”

“He’s playing a role. He’s some, what do you call them? Gigolo.”

Carlotta stares at him in amazement. “How do you know this?”

“I just know it, Lottie. No way in hell is that guy Darcy’s type.”

“He is . . . unusual for a town like this.”

“He’s a stooge. It’s all the work of Eric Joyce, that I can tell you.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“What you do best, Lottie. Talk. Gossip. Get the word out.” The music ends and Porter gives her a little shove. “Go on, what are you waiting for?”

Carlotta seeing him walking away from her, realizes that—yet again—he cares only for Darcy.

Still cares enough to want her humiliated.

Carlotta bottles her anger and disappointment and focuses it, staring across the room at where Darcy stands chatting to a group of people.

And, like a cowcatcher on the snout of a train, Carlotta forces her way though the crowd, ready to go and confront Darcy and bring the little bitch down a peg or two.

Forrest—hand under his shirt, rubbing at his mother’s ring to soothe him—watches Porter dancing with a hard-faced woman, their eyes drawn to Darcy, and has a crystal clear flash of precognition.

He knows without knowing how he knows that this woman is Darcy’s enemy.

And that Porter is priming her with what he has intuited.

When Porter unhands her at the end of the dance, and virtually shoves her in his ex-wife’s direction, the woman elbowing her way through the revelers to where Darcy stands, Forrest asks himself why he gives a damn.

This isn’t his fight.

He’s way above this.

And that’s his answer right there: why the hell should he stay meek and quiet in this room full of poorly dressed, jumped-up peasants?

He is a man of pedigree.

Of breeding.

He is also a man filled with painkillers and cheap bubbly.

A man looking for trouble as he spins on his heel and heads toward the bandstand.

Darcy, drinking champagne, talking to a group of Santa Sofia’s most prominent citizens—the mayor pumping her hand and thanking her for what she has achieved tonight—has been able to put her sadness, and her anger, aside.

The night has been a success.

Money (more money than ever before thanks to Eric) has been raised.

And Forrest Forbes has played his part impeccably.

He has drawn no attention to himself—even though his looks are show-stopping—and let her do what she is here to do.

He’s made sure she always has a drink in her hand, he’s danced with her (a good dancer without being flashy) and she feels that he somehow has
got
her, understood without being told what she needed tonight.

He deserves her thanks, but when she looks around the room, her eyes skidding over the odious Carlotta McCourt who is bearing down on her, and tries to find Forrest, he is nowhere to be seen.

Carlotta grabs her arm and says, “You’re paying him aren’t you?”

Darcy turns to her, “I beg your pardon?”

“That Forbes guy. You’re paying him. He’s like some escort, isn’t he?”

The mayor, his wife, and their friends are staring at Darcy, who feels her composure slipping.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You couldn’t bear to come here tonight on Eric Royce’s arm, not with Porter being here with his pregnant wife, so you paid some guy. I saw him arriving at your house with Eric Royce last night. He’s just some actor isn’t he? Pretending to be your date? God, Darcy, how
humiliating
!”

Darcy feels her cheeks burning and she’s ready to flee into the night when the band comes to a sudden ragged stop and she hears Forrest Forbes’s voice, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen if I may ask you to indulge me for a minute.”

She looks at the bandstand, and there he stands, in the spotlight, staring at her.

Is the man drunk?

Drugged?

Deranged?

All of the above?

“I’m sure some of you are wondering who I am,” he says.

“Oh, I’ve got your number, buster,” Carlotta says.

“Wondering how I was lucky enough to meet the wonderful Darcy?”

He points at her.

“I’ve known Darcy for only a few short weeks, but by knowing her my life has become transformed and—even though she will find this display of public affection embarrassing—I want to declare my love for her and ask her a question.”

Darcy stands stunned as Forrest steps off the bandstand—looking nimble and lithe, no sign of his injuries—and walks over to her, the spotlight following him.

He kneels down on one knee and holds up a ring that sparkles like flame in the light.

“Darcy, will you be my wife?”

And Darcy, knowing in that moment exactly how a deer in the headlights feels, stares around the room:

Sees Porter with a stunned expression on his face.

Sees his silly child bride looking bewildered.

See Carlotta McCourt’s mouth fallen open in a cartoonish O.

And then she hears something, in the absolute silence that has followed Forrest Forbes’s outrageous declaration, hears a voice, realizes that it is her voice and that she is saying, “Of course, Forrest, of course I will marry you.”

And that ring—good God how many rocks on that thing?—slides onto her finger and when he stands and kisses her (
the man can kiss
) she swoons into his arms and allows herself to be swept onto the dance floor to the sound of loud applause, and it’s not the band she’s hearing stumbling through “Isn’t She Lovely”, it’s the sound of sitars and drums and swirling flutes.

19

Poor Billy Bigelow is down on the beach at dawn, staring at the wooden pier that disappears out into the fog, thinking the
rickety jetty
is a great metaphor for his life, his future stretching off into a cloud of nothingness.

When he humiliated himself the other night at Darcy’s he’d thought he’d hit bottom, but in the early hours of this morning, after his good friend Teddy the catering manager at the Country Club came to fill him in on the Ball (“I don’t care how late it is, you stop by an give me a blow-by-blow,” Poor Billy had instructed his old school pal) he’d sunk into a depression a thick as this ocean fog.

Darcy was to be married.

She’d been proposed to in a ridiculously public (and absurdly romantic) manner.

And, of course, she’d said
yes
.

Twenty years of dreams, gone.

Poor Billy looks down and sees that he is standing up to his ankles in the surf, his shoes and pants bottoms soaked.

When he retreats and walks across the sand to the main road, he squeaks.

Averting his eyes from the spot where the horrible accident happened, he crosses the road toward the Peggy’s all-night diner.

Perhaps a cup of coffee and a plate of Peggy’s eggs will restore him.

Usually Jimmy keeps a weather eye open for Topsy, Peggy’s terrier, built at the perfect height to trip him up, but today he is too preoccupied to take his usual precautions and the dog—a cunning little beast—darts from nowhere and gets under Billy’s feet and there he is, spinning and pirouetting, that long, gracelessly body flung around as if he’s suffering some kind of seizure, and to break his fall he grabs hold of a table and finds himself falling into a booth, staring at the face of Brontë Baines.

“Good morning,” she says, “how nice of you to join me.”

“Oh, thanks, yes,” he says, getting his breath back. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“No, I don’t. Not at all.” She looks at him with those wild, soulful eyes. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Are you terribly attached to the name Billy?”

“No, I’m not, actually. Why?”

“You look far more like a William to me. Billy, I feel, is more suited to a child or a yahoo, and you are neither.”

“Uh, no, I suppose I’m not. Well, definitely not a child.”

“And far too refined to be a yahoo. So, William you shall be.”

Peggy is there in her apron, her dyed blonde hair fighting a silly hat. “Your usual, Billy?”

“Yes, Peggy. Thank you.”

Peggy glowers at Brontë. “Heads-up missy: the bottomless cup of coffee just hit bottom.”

The woman strides off, the dog falling in behind her, but not before the mutt has shot Billy a look of triumph.

This is a war that has dragged on for many years, and it is usually Billy who is bested.

“So, Brontë, how are you liking Santa Sofia?”

“Oh, I find it very congenial, thank you.”

“Fixed yourself up with a place to stay?”

When the girl stares at him and then blushes into her empty coffee cup, something dawns on Billy and he surfaces from his all-consuming and terribly selfish funk.

“Oh, God, you spent the night here, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“But where are your things?”

“I have no things.”

And she tells him about becoming distracted by that display of petunias and the bus driving off with her bag.

Billy shakes his head, this is a story worthy of him.

“Okay, I know somebody at the bus company. I’ll make a couple of calls and I’m sure they’ll be able to deliver your bag sometime today.”

She’s staring at him. “You’d do that? For me?”

He shrugs. “Sure.” He clears his throat. “Now, forgive me if this is embarrassing, Brontë, but I have to ask: are you, I mean, do you . . .”

“I’m broke, William, if that’s what you’re so kindly asking. I spent my last money on the bus ticket.”

“Ah, right. Well, you must allow me to give you an advance on your wages.”

“That would be an extraordinary act of kindness.”

“Oh, please, it’s nothing.”

“No, it’s not nothing. It’s very definitely something. A bigger something than anybody has ever done for me.”

Billy’s eggs arrive, and Peg—kind hearted despite her prizefighter face and shoulders—pours Brontë another cup of coffee.

“Just because you’re a pal of Billy’s I’ll make an exception,” she says, “but only this one time, hear?” She shoves a thick finger in Brontë’s face. “And get yourself a room.”

The girl cowers and nods, sipping at her coffee.

Billy manages to eat his eggs and swallow his java without major mishap—although it is touch-and-go when he whacks the bottom of the ketchup bottle, and only a smart move by Brontë gets her out of the path of a stream of thick red sauce—and he leaves money on the table and stands.