A Funny Thing About Love (36 page)

Will looked blank then said, ‘Tash was having an X-ray. They think she might have broken her toe when she dropped a weight on it at the gym and she wanted me to keep her company as she hates hospitals.'

‘What about you saying you had some important news for me as you left?' Carmen was determined to prove that she had not been a loony tune by jumping to the pregnancy conclusion.

Will burst out laughing. ‘Carmen, you are priceless, a ruby, a diamond among women. I was going to tell you that M&S seem to have stopped making Wobbly Worms and replaced them with Colin the Caterpillar, and how did you feel about confectionery that had the same name as our former accountant?'

Tash wasn't pregnant? She and Will had broken up? There was just too much to take in. Carmen put her hands over her face and laughed so hard that she cried. Will put his arms round her and pulled her to him and she put her arms round his neck and for a while they just held each other until the tears had run their course. As soon as she stopped crying Carmen registered that the butterflies were going ballistic, especially when Will
kissed her neck and then her lips and Carmen kissed him back. No kiss was ever sweeter or sexier or held such a promise. And this time Carmen knew exactly where the kiss was leading, didn't want it to stop. ‘I'm still cold,' Will murmured.

‘Come to bed then, I'll warm you up.'

And so it was that instead of sitting alone and surveying the wreckage of her love life, Carmen took Will into her bed and Will had his eyes open all the time they made love and it was even better than she had once anticipated that it might be.

‘That was even better than I thought it would be,' Will said afterwards.

‘Even though I lack Tash's balletic suppleness,' Carmen teased.

Will looked at her and put his finger on her lips. ‘No teasing. I feel bad about Tash, I only went out with her again on the rebound, all thanks to you. There I was gearing up to declare my feelings to you and you knocked me back. I used Tash to repair my battered ego but it was wrong of me. And then when I found out about Daniel I was so jealous of the skateboarding gardener.'

Carmen turned over and propped herself on her elbows to look at Will. She still couldn't quite believe that he had ended up in her bed, though it felt right as well, as if he belonged there.

‘Why were you jealous of him? You've got a great career and I bet you don't even like skateboarding. You'd be rubbish at it anyway, I reckon.' Carmen was
trying to keep it light because she couldn't quite believe what she was hearing.

‘I wasn't jealous of that, I was jealous because . . .' Will hesitated. ‘Oh, for God's sake, Carmen, I thought as a woman you were supposed to be blessed with powers of intuition. I was jealous because he had you.' Will ran a hand over his short black hair, suddenly less sure of himself than usual. ‘Don't you get it, Carmen? I really like you, I mean
really
like. Don't laugh but I think I love you, Carmen Miller. I don't mean I think, I mean I know I love you. You've been wrapped around my heart since you first walked into my office in your foxy mutton outfits. It was the denim shorts and high heels that did for me.'

Carmen punched him on the arm (on the very satisfyingly muscular arm, she was pleased to notice – in fact, everything about Will's body was satisfyingly muscular).

‘Don't hit me, I've just said I love you. It's a big moment.' It was a big moment. Carmen looked at Will and knew that she loved him. It was in a different league to what she had felt for Daniel, which she now realised was infatuation. She loved Will because he understood her, understood the person that she wanted to be, well, nearly.

At that a series of loud bangs signalled fireworks exploding over Brighton to bring in the New Year. ‘I didn't plan that,' Will said, pulling her to him.

‘It would have been a terrible cliché if you had.' Carmen was so close to telling Will that she loved him, but something stopped her.

‘I'll get the champagne.' If in doubt, reach for alcohol.

Walking into Marcus's production company Neon Tiger was like stepping back in time as Carmen saw first Trish, then Daisy, Lottie and Dirty Sam, all of whom had needed very little persuasion to take redundancy and leave Fox Nicholson.

‘Oh my God!' she exclaimed, hugging each of them in turn, even Dirty Sam, and usually she kept him at arms' length as he was a terrible groper. ‘It's so good to see you all! You can let go now, Dirty Sam,' she added, extricating herself from Dirty Sam's overly passionate embrace – if he was a dog he'd be one of those pesky little mongrels who was forever trying to mate with your leg. It was the first time Carmen had visited the company. She had spent the last month working flat out to finish the sitcom, discovering that there was nothing like a deadline to stop all the random acts of procrastination and focus the mind.

Marcus had managed to rent an office in a prime location just off Tottenham Court Road. He'd got it at a bargain price as it was slightly run down and wasn't built to the high-tech spec so many companies demanded. But that was a plus as far as Carmen was concerned. She was delighted to see that all the windows opened, there
was no hideous overhead lighting that made one want to put one's head in a bag to escape its penetrating glare, and there were no glass cages, though Will had his own office tucked in the corner, as did Marcus, both of which had glass doors with venetian blinds. Trish had already made herself at home and had surrounded her desk with her cacti collection and aquarium.

‘This is going to be your desk,' Trish told her, pointing out a work station adjacent to hers. Carmen was going to work part-time for the company developing scripts while they waited to see what would happen with her sitcom. Will was training up Daisy to be an agent, as he reckoned she had a killer instinct and was wasted as a receptionist. With characteristic dark humour she had decorated her work station with a red-and-white triangular warning sign: ‘Touch my stuff you die, yes, I mean you, Dirty Sam.' Lottie's desk had a vase of cheery sunflowers on it, a present from her girlfriend congratulating her on her new job, and Dirty Sam's had at least three coffee mugs that needed washing and a large cardboard figure of Megan Fox.

‘It's the closest he gets to a real woman,' Will told her as they walked past on their way to his office.

‘We know what you're up to!' Dirty Sam called out after them.

Will fixed him with his big boss look. ‘Missing Tiana?'

Dirty Sam pretended to be working on a very important document.

‘We're going through Carmen's sitcom, not that it's any of your business.'

Will could be very masterful when he chose to be, Carmen reflected as she followed him. As soon as Will had shut the door he pulled down the venetian blind. ‘But now Dirty Sam will definitely think we're up to something,' Carmen protested.

‘We are up to something,' Will said, putting his arms round her and kissing her. ‘I've always wanted to have carnal knowledge with one of my colleagues in the workplace, and now I'm the boss I really feel there's nothing stopping me.'

‘I'm not having sex with you in here,' Carmen said when she surfaced from the kiss. ‘I just couldn't, knowing that everyone was out there.'

‘You mean you don't want to slip out of your panties and straddle me while I sit at my desk playing at being a big executive.' Will gave her a wicked grin.

‘Not now you've said that word. I'll never forgive Marcus for telling you.'

Will sighed theatrically. ‘Shame. Come on, Miller, let's get to work. I'm going to be pitching this to Channel Four in three weeks and it's got to be perfect.'

And they did just that. Carmen knew that once Will had set his mind to do something, he would not be deflected. She watched him frowning with concentration as they went through the scenes, running his hands through his short hair, and her heart flipped over.

The four weeks since New Year's Eve had been some of the happiest she had ever known, passing in a whirlwind of passion, laughter and work. She had moved back to London on New Year's Day and was staying
in Marcus's spare room until she could get enough money together for a deposit. Will wanted her to move in with him but it felt too soon after everything that had happened. She had rushed into things with Daniel, and look where that had got her. Besides, she told Will, she couldn't leave Marcus on his own. He was still mourning Leo, and Carmen felt that only her presence in the flat stopped him embarking on a self-destructive fuck-fest, which was what he kept threatening to do. Will didn't push it, but Carmen could tell that he was waiting for her to move their relationship on. She still hadn't told him she loved him, knowing that when she did she would have to tell him about not being able to have children. Will would be very understanding, she was sure, but the pity would creep in and then he would be looking for an exit.

‘So what's the plan for tonight?' Will asked when they'd been working for some three hours, sustained only by quantities of Colin the Caterpillars, which neither thought were a patch on Wobbly Worms, and interrupted at least four times by Dirty Sam with spurious questions, desperate to see if they really were up to anything.

‘We're taking Marcus out for his birthday at Rico's. I thought he'd want to go somewhere posher but he said he wanted low-key. Last year Leo flew him to the Four Seasons in New York, and I imagine that Rico's is probably about as far away from the Four Seasons as you can get. I'll meet you there, I've got to go and buy his present.'

‘Ah, the life of a part-time worker.' Will leaned back in his chair. ‘Are you sure you won't move in with me? Then I could come home to you cooking supper, wearing a cute little apron, maybe with nothing on under the apron.'

‘That would be dangerous in the kitchen, don't you think?'

Will was lost in his fantasy. ‘My slippers warming by the fire as you pour me a glass of wine.'

‘If that's the life you've imagined for us then let me tell you I am never moving in with you, and if I ever see any slippers in your flat, they won't be warming by the fire, they will be in the fire. Slippers are the antidote to passion,' Carmen declared, gathering up her things.

‘How can an UGG-wearer diss slippers? My West Ham pair are very fetching, I'll have you know. I'm sure you'd find me just as irresistible if I was naked and only wearing them and a smile.'

‘No way!' Carmen shot back.

‘Yes way.' Will got up and grabbed her arm, forcing her to sit on his lap, at the very moment Dirty Sam came in on one of his leering missions.

‘I knew it!' he declared, punching the air and practically skipping back to his desk, shouting, ‘Lottie, you owe me a fiver. They were at it.'

Carmen looked at Will. ‘And you employed Dirty Sam why?'

‘Evidently not for his social skills. He's very good at spotting comic talent, and in an ideal world he would
do just that and the rest of us would never have to interact with him.'

Carmen slid off his lap and straightened her skirt.

‘We may as well do it, don't you think, now that they all think we have?' Will said hopefully.

‘I'll see you later,' Carmen replied, walking out of the door and glaring at Dirty Sam who still looked as if he had won the lottery. She wondered if there was a course he could go on to learn people skills, then reasoned it was probably too late.

She spent a pleasant couple of hours mooching around the shops trying to find a suitable present for Marcus – the man who really did have everything. In the end she went for a collection of Oscar Wilde's fairy stories. As she walked back to Mount Street she thought about the last month. Being with Will was a revelation – it was like having a lover and a best friend all rolled up. Carmen had never attached much weight to the idea that there was a person out there who would be ‘the one'. But with Will she was having to revise that idea, maybe he was her one. The trouble was, for how long? She knew she was living on borrowed time and felt that any moment there would be a wake-up call, and she would be forced to say goodbye to a happiness that seemed all the sweeter as she knew it couldn't last.

‘Happy Birthday, Marcus!' Mamma Mia declared, folding Marcus into one of her bear hugs and giving him a series of hefty kisses which indicated the depth
of her affection for him, almost as great as her feeling for Will if the tightness of her grip and passionate smack of her kisses was anything to go by. ‘The first celebrity to dine at Rico's! I am so proud. See, I have already put your picture up on the wall.' She pointed over to a poster-sized framed photograph of herself and Marcus she'd had taken the last time he'd visited, and which was decorated with gold tinsel to ensure it stood out from the others. ‘I know you are used to the very best and I will give you the VIP treatment, I promise, my darling boy.' With that she exited in a flurry of black skirts to boss the waiters around.

‘I thought this was going to be low-key,' Marcus said, looking accusingly at Carmen.

‘It is,' Carmen insisted. She appealed to Will, Sadie and Dom (yes, miraculously Sadie still hadn't dumped Dom), for back-up. ‘Mamma Mia's always like this. She's not putting on anything special just for you.' At this Carmen crossed her fingers as Mamma Mia had excelled herself in the birthday arrangements by making a cake and decorating it with a picture of Marcus's face made out of icing, which she was going to carry to the table while the entire restaurant burst into a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday', accompanied by Mamma Mia's grandson on the accordion. Carmen hadn't had the heart to tell Mamma Mia that Marcus had an irrational hatred of the accordion – even the sight of one set his teeth on edge.

‘Well, just so long as there is no cake and no singing of “Happy Birthday”, you know I hate that kind of thing.'