Blind-Date Baby (12 page)

He’d done this for her, had planned it all out. A trip to Angelina was all the wedding present she could have wished for. Just like that, all her fears about the future melted away and the anchors holding her in the past let go. This was her life now. This was her husband. And he was funny and caring and sexy enough to eat with a dollop of whipped cream.

She couldn’t stop looking at him as he paid the bill and they made their way through the crowded café to the front of the shop. She didn’t even break her stride to look at the cakes behind the counter again. She was totally focused on him.

The cool spring breeze was welcome on her face when they stepped back out into the street. She stopped him by tugging his hand, making him come back to her. Now it was her turn to call the shots, to bestow the gift. She leaned in close and kissed his ear before whispering, ‘Take me back to the hotel, Noah.’

‘But—’

‘Take me back to the hotel.’

All the way back in the taxi, they held hands, played with each other’s fingers, unable to stop touching, caressing, stroking. For most of the journey they just smiled and stared out of the window, but they saw nothing, their whole attention given to the tips of their bodies that were intertwined.

It was the same in the lift at the hotel. They stood at the back, behind the other guests, and shared a secret with each other.

Once in the hotel room, there was no place for nerves. Grace didn’t even remember she’d had any as they began to kiss and peel layer upon layer of clothing from each other. Sometimes they were hungry and impatient, sometimes slow and teasing.

She was lost. Lost somewhere where there was only Noah. Noah’s hands, Noah’s lips.

When the last of the barriers between them had been stripped away, he slid his hands down her naked torso and she shivered with delight. Then he scooped her up in his arms so she was cradled against his heartbeat and carried her to the bed.

M
AKING
love with Noah was like nothing else Grace had ever experienced. It was like handling raw fire, but without getting scorched—well, only in a good way. He was so strong, so totally focused, yet so devastatingly good that, for a few moments, she was incoherent with pleasure. Her whole body thrummed.

She could feel his breath against her shoulder as he lay half-draped over her. His ribs moved up and down, up and down, in a deep, even rhythm. Grace lay still, taking comfort from it, and let her eyes wander over her surroundings. Light from a street lamp somewhere shone on the ceiling and wall, creating a strip of distorted light, and she stared at it, wondering why she’d woken and why she couldn’t snuggle back into him and sleep.

With Rob, sex had been good—fun, energetic, playful—but this…Noah…

A different league.

She couldn’t kid herself any more. This was no platonic, mutual partnership. This was the real thing. With honest-to-goodness violins playing and birds singing, even though it was nowhere near dawn yet.

She loved Noah.

And so much for it being safe. It was grown up, all right. Big and scary and very, very dangerous with sharp teeth. No
wonder she’d made excuses to avoid getting close to it all these years. She should have listened to her instincts and stayed the hell away.

But then Noah made a sound that was half-snuffle, half-snore and pulled her tighter against him and she couldn’t help but smile, even as her eyes filled with tears. Why did the good things in life have to come with a dark opposite? Life and death. Love and hate. Fear and faith. Why couldn’t she love Noah without the threat of losing him? It would always be there, hanging in the background like an unexploded bomb, waiting to detonate when she finally relaxed and believed it had all been a bluff.

Losing Rob had been bad enough. For months, she’d only dragged herself out of bed in the mornings because Daisy had needed her cereal. Daisy had saved her life back then without even knowing it. Any moments of imbalance on her mother’s part had been quickly countered by a ponytail of dark waves and a cheeky smile.

Grace wriggled herself backwards so she was as close to Noah as she could get, not even a millimetre of air between them. His chest was warm against her back and beating a reassuring rhythm.

Not yet. Not tonight. But the loss would come. One day. It always did.

And she was a coward, too scared to face it.

She gently kissed the forearm wrapped around her and pulled it close so she could lay her cheek against it.

You should have seen it coming, Grace. You do love and marriage and babies, remember? What did you think was going to happen?

Her only hope was that Noah was taking the same journey she was, that they were going to do as he’d said and work out how they felt together.

The next couple of days were exactly what a honeymoon in Paris should be. Grace and Noah stayed in bed and ordered room service quite a lot, making love whenever the mood took them, which seemed to be pretty often. Even Daisy would have been shocked that her old fogey of a mother could have such an appetite for nothing but Noah. Not that she was going to talk to Daisy about this. In Daisy’s own words, that would be TMI—too much information. For both of them.

On their last morning, after breakfast in bed, which had turned into
we might as well stay here for lunch too
, Grace snuggled into Noah, her head on his chest and his arm tucked round her.

Even though they were married, there was so much she didn’t know about him. It had all happened so quickly that they’d bypassed a lot of the getting-to-know-you process. And she wanted to know everything about him, to understand him. Partly because she was hoping he was feeling the same way she was, but it was more than that. She loved him. And that meant every new thing she learned about him was a treasure, something precious to be stored away in her mind and wondered at.

‘You know all about me now—my history with Rob, my disastrous dates between then and now—but you haven’t told me anything about you.’ She poked him in the ribs. ‘That’s the problem with being such a nosy parker. You’re too good a listener. And I’m too good a talker.’

Noah stroked her arm and kissed the top of her head. ‘Seems we’ve found the perfect balance.’

She shook her head against his chest. ‘You must have had a couple of serious relationships in your life. I can’t be the first one. And, anyway, I don’t really count yet, do I?’

A pair of hands reached round her waist and hoisted her up so she was lying on top of him. A wicked gleam was in his eye. ‘Believe me, you count.’ And then he started to trail his fingers up the backs of her legs, higher, higher…

‘That’s not what I meant, Noah. You’re avoiding the issue.’

His fingers stopped moving. ‘Maybe there’s nothing to avoid.’

But the gleam in his eye had been replaced by a shuttered hardness. She slid off him. ‘Maybe there is,’ she said quietly.

Noah pushed himself on to one elbow and launched himself out of bed. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Grace. Subject closed.’

She gathered the rumpled sheet around her as he disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door. Well, there was her answer. Now she knew exactly how Noah felt.

The face staring back at him from the bathroom mirror was not a pretty sight. His brows were slanted together and his jaw was square and hard.

It had started already.

The probing. The questions.

He just hadn’t thought it would happen so soon. Grace had taken him completely by surprise. They’d been having such a good time, just enjoying the moment, and she’d had to go and spoil it with deep and meaningful stuff. Although he knew he shouldn’t be—she was just doing what women did—he was angry with her.

It had taken Sara much longer to start trying to unravel him but, after a while, the innocent-sounding enquiries had come. What are you thinking, Noah? What are you
feeling
, Noah? It was like being one giant scab that women couldn’t resist picking at.

At first, he’d tried really hard with Sara. He’d tried to dig deep, had tried to come up with answers she’d like. But it hadn’t been real. He’d invented a version of himself—fictional Noah—whom he’d analysed like one of the characters he created in his books. The real Noah was just as much a mystery to himself as he was to Sara.

So he’d thought hard about fictional Noah’s motivation and
what he wanted out of life. He’d prepared pretty speeches to say in case she caught him unawares. Things that Sara wanted to hear, things that would make her happy. After a while he’d got fed up with fictional Noah. The guy had been just too annoyingly perfect.

Maybe that was why his smokescreen had failed after a couple of years. He’d just got sick of the sound of his own voice and he couldn’t stand to regurgitate all that soppy stuff any longer. Then Sara had started talking about glass walls and needing more. She’d picked and picked and picked at him. And when she’d finished gouging away at him, when the scab had finally lifted, she’d discovered the truth. Underneath, there was nothing. And then she’d left.

He really didn’t want Grace to leave.

The last couple of days had been amazing and, despite his glass wall, he’d felt closer to the love thing than he’d ever felt before. But still there was something stopping him. He just wasn’t that deep. There was nothing there to give.

So, he’d just have to distract her or, like Sara, she’d pick, pick, pick and discover what was under the scab that had reformed itself into a hard little shell. No healthy new skin. Just an empty space.

He took a shower to give himself and Grace a few minutes to calm down. As he towel-dried himself he hoped to God she wasn’t crying. Anything he said to crying women just sounded trite. He normally made things worse.

But Grace wasn’t crying when he re-entered the bedroom. She was getting dressed—noisily. She was banging doors and stomping from wardrobe to bed and back. He intercepted her.

‘I’m sorry, Grace. I didn’t mean to snap at you.’

See? Even though the words weren’t over-the-top and gushy, they still sounded fake to his ears, like lines in a play. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean them, just…that he didn’t feel anything when he said them.

She stopped and looked at him, a shoe in one hand. He suddenly felt as if he’d been sliced up, put on a slide and shoved under a microscope.

‘I appreciate the apology. I wasn’t trying to pry. I just think we need to get to know each other better.’

He nodded.

He’d thought he’d be safe from that with Grace. Safe, because a marriage based on nothing to do with love shouldn’t require all the painful scab-picking. He’d been wrong. The thought niggled him. He didn’t like being wrong on a general level, but also about this specific thing. If he’d got this wrong, what else was he mistaken about?

Time to distract.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said.

They ended up wandering up to the Seine and onto Les Pont Des Arts. Grace leaned on the railing and watched the slate-grey water rushing below the bridge. Then she raised her head and looked towards the Ille de la Cite, the spires of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle poking into the sky. It was so beautiful here, all this pale grey stone, the deep blue of the sky, the vibrant green of the trees that lined the river.

Noah came up beside her and they stared at the water in silence.

He seemed so relaxed, so charming. And she’d not seen anything beneath that until today. It was like the river. She’d been too blinded by the ripples and light bouncing off the surface to see what nasty stuff was lurking at the bottom. There were huge parts of himself that Noah kept hidden and she wanted to know why. She wanted to know why he camouflaged himself so well.

Noah reached out and took her hand.

She didn’t pull away, even though she was still smarting from his remark that morning. She accepted his hand, curling
her fingers around his warm skin. He was trying, and that was good enough for now.

They walked to the end of the bridge and down a flight of stone steps so they were walking on the grey stone quay right next to the Seine. Other couples passed them, hands caught just like theirs, and Grace knew she should feel a sense of comradeship with them.

I’m in Paris and in love too.

But it wasn’t quite the same, was it? Those other couples were in love with each other.

Now they were close to the silver birches lining the bank she could see that their markings were not just the normal black slits in the pearly bark. Up the entire trunks of every tree, covering every possible square inch, were names and declarations of love in many different languages and scripts. She recognised some English and French and Japanese, but others she just couldn’t put a name to. She’d bet Noah would know. But Noah wasn’t looking at the trees; he was looking at the river and muttering something about Napoleonic architecture.

An echo of the premonition from her wedding day turned her toes to ice.

Noah didn’t love her.

He might never love her.

And he would never carve her name on a tree in Paris.

Back in London, things improved—at least on the surface. Noah and Grace began their lives together. They ate at nice restaurants, attended parties and other functions up in town, and generally stuck to the plan they’d had when they’d married. Noah wrote and Grace started looking at prospectuses for catering colleges, even though she wasn’t sure any more that she wanted to go back to being a student, but it seemed she should explore the option, even if she didn’t pursue it.

And they made love.

For Grace, it was the only thing that kept the creeping cold feeling at bay. Unfortunately, it wasn’t helping with the head-over-heels, desperately in love with Noah thing. It was all such a cliché. Every time he looked at her now, her heart did a triple flip. When he smiled, she just wanted to melt. And when he took her in his arms and touched her with such tenderness, she thought her heart would break with the beauty of it.

In other words, she was up the creek without a paddle. And she was just crazy enough in love with him to want to jump out of the boat and drown in him. She just didn’t care.

But they never spoke of love. It was an unwritten rule. Not part of their agreement.

One morning, almost a month after their return from Paris, Grace decided there was only so much mooching around a big old house that a woman could do. Noah was hidden away inside his study, as he often was in the mornings, wrestling with some character problem that was making him a huge grouch, and she knocked on the door and let him know she was going into town. He just waved with his left hand and continued scribbling in a notebook with his right. She didn’t take offence. She was starting to get used to the Noah who retreated into his imaginary world for hours every day.

Walking up the cobbles in the High Street made her sad now. The Coffee Bean and Martin’s book shop, which had also been snapped up, were now boarded up. It wouldn’t be long before the Java Express logos appeared on them. It felt as if a part of the village’s soul had died.

Without warning, tears filled Grace’s eyes and she began to sob.

What was happening to her? Yes, she was an emotional kind of person, but she wasn’t normally given to weeping in the street. Maybe it was all getting too much for her—the pain of seeing Noah, blithely going about his business, never realis
ing for a second that she wasn’t totally happy, despite his best efforts to give her all the things he’d promised her. She wouldn’t want to be without him. She loved him too much to leave him and still held out hope that, given a few years, he would soften and come to love her too. But she was starting to think that her grown-up decision to marry Noah for companionship and security hadn’t been her most sensible moment. After all, even grown-ups made mistakes.

A yawn crept up on her. She was tired, that was all. And, she had to face it, there was plenty in her life at the moment that was contributing to her general weariness. It was probably just PMT making her all emotional. She’d been through a major upheaval in the last couple of months—losing her job, moving house, getting married. No wonder she was wiped out and falling into bed before ten in the evening.