Cloche and Dagger (7 page)

It wasn’t until we’d cracked the third bottle of wine that Nick made the connection I’d been dreading.

“So, Scarlett, I know this sounds crazy, but I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

“It’s not crazy,” I said.

“But you just arrived yesterday,” Andre said. “And you’re from the States. How could Nick have seen you before? Are you an actress?”

“Not in the traditional sense,” I said.

They exchanged a confused look.

“Do you really want to hear my tale of woe?” I asked.

“Yes!” they said together.

“I’m an Internet star,” I said with a hair toss.

Andre looked confused. Nick frowned.

Obviously, that wasn’t enough of a clue. I was going to have to tell them the whole sordid story. It was just as well. They would put it together eventually, just like the girl in the pub yesterday, and at this point in our friendship, I’d rather they heard it from me.

“Do you have your Internet hooked up?” I asked.

Nick leaned over the table to reach into his briefcase, and he pulled out a tablet computer. He fired it up and handed it to me.

“Is this adult viewing only?” he asked.

“No!” I protested. “Sheesh, I’m not a porn star.”

“Pity,” Nick said with a grin.

Not surprisingly, I was able to type “party crasher” as I’d been nicknamed by the press into Google and the video gone viral came right up. I turned the tablet toward them and they leaned over it while I drained my glass and lifted the bottle of wine to fill it again. After a few seconds, Nick stared up at me with wide eyes.

“I’ve seen this before. That’s how I know you. It’s you, oh my god, it
is
you!”

“Shh!” Andre hushed him. “Oh! You got him right in the face!”

“Wow, that was no little cupcake tower you decimated,” Nick said. “Wait! Is that the wife?”

“Yeah, apparently, there was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar diamond necklace decorating the top of the cake,” I said.

“But you just hefted off the top tier and chucked it at him!” Andre’s eyes were huge.

“Yeah, I was pretty lucky I didn’t take out one of his eyes with that necklace.”

Andre looked at me, and I could see he was pressing his lips together in an effort not to bust up. Nick had his head down and his shoulders were shaking as he did his best to squash his own laughter.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Yuk it up before you hurt yourselves.”

The dam broke. They basically had fits while I sipped my wine and waited.

“Better now?” I asked when they began to wind down. This, of course, set them off to laughing again.

When Nick began to wipe his eyes, I thought we might be in the clear.

“Well, you really frosted him, didn’t you?” Andre asked.

And they were off again.

“She could have gotten an ASBO for cake and battery.” Nick chortled.

I sighed. Luckily, I’d spent enough time in the UK to know that an ASBO is an anti-social behavior order, a fairly common citation, otherwise I might have been offended.

“That would have been the icing on top,” I quipped. They both stopped laughing. “What? That was good. ‘Icing,’ ‘top,’ oh, come on.”

“Oh, love,” Nick said with a sad shake of his head.

“I should have gone with ‘cherry on top.’”

“No, that’s ice cream,” Andre said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nick said. He reached across the table and patted my hand with his. “We like you anyway.”

“I still think ‘icing’ was clever,” I said.

“Let it go now,” Andre said. “So, tell us how you found yourself in such a layered situation.”

Nick spewed his sip of wine across the table and they were doubled up with laughter again.

“Really?” I asked. “‘Layered’ trumps ‘icing’? Ugh, no fair!”

I huffed, but it was impossible to stay mad at them. When they’d recovered themselves, I gave them the entire story from how I’d met the rat bastard and dated him for two years, thinking he was separated, to how I walked in on the anniversary party he was hosting for his wife.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Andre said.

Nick nodded, looking too choked up to speak. All mirth was wiped from their faces and they looked at me with pity. I think I preferred the laughter.

“Don’t feel bad for me,” I said. “Feel bad for his wife. It turns out he had a few more girls on the side. I can’t imagine how she’ll ever forgive him.”

“If he’s throwing twenty-five-thousand-dollar necklaces at her, I imagine she’ll dig deep enough to find forgiveness in her heart,” Andre said.

“Or her wallet,” I said.

“And now you’re here with us,” Nick said. He lifted his wineglass and toasted me. “To Scarlett and her new beginning.”

“To Scarlett,” Andre said.

“To me,” I said.

We touched our glasses together and for the first time since I’d arrived I felt as if I was coming home.

“So, Andre, what do you think about taking Lady Ellis’s portrait?” I asked. “I’ll pay you and I’ll make sure she understands that we both get to use the photograph for our businesses.”

“Lady Ellis?” Nick asked.” You mean the Countess of Waltham married to Earl Ellis of Waltham?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “Do you know her?”

“Who do you think gave her that gorgeous smile?” Nick asked. “She’s a very powerful lady.”

“So it would be good for the business to take her portrait?” Andre asked.

“It would be excellent,” Nick said.

“So, Friday morning, Andre, are you willing?” I asked.

“And able,” he said.

“To new business opportunities,” I said and raised my glass.

“And to new friends,” Nick said.

We killed off the third bottle and the two of them insisted upon walking me home. They lived above Andre’s studio just like I lived above the shop. It made me feel more secure to have friends right down the street.

Oh, I knew some of the shop owners from spending my vacations here, but I imagined they remembered me as the very loud child I once was, not as the grown-up I’d become. And if they saw the video of me that had apparently circled the globe, well, then there was no chance of proving my maturity whatsoever.

It was probably the wine, but I found, as I hooked my arms through Andre’s and Nick’s and the three of us sang a horrid rendition of Katy Perry’s song “Peacock” as we skipped down the street, well, I really didn’t care what anyone thought of me at the moment.

Mim’s Whims came into view just as I busted out into a knee-raising, arm-flapping part of the song. It took me a moment to realize that Andre, who really couldn’t dance, and Nick, who was surprisingly good, had stopped moving.

“Come on, guys,” I said and continued to sing, “‘I want to see your—’”

Nick was shaking his head back and forth and his eyes were huge. Andre pointed to something behind me.

“What?” I asked, freezing in place as if this would somehow make me less visible. I tried to be quiet but I think my voice was made louder by the dampness on the air. “Is it a cop?”

“Lucky for you, no,” a voice said from behind me.

I whirled around to find Harrison, leaning against the front door with his arms crossed over his chest wearing a frown so deep it looked permanently etched into his face.

Introductions were awkward. But Harrison seemed less suspicious upon learning that Nick was a dentist, which was interesting, given that most people do not have the warm fuzzies for dentists. I think he lent Andre and me an air of respectability in our shenanigans that we were lacking on our own.

“I’ll stop by tomorrow to discuss,” I whispered to Andre as I hugged him good night. He nodded.

“‘I want to see your peacock,’” Nick sang into my ear when he hugged me, and I giggled.

I waved as they strolled back to their apartment and yelled, “Good night!”

“Shh,” Harrison hushed me. “You are aware of how loud you’re being, yes?”

“Am I?” I asked at top volume. I was perhaps feeling the teensiest bit ornery.

“Scarlett, don’t you know the whole of London is on CCTV?” he asked, sounding thoroughly annoyed.

“Sure,” I said. I remembered that they had installed closed-captioned cameras all over London. Mim had been very much against it as a privacy issue.

“So, your behavior is undoubtedly being recorded somewhere,” he said.

“So what?” I asked.

“So, I think you’ve had more than enough attention from your bad behavior being filmed lately, don’t you?”

Ouch! I felt as if he’d slapped me, but I had to concede the point.

“Fine, Harry,” I said in a much lower volume this time.

It took me a moment to fish my key out, but by the time I found it, Harrison had the door unlocked. “It’s Harrison,” he said with a sigh. “I have a key, too. Viv likes me to keep a spare for her in case she locks herself out.”

“Uh huh,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. To me it was just more evidence that he and Viv were more than friends and business partners.

“After you,” he said and gestured with his arm for me to enter.

I didn’t bother to turn the lights on until I got to the back room. I put Viv’s umbrella away and hung up my jacket. I turned to find Harrison watching me.

“What?” I asked.

“I might have known,” he said.

“Known what?” I asked. But I didn’t wait for his answer. I was cold and required a piping-hot beverage. “I’m going to make tea. Would you like a cup?”

“Do you know how to make tea?”

“No,” I said. “I was hoping you’d offer.”

I shivered. Although Florida was a damp state, it was significantly hotter than London, and I couldn’t seem to get the chill out of my bones.

Harrison rolled his eyes and moved to the little kitchenette where he put the kettle on. I figured this was a good chance to get him talking about Viv, so I could determine what exactly their relationship was and see if he knew more than he was saying.

“So, what did you mean, you ‘might have known’?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. He took the tea tin out of the cupboard over the sink and began to spoon loose tea into the steel infuser.

“Oh, no,” I said. “You can’t say something like that and not explain it.”

He looked up from the cobalt-blue teapot into which he’d just put the infuser. He was giving me a slightly annoyed face, and I had a feeling the wine was making me more demanding than charming, but still, I wanted to know what he meant, and I wasn’t above badgering to find out.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’ll just keep bugging you until you tell me.”

“Honestly, I meant nothing by it,” he said.

I shook my head, indicating that this was unacceptable.

“Fine, it’s just that I was worried that you’d be curled up in a little ball of sad and lonely because Viv isn’t here, so I came over here in the pouring rain to check on you and what do I find? You skipping down the street, singing at top voice with your two new best friends,” he said.

“And that’s a bad thing?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s not bad. It’s not normal, but it’s not bad.”

“I get the feeling you don’t like me very much,” I said. “In fact, you seem to suffer from a case of permascowl when I’m around.”

His lips twitched, but he didn’t smile or laugh.

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” he said.

The kettle began to whistle and he turned away as if relieved by the interruption.

He filled the teapot with hot water and then covered it while the tea steeped. As if done with our conversation, he foraged through the cupboards until he found a canister of McVitie’s Hob Nobs, a rolled oat biscuit with a layer of milk chocolate on it. He put some out on a plate for us to share, and I reached for one, surprised to find that I was hungry.

“Then what is it?” I asked.

“What is what?”

“If it’s not that you don’t like me, then what is it that makes you look so grumpy when I’m around?” I asked. I had a feeling he was being deliberately obtuse, but what the poor man did not realize was that I had staying power.

“I’m not grumpy,” he growled.

“So you’re just doing an impression of a grizzly bear for grins?” I asked.

“We don’t have bears in England,” he said. “And that’s my point. I don’t think you belong here either.”

“So,
I’m
the bear?” I asked. I was getting confused.

“Uff!” He let out an exasperated huff and then poured the tea. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, what did you mean?” I asked. I waved my hands at him. “Because this little tap-dance thing you’re doing is giving me a headache.”

He pushed my cup of tea at me, and I met his gaze and held it. It hit me then just what a handsome man he was. He had changed his clothes from earlier and was now wearing jeans and a forest green crew neck sweater. It made his eyes appear darker and more mysterious.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think you belong here and you should probably go back to the States as soon as possible.”