Royal Baby (A British Bad Boy Romance) (36 page)

“So you believe me?”

There was a pause, and then she finally replied. “Yes. Sorry for assuming the worst,” she said. “I’ve been acting like one of those crazy jealous girlfriends, haven’t I? I should’ve checked first instead of racing off, but I just…I don’t know. I’m really sorry.”

My heart leapt as I realized she’d almost described herself as being a ‘girlfriend’ of mine, even though I knew she only meant it in a general sense.

“It’s totally understandable. And I can’t believe you just know all that stuff about my schedule. You’re so smart,” I said. “Or maybe a stalker,” I added for some much-needed comic relief.

She let out a small chuckle. “Ha. You wish.”

“I kinda do.”

“So why didn’t you just tell me about Brian?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t think it’s your fault that he’s acting this way, and honestly, it’d be
my
fault if I got fired. I was the one who decided to be unprofessional and sleep with you. It’s on me, one-hundred percent.”

“I guess I was just worried. I thought you might hate me for making a total arse of things.”

“Well, you certainly made a total ‘arse’ of things at the car show tonight,” Allison pointed out, “but does it seem like I hate you?”

“Hard to tell at this point.”

The amusement faded from her voice, and I heard her sigh again. She might have believed me, but all was clearly not well in her mind.

“It’s all so damn complicated now.”

“Let me make it up to you,” I said, eager to make amends. “Let me take you out tomorrow.”

“I don’t know…”

“But you said you believed me.”

“I do, but with your job, your image, with Brian…I just don’t see how this is going to work. That’s what I meant when I said it’s all so complicated now.”

She sounded genuinely sad now, disenchanted. The fairytale that life had seemed to present to her earlier had just been punctured by hard reality.

“Look, I get that. But please give it one more chance,” I said. “Hey, here’s an idea. I’d really love to show you where I grew up. You in?”

Perhaps I was manipulating her a little bit. The reporter’s instincts in Allison would surely perk up at such an offer; any journalist would love
to see where I grew up. I could almost hear her interest down the phone…but would it be enough to allow her to ignore all the other stuff going on?

“Um…okay. That sounds nice.”

My heart leapt again.

“But just one more date,” Allison went on. “And not even a date, really. Just two people hanging out. Just reporter and subject doing some background research.”

She did seem anxious to avoid the word date, but that wasn’t going to stop me from pursuing her.

“Sounds good. Maybe one day you’ll let me take you on something you can actually call a date. One that isn’t the stadium, that is,” I said.

I hoped my lighthearted words might lighten the tone between us, but Allison’s response still seemed downbeat. “Let’s just see how things go tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

I understood perfectly. She’d only just met me a few days ago, so even though she liked me, she was worried about wrecking my media image, and she was worried about possibly losing her job. After all, any sane person would be worried about that given what had happened with Brian’s threats, and only an insane person would be willing to throw caution to the wind and give up their job for the sake of a person they’d only just met. I suppose I was lucky she’d even said yes to coming with me to see where I grew up.

I gave her details of where and when to meet me the following afternoon. “And dress casually,” I added.

“Are we playing football again?”

Was there a hint of playfulness to her tone now? The mention of casual clothes reignited memories of our first ‘date’—a happier time that now seemed almost an age ago.

“No,” I said, unable to stop myself from smiling, “I struggle to go anywhere incognito, and that area most of all. Basically, if you dress up, then you stand out. And if
you
stand out, then
I
stand out, and that’s that. It’s weird not being able to visit your home neighborhood as yourself but…that’s the way it is. ”

“Oh, I see. Casual clothes it is, then.”

“Tomorrow at the tube station?”

“Tomorrow at the tube station.”

The conversation seemed to be over but I was loathe to leave matters between us— which had once been so affectionate and intimate—in this stilted state.

“Next time I take you to a car show, you’ll be on my arm. We’ll figure it out somehow, without you losing your job.”

It was possible that Allison might not have wanted to be reminded of the unpleasant events of earlier this evening, but when she spoke, there was a hint of a smile in her voice. “Well, to be honest, I don’t really like car shows. I know that probably makes me totally uncool, but there it is.”

“Nah, that’s fine. We can go to other glamorous places,” I said.

“The Eiffel Tower?” There was more than a suggestion of playful flirtation in her voice now. “I hear it can be quite fun up there.”

I grinned. “Only if you go with the right person…”

Chapter 13

Allison

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I was really doing the right thing here. Liam’s explanation of what had happened, or rather hadn’t happened, between him and the model had checked out, but the fact remained that I could only verify for sure that he hadn’t screwed her on top of the Eiffel Tower during Paris Fashion Week.

What if the model had just picked the wrong fashion event? There were enough of those in Paris for her to get confused, and most of the models at the car show had seemed as if they would be easily confused. More worryingly, the skanky model might’ve lied about her past experience with Liam to seem cool in front of her young friend, but she could’ve been telling the truth about getting a note from him that evening. I’d assumed that because she was lying about one thing, she was lying about both, but there was no absolute proof to back that theory up. For all I knew, Liam could have called me to patch things up and then gone home with the model. In fact, she could’ve been in the room even as Liam was talking to me on the phone. She could’ve been…well, anything could’ve been going on while Liam was talking to me.

Perhaps that was a little far-fetched, but then again, this was Liam Croft—if only half the stories about him were true, then talking to one girl on the phone whilst another performed some ‘act’ on him was perfectly believable.

I mentally kicked myself for having slept with him so quickly—maybe he’d lost the initial respect he’d had for me because I’d given it up so fast. Some guys were just like that, as backwards at it all seemed. Then again…why call me at all if that were the case? Why go to all that trouble if he had no real interest in me? Perhaps he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, but there were all sorts of possibilities, and in the end what it came down to was one question—did I trust Liam?

Right now that question could only be answered with a resounding ‘maybe’.

There was also the role of Brian Thomas to consider in all this mess, and what Liam had told me about Brian was very believable. Liam’s image as football’s bad boy player was intrinsic to his appeal beyond the immediate footballing world. To be popular as a footballer, all he had to do was play well, which he did, but Liam’s success was founded on the fact that people with limited interest in football were still interested in him. And the reason for that was the image which Brian Thomas had so carefully crafted, and was now striving to maintain.

Having a girlfriend would definitely get in the way of that image.

So yes, Liam’s explanation was easy to believe, but did I believe that he wasn’t complicit in it? Liam had played that role, apparently quite happily, for a long time now, and what man wouldn’t love to be given
carte blanche
to enjoy his life and sleep with whoever he wanted without consequences? It sounded like a dream come true, and yet he was trying to make me believe that he wanted no part of it anymore.

Did I really believe that? Or was it more likely that he’d been keen to play the field last night and had just been caught doing it? And even if it was true of last night, up to this point Liam had certainly given every impression of enjoying the playboy lifestyle—and now he was really giving it up just for me? How long would that last? What if a month with me was enough and then he decided to go back to all the lanky blonde models?

All told, I’d been a lot more certain of myself when I’d been chatting with Liam last night than I was this morning, faced with a bunch of questions to which I didn’t know the answers. And still, it all boiled down to that one thing: did I trust Liam? My answer remained the same.

Maybe.

Liam didn’t know it, but if he truly cared about me, then a great deal depended on today. Today was going to determine once and for all whether I felt I could actually trust him.

Right now, as I stood outside the tube station, I wasn’t sure that Liam was off to the best of starts in convincing me. Not because he was slightly late again (although he was), but because of the casual clothes he’d asked me to dress in. When he’d said it, I’d actually been quite pleased, because it reminded me of our first da…ahem, our first meet-up at the stadium, while our fancier night out to the car show had been a complete disaster. But then I’d started to wonder why. His explanation wasn’t wholly unreasonable, but was the great Liam Croft
really
that worried about being recognized in the street? I’d seen him in the news, surrounded by adoring fans and clearly having the time of his life. So what was different now?

I was with him.
That
was what was different.

He was fine being recognized when he was on his own or at a fancy party with a skinny blonde girl on his arm, but when going out with some rounder, darker-haired girl, he would rather not be recognized. What did that say?

Nothing good, that was for sure.

Again, I was willing to admit that perhaps I was just assuming the worst, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I really wished Liam would show up soon—the longer I stood here, the more my active brain invented problems, and the more I thought about them, the vaster proportions they assumed in my head. Despite all that, I knew that I’d feel better about it all once Liam was here, and for now at least, that was a comforting thought to keep me company as I waited.

And speaking of waiting…where the hell was he?

Suddenly an unseen hand grabbed my ass and squeezed. I shrieked, wheeled around and smacked the perpetrator—a suspicious-looking man in dark glasses and a hoodie—as hard as I could before pulling away and preparing to run like hell, because you never knew what a person like that might do next.

“Wait! Allison!”

It wasn’t just the fact that the man had used my name which made me stop; I knew the voice.

“Liam?” I said, eyes widening.

Somewhat sheepishly, the world’s most famous footballer peeped out from behind his disguise. “Hi. How are you?”

“Scared out of my mind! Why on earth did you do that?”

Liam gave me a sheepish grin. “I thought it would be…you know…funny?”

“Really?” I asked, arching an eyebrow and putting my hands on my hips. “I thought you were some sort of tube station sex offender!”

Liam looked away. “Well, when you put it like that, I guess it may not have been the smartest thing I ever did.”

I flashed him a half-smile and shook my head. “You think?” My voice had lowered a bit now—it was hard to stay mad at someone who looked so utterly crestfallen.

Dammit, it was hard for me to stay mad at Liam full stop. Besides, I guess his joke was actually a little funny, now that I knew it had just been him grabbing me.

“I was just trying to…” Liam struggled for the right words but I stopped him.

“I know, you idiot.” I laughed and shook my head, and Liam grinned back. He was forgiven, and he knew it.

Things had changed between us so rapidly over the course of our brief association that it was hard to know how to act around each other, and although suddenly grabbing a woman’s ass in a public place was never a bright idea, I understood what he’d been attempting. He wanted to recapture the lighthearted, fun side to our relationship that had so characterized it that night at the stadium. He’d gone about it in a spectacularly dumb fashion, but I saw where he was coming from because I wanted the same thing myself. I would’ve given a lot to go back to the easy banter we’d enjoyed just a few nights ago.

“So where are we headed?” I asked.

“This way.”

Liam led me down into the tube station, amongst the blank-eyed ranks of commuters, enthused tourists and weirdos who just seemed to live down there. To me, it seemed like a maze—tunnels crossing each other, doubling back, descending still further via escalators—but Liam navigated it with practiced ease, not even stopping to look at the confusing color-coded signs to guide him. He was a local boy who’d made it big, but he remained a local boy—he knew his way around his city.

“How much of London is underground?” I asked as we lined up on the platform.

“Best not to think about it,” said Liam. “There’s always new buildings going up and I honestly have no idea where the foundations go, or why they don’t just sink into the ground, given how little ground there actually is to support them. Never mind the tube network itself, which is
vast
, there’s also the sewer system, the Royal mail tunnels and new rail lines being built all the time. It’s just a honeycomb down here. Hard to believe there’s a big, heavy city on top of it.”

I nodded. “I think you were right in the first place…best not to think about it. Pretty crazy.”

The train pulled up, the doors slid open and Liam led me onboard. We found ourselves seats and sat in somewhat stilted silence as the train rattled through station after station, heading for the outskirts of the city. There was still a sense of awkwardness between us—all was not yet as it should be or as it had been.

“This is us,” Liam finally said.

We were a couple of stops from the end of the line and the train was more or less empty by now. We were the only ones getting off at this particular stop onto the empty, echoing platform.

“Quiet,” I remarked. It was a somewhat unnecessary thing to say but the silence seemed to oppress me into saying something.

“This time of day, yeah,” Liam said. “You should see it at rush hour. You can’t move in peak times. It’s horrible. This way.”

He led me along the platform, trailing his hand along the tiled wall. I got a vivid impression that this was something he’d done since he was a kid walking this familiar path, and that he’d never got out of the habit.

An escalator took us up out of the dim closeness of the tube network and back into daylight.

“Here we are,” said Liam, a half-smile on his face as he gestured around us. “I take you to the nicest places, don’t I?”

“This is where you grew up?”

There was no getting around the fact that Liam hadn’t grown up in a particularly ‘nice’ area. Polite euphemism would have dubbed the place ‘cultural’, ‘atmospheric’ or ‘salt of the earth’, studiously avoiding words like ‘dump’. This was the part of London which contained the homes of the people who did the jobs that no one thought about until they weren’t done, at which point they noticed sharply and started talking about how lazy the working classes were. And those were the lucky ones, because this was also where the people who struggled for work lived, who queued up at the employment office every day in the hope of finding something, and usually finding nothing. Affluence was yet to arrive here, and if it ever did it, would likely push out all those who lived here now.

Liam pointed at a building on our left as we walked. “That’s where me and Dean went to school. Some days. And that,” he pointed to a pub, “is where we went the other days.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“When we started drinking? Too young, really. But our Dad used to take us in there so no one really questioned it when we started going in on our own.”

We wandered down the street and reached a small play area, squashed between a row of shops and a building site.

“Used to come here a lot too.” Liam smiled at the memory. “They’ve replaced all the equipment now but when we used to come down there was a see-saw—rusted to hell and it used to squeak like a baby screaming, but I used to play on that for hours. Dean always wanted to go on the climbing frame but I didn’t like the height of it. He carried me up there once, when I was six, just to show me there was nothing to be scared of.”

“And then you weren’t scared anymore?” I asked.

Liam grinned. “Nah. I actually wet myself.”

“Ah.” Most people would be embarrassed to tell a story like that, but Liam was obviously comfortable revealing his early memories to me, and that fact made me feel warm despite the cold, biting air outside.

“It was years before I was able to go up that bloody climbing frame again. I still don’t like heights very much.”

“I’ll scratch the Eiffel Tower off our ‘to do’ list, then,” I said.

He grinned again. “That’s different. Going with you would be great,” he said with a wink. “But if you run off and leave me up there alone, then I might just never speak to you again.”

I laughed. The awkwardness between us had really started to melt. Without the pressure that a normal ‘date’ situation imposed, we could just be ourselves and joke around. That was when things seemed to work best between us.

But how long could it last?

We walked on, and I glanced up at the skyline. Dominating the whole area, looming above like vast monoliths, were three tower blocks; vast concrete beehives, likely filled with so many people that it was hard to imagine where they all came from.

“That one,” Liam pointed to the block on the left, its windows just caught by the morning sun, “that’s where we lived when I was a kid.”

I simply nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say, and there were times when it was probably better to say nothing.

“Mum and Dad still live there,” he added.

It was hard to read Liam’s face when he spoke of his parents, as if he was actively trying to expunge all emotion from it. But the emotions were surely there, so mixed that it would’ve been hard to distil them into anything specific; positive or negative.