The Goddess Rules (17 page)

“Ah, yes, I remember, all swans belong to the queen in this country. How wonderful. Perhaps I made the wrong decision when I turned down Charles. I would have liked to own all the swans in England.”

“Well, I came along didn’t I? Swept you off your feet?” Tony said. Mirri took his arm. “We’ll be back in a bit, kids. Just got a bit of catching up to do.”

“See you soon,” Kate said. Suddenly a bit alarmed at the idea of being alone with Felix. She didn’t really have anything to say to him, and it was clear that their lifestyles differed wildly—yacht boy meets shed girl. All they had in common was wood.

“So, Felix, you must be very fit.”

“Fit?”

“Skiing.”

“Ah, well, I only ski a little during the season,” Felix said. “Do you ski?”

“I did once on a school trip but I couldn’t stay up.” There was an awkward pause.

Felix looked around the park as if fascinated. “The swans are beautiful. No?” he asked as he rested back on his elbows.

“They are. I used to have one in my bedroom,” Kate informed him.

“Your mother is the queen?” He smiled warmly. Clearly he wasn’t holding the lack of scintillating conversation against her.

“My father was a taxidermist, actually. I still have a zebra by my bed.”

“It’s not creepy?” he asked.

“I’m pretty used to it. Men sometimes get a bit freaked out by it, though,” Kate said, aware that it made her sound like a multilovered woman. But what the hell.
Nothing wrong with a little embellishment,
Mirri would have said.

“These English men are pussies,” Felix said. “A Frenchman would never be afraid.”

“So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years,” Kate said. “Wrong nationality.”

“Most definitely.” He looked at her for a long second before closing his eyes and letting the sun fall full on his face. Kate was relieved that he’d relaxed. Following his example, she lay back, sighed, and resisted saying anything about the weather. Sometimes it was better to say nothing. But just a moment after Kate had settled back, letting the long blades of grass tickle her ear, she felt a similar sensation on her leg—an ant, possibly. She twitched her leg but it didn’t go away. It was only when she moved her hand down to brush the insect off that she suspected that it wasn’t an ant at all. It was larger than that. And furrier.

“Shit!” Kate leapt up and screamed as she felt a stabbing sensation above her knee. “Ow ow.” She pulled up her skirt to see what had happened.

“Kate, what is it, what’s the matter?” Felix pulled off his sunglasses and looked at her leg.

“I think I’ve been stung,” she said as she noticed a half-crushed bee staggering on the ground beside her. “It hurt.”

“They can be nasty,” Felix said seriously. “Are you allergic?”

“I’m not sure,” Kate said, quite honestly. She’d never been stung before. And it bloody throbbed. She breathed—to see whether she still could. “Am I swelling up?” she asked him.

“Let me see.” Felix leaned into her and looked closely at her leg. It was just above her knee, practically on the inside of her thigh, she noted with a wince that was part pain and part embarrassment. He touched what was now a swollen red lump on her skin.

“I can see the sting.” He looked at her face, which paled. “Do you have a credit card?”

“It got swallowed by the machine the other day,” Kate said, slightly bemused. “Why? Are you going to call an air ambulance?”

“We have to take the top off the stinger or it’ll pump in more venom.”

“Oh.” Kate was impressed by his ability to survive in the wild. She was even more impressed when he produced a black credit card from his jacket pocket and lanced it across the red lump on her leg.

“Ouch,” she yelled. “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry, but it needed to be done. It should be fine now.” And with that he reached into the picnic hamper.

“Thanks,” Kate said with relief as she pulled her skirt back down over her knee. “That’s much better.”

“Not yet.” Felix pulled a handful of ice out of the hamper and with the other hand lifted Kate’s skirt back above her knee. In fact, way back above her knee. Practically to her knicker line, she noticed. He saw her surprised look. “I don’t want to make your skirt wet,” he said.

“Right,” Kate said quietly, as his brown fingers clutched the ice and placed it gently on her sting.

“Ah, it’s cold,” she said, trying not to sound hysterical.

“It will be.” Felix looked at her, and at first she assumed that he was just checking that her glands weren’t swelling up and slowly murdering her, but he wasn’t. He was looking at her face. And he wasn’t turning away.

“Oh, that’s much better,” Kate said briskly, avoiding his gaze and looking at his hand on her thigh. “Thanks, I’m sure it’ll be fine now.”

“I think it needs more time,” Felix told her. And he carried on looking at her. Then he pulled the icy hand away and examined the place where the sting had been, which was now just a big goose-bumped red patch. “Yes, just a bit more.”

“Okay,” Kate agreed. Hoping that he wouldn’t notice how much her breathing had deepened, and how, despite trying to remain practical, this was just about the sexiest thing that had happened to her in decades. Having a proper man lift her skirt and run ice into her thigh. Even in the name of first aid.

“You have very pretty legs” was the next thing he said.

“I ride a bike. Everywhere,” Kate told him, trying to ignore the way he was looking at both her legs, not just the stung patch anymore.

“I like them.”

“Right.” Kate swallowed hard and tried to focus on the sting. But the pain had gone. All she could feel now was Felix’s hand on her thigh. Then he caught the look on her face, which was flushed pink, and that was all the encouragement he needed to swing into seduction mode.

“I think that’s enough ice,” he said. Before Kate could register disappointment he had bent his head into her lap and kissed the sting. “But it’s never better without a kiss.”

“Oh,” Kate said, as Felix repeated the kiss. This time without removing his lips from her skin. “Well it certainly feels much better now,” she added cheerfully. She didn’t want him to think that she was enjoying herself too much—in case what he was doing was simply saving her life, rather than giving her a thrill.

“Good,” he said softly as he changed his position and knelt between her legs, from where he began to slowly kiss his way up her thigh, dotting her leg with small, lingering kisses. Oh, so he wasn’t saving her life anymore. At least not in the technical sense. “Do you like this?” he asked.

“Sure,” Kate said. She wished that she could lose herself in the moment but it was difficult. She didn’t know the guy, she was in the open air in Regents Park, his father would be coming back any second, and the scene, though sexy, felt slightly contrived. Which, when you put it like that, actually sounded like the hottest way to spend an afternoon that Kate could ever have dreamed up. She’d often had fantasies about sex outdoors, but Jake had always scoffed. But then Jake didn’t have the body that Felix had, she noted, as he removed his shirt and lifted her skirt up over her knickers, now. She was torn, at that moment, between trying to remember which underwear she’d put on this morning and wondering what Mirri would have done in her position.

Forget about your underwear and enjoy the fact that there’s a handsome man kissing the inside of your thigh in the afternoon sunshine.

That was exactly what Mirri would have done. So seconds later Kate moved her legs just a fraction farther apart and began to smile as Felix pulled back her cotton knickers and began to do such incredible things to her that she closed her eyes, lay back, and stopped thinking anything at all.

Until what felt like years later, when she felt Felix’s breath by her lips.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“I think you already did.” Kate moved her lips toward his. Her first truly French kiss. Okay, she was patriotic and stuff but she had to concede that it beat every other kiss she’d ever had, hands down. She tried to analyze why—his lips were soft and beautiful, his skin smelled of warm sun and sandalwood, his hair felt so incredibly thick and short between her fingers, and whatever he was doing to her breasts, she didn’t ever want him to stop.

“I love the feel of your skin,” Felix said as he stroked a finger over her cheek. “And your eyes, did you know that they are like amber?”

“Thank you,” she said and pulled his head gently back toward hers so that she could have another one of those things that she had mistakenly spent her life, until now, referring to as kisses. When really what she’d been getting until about ten minutes ago were cheap imitations of the real thing. She wanted to tell him that she loved him. But really she just loved what he was doing to her.

“Ah, I’m glad that you have found something in common.” With an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, Kate heard Mirri’s voice hovering above her.

“Mirri.” Kate pulled her skirt back around her knees and tried to sit up, but Felix’s arm was slung around her shoulder and though he’d stopped kissing her, he was playing with her hair, twisting it around his finger, hugging her close.

“Did you have a nice walk, Mirabelle?” he asked. He was stretched out beside Kate, his voice low and relaxed in her ear. He wasn’t flapping about having been discovered shirtless, kissing a strange girl in the park.

Kate sadly wasn’t that cool. “I got stung.” She sounded shrill. “Felix was helping me. He put some ice on it. And used a credit card. Did you know that you should use credit cards? I always thought it was tweezers but apparently that just sends the venom deeper.”

“We saw the swans.” Mirri judiciously avoided Kate’s near hysteria. Well, somebody had to.

“Mirri, love. Can I have some of that avocado salad you were telling me about?” Tony said as he sat down. “I still can’t believe you can cook.”

“Will you come home with me?” Felix whispered in Kate’s ear as Mirri searched for the salad and Tony poured himself another glass of water.

“What? Now?” Kate asked. And she did for one fleeting second wonder whether perhaps Felix was being paid by Mirri to bury his head between Kate’s thighs and take her home.

“Yes.” He smiled and sat up. “We can call by your house and get your passport?”

“My passport?”

“If we leave soon we will be there for cocktails,” he said.

“Be where?” Kate noticed that Mirri was looking on with a huge smirk on her face. If she could have gotten away with it she would also have clapped and waved pom-poms. But that might have blown Kate’s cover.

“Capri,” he said. “Don’t worry about a bikini, you can buy one tomorrow.”

“
Capri
Capri?” Kate asked. “I mean it sounds great but it’s not London, is it?”

“No, it’s an island near Italy.” Felix laughed and then kissed her on the lips. “Did you have something else planned?” Kate shook her head. She decided not to tell him that she’d been planning on spending the evening cleaning jam jars.

Chapter Thirteen

“So you’re what they call a playboy?” Kate warbled happily as she dangled her feet in the milky blue, moonlit water of the swimming pool and took another sip of the most delicious white wine she’d ever tasted.

“I suppose so,” Felix said as he swam a few slow strokes toward her and stopped at her feet. They had arrived on the island three hours ago in Tony’s helicopter, just in time to see the sun set over the rocks where the Sirens of myth were supposed to sit and lure sailors to their death with their irresistible song. Kate had wondered how many times Felix had told this story to different women—but hadn’t been even faintly bothered by her conclusion that it must be in the hundreds. The sky above Capri was pale—the moon was almost full—and from the clifftop where Felix’s house was perched, you could see for miles out to sea, until the point where the sea became as dark as the sky and the horizon vanished. Then they’d eaten dinner on his deck—just a bowl of fresh pasta and tomato sauce, because the cook, not expecting Felix back, had taken off to Naples for the afternoon. But it was perfect nonetheless. And after they’d talked a bit, about Mirri and Felix’s work in Paris and Kate’s painting—nothing that was going to set the world on fire but pleasant enough—Felix had put Kate on the back of his moped and sped down through the unlit, narrow streets and alleyways to the local square where the gelateria was just closing. They hopped off onto the dusty ground and Kate insisted on buying him a pistachio ice cream until she realized that she didn’t have a euro to her name, only a five-pound note in her purse. Felix had laughed, bought her the ice cream, and they’d sat for a while on the steps of the local church, where they watched the dogs scrabbling for scraps in the gutter and listened to a young couple arguing in a house across the square. They’d sat there and eaten their ice creams until their hands were sticky and she was longing to get back to the house where she hoped he’d kiss her again. Because despite their racy start in Regents Park earlier that afternoon, Felix hadn’t so much as held Kate’s hand since then.

But now, back at his villa, as he swam toward her, Kate knew that the hiatus was thankfully over. She was still wearing the same dress she’d had on in the park, her hair hanging grubbily over her shoulders now. She’d only had time to run into the shed and collect her passport as they were leaving, and had no time to preen herself for one of the most unimaginably romantic things that was ever likely to happen to her. They had dashed to Battersea heliport and then hopped to Capri so quickly she had nothing but her purse and the clothes she was standing in. But Felix didn’t seem to notice her disarray, because it was obvious that the sparkle in her eyes was so dazzling. Hell, it had to be blinding if Felix the Frenchman was tugging gently at her feet the way he was.

“I like beautiful women.” He shrugged. Here, in his own home, Felix was entirely different from the quiet, reserved way he’d been in the park. He was confident, at ease, and couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Kate.

“I like your pool,” she told him. She was learning quickly that it didn’t really matter what you said in a situation like this. You could be as moronic as you liked and talk the most uninteresting nonsense—just as long as the attraction was there. Which was a huge relief to her. She’d always thought that she needed to be unendingly fascinating for a man to fancy her. But she was discovering that some things were much more important—like going with the moment.

“Have you ever made love underwater?” he asked, not taking his eyes off her. And though part of Kate wanted to roll her eyes to heaven and write Felix off as a cliché with a suntan, she also wanted to do just that—make love underwater.

“No. I haven’t,” she told him as he took hold of her hands and helped her down into the water, fully clothed.

“Perfect,” he said as she stood on the bottom of the pool on tiptoes and put her hands on his tight, muscular waist under the water. “I’ll show you how to.”

“Perfect,” Kate echoed, as she tried to suppress the triumphant voice in her head that wanted to call up Jake and tell him how great sex in a swimming pool in Capri with an international playboy with a helicopter and a suntan was. She’d left her phone behind, however, and, though she didn’t ever believe it would be so easy, when Felix took off her T-shirt under the water, when it billowed out and drifted away, and when Felix touched her nipples with his fingertips and edged his knee between her legs as he kissed her—she left Jake behind, too. And there was no way he was ever going to be able to catch up again, she realized, not knowing whether it was her heart that was sinking, or her that was floating.

“So did you have fun?” Mirri asked when Kate wandered into the kitchen two days later wearing a man’s pale blue Turnbull & Asser shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her denim skirt, which Felix had laid out to dry all day yesterday on a rock in the sun. A new gingham bikini they’d bought in a hotel foyer yesterday morning was scrunched up in her handbag.

“I’m shattered,” Kate said as she collapsed into a chair and smiled.

“I’m so happy.” Mirri put her hair into a ponytail and leaned toward Kate conspiratorially. “Was he fabulous?”

“Yes, he was fabulous.” Kate stretched her legs out and hooked one ankle over the other. “We made love underwater, which I’ve always wanted to do. We made love on a coastal path overlooking the sea and nearly got caught by a couple walking their dog. He taught me how to ride a moped and when I woke up this morning he told me that I was beautiful.”

“Wonderful.” Mirri grinned. Then she looked concerned for a second as she scrutinized Kate’s face. “You’re not in love, are you?”

“God no. Of course I’m not.” Kate emerged from her reverie. “That’s the best thing about it. For the first time ever, I slept with a man and felt nothing but warmth and . . . well, pleasure.”

“It’s very liberating.” Mirri nodded.

“And it’s really thanks to you,” Kate said.

“Oh, nothing to do with me. He found you very attractive. I could see that. But then, who wouldn’t? You have removed the stick from your ass.” She winked.

“Really? Was I that bad before?”

“You weren’t bad at all. You were good. Unbearably, boringly good. You were good to that Slug and you were pleased with yourself for being good. Now you’re just . . . well, you’re just being.”

“That’s very zen.”

“It’s very selfish. But it’s also very honest. If you can’t please yourself you’ll just get angry and the stick will remain in your ass for ever and you’ll never be really happy.” Mirri was opening her usual reams of post. She seemed to give meaning to the Royal Mail.

“Mirri, how do you know all this stuff?” Kate asked as she sniffed the cuff of Felix’s shirt and smelled sandalwood.

“I had to learn it or I’d have gone mad. I was brought up at a time when they thought you were possessed by the devil if you didn’t want to please a man. I was lucky. I married a man who let me have a career and so I escaped my parents. But they still thought I was a black-hearted Jezebel. When I left my husband, when I had affairs, when I behaved like a man by sleeping with men I didn’t care about I was spat at in the street by strangers. Newspapers wrote about how I must be a witch. I had to fight to have my freedom. Because I was never going to just wash some man’s socks. I liked sex. I liked adventure.”

“You were a pioneer, weren’t you?” Kate said, understanding for the first time the significance of Mirri on the progress of women. And not just the sexual revolution, either.

“Not because I was great. Just because I wanted to have my own way. But even though I was doing what I wanted to do, I sometimes wished I were a better person. That’s why I ended up with the animals. Because I can love them in a way I could never love men.”

“Why couldn’t you love men?” Kate asked. Mirri had stopped opening her post. Instead she was rubbing the edges of an envelope with her fingernails.

“Because they just wanted me as a trophy in those days. They wanted to be the one who tamed me. It was too boring to give them what they wanted.”

“So you’ve never been in love?” Kate asked, bewildered by the fact that this incredible woman could have done just about everything in her life but be in love.

“Never,” she said, and looked down at the envelope.

“That’s awful,” Kate said, then became aware of how judgmental she sounded. “Well, I suppose you don’t miss what you never had?”

“You know, I’m not sure,” Mirri suddenly said, in a voice that had become very distant. Kate remained quiet. “I think that maybe once I did have it.”

“Love?” Kate asked gently.

“I met a man. In England actually. But it was just a weekend. It couldn’t have been love because love can’t happen in two days. Right? That would be ludicrous.” Mirri seemed suddenly to be completely uncertain. She looked at Kate fleetingly, then quickly back down at the envelope. As if she didn’t want to know the answer.

“That depends whether you believe in love at first sight or not,” Kate replied.

“Well, I’m not sure if I believe in love at all. So I suppose I’ll never know,” Mirri said. “And anyway it doesn’t matter one bit. It was thirty years ago and I’ve lived without knowing all this time. So it can’t have been love.”

Kate was at a loss as to what to say. Mirri seemed frailer than she’d ever seen her. She looked entirely lost. “Who was it?” she asked. But the very moment she spoke the kitchen door opened and Leonard walked in, carrying an Indonesian statue in front of him. He couldn’t see the anguish on Mirri’s face around the bulky statue, so he bulldozed in regardless. “Goodness me, the wanderer returns,” he said cheerfully, and deposited the statue on the counter with a groan. “How was Capri? Did you see the Tiberian villas?”

“Leonard. Are you mad?” Mirri asked as the color returned to her face and she flung the envelope aside. “She was making love day and night.”

And then in unison both Kate and Leonard shouted, “Mirri!” in horror, because this was not the sort of information either of them wanted to share.

“Boffe, so English.” Mirri giggled and once again set about tearing open the pile of fantastically heavy, watermarked envelopes, discarding most of them into the kitchen bin on top of the potato peelings and sodden tea bags.

“I didn’t make it to the ruins, Leonard, no,” Kate said. Then in a bid to reestablish some decorum, she added, “But I did go to a church.”

“Really, which one?” Leonard asked. Mirri looked up in vague alarm.

“Oh, well, I don’t remember but it was white and pretty and in a square.”

“You went sightseeing?” Mirri sounded disappointed.

“Acutally we ate ice cream on the steps. But it was pretty. Really pretty. And the bell rang,” Kate said defensively.

“Well, it sounds very jolly. Now I’ve got to get this chap into my office so I can see whether he is fifteenth century or whether I’ve been robbed blind. I’ll see you ladies soonest.”

“Good luck,” Mirri chimed as the door to Leonard’s office banged shut.

“Mirri . . . about what you were saying?” Kate uttered, after a moment of silence.

“I think that it’s the perfect moment for you to do a little more sketching of Bébé, don’t you? He will have woken from his nap and you said you want some time with him outdoors.” Mirri stood up hastily and in doing so consigned Kate’s question to the rubbish bin, along with the discarded envelopes and unappealing party invitations.

“Sure, I’ll go and have a quick shower, then I’ll get my pencils,” Kate agreed, because she felt guilty, not only for haring off to Capri at the tweak of a nipple, but also for pressing Mirri on the subject of her lost love. For it was clear to Kate from Mirri’s total unwillingness to continue with the conversation that she had been in love thirty years ago. What had happened since then she had no idea. But it didn’t stop Kate wondering very hard indeed about the matter.