The Goddess Rules (23 page)

“No, I think maybe I should,” he said, and proceeded not to say anything. Kate looked at him closely as he peered down into his glass as if hoping to find the answer to her question. As he gazed into his drink and Kate gazed at him, however, she suddenly saw everything very clearly indeed. It wasn’t that Louis was bipolar at all. He
was
shy and awkward and tongue-tied, certainly, but—she realized with the resounding thud of truth—only when he was talking to
her.
Immediately Kate wished that she’d never asked Louis why he hated Jake. Because the thing was, she already knew the answer.

“Because . . .” He took a deep breath and she saw his chest inflate slightly beneath the gray sweater that he’d pulled on over his T-shirt earlier.

“Because he was mean to me. Because you had to scrape me up from the ground of Sainsbury’s car park. Because he was a faithless idiot who didn’t deserve me.” Kate leapt in so that he didn’t have a chance to say what she’d just forced him to pluck up the courage to say. He looked at her very hard for a moment and she watched his chest deflate. The flare of honesty went out of his eyes.

“Exactly,” he said, and stared at the melting ice in his whiskey sour.

If Jake had been looking for a sign that he had to marry Kate, he would have found it in the black cab that hared around the corner of New Bond Street and onto Conduit Street. He would have seen the sign pretty quickly if he’d witnessed his former girlfriend looking with new eyes at an old friend. He would have sensed he was in danger of being left out in the cold. But Jake was looking the other way.

“Come on, you beauty,” he screamed at the television screen on the wall of Ladbrokes. “Come on Mickey Mouse.” Okay, it wasn’t as if the horse was called Love of My Life or Run for Your Wife or anything supersignificant, but Mickey Mouse was about as close to Kate Disney as he was likely to get. And she—the horse, not Kate—was flying into first place in the six thirty at Sandown. Jake launched his fist into the air victoriously and then went to collect his winnings. So while he hadn’t seen Kate and Louis—God had given him a different sign.

“If Mickey Mouse wins I go straight back to S. J. Phillips tomorrow morning and buy her a ring.”

He’d gambled with fate and Kate had won. At least that was how he saw it.

“Come on, Louis. This isn’t some magical mystery tour. I have to go home. I have cress stuck to my skirt and I’m drunk.” Kate giggled as Louis refused to break his silence. He was sitting opposite her in the backseat of the cab, defiantly looking out the window. “Where are you taking me?” she pleaded. He’d whispered his instructions to the cabbie as they got in. “Please not back to the Tate.” She knit her fingers together in prayer and begged. “And not to dinner somewhere. I still have chocolate éclairs up to here.” She slammed her hand on her breastbone to show how full she was. “Speak to me, Louis. Please. And if you won’t then take me home.” Louis turned around. Kate was looking imploringly at him. “Are you trying to kidnap me? Did you just offer the driver twenty quid to take me to Balham?” she asked as they made their way down The Strand and on to Aldwych.

“We’re here.” He smiled as the driver pulled up in the middle of Waterloo Bridge. Louis handed him a note and he handed back a bottle that had been on his passenger seat. Clearly Louis had slipped it in when Kate wasn’t looking.

“Okay, you’re throwing me off London Bridge,” Kate said as the muggy evening air wrapped itself around her. Instinctively she went and stood at the railings to see if there was a cool breeze coming off the river.

“It’s Waterloo Bridge, you twit,” Louis said as the cab pulled away into the traffic.

“I missed you, Louis,” she said, and leaned her head over the edge of the bridge so she could see the water. She’d completely forgotten how much they used to see of one another before Jake had appeared on the scene. They’d go to galleries together; they even went on the London Eye for the first time together. Kate turned and looked at the giant wheel as it cast a shadow onto the water. Louis was looking at it, too. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked quietly. The fresh air had taken away her shrill edge and she felt unexpectedly calm being here with him. Calm for the first time in ages—for the first time since she’d split up with Jake, since Mirri had arrived, since her interlude with Felix. It suddenly dawned on Kate that she’d been through so much stretching and pulling and molding lately that she’d barely been in her own skin. And now, as she looked down the river at the most heartrending view in all of London, with Louis by her side, she felt settled.

“We were miserable all those years ago.” She laughed. “And I can’t even remember why now. I was getting over some guy whose name I’ve forgotten and you were down in the dumps for some reason and we called it the Millennium Wheel of Hope.”

“Yeah, we came for a walk here every Sunday before they’d raised the wheel and we’d promise that by the time it was spinning we’d be okay.”

“And we were,” Kate said. She really had rewritten history in her own head—she and Louis had been great pals for a while. Until Jake happened.

“Here’s to being okay.” Louis had been holding on to the bottle he’d brought from Claridge’s. Now he lifted it up, and Kate saw that it was champagne. “I thought it was an auspicious way to start our new project together. Like naming a ship.”

“Let’s name our ship
Hope,
” Kate said dreamily as she looked at St. Paul’s and Big Ben in the fading twilight.

“Oh, right, ’cause that’s original.” Louis popped the cork on the champagne and gave her a teasing sidelong glance. Then, before she could protest or hit him, he thrust the foaming bottle in her direction. “Cheers,” he said. Kate put her mouth over the bottle and gulped it down, trying not to choke. When all the foam had given way to fizzing liquid she caught Louis’s eye.

“If you make one suggestive remark I’ll push you in,” she warned. He gave her a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and took a swig himself. Then he leaned back against the railings.

“Are you still going through your phase?” Louis moved his head close to her head as they both watched a riverboat in the distance. She could feel his hair brushing against hers.

“Which phase is that?”

“The dancing one?”

“Oh, the tables!” She moved her head a fraction nearer. Any more and she would have been resting on his shoulder. “No, that was weeks ago. I think I’ve grown up since then.”

“My loss,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“I’m used to it.” He took another mouthful of champagne and passed the bottle to her. “Day late and a dollar short. That’s me.”

“Louis.” She tried to sound stern but it came out wrong. Instead she sounded pitying.

“You know why I hate Jake so much, don’t you?” He turned his body to hers. Kate only turned her face.

“Yes.”

“Really?” He looked surprised.

“I only worked it out today. About an hour ago, in fact.” Kate looked at her watch. It was nine o’clock. “A few hours ago, then . . . time flies, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t mind anymore,” Louis said, and his dark eyes held hers. She gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t mind being in love with you and not having you. I’m used to it.”

“I never knew.” His face was close to hers again, but unlike yesterday Kate didn’t pull away. She looked at his lips, which were wide with a sharp Cupid’s bow that looked like it had been carved out of marble. She remembered how she’d felt when she saw the picture of him in the magazine. As if she were seeing him for the first time and as if he were her secret and it was weird having to share him with the world. She felt like that now—he looked so strange and yet so familiar.

“Would it have made a difference?” he asked, and then looked away, knowing that she was going to say that it probably wouldn’t have.

“I have no idea.” She tried to see him objectively but she couldn’t. He was Louis, he was indistinguishable from herself. “Hand on heart I have never, ever thought of you in that way.”

“So all the times I thought you were undressing me with your eyes . . .” He laughed, and the tension between them vanished.

“You probably just had a bit of fluff on your sweater,” Kate confirmed.

“Poor me.” He was about to turn and walk off in a pretend tantrum, but Kate caught his arm and made him look at her.

“But now I come to think of it . . .” She blinked and then lowered her eyelashes, wondering what it would be like to kiss him, “I wish you would . . .”

“Would what?” They stood on Waterloo Bridge with the traffic trailing by and the odd tourist or commuter pushing past them. She thought about what she wanted him to do but felt too confused to ask.

“I wish you’d take me home.” She bit her lip and felt the goose pimples rise on her arms as the breeze got up. “I’m freezing.”

Chapter Seventeen

Kate was awakened the next morning not by Mirri hammering or by a naked man kissing her but by the sound of rain on the shed roof. It was drumming incessantly on the shingle and then sloshing into the gutter. She cast her mind over the previous evening to see what she’d said that she shouldn’t, drunk that she wished she hadn’t, or not done that she ought to have. Claridge’s. Waterloo Bridge. Louis being in love with her. That was enough to make her open her eyes. Oh hell. Louis loved her. The thought made her want to run. And not because it suddenly made the whole thing incredibly awkward between them—she saw now that it had always been awkward for that very reason. Mirri had been right that day that she’d said sexual tension was the problem. Kate couldn’t comprehend how someone as out of her league as Louis might feel that way about her. She thought about the hothouse girls and the sweetpea girl and how he’d strode through the Tate with her tripping along at his heel. Louis had it. Kate could hold her own as his pal but never in anything more than a tomboyish way. He made her feel nineteen—as if she’d still die of embarrassment if he so much as
asked
her for a slow dance.

She got up out of bed and put on the kettle, feeling overwhelmingly tired from all the champagne and cocktails, and then trailed back to her duvet without making a cup of tea. The air in the shed was damp and smelled of mildew. Today she was going to go to the estate agents and look for somewhere to live, there was nothing else for it.

“Got to get real,” she said, and dashed over to the boiling kettle.

“Two sugars for me.” She turned around to see Louis peering through a crack in the door.

“Am I disturbing you?” he asked. His hair was still wet and hung about his eyes in shiny, licorice-colored strands; his white T-shirt matched his grin. It wasn’t often that Kate saw Louis’s teeth, but they were unexpectedly perfect for such a laid-back man with a fondness for looking shabby. Kate was flustered. She hadn’t even gotten around to recalling what had happened when he’d brought her home last night. Though she knew that they hadn’t had sex, because that memory would have hit her like a sledgehammer to the head the instant she woke up if they had. In fact, all she could recollect was that they’d finished the champagne in the cab home and he’d seen her to her door. And that was it. No lingering looks, no kiss, no nothing.

“Did you sleep outside my door?” she asked, mentally computing what she was wearing. First for decency and then . . . and this was new for her . . . for attractiveness.

“I’m not
that
crazy about you,” he said.

“Right. So we’re obviously not going to pretend that the whole thing never happened then?” Kate glanced at him and was impressed by how relaxed he appeared.

“You’re kidding. I’ve been wanting to say that for ten years. You’ve no idea how great I feel this morning.” He took the cups out of her hand and put them on the counter.

“Are you going to kiss me?” Kate took a step back so that she could better assess the situation.

“No, I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Since you’re about as much use as a wet weekend at the seaside.”

“I feel like I was taken out by a sniper’s bullet and then had my brain sucked out through the hole.” Kate shuffled back over to her bed.

“Caipirinhas. I ought to have warned you.” He sniffed the carton of milk before sloshing it into the cups.

“What are you doing here anyway?” She flicked the heater on with her foot, pulled on a cardigan, and sat on the end of her bed as she watched him make tea. “Apart from the fact that you look good in my kitchen.”

“I’m not staying.” He handed her the tea. “I just came around to see if you wanted a lift into work?”

“Oh hell. I forgot.” Kate moaned and flopped backward on the bed. “You’re my boss.” He sat down in the armchair and reached out to touch the zebra with his free hand.

“I also wanted to say that you don’t have to worry about what we talked about last night. I didn’t mean for anything to happen and it’s not going to change anything.”

Kate looked at him and suddenly felt shy in her old nightdress. “It’s not?”

“I promise. Though occasionally you have to know that I’ll be checking out your legs or thinking that your eyes are a pretty color.”

“Really?” Kate sat up and pondered Louis—who for all his confessions and flattery didn’t actually seem to her as if he gave a damn about her. In fact, he looked positively indifferent to her as she lay there in her practically invisible old cotton nightdress, which you could definitely see her nipples through. He nodded and took a sip of his tea.

“Are you sure?” She knelt up on the bed and noticed how long his legs seemed in her shed. They stretched practically all the way over to the bed.

“Only occasionally,” he reassured her.

“Louis?” she asked, trying to get him to notice the see-throughness of her nightie. “What is it that you like about me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Everything. You’re cute.” He shrugged.

“Cute?” She scowled at him. “Like a puppy?”

“You’re funny.”

“Big deal.”

“I like your nose.”

“Louis.” Kate sprang off the bed indignantly and stood up with her hands on her hips looking down at him.

“What?” He was clearly surprised at how feisty she’d suddenly become and looked faintly bewildered.

“I don’t think you fancy me at all.”

“Don’t I?” He couldn’t help but smile at her now.

“No. You think I’m cute. Like little-sister cute. You probably had a crush on me the first time we met because I looked after you when I maimed you but really I don’t think you’re in love with me at all.” She was completely put out by the idea. As if Louis had somehow cheated her.

“Don’t you?” He was enjoying himself now. And he could see her nipples through her nightdress.

“No. I don’t.” Kate’s hands dropped from her hips to her side in defeat.

“Oh, well.”

“What do you mean ‘Oh, well’? Louis, are you or are you not in love with me?” she demanded.

“I’m in love with you.” He could barely keep a straight face anymore. She was like an outraged child.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I am.”

“Prove it.” She put her hands back on her hips and waited.

“Are you expecting me to die for you or something?” He sat forward in his chair as if thinking of his next chess move.

“I don’t know. I’m not the one who’s supposed to be in love.” She frowned.

“Okay then.” With which Louis stood up. He placed his hands on either side of her face, looked at her for a moment, and then leaned toward her and kissed her on the lips. It wasn’t a long kiss but it lasted just long enough for Kate to know that she didn’t want it to end. “Now do you believe me?”

“Perhaps,” Kate said quietly, and this time
she
kissed him. Of all the things that had surprised her about Louis lately this kiss surprised her the least. Because for some reason she realized that she had always known exactly how it would feel to kiss him. She knew how he would taste, how he would smell, and how soft his neck would feel beneath his hair. She also knew that it had been worth waiting for.

Nick waited for the dogs to follow him through the kitchen door before closing it behind him.

“Shut up, you heathens,” he yelled, and pushed one of his hefty black Labradors out of the way with his leg. It was eleven o’clock and he’d just made it back through the woods before the downpour had begun. Which meant that he and the dogs had to run across only one field in the rain. His housekeeper had lit a fire and he stood by the inglenook and dried his trousers out. The dogs barked furiously until he gave in and fed them.

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled impatiently as he poured biscuits on top of their meat. Then he began to think about his own breakfast. He was supposed to be cutting back on the bacon sandwiches, but when it came down to it, he just never felt like eating the rabbit food that the girls tried to force on him.

“It’s for your own good, Daddy. We just don’t want you to die,” Jasmine said whenever he looked like he might be weakening.

“Well, since you put it that way, sweetheart,” he’d respond, and cram in another mouthful. At least there was someone to care about him, he supposed, but the lot of a single father was not an easy one. Neither was it a guilt-free one. Every time he had a cigar, one of the girls would mention throat cancer. Every time he had a second glass of wine, they practically checked him into The Priory.

“Somebody’s got to look after you,” Ella would say as if she were a hospital matron from the 1940s.

“And what about your mother. Are you as bossy with her as you are with me?”

“No, Daddy, she’s got Simon to look after her.” Jasmine wasn’t as diplomatic as her sister, who always ended up elbowing her sharply in the ribs when she said things like that. Not that Nick minded. He was relieved that his ex-wife was happy. Everything she’d said was true after all—he was emotionally shut down, didn’t know how to show affection, and would be happier on his own. She was much better off with Simon. The girls were the only thing in the world he really cared about anyway. As long as he had them he was happy.

He waited for the kettle to boil and looked at the front of the
Evening Standard
that someone had left on the table. And there she was. It was strange, he’d looked for her picture every day since he’d known she was back in the country, but it had begun to seem as if she’d vanished. Or at least as if he’d dreamed it last time. He’d glance at all the papers in the newsagents when he went in, he’d scan the red tops in the petrol station—but nothing. Until now. He dripped HP Sauce onto a picture of Tony Blair and stared at the photo of Mirabelle Moncur—walking arm in arm with a man young enough to be her son. But definitely handsome enough to be her lover—lest he try to deceive himself. It was the story he’d been waiting for:

M
IRABELLE
M
ONCUR
S
TEPS
O
UT WITH
T
OYBOY

God, they were so unoriginal,
he thought as he wiped the goblet of sauce from the page and let the dog lick his finger. He didn’t read any further. But what he did do was finish his sandwich and then go straight to his office, where he pulled a half-written letter from his top drawer. He glanced at it once, before screwing it up and throwing it into the bin.

“So what happened with Jonah the other night?” Kate asked as she added the finishing touches to Bébé’s ears. The portrait was coming along much better than she’d expected. She’d been worried that he might end up looking kind of cheesy—but he didn’t. He looked ruffled and beautiful. At least so far. There was still a long way to go before she was home and dry. She always tried to resist the temptation to do a few strokes of paint too many, as there was a fine line between finishing a painting and messing one up. Still, right now it was good.

“I love him,” Mirri said as she came around the back of Kate’s easel and stood beside her.

“So are you going to let him leave his wife?”

“I mean your painting of Bébé. I love him.” She touched a corner of the canvas where the background paint was dry.