To Marry a Prince (5 page)

‘That’s very fair of you.’ There was a smile in his voice. ‘How are you feeling now?’

Bella thought about it. ‘A bit odd, to be honest.’

‘I’ll get you that champagne.’

He made his way sure-footedly through the dark maze that was the courtyard. She listened but did not hear so much as a pot scrape or a branch snap in his wake. When he returned, she accepted the glass of wine gratefully, but sighed.

‘I wish I could do that.’

He was amused. ‘Do what?

‘Navigate my way round these plants without sounding like a herd of buffalo. I’m afraid I’m one of the world’s bumpers.’

‘Bumpers?’ he said blankly.

‘That’s what my father used to call me. “Let’s hope Bella doesn’t want to be an actress,” he used to say. “She’d always be bumping into the furniture and breaking the crockery.”’

‘Did you want to be an actress, then?’ He sounded intrigued.

Bella drank some more champagne. It was good. The bubbles seemed to act on her like water on a drooping daisy. She straightened, feeling chirpier by the minute

‘Good God, no. I hate being on show. Curdles my insides. But I wish I wasn’t so clumsy.’

‘Would it help you with the creepy crawlies and the tropical storms?’

She took another mouthful of champagne, then another and another. Yes, bubbles were definitely energising. ‘There you go, laughing at me again.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘No. I think I quite like it.’

‘Thank you,’ he said gravely.

He sat down on the sofa beside her. Bella shivered.

‘Are you cold?’

‘No.’ She looked up at the sky. The clouds were still scudding across the moon but she felt as warm as toast. ‘You know, three … no, four … nights ago, I walked down a beach at night and there were so many stars you couldn’t have put a hand between them. And here there isn’t one.’

‘So why are you here, not there?’

‘Ah. That’s a long story.’

He settled back among the cushions. ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere.’

She sank back too, clutching the champagne flute against her. ‘Nothing’s ever as good or as bad as you expect, is it?’

‘That’s a bit sweeping. Sometimes it takes a while to find out how good or bad something has been.’

He had a wonderful voice, she thought, deep and dark and thoughtful. Merlin would have a voice like that. Shame he didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘You’re wrong. You know at once when a thing is wrong. I did. I just didn’t—’

‘Didn’t?’ he prompted.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Bella, annoyed. In the darkness, it didn’t seem so bad to say it aloud. ‘I didn’t want to admit it, all right? I went out to the island convinced I was going to get close to nature, save the planet and find my place in the universe.’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘Nope. Nowhere near.’

‘Tough,’ was all he said.

But she had the feeling that he understood.

‘Waste of time, feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘You are so right. But was this island of yours all bad?’

She thought about it. ‘I suppose not,’ she admitted. ‘I learned a few things.’

‘Like what?’

‘One …’ She ticked them off on her fingers. Or, at least, she started to tick them off on her fingers, but that made her glass tilt alarmingly, nearly spilling champagne. So she stopped. ‘See what I mean?’ she said, side-tracked. ‘Clumsy.’ Champagne had slopped on to the back of her hand and she licked it up. ‘Waste not, want not.’

‘Mmm.’ He sounded a bit distracted. He cleared his throat. ‘You were going to tell me what you learned?’

‘Oh, that. Well, lots of things. The nutritional value of red seaweed. That wind in the palm trees sounds like
rain on a corrugated-iron roof and it breaks your heart when it isn’t. That counting fish is really boring when you do it every day. That people tell you something is adventurous when it’s really just hot and dirty.’

‘Ah.’

‘And also,’ said Bella loudly, ‘that I’m not very brave. So here’s to the stars and equatorial fish stocks! I hope they’re very happy, but I’m not going back.’

And then, to her own surprise, she began to cry.

Silk Shirt coped surprisingly well. He didn’t say everything would look better in the morning like Lottie would have, or that she’d change her mind when she thought about the importance of the work, like Francis Don had, in their last, vituperative exchange. He took her glass away from her – Bella resisted but he pointed out that it was empty, so in the end she let it go – and put an arm round her, and drew her against his shoulder, and let her weep it out. He would probably even have produced a handkerchief, but she had one tucked into her watch strap under one long blue sleeve, so she was spared that indignity, at least.

‘I thought it’d be all right when I got home. But it isn’t. I’m
cold
. The magazines are full of people I don’t know. My mother’s much too busy running a Charity Ball to have me home …’ She ran out of voice and blew her nose hard.

‘Bummer,’ was all he said.

But she had the feeling that he knew what she was talking about. It steadied her.

She drew a long sigh. ‘Yes, but I didn’t belong on the island, either. I’ll miss the children in the village. Some
of the people. But that awful knowing I’d been a gullible idiot … and everyone else knowing it, too … that was the pits.’

He sat very still. She sniffed, and straightened the handkerchief that she could barely see, folding it and folding it, corner to corner, in her absorption. She had a huge urge to tell
someone
the whole sorry story.

‘The trouble was, a man I respected basically did a con job on me. It took me too long to recognise it and a whole lot longer to admit it. But that’s the truth. And that hurts, you know?’

He hugged her a bit closer. ‘Yes, I know. Been there.’

‘I mean, if he’d said, “Come and help out; we’ve got no money, so we live on rich kids doing work experience,” that would have been fair. That would have been the truth. But he spun me this big line about what a valuable researcher I was, and how I could make all the difference, and he said he would make sure I got a real job at the end of it. When all he wanted was someone to count bloody
fish
.’ Her voice rose. ‘I don’t even like fish.’

‘I can see that one would go off them.’

Bella’s head reared up. ‘Are you laughing at me again?’ she said suspiciously.

‘Maybe a little.’ He tucked a tumbling strand of blonde hair behind her ear.

She relaxed back against his shoulder again. ‘You know, I don’t feel quite real. Not here. Not there. It’s like I’m a character walking through other people’s dreams. When they wake up, I’ll disappear. Pffft!’ She clicked her fingers. She had to have three goes at it but she managed
it in the end. ‘Pffft!’ she said again, pleased. She peered up at him in the darkness. ‘Does that sound weird?’

‘It sounds as if it’s time I got you home.’

But Bella was on another tack entirely. ‘Are you an actor?’

‘Good heavens, where did that come from?’

‘The voice … Wonderful warm voice.’

‘You know, I’d be really flattered if you weren’t slurring your words,’ he said, shifting her. ‘Come along, Dream Girl.’

‘I know. You’re a psychiatrist.’

‘Why on earth …?’

‘You ask really good questions and then you listen.’

‘Oh, yes, I listen all right,’ he said. ‘It’s about the only thing I do.’

‘Well, you’re very good at it,’ Bella told him. ‘Very, very, very good.’ She snuggled into his shoulder.

‘Oh, no. You can’t go to sleep here. On your feet, Dream Girl. You’ve got a home to go to, and it’s time I took you there.’

He hauled her upright and got her across the courtyard. But as soon as he opened the door into the house, the lights switched her brain into gear again, and she looked at her watch in horror.

‘The minicab! They’ll be here any minute, asking for Hendred Associates. I said I’d be waiting for them. Where did I leave my
coat?
’

‘Ah, the car. It is for you,’ said one of the passing waiters. ‘They are waiting outside. Your coat, it is on the rack in the breakfast room. I show you.’

Bella dashed off to get it but when she shot back to
retrieve Lottie’s borrowed bag from the courtyard, there was no sign of Silk Shirt. She did look, but the cab was waiting and she could not see anyone the right height or wearing a pearl-white silk shirt. So she had to go without saying goodbye to him.

Just as well, she thought grimly. Panic banished the effects of the champagne. Now Bella was remembering, rather too vividly, how she had curled up against his shoulder and told him the story of her life.

She said a distracted goodbye to her hostess and fell gratefully into the back of the minicab. She told herself she was just tired. She told herself she was over-reacting.

But there was a cold voice in the back of her head, like a headmistress giving an end-of-term report. Change everyone around her … change time zones … change continents … Isabella Greenwood still makes an utter fool of herself.

AAAAARGH!

‘When is a Date not a Date?’ –
Tube Talk

Bella woke the next morning with a mouth like the inside of a sandpit. She groaned and rolled over, muttering. But the taste wouldn’t go away.

Eventually she hauled herself up on one elbow and peered at the bedside clock. But even closing one eye, she couldn’t stop the figures dancing in and out of focus. She fell back with a thump – and something scratched her ear.

‘Eeeugh!’ she yelled, forgetting she was no longer on the island.

She leaped out of bed and looked round wildly for something to hit the bug with. If it was a bug. She had horrid images of scorpions and poisonous centipedes …

It was only when she was looming over the pillow, with a copy of the heaviest Harry Potter she could grab from the bookcase raised high above her head, that all the bits of her brain clicked back into place.
Of course
. She was not on the island: no tent, no cooking pots, no wonky table with sheets of data stacked high on it. And
this was a real bed, too. She was in Lottie’s spare room and the most lethal thing in it was the dodgy hair dryer.

Bella lowered Harry, feeling a fool.

Still, even if Pimlico was scorpion-free, something had bitten her. With well-practised caution, she pulled back the covers.

And stopped, appalled.

It looked as if someone had emptied the contents of one of Granny Georgia’s pot-pourri jars over it, exactly where Bella had been sleeping. There were bits of powder-dry leaves, mixed in with twigs and, frankly, earth. A green stain across the bottom sheet ended in a half-crushed bay leaf. Where her head had lain, the pillow was peppered with a brownish-grey dust. It was all made worse by unmistakable smears of last night’s lippy and a sad bit of sparkle.

‘Yuck,’ said Bella from the heart.

The bedroom door opened and Lottie wandered in, yawning. She was wearing an oversized teddy bear tee-shirt that reached down to her knees, and pink socks. ‘You screamed, miss?’ she said amiably.

Bella shuffled a bit. ‘Er – I thought a scorpion had got into bed with me. I
was
half-asleep.’

Lottie narrowed her eyes at her. ‘Have you been reading science fiction again?’

Bella shook her head. ‘No. Worse than that.’ There was no help for it. She would have to come clean. ‘I – er – sort of fell into bed last night without taking my make-up off and …’ She stood aside, letting the state of the sheets speak for her.

Lottie stared and her mouth fell open. ‘That’s not all you didn’t take off, from the look of it. Is that mud?’

‘No. Or rather, well, yes, I suppose it is.’

Lottie closed her mouth, opened it again, shook her head, closed her mouth and sat down rather hard on the end of the bed.

‘Why?’

‘Um – you could say I had an accident.’

‘I can see that. If Carlos saw your hair now, he would slit his throat. Or possibly yours.’

Conscience-stricken, Bella put up a hand to her hair. A couple of pins fell out. So did a withered ivy leaf and rather a lot of dust. She turned to look in her predecessor’s mirror and recoiled. She had gone to bed in her underwear. She had a wide smear of dirt on her right cheek. Nothing at all survived of Carlos’s work of art. Where there had been an artless cascade of feathery blonde locks, there was now a lopsided mess of pins, garden detritus and, possibly, wildlife.

She prodded it, cautiously. ‘Do you think there could be a centipede in there?’

Lottie moaned.

‘I know. I know. I go to the ball dressed up like a million dollars and come home looking like Fungus the Bogeyman. I didn’t do it on purpose. These things just happen to me.’

Lottie closed her eyes. ‘It’s too early for this,’ she said. ‘I need coffee. And water. Lots of water. You can tell me what happened, but not until I’ve rehydrated.’