Just Friends (50 page)

Freya took another sip of her tepid white wine and gazed into the middle distance with a half-smile on her face, as if she wasn’t really part of this sad, singles group—merely sightseeing, or perhaps gathering material for an amusing little feature on the Women’s page. This was turning into one of the worst evenings of her life. She thought of Cat, downing cocktails with the man she loved amid whispering palm trees, and wanted to strangle her. Freya wasn’t in the mood for this.

Still, she had promised Cat. She must make an effort. Freya straightened her shoulders and braved the chattering hordes. Before too long she found herself talking to an okay-looking guy, about the right age. He was pleasant and polite, but she found it almost impossible to think of anything to say that didn’t sound stupid or boring or both. This was all so banal! She could see him losing interest, his attention beginning to drift over her shoulder. Eventually, he made an excuse about refilling his glass; a few moments later she saw him laughing heartily with Ms. Gray Suit and accepting her card. Freya realized that she had not even gotten to first base in this ridiculous dating game. She circled the crowd, gathering the courage to try again, picking up snatches of conversation.

“I
adore
novels—especially the fictional ones.”

“. . . No, but I saw the movie.”

“He said his favorite writer was Tom Clancy. I mean,
hello
?”

“Don’t you feel that Shakespeare is, in a very real sense, with us here today?”

If only Jack was here. If only she hadn’t said those terrible things to him. If only he wasn’t
married
. Freya could think of no explanation of why he had married Candace Twink. Could she be pregnant? Had Jack’s father forced him to marry her? Was there some Madison inheritance dependent on marriage? Had he just given up and decided that he might as well marry Candace as anyone else? Nothing made sense.

The touch of a hand on her elbow made her jump. “Well, well,” said a familiar voice, “if it isn’t the woman who mistook a pocket calculator for her mobile phone.”

It was that literary agent, Leo Brannigan, smiling in that irritatingly superior way. He was wearing the cool-media-person’s uniform of casual jacket and immaculate T-shirt. “How’s it going?” he asked with a leer. “I hear these evenings are great for pick-ups.”

“Oh, I’m not with this lot.” Freya trilled with laughter at the very idea. “I just, er, came in to buy a book and, er, decided to sneak a free glass of wine. It’s my birthday,” she added, as if this were an explanation.

“Oh, yeah?” Leo looked unconvinced.

“What about you?” she countered. “Found any nice girls?”

“Me?”
Leo’s dark brows snapped together. “Jesus Christ! I wouldn’t be seen dead with these losers.” He had the perfect face for sneering, Freya thought. “No, I’ve got one of my writers downstairs signing books. I’m just hanging out till he’s finished.”

“It’s not . . . Jack, is it?”

“Who? Oh—
Jack.
No. Wish it was. He decided to stay with Ella Fogarty.”

Freya nodded.
Good for you, Jack,
she thought.

“No, I missed a trick there.” Leo gave Freya a brooding look, as if it were her fault. “I just hope Ella knows how to extract the right level of advance. These publishers are such tightwads.”

“Mmm.” What was he talking about?

“The word is it’s very good. Even better than
Big Sky
. Maybe bestseller material.”

Freya tried not to goggle. Jack had finished his book! She took a slurp of wine to cover her surprise, choked, and had to be patted on the back. “I always knew he’d do it,” she croaked.

“It didn’t look that way back in the summer,” said Leo. “Even though I tried getting him on my list I wasn’t sure he’d ever perform. It looked like he was heading nowhere. Then something happened to him, I don’t know what.”

I do,
Freya thought. Her heart sang.

“Maybe it was the marriage,” Leo suggested.

“Bollocks!” Freya exclaimed. Candace Twink could no more inspire Jack to write a novel than she could fly to the moon. The woman couldn’t even see her own two feet! Catching Leo’s startled glance, she added, “I mean, I don’t see why that should have any particular impact on his writing.”

“Well, I do. I’d say that was a real punch in the balls.”

“Would you?” Freya smiled brightly.
What
was a punch in the balls? Was he calling Candace a ballbuster? She didn’t seem to be doing too well with conversations tonight.

“I mean, from the old man,” continued Leo helpfully.

Freya frowned. “What, you mean cutting off his allowance?”

“The guy had an
allowance
! Jeez, these spoiled rich boys. No, I mean the business with the girlfriend.”

“What girlfriend?”

“The one he married, of course.” Leo’s tone implied that she was a half-wit. “I mean, what a great story. There’s a novel right there.”

“You think so?” Freya cocked her head intelligently. She was utterly mystified.

“Well, sure! You introduce your girlfriend to your father, and the next thing you know they’re getting married. It’s your worst fucking nightmare.” He cackled maliciously.

Freya stared at him, openmouthed. There was a strange noise in her head, like one of those complex 3-D puzzles clicking into place. The very week she’d left for England with Jack, Candace had gone out on the town with Jack’s father. Jack’s father liked women. Candace liked money. Candace wanted to
be
someone. Leo had said
father
. Freya took a gasp of breath as the glorious, miraculous, obvious truth arrowed into her brain and finally hit the bull’s-eye. Candace had married Jack Madison
senior
! Which meant . . .
which meant that Jack wasn’t married after all!!!
She burst into hysterical laughter.

Leo was looking at her as if she’d finally flipped.

“I just think it’s terribly funny,” she explained, raising her hand to hide a huge, foolish grin. He wasn’t married!

“You women are so callous.” Leo shook his head in disgust. “Just think how upset the poor guy must be about it.”

“Who? What?” Freya couldn’t concentrate with all the voices jabbering in her head. Jack wasn’t married! He was free! He’d even finished his book! How wonderful he was.

Leo rolled his eyes. “Isn’t Jack upset that his, i.e. Jack’s, father has married his, i.e. Jack’s, girlfriend?”

“Don’t be daft!” Freya scoffed. “Jack wouldn’t care who married her. She’s a bimbo, for heaven’s sake! You could count her brain cells on the foot of a three-toed sloth. Jack’s much too good for her. I mean, he’s so . . . talented and so . . . funny . . . and nice and handsome and—” Whoops! She was babbling. “At least, some people seem to think so,” she ended feebly.

“Oh, I get it. . . .” Leo gave her a sly look. “I heard you’d moved in with him for a while. But you couldn’t get your hands on him because of this other girl, right? Now the field is clear, you can start chasing him again.”

Freya drew herself up tall. “I was never chasing Jack,” she informed him with dignity. “We were just friends.”

“Oh, sure,” he said skeptically.

“We still are!” she insisted, stung.

“Really?” said Leo. “Then how come you’re not with him now instead of hounding poor single men?”

“What?” He’d lost her again.

He sighed at her stupidity. “Didn’t you say it was your birthday?”

“So?”

“You know: you and Jack—the bet?”

“What bed?” Freya blushed scarlet. She pictured the moonlit room in Cornwall, Jack smiling down at her, his hands tugging at the straps of her dress. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten. But how on earth could Leo know about that?

“Bet,” Leo repeated, as if to a moron. “
B-e-t.
Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

Freya stared at him. Her heart was beginning to pound. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten. The hot night at Café Pisa, it seemed a lifetime ago—Jack saying, “I’ll be there”—and her making that stupid crack about marrying a lord. Only it was Jack who’d gotten married. Except he hadn’t. . . .

“As in poker? About six months ago? In Jack’s apartment? Are you having trouble with your ears?”

“The bet!”
shrieked Freya, so loudly that the room hushed for a moment and everyone stared. Her mind whirled. The eighth at eight. Oh, my God, he might be there now!

She grabbed Leo’s wrist and looked at his watch, forgetting she had a perfectly good one of her own. Nine-fifteen. He’d think she wasn’t coming—that she didn’t care—that she’d meant it when she said she never wanted to see him again.
Oh, Jack, wait!

Oh, God, Oh, God. She started to sprint for the escalator, then turned back and slung an arm around Leo’s neck. “Come here, you bastard ten-percenter.” She gave him a smacking kiss.

Leo rubbed his cheek, a look of astonished recognition spreading across his face. “You’re in love with him!” But Freya was already gone.

CHAPTER 36

The waiter pounced on Jack’s empty glass and shot him a dirty look. Jack had lingered for almost an hour over two Bloody Marys; outside, there was a queue waiting for tables. Yet again the waiter asked if he should open the champagne; yet again Jack told him to wait.

How much longer? Jack had spent many hours of his life waiting for women. He still hadn’t figured out exactly what they
did
all that time, but he knew that whatever it was took them twice as long as one could possibly imagine. In fact, in female terms, Freya was barely late at all. Candace, for example, had kept his poor father waiting in the Oaksboro church for forty-five minutes—and that was for her own wedding. But she had turned up in the end. They were on their honeymoon now in Candace’s dream destination, Las Vegas. Candace Twink was a remarkable woman in her way.

Her note had been lying on the hallway floor of his apartment when he got back from Cornwall.

You bastard! Harry from upstairs told me where you’ve gone and who with. I always thought there was something between you and Her. Well, chacun a son goo, as they say in France. I have too much respect for myself as a woman to play “second fiddle.” It is time for me to focus on my own life-goals and fulfill my potential as a human being. DON’T call me.

It had not immediately occurred to Jack that Candace’s “life-goal” might be to marry his own father. In fact, when he opened the letters from Candace, Lauren, and his dad, all on the same subject (though Lauren’s was much the funniest), he’d almost broken his no-drinking rule. Once he’d recovered from his surprise, the news of the marriage seemed entirely appropriate, though even he was struck by the single-mindedness with which Candace had embraced her destiny. Overnight, she had reinvented herself as Scarlett O’Hara. With a ruthlessness that inspired awe, if not admiration, she had repudiated her background, her friends, and very nearly her own family, eagerly agreeing to celebrate the wedding at the Madison home and admitting only a small group of terrified Twinks, who stood outside the church in an ostracized huddle wearing their best Macy’s suits. Jack now suspected that, even as she’d composed her note of dismissal, Candace’s eye had been firmly fixed on a prize infinitely more valuable than himself. Jack had accepted his father’s offer of the role of best man, “to show everybody we’re still friends,” as his father put it. “Everybody” meant the whole of Oaksboro and practically everyone Jack had ever known. He was in no doubt that they all knew exactly how the happy couple had met. The story of how a man approaching seventy had stolen his own son’s girlfriend was too good not to broadcast throughout every barroom and hairsalon in the county.

Oddly, the potential humiliation of this situation had had the opposite effect. Contemplating Candace in her wedding creation, her left hand locked tight into the crook of his father’s arm and displaying several thousand dollars’ worth of diamond ring, Jack had felt no jealousy at all, only a faint sadness that this was her narrow definition of happiness. He felt sorry for his father with this absurdly young trophy wife, who was unlikely to make him any happier than his previous four. Dad’s cronies might josh about old dogs and lead in pencils, but the truth was that his father had not been up to the challenge with a real companion with a brain, like Lauren. Jack knew he wanted to do things differently.

Still, it was going to take some getting used to, having Candace for a stepmother. Jack longed to tell Freya the whole story. He knew how hilarious she’d find it. But she wasn’t here.