The Goddess Rules (27 page)

“Hi, gorgeous,” Jonah said, and grabbed Kate for a kiss on the lips, which was Jonah’s flirtatious way.

“Jonah, it’s good to see you,” Kate said. She hadn’t seen him for weeks. Obviously, though, Mirri wasn’t letting the pain of lost love get in the way of sex with a handsome man. And Jonah was so handsome. As usual he hadn’t shaved and his eyes glinted out from his tanned face. “Have you been on holiday? Your arms are the color of mahogany.”

“A week in Thailand with the family.” He raised his eyebrows naughtily. “Doing my penance for being a bad boy.”

“Yeah, well, watch out being that color. Leonard might mistake you for a Regency table and put you up for auction,” Kate said. “Is Mirri around? I wanted a quick word with her.”

“Upstairs in the bath.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m taking her to some smart dinner and she’s taking forever.”

“Woman’s prerogative.” Kate patted him on the shoulder as she walked by him and headed up the stairs.

“Thought that was to change their minds?” he called out.

“You won’t have to wait long,” Kate said then instantly regretted it. It was pretty much the truth, wasn’t it? Quite soon Jonah would have to move on to the next pretty thing and Mirri, all being well, would be reigniting her love with Nick Sheridan. Though of course Mirri wasn’t in quite such an optimistic frame of mind.

Kate could hear the idiosyncratically French sound of Johnny Hallyday drifting from Mirri’s bathroom when she knocked.

“Come in,” Mirri called out. Not having a clue whether it was the TV repairman or Nick Sheridan himself.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said dismissively when Kate walked in. Maybe she had been hoping for the TV repairman after all.

“Do you want me to wait till you’ve finished?” Kate asked, and took a step backward. Mirri was, after all, up to her ears in her evening bubble bath, her hair was wet and hung around her shoulders like a mermaid’s.

“No, but I don’t want you to nag me,” she said, and turned off the dripping tap with her big toe.

“I just thought maybe you’d want to talk about what we do next,” Kate said. There was no point beating about the bush with Mirri. She’d pretend not to know what on earth Kate was talking about.

“I’m not sure that I want to do anything. He’s probably dead,” she said glibly.

“He’s an architect and he did something famous in Madrid. It’s not going to be hard to find out.”

“No, but it’s going to be hard if he’s married to a woman he loves.” Mirri looked sidelong at Kate, who had tucked herself up on the floor by the bathroom radiator.

“I can find out for you and if he’s married then I’ll let you know. There are ways and means.”

“I prefer to be direct,” Mirri said.

“So direct that you’ve pretended he didn’t exist for thirty years.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Mirri shrugged.

“Well, if you hadn’t made it sound like the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard then I wouldn’t expect you to do anything.”

“I was being foolish.” Mirri tugged her towel from the rail and pulled the plug out of the bath.

“You were being more honest than you’ve ever been before. Certainly with me anyway.”

“So?” She stood up and wrapped the towel around her as Kate pulled peeling polish off her toenails.

“So”—Kate glanced up at Mirri’s face—“I think when you’re at dinner I should look him up online and then we’ll discuss what to do next.” Mirri stood still and looked as vulnerable wrapped in her towel as a child who’d just been rescued from a swimming pool.

“Really?” she asked. Though Kate knew that this was her way of giving her consent.

“Don’t even think about it. We’ll talk later,” Kate reassured her in what she hoped was a light way. “You go and have your dinner with Jonah and I’ll have my drink with . . .”

“Ah, Lovely Louis.” Mirri tugged a comb through her hair.

“Not really,” Kate said, loudly enough to be telling the truth but too quietly to be heard. Well, by anyone other than Mirri, whose hearing was accustomed to hearing hippos on the loose in her vegetable garden at four in the morning.

“Who then?” she asked as she looked in the mirror at Kate, who was now sitting on an old damask-covered armchair in the corner of the bathroom.

“Jake,” Kate said flatly, hoping that Mirri wouldn’t remember Jake and The Slug were one and the same person.

“The Slug?” Mirri spun around.

“It’s just a drink.”

“Why?” Mirri looked closely at Kate.

“Don’t tell me you’ve always done the right thing,” Kate began, then realized that excuses might serve her better than defensiveness so changed tack. “It was three in the morning and I couldn’t get him out of my shed and he’s been sending songs to me all week and I feel a bit sorry for him. Anyway, what difference does it make? I’m just having a drink with him. It’s the intention that counts and I’ve moved on so far in my life that there’s no way this means anything,” Kate ran on breathlessly.

“Okay,” Mirri said, “I understand.” She wandered into the bedroom, where she began to rummage through her wardrobe, which was filled with enough vintage Ozzie Clark dresses and fabulous capes and shimmering gold-threaded African caftans to begin a museum of costumes right under Leonard’s roof.

“Do you really?” Kate was taken aback. She’d at least expected a small war over the matter. Then she realized that Mirri had just shown trust in her, which was much worse because now she had to prove worthy of that trust.

“Do you think this one?” Mirri held up a chalky-green cocktail dress to her body.

“Yeah, that’s lovely,” Kate said. “Now I’m going to go and do my research and we’ll talk later.”

“À bientôt, cherie,”
Mirri said as she put the dress back in favor of a man’s shirt and an old pair of Yves Saint Laurent smoking pants. She didn’t want Jonah to be too hopeful of his luck tonight. She was tired.

“Leonard, are you using your computer?” Kate asked as she skipped down the stairs.

“Gracious me, no,” he said. “Not if I can help it.” Leonard was actually much more competent on his computer than he let on, but he considered it vulgar to be seen to know too much about technology.

“I’m just going to go online for half an hour or so,” Kate said as she shuffled by Jonah and into Leonard’s office.

“Help yourself,” Leonard said distractedly as he showed Jonah a catalog of eighteenth-century fine art on auction next week.

“And if you’re looking up nude photos of me,” Jonah called out to her wickedly, “it’s not the real thing. Just my head on some unlucky bastard’s body.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, Jonah. I won’t be looking.” Kate settled down into Leonard’s office chair and waited for the computer to make its welcome noise.

First of all she typed in Nicholas Sheridan’s name. She looked down the thousands of results and swiftly eliminated the Nicholas Sheridan who in 1796 had been an Irish Flax Grower. She also mentally crossed off the Nicholas Sheridan in Year 12 who was a Math Olympiad somewhere in Glasgow. Then she came to a crop of results that sounded much more promising: Great Buildings Online. From Here to Modernity. Clearly these were of a more architectural nature. She found Nicholas Sheridan Partnerships and decided to click on that one. It had a royal blue and listed
NEWS, PROFILE, AWARDS
, and
CONTACT
. Well, hopefully if this
was
right she’d get to
CONTACT
later. She navigated her way to
NEWS
and found a list of buildings three pages long, beginning in 1975. God, that was practically historical—maybe he was dead after all. But she skipped to page three and saw that his firm’s latest project, which seemed to be an airport in Switzerland, wasn’t due for completion until 2007, which gave her some hope that he might still be breathing somewhere. Clearly, whatever else Nick Sheridan had done in his life he had stayed at the office late many nights because he’d designed more buildings than she’d managed to ruin paintbrushes.

“What are you looking up then?” Jonah walked into the office doorway, startling her. She doubted whether Jonah had any clue that Nick Sheridan even existed, much less that he was Mirri’s lost love. But still she flipped the page back to a horoscope to be on the safe side.

“My stars.”

“Load of nonsense.” He grinned. “If it’s love, you haven’t got time to read your horoscope.”

“If it’s love, you wouldn’t tease young girls. You’d be nice.” Mirri appeared beside Jonah with a look like thunder on her face.

“Of course it’s love.” Jonah grinned at Mirri who clearly felt a bit guilty about having Kate look up Nicholas Sheridan. She changed her tune and smiled at Jonah as sweetly as she ever did at anyone, then threw Kate an anxious look.

“It says to expect interesting news of an old flame,” Kate said meaningfully.

“What a load of crap.” Jonah laughed and then pulled Mirri close to him for a kiss.

“We’ll see,” Kate muttered under her breath and flicked back to her Nick’s pages a few minutes later when Mirri and Jonah were finally dispatched to their taxi and on their way to dinner.

So it seemed to Kate that Nick Sheridan certainly couldn’t have had much time to pursue love affairs and marriages and a social life, because he must have been so damned busy for the past thirty years. He’d designed squares and parks and civic buildings and train stations and then a project in Madrid—that must have been the one that Leonard had mentioned. There was absolutely no doubt in Kate’s mind that this was
the
Nick Sheridan they were looking for. Next she went to the
AWARDS
page—which was endless and ran the gamut from small and pointless-seeming awards for which it hardly sounded worth the bother turning up at the ceremony—like the Concrete Society Award—to much more impressive things that had very grand initials beginning always with
R,
which was obviously the Royal-something-something award. Nicholas Sheridan was clearly big time in the architectural world, Kate concluded as she moved on to the
CONTACT
page—the one that counted. But if she expected to find a house address, telephone number, and cozy-sounding e-mail address, Kate was clearly underestimating the might of the man Mirri had fallen in love with all those years ago. All that was on this page were his offices in Tokyo and London and some very intimidating and impersonal e-mail addresses. There was no way she could e-mail his international partnership and mention an affair that the company president had enjoyed three decades ago. So what next?

Kate went back to her search and looked for articles that might tell her more about the man than the buildings. She looked at Leonard’s clock. Jake would be here in ten minutes and she still had on her jeans. Still, what did it matter? She clicked on several articles but only gleaned a bit about his views on development of greenbelt land. Eventually she saw one that she knew would be more helpful—
House and Garden
magazine. There it was, the Oxfordshire home of Nicholas Sheridan, architect—a seventeenth-century manor house with a river running through the woodland and an art deco swimming pool and pool house. And while it didn’t tell her any more than the other website about what he might look like or be like or whether he lived alone or with a devoted wife, she did know that his master bedroom was painted sage green (how likely was it that a wife would endure this, Kate wondered) with a bedspread from Kurdistan. Now all she needed to do was call directory inquiries tomorrow and find a Sheridan in the “picturesque Oxfordshire village of Letcombe Bassett.” After that it was up to Mirri, but as Kate closed down the computer she considered her research well done.

“Did you find what you needed?” Leonard asked on his way out to dinner.

“Sure did.” Kate nodded in a satisfied way and felt relieved that everyone was going to be out when Jake arrived.

Chapter Twenty

Back in her shed Kate had fewer clothes to contemplate than Mirri. She couldn’t be bothered to change from her jeans so she just took off her grotty T-shirt and pulled on a cardigan of Tanya’s that she’d borrowed last winter. She’d worked really hard not to return it as it was one of the few cashmere items in her possession. While she waited for Jake to arrive, she flicked on the J. J. Cale in her CD player and texted Louis.

I’m out with old friend for drinks. Hope you’re having fun. Thanks for last night. Kxx

It wasn’t that she felt the need to inform him of her every move. Just that she would feel better if she was somehow busted on a night out with Jake and she’d at least told a semblance of the truth to Louis. But before she could agonize over the whole thing too deeply there was a loud, confident knock on the door.

“Good evening, Miss Disney.” Jake was standing before her looking smarter than she’d ever seen him. He was wearing a shirt and jacket and possibly even had styling product in his hair. Kate took a step backward.

“Did somebody die?” she asked with a nervous laugh.

“What do you mean?” Jake appeared puzzled.

“Well, you look so smart. I’ve only ever seen you dress up like that for funerals or job interviews.”

“No, I just wanted tonight to be special,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek, despite the fact that she’d practically pinned herself to the far wall of her shed in order not to kiss Jake. Because even though he used to intimidate her terribly by being cold to her, now she was much more nervous about him being so overfriendly. It was too odd for words.

“It’s only a drink, Jake,” she reminded him.

“So did you like the song I sent you last night?” he asked anxiously as he watched her face closely.

“The song?” She thought back to last night but all she could remember was how tired she’d been. Then it dawned on her: He meant the envelope she’d thrown in the bin. “Oh, yeah. Well I didn’t actually get around to listening to it. But I will.”

“Did you open it?” He scrutinized her expression and Kate couldn’t lie.

“Actually, Jake, I threw it in the bin.”

“You did what?”

“I was tired. I couldn’t hear another song that reminded me of you,” she said honestly.

“Then you still care?” Jake’s face lit up.

“No, Jake, I haven’t been able to afford to care for a long time. But I do still have memories and they sort of tear me apart so you can’t really blame me for not wanting to listen to your very pretty, sad songs.”

“I suppose so.” Jake began to look around the room for the rubbish bin. “But it might have been a bit harsh of you to throw it away.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said as Jake located the wastepaper bin and sure enough, there, amid the rubbish that was thankfully only a few tissues and some screwed-up sketches, he found the envelope.

“I’ll keep it, then,” he said as he retrieved it and put it in an inside pocket of his jacket. “Waste not, want not.”

“Good,” Kate said. Thinking with only the faintest of pangs that he’d just give it to some other girl tomorrow night anyway. It wasn’t that she wanted Jake to be all over her, but she had been secretly pleased this week that he’d put so much time into trying to win her back. It wasn’t that she wanted him, or even that she wanted the pleasure of turning him down. It was just that in a strange way it made up for all the time he hadn’t been sweet to her when they’d been together.

“Oh, and Kate?” Jake was eyeing up her jeans. “Are you wearing those?” Kate looked down at her jeans and felt the flood of old insecurities swamp her. Did they make her look too fat? Too frumpy? Too unfeminine? Or was it just that Jake claimed never to have seen a woman look her best in jeans? Kate cast her mind back and tried to remember. Then she stopped dead in her tracks.

“Yeah, I’m wearing these, Jake. I like them.” It no longer mattered what Jake thought of her jeans or legs or femininity.

“So do I. I think you look great in them,” he said hurriedly. “It’s just that I’m not sure that you’ll be allowed in . . .” Then he stopped. “You know what. Fuck it. If they won’t let you in then we’ll go somewhere else. You’ll look hotter than any other girl there.” He took Kate by the hand and led her out of the shed.

“Right. Well good,” Kate said, with the wind well and truly taken from her sails. “So where are we going that’s so fancy I can’t wear jeans?”

“Just wait and see,” he said, and led her down the garden path. Not for the first time, she noted drily.

“Your chariot, m’lady.” He smiled as they walked out of the side gate and onto the street. Jake had rushed over to a 1970s cream Mercedes with the top down and opened the passenger door.

Kate stopped in her tracks. “Jake, what are you playing at?” She wasn’t cross, just really surprised. He’d never pulled a stunt like this. Ever.

“I’m taking my girl for a night out,” he said with a flourish.

Kate didn’t move. “Jake, I’m not your girl anymore. You know that.” She was concerned and a little bored at having to cover this old ground yet again.

“I know,” Jake said, “but will you get in anyway? We’re late.”

“Jake, we’re going for a quick drink. That was the deal,” Kate reminded him as she got into the car and he walked around to the driver’s seat. “Whose car is this, by the way?”

“Enough questions, angel. Let’s just have some fun, shall we?” He turned the keys in the ignition and pulled out into the traffic.

“So I’m going to look at a flat in Primrose Hill tomorrow,” Kate said to fill the dreamy silence that Jake seemed to have fallen into. “All part of moving on, you know. Growing up and getting out of the shed.”

“Sounds good,” he said, but his mind was elsewhere.

“So how’s the music going? Any joy with those distributors who were interested?” She was trying to be as all-business as possible.

“Yeah, it’s fine. Music’s fine,” he said as they drove along with the warm evening breeze whipping through their hair. He was playing with the stereo and at that moment a Nick Drake song, as haunting as the others he’d sent, filled the car. Kate wondered whether this had been the song in the envelope last night. She guessed she’d never find out now.

“Where exactly are we going?” she asked as they drove south toward Chelsea.

“You’ll find out.”

“Jake . . . I can’t be out too late. I’ve got an early start tomorrow,” Kate complained.

“I won’t keep you out.” He put his hand somewhere near his heart and promised.

Ten minutes later, after Kate had tried and failed to converse with Jake and had eventually given up and succumbed to Nick Drake’s absurdly, and for Kate irritatingly, romantic “Northern Skies,” Jake stopped the car and parked by the pavement next to the river.

“Here we are.” He got out and came to open her door but Kate had managed to get out herself already and was looking around to see if there was a nearby pub that they might be going to. For a moment she was relieved. At least there were no swanky restaurants or fabulous bars around here, so clearly Jake wasn’t planning to wow her too well. Jake pulled the roof up on the car and locked it.

“Where are we going, then?” Kate asked. “And why wasn’t I allowed to wear jeans?”

“I was going to stop off at the Blue Bar for cocktails first but you seemed a bit impatient”—he winked at her—“and inappropriately dressed. So I thought we’d come straight here.”

“Here being which pub, then?” Kate asked, almost wishing they had gone to the Blue Bar—the cocktails there were spectacularly good and always put her in the best mood.

“Angel, have you got so little faith in me?” Jake laughed and then ushered her toward the wall overlooking the river.

“Oh, Jake.” She couldn’t help herself from blurting out when she realized what he’d planned. “Don’t tell me . . .”

“This way,” he said as he led her onto a small jetty and down to a houseboat. “It looks a bit rotten but I’m told it’s completely safe.” He jumped onto the deck of a racing green houseboat with flaking paint and held out his hand to help Kate down. The sun was bouncing off the ripples on the water; the only sound was the soft, rhythmic lapping of small waves against the side of the boat and the neighboring vessels, which all seemed to be deserted.

“Jake . . . ,” she began to protest. But then she noticed that there was a picnic blanket at the prow and on it was an ice bucket with a bottle inside it and two glasses next to it.

“I thought we could watch the sun set on the river.”

“I thought we were going out for a quick drink,” she said sternly, wondering whether she ought to just turn back now and tell him to take her home. But his eyes were so soulful and excited to see her reaction that she just couldn’t.

“We are. I just wanted it to be nice,” he said. “Now, come and look at the view from the top deck.”

Kate followed Jake around the boat and he held her hand the entire time to make sure that she didn’t fall through holes or overboard. He led her down the steps into the cabin, showed her the kitchen which was doll-like in size, and then he showed her the berth and bed, without once making her feel uncomfortable or as if he was about to pounce. Which was a good thing because if he had she would just have hit him over the head with a saucepan and headed straight for the Embankment to hail the nearest taxi.

“Drink then?” he asked as they emerged into the golden light of the sunset from the dark, mildew smell of belowdecks.

“I suppose so.” Despite being a decaying heap the boat was pretty enchanting and definitely the kind of place Jake loved. And though she didn’t want to admit it to herself it was the kind of place she loved, too. In her early twenties she’d longed to live on a houseboat, and had even gone so far as to look into renting one, but her bourgeois nature got the better of her when she learned that you couldn’t get insurance for them so if they sunk you were scuppered. Still, it was so beautiful here now and she wondered whether she ought to want to be here with Louis. But it was such a Jake thing that she couldn’t imagine it.

“Cheers,” he said as he handed her a glass of champagne.

“Cheers.” Kate sat down on the blanket, because it looked dry, and couldn’t quite believe that for a second time this week she was drinking champagne with a man overlooking the river. Perhaps Mirri was her fairy godmother who’d arrived twenty-nine years too late, she thought as she grinned at the latest twists in her boring, shed dweller’s life.

“So I know you think we’ve said it all, but I have a few things I want to tell you,” Jake said without even taking a sip of his drink. Which made Kate nervous enough to practically bolt hers down in one hit.

“Oh, come on, Jake. Let’s just have fun like you said. It’s not as though both of us haven’t moved on. We don’t need to go over all the things that went wrong. Let’s just look to the future.”

“I have. That’s why I brought you here.” Jake looked unusually serious. Kate winced and took another large mouthful of her drink. Just enough to take the edge off her fear, anyway.

“Kate, I’ve missed you,” he began.

“Please, Jake, don’t,” she interrupted. “Let’s just look at the sunset.”

But he was like a ship in full sail and wouldn’t be silenced. “I didn’t realize at first that I was missing you but when I did I had to do a lot of thinking. About how I’d treated you over the years. About how much you meant to me. About the fact that I’ve never gotten on with any other woman as well as you. You were my best friend, Kate,” Jake said. Then he smiled at her, with the look of dread etched on her face as she helped herself to another glass of champagne. “And I also loved you.” Kate looked for the first time that night at his face and was surprised to see that nothing had changed. She claimed to hate him now but it was still the same face that until very recently she had been mad about. The face of the man who had broken her heart but kept her hanging on long after she ought to have left. Maybe she’d expected him to have changed by now—to have become less attractive to her because she’d finally decided that she didn’t want him and his behavior was too despicable to bear—but he hadn’t changed. His eyes were still the same and his lips were still the lips she had loved to kiss. He was still Jake and she suddenly wasn’t sure whether she’d ever stopped loving him at all. Or whether she’d just been momentarily distracted by the sheer fun and novelty of Felix and Louis having crushes on her.

“Jake, don’t,” she pleaded as she realized that she just might be in real trouble here.

“Kate, I know what I was like and I couldn’t help it. But I am sorry and things will be different from now on.” He tried to take her hand but she kept it determinedly in her lap.

“No, things won’t be different. It’s over,” she said as gently but firmly as possible.

“I love you. More than I’ve ever loved anyone. And if you just give me a chance I’ll try so hard to be what you want me to be.” She’d never seen him so sincere and so vulnerable and she found it painful and disconcerting.

“I wanted you to be you. But nice to me. That was all I ever wanted, Jake. But I don’t think you’re capable of ever changing. And even if you were, I’m not the girl for you. If I had been you’d have known from the start that I was and you’d have known that you loved me. You’re just panicking now because you’re about to lose me.”