To Marry a Prince (16 page)

Bella hesitated. As if he could feel her eyes on him, Richard looked up and made one of their hand signals, acknowledging her and pointing towards the far end of the screen. It was so fleeting that nobody could have been certain that he did it, or not unless they were watching him closely.

He was a born conspirator, thought Bella, somewhat reassured. She must remember to tell him so.

She eased her way through the crowd. There was a respectful distance between the director’s party and everyone else, which resulted in even tighter bunching at the margins. Several times she lost sight of Richard altogether and by the time she got to the edge of the screen, he and his host and fellow guests had moved on. She hovered, not sure whether she was meant to follow them or not. But even as she stood there undecided, she saw Richard’s head turn and he was retracing his steps. He did not look up – he was frowning down at the catalogue – but he made a gesture which just
might
have been a signal to retreat behind the screen

Oh, hell, thought Bella. Still, what have I got to lose?

She backed round it, and found herself in a narrow space, full of chairs and signboards. She nearly backed out again, only almost immediately Richard was with her.

‘Quick.’ He put one hand over her shoulder and did something complicated to a wall-mounted console she had not noticed. A bit of wall slid away behind her. ‘Inside.’

Bella backed, predictably stumbling a little. She caught hold of him to steady herself and stood there, blinking, as the wall closed again behind him. It left them in darkness except for the street lights beyond the uncurtained windows. Richard’s breathing was thunderous.

They appeared to be in a small boardroom. Just at the moment, it was a dumping ground, not only for chairs
but for stepladders, paint pots and, unmistakably, dust sheets. It smelled of turpentine.

‘Gosh. They only just got the place finished in time, didn’t they?’ Bella said brightly.

But Richard was not interested in the gallery’s refurbishment issues.

He towered over her like an avenging angel. ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Before she could answer, he drove her back against the baize-covered boardroom table and was kissing the life out of her.

When at last Bella got her breath back –
some
of her breath back – he was kissing her neck, her hair, her temples, and muttering. She swallowed hard.

‘Um—’

‘You’re crazy,’ he whispered urgently. ‘You know that? Mad as a Cornish cat. This party is crawling with photographers, journalists of all persuasions, not to mention a whole bunch of people who would sell their granny for a name check in the gossip columns. And you waltz in, looking like something out of a 1940s musical, and expect to get
away
with it?’

‘Nobody looks at waiters.’

His laugh was half a groan. ‘They look at perky waitresses dressed like cabin boys.
Sexy
cabin boys.’

‘Oh.’

‘I just bet there’s half a dozen dirty old men out there who already have your picture on their phone.’ He flipped open her mess jacket and did some complicated breathing into her cleavage. ‘God, you’re gorgeous,’ he said, muffled.

Bella’s head went back and her toes started to do that curling-for-the-carpet thing again.

‘Is this wise?’ Her voice came out high and breathless.

‘Nope.’ He was laughing, intent, and there was no way he was letting her go.

She was wracked with pleasure. ‘What if someone comes in?’

‘Your problem,’ he said smugly, not raising his head. ‘I don’t care.’

She gave an involuntary gasp of pleasure. ‘Don’t
do
that.’

He did lift his head then. ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Thought so,’ he said with satisfaction, and went back to driving her quietly out of her mind.

Bella stuffed her knuckles in her mouth and concentrated on not screaming the roof off. Then various irritating fastenings began to give and her concentration became even more focused. They toppled sideways, Richard laughing like a maniac. She felt a shoe fall away, then her trousers and suddenly he wasn’t laughing any more and neither was she, as they pulled at each other’s clothes almost desperately.

A bit – a tiny and diminishing bit – of her brain said:
I don’t do things like this. And nor does he!

But her body wasn’t having any truck with that. There was that moment of total completion as he slid inside her and then they were off on a crazy ride and she stopped thinking at all.

She floated gently back to earth to find he had collapsed on top of her, his mouth against the naked
skin of her armpit. Naked? How did she get naked? She smelled warm skin and freshly laundered cotton and shampoo. Or was it aftershave? And, distantly, the whiff of new paint. She moistened her lips and discovered she was tasting champagne that she had never drunk.

‘Oh, Lord,’ she said, as her brain came tiptoeing timidly back into consciousness.

He stirred. His tumbled hair was soft against her sensitised breast. Bella shivered involuntarily.

‘Whaaa?’

She began to push at him. ‘We need to move. We’ve got clothes to find.’

At once he was alert. He sprang to his feet, only to trip over his own trousers and stagger, hobbled, to the boardroom table. He held on to it like a drunk in a Western saloon.

‘Jesus!’

Bella could not help herself. She started to laugh and couldn’t stop, lying on the carpet convulsed and helpless.

He looked down at her, sprawled and giggling. He ran a hand through his wild hair. A slow smile dawned.

‘You are disgracefully tempting—’

And then the worst imaginable thing happened. A door that neither of them had been aware of opened at the far end of the room.

He dropped like a stone to the carpet and rolled under the table. Bella hauled up her trousers and grabbed her jacket, trying to wriggle deeper into the shadows and join him. She found that she had picked up a carpet burn.

‘
Ouch!
’

She shut up at once. But was it too late? She could not see anyone for the piles of chairs and the big table. But that door was definitely still open. She held her breath, aware that Richard, too, was hardly breathing. His hand felt for her across the carpet and she realised that he was sitting with his knees up, his back against the table leg. He gathered her against him, comfortingly, and they braced themselves for discovery as Bella buttoned her steward’s jacket.

A hectoring voice said, ‘This looks terrible. If Sir Brian asks, you’ll just have to say that the paint is still wet. We’ll have to keep it locked. We can’t have Royalty coming in here.’

‘Too late,’ muttered Richard into Bella’s hair.

She started to shake again, with agonising, silent laughter.

The bossy person went out and closed the door decisively. Silence and shadows reigned again.

‘Oh – my – God,’ said Bella on a long, shaky breath.

Richard was stuffing his beautiful shirt back into his trousers. ‘Too right,’ he said with feeling.

She thumped back against the piled chairs with a great sigh of relief.

‘I thought we were for it.’

‘Yup. Me too.’

But he didn’t sound as worried at the thought as she would have expected. Instead, he sounded positively tranquil. Even pleased with himself.

‘What happened to that terminal good behaviour syndrome?’

He laughed. ‘I must be getting over it at last.’

He stood up, shaking out his jacket, and held his hand down to help her up. She took it and came lightly to her feet.

Trying for normality, she said, ‘That was unexpected.’ Her voice did not sound like her own.

‘Tell me about it.’

Richard’s hair was all over the place. Her fault, Bella realised. She tried to restore order to it, without much success.

He caught her hand and carried it to his lips, kissing the palm. ‘Why didn’t you
tell
me what you were going to do? Do you know what I felt when I saw you?’

‘Yup. I think that was pretty clear.’

‘You were damned lucky I kept my cool.’

She wriggled a little, appreciatively. ‘Not that cool.’

He shook his head, laughing. ‘Call it a slow burn, then.’ He shot his cuffs. ‘Have you any idea how far outside my comfort zone this is?’

Bella was indignant. ‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Mine. Mine.’

‘If you hadn’t jumped on me …’

‘Stop it,’ he said, not laughing now.

She widened her eyes, innocently.

‘And you can stop looking like that, too. I have three hours of speeches, compliments, and landscape art to get through. I need Zen, not—’

‘Not—?’

‘Not an inner eye full of you looking, well, like that.’

Bella raised an eyebrow.

‘OK. OK.’ He re-buttoned the offending mess jacket
and straightened it over her hips. His hands lingered, as if they had a will of their own. But he said, ‘
No!
’ and put her away from him with resolution. ‘I have places to go, people to be bored by. This has gone far enough. I am leaving
now
.’

Just before he pressed the button to slide the door open, he turned and said as if it were desperately important, ‘I need to be with you tonight. Will Lottie be OK with that?’

‘I’ll sort it,’ said Bella, dazed.

‘Of course,’ said Lottie, when she called.

She didn’t ask any more and Bella didn’t volunteer any confidences. But they had known each other a long time.

‘I think I’ll stay over at Katy’s. We’re going to a movie and it will be easier.

So they had the flat and the night to themselves. And they didn’t talk about the diary, or the dangers of being found out, or friends, or family, or anything but the moment and what they wanted next.

It was their last night together for nearly two weeks. There were no more evenings in front of Lottie’s fire, not even curtailed ones. They spoke during snatched moments on the phone, several times a day. Although they went on to radio silence, at Bella’s request, when her mother came up to Town for a day of exhibitions, shopping and pampering.

‘I can’t face standing next to her and talking to you on the phone,’ Bella told Richard frankly. ‘She’d be over
the moon if she knew. I couldn’t bear it. I know that. But
not
telling her feels so underhand, somehow.’

‘I can relate to that. OK, silent running on Thursday. We can have a nice long call after midnight to make up for it.’

They did. But in all that time they only met face to face twice: once in a sandwich shop, with Richard disguised in jeans and a Millwall supporter’s scarf; once at a literacy fund-raiser for which Lottie’s company was doing the PR. Richard was guest of honour, of course, very princely in tuxedo and all the trappings, monogrammed cuff links included. He and Bella had a sedate dance. She did her usual trick of falling over her feet. He managed to stay looking regally courteous and kept her at a decent distance, but a muscle worked in his cheek, and she knew it was no easier for him than for her.

‘This is torture,’ Bella muttered.

‘I know. I’m sorry. You’ve been very patient. And at least we’ve got dinner next week.’

‘A whole evening! Do you think you can stick to it this time?’

‘Definitely. I’ve told everyone on my staff that nobody,
nobody
, interferes with my night off. If they try to put anything in my diary that evening, I’ll send them all on an endurance team-building exercise in Sutherland in December.’

Bella laughed up at him. ‘That should scare them.’

His arm tightened. ‘Too right.’ He looked down at her searchingly. ‘How are you doing, my love?

‘Fine. Great. I’m seeing Neill tomorrow. He’s come
up to London for some teachers’ bash and we’re having a quick meal before he gets the train home.’

‘Sorry I can’t meet him.’

Bella shifted uncomfortably. She was coming to realise that Richard didn’t understand why she didn’t want to tell her family. He was fine with keeping their relationship secret from the media. But it was increasingly obvious that he minded not telling his own family, especially his brother George. And he’d said more than once that he would like to meet various members of her family. He didn’t press it but it was there, undiscussed, like so much of this relationship.

She said now, ‘Maybe some day.’

‘I’ll hold you to that.’

Bella thought he probably would. God, this thing was going so
fast
.

She said defiantly, ‘Anyway, you haven’t got a window to meet anyone new for months. Don’t forget I’ve seen the diary.’

He laughed. ‘Have you studied it so closely?’

‘Ian more or less told me to eat it after I’d read it, so I thought I’d better. You know I’ve only got hard copy? He refused to let me have a memory stick. Said I might lose it.’