Married By Christmas Read online

  ‘What about me?’ Liv said, caught off guard by the question.

  ‘You never talk about yourself much,’ Tom said. ‘Not any more. I was thinking on the plane, when we first met at the club getting you to talk to me was like getting blood out of a stone.’

  ‘Was it?’ Liv asked him, uncertainly. She hadn’t been aware of him trying to squeeze words out of her particularly, mainly because she’d been hiding around corners willing her skin not to come out in scarlet blotches every time she walked past him, offering a casual ‘hey’.

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘You’d scurry off after a class, and be home before I could catch you, for ages.’

  ‘Were you trying to catch me?’ Liv asked, confused.

  ‘Yes!’ Tom laughed, rolling his eyes, momentarily distracted from his misery. ‘Oh, Liv, you are funny!’

  ‘Am I? Am I funny?’ Liv asked, without very much mirth, before adding the inevitable question. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, “why”?’ Tom asked her, puzzled. ‘Do you really not know?’

  ‘I really don’t,’ Liv said. ‘I mean because I’m such a great kick-boxer? Or because I know all the best bars in London or … why?’

  ‘Because I fancied you, you muppet,’ Tom said shaking his head. ‘I don’t know how you don’t see all the attention you get from men, I really don’t.’

  ‘You fancied me?’ Liv repeated the question, rather testily. ‘Me? Wait – what attention?’

  ‘Yes, I fancied you!’ Tom said. ‘How many girls does a bloke meet who fight like a motherfucker, drink like a boy and look like Audrey Hepburn? Of course I fancied you! Almost every red-blooded male who meets you does.’

  ‘You never said!’ Liv spluttered, weighing up her sense of loyalty over even discussing the matter of attraction between her and best friend’s intended. ‘Why did you never say?’

  Tom stared at her then, his face suddenly serious. ‘Because we hung out, for ages,’ he said. ‘We did stuff, went places, went to the cinema even, and you never, ever, not once gave me any sign that you fancied me back. I can take a hint, you know … eventually. Anyway, never mind, it all worked out for the best in the end.’

  ‘I never gave you a sign that I fancied you back,’ Liv repeated in disbelief. ‘What sort of a sign were you looking for? My tongue down your throat, whipping my bra off in the middle of the latest Mission Impossible? What?’

  ‘Either of those would have worked,’ Tom said slowly, puzzled by her angry response. ‘But you were just … You’ve always just treated me like a mate, so I thought that’s what you wanted us to be … Wait, are you telling me you did fancy me?’

  ‘No!’ Liv said quickly, her heart and shoulders sinking in unison. ‘OK, yes, yes, Tom. Yes, I did fancy you, and all those drinks and shopping and cinema trips we went out on, I was waiting for you to make the first move, you know like boys are supposed to? But you never did, so I had a birthday party, just so I could invite you, so I could try and make something happen. Only you met Anna and … fell in love with her and you would have met her anyway, I suppose, even if we had … done something. And presumably you would have fallen in love with her anyway, wouldn’t you? So …’

  Liv wasn’t really sure where to go with that particular train of thought. It seemed to her that if you were about to marry someone then they had to be the person you were destined to be with from the beginning. Even if she and Tom had started seeing each other, as soon as he met Anna it probably would have been game over. He’d have fallen for her – how could he not? And things would still be the same as they are now, only she might have got to kiss him a lot first. Though, actually, Anna would never have gone out with someone her best friend had previously gone out with, so there would have been no Tom and Anna, no wedding, no emergency visit to New York. Tom would probably have drifted out of both of their lives by now and … Liv forced herself to stop thinking about what might have been. The idea that fate could be so fickle scared her. She’d always comforted herself with the idea that Anna and Tom were meant to be together; the thought that their relationship was somehow accidental was no comfort whatsoever.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Tom turned his back on New York City, leaning hard against the window, clearly not getting quite the same melodrama from the situation as Liv was. ‘That’s so weird, because that was my plan too. My plan was to come to the party and get up the courage to kiss you and see if you hit me or not. And you know what, I think if you’d opened the door instead of Anna, I probably would have kissed you right then and there, because I was too nervous to wait. Only you didn’t, Anna did.’ Tom shook his head. ‘Funny how things work out, isn’t it? If things had been different, I’d have been dating you instead of Anna.’

  ‘Yes, it’s funny,’ Liv said quietly, returning her gaze to the view.

  ‘I wonder what we’d have been like as a couple,’ Tom said, chuckling. ‘I mean it would have been odd, wouldn’t it? I wonder how long we would have lasted, what we would have been like together, I mean. I can’t imagine it now, can you? Funny!’

  ‘Hi-fucking-larious,’ Liv said, turning on her heel and heading suddenly for the lift.

  ‘What? Wait, Liv, hold up!’ Tom caught up with her in two easy strides as she was forced to come to a standstill outside the bank of lifts.

  ‘Stupid tall buildings,’ Liv muttered under her breath. ‘Who needs more than four floors for anything, anyway, bloody stupid city, and stupid lifts.’

  ‘Liv!’ Tom said her name. ‘What have I said? Come on, this isn’t like you. You don’t do that girly thing of getting all cross with a man, and not telling him why. That’s one of the things I love about you.’

  Liv’s head snapped round to look at him, her eyes narrowing dangerously at his casual usage of the word that had been plaguing her more or less since she set eyes on him all those months ago. Fortunately, she heard a gratifying ping behind her as the lift door slid open, hissing her response.

  ‘If you don’t know then I’m not telling you,’ she said stepping inside, and tapping the doors closed button furiously. ‘Get the next lift. I’m not talking to you.’

  ‘But what do you mean? Why?’ Tom called through the ever narrowing gap in the door. ‘What about the skating, do you still want to …?’

  The door slid shut, and Liv found herself mercifully alone for a few minutes at least. The idea, the very idea that she’d come so close to being with the man she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about ever since meeting him made her want to beat her fists against the wall, punch Tom on the nose and go and find Anna and rip all her hair out for accidentally getting in the way of Tom’s fleeting interest in her. Except of course really the only person she could be angry at was herself. After all she’d had countless opportunities to give him that one particular look or touch that would have absolutely – with no room for doubt – shown him how she felt about him. Even if she’d had no idea how to do that. She’d also been the one who’d invited him into the home she shared with her taller, curvier, blonder flatmate, the one who always outshone her, even when she didn’t mean to. And most of all it had been stupid, moronic, idiotic her who’d persisted in feeling the same way about Tom even though she now had concrete proof that he was as dumb as a bag of rocks.

  When the lift finally reached the ground floor, the doors opened to reveal Tom standing there. His lift had somehow beaten hers.

  ‘I caught the express,’ he said, by way of an explanation.

  ‘Oh,’ Liv said, shouldering her way past him and marching towards the lobby exit.

  ‘Liv, I’ve worked it out, why you are pissed off,’ Tom said.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes, of course you are, you have every right to be. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Liv said, turning round very slowly to look at him. Sorry for not kissing you first, sorry for not realising it’s you and always has been, were the words running through her jet-lagged head. She lifted her teary eyes to h
is, dimly hopeful of a Hollywood ending right then and there. (Even if there was still Anna to square away.)

  ‘To put you in such an awkward position, talking about fancying you when I’m about to marry Anna. I know that must seem disloyal to you, and you’re right. I’m completely out of order. It’s Anna I’ve got to think about now, Anna above everything else and it was crass of me to even bring it up.’

  ‘Oh, right, well, yes it was,’ Liv said, wondering exactly how many times Tom could unwittingly crush her to smithereens without her actually turning to dust. ‘Make sure you don’t do it again.’

  ‘I will … I won’t, I mean,’ Tom said. ‘Are we friends again? Because I don’t think I could take falling out with you now, you are just about all there is holding me together. What I was really trying to say, before, up there, is that things might not have worked out romantically for us, but you mean a lot to me.’

  ‘Do I?’ Liv said, any remaining ice chips in her heart melting in a moment.

  ‘Course you do,’ Tom said, dropping his arm around her shoulders and kissing her on the temple. ‘There’s no one else in the world I can talk to the way I talk to you. So, come on, there’s nothing we can do until Anna gets in touch. How about ice skating, then lunch, then maybe several gins in the bar at Anna’s hotel until she finally shows up and we can get things back to normal?’

  Trouble was, Liv thought, as she rested her head against Tom’s shoulder for a moment, getting things back to normal was the last thing she wanted.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘This is not at all how I imagined it,’ Anna said as she followed Miles into the Bowery Ballroom, where he was about to audition for the New York Rock Department. It was an impressively shabby old variety theatre on Delancey Street, which had clearly been a club for some years. The gold paint was cracking and peeling off the plaster and a wooden floor had been scuffed and scratched by decades of dancing feet. Both gave the venue an atmosphere of authenticity added to by the faint but lingering scent of stale beer.

  The Bowery was decorated for Christmas with equally old, vintage-looking decorations: 70s-style big-eyed, plastic light-up reindeer; strings of yellowish fairy lights with huge sections hanging in limp darkness. There were plastic stars – mostly bald of the silver glitter that had once gilded them – hung from the vaulted ceiling, held in place with determined drawing pins, which marked the already pitted surface of the ceiling. With the snow driving down past the windows in the lobby, it felt a little to Anna as if she had stumbled back in time or perhaps through some magic wardrobe where a permanent Christmas party rumbled on, despite whatever the world was doing outside.

  ‘How did you imagine it?’ Miles said tightly, as he approached a bored-looking girl, with a record label ID round her neck, sitting behind a trestle table in front of the double doors in the auditorium. The sound of very loud music vibrated the glass in the doors, and made the swirls of ancient carpet beneath Anna’s feet hum and vibrate.

  ‘I pictured a recording studio, I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘And you in headphones behind a glass wall and a table with a lot of buttons and slidey up and down things. This seems much more … intense.’

  ‘The NYRDs want someone who’s good live, who can blend in with the band, and still bring something new. It’s all about the vibe,’ Miles said, his tone short and tense, his nerves clearly visible in his clenched jaw and the throbbing vein in his temple. It was the only time in their – admittedly very short – acquaintance that Anna had ever seen him any less than utterly relaxed and at ease in his body, and somehow this unexpected vulnerability made her like him all the more.

  Nevertheless, despite his nerves, he managed a near perfect smile as he greeted the girl, whose ID tag revealed she was called Cheri Mortimer.

  ‘Hi, I’m Miles,’ he said, extending a hand to her.

  ‘I know who you are.’ Cheri smiled at him, visibly perked up by the sight of him. ‘I love your stuff. It was me who suggested you when they were brainstorming for replacements. I showed the bosses your YouTube stuff too.’

  ‘Really,’ Miles said, a little awkwardly, two bright spots of colour appearing on his cheekbones, as he was confronted with a bona fide fan. ‘Thank you … I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say anything,’ Cheri told him cheerfully. ‘I might have got your name in the conversation, but my opinion doesn’t count for much round here, not yet anyway. Your music is what got you here, and you’re the last of the five they are seeing, so go for it. The guys need someone to really rock it out now.’

  ‘They’re only seeing five people?’ Miles asked her, as she handed him a pass with his name and photo on it.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Cheri said. ‘Yeah, it’s going to be one of you guys, just depends which one. The label wants looks and charisma, the band wants talent. I guess whoever has both is the winner. It’s that way through to the auditorium. The last guy is just finishing up, so you can sit in the back and watch him if you like.’ Cheri smiled at Anna, who’d been hanging back, doing her best to be discreet. ‘I shouldn’t really let your girlfriend go in with you, but as long as she sits at the back it should be OK.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Anna smiled at Cheri as she followed Miles into the theatre, realising as the doors opened to blast them with unadulterated hard rock at top volume that neither one of them had done or said anything to contradict the girl on her status as Miles’s love interest.

  Anna perched on the very end of the back row, Miles standing by her side as they watched the band, and the other potential new singer, perform one of their songs together. It was very loud, a world away from the song he’d sung for her on the open mic night. Full of screaming guitars and thundering drums that, if Anna was honest, mainly hurt her ears and made her dream of some benign elevator music. When the other auditionee sang it made her wonder if all the dogs in the vicinity were howling and all the cats running in the opposite direction. Still, maybe that was how it was supposed to be, all loud and shouty, and, as a girl who mainly listened to the sort of boy bands whose edgiest move was getting up from a stool and walking forwards in response to a key change, she acknowledged that she wasn’t best placed to sit in judgement.

  ‘Is he any good?’ she repeated twice before realising she’d have to stand up and whisper the comment in Miles’s ear. She rested her hand on his shoulder as she put her lips very close to his ear. Caught off guard he turned to face her, and suddenly their lips were very close together indeed, their noses actually touching. In all the noise and din, Anna caught her breath as she looked into his ice-blue eyes, her hand still on his shoulder. And then before Anna could move, or even react, Miles leaned forwards and kissed her, very gently, very briefly on the mouth.

  ‘For luck,’ he said, as the track came to an end, and suddenly the room was almost silent again, silent enough for Anna to be able to hear her blood thundering in her ears. ‘And no, he was terrible. I’m going to kick his arse from here to the moon and back, just for you, Annie Carter.’ With one last smile at her, Miles grabbed his guitar by the neck and strode towards the stage.

  ‘Thanks, man.’ The bassist shook the other guy’s hand. ‘We’ll call you later, yeah?’

  Anna watched as Miles leaped onto the stage with athletic ease, shook hands and exchanged man hugs with the other musicians, talking and laughing about something she couldn’t make out, but the truth was even if she hadn’t been right at the back of the auditorium she still wouldn’t have been paying any attention to what was going on, because at that moment, and for quite a few moments afterwards, all she could think about was that Miles had just kissed her, albeit briefly, for a matter of seconds and with no more sexual intent than a peck on the cheek. Which begged the question, why was her heart threatening to pound its way out of her chest and why had her knees turned to jelly?

  Miles was now performing serious rock music, wielding his electric guitar with more than a little theatrical aplomb, and a fair amount of phallic implication. It was quite a differen
t spectacle from the one he’d given in the little bar, when he’d sung just for Anna and, more than that, it was quite a thing to behold. Anna sat down with a little wobbly-kneed bump, after the first NYRD track that Miles had had to learn kicked in, and found herself unexpectedly swept up by the driving guitars and, more pertinently, by Miles. She found it was impossible to take her eyes off him as he strode across the stage, interacting with the other musicians like he’d known them all his life. It was if he owned that few square feet of rickety, dusty wood, which became the very centre of the known universe as long as he was standing on it. Whereas the last candidate had all but screamed the lyrics – which seemed to have something to do with whisky, fast women and Armageddon – into the microphone, Miles’s rendition was altogether more tuneful – he actually sang the words and, as a result, Anna realised she could almost detect a melody that was verging on catchy. Entranced, she watched as his fingers flew over his guitar like … well, like a well-practised lover who knew exactly how to make his instrument cry out. Anna smiled as he smiled, filled with the sheer joy of what he was doing, grinning at the other musicians on stage as they listened to each other play, catching each other’s enthusiasm. For a total of five numbers, Anna sat on the edge of her faded red velvet seat, entranced, as Miles gave everything he had. She delighted in every arrogant toss of his head, each provocative thrust of his hips, and particularly the way he slid on his knees from the back of the stage to the front during one particularly challenging solo. And as she watched him perform, Anna came to a conclusion which somehow, deep down, did not surprise her: it was very easy to be sexually attracted to a man with an electric guitar.

  And the truth was that, after forty-eight hours in his company, she was undeniably, and very strongly, sexually attracted to Miles. The man she’d assumed to be an idiot with a propensity for unwittingly selecting near fatal beverages, the man she’d dreaded sitting next to on a plane and fully hoped never to see again had somehow become irresistible. Which, Anna realised with a heavy, heavy heart, was very bad news for someone with a life plan.