Married By Christmas Page 25

  ‘There wasn’t any time to think!’ Anna said. ‘Sometimes you just have to act.’

  Both of them were very aware that that didn’t sound at all like the normal sort of thing Anna would say.

  ‘Fine, but you haven’t answered any of my calls since you got here or tried to call me. And then when I walk in and there’s a man here … in your bedroom, and you’re really drunk, and you don’t normally get really drunk, and then suddenly there’s Charisma, who I haven’t seen in years and … I just couldn’t work out what was happening. I don’t blame you for wanting to punish me, but I overreacted by taking it out on Miles.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to punish you,’ Anna said, her hands hanging limply at her sides, when she knew she should be reaching out to her fiancé, pulling him into an embrace. ‘I just … I needed a bit of space. I know I should have called you as soon as I got here, I meant to. But, I suppose I was more shocked about Charisma than I realised, and then I found her photo on the internet when you said there was nothing, and it felt like if you hadn’t been straight with me about that, what else had you lied about?’

  Tom dropped his gaze to the floor. ‘I didn’t mean to lie to you, I was trying to protect you.’ He finished the sentence uncertainly, unsure that Anna would buy it. ‘I knew how much it would hurt you if you saw photos of Charisma in all her glory. I was worried that you wouldn’t understand, but she is my past. I decided nearly a year ago now that you are my future, the rest of my life. And I’m not the sort of man who goes back on his promises, even if I am the sort of man who has messed it all up really badly.’

  ‘Miles said you were protecting me,’ Anna said. ‘Miles made a lot of sense about a lot of things, actually.’

  ‘Did he?’ Tom rubbed his hands through his hair. ‘I guess I just don’t know what to think about you hanging out with another man, Anna. In your hotel room, behind my back.’

  ‘And I guess I don’t know what to think about you being secretly married to another woman and then even when you do tell me, mainly because I made you tell me, by following you, not telling me everything!’ Anna retorted, finding herself increasingly sober. ‘I guess I don’t really know what I think about that. I guess I’m still angry about it, and worried that it’s changed things between us and maybe that’s why …’

  She had been about to say that maybe that was why she was having confusing reactions to Miles, but she stopped herself just in time.

  ‘Maybe that’s why I didn’t call you, or answer your calls.’

  ‘Nothing has changed between us,’ Tom insisted, taking a step towards her. ‘Please, Anna, it hasn’t. I know I handled it all wrong. I know that. But that doesn’t mean everything can’t go ahead as you planned, does it? You’ve done it, you’ve found Charisma, you’ve made the wedding possible, and now, because of you, everything can be exactly like it was before. We can get married on Christmas Eve, Anna!’

  Anna’s gaze slipped to the window where earlier Miles had drawn back the blinds to make the most of their panoramic view. It felt like the city was crowding round on the other side of the glass, peering in, to see what happens next.

  Anna wondered why it was that she wasn’t rushing into Tom’s arms and kissing him madly, the way a girl should be doing when a boy has done such a good job of making a romantic declaration. And yet she was still there, her arms still hanging at her sides, no longer aware of her torn dress, nowhere near ready to embrace him. Tom took another step closer, and Anna resisted the urge to back away.

  ‘Anna? Come on, please,’ Tom pleaded, sweetly, with those Labrador eyes that Anna had never been able to resist before. ‘Look, I know I landed a massive bombshell on you out of nowhere. And I know I was less than supportive about your idea to come out here and look for Charisma. I know that I was wrong about that. But, darling, I’ve been so cut up about it. Liv will tell you, we’ve been together the whole time since you left. She’s been brilliant helping me make sense of it all. If she hadn’t been by my side through all of this, I don’t know what I would have done. It wasn’t that Charisma was a secret, it was just that she was from a life, another universe, where I don’t exist any more. The person I was then with her, he doesn’t exist any more. That made sense in my head, although admittedly the relevant authorities probably wouldn’t take the parallel universe excuse as a valid reason for committing bigamy.’

  Tom stopped himself talking, taking the final few steps between him and Anna.

  ‘Can we put this all behind us now?’ he asked her, as if he were offering her a once in a lifetime deal. ‘Pick up our lives where they left off?’

  ‘Yes.’ Anna nodded, mustering a weary smile, because, really, there was no other answer but that one. It was the answer she had given him almost a year ago when he’d proposed, and no matter how confused and churned up her feelings were right now, it was a commitment she was determined to abide by, and knowing that suddenly made everything else seem wonderfully simple.

  ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘After all we’re getting married in a few days.’

  Smiling, his expression flooding with relief, Tom closed the last few inches between them, and took her in his arms, holding her body close against his. Anna looked up into his lovely eyes, his kind familiar face that had become so important to her over the last year and a half, and waited to feel even a tenth of the electricity that had surged through her when Miles’s lips had brushed against hers for that fraction of an unexpected moment.

  The fact that it didn’t come didn’t mean anything especially, she decided with detachment, as Tom pressed his lips against hers, gently opening her mouth with his tongue, in what had become his familiar kissing routine. It was only that she had gotten to know Tom well, that their kind of intimacy was solid and real, absent of the sort of, probably one-sided, sexual tension that being holed up in a hotel room in New York at Christmas might artificially create between two people. Concentrating very hard, Anna made herself stop thinking about anything except Tom, aware of exactly how important this moment was.

  This was the moment the lovers reunited after hitting some serious bumps in the road, this was the moment when Charisma, and Miles, and last-minute flights that separated them by thousands of miles, were long forgotten, the moment that everything fell into place and they became one again.

  Relaxing her body, Anna finally wound her arms around Tom’s neck and kissed him back. She let her chin tilt back as his mouth travelled to her jaw and her neck. Closing her eyes, she sighed as the stubble of Miles’s dark beard tickled her neck, and his hand, his beautiful, clever guitar-playing hand, caressed and cupped her lace-covered breast, running his thumb over her nipple until she moaned. And then Anna remembered this wasn’t Miles she was kissing, it wasn’t Miles touching her that way.

  Panicking, she pushed Tom away as if it was Miles himself she was rejecting.

  ‘What?’ Tom asked her, with some dismay, flustered and clearly in a state of arousal. Suddenly self-conscious, feeling like she was betraying someone, but not exactly sure who, Anna covered herself, crossing her arms over her chest, to keep her dress in place, half turning away from Tom to hide her confusion.

  ‘I thought we were OK now?’ Tom said. ‘Are we not OK now?’

  ‘We are,’ Anna said, ‘Of course we are, it’s just …’

  This couldn’t be happening, she couldn’t come all this way to save her wedding to Tom to suddenly transfer her affections to the first man she bumped into, that was just not the sort of thing that sensible, careful-never-to-put-a-foot wrong Anna Carter would do. It was the sort of thing her mother would do though, Anna realised. Rip everything that was supposed to be solid and good apart on a whim or a fad, because she never did grasp the importance of seeing things through, least of all parenting her only child. Anna simply would not allow herself to be that person. Whatever stupid feelings might suddenly be manifesting themselves now, they had to be repressed and stamped out at once, because Anna would not let this happen to her now, at this point in
her life when almost everything was just as she had planned it to be, her careful, vital life plan, that was all that stood between her and the world of chaos that she had escaped.

  It was Tom she loved, Tom she wanted, Tom she would marry. She knew that when she had got on the plane to New York, and she was certain that as soon as she was out of this heady city, as potent as a field full of poppies, then everything would fall back into place. Stealing herself, she went back to her fiancé and put her arms around him.

  ‘It’s just … they’re all downstairs, and I bet they’re waiting for us. It feels weird that we are up here, as if they would know if we were … you know.’

  ‘You want to wait for a better moment.’ Tom nodded understandingly. ‘Yes, you’re right. It would be kind of wrong to abandon Liv with two virtual strangers, after everything she’s done. And I’m pretty sure if I leave her around that Miles for too long he’ll try to seduce her too.’

  ‘Oh Miles is all wrong for Liv,’ Anna said with determined casualness, as she let go of Tom and walked towards the bedroom. ‘The last thing she needs is to fall for a man who’s about to go off around the world and make a career of having women throw themselves at him.’

  ‘Really?’ Tom said with a touch of jealousy.

  ‘Yes, that was why Miles was here, for his chance at a big break, and he got it too. A whole new life is about to start for him.’ Anna paused, realising that there were not very many more hours left until the last minute that would tick away to the moment where she would never see Miles again. And just then, standing in her ripped dress in a suite in the Algonquin, it made her feel excruciatingly sad. ‘Anyway, let me get changed and let’s go down and join them. After all Charisma is still your wife.’

  ‘Anna, I thought …’

  ‘We are fine,’ Anna told him. ‘Honestly, everything is fine. I’m joking!’

  Anna was very clear about what she had to do next.

  ‘We get the papers back,’ she said to Tom. ‘We watch as Charisma signs them and we get the first flight back home. The sooner we are back where we belong in the real world the better.’

  As Tom waited in the other room for her to find another dress, Anna slipped off her ruined frock and hugged it against her chest for a moment as she took several deep breaths. A few more hours and she would be safe again, her carefully ordered life would be back on track and Miles would be miles and miles away, out of her life for ever. All she had to do was to get through the next twenty-four hours and it would be as if Charisma or Miles had never happened. She would leave them both – and any residual feeling she had for Miles – behind as she and Tom headed home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright!’

  Distracted by her attempt to glue on her first ever set of lash extensions, Anna paused and looked over her shoulder to where Charisma Jones was lying on her bed, having consumed most of a bottle of pink cava, in readiness for Anna’s belated hen night. It still came as a shock to Anna that Charisma had not disappeared from her life as neatly as she’d predicted, but then she did only have herself to blame for Charisma’s presence.

  ‘Why are you here again?’ Anna asked her, shaking her head. It had been three days since they had arrived back from New York en masse, three days since Anna had said goodbye to Miles and somehow acquired herself a former wife as a wannabe bridesmaid.

  ‘Because you invited me,’ Charisma said, sprawling herself all over Anna’s lovely cream quilt like she was on a Playboy shoot. ‘Because once you had my signature on your papers you flung your arms around my neck, said, thank you so much, Charisma, you’ve been amazing, I know, why don’t you come to the wedding?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t actually mean it,’ Anna said. ‘I was merely being polite. I thought you were far too busy being a sexually confused nun to pay a fortune for the last flight out of New York before Christmas and come and move in with me.’

  ‘Pah, that pile of crap was never going to make me famous,’ Charisma said cheerfully, opening Anna’s bedside drawer and peering inside. ‘Funny, I felt sure this would be where you kept your vibrator. Anyway, when you offered, I decided it must be fate. London, this is where it’s at – the West End, Lloyd Webber, Les Miserables bastards! I want me some cool Britannia.’ Charisma pushed herself up on her elbows, tipping her head on one side to regard Anna’s futile attempts to wear fake lashes, one of them now glued rather securely to her cheek. ‘You know what, it’s a shame I signed those papers. I’d have found it much easier to get work if I was married to a Brit. Maybe it’s not too late to recind …’

  Anna picked up her tinsel halo headband provided courtesy of Liv and threw it vaguely in the direction of Charisma, who, giggling, hung over the far side of the bed to scoop it up off the floor, revealing her bare behind.

  ‘Can I just say,’ Anna said, ‘that before we go out that door you are putting on panties. This is England, we do things properly here. In underwear, mostly.’

  ‘All right, guv’nor, keep your drawers on,’ Charisma said in the terrible cockney accent that she had insisted on using with almost everyone she had encountered since she had moved herself into Anna and Liv’s flat.

  ‘Apples and pears. Chim-chimmeny, what a palaver!’ Anna couldn’t help laughing. If there was one thing she could say about her unexpected house guest it was that she was very entertaining. And although it was true that Anna had impulsively invited Charisma to the wedding, there were mitigating circumstances.

  The morning after Tom and Liv arrived in New York, Anna had woken up early in bed with two other girls – Liv and Charisma. Liv had taken the middle spot in the king-size bed, to prevent any more brawling, and Anna could tell by looking at her best friend that she was only pretending to be asleep, which meant she didn’t want to talk. They still hadn’t talked properly since Liv had arrived, and Anna knew she was cross with her, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. So, deciding that she had enough on her plate to deal with and desperate for a breath of fresh air and some strong coffee, Anna had pulled on a pair of cream leggings, a deep-green sweater dress, grabbed her coat and, after stopping to stick a note on the suite door explaining where she was, crept out of the room and made her way down to the lobby and out into the bright, freezing morning.

  The snow had stopped falling sometime in the night, which had to be good news when it came to booking a flight home, and the sky was a vivid blue, domed above the looming tops of the skyscrapers, like a bell ready to ring out for Christmas. Shuddering against the cold and wrapping her scarf around her neck, Anna headed for a coffee shop across the street that she and Miles had passed a few times since they had arrived. It didn’t take long for her to notice as she stood in the queue that Miles was already present, sitting in the furthest corner of a booth, picking a paper napkin to pieces. Just the sight of the back of his head was enough to send her heart thundering away and for a moment Anna considered pretending that she hadn’t seen him, turning around and going in the opposite direction, but then she told herself it was foolish. Her crush on Miles had to be faced and sent packing. There was no real reason to hide from him, no real reason at all. And after all, this was her chance to say goodbye.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, a little tentatively as she approached him. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  He looked so sad, even when he smiled and nodded, that Anna thought at once that something must have happened.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked him, concerned. ‘The band haven’t changed their mind about you, have they?’

  ‘No, no not at all, they’re very keen. I’m just …’ He ripped open a tube of sugar and poured it into his coffee, then discarded the wrapper with at least four more that he’d already opened. ‘Oh, you know how it is when you finally think that you’ve got everything you ever wanted and then you find out there’s something else you want even more?’

  He looked up at her on the last word, and the look in his eyes took Anna’s breath away.

  �
��You mean that your new career as a world famous rock star isn’t enough?’ she asked him in a very small voice, terrified but desperate to know what he was going to say.

  ‘I don’t think anything will ever be enough if I don’t have you,’ Miles said.

  Anna gasped in a breath. Did he really just say that? Did he mean it, or was it just another symptom of their little snow globe Christmas fantasy where nothing was quite real and everything was edged in glitter?

  ‘Pardon?’ Anna managed to say, just about.

  Miles smiled wanly. ‘Oh ignore me. It’s because I’m artistic – we artistic types are never happy. Still, I will be able to write some great songs about how I came to New York for a career and met an incredible girl who was about to get married to someone else. I can see a life of doom-laden miserable music ahead of me, just what NYRD fans love.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Anna said carefully, ‘one of the things I always liked about you was your cheerfulness, even when you’d almost killed me with a kiwi you were remarkably chipper.’

  The two of them smiled at each other, challenging the other one to hold their gaze.

  ‘There are a lot of people in our hotel suite, aren’t there?’ Miles said. ‘It feels sort of … wrong. I suppose I got used to our own little snow globe, and then along comes Tom and Charisma – and your mad mate – and they shake it all up.’

  ‘You think of us in a snow globe too?’ Anna asked, sensing something dangerous building in the air between them, like the promise of a storm just before the thunder rumbles.

  ‘Anna, I’ve got to say it,’ Miles said.

  ‘Don’t, please.’ Anna was suddenly scared. ‘I don’t want you to say anything.’

  ‘But I have to,’ Miles said. ‘I know it won’t end well, not for me, anyway, but I can’t let you go without saying what we both know is true …’

  ‘You could you know, it would be absolutely fine.’ Anna looked away from him, towards the door, expecting Tom to come through it any moment, having found her note and decided to go and join his fiancée for a coffee, not expecting for one moment that she would be engaged in a secret tryst.