The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance 2016

‘It’s exactly the point—and if you would stop looking at the big picture with irrational feminine logic you would agree with me.’

‘Sometimes,’ Alexa gritted, ‘I really want to hit you.’

‘Who knows...?’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Maybe you will. Although if you do, it won’t be in anger...’

‘What are you talking about?’

Colour crawled into her cheeks as he raised his eyebrows and shot her a slow, deliberate smile. Her treacherous body tingled. Try as she might, she couldn’t bank down the sudden tightening of her nipples, achingly sensitive as they grazed against her lacy bra. And she was aghast to feel spreading dampness between her legs.

‘Never tried a bit of bondage?’ Theo asked, enjoying the hectic flush in her cheeks. ‘I admit I do prefer my women to fully participate in the action—although who knows...? I’m a man who has always been open to new experiences...’

‘I’ve already told you...’ Alexa could barely get the words out because her mouth was so dry. ‘We won’t be... That won’t be part of the deal...’

Did she have any idea how much he disliked being told that there was something he couldn’t do? Theo thought that if she did she might refrain from that approach.

‘Anyway, we’re straying off the topic.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t like feeling that I have no input.’

‘And you’re implying that that’s the way I treat women generally? You’re telling me that you think I’m a bully who takes advantage of women...?’

Alexa cringed because, put like that, it seemed a crazy accusation. If he was a mean bully who took advantage of women why would they care if they were dumped? That blonde who had sidled up to him still had the hots for him. That had been very obvious. And she was the sort of woman who could have any man she wanted. If money had been the only thing keeping her in a relationship with Theo, there was no way she would have looked at him the way a starving man eyed up his next meal.

‘I’m just saying—’

‘I have never bullied a woman in my life before,’ Theo interrupted coldly. ‘I have extremely healthy relationships with the opposite sex. I am honest to a fault. I have never pretended that commitment and marriage is a possible destination. I have always told them upfront that I’m in it for fun and that fun doesn’t last—that beyond that I have nothing to give. But while they’re with me they couldn’t be treated better. Andrea, as a case in point, was showered with presents and taken to the sort of glittering social dos that have gone a long way to kick-starting her career in film.’

Alexa didn’t say anything, because he seemed to expect congratulations for being the sort of guy most women who wanted something other than a ten-second fling would run a mile from. And she was sure that a lot of those women who had been given his rousing speech on not getting thoughts of permanence wouldn’t have been quite as cheerful when they were dispatched as he liked to think.

‘What do you mean that you have nothing to give beyond fun? Why?’

Theo flushed darkly and immediately decided that he had imparted enough information on the subject of his private life. Inside, where the soul stored love, his soul was empty. No reserves left. That place, instead, stored the pain of his father’s reaction to loss and the hurt of his own loss...all the result of that big thing called love.

‘I’m not laying down laws,’ he said snappily, bringing the conversation back to the matter in hand. ‘Feel free to tell me if you think it’s feasible for me to set up camp here for the duration of our short marriage... Even when you have no strenuous objections to moving to London aside from the fact that it was a decision you feel you didn’t reach of your own free will.’

‘I’ve never had anyone make decisions on my behalf.’ She stuck stubbornly to her guns, but she knew that her moral high ground was being eroded from all directions.

‘Then maybe you should sit back and enjoy the novelty.’

Theo knew that that remark was tantamount to waving a red rag at a bull with an axe to grind, but he couldn’t help himself. Something about the way she reddened and pursed her lips and glared made for addictive watching.

Alexa refused to rise to the bait. They exchanged a brief look, during which a lot seemed to be said without any words passing between them. She communicated with a slight tilt of her chin that she knew exactly what game he was playing—knew that he was trying to rile her because it amused him—and he, in turn, acknowledged the truth in that.

The moment unnerved her.

‘I don’t like being told what I can wear and what I can’t,’ she confessed shortly.

‘So I’m taking it that part one of your complaint has been dealt with? You’re in agreement with me that London would be the best base for us?’ He sighed. ‘Decisions have to be made,’ he said heavily, ‘whether you like it or not. Your parents are more than welcome to come and stay with us whenever they want and let’s cut to the chase: we’ll only be together for just as long as it takes for the ink to dry on our marriage certificate...’

‘It’s awful. I never thought that I’d end up getting married for all the wrong reasons...’

It was a sobering thought. An arranged marriage—a marriage of convenience—was a marriage without love, and she had always imagined love and marriage as two words inextricably bound together. Yet to some extent her parents’ marriage had started on lines very similar to those she was now having to endure.

This tangent threatened to lead them down all sorts of unfamiliar paths, and meandering chat about emotional issues just wasn’t his forte, but when Theo looked at the heartfelt expression on her face he found it hard to feel exasperation.

‘Love disappears,’ he said gruffly. ‘And even when it doesn’t it burns so strong that it consumes everything around it and ends up self-imploding.’

They were leaning into one another, unconsciously promoting a space around themselves that excluded everyone else in the restaurant, and for that he was glad—because a bride-to-be with a downcast, near to tears expression could in no way be interpreted as a bride-to-be contemplating the happiest day of her life.

As it looked from the outside, they were two people huddled and whispering sweet nothings to one another.

He entwined his fingers with hers and absently stroked her thumb with his to promote the illusion.

‘I prefer not to think that way. I prefer to think that you can really find your soulmate and, yes, live happily ever after without everything “self-imploding”, as you say. Or else disappearing like water down a drain. That’s not how love works. I might be stupid, but I’d like to think that the man for me, the man who can make me happy, is out there...and I’ll find him. We’ll find one another.’

‘And who’s to say that won’t happen...?’

‘What do you mean?’ For a few seconds Alexa was genuinely disconcerted. Was he talking about them? Insinuating that their marriage of convenience could end up becoming the real thing?

‘I mean you will move on from me and find this man of your dreams—maybe a little later than you originally planned, and not quite in the order you might have anticipated, but who knows...?’

‘What’s made you so cynical?’ she asked, flabbergasted at the casual way he was happy to dismiss their marriage and divorce as just something a little inconvenient—something that could be swept aside in the future as though it had never happened.

Whether they were married for twelve months or twelve minutes, and whether she liked him or not, he would leave an impression. She would not be the same person she had been before.

‘Let’s leave that thorny subject for another day,’ Theo told her wryly. ‘I’ll let you know when we’ll be leaving for the States...’

‘I didn’t say that I was coming with you.’

‘Are you going to argue with each and every small thing until we finally part company and go our separate ways? Because if that’s your intention it’s going to be a very long twelve months.’

‘I’m not being argumentative.’ She glared at him mutinously and in return he raised his eyebrows in cynical disagreement. ‘But if I’m obliged to fall in line and never complain then I think it’s only fair that you fall in line a bit as well.’

‘Are we about to have another bracing conversation about the “separate bedrooms post-marriage” clause?’

‘I’d like you to sample how I live,’ Alexa continued doggedly. ‘You want me to go to all sorts of stupid fancy social dos—’

‘Don’t write them all off. You might find that you actually enjoy some...’

Alexa chose to ignore that interruption. ‘The least you could do is try and understand what I’ll be sacrificing.’

Theo raised his eyebrows and began standing up. He was at a loss to understand what she was talking about. Of course the ‘pause’ button would have to be pressed on her fairy-tale love and perfect soulmate, but she was young. Plenty of time for her to find that once their committed spell together was at an end.

Frankly, he could tell her that airy-fairy dreams were a certain recipe for disappointment—but what would be the point of that? She would find out soon enough. She was an enduring romantic, while he...he had about as much faith or interest in romance as a turkey had in signing up for centrepiece duties next to the carving knife on Christmas Day.

She had asked him why he was cynical. He could have told her that he’d had a close-up view of just the sort of pain love could bring—the sort of pain that no one in their right mind would want inflicted on them.

It tended to turn a guy off marriage. Although, in fairness, he knew the day would come when marriage would make sense, and when that day came he anticipated something very much like what he now had—but without the complication of a partner in search of the impossible. Emotions would not take over, leaving him vulnerable to going through what his father had gone through.

Of course he was a very different man from his father. Stefano had met his wife when they had both been young. They had fallen in love when they had both been green around the ears. Theo was anything but green around the ears. The opposite. And he prided himself on having the sort of formidable control that would never see him prey to anything he didn’t want to feel.

An arranged marriage with the right woman—a woman who wasn’t looking for anything that wasn’t on the table—would be the kind of marriage he would eventually subscribe to. It made sense.

‘Do tell me what that would be. What great “sacrifices” will you be making? Tell me. I’m all ears...’

They were outside now, walking in the balmy sun. He had a case load of documents to read before his trip to New York, but he didn’t think that a few minutes prolonging their conversation would hurt.

‘I can show you.’

She hailed a cab and leant forward to give the taxi driver an address. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that time was money, but he desisted. Why provide her with another excuse to stage an argument? He had never met a woman as stubborn and as mulish as she was, and those were traits he had no time for. His life was stressful enough, without having a woman digging her heels in and finding objections to every single thing he said or suggested.

‘We’re here.’

‘Here? Where?’ The designer shops and smart cafés had been left behind, to be replaced with dingy shop fronts and fast food outlets. It was the sort of place Theo had only ever passed with the windows of his chauffeur-driven car rolled up.

‘The shelter where I volunteer,’ Alexa told him.

She pointed to a building next to a pawn shop. A grim concrete block fronted by a no-nonsense black door that would have deterred anyone but the most foolhardy.

‘I want you to come in and see it—meet some of the other volunteers I work with.’ She sprang out of the car, only realising that he hadn’t followed when she had slammed the door behind her, at which point she reopened her door and peered inside at him.

‘You’re not scared, are you?’ She smirked, because for the first time since she had boarded the rollercoaster ride that had become her life she felt as if she had the upper hand. ‘I promise I won’t let anything happen to you...’

Theo looked at her, partly outraged because no one had ever dared accuse him of being scared of anything in his life before, partly amused because she had wrong-footed him and not many had done that either.

‘What do you think I might be scared of?’ he murmured as they headed into the shelter.

‘A new experience?’ She blushed, hearing the teasing tone in her voice.

‘You’ve broken the ice on that one,’ Theo pointed out drily. ‘When it comes to new experiences, you rank right up there as a first.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Alexa threw back at him, because she knew that a compliment it certainly hadn’t been meant to be.

He smiled slowly, his amazing eyes skirting over her flushed face and doing a lazy inventory of everything else.

‘You should,’ he murmured. ‘I have a jaded palate, and new experiences are always welcome...’

‘Even unpleasant ones?’

‘What are we talking about, here? The shelter...or you...?’

He was leaning against the door, towering over her, and she felt her heart begin to race. His voice was as smooth as the finest dark chocolate and his eyes were doing all sorts of weird things to her nervous system, muddling her thoughts and stripping her of that momentary feeling of triumph she’d had moments earlier.

She rang the bell and turned away, although she could still feel him staring at her, and suddenly the memory of all those convenient kisses slammed into her, depriving her of breath.

She didn’t like him, she reminded herself fiercely. Not only did she not like him—she didn’t like the situation she was in.

But he was so sinfully good-looking. He had the sort of face that made her want to stare with helpless fixation and keep on staring. He had that effect on every woman. She had witnessed it for herself. And, whilst she had thought herself immune to that sort of thing, she had to accept the galling truth that she wasn’t as immune as she wanted to be.

That was why she found it so unsettling whenever he got too close to her, and why the thought of those kisses kept her awake at night. She was human, and she lacked the necessary experience to deal with a man like Theo De Angelis. All her old-fashioned ideas about only ever being attracted to her soulmate had been turned on their head...

Which didn’t mean that they had disappeared! No, it just meant that she responded to him on a purely physical level, and it was only now that she was accepting that unpalatable truth. She’d always assumed that, for her, physical attraction would only be possible when it was to the guy who had stolen her heart, but she’d been wrong. She could see that now.

Which was a good thing.

Once you knew your enemy, you knew how to arm yourself—and her enemy was her treacherous body. She would just have to make sure that she maintained as much distance as she could and never, ever repeated the mistake she had made at the restaurant, when she had initiated that kiss and totally lost herself in it.

It was great that she was going to introduce him to what she did, because it was the one area in which he would be at sea—and that was something she would really enjoy watching.

‘You’re smiling...’ he leant in to whisper as footsteps were heard on the opposite side of the door. ‘Private joke or something you’d care to share?’

‘Private joke,’ she told him promptly.

She looked away as the door was opened and felt a lump in her throat, because she knew that she was going to miss the shelter beyond words when she disappeared off to London.

The prospect of the lifestyle awaiting her there made her want to burst into tears.

Not that he would ever understand.

She sneaked a sideways glance at him and, introductions made, took a background seat to watch the spectacle of the great Theo De Angelis fumbling awkwardly in a situation of which he would have had no experience.

He didn’t fumble. He charmed all the women there, Franca and Louisa and Marie and Ndali. He introduced himself to some of the women who came to them for practical and emotional help. He pried and prodded into all the rooms and asked so many questions that anyone would have thought that he was an expert on women’s shelters.

He talked finance with the guy who ran the place, and made a show of looking at the books. He even went so far as to make suggestions on how small improvements could be made!

She had hoped to watch him squirm, and instead he had dumbfounded her with lots of phoney interest.

‘So what exactly is your role there?’ was the first thing he asked when they were back outside an hour and a half later.

The work awaiting his attention would have to wait and he had resigned himself to that. Allowing work to take second place to anything was an alien concept to him, but he had watched her as they walked through the premises, watched her interaction with her colleagues, and the casual, friendly, concerned manner with which she had spoken to the some of the women waiting in queues to be seen or chatting to the other volunteers.

Everything about her had breathed open sincerity. Her laughter with her colleagues had been rich and infectious. Frankly, it was the sort of laughter that had been conspicuously absent between them, and he had been irked by that.

He had been tolerant of her hostility, even though he privately thought that she should have taken her cue from him and dealt with the whole unfortunate situation with a bit more aplomb—because why rail against the inevitable? And besides, it wasn’t destined to be a lifetime situation. He had gritted his teeth at the patently grudging reluctance in her responses to him and the ease with which she accepted as fact the thought that he was deplorable.

But here he had glimpsed a side to her that he hadn’t seen before.

It was rare for any woman not to respond to him. Even when he was uninterested in them they still tried hard around him. He had made exceptions for her because of the circumstances of their forced relationship, but only now was he accepting that her indifference was an offence to his pride.

On a more basic level, he wanted what he had seen of her at that shelter. It was human nature to desire the things that are denied. Fact of life.

Alexa was making sure to keep as much distance between them as was acceptable, considering they were supposed to be madly in love. People who were madly in love didn’t necessarily have to hold hands everywhere they went—and besides, no one in these streets knew who they were.

Niggling away at the top of her mind was the uncomfortable thought that she fancied the man, and that her plan of seeing him out of his depth and floundering in unfamiliar surroundings—which she had hoped might put the brakes on her stupid attraction to him—had spectacularly backfired.

She should have guessed. He could pull that charm out when it was needed like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

‘Are you really interested?’ she asked, then belatedly remembered what he had said about her arguing with everything he said. ‘Sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Even if you’re not really interested, it’s thoughtful of you to pretend to be.’

She was determined to stop letting him get under her skin and rattle her. If she could reach a higher plane of being cool and controlled when she was around him, then her wayward responses could be harnessed and quickly killed off. Fancying someone because of the way they looked was so superficial that it surely couldn’t last longer than two minutes.

‘And,’ she continued, ‘you put on a really good show of being interested in what went on there.’

Theo’s mouth tightened. Whatever he said or did, she was determined not to give him the benefit of the doubt and it was really beginning to get on his nerves.

‘So what exactly is your role there?’ he repeated, keeping his voice even and neutral.

They were heading back in the direction of the bars and shops and cafés, looking out for any passing taxis and walking until they could hail one. They had quickly left behind the insalubrious neighbourhood where they had just been, and the houses to either side of them now were well maintained but small and all exactly alike.

Theo realised that this was a part of town he had never actually visited. He wasn’t in the country a lot, and when he was his visits were fleeting, because he far preferred to import his father to London.

Having always considered himself a man of the world—widely travelled, the recipient of far more global experiences than most people could ever dream of achieving in a lifetime—he now wondered when and how he had managed to isolate himself so entirely in a very specific social circle that was accessible only to the very, very wealthy. He was delivered to and from places in chauffeur-driven cars, never flew anything but first class, always had the most expensive seats at the opera or the theatre...

Alexa, having come from a very similar background to his own, should have followed the same route—maybe without the high-powered career—but she hadn’t and that roused his curiosity.

‘It wasn’t quite the sort of thing I was expecting,’ he expanded truthfully.

‘And what were you expecting?’

She turned to him and was dazzled by the glare from the sun, which threw his lean, handsome face into a mosaic of shadows. She shielded her eyes and squinted against the sun. Overcome by a sudden feeling of vertigo, she took a couple of small steps backwards.

‘A soup kitchen and people waving begging bowls at you?’

She took a deep breath and told herself that sniping and bristling was just a symptom of the stupid attraction she felt for the man, against all odds. If she carried on like that he would begin to wonder why he got under her skin the way he did, and the last thing she wanted was for him to suspect that he got to her, that she was so horribly alert to him.

‘I guess shelter might be the wrong word...’ She fought to inject polite indifference into her words. ‘Most people do think of the homeless when they hear the word shelter. It’s more of an advice bureau. Women come to us with all sorts of problems. Financial, personal... Often we redirect them to other services, but there are people on hand who are really experienced at listening and getting the desperate off the path they’ve gone down. We also have contacts with companies who offer jobs wherever possible, to help some of them get back on their feet...’

What she had really wanted to show him, Theo mused, were the sort of people she liked. He hadn’t been able to help noticing that the men there had been a ‘type’.

Caring, soft-spoken, touchy-feely...

Had she subconsciously wanted to show him the sort of guys she liked—was attracted to? Had her intention been to draw comparisons, so that she could underline how far short he fell of her ideal? Just another way of reinforcing her dislike for the position she was in and the man she would be forced to marry—like a Victorian bride being dragged to the altar, kicking and screaming.

And yet...

When she had pulled him towards her in the restaurant and kissed him... Hell, he knew enough about women to know that loathing and dislike hadn’t been behind that kiss. She might not want to admit it, but he had felt an urgency there and it intrigued him.

Why wouldn’t it?

‘Those are the people I enjoy being around,’ she carried on, pausing as his driver cruised up alongside them and stopped.

When had he summoned a driver? But of course that would suit him far better than a normal taxi, because there was the option of sliding up that partition so that their conversation could not be overheard. He was always one step ahead.

‘Is that your not so subtle way of telling me that those are the sort of men you enjoy being around?’ He slid into the seat alongside her and predictably slid up the partition, locking them into complete privacy.