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‘You’re the real deal, Izzie Silver,’ he said. ‘I like that.’
‘Honest,’ she said, pushing her plate away. ‘Not everyone likes it.’
‘I do. Yes, you could say I am rich.’
‘You don’t own a super-yacht, though?’ she asked, with a twinkle in her eye.
He laughed again. ‘No. Do you want one, or do you simply want to date a guy with one?’
Izzie smiled at his innocence. ‘You haven’t a clue, do you?’ she said coolly. ‘I am so far away from the type of woman who wants a man with a super-yacht that I am on a different continent.’ She rearranged things on the table, pushing the salt and pepper around. ‘The pepper is me.’ She stuck it at the edge of the table. ‘And the salt –’ she moved it to the other side completely, ‘– is the sort of woman who wants to know a guy’s bank balance before she meets him for a drink. See? Big gap, big difference. Enormous.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Just don’t do it again,’ she joked. ‘I have never in my entire life gone out with a guy because of the size of his bank balance. Ever. I did briefly – one date – go out with a guy from next door in my old apartment because he knew how to work the heating, and he’d fixed it for me one day when the super wasn’t around and I went out on a date with him, but that was it. A one-off.’
‘You came out with me because I gave you a ride back to the office, then?’ he teased.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Keep going with this life story of yours. Tell me some personal stuff.’
He was forty-five, his wife was a couple of years younger and they’d married young, kids, really. Izzie was sorry she’d asked for personal stuff.
‘Then, Tom came along quite quickly,’ he said proudly. ‘It all changes then, you know. Do you have children?’
Yes, in my handbag, Izzie wanted to say. ‘No, ‘fraid not. So I don’t know how it changes everything.’
‘Take my word for it, it does. It changes the couple dynamic, you get so caught up in the kids. But, hey, I didn’t come here to talk about my boys,’ he said.
‘OK, what did you come here for?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was here. He was too complicated, there was too much going on in his life. She needed a rebound guy like she needed a hole in the head.
Besides, he wasn’t even at the rebound stage: he was still in the nursing-the-broken-relationship stage. A man on the hunt for a rebound relationship didn’t necessarily want to talk about his wife and kids.
Pity, she thought sadly. He was lovely, sexy, made her stomach whoop in a way she could never quite remember it doing before.
It just proved what she knew and what Linda had confirmed to her: all the good ones were taken. But he was a charming guy and she could enjoy lunch and mark it down to experience.
‘You still don’t know what I came here for?’ he asked.
Izzie shot him a wry look.
‘I might want to know more about the modelling industry so I can invest in it,’ he continued.
‘You might just want to be introduced to long-legged models?’ she countered. ‘I’m normally quite good at working out if a man is interested in me only as a means to get to the models. Although you –’ she surveyed him ‘– aren’t the normal type. You’re too nice.’
He pretended to gasp. ‘Nice? That’s not a word people usually use about me. I’ve been called a shark, you know.’
‘You’re nice,’ Izzie said, smiling back at him. It was true. For all that he was an alpha male, with all the in-built arrogance and intelligence, he had a solid, warm core to him, a devastatingly attractive bit that said he might be a rich guy but he’d been brought up to take care of people, to protect his family and his woman. Izzie felt a pang that she would never get to be said woman. There would be something wonderful about being with a man who’d take care of her.
‘You might pretend to be a shark but you’re a pussycat,’ she went on, teasing a little. ‘Besides, I know you don’t need me to get you introduced to the supermodels. You’re rich enough to buy all the introductions you need. Money is like an access-all-areas card, isn’t it?’
‘My but you’re cynical for one so young,’ he grinned.
‘I’m not young, I’m nearly forty,’ she said. If she’d thought he was interested in her, she’d have said she was thirty-nine. ‘It’s creeping up on me every day. I’m going to be over the hill soon.’
A few days ago, it might have been a joke. But since the Plaza and Linda, Izzie no longer felt complacent at the thought of her approaching birthday.
‘You’ll never be over the hill,’ he said in a low voice that made her think, ridiculously, about being in bed with him and having him slowly peeling off her clothes.
‘Are you flirting with me, Mr Hansen?’ Izzie squawked to cover her discomfit. ‘I thought this was a friendly lunch.’
‘Cards on table,’ he said, ‘I am flirting with you.’
‘Well, stop,’ she ordered. ‘You’ve just told me about your wife and fabulous kids. I don’t know what sort of women you’re used to meeting, but I’m not in the market for part-time love. I’ve got through thirty-nine years without dating a man who’s still tangled up with his wife and I’m not planning on starting now.’
‘Do you think I’d be here if my marriage was still viable?’ he asked in a low growl. ‘Give me some credit, Izzie. Yes, I have a wife and kids, but we’re separated and we’re only living together for the sake of those kids. Didn’t you listen to me? I told you Elizabeth and I married young. We haven’t been a couple for years, nobody’s fault, it just was inevitable. We finally agreed a few months ago that it wasn’t working on any level and we needed to formalise things.’
‘Oh,’ said Izzie, waiting. Was he serious? Or was he really still in that awful post-break-up stage where he was trying to convince himself it was over and that a rebound would sort him out?
‘I love her, I’ll always love her,’ he said, ‘but it’s like loving your sister. We’ve had twenty-four years together and counting; it’s a lifetime, but the marriage part is long over. We try to appear together for the younger boys. Tom would be able to cope with it if we split up, but Matt and Josh, no. The New York house is so big, it’s not a problem. Lots of people do it: if you have enough space, you can all exist happily together. I have my life, she has hers. Elizabeth’s parents divorced and she didn’t want our boys to come from a broken home. That’s why we stayed with each other, I guess, but it’s too hard. I can’t do that any more.’
‘What if one of you fell in love and wanted to be with another person?’ Izzie asked, trying to understand this strange arrangement. She felt like she was standing on a cliff and was about to fall. She didn’t want to fall without knowing he was going to be holding his arms out.
‘That’s never happened. Before,’ he added the last word deliberately slowly. ‘If it happened, then everything would have to change.’
‘Do people know about this?’
‘Most of our circle know. We’re not broadcasting it, but it works for us. Matt and Josh are still so young. They think they know it all now they’re twelve and fourteen, but they’re still kids. Now they can see their parents living amicably in the same house, they’ve got stability. That’s our number one priority.’
‘I see,’ she said, thinking with a sudden flash of sadness of her life when she was between twelve and fourteen.
‘Do you?’
She nodded and somehow he instantly picked up on the fact that she’d become suddenly melancholy.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I was thirteen when my mother died,’ she explained. ‘Cancer. It was sudden too, so there was no time. Six weeks after we found out, she was dead.’ She shivered at the memory. It had taken her years to be able to say the word cancer: it had held such terrifying connotations, like an unlucky charm, as if just saying it brought danger and pain. ‘My father and my grandmother tried to protect me from that, but they couldn’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been tough.’
She nodded. Tougher than anyone could imagine. In a way, she’d dealt with it by not dealing with it: locking herself up tight inside so nothing could hurt her, not crying, not talking much to anyone, even darling Gran, who was so devastated herself and was trying to hide it for Izzie’s sake.
Dad, Uncle Edward and Anneliese had all been there for her, ready to talk, laugh, cry, whatever she needed. Only her cousin Beth – quirky, irritable, easily upset – had been her usual self. Beth had actually helped the most in the first year. She’d made Izzie cry one day by screaming at her and that simple act of one person in her life not tiptoeing around her, brought Izzie back.
‘Is your father alive?’ Joe asked gently.
Izzie smiled. ‘Yeah, he’s great, Dad. A bit dizzy sometimes; runs out of sugar and cream endlessly and has to rush over to my aunt Anneliese’s house or to my gran’s. Between them, they take care of him – not that they let him know or anything. He’d hate that. But they do. They tell me how he’s getting on.’
‘Coffee, dessert? More wine?’ asked the waiter.
When he was gone, having cleared their plates and taken coffee orders, Joe leaned forward again.
‘Tell me more about you,’ he urged.
But Izzie felt she’d revealed enough about herself. She rarely talked about her mother, certainly not to someone she’d just met.
‘Hey, that’s enough of me,’ she said, trying to sound perkier. ‘You’re more interesting, Mr Mogul. So, tell me – are you interested in buying a model agency?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you were but –’
‘But you needed to know where you stood?’
‘Convent education – it gets you every time,’ she sighed.
‘Would Sister Mary Whatever approve of me?’ he asked. She could feel his foot nudging hers under the table.
‘I think you’re probably the sort of guy they had in mind when they told us to bring a phone book out with us on dates,’ Izzie quipped.
When he looked puzzled, she filled him in: ‘If you had to sit on some boy’s lap, you placed the phone book down first, then sat. An inch of paper barrier.’
‘More like five inches if you lived in Manhattan.’
‘Don’t boast.’ She was smiling now.
‘So you might see me again, Ms Silver, now you know I’m kosher?’
‘I might,’ she said.
‘Listen, I have an art collection in my office building –’
‘You didn’t bid on that Pasha picture at the charity lunch,’ she interrupted.
‘I might have, except I was distracted,’ he growled. ‘I have to go to an artist’s studio to look at some paintings tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to come?’
Izzie took the plunge. Looking at art – where was the harm in that? ‘Sure. What time?’
‘Say eleven o’clock?’
‘You said “afternoon”,’ she said, confused.
‘He lives in Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains. We’ll have to fly.’
Izzie had never been on a private jet before. First, she and Joe were picked up by helicopter and flown to Teterboro airport where a Gulfstream sat waiting on the tarmac. Inside, apart from the crew, there were just the two of them.
‘It’s fabulous,’ Izzie said in awe as she stepped into the cabin. On the inside, it looked smaller than she’d imagined but the luxury was something she couldn’t have dreamed up. Entirely decorated in calm cream shades, there were only eight or nine vast cream leather seats.
The light oak cabinets were topped with marble instead of airplane plastic. It was luxury cubed. Even the blankets laid on the seats felt too soft to be ordinary wool.
‘Cashmere?’ she asked the stewardess standing to attention with a smile fixed to her face.
The stewardess nodded. ‘The seats are a blend of wool and leather, for added comfort.’
‘There’s nothing you can’t do on this plane,’ Joe said, sitting down and reaching out for the glass of cold beer the stewardess had ready for him, without him even asking for it. ‘Watch DVDs, phone outer space – you name it. They’ve even got a defibrillator on board. Have you had to use it, Karen?’ he asked the woman.
‘Mr Hansen, you know I can’t tell you that,’ she said, grinning.
They flew into Gatlinburg but Izzie could only glance at the pretty streets of the historic town before they were driven out of town for twenty minutes to a property set on its own in the foothills of the Great Smokies.
‘I can see why a painter would want to work from here,’ Izzie said, taking in the sweep of powerful mountains ranged all around her as they walked to the door of the ranch-style house. The greenery reminded her a little of home, but there were no mountains in Ireland like these, no giant peaks that dominated the landscape.
The artist, a man named AJ, made them drinks and ambled round his studio, talking in a laid-back Tennessean drawl. Izzie had worried that the artist might wonder who she was and she imagined an awkward conversation ensuing, but no such thing happened. It was as if, once she was with Joe, she was instantly a member of whatever club they were in at the time. She found that she liked that.
Joe wanted to buy a lot of paintings.
AJ hugged him in a loose-limbed way. Izzie wondered how much it had all cost, but decided against asking. She wasn’t sure if she could take it.
On the flight home, over Cajun blackened fish, a Gatlinburg favourite recipe that the galley staff had prepared in honour of their destination, Izzie idly mentioned her initial anxiety that AJ would wonder who she was.
‘Who cares what other people think or wonder?’ he said, genuinely astonished at such a concept.
‘No reason,’ Izzie said cautiously. ‘It’s just –’
She stopped. She was scared of so many things around Joe: how intensely she liked him, how powerfully attractive she found him. But there were all those complications to consider. Izzie felt she was on a slippery slope now – she didn’t want to fall in.
Also, she was afraid that, just by being with him, she’d appear like the sort of person she disliked: the all-purpose rich man’s girlfriend. Not that she was his girlfriend or anything yet. He hadn’t so much as touched her, and she wasn’t sure if this was on purpose or not.
I have a career and my own life, she wanted to yell. I like him for who he is, not for how much money he’s got.
He dropped her home in the limo. Neither of them moved. Izzie felt so conflicted: on one hand, she wanted to invite him in and see what happened next. On the other, she wanted to go slowly because this felt so special, so different.
If only he’d do something, say something, then she’d know how to respond.
But he seemed to be playing some gentlemanly game, waiting for her to do something.
‘Have you talked to your wife about meeting me?’ she asked. Why did you say that? she groaned inwardly. How to kill a romantic atmosphere in ten seconds flat.
‘We don’t talk about the people in our life,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’d weird me out.’
‘Because you’d be jealous?’ Izzie asked tentatively.
‘Because we’re trying to keep a reasonable family unit together for the sake of the boys and that might add extra pressure,’ he replied.
And then, he leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips, not a Mr Predator kiss but a gentle, till tomorrow sort of goodbye. Izzie closed her eyes and waited for more, waited to sink into the kiss. But there was no more.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow and thanks for coming with me.’
‘Thanks for asking me,’ she said coolly. She was still trying to work out why he hadn’t kissed her properly. ‘I’ve never been to Tennessee before. Does a two-hour flying visit count as being somewhere?’
