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And he held on to her hand. It was heady stuff.
‘Whatever,’ she said, distracted.
‘You like to be accurate.’
‘Yes.’ She was still oddly shaken. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
‘It’s obvious. Well, then, we’d better say goodbye.’
He tugged her hand, bringing her a critical step closer to him. Bent—he had a long way to bend—and brushed her cheek with his lips.
Francesca gulped. For a moment she was in a cloud of cold, pure air, surrounded by cedar and a sense of imminent danger, as if she were facing a climb that was beyond her. And then she was on a crowded balcony again on a wet London night. And the stars had gone in.
‘Er—goodbye,’ she said, more breathless than she would have liked.
He straightened. ‘Good luck yourself. I hope you get your ex-prince.’
Francesca, who never gave up on any of her self-appointed tasks, was for the first time in her life going to pass. She had no intention of doing anything more this evening than going home and trying to get her breath back. But she was not admitting that to anyone else. And, besides, there was always another day. One way or another, she would get the crown prince to one of The Buzz’s book-signings if it killed her.
‘Cast-iron certainty,’ she said, sticking her chin in the air. She was not going to lose focus because Barry de la Touche had dumped her and a tall stranger had not quite kissed her. She was not. She said as much to herself as to him, ‘I always get my man.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I WANT,’ said Conrad, pleasant but very firm, ‘to know about a bookshop. It’s near the gasworks in Fulham. I’m not moving until I know the name of the woman who owns it.’ He looked as if he meant it.
The publicist had been looking for him with increasing desperation. The Press interviews were not going well. The editorial director had called one journalist a freeloader. Then he told a researcher for a daytime television programme that he didn’t expect her viewers to be able to read words of more than one syllable. It was definitely time to break out their secret weapon. Only it looked as if the secret weapon had ideas of his own.
‘I’ll find out for you,’ she promised. ‘Just please come and talk to the Press now.’
‘How will you find out?’
‘Ask. Someone in this crowd is bound to know.’
‘But I don’t know the name of the bookshop.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s a small world, books.’ She urged him towards the room where the Press interviews were taking place. ‘What does she look like? How old? What’s she interested in?’
‘Small. Dark. Huge brown eyes. Sometimes they go all big and misty as if you’re the most wonderful thing she’s ever looked at. Sometimes they snap. She’s twenty-three, and she’s fierce.’
‘Oh,’ said the publicity assistant, rather taken aback. ‘Well, that ought to find her. Fulham, you said?’
By the time he had played his part in the discussion of Ash on the Wind, she was back.
‘Sounds like Jazz Allen’s place. It’s called The Buzz. But Jazz is nearly six feet, black and beautiful.’
‘Not her. Look again.’ He thought. ‘She also knows a lot about Montassurro. Or thinks she does. Her father was some sort of refugee.’
One of the journalists who had slipped out in the hopes of a private exchange with the ex-prince overheard. He inserted himself between them.
‘Do you mean Peter Heller’s daughter?’
Conrad’s brows twitched together. ‘Heller?’ he said in tones of acute distaste. ‘That crook?’
The journalist grinned. ‘Can I quote you? He’s an esteemed international financier these days.’
Conrad did not smile. He was looking really disturbed.
‘Are you telling me that Peter Heller’s daughter would waste her time with a small bookshop? In the shadow of the gasworks? I don’t believe it.’
‘Not that small,’ said the journalist drily. ‘Everyone’s talking about The Buzz. They’ve got quite an internet presence already, too. It was the Heller girl who set that up, by what I hear.’
‘You mean Jazz Allen’s new partner?’ said someone else, joining them. ‘I hear she’s a phenomenon.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the journalist. ‘Everyone thought it was going to be a three-day wonder for her. Well, she’s rich enough to invest in a little business like that without caring too much if she gets her money back. But it hasn’t turned out like that.’
‘You are so right,’ agreed someone else, with feeling. ‘Francesca Heller is no sleeping partner. My reps say she challenges them all the time. Fearsome woman. But she’s certainly improved their ecology list. And Jazz thinks she’s wonderful.’
‘So does Prince Conrad, from the sound of it,’ said the journalist with a sly glance sideways.
But he did not get the response he was hoping for. The tall man looked at him in silence for a moment. The heavy-lidded eyes were quite unreadable. Then he turned away, shrugging.
‘Well, would you get the email address for me?’ he asked the publicity assistant indifferently. ‘I said I would do a talk for them some evening.’
He did not say another word on the subject of Francesca Heller all evening. Instead, to his hosts’ surprised delight, he circulated conscientiously. He even stayed until the very end of the party.
But, though he got a very good proposition from a giggling copy editor in low-cut spandex, and the editorial director offered to take him to dinner and throw ideas around about a series, there was no sign of Francesca Heller. He shook his head at both invitations.
‘No, thanks. Unless—there’s no one else left inside, is there?’
‘No. Just us,’ said the copy editor, weaving slightly. ‘You’d better come. You’ll have missed every last train. Come to the club with us and then take the milk train at dawn.’
‘I’m all partied out, thanks. I’ll get a train after breakfast.’
There was consensus that this was a waste.
Conrad’s steep eyelids drooped in the familiar bored expression.
‘Goodnight, everyone. Have a good one.’
He strolled away. He didn’t appear to move fast. But those long legs had taken him out of sight before anyone could think of an argument to call him back.
Francesca, Conrad thought.
Odd name for a girl who was half-English, half-Montassurran. Sounded Italian. Come to think of it, she looked like one of the Italian beauties you found in Renaissance paintings, all abundant hair and wide pure brow, with their enigmatic half-smiles. He had always thought they were probably too intelligent for their own good, those serene, secretive women. There was always something mysterious about them, something that said, ‘You don’t really know me at all.’
Of course, Francesca Heller had not been particularly serene this evening. But she had not come across as a second-generation Montassurran confidence trickster either. His jaw tightened.
Not that she thought of herself as Montassurran, obviously. All that nonsense she had talked about brigands! He should have challenged her on it at once. He could not think why he had not.
Hell, yes, he could. He knew exactly why. She had been looking at him with those wide, wide eyes, as if she was somehow caught up in a dream, and all he wanted to do was keep her looking at him like that forever. OK, maybe she was not serene. But the mystery was there all right. By the bucketful.
Fool, he castigated himself. Stupid fool! All she was interested in was catching a prince for one of her bookshop events. She had even admitted it. From all he could find out, she was as good at business as her father. And Peter Heller’s daughter was the last person in the world he wanted to tangle with.
Yes, that was better. He would walk a while and think of everything he knew about her father.
Conrad reminded himself that he knew a great deal about Peter Heller and his business dealings. The whole Montassurran community in London did. And they knew Heller was ruthless, acquisitive, and not at all scrupulous. Without actually doing anything criminal, Peter had exploited more than one of the Montassurran exiles who had been so ready to welcome him when he first got to London.
Remember that! Conrad thought. Thinking of Peter, the multimillionaire exploiter, would put mysterious, misty-eyed Francesca Heller in perspective.
Except that it did not. Not quite. She was under his skin, like a rose thorn.
Conrad walked hard, hardly noticing the cold night or the desultory rain. Feet pounding on the pavement, he could convince himself that she was a momentary aberration; that he did not want a woman in his life whom he would be ashamed to introduce to his grandfather and the people his grandfather thought of as his subjects; that he did not want a misty-eyed innocent in his life either, come to think of it. And then he remembered the way her chin came up when she thought he was mocking her. The way her breath caught when he touched her. And the wide, wondering eyes that seemed to look into his very soul.
Look, he said to himself. Either Francesca Heller was what she ought to be as her father’s daughter, a real wily operator. In that case she was not the woman for him. Or she was what she had looked tonight. It was a faint outside chance. No woman of twenty-three was so open, so unguarded, so—he said it to himself deliberately—vulnerable. But if she was—
Ah, if she was, then Conrad Domitio was not the man for her.
Francesca gave up soon after the tall man left her. The crowd was too pressing. She couldn’t find Jazz. She was never going to find a prince she did not know. Especially if everyone else was after him too. She collected her coat and bumbled out into the rainy dark.
Without her glasses, of course, it was not easy to find a cab. She flagged down a Range Rover, a delivery truck and a traffic light showing amber before she connected with a taxi for hire. She gave the driver the address and then fell back against the upholstery and closed her eyes. Tomorrow morning she was going to order three pairs of glasses—one for home, one for the shop and one for her handbag. This evening’s nightmare was never going to happen again.
But it had not all been a nightmare, something whispered. The tall man on the wet balcony. He had not been a nightmare. He had been—exciting.
Yes. Well. There was such a thing as rebound. She had already warned herself once tonight…
That was when it hit her. The difference between expectations and reality—it got you every time. She had expected the evening to end with herself and Barry going back to the riverside flat together. They should have been planning their future. They would have been acknowledged as lovers. She would have belonged somewhere at last.
Instead of which she was sitting alone in the back of a London taxi cab, going through streets she could barely see and certainly not recognise, dreaming about a man she would not recognise if she saw him again.
Well, probably not. Though that air of power was pretty impressive. Maybe that would survive, even when she got her glasses back and could actually see the man’s face. And that aura of leashed energy, the outdoorsy smell of wood smoke and cedar—she would recognise those at fifty paces.
Francesca realised it with a little shock.
‘Wow! Rebound and a half,’ she muttered, trying to laugh at herself.
But it wasn’t funny. Barry’s defection must have left her so vulnerable that she was fantasising about a complete stranger. That was what adolescents did. And Francesca, the world’s most self-contained schoolgirl, had not done it, even when it was normal.
‘Oh, boy. Postponed adolescence strikes at last,’ she said bitterly. ‘Francesca, my girl, you have got to be careful. Or this could get out of hand.’
It was not a good night. She tried to go to bed. But she kept thinking of Barry. And the stranger. And Barry again.
There was a nasty moment when she found her second best pair of glasses behind a sofa cushion. She remembered when he had taken them off, between kisses. She remembered what she had thought they would be doing tonight. By now she and Barry would have been stretched out on that sofa. He would have been playing with her hair, teasing her about what he called her twenty-twenty pernicketyness.
‘Let yourself go,’ Barry would instruct. ‘Stop counting. Free the imagination. Fly with me.’
Fly? Fly? How on earth had she ever thought she could change? She was never going to fly. She did not have the imagination. And her taste in men was terrible, too. Look at how she only had to close her eyes and she smelled wood smoke…
Forget the man on the balcony. Think about Barry. At least you knew him. Well, nearly knew him.
For now that she was on her own she was remembering all the times Barry had appeared to be dating another girl. When he made his move on Francesca he had explained all those incidents away so easily. Now she thought about it, she realised that he must actually have been running the two of them in tandem. God, but her judgement was awful.
She gave up on sleeping and swished round the empty flat in her long crimson housecoat. Her mother had given it to her for Christmas. She did not like it. It was too dramatic. But it was almost the only thing in her wardrobe that Barry had not seen.
Her eyes leaked tears. She brushed them away furiously. She never cried, she reminded herself bitterly.
She was not missing him. She had never known him, so how could she be missing him? What she was missing was tenderness. Well, the illusion of tenderness. No man in his right mind would really feel tenderness for a woman who found it easier to add up than let her imagination fly. Who inherited her looks from a father who looked like a troglodyte. Who wore glasses held together with a grubby plaster.
Even the stranger would not have wanted to talk to her if it had not been too dark to see her face.
No, no, in the race for emotional fulfilment she was a non-starter. And she had just proved it for about the tenth time in her adult life.
‘Get used to it,’ said Francesca aloud. ‘Concentrate on the career. At least you have a chance of getting that right.’
So she was already tidying the tables of books when Jazz arrived the next morning.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get you your prince,’ Francesca announced, even before Jazz had unwound her rainbow scarf. ‘I couldn’t find him.’
Jazz extracted a large latte from a paper carrier bag and eased off its plastic lid. She passed it across. After three months she and Francesca knew exactly how the other liked her coffee.
‘I’m not surprised,’ she said philosophically. ‘I managed to chat up Maurice Dillon. He’s going to do a workshop for new writers for us next month. What about you? Find anyone interesting?’
Francesca shook her head. ‘Only a man who wanted to go out onto the balcony and talk in the rain.’
Jazz raised her elegant eyebrows. ‘Sexy.’
To her surprise, Francesca flushed slightly.
‘Hey, you didn’t do anything I would have done, did you?’ Jazz said, amused.
‘Of course not,’ said Francesca, uncharacteristically flustered.
Jazz laughed aloud.
‘I didn’t mean that. Well, I did, but—Stop laughing at me. Hell, what do I know what you would have done?’
Jazz sipped her own double espresso. ‘Not a lot on a wet night in the open air, to be fair,’ she admitted. She sent Francesca a thoughtful look. ‘It must have been freezing.’
‘Er—yes. Maybe. I—um—I didn’t really notice.’
‘Ah.’ Jazz sipped more coffee. ‘So how long did you stay out there?’
‘I don’t remember.’ A hint of defiance had crept into Francesca’s voice.
‘Ah.’ Jazz sucked her teeth. ‘Fanciable, I take it?’
Francesca thought about warm magnetism and alien lips brushing her cheek. She could not help herself. She gave a little shiver. It was purely involuntary. And she knew Jazz saw it.
‘Fair to middling,’ she said, unconvincingly. ‘Well, what I could see of him, which was about as defined as a Rorschach inkblot. Which reminds me—can I have my spare glasses, please?’
