Authors: Lauren Boutain
She was worried, for her own sanity, about what would happen if she saw him. Talking to Adrik…
“
I’ve started the family portrait, haven’t I?” Adrik was saying to her, filtering through her shock.
She nodded. Painting in his workshop had really helped her to relax over the past week, and as well as the picture they had done together with the spray-cans and hand-prints, she had started a number of new canvases, including one of the movie producer, his partner and their sons from Venezuela and Colombia, and one of Millie Watkins-Mosse as a present for her prom. She had also drawn cartoons of Lucas chasing the bastard cat while it stole progressively unfeasible amounts of food from the oven, which Adrik loved and had stuck on the wall at his end of the workshop.
Derek Goldman. The last person on Earth she wanted interfering right now…
“
Are you all right?” Adrik murmured, reaching out to take her hand where she was scrunching her napkin tightly on the table between them. He turned his gaze to her glass, to see that it had been refilled, and then back into her eyes. “You look pale all of a sudden. Who gave you another drink?”
“
It’s fine, I didn’t notice I’d finished it.” Christie’s stomach was knotting. “Just – nervous. Thinking about tomorrow.”
He nodded in agreement, and she remembered that this was new for him, too.
“Well, if you’re getting spiked, I’m getting spiked.” He reached for her glass, and drank some of it for her, before replacing it. “I don’t trust all of these old people, and the whole pharmacies of medication that they come armed with.”
Christie smiled, in spite of her fears.
“We’ll sleep well and have regular movements,” she joked.
“
Not in that order, I hope.”
There was a dessert trolley to follow. Eileen’s chefs had provided traditional iconic puddings, including fresh raspberry and cream-filled sponge cake, an impressive sherry trifle, strawberry Eton Mess, mint and lemon ice-cream decorated with dark chocolate shards, Black Forest gateau, and a baked Alaska with sparklers fizzing around it. Christie overheard the guests whispering their negotiations, discussing who would ask for what, in order for there to be the opportunity to try everything without appearing to be a greedy piglet.
“Let me know if you hear of an interesting property locally,” Adrik said to the developer, who was seated on his other side. He slid out a business card, and passed it to him. “We’re looking for a love-nest here.”
Christie found herself wondering how long their charade was intended to last. And wishing, not for the first time, that it wasn’t a charade at all.
Eventually, everyone gravitated to Eileen’s favourite room with the telescope, for drinks and after-dinner nibbles overlooking the now moonlit lake. The properties scattered on the far shore glittered like fireflies, which proved to be the entertainment for the evening.
“Angelique has the nudists in her house again,” Eileen revealed, one eye to the telescope, while Xaviér, now confined to his cage, begged for grapes, walnuts, crackers and cubes of cheese from the guests. “Twice a year, they come now. They used to rent a villa in Egypt once a year, but I think there were issues. Interpol raided it, anyway. Poor things. Can’t a group of old people go on holiday together, without being sprung out and interrogated by specialist officers doing international sex-trafficking investigations?”
She raised an arm and waved gleefully out of the window.
“I think they’ll enjoy the celebrity-spotting tomorrow,” she said, as Giovanni shuffled up eagerly to peruse the view in turn. “It looks like a good night for a naked lake cruise under the full moon, in the meantime. Perhaps they will take the boat out. Adrik – Christie – have a peek.”
“
Oh, no…” Christie was mildly horrified, as Adrik got up to go over. “I couldn’t.”
“
Ah, it’s not like that,” Eileen reassured her. “They have a telescope too. They’re perfectly open about it.”
Adrik took over position at the eyepiece from the ageing Sicilian, and chuckled as he squinted through.
“I can see that man’s hand,” he remarked, and adjusted the magnification. “It looks very bad. I don’t think it’s his lucky night.”
Giovanni spluttered his sherry, laughing, while the other men in the room also chuckled to themselves and exchanged private comments. Adrik straightened up and looked around, beckoning Christie over to join him.
“It’s not like at the opera, is it?” she asked, approaching warily.
“
Wait and see,” he smiled, taking a pace back, to make room for her.
She stepped in between him and the telescope. The feeling of trepidation was exactly as though she had just been invited to click on a dodgy site address in an email linking to a live webcam, where a very bored and possibly chilly model would be stationed, mostly preoccupied with typing and sending out masses of internet spam.
Well – at least looking through a telescope wouldn’t automatically download a virus.
Adrik started stroking the back of her waist, a small but very noticeable distraction. Hoping she wouldn’t want to wash her eyes out with soap in the next few seconds, she leaned over to peer through.
“Ohhh…” she exclaimed, as realisation dawned, seeing the portly group seated around a table being dealt cards by a silver-haired woman wearing only a green sun-visor. “Poker!”
“
Don’t encourage him, dear!” Eileen cried, and then thoroughly reddened under her net demi-veil, as the men guffawed and Giovanni had to reach for a handkerchief to dry his streaming eyes. “Maybe I was looking through a different window…”
* * * *
The guests gradually departed for their boats home, and they felt it was time to say goodnight. Eileen gave each of them a kiss on the cheek.
“
Giovanni is going to tuck me into bed,” she said, patting the Sicilian’s wrinkled hand as she took his arm. “And I will show him how I have my little tiny stroke…”
“
Not in that order, I hope,” chuckled Giovanni conspiratorially, echoing Adrik from earlier, and the elderly couple wobbled off along the marble hallway, supporting one another more due to the drink than to their age.
Adrik and Christie watched their progress, wincing every time either of the two weaved too close to the walls or furniture, until they were safely in the disabled lift that would take them up to Eileen’s turret. The two old love-birds sat beside each other on the elevator’s red velvet seat, and Giovanni reached forward creakily to press the button. Before the doors closed, the onlookers saw them clasp hands, smiling into each other’s eyes, and lean together for a brief, flirtatious movie-star kiss.
“He’s going to die a very happy, dirty old man,” Adrik observed.
Christie, whose hands were clasped in front of her, awestruck, let out a long sigh.
“She is amazing,” she admitted, and felt Adrik brush a strand of hair that had escaped from her French pleat aside, from the back of her neck – reminding her that they were now virtually alone.
“
Worried about tomorrow?” he asked, and she nodded. “Yeah – I know. Let’s go back to the annexe and try to chill out a bit.”
* * * *
The full moon was high overhead, turning the lake to burnished silver and mercury. The view was still stunning, and the breeze only slightly cooler than in the afternoon.
Perhaps I should run away now, and just live here somewhere in secret…
Christie stood looking out over the water, with one hand on the tree-trunk where it angled in slightly over the pool at the corner of the terrace, trying not to bite the nails of her other hand.
Derek would be here tomorrow. Perhaps he was in the immediate area already. In which case, running away held as many risks as staying put – if there was a danger of running straight into him…
How seriously had he been ill? Had it affected him badly? Supposing his self-control had sprung a leak, and he arrived having developed a form of social Tourette’s, like Xaviér the macaw? Did he now go around disclosing everything about himself and his private life?
There’s no physical evidence of our relationship
, she reminded herself, severely. If he said anything to her, or to Adrik, she could easily deny it. Derek had never even taken a photograph of her, let alone kept one. His fear of hackers and the like made him keep her at a safe distance.
In contrast, Adrik still had the photograph of them from that night in
Harding’s
, which had appeared in the newspaper next day. He kept it on the desk in his study, and had somehow gotten hold of the original digital image – maybe from whoever published the article, or by searching online – and installed it as his desktop wallpaper on the computer tablet. He’d also had a disc sent to him from the magazine, containing a massive file folder of all of their home photo-shoot images. As for courting the paparazzi…
Derek, however, had nothing on her. He’d made sure of it.
It was while she was still thinking about photographs that she heard the faint click of an electronic shutter behind her, and an abrupt, staggered flash illuminated the leaves of the tree arching overhead.
“
Sorry,” Adrik apologised as she snapped around, startled, and lowered his camera phone. “I liked the way you were standing just now, leaning on that tree.” He approached from the step onto the terrace outside the sitting-room, bearing two glasses in his other hand. “Lucky tree.”
Her blood began to race as he drew nearer. He offered a glass.
“Vodka and tonic,” he said. “Mostly tonic.”
“
Thank you.” She accepted, and the refreshing chill of the first sip was antagonised by the warmth that the vodka left in the back of her throat. It soothed her somewhat, certainly didn’t make her feel invincible, but it loosened her tongue enough to raise a question she wanted answered. “So – what does
more-zhna
mean?”
Adrik hesitated, halfway through a sip of his own drink. He lowered his glass.
“Let me take a picture of us together first,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you.”
“
If I said
more-zhna
to that suggestion…?”
“
It would work as a response, yes,” he confirmed. “Deal?” Christie nodded her head, and he held out his drink. “Hold this for me. And swap places.”
She stepped away from the tree-trunk, and he took her place, leaning his spine into it. His free hand curled around her waist, prompting her to spoon up against him as he raised the camera phone with the other.
“Say
‘more-zhna’
.” He kissed her hair lightly, closing his arm tighter.
“
More-zhna.”
The camera clicked and flared.
He turned it over to view the image. It showed Adrik still nuzzling her, while something about the effect of the Russian word on her breath made Christie appear almost impossibly sultry. She felt him tense a little as they looked at it, and his hand moved slightly to stroke her waist and hip.
“
Very nice,” he said at last, quietly.
“
Tell me what it means,” she reminded him, all of her instincts warning her that he was about to become extremely forgetful of their agreement, and move onto more – pressing matters.
He closed the image folder and switched to a translation application, which was already assigned in his default preference settings as
Russian – English.
“
More-zhna,”
he said into it.
Translating…
Christie waited, biting her lip. The little rotating egg-timer vanished.
English, phrase: ONE CAN – ONE MAY – IT’S POSSIBLE.
“Oh…”
“
You thought it was something bad?” he remarked, his hand now tracing lines around her hip through her dress. “Or an insult?”
“
Something like that…” Right now, the tiny streaks of distraction travelling inwards from his fingertips were inducing their own sense of forgetfulness on her. “Now I’m trying to remember all of the different times you’ve said it…”
“
I don’t want you guessing everything I’ve given away just yet,” he replied, and the phone vanished into his jacket pocket. He reached up to the nape of her neck and moved the loose tendrils of her hair aside again to kiss it, before releasing her with a sigh and retrieving his drink from her hand. “What are you thinking about tomorrow? There’ll be so many people here – once we’ve managed to appear in a few photos, we could leave everyone to get on with it themselves. If it’s too much for either of us. Maybe steal one of their boats and go joy-riding.”
“
Do you know what joy-riding means?” Christie felt she had to check.
“
I know what I want it to mean,” he grinned.
“
I thought so.” She looked out over the lake. “Yes, why not? Apparently there’ll be paparazzi and nosy nudists and a swearing parrot all out sailing tomorrow, if not already. We should fit in just fine – avoiding our own engagement party…”
“
What is it?” He frowned. “I know something else is bothering you, Christie.”
She couldn’t tell him. Not about Derek. In the same way she knew Derek didn’t have any evidence – neither did she.
But there was another feeling, eroding away at her. The knowledge that this was all fake. Her side of a bargain that they had struck.
Which, since this afternoon, had become very blurry indeed. He hadn’t even asked her about the diamonds – but she’d been one moment of agonisingly perfect torture away from breaking point.
The moonlight flickered off the water of the infinity pool and the lake, as if taunting her that for some people, it wasn’t just there for lighting or for show.
“
I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” she muttered to herself.
Too late to realise that it was out loud.
Adrik removed her own glass from her hand, and put them both down on the terrace’s stone wall.
“
I think I liked it better when you were the one leaning against the tree.” He took her hands and drew her around him in a circle, almost like the waltz… before she felt the rough bark press up against her back, and he stepped in, closer than a dance instructor would consider appropriate. “Nowhere for you to go. Tell me what’s wrong.”
His lips brushed her cheekbone, as he spoke.
“Everything…” she breathed at last, weakly.
He slid his hands behind her shoulders, guiding her arms up around his neck, until he rested his elbows against the tree-trunk either side of her.
Any escape route was closed.
“
I said that you wouldn’t be able to handle it, unless you talk to me,” he reminded her.
“
I know.” She dropped her face against him. “And you were right.”
The leaves forming their canopy rustled almost apologetically in the gentle breeze, the only other sound being the occasional disturbance in the water’s surface beside them. She didn’t know how long they stood there, silently embracing, not moving.
“How far do you want this to go?” he asked her, quietly. “The arrangement.”
Can’t we just stay here? Like this?
Filled with the dread of letting her guard down and what the consequences might be, Christie couldn’t second-guess his reasons for asking her about their deal, right at this moment.
Still with her face buried in his shoulder, she felt one of his hands move slowly down her side, and back up again. Soothing.
Needing a response from her.