Little Lady Agency and The Prince (3 page)

But before I could recover my jaw, he turned round and slapped a hand over his stomach.

‘What are you staring at?’ he demanded, turning away from me again so I couldn’t see whatever it was he was so self-conscious about. ‘Haven’t you ever seen an appendix scar before?’

Mel!
I told myself, with a brisk mental shake. That was the trouble about having a boyfriend you saw only at the weekends. By mid-week, I could almost fancy Jeremy Clarkson.

‘Bath’s about to overrun!’ I carolled. ‘Use whatever you want! I’ll make the tea!’

And I turned on my heel and scuttled back to the kitchen.

Nelson never lingered in the bath, and after ten minutes he plonked himself down at the kitchen table. He was now dressed in a pair of jeans and a blue shirt, and towelled his damp hair as I pushed a mug of tea towards him.

‘What’s the big rush?’ I asked, hoping he’d stay long enough to put dinner on.

Nelson stopped towelling and looked up. ‘
Dur
. I’m taking your friend Jossy Hopkirk out for dinner. We’re going to a new organic pub in Islington. Come on,
you
set up this date.’

‘Oh, yes.’

In an effort to kick-start Nelson’s sluggish love life, I’d turned to my bulging address book and set about creating a programme of blind dates for him, in the hope that he too might get to enjoy the delights of couplehood currently experienced by me and Jonathan. I had high hopes for Jossy. She had an advanced driving certificate and worked for a donkey charity. Competent parking and animal aid featured high on Nelson’s Top Ten requirements in female company.

‘Is that a new shirt?’ I asked curiously. Nelson seemed to be making more effort than normal – a haircut, fresh shirt, the trip up to north London . . .

‘Ah, you noticed!’ he said. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Good!’ I said. ‘That’s . . . good.’

‘You like it? It’s the right colour?’

‘Yes. It’s great.’

I wasn’t sure what this was about. Nelson normally spurned my help in clothes shopping. He was the one bachelor I wasn’t allowed to fix up.

‘Suppose I should really get you to give me a final check-up,’ he went on, as if he were reading my mind. ‘Sort out my wardrobe, and all that. Before you . . . go.’

‘Before I go where?’

‘To Paris.’ He ran a hand through his hair; now drying in wheat-coloured spikes. ‘Have you sorted out a date yet? For your big move?’

I blinked. ‘No. Not yet.’

For the second time that evening we stared at each other in silence.

‘I expect I’ll be discussing that with Jonathan this weekend,’ I said, trying to sound excited.

I mean,
of course
I was looking forward to setting up home in Jonathan’s gorgeous Parisian apartment, and it wasn’t like we’d never be in London again, but leaving Nelson and the flat I’d lived in for so long was something I hadn’t spent too much time dwelling on.

Nelson made a really obvious attempt to look jolly. ‘Yes, well, I need to know, so I can aim to get one of these blind dates of yours moved into the spare room,’ he said. ‘Place wouldn’t be the same without tights over the radiators and nine different shampoos cluttering up the bathroom.’

‘And then there’s my rent!’ I said, in an equally lame jokey tone. ‘I know it’s subsidising your organic-food addiction.’

He pulled a face. ‘And what if she doesn’t like
eating
?’

I felt a terrible pang in my chest, at the idea of Nelson patiently putting up with some dreadful bimbo’s faddy diets and yappy friends talking over
Time Team
. We’d come to an understanding over the years.

‘I’ll miss you, you grumpy sod,’ I blurted out, grabbing his hand over the table.

‘I’ll miss you, you daft baggage,’ he said, squeezing it.

The phone rang on the wall next to me. It was half six, the time Jonathan called me from work every day. His time-keeping, like everything else about him, was meticulous.

I squeezed Nelson’s hand apologetically. ‘That’ll be Jonathan. We’ll talk later, OK?’

Nelson looked as if he were about to say something, but then shoved his chair back. ‘Right. I should get a move on.’

‘You look v foxy, by the way,’ I added, reaching for the phone. ‘I hope Jossy’s made as much effort!’

Nelson mumbled something I didn’t catch, but I wasn’t really listening. My skin was tingling with delicious anticipation as I picked up the receiver and reeled off our number.

‘May I speak with Mrs Melissa Riley-Romney-Jones?’ enquired a smooth American voice.

I sighed with pleasure and leaned against the kitchen wall. ‘Not quite yet. In a month or two?’

‘Not sure I can wait that long, Mrs Romney-Riley-Jones,’ said Jonathan.

I didn’t care what order the names were in, I would never ever get sick of hearing any of them.

2

Jonathan Riley was the first man I’d ever dated who actually seemed finished.

That wasn’t just because he had a great job, or because his coppery hair was always perfectly groomed, and his suits were handmade. It wasn’t even because he was, in my opinion, quite knee-wobblingly gorgeous, with his strong cheekbones, and a devastating smile that crinkled up his grey eyes. Jonathan had a special kind of polish, the sort you see in those Golden Era studio portraits of Hollywood stars. Nelson could snort all he liked about stuffed shirts, but I’d never seen Jonathan lose his temper or be rude, and he quite literally swept me off my feet in our fairy-tale courtship of dinner-dances and midnight taxi rides round London. I’d almost stopped believing that sort of romance was possible.

However, while it was easy to be poised and stylish in smart Parisian cafes, in the company of a man who made me feel like Grace Kelly, there was something about the sight of Romney Hall’s wrought-iron gates that brought out the quivering adolescent in me.

And that’s where we were right now. The happy hours since I’d picked up Jonathan from Waterloo station had flown all too quickly, and suddenly we were walking away from the safe haven of the car, and towards the ivy-covered dragon’s den.

‘Now, remember, darling,’ I said, ‘if you really can’t bear another moment, wink at me, I’ll pretend to faint and we’ll just have to go home. I’ve done it before. People are always passing out at my parents’ parties, for one reason or another. Leaving in a fury. Or a taxi.’

Jonathan raised an eyebrow with an expression of adult amusement that calmed the butterflies cavorting around my insides, and replaced them with an altogether more pleasant fluttering sensation.

‘It’s only forty-eight hours,’ he said, putting his arm around my waist as we crunched across the gravel drive. ‘And I have met your family before, remember? It won’t be a shock.’

‘They never fail to shock me, and I’ve known them for twenty-nine years,’ I replied dourly. My family was held together by a series of long-running disputes and grudges, and so far Jonathan had managed to remain impressively neutral in the face of shameless flattery and pitching. Although Daddy was an MP, the rest of them were just as bad.

‘Well, OK, if they’re vile to me this weekend, I’ll take it as a sign that I’m part of the family. It’ll be a compliment!’

‘Hmm,’ I said, checking the cars. They were all there: Daddy’s Jag, Mummy’s battered Mercedes estate, Granny’s little red sports car, some vast American SUV that I assumed belonged to my sister Emery and her husband, William, and a black BMW X5 with blacked-out windows and Swedish plates, which could only belong to my other sister, Allegra, unless Mummy had engaged a particularly Gothic caterer for this evening.

Allegra was married to a Swedish art dealer, Lars, and was meant to live in Stockholm. We still saw quite a lot of her, unfortunately.

I paused as we reached the huge oak front door, and suddenly grabbed Jonathan’s hands in my own gloved ones.

‘I just wish they’d be normal,’ I wailed urgently. ‘I just . . . Don’t let them put you off marrying me!’

‘Oh, honey! Don’t be ridiculous!
Nothing
could do that,’ said Jonathan. ‘Anyway, it’s a celebration,’ he went on. ‘How rude do you think they’d have to be to stop me from marrying you?’

‘Well . . .’

Jonathan cut off my fifteen examples by wrapping his arms around me and kissing me with considerable passion. Once I’d got over the shock of actually snogging against my front door, something I’d never
ever
done, I melted happily into him, and would have carried on enjoying the delicious tingle of Jonathan’s hands investigating beneath my new jacket, when the front door opened and we staggered back in shock.

‘Oh,
God
,’ drawled Allegra, folding her arms across her chest so the trumpet sleeves of her latest black dress hung down witchily. ‘It’s Romeo and Juliet.’

Blushing furiously, I scrambled to adjust my clothing. Jonathan merely shook out his jacket sleeves and stepped over the threshold into the hall.

‘Allegra, lovely to see you,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek.

‘Hmm,’ she replied non-committally.

I steeled myself as I followed him in. It was never lovely to see Allegra. She had the dress sense of an operatic undertaker, and the sort of social manner that would have made her right at home in the more cut-throat days of the Roman Empire.

‘
Bonjour
, Allegra,’ I said, kissing her alabaster cheek. ‘
Ça va?
’

‘Hello, Mel,’ she replied. ‘Don’t tell me you got that shirt in Paris?’

‘Yes,’ I said, beaming.

‘
Really?
’ She frowned in disbelief.

‘Yes!’ I protested. ‘From Samaritaine!’

‘I don’t know
what’s
going on with French fashion these days,’ she said, stalking back to the drawing room.

‘Ignore her,’ muttered Jonathan, as I spluttered impotently. ‘You look adorable.’

I thought we could creep into the drawing room without a big scene, since Daddy was standing with his back to the door, holding forth about something, but I’d reckoned without the eyes in the back of his head.

‘. . . now where you’re going wrong, William, is listening to the other chap’s opinion. Schoolboy error! Distracts you from your own, ah,
Melissa
, nice of you to drop in at last!’

My father spun round with his usual vulpine grin of welcome, and I took an involuntary step backwards.

On a good day, Daddy wasn’t a bad-looking man, if you went for the ghastly silver-fox type of Englishman, but he seemed to have undergone a makeover of quite Trinny and Susannah-ish proportions. His grey hair was teased into youthful fullness, the bags under his eyes had vanished, and his skin had taken on a Caribbean glow not usually associated with the damp native climate of the Cotswolds.

As his welcoming smile widened into a veritable rictus, I noticed numbly that he’d also invested in a whole new set of teeth that made even Jonathan’s gleaming American dental work look rather shabby.

I assumed that was why he was smiling so much. My father liked to wring full value out of everything.

‘And you’ve brought Justin with you, I see,’ he went on, as I searched frantically for the right thing to say.

‘
Jonathan
,’ my mother corrected him, shimmering forward, her long white hands extended. ‘As you very well know. Ignore him, darling, he’s just trying to be foul. Although you never really have to try too hard, do you, Martin?’ She clasped Jonathan’s arms and beamed up into his face as if he was the only guest she was really bothered about. ‘
So
glad you could come!’

‘Belinda, not even a strike on the Channel Tunnel could keep us away,’ he replied, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘I’ve been looking forward to it all week.’

Mummy liked Jonathan. He knew how to be really charming and still sound like he meant it.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said, turning to me, and squinching up her face in an air kiss. She seemed to be lightly tanned too. I wondered if my father had done a two-for-one deal at the village salon. ‘Braveheart’s been missing you,’ she added accusingly.

Mummy was something of a dog lover, and it seemed only logical when Jonathan first moved from New York that he should park his West Highland terrier with her while he found somewhere to live in Paris. From what I’d seen of him lately, he was even less keen to move to France than me, living as he was in the lap of doggy luxury.

But before I could start apologising, my father grabbed Jonathan by the shoulder – no mean feat, since Jonathan was at least four inches taller.

‘Now then!’ commanded Daddy. ‘I’ve been waiting to show you something!’

Jonathan looked at me with a faint flicker of trepidation.

‘It’s just the sword,’ I whispered. My father claimed to have ‘acquired’ the sword that executed Anne Boleyn. He liked to show it to potential sons-in-law. The first time William had visited as Emery’s official fiancé, he’d actually taken it down and started swinging it about, nearly decapitating Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper, which, I think, shocked my father into signing whatever ghastly prenup William’s lawyers had drawn up.

‘Come on!’ barked my father. ‘Just time to have a quick trip up to the armoury before dinner!’

I patted Jonathan on the arm. One of the billions of things I loved about Jonathan was that he refused to be intimidated by my father.

‘Great!’ said Jonathan, in a cheerleading voice. ‘Bring on the, er, armaments!’

My father – or, rather, the TV actor who seemed to be playing my father – clenched his jaw and led the way out of the drawing room.

‘Lars? William?’ I looked at my brothers-in-law hopefully. ‘You’re not going to join them?’

Both shook their heads rather too quickly.

With Jonathan gone, I dutifully made the kissy-kissy hello rounds: first, Lars, who, like Allegra, was dressed in head-to-toe black. I steeled myself to kiss Lars. He always had worrying bits of food detritus in his thick black beard, and smelled vaguely of glue. Every time I saw Lars and Allegra they seemed to be in the middle of some endless row, which they kept on the boil like a pan of everlasting stock.

‘Hello, Lars,’ I said, aiming a kiss at a clean bit of beard. ‘You’re looking very well.’