As the kiss became more unruly and ungainly, Hugo pulled her on to the passenger seat with him and they started to laugh as clothes became caught on gear and brake levers and wrists trapped in head rests. Yet still they kissed, totally unable to stop even though their feet kicked plastic stereo speakers and their shoulders crashed against seat-belt fittings. Tash’s bottom knocked the glove compartment open, Hugo’s elbow pressed down on the centre control panel and whizzed windows and sunroof open and shut. Even when the seat flew back six inches, almost giving them both whip-lash, they couldn’t stop laughing and kissing and making up for more lost time than Buck Rogers at a reunion party.
‘I’ve wanted to do this for so bloody long.’ Hugo kissed his way down her throat with delicious short, deft bursts, like a flautist performing scales.
‘And I’ve wanted you to do that for so long.’ Tash squirmed delightedly. She was bobbing around on a great lagoon of lust now. Every new touch sparked off another fast-burning fuse of excitement that fizzed down through her and let off great depth charges in her pelvis.
They were beginning to break up the car like teenage hooligans. As they started to slide limbs against limbs and delve hands into clothes, they twisted around in the confined space, crashing against the dashboard, the side window and the hand brake. The rubber casing spun around on the gearstick, the rear-view mirror smashed against the windscreen, the stereo speaker flew off. Coming up for air and pressing her palms on to the head-rest so that she could stretch back her neck, Tash pushed the padded rest right out of its metal sockets and landed back at Hugo’s mouth again. Laughing, she pressed her lips to his once more. Who needed air? She’d never been able to breathe properly when she was near him anyway, so she’d had a lot of practice holding her breath.
Another lorry rattled by, shaking the car on its wheels. Falling back across both front seats now, Hugo and Tash didn’t even notice. Nor did they notice as they pulled shirts from trousers and coats from shoulders, that the car had started to creep forward very slowly. Starting to touch more skin than cloth for the first time, they had no idea the car was gaining momentum. It was only when, as Hugo’s hands slid into Tash’s waistband and her fingers traced every rib of his chest, there was a loud, shuddering crunch that they looked up. At precisely the same moment two airbags flew out from the dashboard and the steering wheel, like parachutes snapping open at five thousand feet, thwacking Tash in the face and Hugo in the knee.
They had rolled forward and crashed into the road sign. It wasn’t a great impact – the bull bars at the front of the car were barely dented – but this was a super safety-conscious, ergonomically designed luxury penthouse of a car and it pampered its occupants accordingly. Or, in Tash’s and Hugo’s case, squashed them against the plush leather seats with two plump, fabric marshmallows, like contestants in some bizarre X-rated game of It’s A Knock Out.
‘What happened?’ Hugo looked up at her.
‘Well, either the earth moved or the car did.’ Tash removed her face from a taut white airbag and squinted out through the driver’s door window. The hedge opposite had a distinctly different profile from earlier, with a gate in the middle. ‘Yup – the car moved.’
Laughing, Hugo groped around in his discarded coat pocket for his folding binder-twine knife and, having turfed out several packets of Polos, his mobile phone and a great scattering of old receipts, finally located it.
‘Isn’t that a bit rash?’ Tash pulled back her chin. ‘I’m sure there’s an instruction manual around here somewhere which says how to let them down.’
‘I’m sure there is.’ He smiled up at her. ‘But the only thing I never want to let down again is you.’ And, calmly popping both bags, he pulled her back into a long, luscious kiss that left Tash so breathless she wished he’d left one airbag to puncture later – she could use the oxygen.
‘Let’s go back to the forge,’ he breathed as his fingers inched inside her shirt again.
‘We can’t,’ she gasped, shivering with excitement as his thumb brushed over her nipple. ‘Niall said he’d meet me there.’
The thumb was abruptly withdrawn.
‘Why?’
‘To talk about these awful wedding theatrics.’ Tash felt reality crash its way into the car as fast as a juggernaut through the windscreen.
‘What’s so awful about them?’ Hugo was playing with a button on her jeans, his face incredulous.
‘You’re not serious?’
His eyes were drinking her in now.
‘Why not? It seems a perfect solution to me. Admittedly, Niall’s buggered things up totally by leaving it so long – I’m pretty certain Lisette wouldn’t have sued him at all if he’d let you call off the wedding a fortnight ago. But that’s academic.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tash was amazed he was so relaxed about the idea of staging a fake wedding. The prospect appalled her.
‘There’s no way she’d sue Niall,’ Hugo laughed. ‘Think about it – he already gives her practically half his earnings which is bloody criminal in this day and age, especially given how well she’s doing now. There’s not a court in the country that would let through a case brought by an alimony-grabbing divorcee, suing her ex for calling off his second wedding. The tabloids would have a field day.’
Put that way it did seem rather ridiculous. Tash wondered why Niall had made it sound so convincing at the time. His melodramatic, overactive imagination had, as ever, improvised a five-act tragedy from the flimsiest of synopses.
‘But then surely we can just come clean?’ she said excitedly. ‘Why have a wedding at all?’
‘Well, firstly because Lisette’s film is depending upon it, and secondly because it could be bloody good fun.’
‘Fun?’ Tash gulped.
‘I’m sorry, darling. I’m not thinking – you must feel awful about deceiving your family this way.’
Tash was so horrified, she couldn’t speak. This is the man I’ve just declared a lifetime’s love to, she thought weakly, and he’s suggesting I go through with the pretence of marrying Niall for ‘fun’.
‘The trouble is,’ he went on, not seeming to register her momentary loss of faith in him, ‘that Lisette must have realised last week that you and Niall were hitting stony ground faster than a hydraulic drill, and she started to panic. Ironic really that she invested so much in you two getting married – I mean, she can hardly have been pleased about it, but she saw too much profit in the whole thing to be emotional.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, she’d already tried to sway it by telling you that she would only sign her share of Snob over if you and Niall got married,’ he started.
Tash closed her eyes.
‘Don’t worry – I think I can help you on that one,’ he said smoothly. ‘But what I can’t do a hell of a lot about is the fact that she’s now quite prepared to swap one kind of publicity for another. She thinks Niall is going to announce that the wedding’s off tonight, remember? And she’s got half the tabloids queuing up at the Olive Branch as I speak to report on it, although she’s lured them there without breathing a word of her suspicions in case she’s wrong and you really are potty enough to marry Niall. I must say, you’re a bloody good liar, Tash. Even she’s not certain.’
‘Thanks,’ she said weakly.
‘And as her scoop de grâce,’ Hugo went on, running an idle finger up and down the inside of Tash’s thigh, ‘she’s lined up a particularly sordid exclusive to feed to one grubby Sunday rag outlining the full details of Niall’s drinking problem and his affair with Zoe. It’s pretty career-wrecking and there’s a lot of stuff about Zoe’s first marriage which would absolutely crucify her and the kids if it was made public. You know Si Goldsmith’s schizophrenic? And Lisette has written in a lot of balls about Zoe being involved in the porn industry, which is absolute rot. Even your brother gets a mention.’
‘Matty?’
‘Yup – Lisette was party to some sort of confession of childultery between Zoe and him. That’s like adultery but without the sex, I gather. Of course she’s added it in spades. She has them bonking against a shelf of pickles in the larder of all places. If Niall stands up in front of her high-powered guests tonight and tells them that you’re calling off the wedding, Lisette’s little ex-file lands on a hack’s desk before you can say knife in the back. That hack will think all his Sunday exclusives have come at once. Compared to that, posing for
Cheers!
next Saturday seems a pretty small price to pay, doesn’t it?’
‘Christ!’ Tash was reeling. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘It might have escaped your notice, but I’ve been wearing my mobile phone like a piece of costume jewellery this weekend.’ Hugo grinned.
‘Stefan thought you were calling the Samaritans because you were pining for me,’ Tash remembered.
Hugo looked absolutely revolted by the idea.
‘But why go to such lengths to find out?’ she went on hastily. ‘Are you mentioned in Lisette’s story? Is that it?’
‘I made it my business to find out.’ Hugo looked at her, a smile spreading across his face. ‘Because I’ve made it my business to look after you over the past two years, Tash. And, lord, do you take a lot of looking after.’
She bit her lip, suddenly remembering what else he seemed to have done for her. It was the very thing that had made her doubt him and she burned with shame. ‘And does that include buying Lisette’s share of Snob?’
‘Ah.’ Hugo looked awkward. ‘I’ve taken a bit of a gamble there, I’m afraid. You see, I couldn’t handle her terms, so yesterday I told her to stuff the deal. I was all set to reap the benefits when you blew it by telling everyone that you were still marrying Niall.’
‘What were Lisette’s terms then?’ Tash asked.
He took hold of her shirt collar and pulled her towards him. ‘That I wasn’t allowed to do this.’
Lord, but kissing him was fun, she thought headily.
‘Stefan once accused me of trying to buy you,’ he said when he finally broke away. ‘And he was right – what’s that poem Niall’s always quoting when he’s pissed? The one by Sir Walter Raleigh? About throwing things over puddles.’
Tash hid a smile. ‘I think you mean Yeats: “
Had I the world’s embroidered
. . .”’
‘That’s it,’ he nodded. ‘Well, I was so busy throwing the world’s embroidered cloths under your feet that I didn’t realise you had your head too far up in the clouds to notice. Then you gave me your dream – your ride on Snob at Badminton. I was so fucking diabolical to you that day because I suddenly realised how shallow all my efforts had been. There was nothing I could give you that meant that much – I thought maybe buying Snob back for you, but that was just money again. I wanted to give you a dream. I still do.’
‘You just have.’ She looked into his lovely, curling-lipped, blue-eyed face and was almost wiped out by happiness. ‘You’ve told me you love me. I’ve dreamed of that for years.’
Laughing, he reached out a hand to stroke her cheek. ‘You are so incredible. Christ, you are just so beautifully bloody, unbelievably incredible.’
His hand slipped from her cheek to the back of her neck, thumb caressing the hollow of her ear. Then he slowly sat up and pressed his nose against hers, eyes fixed on her imploring.
‘Do you really have to meet Niall at the forge? I want you all to myself for tonight. Can’t we just go straight back to Haydown?’ He kissed her so long and hard on the mouth that Tash practically melted into the dashboard.
‘I owe it to Niall,’ she panted, fighting an urge to pull Hugo on to the back seat and forget all about Niall and the wedding charade.
‘You don’t owe that bastard anything.’ He pressed his lips to her ear.
‘I haven’t told him that I’m willing to go ahead with next Saturday yet,’ she realised with a start.
Hugo gave her a curious look, then shrugged. ‘I suppose it is your family’s big occasion, although I’m certain they’ll enter into the spirit of things once they realise what’s going on.’
Tash thought that was perhaps a bit optimistic.
‘God knows how I’ll be able to pay back all the money Daddy and Pascal have forked out.’ She closed her eyes at the thought.
‘Sell the car.’ Hugo started to kiss her mouth again.
‘It’s your car,’ she murmured. Not that there would be much of it left to sell even if it were hers, she decided, as they started sending the windows up and down again.
‘I was talking about the French banger.’ Hugo kissed his way down her throat once more. ‘That thing’s a death trap. I thought I was going to lose you that day you set out to Scotland in it. I had half a mind to drive after you in the horse-box and bar your way like a French farmer staging a port protest.’
‘I wish you had,’ she sighed.
‘I thought,’ he pulled back and looked her in the eyes, hands holding her face like a trophy, ‘that you would never tell me how you felt – I kept trying to make you, but you ran away.’
‘You never told me how you felt!’ she protested.
‘Christ! We were like two kids saying “you go first”, weren’t we?’ he laughed, eyes lingering on her. She’d never have believed they could look so loving, so completely without scorn. ‘Everyone told me to fight for you – Penny, Stefan, your mother, Zoe – even that hippy brother of yours. The only person who seemed to think I was wasting my time was you.’
‘I’m pretty gutless when it comes to men,’ she confessed. ‘You have to declare undying love to get me to believe you.’
‘Which was why O’Shaughnessy did so well – he declares undying love to every woman he meets. Lisette says it used to drive her wild.’
‘Thanks a bunch!’ she sighed.
‘I’m wildly jealous so I’m allowed to snipe.’ He pulled an apologetic face and kissed her again. ‘I know he adored you – and I wanted to kill him for it. But I also know he changes his mind as often as the shape of his facial hair, whereas I stick to a decision like gum on a shoe. So you have to bloody believe me when I say I love you, Tash, because I fucking well mean it.’