The small kitchen seemed to darken and Ivo felt something inside him contract.
Belle had always been too big to squeeze into the narrow confines of his cold world. She had always been brighter, warmer, more alive. A place where he could lose himself, forget who he was for a while. When he was with her, he was the best he could be but she deserved more and had, apparently, finally realised that.
It was as if, out there in the high mountains, she had reached into herself, had found the confidence to abandon a perfectly honed image that the public adored, replacing it with a new, more powerful, maturer look to take her into a new decade. As if she’d somehow tapped into an inner strength that made her at once more desirable, less attainable.
She no longer needed a prop. No longer needed him.
Once, all he would have had to do was reach out, touch her and she would have been his but his attempt to stop her from leaving had, in its desperation, been so clumsy that she’d rejected him out of hand.
To bring her back now, to hold on to her, would be selfish beyond belief. And yet he could not let her go. And did not know how to keep her.
If she were a company he’d know what to do. He could interpret the balance sheets, analyse performance, formulate a plan…
‘Someone who will give you what I never could,’ she finished.
‘You give me-’
The words began to spill out before Ivo could stop them.
‘I know what I give you,’ Belle said, cutting him off before he made a total fool of himself.
The world might think them lost in love, but the world knew nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said abruptly, indicating the food she’d made him, an ache as familiar as breathing in his throat. To stay and eat with her in such intimacy, such closeness, was a sweetness, an indulgence he would not, could not permit himself. ‘I’ll have to leave this. I have a meeting.’
Meetings. Mergers. Takeovers. More money. More power. Anything to fill the aching void within him.
Then, unable to just walk away, ‘Is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you?’
That was almost a plea, he realised with a jolt and for a moment he thought he might have got to her, but she shook her head.
Finding it harder to leave than he would have believed possible, he looked around the small, hard-used apartment. ‘You can’t stay here. Give me a day or two and I’ll arrange for somewhere more comfortable for you to live.’
‘Is that what’s worrying you?’ she demanded, taking him by surprise as she flared up at him. ‘That it won’t look good if the world discovers that I’m holed up in a tiny flat near Camden Lock rather than expensively housed in a penthouse in Chelsea Harbour?’
‘This isn’t about me.’ Except that it was. He needed to rid himself of this feeling of helplessness. If he could do something, regain some measure of control…’I just want you to be comfortable. To be safe.’
‘I know you mean well, Ivo-’
Was a man ever damned with fainter praise?
‘-but I need to be in my own place right now.’ Then, before he could argue, ‘I’ll call Miranda and make arrangements to have my things moved from your house.’
Your house…
Not
Somehow they got through the awkwardness of goodbye without touching, using the meaningless words that people say when they don’t know what to say.
‘If you need anything…’
‘I’ll call.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said as she made to follow him to the door, not able to face that moment at the door when to kiss her would be unacceptable, not to kiss her would be impossible.
And while he was still strong enough to resist the tug of some force that seemed to draw him inexorably towards her, just as a current drew a drifting ship on to rocks, he walked away, out of her flat, down the steps and out into the busy streets.
His chauffeur opened the door of the Rolls, ready to whisk him back to his ivory tower, but, on the point of stepping in, he changed his mind. Stood back.
‘Call the office, let my secretary know that I won’t be back today, Paul.’
The man cleared his throat. ‘She rang a few minutes ago, Mr Grenville. Threadneedle Street called to ask where you were.’
He had a meeting at the Bank of England and he’d forgotten. Something that had never happened to him before.
‘Ask her to call and make my apologies, will you?’ Then, ‘I won’t need you until the morning.’ And, without waiting for a reply, he began to walk.
If Belle were a company that he wanted to acquire he’d know what to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
BELLE forced herself to eat. She had not been hungry. Cooking had been no more than a distraction, a focus for her eyes, something safe to do with her hands, but the horror of wasting food was too deeply ingrained to simply tip it into the bin and so she chewed food she could not taste, swallowing down a throat choked with pain.
Just because she knew what she was doing was right-right for her and right for Ivo-didn’t mean it was easy.
Even now his presence filled the small kitchen, marking her space, owning it with a faint trace of something that lingered in the air. The warmth of his skin, the clean scent of perfectly laundered clothes, something that she couldn’t name, but which left her weak with longing, hanging on to the edge of the worktop as if it were a lifeline.
In desperation she grabbed an air freshener from the cupboard beneath the sink and sprayed it around. What had been proved to eradicate the odour of sweaty socks, however, had no discernible effect on the subtler, pervasive essence of Ivo Grenville.
The scent, she realised, was in her head; she would have to live with it until it wore away under the attrition of everyday life. Fading like a bittersweet memory. Or a photograph left in the light.
On autopilot, she forced herself through the motions, rinsing the dishes, putting them in the dishwasher. She wiped down the work surfaces, counting to a hundred before she allowed herself to go to the computer and check the email. Appeasing the Fates with patience, so that the news was more likely to be good. Or maybe just afraid that it wasn’t the one she was waiting for.
The Fates clearly thought she needed a little more time.
It was not news about Daisy but an email from Simone, who was in a bit of a flap about losing the diary she’d been writing all through her trip. Confessing that towards the end it had become more an emotional than physical record of her journey, containing the secrets that had spilled out in the clear quiet of the mountains.
If anyone had found it they all risked exposure.
Maybe it was disappointment, or that she was still aching from the encounter with Ivo, but she couldn’t bring herself to get worked up about it. But Simone was anxious, full of remorse, and Belle responded with reassurance- the diary was undoubtedly in some airport trash compactor and on the way to landfill by now. Then, because the contact restored her, renewed her conviction in the rightness of what she was doing, she scanned one of the pictures from the strip she’d taken in the photo booth, adding:
I’m attaching a picture of the ‘new’ me. As you can see, I’m now a little less Monroe, rather more, well, me, I
