for a while, hoping to spot the girl. There had been something about that little scene that had seemed…staged. He didn’t believe in it any more than he believed in Belle’s documentary.
Her twitchiness when she’d thought he was looking at her laptop last week, the way she’d jumped when an email arrived, had suggested something else entirely.
Something that might explain everything. That could offer him a measure of hope.
She’d been looking at adoption sites and one answer had leapt into his mind and refused to go away. If Belle had been a teenage mother, had given her baby up for adoption, the child could well be coming up to an age where it was possible to search for, contact his or her birth mother.
Was that what this was all about? Was she waiting, hoping for a call from a child she’d surrendered to a couple who couldn’t have one of their own? How ironic that would be.
And he wondered too about those silent calls.
Her stiff back as she’d determinedly ignored them, the way her brush had stopped working as her invitation to leave a message came to an end, the beep. The slump in her shoulders as there was yet another hang-up.
Had her family disowned her? Did people still do that? It would explain why she never talked about them.
It would explain so much more than that.
But why she’d married him was not the issue.
It was the fact that she’d assumed he would disown her too, once he knew the truth, that she didn’t trust him enough to share her secret, her loss, that was painful beyond imagining.
Awards dinners were not a new experience for Belle. She’d even been nominated before, although admittedly not for the top honour. But arriving on her own, walking down the red carpet into a barrage of flashlights without Ivo at her side was a very new, very lonely experience. One that her agent’s presence did nothing to assuage.
Thank goodness for the dress. Strapless cream silk, worn with a bronze lace evening coat that hung from her shoulders to spread in a demi-train, brought gasps from the crowds gathered on the pavement to see their favourites arrive.
And at her throat she wore the choker of large freshwater pearls, each nestling in its own crumpled gold and diamond cup, that Ivo had bought for her birthday the year before. It was stunningly modern and yet as ageless as the dress she was wearing. She’d forgotten about jewels, would have gone without rather than call Ivo, but he forgot nothing and had sent his chauffeur over on Monday night with the contents of the safe. He clearly expected her to keep them, but she’d picked out what she’d needed for the dinner and sent the rest back, citing security.
The dress, the jewels, were not enough.
In front of the cameras she was fine. It was easy to reduce her audience to one imaginary old lady, nodding off in an armchair. In public, faced with real people, she always expected someone to shout, ‘Fake!’ To expose her. Show her up for what she really was.
Without Ivo’s steadying hand beneath her elbow, Belle had to fight down the urge to run, to escape all those eyes, all those cameras, reach deep for a smile as she forced herself to walk slowly along the carpet, stop to exchange a word with someone she recognised, respond to the calls of the photographers and wave in response to the calls of ‘good luck’.
Call back, ‘Thank you’, when someone shouted, ‘Great hair!’
She even managed to blow a kiss directly into the lens of her own network’s news camera as it tracked her progress.
She told herself that Daisy might be watching.
Ivo, she knew, would not be. Beyond the financial and political news, he had no interest in television.
He had, however, sent her creamy hothouse freesias with a card inscribed simply with his name.
Just ‘Ivo’. Not ‘Love…’, or ‘Thinking of you…’. Not his style. He had, however, written it himself. Had spoken to the florist personally. His PA would have sent a basket of red roses. Miranda, more imaginative, would have scoured the hedgerows for deadly nightshade-but they would have been exquisitely arranged.
Ivo had sent her freesias the morning after their first night together, when they’d made love as if the world were about to end. An odd choice-they were the flowers a man might have sent to his bride-but exotic hothouse blooms would have been too obvious and he had never been that.
She slammed a door shut on that thought.
It wasn’t a romantic gesture she told herself. It was the gesture of a man who, when he wanted something, was prepared to take infinite trouble to acquire it. Knew how to make surrender feel like triumph.
She thought he’d let her walk away, maybe even be glad that she’d taken the decision, but he was there every minute of the day, not just crowding her thoughts, but physically present. Checking that she was coping. Turning up to help her decorate, even. And that confused her too. It was as if he was saying, ‘I’m fine with this…’, ‘I’m just helping you move on…’
It didn’t feel like that, though.
Or maybe it was just that she didn’t want it to be like that.
Bad enough that she’d rushed home on Monday. She might have fooled herself into believing that it was Daisy she was desperate to hear from, but the disappointment when Ivo had not dropped by with her post, when he’d sent Paul with her jewels instead of coming himself, had been just as keen as the lack of a response from her sister.
Ivo was watching the news, knowing that after the serious stuff they’d show the celebrities arriving earlier that evening for the awards dinner. As Belle took Jace Sutton’s hand and stepped from the car, looked up, smiled into a barrage of flashlights, he could scarcely breathe.
Had he expected, hoped that she might look a little lost? As if she was missing him? On the contrary, she looked utterly self-possessed. Stunning. And, as she turned to the camera, blew a kiss, he was the one who was lost…
There was a tap at the library door and, as he flicked off the television, his housekeeper said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Grenville, but there’s a police officer looking for Mrs Grenville.’
The evening was interminable. Ivo’s absence was not remarked upon; in the self-absorbed world of television, Jace Sutton, full of industry gossip, secrets, made a much more entertaining, and useful, contact.
Dinner, endless awards, gushing speeches, washed over her in a blur. When the man who’d given her that first chance-setting her on the path that ended here-at last read out the list of nominees for the final award of the evening-Television Personality of the Year-then opened the gold envelope and smiled as he read out the winner’s name, it took a moment for her to realise that the name he’d read out was ‘Belle Davenport’.
That it was her.
That she would have to walk up to the stage and somehow thank everyone who’d ever so much as made her a cup of tea for making her success possible.
Far too late to regret wanting to prove to herself that she could do this on her own and wish she’d pulled a sickie.
It took a while to make it to the stage. So many hands reached out to her that could not be ignored. Eventually she mounted the steps, took the trophy, turned to acknowledge her audience and the room stilled.
She looked down at the trophy in her hand and blinked back tears that she’d been fighting all evening. ‘This trophy has my name on it, but it isn’t really mine. It belongs to everyone who makes Breakfast With Belle the kind of programme people switch on every day. Susan, who meets me at four-thirty with a cup of Earl Grey and a smile. Elaine, who works magic with make-up. No, honestly, it’s true. I do wear make-up…’ There was laughter. ‘It’s unfair to pick out names, but look at the list tomorrow morning when the titles roll. Every one of them should have their name inscribed on this award, because it takes every one of those people, doing their job behind the scenes to make me look good. It belongs to the people they live with too, their partners who are disturbed at four o’clock every morning and who never get a decent night out because we have to be in bed by nine o’clock every evening.’
‘Lucky Ivo Grenville,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed, giving her a moment to recover.
Ivo, standing unnoticed in the doorway watching her, saw her smile, too.
‘Lucky Belle Davenport,’ she said with feeling when the laughter subsided.
For a moment he thought she’d seen him, but then he realised that she was seeing no one. That she wasn’t speaking for effect, but from the heart.
‘Oh, Belle. What have I done to you?’ he murmured. A waitress was standing within touching distance, but she
