him.
It helped that the work was so interesting, too. She was excited by her plans for the party, and the fact that she only had three weeks to make it work added a burst of adrenalin. Lucy was determined for it to be a success. It felt as if this was her chance to prove something-to Guy and to herself.
‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ she said when her heart had stopped showing off and was accepting a rapturous round of applause. Breathe in, breathe out. See, she could do it. ‘I’ve been worrying about what to wear.’
The invitation had said ‘black tie’. ‘Which means you go for glamour, big time,’ Meg had said when consulted. They had been through Meg’s entire wardrobe, but in the end nothing had been suitable and Lucy had blown half her salary that lunchtime on an outfit that she would never have dreamt of wearing even a month ago.
‘I want to look like a grown-up,’ she had told the girl in the shop, and she was now the proud possessor of her very first little black dress and the most glamorous shoes she had ever owned.
‘I’m sure you’ll look great,’ said Guy. He paused, looking at her as if he wanted to say something else, but in the end he just told her that he would pick her up at eight.
‘You look fab,’ said Meg admiringly when Lucy came downstairs that night. ‘Guy won’t be able to keep his hands off you.’
The problem was likely to be the opposite, Lucy thought when Guy turned up in a dinner jacket. The most ordinary of men looked better in the austere black and white, and the effect on Guy, who was more handsome than he ought to be at the best of times, was devastating. The sight of him made Lucy’s knees buckle and her stomach looped the loop crazily before it landed, panting and squirming helplessly, deep inside her.
Guy whistled when he saw her. ‘You look all grown-up,’ he said.
But, as soon as she walked into the party, Lucy’s confidence in her appearance evaporated. The little black dress that she had been so pleased with, that had felt such an extravagance, suddenly seemed to have ‘chain store’ stamped all over it. Every other woman there was beautifully dressed, their tiniest accessories costing at least five times what Lucy had paid for her entire outfit.
It was like being in a parallel universe. It wasn’t that the other guests weren’t pleasant, but Lucy was used to parties where everyone was crammed into a narrow hallway or an even smaller kitchen, where the music was so loud that her ears buzzed for days afterwards, and she could barely see who she was talking to, let alone hear them.
At the Sheldons’ party a string quartet played quietly in the background, discreet waiters circulated with trays of canapes and champagne, and the guests conversed in a civilised manner. There was no shouting, but no loud laughter either. Lucy felt Guy sigh beside her.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I want to stand up on a chair and shout obscenities, just to see what everyone would do!’
It was such a relief to know that he found all the tastefulness a touch oppressive too that Lucy laughed. ‘Or run away and jump in a fountain,’ she suggested.
‘Or dance on the table in a smoky bar.’
They smiled at each other, enjoying the images, enjoying each other’s company as the constraint between them was forgotten for the moment.
‘Tell me that the party for the paediatric unit isn’t going to be like this,’ said Guy.
‘It isn’t going to be like this,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s going to be fun.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Something indefinable changed in the air between them as their eyes met, and Guy put out a hand. ‘Lucy-’
‘Guy, how nice to see you!’
Startled, they both turned to see a dark, svelte woman, so beautifully groomed and so elegantly dressed that Lucy immediately felt crumpled.
‘Saskia!’ Guy kissed her cheek, then turned to introduce Lucy. ‘This is Bill’s daughter, Saskia Sheldon. Saskia, my fiancee, Lucy West.’
‘I heard you were engaged,’ said Saskia warmly. ‘Congratulations! You must tell me all about it.’
Lucy let Guy do that, and watched the two of them as they talked. They made a good couple, she couldn’t help thinking, both witty, intelligent, good-looking and charming. She really wanted to dislike Saskia, but she found herself admiring her instead and feeling deeply inadequate in comparison.
It was clear that Saskia was what Meredith would call a serious person. She was clever, attractive, successful, interesting and what was worse, she seemed genuinely nice. As Bill Sheldon’s daughter, she evidently came from the same privileged background as Guy, but Lucy gathered from the conversation that she was a successful corporate lawyer in her own right.
Guy ought to be with a woman like Saskia, Lucy realised dully. She was surprised that he couldn’t see it for himself. How could he look at her standing next to Saskia and not compare them? On the one hand, a mature, capable, beautiful woman, and, on the other, herself: scatty, cheaply dressed, unqualified, not a single accomplishment to her name.
It was time she grew up.
The evening seemed endless. Lucy smiled brightly and chatted and longed for it to be over. It was a huge relief when Guy suggested they go.
‘Are your shoes up for a walk?’ he asked when they got outside. ‘It’s too nice an evening to go straight home, and I could do with a bit of air. Do you mind?’
They headed through Covent Garden and down Long Acre into Trafalgar Square, not touching, not talking much either, but Lucy was intensely conscious of Guy by her side, of his easy stride, of the familiar set of his shoulders and the hard, exciting angles of his face. The fuzzy light from streetlamps cast a protective blur over everything, hiding her expression, and her blood hummed with awareness and a kind of sadness. She couldn’t imagine many more occasions when she would be alone with Guy like this.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Guy said as they walked down the steps in front of the National Gallery. ‘I know tonight wasn’t much fun, but you did brilliantly. You charmed the pants off Bill Sheldon and his crusty old cronies. I was proud of you, even if you’re not really my fiancee.’
‘I felt horribly out of place,’ Lucy confessed. The evening had been a depressing reminder of just how little she belonged in Guy’s world.
‘You didn’t look it,’ said Guy. ‘You looked fantastic.’ He stopped at the bottom of the steps and Lucy faltered to a halt as he turned to face her where she stood, a couple of steps above him so that their faces were on the same level. ‘You still do,’ he said.
His voice, very deep and very low, set Lucy’s heart drumming painfully in her chest, and the look in his eyes made her pulse boom so thunderously that she could barely hear. Trafalgar Square was thronging with people, even at this time of night, and there was a steady stream of traffic heading down to Big Ben, but standing there on the steps Lucy felt as if the two of them were quite alone in the heart of the city.
‘Th-thank you,’ she stammered, only to catch her breath as Guy reached out and put his hands at her waist to draw her down the last step towards him.
‘I’d really like to kiss you,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all night, ever since you opened the door wearing that dress. No, longer than that. Since the last time I kissed you. Can I kiss you again?’
‘I don’t…don’t think that…would be a very good idea,’ Lucy managed with difficulty. She had forgotten how to talk properly. Her voice was staggering up and down the scales, and she kept taking a breath in the wrong places so that her words came out sounding most peculiar.
And all the time Guy’s hands were sliding warmly around, pulling her into his body, making it even harder to think.
‘Why not?’ he murmured, kissing the side of her neck, and she shivered.
‘Because…because…’ Lucy’s senses were reeling and her mind seemed to have given up on the effort required to string a few coherent words together.
His lips were drifting tantalisingly along her jaw. ‘That’s not a good enough reason,’ he said, teasing laughter rippling through his voice.
‘Why kiss me, then?’ she asked unsteadily.
