Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (11 page)

Edward, dear kind Edward, had come a very definite third in his wife’s list of priorities.

Women’s first love and concern would always be their children, if they had them, Anneliese had realised, while men’s would be their women. The two equations weren’t even on the same page.

Had that driven Edward away – always being third in their marriage? How could he not have known that he wasn’t third through choice but because of the rules of simple survival?

Anneliese sighed and stared out at the view that sold the house to her and Edward all those years ago. In the sharp light, Milsean Bay was like a mirror set in a valley that changed from white sand to the peaty green of the fields.

Beyond lay the Atlantic Ocean where seagulls swooped and flecks of white foam whisked up dramatically.
Be careful
, roared the water. It was a lesson that locals never forgot. Tourists took boats out to explore the sheltered bay, and kidded themselves that the waters were safe, only to have to be rescued when their boats were swept out into the fierce tempest of the Atlantic.

Basking sharks could sometimes be seen from the cliffs above the point, where a dolmen stood in grandeur. Anneliese could remember the day she and Edward had taken Beth to see the dolmen when she was small, wanting to instil a sense of pride in her.

‘This is our history, Beth,’ Edward had explained.

And now he’d rewritten their family history. Anneliese didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that. There was no justification, none.

Of course, it didn’t matter to Edward if she forgave him or not. He wasn’t in her life any more.

Izzie’s Manhattan apartment was cold and looked bare after the warmth of the New Mexico hotel. Even her beloved New York was coolly impersonal today, she decided: the cab driver who’d picked her up at the airport hadn’t been classically eccentric, just dull, and it was raining too, the type of flash flood that could drown a person in an instant.

Wet and tired, Izzie slammed her front door shut and set her luggage down, trying to put a finger on the sense of discontent she felt. There was something about the friendliness of the pueblo, a small-town kindliness that Izzie missed from home. She was a small-town girl, after all, she thought, feeling a rush of homesickness for Tamarin. She thought about home a lot these days. Was it because she felt so alone when Joe left late at night and her thoughts turned to her family, the other people who cared for her?

Or was it because she felt a growing anxiety over what was happening: a relationship that was so hard to explain that she hadn’t tried to explain it to anyone, not Carla, not her dad, not Gran.

She stripped off her dripping jacket and only then allowed herself to look at the answering machine. The message display showed a big fat zero. Zero messages.

Horrible bloody machine. She glared at it, as if it was the machine’s fault that Joe hadn’t rung.

Turning on the lamps to give her home some type of inner glow, Izzie stomped into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into the shower to wash away the dust of the mesa. She was becoming obsessed with cleaning herself. Was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a product of tangled love affairs? She’d never had so many showers in her life, always showering and scrubbing and oiling in the hope that, once she was in the shower, the phone would ring. It always used to. But not now. Joe hadn’t phoned in five days.

Five days.

‘I’ll talk to you,’ he’d murmured the morning she flew to New Mexico.

‘You do that,’ she’d murmured back, wishing she could cancel, wishing something would happen so she’d be close to him, because there was a cold, isolating feeling from not being in the same city as him. What was that about?

But he hadn’t phoned.

Not even on the last night when they all let their hair down, when the noise of partying would have made any normal absent lover slightly jealous – which was why Izzie had hoped he’d phone then, just so she’d have the chance to move away from the hubbub and casually say that Ivan was playing the limbo-dancing game, and make it all sound
fabulous
. So fabulous that he’d be jealous of her being there without him…Except he hadn’t played the game. He hadn’t phoned.

Izzie clambered out of the shower, still irritated.

No, a shower wasn’t the right thing. A bath,
that
would be perfect.

She started to fill the tub, poured in at least half of her precious Jo Malone rose bath oil, opened a bottle of white wine and made herself a spritzer for the bath, and finally sank into the fragrant bubbles.

She sipped her spritzer, laid back with her eyes closed and tried to relax. But the blissful obliviousness baths used to bring her, a sinking-into-the-heat-thing that made her forget everything else, evaded her. As ever, since she’d met Joe,
he
was the only thing in her mind.

For that first lunch, they’d met in a small, quirky Italian restaurant in the Village, the sort of place Izzie hadn’t imagined Joe would like. She’d guessed he’d prefer more uptown joints where the staff recognised every billionaire in the city. It was another thing to like about him, this difference.

Over antipasti, they chatted and the more he talked, the more Izzie felt herself falling for him.

He’d got a business degree, then joined J.P. Morgan’s graduate-trainee programme.

‘That’s when the bug hit me,’ he said, scooping up a sliver of ciabatta bread drenched with basil-infused olive oil. ‘Trading is all about instant gratification, and I loved it.’

‘Isn’t it stressful?’ she asked, thinking of losing millions and how she’d have to be anaesthetised if she did a job like that.

‘I never felt stress,’ he said. ‘I loved it. I’d trade, lose some, win some, whatever, I’d go home and go to sleep. People burned out all the time – the hours, the work-hard, play-hard mentality, it got to a lot of them, but not me.’

At twenty-nine, he’d been running his own trading fund, a hedge fund.

‘That’s what it means,’ said Izzie delighted. ‘I never knew.’

The higher up the chain he went, the more risk but also bigger percentages to be earned, until finally he ended up as head of trading for a huge bank. ‘Basically, you’re trying to systematically beat all the markets through math,’ he explained. ‘You name it, we traded it. We were a closed fund.’

Izzie, mouth full of roasted peppers, looked at him quizzically.

‘Means we only reinvested profits and no new investors could get in.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded. This was like a masterclass in Wall Street. How many years had she known all those money guys and never had a clue what they were talking about?

Finally, he and a friend named Leo Guard had started their own closed hedge fund, HG.

‘Eventually, we were doing so well, we changed the fee structure from two and twenty to five and forty.’

‘I add up using my fingers,’ Izzie explained. ‘I have no idea what that means.’

He grinned and handed her some more bread.

‘That’s the typical fee structure: two and twenty means you get two per cent for management and twenty per cent of profits from performance.’

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And you were trading in millions?’

He nodded. ‘Imagine having six hundred under management.’

Izzie hated to look thick. ‘Six hundred million dollars?’ she said, just to check.

He nodded.

‘You’re rich, then,’ she said, hating herself for eating all that antipasti as she already felt full and the main courses would be coming soon.

Joe laughed.

‘You’re the real deal, Izzie Silver,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

‘Honest,’ she said, pushing her plate away. ‘Not everyone likes it.’

‘I do. Yes, you could say I am rich.’

‘You don’t own a super-yacht, though?’ she asked, with a twinkle in her eye.

He laughed again. ‘No. Do you want one, or do you simply want to date a guy with one?’

Izzie smiled at his innocence. ‘You haven’t a clue, do you?’ she said coolly. ‘I am so far away from the type of woman who wants a man with a super-yacht that I am on a different continent.’ She rearranged things on the table, pushing the salt and pepper around. ‘The pepper is me.’ She stuck it at the edge of the table. ‘And the salt –’ she moved it to the other side completely, ‘– is the sort of woman who wants to know a guy’s bank balance before she meets him for a drink. See? Big gap, big difference. Enormous.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just don’t do it again,’ she joked. ‘I have never in my entire life gone out with a guy because of the size of his bank balance. Ever. I did briefly – one date – go out with a guy from next door in my old apartment because he knew how to work the heating, and he’d fixed it for me one day when the super wasn’t around and I went out on a date with him, but that was it. A one-off.’

‘You came out with me because I gave you a ride back to the office, then?’ he teased.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Keep going with this life story of yours. Tell me some personal stuff.’

He was forty-five, his wife was a couple of years younger and they’d married young, kids, really. Izzie was sorry she’d asked for personal stuff.

‘Then, Tom came along quite quickly,’ he said proudly. ‘It all changes then, you know. Do you have children?’

Yes, in my handbag, Izzie wanted to say. ‘No, ‘fraid not. So I don’t know how it changes everything.’

‘Take my word for it, it does. It changes the couple dynamic, you get so caught up in the kids. But, hey, I didn’t come here to talk about my boys,’ he said.

‘OK, what did you come here for?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was here. He was too complicated, there was too
much going on in his life. She needed a rebound guy like she needed a hole in the head.

Besides, he wasn’t even at the rebound stage: he was still in the nursing-the-broken-relationship stage. A man on the hunt for a rebound relationship didn’t necessarily want to talk about his wife and kids.

Pity, she thought sadly. He was lovely, sexy, made her stomach whoop in a way she could never quite remember it doing before.

It just proved what she knew and what Linda had confirmed to her: all the good ones were taken. But he was a charming guy and she could enjoy lunch and mark it down to experience.

‘You still don’t know what I came here for?’ he asked.

Izzie shot him a wry look.

‘I might want to know more about the modelling industry so I can invest in it,’ he continued.

‘You might just want to be introduced to long-legged models?’ she countered. ‘I’m normally quite good at working out if a man is interested in me only as a means to get to the models. Although you –’ she surveyed him ‘– aren’t the normal type. You’re too nice.’

He pretended to gasp. ‘Nice? That’s not a word people usually use about me. I’ve been called a shark, you know.’

‘You’re nice,’ Izzie said, smiling back at him. It was true. For all that he was an alpha male, with all the in-built arrogance and intelligence, he had a solid, warm core to him, a devastatingly attractive bit that said he might be a rich guy but he’d been brought up to take care of people, to protect his family and his woman. Izzie felt a pang that she would never get to be said woman. There would be something wonderful about being with a man who’d take care of her.

‘You might pretend to be a shark but you’re a pussycat,’ she went on, teasing a little. ‘Besides, I know you don’t need me to get you introduced to the supermodels. You’re rich enough to
buy all the introductions you need. Money is like an access-all-areas card, isn’t it?’

‘My but you’re cynical for one so young,’ he grinned.

‘I’m not young, I’m nearly forty,’ she said. If she’d thought he was interested in her, she’d have said she was thirty-nine. ‘It’s creeping up on me every day. I’m going to be over the hill soon.’

A few days ago, it might have been a joke. But since the Plaza and Linda, Izzie no longer felt complacent at the thought of her approaching birthday.

‘You’ll never be over the hill,’ he said in a low voice that made her think, ridiculously, about being in bed with him and having him slowly peeling off her clothes.

‘Are you flirting with me, Mr Hansen?’ Izzie squawked to cover her discomfit. ‘I thought this was a friendly lunch.’

‘Cards on table,’ he said, ‘I am flirting with you.’

‘Well, stop,’ she ordered. ‘You’ve just told me about your wife and fabulous kids. I don’t know what sort of women you’re used to meeting, but I’m not in the market for part-time love. I’ve got through thirty-nine years without dating a man who’s still tangled up with his wife and I’m not planning on starting now.’

‘Do you think I’d be here if my marriage was still viable?’ he asked in a low growl. ‘Give me some credit, Izzie. Yes, I have a wife and kids, but we’re separated and we’re only living together for the sake of those kids. Didn’t you listen to me? I told you Elizabeth and I married young. We haven’t been a couple for years, nobody’s fault, it just was inevitable. We finally agreed a few months ago that it wasn’t working on any level and we needed to formalise things.’

‘Oh,’ said Izzie, waiting. Was he serious? Or was he really still in that awful post-break-up stage where he was trying to convince himself it was over and that a rebound would sort him out?

‘I love her, I’ll always love her,’ he said, ‘but it’s like loving your sister. We’ve had twenty-four years together and counting; it’s a lifetime, but the marriage part is long over. We try to appear together for the younger boys. Tom would be able to cope with it if we split up, but Matt and Josh, no. The New York house is so big, it’s not a problem. Lots of people do it: if you have enough space, you can all exist happily together. I have my life, she has hers. Elizabeth’s parents divorced and she didn’t want our boys to come from a broken home. That’s why we stayed with each other, I guess, but it’s too hard. I can’t do that any more.’

‘What if one of you fell in love and wanted to be with another person?’ Izzie asked, trying to understand this strange arrangement. She felt like she was standing on a cliff and was about to fall. She didn’t want to fall without knowing he was going to be holding his arms out.

‘That’s never happened. Before,’ he added the last word deliberately slowly. ‘If it happened, then everything would have to change.’

‘Do people know about this?’

‘Most of our circle know. We’re not broadcasting it, but it works for us. Matt and Josh are still so young. They think they know it all now they’re twelve and fourteen, but they’re still kids. Now they can see their parents living amicably in the same house, they’ve got stability. That’s our number one priority.’

‘I see,’ she said, thinking with a sudden flash of sadness of her life when she was between twelve and fourteen.

‘Do you?’

She nodded and somehow he instantly picked up on the fact that she’d become suddenly melancholy.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I was thirteen when my mother died,’ she explained. ‘Cancer. It was sudden too, so there was no time. Six weeks
after we found out, she was dead.’ She shivered at the memory. It had taken her years to be able to say the word cancer: it had held such terrifying connotations, like an unlucky charm, as if just saying it brought danger and pain. ‘My father and my grandmother tried to protect me from that, but they couldn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been tough.’

She nodded. Tougher than anyone could imagine. In a way, she’d dealt with it by not dealing with it: locking herself up tight inside so nothing could hurt her, not crying, not talking much to anyone, even darling Gran, who was so devastated herself and was trying to hide it for Izzie’s sake.

Dad, Uncle Edward and Anneliese had all been there for her, ready to talk, laugh, cry, whatever she needed. Only her cousin Beth – quirky, irritable, easily upset – had been her usual self. Beth had actually helped the most in the first year. She’d made Izzie cry one day by screaming at her and that simple act of one person in her life not tiptoeing around her, brought Izzie back.