Just Friends (33 page)

“My excuse for what?”

“For your peculiar behavior over the past couple of weeks. You’re worried about something. I can tell.”

“No, I’m not.” Freya stuck her chin in the air. “And there’s been nothing ‘peculiar’ about my behavior.” Apart, she admitted privately, from answering lonely-hearts ads, picking up young men, writing anonymous letters, simulating sex, and pretending to be a Mexican maid.

Jack gave her a look. “You can’t fool me,” he said.

In the end she found herself trying to explain the problem of a single woman of a certain age attending the wedding of her much younger sister—worse, stepsister—without an escort. It was uphill work.

“What’s the problem?” Jack was mystified. “Pick someone up when you get there. I’ve always found weddings a rather fertile hunting ground.”

“That’s because you’re a man.”

“What’s the difference?”

Freya goggled at him. “Who exactly do you think is going to pick me up?”

“I would.” He grinned.

“No you wouldn’t—not when the place is crawling with scrumptious twenty-five-year-olds.”

“Ah. I take your point. But I’d still pick you up.” He smiled winningly. “Speaking of scrumptious twenty-five-year-olds, why don’t you take Little Lord Fauntleroy with you?”

“If you mean Brett, that’s over.” Freya folded her arms primly. “No, I shall go alone. At least that means I won’t be encumbered when I meet Mr. Perfect. Correction:
Lord
Perfect.”

Jack frowned. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not? You just said weddings provided fertile hunting grounds.”

“But then you might stay in England, and start wearing headscarves. I’d never see you again.”

“So? You’re the one who’s talking about leaving New York.”

“Yeah, but—”

“In a few months’ time maybe neither of us will be here.”

Jack looked momentarily shocked by this thought, then gave a hopeless shrug. “You’re right.”

“Mind you, I’m still holding you to my birthday dinner, wherever we are. A bet’s a bet.”

“The eighth at eight.” Jack nodded. “I’ll be there.”

“Unless I’ve already become Lady Perfect.”

“And I’m giving my acceptance speech for the Pulitzer.” He gave a cynical grunt. “Seen any flying pigs lately?”

Freya suddenly felt utterly defeated. She stretched her arms wide and sank her head back to stare into the rusty-black sky, its pale stars almost eclipsed by the city’s electric glow. Once, she had had long blond hair, fizzing energy, a thrilling succession of jobs and men, friends, parties, a beckoning mystery future. Once, Jack had been the handsomest, luckiest man in New York, bursting with talent. And now look at them. Jack was broke, with his career on the skids; and she was a pathetic thirtysomething too scared to go home to a wedding without a man in tow. They had reached the end of the track, last stop on the line.

Eventually she straightened up and gave a deep sigh. Her eyes met Jack’s.

“Who wants to be a millionaire?” he sang softly.

“I do,” answered Freya.

They smiled.

Suddenly Jack was jabbing her arm, repeatedly and painfully, with one finger. “I’ve had a brilliant idea,” he announced.

“Stop that!” She swatted his hand.

“Listen.” He pulled his chair close. “You want someone to come to this wedding with you, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ten out of ten.”

“Someone respectable?”

“Yes.”

“Good-looking?”

“Definitely.”

“Whom you like?”

“Preferably.”

“And male.”

“Ha ha.”

“Well, then.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

“Well, then what?”

Jack raised his eyebrows as if the answer was obvious. She raised hers, to show him it was not.

He spread his hands.
“Me.”

Freya stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

His face fell. “I hate the way you always say that. What’s so ridiculous?”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “You don’t understand. I’m supposed to be going with a
boyfriend
.”

“So? Why couldn’t I pretend to be your boyfriend? It’s only for a couple of days.”

“Four days. Thursday through Sunday. We’d be sharing a room. You’d have to hold my hand, and gaze into my eyes, and pretend you thought I was wonderful.”

“But that’s my best thing!”

“You wouldn’t be able to chase after the bridesmaids, or get drunk, or contradict me all the time.”

“Who would dare to contradict you?”

“And you’d have to be charming.”

“I
am
charming! ‘Excuse me, Lady Basset-Hound, I believe this is your lorgnette.’ ”

“Oh, Jack . . .” Freya couldn’t help giggling.

“Well, why not?” he demanded. “It would be fun.”

“Look at your clothes.”

“I have real clothes—I just don’t wear them.”

“And your hair.”

“But my hair’s always been like this!”

“Exactly.”

“What if I cut it . . . just for you? Snip, snip . . .”

He had switched that Southern charm up to maximum. Freya tried not to smile. “You just want an excuse to escape your problems,” she said severely.

“I want to help you.”

“Do you?”

He reached out and caught her hand in his, startling her. “We could help each other,” he amended.

His mouth curved in a familiar, teasing smile. But his blue eyes were serious. She felt his palm against hers, warm and dry, and the firm grip of his fingers.
Jack,
she thought.
Jack? . . .

Freya disengaged her hand. An irresistible impulse gathered inside her, as if she was balanced on the very tip-top of the Cyclone, waiting for that terrifying, thrilling swoop into the abyss. Her eyes met Jack’s.

“You’re on.”

CHAPTER 22

“Nice bed.”

Jack bounced up and down on the four-poster, dislodging a shower of small particles from the tattered hangings. He peered upward into the dusty gloom. It wouldn’t surprise him if an entire family of mice lived up there—had lived there for generations, since the days of Queen Elizabeth I. Sir Mouse and Lady Mouse, and their aristocratic little mouselets. He pictured their coat of arms: rat rampant on a wedge of Cheddar cheese, with a Latin motto—
In bedum non catum.
He lay back, chuckling softly. That pink drink Freya’s father had given him was powerful stuff.

“Glad you like it.” Freya unsnapped the catches of her suitcase. “You’ll be able to admire its finer points from over there”—she pointed—“on the chaise longue.”

Jack raised himself on one elbow to squint at an angular piece of furniture that looked like a cross between a prison bunk and an old-fashioned dentist’s chair.

“Aw, come on. I’m way too tall. Do you want to show up at this wedding with the hunchback of Notre Dame?”

“Not
noder daim
. You’re in Europe now.
Notrrre dahm
is the favored pronunciation. And stop making that horrible face.”

“Oui, madame. But I’m not sleeping on that thing.”

“One of us has to. We’re only
pretending
to be a couple.”

“That’s a relief. I don’t know how much more of this warm togetherness I can take. Hah! Missed!”

Jack reached down over the edge of the bed to retrieve the missile Freya had thrown at him: one of her shoes. (Eight pairs she’d brought with her—
eight!
—as he’d discovered when he’d offered to carry her suitcase at the airport and almost got his arm yanked off.) He tossed it over to her. “Here you go, Cinderella.”

Without comment she put it in the massive carved wardrobe that leaned forward at an alarming angle on the bedroom’s uneven floor, and continued unpacking. Jack decided to do the same.

She’d been like this, wound tight as a spring, ever since they landed. For the first hour or so of the long drive to Cornwall, he’d barely glanced at the passing landscape; his eyes kept straying to the speedometer of the hired car, which scarcely dropped below ninety. Freya drove the way she did everything—fast, defiantly, with an edge of danger. “Wiltshire,” she’d announce, as they flashed down the three-lane highway, “Somerset . . . Devon.” She hadn’t seemed tired. When he had grumbled mildly about his sleepless night in the cramped, economy-class seat, she told him firmly that she didn’t believe in jet lag. He hadn’t dared to mention the word
lunch
, and finally took refuge in sleep.

He’d woken in midafternoon to the astonishing sight of a line of high-tech windmills cresting the hill before them, arms flailing, like iron monsters sprung from the pages of H. G. Wells. Freya announced that they were now in Cornwall. Jack put on his glasses and looked about him with interest. He had visited England a couple of times, but had not strayed far beyond London and the usual tourist circuit; he had never visited real English people in a real English home. At first sight, Cornwall seemed slightly spooky, a mixture of forbidding moorland and grim, granite towns. Signposts pointed the way to places called Ventongimps, Zelah, and Goonhaven. Once he spotted a tall smokestack poking eerily out of a scrubby field, which Freya told him was the relic of an old tin mine. Up and down they swooped, on a smooth, gray ribbon of road. Gradually the landscape softened into a patchwork of spreading meadows grazed by piebald cows. They passed small, quiet villages, each with its pub and square church tower. Hand-painted signs at the roadside advertised trekking, campsites, pick-your-own strawberries, Village Day celebrations, fresh mackerel and, in one intriguing instance, “Bitches—free to good home.” Trees became scarcer and more stunted, buffeted into cockeyed shapes like umbrellas blown inside-out. Spiky, palmlike plants sprouted unexpectedly in front gardens—more Florida than England. Mile by mile, the horizon seemed to flatten itself and recede into a silvery haze. Jack felt expectancy bubble within him; they were approaching the sea.

“Next hill,” said Freya, reading his mind, and sure enough, at the next rise in the road, there was the heart-lifting sight of a sweep of sparkling water, darkening to slate blue. She glanced over at him and smiled, as if she had magicked it forth herself.

Soon afterwards they turned off the main road and entered a maze of lanes that plunged into woody ravines and skirted narrow, secret creeks. Tangled hedgerows and white lacy flowers lined their path. New York seemed unimaginably far away. Jack rolled down his window and sniffed the sweet English air. A high midsummer sun shone out of a blue sky. He took it as a good omen.

At a dip in the road, Freya turned into an entrance flanked by battered stone posts. “This is it,” she said, and gunned the car up a narrow lane. Trees grew thickly on either side, gnarled and bulbous with age, or rising smooth and gray as elephant hide, their leaves forming a canopy that filtered greeny-coppery light onto the potholed track. They followed this for at least half a mile, during which Jack began to revise his mental image of “the big, old house” Freya had sometimes mentioned. She had never said much about her folks, though on the plane she had briefed him sketchily about her “ghastly” stepfamily. At length they shot out of the woods and rattled over a cattle grid. Open pastureland dotted with sheep sloped away on either side and tucked itself into dark folds of wood. Dead ahead, shaded by elegantly clustered trees, lay a large manor house of gray stone. It looked very old—four hundred years? Six hundred? Jack’s eyes widened. There were decorative gables romantically covered in creepers, and a huge central window, two storys high, studded with small panes of glass like a panel of diamonds. A forest of brick chimneys sprouted from an undulating roof of weathered slate. He could see a scatter of outbuildings—a clock tower—the cupola of something that looked like a small church.

“You never told me you lived in a place like this.”

“I don’t. I live in New York. This is my stepmother’s house.”

It looked like the sort of place where faithful retainers lined up at the front entrance to greet Her Ladyship as she descended from her carriage—but obviously he’d been watching too many costume dramas. In real life, Freya whizzed around the back, through a stone archway and into a courtyard with dusty cars randomly parked, a washing line strung with dishcloths, miscellaneous piles of old bricks, a lopsided tub of geraniums, and a few scurrying chickens. The slam of car doors summoned no grander personage than a waddling black Labrador, whom Freya introduced as Bedivere.