Unbound (28 page)

“Right away?” I’m completely baffled. “Yes, I …of course. I’d love to. But …” I remember the photographers. What if they start following me as soon as I leave the building? Or do they already know what has happened? “I don’t think that’s possible. Because, you see …” now I really wish that nosy Emma woman would disappear, “I can’t really get away from here that easily.”

“I know, I heard about the siege. You do get used to it, Grace. But right now it must be really awful for you, right?”

Her sincere compassion does me so much good that my lips begin to tremble, but I pull myself together quickly because of Emma.

“Yes. But then you know why it would be difficult right now,” I answer.

Sarah laughs. “We’ll sort it out,” she says. “Help is at hand. I’m looking forward to seeing you!” She hangs up with a friendly “see you soon,” and now I’m no longer staring at Emma, I’m looking at my cell instead. Help is at hand?

Someone clears their throat and, when I look up, Alexander is leaning in the doorway.

“Grace, could you come with me for a moment? You’re needed elsewhere,” he says, winking at me. When I realize that he is the saviour Sarah was talking about, I smile too, overcome with relief.

“Of course.”

I hastily reach for my bag, say a brief goodbye to Emma, who watches us go, dumbfounded, and follow him through the hallway into the elevator. But we don’t go up; we go down. All the way down to the underground parking lot.

“We’d better not go out through the main entrance,” he explains, laughing, and, as the elevator doors open, he leads me across the parking lot to a gray Jaguar. Once in the car, he instructs me to scrunch down as much as possible in the passenger seat, so I’m hard to see from outside. He then drives off and we leave the underground parking lot.

The exit is on one side of the building and no one is waiting for us when we drive out. Alexander turns onto London Wall. As we drive past the main entrance to the Huntington Building I take a careful peek out of the window, but luckily they’re not paying any attention to Alexander’s Jaguar. I sit back up in my seat, relieved, as soon as we are out of eyeshot.

Alexander looks at me. “Everything OK?”

I nod, although I’m not sure if it really is.

“I know it can be rather frightening to fall into the hands of the pack,” he says. “But they usually lose interest again pretty quickly, unless you’re a member of the Royal Family. Everything is bound to be looking up by next week, when they get some new stories. You can always rely on Harry for that.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” I say fervently. I could really do without this every day.

We don’t talk much during the ride to Marylebone, probably because Alexander can see how exhausted I am. He parks the car on a side street and accompanies me into the hospital, to the room in the general ward, where Sarah has been transferred. The room is light and clean but furnished with loving attention to detail. Like everywhere else in this exclusive private clinic, it has the feel of a hotel, not a hospital.

Sarah is lying on the bed smiling when we come in. Her face is a rosier color now, and she’s noticeably better, even though the traction cast around her leg still looks rather scary.

“Hello,” she greets us, beaming. Alexander goes to her bedside and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

“Mission accomplished,” he announces, grinning.

Sarah strokes his hand. “Thank you very much! That was very sweet of you.”

“Yes,” I agree. “Thank you so much.” I was so preoccupied that it didn’t occur to me to tell him how happy I was that he got me out of that office. The two of them really saved me. Suddenly, I can no longer imagine how I could have stood it at Huntington Ventures any longer under the circumstances.

Alexander nods at the two of us, then goes back to the door. “I have to make a few more calls and I can only do that from outside,” he says, indicating his cell. But I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to disturb our woman-to-woman talk. Or that Sarah had an agreement with him from the beginning, to leave the two of us alone together.

Once he’s gone, she pats the edge of her bed. “Come and sit with me,” she offers, and I do so.

We look at each other, smiling, for a moment. We’re almost the same age and I feel a connection with her somehow, as if a cable joins us that we can easily send messages along to each other. If she weren’t Jonathan’s sister and we had met somewhere else, I think we would definitely still have liked each other.

“How are you?” we both say at the same time, which makes us both laugh. It does me good to laugh—if only because, since yesterday, I’ve had so little to laugh about.

“I’m very well,” she says, “apart from the fact that I hate lying around here like a useless lump. But, much more importantly, how have
you
been today? Was it really horrible?”

I nod unhappily. “Much worse than I imagined.”

She looks at me compassionately. “I can imagine. The daughter of the Earl of Lockwood has also had the pleasure of dealing with the press once or twice. And, when it comes to Jonathan, they often simply can’t get enough of him.”

I swallow. “I know. He told me.”

She looks serious. “Why didn’t you stay with him, as he suggested?”

My eyes widen with shock. “Did he tell you that?”

She nods. “He was here this morning. Well, why?”

“Because …” How can I explain it? I can’t exactly tell her that I’ve fallen head over heels in love with her brother, but unfortunately he’s only interested in sex and that I therefore don’t feel I can trust him. “I wasn’t sure how things were really going to turn out.” I look at her hesitantly. “I thought it would make everything even worse if I went on seeing him.” “Are you seeing him then?” Sarah asks cautiously. I shake my head unhappily. “But there really was—something going on between you? As the newspapers claimed?” This time, I nod.

“I don’t really know if you could call it that and I think it’s already over, but—yes.”

She’s silent for a moment, looking at me thoughtfully.

“That’s why he was so tense,” she says. “You know that this is a complete novelty for us? My brother has
never
,” she emphasizes the word, “brought a woman with him and introduced her to the family.”

I smile weakly. “That didn’t mean anything—at least, not what your father assumed. Jonathan had found out about our picture in the magazine and wanted to talk to me about it.”

Sarah shrugs her shoulders. “Or protect you from the press and from nosy onlookers.” She looks at me. “Do you care about him, Grace?”

I rack my brains frantically, trying to decide what I should say, but then I just nod. There’s no point in denying it.

“Yes. A lot, in fact,” I confess.

“Well, I ought to warn you about him then.”

I roll my eyes. “Not you too.”

She laughs, but immediately grows serious again. “I love Jon, he’s the best brother anyone could hope for, loving and attentive and always worrying about me, which even gets on my nerves sometimes. And he’s got both feet on the ground, he founded that extraordinary company and has made a big success of it.”

I nod, beaming, because it’s an exact description of the Jonathan I fell in love with right from the start.

“Everything would be great—if he weren’t so closed off when it comes to relationships.” She sighs.

“Why is he like that?” I ask.

Sarah shakes her head. “I can’t fully explain it myself. He’s always been that way, but it got particularly bad after he spent a while in Japan in his twenties and met that guy Yuuko there. Sometimes I think that Japanese man somehow infected Jonathan with his own cold, controlled personality. I haven’t really been able to get through to him ever since. He simply won’t listen to talk about love, let alone about marriage and children—well, you saw what he was like yesterday.”

“Yes,” I say. “He truly hates your father.”

Sarah sighs again, deeper this time. “Because Jon accuses him of being responsible for our mother’s death. But it was an accident,” she explains. “And anyway the two of them have been arguing nonstop about the marriage question for ages now. Dad also voiced a few objections when Jonathan founded his company. All of which means that they don’t have the best relationship—to put it mildly.”

She gives me a meaningful look. “Sometimes I’m really afraid that Jon will never overcome this emotional distance he has with most people. And that’s why I wouldn’t advise you to get involved with him. He’s already made a lot of women very unhappy.” A smile plays about her lips. And then Sarah says something I would never expect.

“But I’ve never experienced him anything like the way he is with you. I think you really might be able to get through to him, Grace. You might be his last chance to get his act together.”

Although this causes the butterflies in my stomach to flutter up again briefly, I look at her unhappily. “After our fight yesterday, I don’t think he’ll want to see me again.”

Sarah grins. “He’s angry with you, that’s true. But when he was here this morning, you could tell how worried about you he is. He called the security company just so that pack of photographers didn’t eat you alive when you arrived at the company.”

“And where is he now?” I ask.

“Since he didn’t want to go into the office today, I assume he’s at home.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

Sarah shakes her head. “I wanted to speak to you alone first.”

A nurse—a different one from yesterday—enters the room, bringing a tray of food. The main course is covered by a domed silver lid with a gold-plated handle, and the dessert has been arranged as if we were in a Michelin-starred restaurant. Wow. It just gets better and better, I think, and decide that if I ever get sick I’d like to be in this clinic too.

“Would you like some?” Sarah asks, but I shake my head. This whole Jonathan thing has affected my stomach, and I’m not at all hungry.

While she’s eating, we don’t talk about Jonathan anymore, we talk about her time in Rome. She enthuses about the paintings she particularly loves and describes herself as a fan of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Sebastiano del Piombo.

“Jon hates it when I talk about their work. It’s not his thing at all,” she explains, laughing.

“Yes, he already told me.”

“See,” she says triumphantly, “he tells you things that most people never find out.”

“What are you writing your thesis on, by the way?” I inquire, because I don’t want to talk about Jonathan and my relationship with him anymore.

She smiles. “On the colors of love.” When I look at her blankly, she giggles again. “That’s how my advisor looked too, when I introduced him to the subject. But it’s very interesting, it really is. I’m investigating the ways in which the painter’s relationship with his model is reflected in the portrait’s color palette. Colors have meanings and painters use them, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, to express certain feelings. I find it …”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, because at that moment there’s a knock at the door and Alexander comes back in.

“I’ve finished and I need to get back to the office,” he says. “Shall I take you back with me, Grace?”

He and Sarah look at each other, but I can tell from their eyes that neither of them thinks it would be a good idea. And I can’t help agreeing with them, so I shake my head.

“No. If that’s …OK?” I look at Alexander hesitantly. He nods, visibly relieved.

“Perfectly OK,” he says, smiling. “You have my official permission to take the rest of the day off.”

He kisses Sarah goodbye on the forehead and wishes me all the best, then he leaves us alone together.

I grin. “What color is your relationship with Alexander, then?” I enquire.

“Red,” she explains at once, laughing. “But unfortunately rather a pale red still. I know he likes me, but he’s so annoyingly reserved. So I’ll have to work on mixing up some new colors now I’m back in London. But I hope we’ll soon produce a much more intense shade.” She grins and I remember Jonathan’s description of her. She does seem determined. But I like her direct, hands-on personality.

“What are you planning to do now?” Sarah asks, as it’s getting time for me to go.

I shrug my shoulders indecisively. “I don’t know.” I definitely can’t go back to the office and I don’t have many other options. “I guess I’ll go back to Islington.”

Sarah opens the drawer of her nightstand, takes out her wallet and hands me a few ten pound notes. “Then take a taxi. Please,” she adds, when she sees that I don’t want to take the money, “I can afford it, believe me.” She smiles a little wryly. “And besides, I was the one who summoned you here, so I’d like to be the one to make sure you get home safely — or wherever you decide to go.” Her blue eyes, which remind me so much of Jonathan’s, look at me seriously. “You’ll think about what I told you, won’t you?”

I nod. Since I’ve been thinking about nothing but Jonathan for days, that shouldn’t be too difficult.

She wishes me good luck once more as I say goodbye to her. One part of me hopes I will see her again.

On the way back to Islington, sitting in the taxi the clinic receptionist called for me, I run through the events of this whole confusing morning in my mind. I suddenly realize that I have to make a decision. No one has actually said it, but there’s a white elephant in the room. As hard as it is to admit it to myself, I know I can’t just continue with my internship as planned. Under the circumstances, that’s completely impossible. I either have to break it off and fly home—or go back to Jonathan and see how things go with him.

If I fly back, perhaps there’s still a slight chance that my affair with him will be seen as just a one-off lapse in judgment. A foolish act that can be blamed on my youth that will forgotten in time. That’s what I should do. It’s the only sensible thing to do.

But the thought of leaving and never seeing Jonathan again hurts me so badly that I can hardly even stand the thought of it. And I can’t get Sarah’s words out of my head. Is it really true, what she told me—do I mean more to him than he would like to admit? I know how loving he can be, seeing the way he is with Sarah. And he’s committed to the people he has professional dealings with—he’s not indifferent to everything; the Hackney project is a striking demonstration of that. So why does he reject the possibility of a relationship? Why are his sister and Alexander the only people who can get close to him? He must have a reason, but he’s clearly concealing it from everyone, even from those he loves.