Too Close Read online

  ‘Holly Bourne is not an old girlfriend,’ Nick said quietly.

  ‘More of a bête noire from what I’ve heard,’ Phoebe said. She grinned, reached up and ruffled what was left of her father’s reddish hair, so close to her own shade. ‘Don’t be so stuffy, Dad.’

  ‘Your father’s quite right,’ Kate said. ‘It was my fault for mentioning her.’

  ‘Oh, pooh, Kate,’ Phoebe said. ‘Nina doesn’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Nina said, meaning it. Nick had told her all about Holly Bourne, all about the childhood girl-next-door who had turned into a grade-A troublemaker.

  ‘Let’s go eat dessert.’ Nick got out bowls and spoons. ‘Someone bring the fruit?’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ Nina picked up the platter.

  ‘Isn’t that dish too heavy for you, Nina?’ Ford shot Nick a look, but his son-in-law was already halfway through the door.

  ‘It’s not heavy at all, Dad. Stop fussing.’ Nina went after Nick, Kate following with a jug of cream.

  Ethan Miller put down the Chronicle and looked up at Ford. ‘Something worrying you, William?’

  ‘Only my daughter’s health and happiness,’ Ford answered.

  ‘Dad, why are you making such a big deal about nothing?’ Phoebe was mildly exasperated.

  ‘I regard your sister’s health and happiness as a very big deal.’

  ‘As we all do,’ Ethan told him easily, and left the kitchen, seeking a lighter atmosphere. Ethan hated tension.

  ‘You have to stop this, Dad,’ Phoebe told her father quietly.

  ‘Stop what exactly?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what. Trying to find fault with Nick when we both know that Nina hasn’t been this happy in years.’

  ‘All the more reason to want to protect her, in my book.’ Ford was only fifty-two, but his face had grown craggy with years, and his green eyes, whenever he was angry or suspicious, came close to disappearing between furrows of creasing skin. ‘Considering what she’s been through.’

  ‘What she’s been through is exactly why you shouldn’t spoil today. They’ve both longed for this, Dad – Nick just as much as Nina.’

  ‘It’s not Nick’s longings I care about,’ Ford said harshly.

  Phoebe’s nose wrinkled with frustration. ‘You can be so unreasonable.’

  Ford glanced towards the door. ‘Nick Miller has a past, Phoebe.’

  ‘Nina has a past, too, Dad,’ Phoebe pointed out. ‘You don’t catch Ethan and Kate making nasty remarks about her.’

  ‘I’d like to see them try.’

  ‘They wouldn’t,’ Phoebe said, still keeping her voice low. ‘They love Nina. We all love Nina. Especially Nick.’

  ‘So why did he say he wants this Holly person as far away as possible?’ William Ford returned to that subject like a dog to a smell. ‘Man feels like that about a woman, she has to mean something to him.’

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ Phoebe said, ‘all Holly Bourne ever meant to Nick was aggravation.’ She linked her left arm through her father’s, and pushed him towards the door. ‘Now come on, Dad, I want to go and celebrate my niece-nephew-to-be.’

  ‘My younger daughter’s telling me to mind my own business,’ Ford announced loudly as they entered the living room.

  ‘It might be about time, Dad.’ Phoebe grinned.

  ‘Both my daughters are my business, Phoebe Ford,’ William said, clearly. ‘And you and everyone else had better remember that.’

  Nina, sitting on the linen-covered sofa beside Nick and licking chocolate ice cream off the end of a spoon, turned to her husband and saw her own strain mirrored in his eyes.

  ‘Take no notice, baby,’ she said, softly, intimately, blocking out the rest of the family. It was a small gift they shared, a quiet, easy ability to soothe one another, to tune out of external disunity and tune in to each other instead. ‘Dad’s just being Dad.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nick said.

  ‘No, it’s not.’ She lowered her voice even further. ‘It’s very wrong of him, but we’re okay, and that’s what matters to me.’

  Nick looked back into her eyes, loving her more than ever.

  ‘Me, too,’ he said.

  Across the room, Phoebe took a cherry from the fruit platter and smiled at them both.

  William Ford frowned.

  Chapter Two

  I feel such guilt sometimes when I look into my wife’s eyes.

  If only, I wish, more often than I can count, I had told her everything about Holly and me. If only.

  Nina trusts me. She believes she knows all there is to know about me. She told me everything about herself, every fragment of joy and all the many boulders of pain that might so easily have crushed her.

  I told myself that because she had already been through so much, it would be unfair to burden her with my own troubles. I told her what I wanted her to know. But maybe if I had shared the whole story, the whole truth, I wouldn’t have my bad dreams now. Maybe I wouldn’t wake up in Nina’s arms and feel so afraid.

  I have so much more now than I ever imagined I could have. I have my wife and our child on the way. I have Phoebe, her sister. I have our splendid Edwardian house in Pacific Heights, with its pale primrose-and-white painted clapboard walls and its generous light-bringing windows and high ceilings. Room to breathe, room to paint. I paint the portraits I always have – and these days I make decent money out of doing so – and more remarkable still, thanks to Nina and Phoebe, I even have my whole new fantasy career, complete with Hollywood movie contract.

  Most of all, I am free of Holly Bourne.

  So why am I still so afraid, in the midst of all this new-found happiness? I guess because I’m just so scared of losing it. Not the career part, nor the home. I’m scared of losing Nina, or the baby.

  Didn’t some Greek writer say something about the fear of pain being worse than pain itself? I don’t agree with him. Nothing could ever be worse than losing Nina.

  I often grow impatient with myself. It’s been six years. It’s over. That part of my life – the Holly part – is finished. Gone. There’s no sense in dwelling on it, no reason to share the darkness with Nina.

  Yet I still feel shame when I see the trust in her eyes.

  And I still feel afraid.

  MARCH

  Chapter Three

  Holly Bourne sits on the banquette beside her lunch date in Le Cirque on East Sixty-fifth Street in New York City, looks into his eyes and smiles at him. Her warmest, sweetest smile. Holly has rich brown hair which she wears tied back or pinned sleekly up when she is at the office or in court. Today is a Thursday, but she has taken the afternoon off and her hair, this lunchtime, cut sharp and blunt, hangs one inch above her shoulders.

  Jack Taylor, successful, thirty-eight-year-old LA lawyer – more than accustomed to dealing with gorgeous women in his everyday life – is feeling the onslaught of another of those composure meltdowns he’s been experiencing regularly since meeting Charlotte Bourne last fall on another trip to New York.

  ‘You’ve shaken me, Charlotte,’ he tells her now. ‘I hardly know what to say.’

  ‘Say yes.’

  Though the first name on her birth certificate and passport is Charlotte, until she graduated from law school, passed the New York State bar exam and went to work for Nussbaum, Koch, Morgan on Wall Street, everyone in her world always called her Holly. Her parents named her Charlotte after her maternal grandmother, but almost from the moment of her Christmas Day birth onward, Holly – her middle name – was what they called her, what seemed to suit her, what stuck. She always liked the name well enough – Lord knew she thought of herself as Holly – but on the day of her first interview with Nussbaum, Koch, Morgan, she made the decision that Holly wasn’t the right name for a sharp, ambitious lawyer heading for the top. Charlotte was more sober, more appropriate; a name to be trusted, relied on.

  Jack Taylor agrees. Jack Taylor – whom Holly knows to be the farthest thing imaginable from
a pushover in his professional life – has agreed with most things she has said since their first meeting six months ago.

  ‘I may hate myself for asking you this question?’ Jack says, ‘but have you really thought this through?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ she answers in her lowest, calmest voice. ‘I think everything through, Jack, always. As I’m sure you do.’

  ‘I guess I just find it hard to believe my luck,’ Jack says candidly. ‘I mean, here you are, this stunning, brilliant, warm, sexy lawyer with a great job and hot prospects right here in Manhattan, and you tell me you’re willing to give it all up to move to LA for me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Holly confirms. ‘I am.’

  ‘But how can you be sure? We’ve had so little time to be together.’

  ‘I’ve had months to think about it,’ Holly says simply. ‘And I’m sure that I’m in love with you.’ She frowns – just a tiny furrowing of her fine, arched, dark brows. ‘That certainly can’t be such a hard concept for you to take in. You must be used to women falling in love with you.’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘You should be. You’re a very attractive man.’

  Something gloriously like joy is stirring inside Jack’s heart. She is such a galvanizingly, touchingly driven young woman, and the fact is that one look from her grey, cool eyes drives him almost as crazy as her wondrous mouth and her gifted, instinctively skilful fingers.

  ‘You must know you are,’ Holly says.

  She reaches for his hand, places it, for just a moment, on her warm thigh, then moves it back onto the banquette and looks him over appraisingly. Jack Taylor may not be George Clooney, but he is a very nice-looking man, with beautifully kempt wavy fair hair, blue eyes, a straight, clean nose and a good mouth. He looks like many of the successful, polished attorneys in New York City, except that Jack, hailing from California, has a suntan. Holly has not yet made up her mind whether she is going to establish a tan when she moves to Los Angeles. It isn’t the thing any more, of course, with all the melanoma awareness, but Holly likes herself with a touch of colour. Jack has already told her that he loves her pallor. She’ll make her own decision when she gets there. The really important decisions, after all, have already been made, so for as she is concerned.

  ‘I find you extraordinarily sexy.’ She returns to ego-stroking, keeping her voice soft, because the tables at Le Cirque are placed close enough for effortless eavesdropping, and this is private.

  ‘And you,’ Jack says, his heart in his words, ‘are far and away the very finest thing ever to happen to me.’ He shifts a little closer to her on the banquette, then smiles at the waiter pouring more wine into their glasses.

  ‘I’ve already told you’ – Holly lowers her voice still further – ‘how long it’s been since I felt this way about any man.’

  She can see from his eyes, their pupils dilated, that he has a hard-on. She debates, for an instant, checking it out under cover of a napkin, but decides against. He knows he has an erection, knows that just talking to her can get him hard. That’s what counts.

  ‘I don’t want to lie to you, Jack,’ she goes on, softly. ‘Your success – your standing as a lawyer – is very attractive to me, too.’

  ‘You’re an honest woman.’ Jack squeezes her hand. ‘That’s one of the things I love most about you, Charlotte.’

  ‘I’ve never seen much point being anything but honest. It’s such a waste of time.’

  Surreptitiously, she checks his pupils again. Maybe he doesn’t have a hard-on, after all. Or maybe he really does love her even more than he wants her. That knowledge excites her. It bodes well.

  Jack shifts again.

  ‘What about the partnership offer?’ He forces himself back to practicalities. Christ knows the last thing he wants is to talk Charlotte out of leaving New York, but he screwed up with his wife less than five years ago, and that was more than enough heartache to last him the rest of his life. ‘NKM is a fine firm – and if you stay in New York, you won’t have to worry about sitting for the California State Bar.’

  ‘I’ve already taken the bar exam.’

  Jack is startled. ‘When? Why?’

  ‘I sat it in February, because I knew there was a chance I might want to relocate someday. I should know by the end of May if I’ve passed.’

  Jack looks at her for a long moment. ‘You’ll pass.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You never even mentioned you were studying for the exam.’

  ‘No,’ Holly agrees, steadily.

  ‘You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘Have you found a job in Los Angeles?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He takes another moment, treading carefully. ‘If you have no objections, I could talk to a few people—’

  ‘I do object,’ she says. A touch of feisty independence never does any harm with a man like Jack Taylor.

  ‘Okay. Sure. I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘I know you didn’t, Jack.’ Holly remains firm. ‘And I am grateful. It’s just that I don’t want your help. Not in that way. I may need it, but I really don’t want it. You do understand, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. You’ve made your own success.’

  ‘Everyone needs help sometimes.’ Holly says, soft again.

  ‘But not mine, now.’

  ‘As I said, not in that way.’

  They play with their food for a while, Holly with her turbot, Jack with his roast pigeon. Neither of them have eaten much. That bodes well, too, Holly thinks. Fresh energy pulses through her in welcoming waves. She knows now that, at long last, she has picked the right man. Right man, right situation, right time. It’s been so long, but here Jack Taylor is, right beside her and ripe for picking. Oh, life can be so good sometimes—or at least it can be when it isn’t being a bitch.

  Jack puts down his fork. ‘I need a little help myself, Charlotte.’

  ‘What with?’

  He takes a moment. ‘Nick Miller.’

  The hurt is in Holly’s eyes, but she keeps her gaze steady. ‘What about him?’

  ‘I know you said you’ve told me everything about him. About the way you felt about him.’

  ‘I have told you everything.’ Holly searches his face. ‘You do believe it’s over, don’t you, Jack?’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘It’s been over for years.’ Her voice is clear and steady. ‘And it was never really going anywhere. If I’d only recognized that fact long before I did – if I’d only listened to my parents – especially my mother, who never trusted Nick – I’d have been much better off.’

  ‘But you loved him,’ Jack says.

  Holly nods frankly. ‘Yes, I did. But he never loved me.’ She raises her chin a little. ‘Unrequited love.’

  Jack shakes his head. ‘That’s hard to believe.’

  ‘It happened.’ She keeps her eyes on his.

  ‘But why did he keep on coming back to you? It makes no sense.’

  ‘None at all.’ Holly gives a little shrug. ‘He kept coming back to make trouble, I guess.’ She manages a smile. ‘He was good at that.’

  ‘He hurt you very badly, didn’t he?’ The question is tender.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  Jack shakes his head again and stares into his wine glass. ‘You know, a part of me wants to find Nick Miller and break his legs for the way he treated you, but another part just wants to shake him by the hand.’

  ‘Why?’ Holly asks, startled.

  ‘Because though I can’t stand to think of anyone hurting you, Charlotte—’ He breaks off. ‘You know, I still can’t seem to think of you as Holly—’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ Holly touches his arm. ‘I was Holly to Nick. I’m Charlotte to you.’ She pauses. ‘Why did you say that, about wanting to shake Nick’s hand?’

  Jack is unsmiling. ‘Because if he wasn’t such a loser, and if he hadn’t done all those terrible things to you
, you might not be here with me now.’

  Holly waits a moment. ‘So what do you need help with, Jack?’

  He picks up his glass. ‘I guess I just have to know if you’re over him. I mean, really over him.’

  The energy hits Holly again, the excitement. She knew, before they sat down at their table one hour and ten minutes earlier, exactly what she hoped to achieve today. It’s coming now. As sure as an orgasm. Just a touch more foreplay, a little more stroking, a few more strong, bold touches—

  ‘Nick Miller is in my past, Jack,’ she says, taking her time. ‘I won’t deny I may have been a fool in those bad old days, but no more.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte. Don’t feel you have to—’

  ‘No, Jack.’ She loves seeing his guilt. ‘Let me. Please.’

  He falls silent. Holly knows he’s thinking.

  ‘I haven’t heard from Nick in six years,’ she goes on, building up slowly. ‘I’m in love now for only the second time in my life. But this time, it’s real. It’s grown-up, mature love.’ Her voice strengthens and warms. ‘And I need you to know, Jack Taylor, that when I fall in love, that’s it for me. No game playing. I’m in it for the long haul, and it’s vital you understand that, because I don’t think I could bear to be hurt again.’

  Jack can’t remember the last time he wept. He’s an almost forty, hard-assed, hot-shot attorney with a double corner office on Avenue of the Stars, for Christ’s sake! (When his mother died – that was the last time.) But looking at Charlotte now – listening to the remarkable openness with which she’s pouring her heart out to him – he can feel his throat tightening.

  ‘I’ll never hurt you, Charlotte,’ he says.

  ‘I think you mean that.’

  ‘I do, believe me.’

  Nearly there.

  ‘If we’re going to go on, Jack,’ she says, ‘our relationship has to be honest, and it has to be all the way. That’s the kind of person I am, Jack.’

  Jack takes the napkin off his lap and dumps it on the table. His heart is beating fast, the way it usually only does when he’s nearing closure on a big settlement, or when he’s on the treadmill at his gym.