Layla trembled and Nick’s fist clenched. He unclenched it and raked his hand through his hair to the back of his neck and turned away from the sideshow. He’d got himself into some situations but …
This guy takes the biscuit! He deserves a viewers’ award. A definite contender for the Top Tosspot.
The moon shone like someone had painted it into a perfect sky spattered with glittering stars. Layla looked beautiful. In spite of everything that this night had churned up, she’d remained a picture of perfection. After the fabulous performance they’d put on, lost in a kiss, proving that she’d moved on, he couldn’t stand by and see her unravel, her effort wasted.
Pent up with menace like his character in the action movie he butted in. ‘We’ve got an early start.’ He shook Joe firmly by the hand. ‘All the best. Thanks for the party.’ He didn’t say ‘back off.’ Instead, he glowered at him, making sure he knew it had been implied. ‘Give my regards to your wife.’ He hooked an arm around Layla’s waist and practically carried her down the steps to the beach. ‘Don’t let him see that he got to you,’ he breathed against her ear. ‘Don’t give him the satisfaction.’
‘He’s infuriatingly insensitive. How did I tolerate him for so long?’ She kicked off her shoes, and ran to the water’s edge. He picked them up and followed. When he caught up the restaurant had become a distant splash of light and pulsing disco beats. ‘Agggghhhh!’ She yelled her trapped emotions at the sky, hitched up her dress and paddled up to her knees into the moonlit water.
For a few flickering moments like frames in an old film her despair reminded him of his mother’s traumas. Talking about her family had picked at the scab of raw memories for him too. She stomped at the edge of the dark sea and he remembered a scream that felt as if the world was ending from long ago.
At their home in Beverly Hills he and Alex had run in from the garden to see what was wrong. Their mother couldn’t find any vodka in her drinks cabinet because she’d drunk it all. In a tantrum she’d thrown the empty bottle at the wall and smashed it. Terrified, he’d reached her sitting room in time to witness her pour an entire bottle of orange liqueur onto the carpet for no other reason than she loathed it. She was padding about barefoot in broken glass, her feet bleeding, the cuts making red streaks on the carpet. He’d watched her cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, so full of fear he ached.
Alex had gone to get the housekeeper, and he’d run towards his mother, desperate to tell her he’d make everything that was wrong better, only she’d shouted, warning him to stay away. Looking back, he understood that she’d wanted to protect him from the glass. At the time, her screeches had been vitriolic, so out of control he’d been paralyzed with shock, afraid to move or speak.
The housekeeper had called their father at the studio, and sent them to play in their tree house until he arrived. Like two little birds they’d sat up in the silent tree house for what seemed like a lifetime, frightened, not knowing if she would be alright.
Finally, Alex had gone to see what he could find out. When he’d come back he’d reported that a doctor had come to the house. She’d bandaged their mother’s feet and prescribed a tranquilizer to knock her out. The housekeeper had given him cookies and they waited, staring at the spaces between the planks in the floor and the long cracks of green light reflected up from the grass way below, the only sound their munching.
Sometime later their father had arrived, pacing back and forth at the bottom of the ladder ranting at the top his lungs that Cassandra was a bloody liability and that the studio would lose thousands of dollars because she’d run out of effing vodka.
‘I can’t sack the housekeeper,’ he’d shouted. ‘She’s given her notice. And you pair are less than useless. Playing games while your mother’s having one of her freak-outs. Get down here, this instant.’
So Alex had scrambled down the ladder and that’s when it had happened – a debilitating sense of panic that stopped Nick climbing down from the tree house. He’d looked at the ground and frozen, unable to get his jellified legs to move. Thinking he was messing about, his father had flown into a worse temper, climbed to the top of the ladder and thrown him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. It had felt like everything in the world was his fault; his mother’s abject misery, his father’s anger, the housekeeper’s desertion – all of these things rolled into a ball of fear in the pit of his stomach. Wobbly, disoriented, when he’d been set the right way up on the grass, he’d vomited on his father’s shoes.
He pushed down the memory and concentrated on Layla. ‘Are you okay?’
She paced back and forth, wading in the black sea, painfully vulnerable. ‘What the ….’ she stopped abruptly, but the words burst out of her, ‘fudge was he thinking saying he missed me? Why open the whole stupid thing up?’
Kicking off his shoes, he peeled his feet out of his socks, rolled up his trouser legs and walked into the water to join her. He took her by the hand and drew her back to the edge. She turned to face him, sadness brimming in her eyes. ‘I nearly lost my cool with Joe – not that I ever really had any!’
She let go his hand and started to walk away.
‘You’re being too hard on yourself. You were going to marry the guy. He deserves to be called out. Just not tonight. When he swings by to get his things you can really go to town.’
‘I mean how does somebody’s wedding just happen?’ She kept walking. ‘Fate?’
‘Or he made a mistake.’ He grabbed their shoes and caught her up. ‘I guess finding someone to spend a lifetime with isn’t an exact science.’ Ankle deep in the water they walked along the water’s edge. ‘For what it’s worth you’re asking the wrong person.’
She’d opened her heart, and as a consequence she had him dredging up things he hadn’t thought about in years. He didn’t know how to make things better. He remembered something now that lifted his mood. He and Alex had picked flowers from the garden and put them in a vase beside their mother’s bed so they’d be the first thing she saw when she woke up.
He’d wanted to look after Layla for the same reason. Being there for someone felt good … until it went wrong. If he told her about his feelings he’d risk making things more difficult for her. He couldn’t expect her to take on his problems. Discovering Beth existed and that he’d been excluded was a nail in his heart. Her rejection was a second nail, piercing in deeper, right next to the first.
His fingers found hers and he held her hand.
‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.’
‘You’re full of wisdom all of a sudden?’
‘Not me. Shakespeare. Julius Caesar. Courtesy of Alex.’
‘Him and Maggie getting together again after all that time apart must have been written in the stars – they’re so meant for each other, proof that sometimes destiny works out right in the end.’
He coughed, his throat scratchy like he’d swallowed sand. ‘You really think that?’
‘Yes.’ She stopped paddling along in the sea and turned to him. She smiled and the hope on her face lit up the night.
His heart thundered. He couldn’t bear to tell her that he’d taken Alex and Maggie’s fate into his own hands. ‘I don’t believe in waiting for life to happen. I like to take control.’
‘Some things are outside of our control.’
Breaking away from her spell, he stared off into the darkness and caught a tiny ball of light whizzing through the night sky. ‘Wow! A shooting star! Did you see it?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice soft, the starry night stole her breath.
‘If anyone had asked me, I’d have said they didn’t exist.’
‘You’ve never seen one?’ She looked up searchingly. ‘Destiny, you see?’
‘I was meant to be here tonight on this beach with you to see a shooting star?’
He smoothed down her hair and his fingers caressed her temples. His lips found hers and his heartbeat pounded.
When she broke away from his kiss she looked down at the water. ‘We’re not fate,’ she protested in a whisper. ‘We’re a fling.’
His heart lurched. The dial on his emotions was turned up high. All he wanted was this moment.
‘What we are is fantastic,’ he said.
He peered up into the star sprinkled sky wondering if he’d spot another shooting star. Did some people wait a lifetime and never see one? Something had happened here.
‘Fantastic is good enough for me.’
She’d been the ultimate decompression, an escape from the mess he’d made. That didn’t make him happy though, it throbbed painfully like the ugly bruise he’d arrived with. He’d stopped separating Layla from her feelings. And his own.
‘Look I have to come clean,’ he confessed, ‘I agree that Maggie and Alex are made for each other. But I don’t trust destiny. You can’t rely on it. Here’s the thing – I set them up. It wasn’t fate. It was me. I asked a magazine to arrange for her to work on a fashion shoot with Alex and me.’ She looked at him wide-eyed and a surprised ‘Oh’ formed on her lips. ‘I thought you knew.’
She shook her head slowly and bit her lip. ‘Why?’
‘Things were tense between me and Alex when Vampires finished. I was angry. Alex wanted to quit, and I blamed him for the show getting cancelled. In reality, it was time and he saw it first.’
‘That’s no excuse for meddling in his life.’ Layla flopped down onto the sand and hugged her knees. She picked up a shell.
‘I got thinking about how things started. I put a hell of a lot of pressure on him. He loved London. He was happy. His thing with Maggie was about to turn into something. He didn’t want to leave for LA. Our mother was still living out there at the time and she’d got the heads up about Mercy of the Vampires. She was like a terrier with a bone – certain that Alex and I would be right for it.’ He sat down on the sand next to her. She gathered a collection of pebbles and shells. ‘I wasn’t convinced. I’d done a little TV, not much, and Alex hadn’t finished his degree.’
She didn’t look up. ‘What changed?’
‘She wouldn’t let it drop. She got me round to her way of thinking and quite honestly she’d been through such a lot of heartbreak – my dad leaving, her problems with alcohol, drug addiction, rehab – I wanted her to be proud of us.’
She touched his forearm. ‘That’s sweet.’
‘Don’t credit me with more kindness than I deserve.’ His heart climbed into his throat. ‘Sure, I wanted my mother’s approval, but once she’d talked me round I wanted Vampires for myself just as much. More. I pushed Alex into dropping out of his drama course before he took his finals. It would have been a non-starter without him. The marketing concept behind us getting the parts of the twin vampires relied heavily on us being real life twins. Our mother had networked until she was blue in the face to get us considered. Given our lack of acting experience, I’m surprised the studio agreed to let us through the doors, never mind hire us.’ He sighed heavily. ‘They did and we’d have been crazy to pass up the opportunity.’
‘Your mother’s name opened doors for you?’ She concentrated on the pebbles and shells, sorting them into separate piles.
‘It’s awkward to admit, but yes. Being the sons of Drake and Cassandra Wells definitely helped. We brought the Wells branding with us. She was beyond ecstatic when they signed us. There was no turning back.’
‘And the rest is history. The show’s a global hit. I’m sorry I haven’t watched much of it. I’ll have to get the boxset.’
He didn’t care what she thought of the show, it was the impact of his admission that mattered. He reached out and touched her face, tipping her chin up so that she had to meet his eyes. ‘You think badly of me?’
‘I think you’re driven to succeed.’
‘Alex looked out for me when we were kids. I always looked up to him. And I couldn’t forget the way he was forced to drop everything. He’d fallen for Maggie. I felt bad about it. So I fixed it for them to meet up again.’
‘Ten years later!’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘Messing with people’s hearts is risky.’ She went back to fixing on the shells and pebbles. In an alternating pattern she arranged them in a circle on the sand. ‘When Magenta – Maggie,’ she corrected, ‘came home to Porthkara after things turned bad with Alex it was like she’d taken a vow of silence. She hated the publicity circus. It hit her hard. She didn’t want to talk about what happened in New York.’ Layla paused, her interest in making a shell circle gone. ‘What you did could have gone horribly wrong.’
‘I wanted Alex to have a chance to see if there was still something there. I didn’t count on things getting so complicated.’
She stood up and brushed the sand off her dress. ‘Luckily it’s worked out for the best. They couldn’t be any happier.’
‘Alex got everything he’s ever wanted and more.’ He got to his feet and picked up a pair of their shoes in each hand, hers swinging by their straps as they walked towards to the bottom of the cliff path. ‘As matchmaking goes, I guess it doesn’t get any better than that. But for the record I don’t make a habit of interfering in other people’s lives. It was a one-off.’
Her smile radiant her eyes twinkled. ‘You tried to make good things happen because you wanted the people you love to be happy. There’s nothing bad about caring.’
His heart thumped. He dropped the shoes, pulled her into his arms and wrapped her in his hold. He held her for a moment, breathing her in. Her electricity shot through him.
‘The sooner I get you off this beach the better.’
‘And if we don’t go just yet?’ The breathless charm in her tone excited him. Still wearing his jacket, she reached up, drawing him towards her, pulling him closer, their bodies pressed together tight. ‘I want you right here, right now beneath the stars.’ She whispered the words against his ear, her breath soft on his hot skin.
Aching hard, he moaned. Possessed with desire for her, a bubble of raw emotion grew from his gut and swelled in his chest. Closing his eyes, he searched his head for words. Her lips pressed against his in a soft urgent kiss.
Lost in the touch and the taste of her he broke away at last. Cradling her face in his hands he drew in a long breath and looked deep into her eyes. ‘You’re so beautiful.’ The words didn’t come close to expressing the feeling she’d unleashed. She was a new storm in his world, good for him – too good for him.