Chapter Twenty-two
“I’m so sorry I’m dragging you home,” Kayla said as she and Stormy stepped onto the escalator to Edinburgh Airport’s departure area.
“Stop apologizing.” Stormy slotted her boarding pass and passport into her bag. “You’ve given me a great reference, that’s better than I had six weeks ago. And who wouldn’t want to swap the UK’s summer rain for LA’s winter sun and warm beer for cold?” In truth, she’d loved both, but she wanted to ease at least one of Kayla’s worries.
More likely she’d be serving that cold beer this time next week in some LA bar or restaurant, but Stormy had a goal now, and enough confidence—and cash—to weather a few setbacks.
Ahead of them on the escalator, Jared carried Rocco. Holding her daddy’s hand, Maddie readied herself for the big jump onto solid ground.
Kayla watched them, her face strained.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Stormy reminded her gently. Her soon-to-be former employer had dark circles under her eyes, testifying to sleepless nights. And if she’d eaten in the past two days, Stormy hadn’t seen it. Jared looked equally haggard.
Kayla shook her head. “Time-out might be the best chance we have of saving our marriage.”
Serious time-out. Kayla was returning to her hometown to stay with her folks for the remainder of the tour. “Mom’s still hobbling and she and Dad are dying to see the kids.” Stormy wondered if she had any intention of returning to her new LA home.
Maddie made her jump and Jared detoured into a toyshop, delaying his good-bye as long as possible, Stormy suspected, suffering for them both. Heartbreak sucked.
Resolutely she turned her mind to her own future. A job would dictate where she rented and meanwhile she’d house-sit for Kayla. Zander had offered accommodation, but he’d done her enough favors. Lately, the few occasions their paths crossed he’d been distracted, even jumpy. He was pining for Elizabeth and it was time to let him go.
Dimity waited next to the departure gate. “What took you so long?”
“On commercial flights, there’s this thing called queues at check-in,” Stormy retorted. When you became friends with Dimity Prescott you quickly learned to give back as good as you got. But the PA had bent over backwards to help Kayla book flights without uttering a single sarcastic word.
“Kayla, you can stop feeling guilty about Stormy losing her job. I’ve found her a new one.”
Stormy gave her a warning frown. She’d asked Dimity if she had any hospitality contacts—the PA dealt with a lot of top restaurants and hotels—but she didn’t want Kayla feeling bad about her return to waitressing.
“Oh that’s fantastic!” Kayla produced her first real smile in twenty-four hours. “Who’s the family?”
“Lord and Lady Spencer-Fleming,” Dimity said not missing a beat. “He’s a British peer, she’s American, they split their year between the States and England and they have three kids under five.”
Stormy squirmed. Even distracted, Kayla would see through that wild story.
“One of their nannies got pregnant to the butler,” Dimity was clearly enjoying herself, “and they need a replacement.”
“And they’ll hire a stranger to look after their kids?” Kayla frowned.
“Oh, Stormy’s met them. He’s Philippa’s brother—that’s Zander’s English housekeeper. Stormy played with their kids one day when they visited and they thought she was charming.” She shrugged. “No accounting for taste.”
“Wait,” Stormy interrupted. “You’re actually serious.” She’d been kicking around the house, waiting for Zander to show when Philippa had invited her to join her visiting family for a casual lunch in the garden. “And Philippa’s aristocracy?”
“Eccentric, posh accent, can run an estate… It can’t be a total surprise. And here, Zander remembered your birthday.” Dimity produced an envelope from her bag.
“It’s your birthday today?” Kayla said dismayed. “Oh God, I feel bad all over again.”
“It’s no big deal,” Stormy said, embarrassed. She opened the envelope and found a receipt and a flyer. You are enrolled for this online course—Prepare for the GED test—Your first lesson will be posted on… Her vision blurred. The envelope also held six hour-long lessons with a tutor. “This is the best present I’ve ever had.”
“Thank you.” Dimity inclined her head graciously. “Zander remembered your birthday, but I buy all his presents. No, I don’t want a hug.” She tried to fend Stormy off. “You’ll crush me with those boobs.”
Ignoring her, Stormy caught her close. “Thank you, skinny bitch.”
“You’re welcome.”
Wearing sunglasses, Jared returned with the kids. “Dimity told us it’s your birthday,” he said and kissed her cheek. “Go ahead, Maddie.” The little girl gave her a bag. “It’s a tiara like mine,” she burst out before Stormy could open it. “So we’re both princ-i-esses.”
“Best present ever.” Blinking at the pink and diamanté glitz, Stormy crouched before the little girl. “Will you put it on for me?” Maddie jammed the tiara on like a crown of thorns, but it didn’t matter.
Dimity checked her watch. “You guys should go through now.”
Everyone avoided looking at Jared. “See you soon, buddy,” he said gruffly and kissed his son. Distracted by Stormy’s tiara, Rocco reached for it, and she accepted him from his daddy.
“And you, princess.” He knelt to hug his daughter. “We’ll Skype every day. Behave for Mommy.”
“He’s wearing his sunglasses inside because he’s famous,” Maddie confided over his shoulder.
Stormy smiled. “I guessed,” she said, but his voice gave him away. She glanced at Kayla’s frozen expression. “How about we walk to the gate and Mommy can catch us up?”
Panic entered Kayla’s eyes. “I’m sure Jared doesn’t—”
“Yeah,” he interrupted. “I do have something to say.”
“Jared,” she said brokenly.
“Please. I won’t ask you to change your mind.”
Stormy exchanged glances with Dimity and they took the kids away.
“It’s ’cause Daddy wants to show Mommy his tattoo,” Maddie confided. She scowled at her baby brother who was chewing on Stormy’s present. “Rocco, no!”
“What tattoo?” Dimity asked and Stormy paused from wrestling her present away from Rocco to give her a repressive look. “It’s really none of—”
“Stop being noble, you want to know as much as I do… Here.” Dimity gave Rocco one of her bangles to chew. “Go ahead, Maddie.”
“It’s on Daddy’s shoulder and it says my name an’ Rocco’s name an’ Mommy’s name and he says it will never wash off. It stays on forever and ever… Why is Stormy crying?”
“Because she’s a wuss,” Dimity supplied, steering her away while Stormy tried to pull herself together, “not like you and me.”
“I’m gonna get a real tattoo too,” Maddie said, “soon as I’m growed.”
“Good for you! Here’s Mommy now.”
Oh God. Frantically rubbing her face against Rocco’s small shoulder, Stormy looked up with a watery smile. Now Kayla wore sunglasses. “You okay?” she murmured while Dimity distracted Madison with money.
“Yeah.” She smiled at Stormy, a wide and relieved grin, as she took her baby. “I think we’ll all be okay.”
* * *
“You okay?” Smothering a yawn, Elizabeth folded her legs under her in the chair. The lamp beside her cast a golden glow on her freckles. Her red curls were all over the place and she wore white flannel pajamas with black-spotted puppies on them. “It’s two a.m. in New Zealand.”
“Is it? I must have screwed up the time conversion.” A lie; he’d just desperately needed to see her, which was why he’d insisted they switch from cell to Skype. “But yeah, I’m fine.”
He’d got through another concert last night with a little help from his friends.
“Are you sure?” She peered at him. “Either you’re pale or the brightness needs adjusting.” Elizabeth started fiddling with the buttons at the bottom of her screen.
“This stage of a tour leg, you’re always wiped.” One down, seven to go and then he could cancel if he had to. He could do this.
“I’m resisting the urge to recommend vitamins and review your diet because I’ve seen your regimen and your self-discipline is way better than mine. You should have seen my helping of pavlova at dinner. Are you sleeping?”
“I’m missing your warm body in bed.”
“Zander, we rarely slept,” she reminded him. “And never spent a whole night together. I made you sneak out at dawn.”
“Yeah, but I slept better after, you wild woman. You wore me out.” Was it weak to need her so badly?
“Poor baby, but you don’t fool me. I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”
“Yeah?” he said warily. He wasn’t ready to talk about his voice issues yet; had one of the band squealed on him?
“Celibacy. It’s been what? A week?”
“Funny,” he said, but his bleak mood lightened. Even after thirty-six hours of hell, she could still make him smile.
“Well,” Elizabeth sighed, “there’s nothing for it.” She began unbuttoning her pajama top. “Skype sex.”
Zander laughed. “Don’t lie. You’ve been dying to do this.” He waited until she’d stripped off the jacket, his hungry gaze caressing her soft pale skin and rose-tipped breasts. “But darlin’,” he said regretfully, “I’m leaving for an interview in five minutes.”
“Why did you let me take off my PJs?”
“Because you’re beautiful,” he said. “And those freakin’ pajamas are hideous, what the hell’s on them?” Two minutes with Elizabeth and the loneliness melted off him like ice.
“Dalmatians,” she said, shrugging the jacket on, but leaving it unbuttoned to tease him with cleavage. “My niece chose them for me.”
“Leave them in New Zealand. Have you confirmed your return flight yet?”
“I’ll get into JFK late afternoon on the twenty-fourth.”
“Damn. I’ll be at a concert briefing, so get the cab to drop you at Rockefeller Center.”
“Won’t that look a little odd, showing up with suitcases? We’ll meet at your apartment as planned.”
“Then we won’t get any time alone until after my charity appearance. I’m hosting a cocktail party beforehand for the major sponsors.”
“Zander, we need to be—”
“Careful,” he supplied.
Her gaze was direct. “Yes.”
“Screw that, let’s go public.”
“What?”
“When you come back, let’s stop sneaking around.” She was the only brightness in his dark life, he wanted more. “I’m crazy about you, you’re crazy about me.”
Red brows lifted. “Am I?”
“Yeah,” he said with the arrogance of desperation. “You are.”
She bit her lip. “And crazy is good?”
Dizzy with relief that she felt something for him, Zander laid his palm against the screen. “Crazy is the only way to live.”
Tentatively she touched hands. “I’ll need to think about going public.”
“You have until Sunday,” he said magnanimously.
“No promises.” Solemnly, she removed her hand and he experienced a rare moment of doubt.
“But in principle, you’re not rejecting the idea.”
That made her smile. “In principle, I’m thinking about it.”
Zander relaxed. As good as a yes from his cautious lover.
* * *
Elizabeth wasn’t going to call it love, not yet.
Crazy about Zander, yes, but that was only a good thing in his mind. In hers, it was a red flag.
The minister gave a signal and she and the rest of the congregation slid forward to the kneelers with a rustle of clothing and faint creak of old bones.
The seven a.m. Morning Prayer service was sparsely populated on a weekday winter morning when the heating didn’t have enough time to heat the vaulted space. The hardy folk mostly, the aged, the insomniacs and those—like her—in need of serenity.
She’d always liked first service. The scents of incense, polished wood, and flowers seemed fresher, richer in the quiet dawn, as though inhaled by the building overnight and breathed out again into the morning.
A draft blew in with a late arrival and she lifted the collar of her coat. As the sonorous voice of the minister led prayers, she responded automatically, her thoughts returning to her dilemma.
Elizabeth didn’t kid herself. Going public would result in a seismic shift in how people perceived her, and it was irreversible—regardless of how long their relationship lasted.
The familiarity of ritual, the repetition of well-known prayers in the company of other faithful quietened and settled her, but she rarely felt reverence through services, possibly because she’d grown up running between the rectory and the church the way other kids ran between home and Nana’s house. God had always been accessible like that.
Did she want her private life in the public domain? Her first listing on search engines to be bonking a rock star? Many people would define her by it, regardless of her own achievements. It would be like her fishbowl childhood all over again, multiplied many times over.
She leaned against the back of the pew to take the pressure off her knees. Thinking in the house of the Lord was like bringing a problem to the world’s best listener.
There were leaps of faith in any commitment, but with Zander that leap spanned the Grand Canyon.
Common sense, his romantic history pointed to temporary. But then, so did hers. He said he’d end their relationship before he slept with another woman, and that, she thought wryly, was no comfort whatsoever.
Sunlight hit the stained glass window and threw jewel tones onto the hat of the old lady kneeling in front of her. As they finished the prayer and slid into their seats, she caught a whiff of tobacco from the pensioner’s coat and suffered a pang of longing for Zander so sharp she had to stop herself leaning forward to stroke the tweed.
Her lover was a self-confessed disaster in his private life. He was sober, he was drug-free, but that was for the tour. When it was over, what then?
The liturgical assistant, Theresa Newman, approached the lectern and found her place in the gilt-edged Bible. “A reading from Luke fifteen.” She cleared her throat. “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?”
Elizabeth sighed, knowing exactly how exasperated that shepherd felt. Writing the first draft of Zander’s memoir, she was finding gaps. Oh, there was disclosure, shocking anecdotes, wry humor, and revelations, but something indefinable was missing; the closest she could come to describing it was soul. Relationships were built on trust, but Zander didn’t trust her. And she didn’t trust him either. Not yet.
And if she was being completely honest—and being in the house of the Lord demanded self-scrutiny—pride played a part in her reluctance.
Logically there was no reason for her and Zander to be together, and logically was how their relationship would be judged by her friends, family and peers. Allied to a rocker, there was a disconnect, a suggestion of mental instability, at the very least a question of judgment. And unlike her lover, Elizabeth did care what the people she loved thought of her.
Was that wrong?
Absently she scratched some paint off one knuckle, recalling Pat’s delight when he’d seen the freshly painted kitchen.
Her relationship with Zander so far was on his terms, in his world. Would he fit into her world, could he? Did he care enough to try?
She had no answers, only questions and doubts.
Falling in love. Even the metaphor suggested that at some point she’d hit concrete. Crazy for him was better because, like rabies, there might be a cure, or at the very least a containment option. And she really needed to believe she could manage these new and very scary feelings before she took the next step.
The prayer service ended. The minister blessed the congregation and told them to go in peace. “Amen to that,” Elizabeth said and side-shuffled out of the pew, her decision made. No.
She needed more time.