When I came down to breakfast the next morning Xander was already there, drinking a cup of black tea and reading the morning papers. He looked more dishevelled than he had been the previous day – stubble shadowed his jaw and without whatever product he usually put in his hair, it was curlier and more tousled than usual and looked as though he had been standing in front of a wind machine. He was also wearing a pair of dark-framed glasses and the overall effect seemed to be making him even more devastatingly attractive than usual.
I remembered the way he’d touched my hair the night before, the way he’d said my name. Had he been going to kiss me? I knew that if he had, I would have kissed him back. I felt stuck again, this time on a see-saw rather than a carousel, stuck between wanting to kiss Xander and being lost in the guilt of not being with Joe when he died. Would this cycle never end?
“Morning,” he said, looking up as I approached. “How did you sleep?”
“Really well, surprisingly,” I replied. Xander hadn’t spoken again after I’d told him I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I thought I’d be lying awake half the night worrying about our almost-maybe-kiss and whether I’d told him too much, but instead I’d fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep, tired from the long walk in the snow and sleepy from the brandy. When I’d woken, Xander was already up and showered. “You end up being an early riser when you have a dog,” he’d said as he and Gus left me to get ready. I’d done the best I could to make myself look presentable in yesterday’s clothes with the powder compact, mascara and lip gloss I’d had in my bag. Without my straighteners, however, my hair was beyond hope.
“How about you?” I asked, even though I could tell from the shadows under his eyes he probably hadn’t slept as well as me.
“Not bad,” he said. “Bit of a contact lens emergency though – unplanned nights away and contact lenses aren’t very conducive. Luckily I had my glasses in the car or I might have had to get you to drive us home.” He smiled at me but I thought it was very unlikely he let anyone else drive the Porsche and he’d have driven half-blind if he’d needed to.
A waitress took my order for coffee.
“Is that Lapsang?” I asked, pointing at Xander’s teapot.
“No sadly, just Earl Grey,” he replied. “But at least it’s not a teabag.”
“I really wouldn’t have had you down as a tea snob.”
“What did I tell you about pigeonholes.” He smiled lazily. “Besides, it goes right alongside being a book snob.” He paused and folded up his paper. “You were telling me about your friend’s café last night.”
“Yes, I think you’d really like it. They sell all kinds of loose-leaf artisan teas. I’ll take you there when we get back, but for now I’m going to get some eggs and toast.”
When I came back from the breakfast buffet he told me he had some good news.
“Any bad news?” I checked.
“No, not this morning. Apparently the roads have been cleared already and if we eat our breakfast slowly they’ll have cleared the car park too, so it shouldn’t be long before we can head back.”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
“Had enough of me already?” Xander asked and I felt my cheeks burn. I’d never blushed so much in my life as I had since I met Xander Stone.
“Best to quit while we’re ahead,” I replied. “Before I find out what else you’re unbearably snobby about. Still, at least we know we have similar tastes in theatre entertainment.”
“God, that pantomime was…”
I held up my hand. “It’s probably best to never speak of it again.”
“While we’re on the subject of not speaking of things,” he went on. “I asked you a lot of questions last night that I probably shouldn’t have done and I just wanted to assure you that everything you told me will remain between us.”
“Thank you.” I looked down at my eggs. “It was quite cathartic, so thank you for listening.”
“Any time,” he said and the silence between us suddenly felt awkward. I tried to eat my eggs but I wasn’t hungry anymore. We’d shared more last night than the confessions we both poured out on our snowy walk back to the hotel. I was sure we’d shared what Missy always referred to as ‘a moment’. Before I had too much time to overanalyse this further or to start wondering what he meant when he said ‘any time’, the assistant manager came over to our table to tell us that Xander should be able to get his car out now. I pushed my eggs to the side of my plate, finished my coffee and followed them out into the car park to see.
It was a glorious morning, the sky clear and blue, the sun shining, the air bitingly cold. The snow lay in big drifts at the side of the car park but the gravel itself looked safe enough to drive on.
“And the roads are clear?” Xander checked again.
“If you follow the York road back towards the dual carriageway then you’re all set.”
“Well, we should probably get going then,” Xander said, turning to me. “Unless you want another coffee?”
“No, I’m good to go.”
We went back up to the room together to collect our coats, Gus trotting at Xander’s heels. I double-checked the bathroom and the table by the bed to make sure that I hadn’t left anything, not that I’d had much with me to leave, and picked up the borrowed boots to take down and return.
When we got back to the reception area and the huge Christmas tree that stood there, Xander took the pink and yellow boots from me in exchange for his car key and Hunter wellies.
“Could you pop those in the car for me?” he said. “Just press this button – the storage area is in the front and it’ll open automatically.”
“In the front?” I queried. “With the engine?”
“Engine’s in the back,” he said, and I nodded as though I knew what he was talking about. “I’ll take these back for you—” he waved the brightly coloured boots in the air “—and pay the bill.”
“No,” I said, catching his wrist. “We should go halves on the bill. Hold on and I’ll get my credit card…”
“I asked you to lunch,” he interrupted. “So I’ll pay.”
“It turned out to be a lot more than lunch.”
“Please, Megan,” he said. “Let me pay for this, just take the stuff back to the car. I won’t be a minute.”
I decided to let it go and do as he said. After all, I had the whole journey back to York to convince him to let me transfer some money into his bank account.
I pressed the button just as he’d said and the front part of the car opened up. For someone as immaculately turned out as Xander, the storage space in his car was an absolute mess and I started to move a few things aside to fit the boots back in. I picked up a brown leather satchel, thinking I could put the boots underneath, but I picked it up upside down and it wasn’t done up properly. A sheaf of typed pages fell out.
I stared at them for a moment. Was this Xander’s new novel? His current work in progress? I knew I shouldn’t look but I couldn’t resist a little peek. Just the working title, I told myself.
I picked up the pages and turned them over, but the manuscript wasn’t Xander’s latest work in progress. It was something quite different. I read the cover page again.
Naked Temptation
-a novel by-
RUBY BELL
*
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Xander’s voice was cold and clipped. It was the voice he’d used in the supermarket the first time we’d met. I hadn’t meant to start reading the manuscript and now I’d been caught.
“I moved this bag and the pages fell out,” I began. “I thought it was your latest manuscript. I only…”
“Don’t,” he said icily, snatching the papers from me and stuffing them back into the leather satchel.
“I shouldn’t…” I tried again.
“No, you shouldn’t.” He snatched the car keys out of my hand and closed the storage space at the front of his car. He took Gus and settled him onto the back seat.
“Well, get in then,” he snapped at me. “I really haven’t got all day.”
I knew I shouldn’t have looked at the manuscript. I’d worked with authors for years and I knew how precious and personal those first drafts can be. The first draft, as I always told my authors when I worked at Rogers & Hudson, is for them and only them. The first draft is their version of the story, where they get to know their characters and the adventures they are to go on. Even if that had been a first draft of Xander’s next book, it shouldn’t have crossed my mind to look at it. I should have stuffed the papers back in the satchel and ignored them.
But it hadn’t been Xander’s next manuscript. It had been a new unpublished Ruby Bell manuscript – perhaps the one that hadn’t been published this winter, for whatever reason. What was Xander doing with it? Did he know who she was? I had so many questions but the look on Xander’s face when I got in the car stopped me from asking any of them. Gus had buried his head under his paws in an attempt to keep out of it.
“Do you make a habit of going through other people’s private papers?” Xander asked as we drove out of the gates of Graydon Hall.
“I wasn’t going through them on purpose,” I said, but my excuse sounded whiny and pathetic even to me. I took a breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have even thought about looking.”
He didn’t respond and I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed even more tired than he had at breakfast and his knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel so hard.
“I realise that you are probably full of all kinds of questions about why I have a manuscript by your beloved Ruby Bell in my car,” he said after a while. “But I’m not at liberty to tell you.”
He had changed back to the man I’d first met, as though everything we’d shared last night hadn’t happened, as though… and then the penny dropped. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it straight away.
“There’s only one reason why you’d have a Ruby Bell manuscript, though, isn’t there?” I asked with more confidence than I felt. “So there aren’t really that many questions.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Dot is a huge Ruby Bell fan,” I went on. “Does she—”
“No,” Xander interrupted. “She doesn’t. And you’re not going to tell her, are you?”
“Of course I’m not going to tell her if you don’t want me to – although, as she’s been such an inspiration to your writing career, I’m surprised you haven’t told her yourself.”
“Told her what exactly?” he snapped back at me, his eyes not leaving the road ahead.
“That you’re Ruby Bell, of course. What other—”
He reached out and flicked a switch on the driver’s panel and loud classical music blared out of the car speakers.
“You may as well just admit it,” I said loudly over the music, making it clear this conversation wasn’t over. “I know I shouldn’t have looked at the manuscript and I am sorry, but I’ve seen it now; we can’t just pretend it hasn’t happened.”
“Oh I think you’ll find we can,” he said coldly.
Was he simply embarrassed? If Xander Stone did, in fact, moonlight as Ruby Bell – and honestly what other explanation was there – why was he so scornful of romance novels? After all, he must have made quite a lot of money out of those Ruby Bell books, almost as much as he’d made writing as Xander Stone – all of them had been best-sellers. I could understand why he would want it to remain a secret but I knew now, so why wouldn’t he just admit it? Unless I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion? But if that was the case, you’d think he’d want to distance himself from Ruby Bell’s writing as quickly as possible.
“I don’t know why you’re so embarrassed,” I shouted over the loud music.
He sighed and turned the volume down, perhaps realising that I wasn’t simply going to let this go. As if I could. This was huge.
“Why on earth do you think I’m embarrassed?” he asked.
“Well you’ve been totally disparaging of romance fiction pretty much since the moment I first met you, and now it turns out that you’re actually one of the best-selling contemporary romance authors in the country.”
“At no point have I told you that. You really should stop jumping to wild assumptions about people.”
“Right,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “Because there are so many other rational explanations as to why you have that manuscript in your car.”
“For all you know, I could be one of the few people who know who Ruby Bell is. I could be sworn to secrecy.” The corner of his mouth twitched slightly and I knew then that I was right. Xander Stone was Ruby Bell and now I was itching to get back to the bookshop and read a Ruby Bell book side by side with a Xander Stone one to see if I could find any similarities in sentence structure, or timbre, or narrative voice.
“Just because you’re too embarrassed to admit it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
Xander made a grumbling noise in the back of his throat but didn’t say anything else. I tried as many different tacks as I could to get him to admit it, until I saw that little twitch in the muscles of his jaw that I’d seen during the green tea incident at the pantomime and decided not to push it any further. It felt as though all the warmth and connection from the previous evening had vanished and I couldn’t understand why, after everything I’d told him, he couldn’t tell me this. Was I asking too much? Was he contractually obliged to keep silent in the face of inquisition? I guess I’d never know.
There was no sign of snow in York of course, which was a shame because now all the shops in our little street had their decorations up it would have looked so festive. Xander stopped his Porsche at the top of the road and I didn’t invite him to pull into the parking space behind the shop.
As I reached for the car door handle I felt his hand on my arm and that familiar tingle of electricity. I wondered if he felt it too.
“I would really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about…” He trailed off, his eyes flicking away.
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I replied. “Everything we’ve talked about in the last twenty-four hours remains between us, OK?”
“OK.” He nodded.
I didn’t know whether to ask him if he was coming to book club on Thursday, if he was staying in York until Christmas or anything else. My mouth felt dry and I managed a feeble ‘goodbye’ as I got out of the car. It wasn’t until he’d driven off that I realised I hadn’t brought up the topic of paying for my half of the hotel room.
I walked up the street to the bookshop, trying to remember if I’d ever noticed any similarities between Ruby Bell’s writing and the writing in Boxed. Of course I hadn’t. Xander was too good a writer to make that mistake, but there had to be something – some quirk or nuance that he wouldn’t have even noticed. My hands itched to start comparing the two authors’ works properly.
But as I pushed open the door of the bookshop all my thoughts disappeared because it seemed we had a visitor. Somebody I hadn’t seen since Joe’s funeral.