Ari brought the car round and she and Johnny jumped in in silence. In all the commotion, their connection to Kit had been forgotten. The journalists were already filing copy to their editors. They had their backs turned. The big story of the night had already erupted.
They drove through the quiet town without saying a word and if Ari had worked out why Amy had sold her story, he wasn’t saying. He was grim-faced, his fists tight on the steering wheel. Kit was already home – he had climbed into a waiting taxi – and they were back at the chalet within a few minutes of him. Clover looked up as they swept up the street – she could see the lights on, not in the drawing room, but beyond the glass wall – in his bedroom.
Ari swung the car into the drive, his hands flexing impatiently as they waited for the gate to slide back. Everything was taking too long . . .
‘Leave him to me,’ Ari said in a tight voice as they trooped into the chalet’s reception hall. He shrugged off his jacket and undid his tie.
Clover’s mouth opened.
‘I mean it. You don’t want to be around him like this.’
She closed her mouth again, seeing Ari’s firm expression. She nodded.
‘Clo, you need to chill. Go and have a bath or something,’ Johnny said, pushing her on her back towards her bedroom, seeming to forget that the only bath in the chalet was in Kit’s room.
Ari ran up the stairs in giant bounds.
She turned back to face him. ‘Johnny – that was bad,’ she hissed, her eyes wide.
‘I know.’
‘We should never have let him go out to that.’
‘We did our best to stop him. There was nothing more we could have done.’
‘But this happened because of us!’
‘Maybe,’ he nodded. ‘But if what those things Amy said about him are true . . . then he’s not really deserving of anyone’s sympathy.’
Clover stared at him. ‘Do you think they are?’
Johnny squirmed. ‘I wish they weren’t. But I don’t think anyone would deny he’s capable of it. Would you want to be Ari right now?’
She sighed. ‘It’s all such a mess.’
He looked at her quizzically.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I guess I thought you’d be more . . . pleased. This is a shock for us all . . . but it isn’t a million miles from what we came out for, either. We may not have a confession of why he did what he did to Cory, but we can get the inside track on this story. You can bet your bottom dollar Ari’s up there right now telling him to do a sit-down with you and get his story on the record, for once and for all. He’ll never have a better opportunity than this. It’s all out of his hands now. If he stays quiet, he’s ruined. He won’t be competing for anyone or anywhere – ever again.’
He looked back at her, seeing how wide her eyes were, how rapidly she was blinking.
‘Julian’s going to have to cut ties with him now, of course. He has no choice. It’s been one disaster after another. He’ll be a laughing stock if he continues to back him.’ He patted the wall. ‘Bye-bye lovely chalet . . . Kit’s about to lose a lot of perks.’
‘I think perks are the least of his worries,’ she murmured. She pulled off her heels, feeling the burn in her feet, and paced anxiously. ‘What do you think’s happening up there?’
‘Kit’s going ballistic and Ari’s trying to calm him down,’ Johnny said flatly. He ran his hands through his hair and gave a weary sigh; Johnny wasn’t cut out for drama. ‘I could do with calming down myself. That was bedlam. Want a drink?’
‘Yes. I’ll get it—’
‘No! You stay put. I don’t want Kit seeing you yet. It’ll only make a bad situation worse. I’ll go.’
Clover stared in frustration as the door closed behind him. She stood patiently – as patiently as she could – for a few minutes, but she couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on. She peered her head out and listened up the stairs. She couldn’t hear shouts or the clamour of things being broken. She looked down towards the lift . . . She could get up there almost silently, see if she could hear anything from the top landing . . .
‘Don’t even think about it.’ Johnny came back down the stairs again, drinks in his hands. ‘Get back in there.’
She went back into the bedroom. ‘Well? Did you hear anything?’
‘Nothing specific. Raised voices, but not so loud I could make out what they were saying.’
‘I should go up there.’
‘No.’ He thrust the tumbler into her hand.
‘But now’s the time to get him to talk. While he’s upset. If he calms down—’
‘No. He’s angry and that’ll make him erratic. And if those allegations are true . . .’ He gave her a warning look. ‘Let him just sit with it overnight . . . Now drink up.’ And he threw his head back and downed his cognac.
Clover watched, then followed suit. She winced as it burned her throat.
Johnny was watching her. ‘Better?’ he asked after a moment.
She nodded, sinking onto the bed. ‘Do you think we should tell Mats? She could warn Julian.’
‘I imagine they already know. Word spreads fast with scandals.’ He gave her a bemused look. ‘At least she’s there to comfort him.’ His tone was flat.
Clover watched him as he wandered over to Matty’s toiletry counter and began aimlessly fiddling with the bottles and potions. He looked baffled by the vast array. ‘. . . Why does she need all this stuff?’ he muttered. ‘It doesn’t make her any more beautiful.’
‘You think she’s beautiful?’
He half-turned his head. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You said “It doesn’t make her any more beautiful.” Not – “It doesn’t make her beautiful.”’
He groaned. ‘Don’t start interviewing me.’ He had his back to her as he absently picked up and put down the various different bottles and ointments on the counter. She watched him smell Matty’s perfume.
‘Why don’t you tell her how you feel?’ she asked quietly.
‘And what would that be?’ he asked sharply.
‘That you’re nuts about her.’
‘Don’t be idiotic! She drives me mad. I think she’s a horrific snob. And she thinks I’m a horrific slob.’
‘Perhaps you should tell her you’ve got a title, then.’
Johnny went very still. ‘How do you know about that?’
Clover sighed. ‘It was on a letter to you once – the Right Honourable Jonathan Dashwood.’
His cheeks flushed with a rush of anger. ‘I don’t ever use it and I don’t want her to know about it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be with anyone who was impressed by it.’
‘Look, Matty only thinks she cares about that stuff because she had so little growing up. The truth is, she doesn’t know what she wants.’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Trust me, she wants what she’s got! Prince fucking Charming.’
Clover shook her head. ‘Julian’s a rich, stupid playboy. He’s not what she needs, we both know that. The two of you are always laughing together.’
‘When you say laughing, I assume you actually mean “fighting”?’
Clover ignored his sarcasm. ‘And she didn’t stop going on about it when you went home with whoever you went home with in Saas-Fee.’
Johnny didn’t reply.
Clover cradled the tumbler in the palm of her hand. Its weightiness felt reassuring. ‘Opposites attract, Johnny. You ground her and she elevates you. It’s so obvious. I don’t get how the two of you don’t see it.’
‘Like you don’t see what’s right under your nose, you mean?’
‘Huh?’
‘I’ve been standing behind that camera, watching the two of you prowling around each other for the past five weeks. I’ve got over two hundred hours of footage through there, of you two.’ He pointed towards his bedroom across the hall. ‘You never take your eyes off each other – he watches you when you’re not looking; and you watch him when he’s not looking. Every room he walks into, he looks to see where you are in it . . .’
‘Yes! Because I’m persona non grata; public enemy number one.’ She gave a shocked laugh.
He stared at her. ‘What exactly happened between you on the mountain?’
The mountain? ‘. . . You know what happened! I almost went over the edge and he stopped me.’
‘No. There was more than that – because the very next morning you had run off to Geneva and he was left like a clockwork toy someone had forgotten to wind up!’ He stared at her almost angrily. ‘You maintain this hostility towards each other, but it fools no one but you two. Your problem isn’t that you slept with him, Clover. It’s that you only slept with him once!’
Clover stared at him, aghast. Where had this come from? Johnny couldn’t possibly think—
The sound of a cough made them both jump.
Ari was standing by the door. Clover felt her cheeks flame. How much had he just heard? Had Kit’s name been mentioned? Was there any way for Ari to have identified him?
‘Hey,’ Johnny said in a strangled voice. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine?’ Clover echoed.
Ari shrugged. ‘He’s upset of course, but he’s taking it on the chin.’ He looked at them both. ‘So I just wanted to make sure you’re still set for an ETD of eleven a.m. tomorrow?’
Clover blinked in disbelief. ‘He’s not still planning to go to St Moritz?’
‘Of course. Why not?’
Why not? Was it just her or was the whole world going mad? ‘But the story . . .’
‘Will blow over. Amy’s entitled to have her say.’
Have her say? She had destroyed him! Clover’s eyes narrowed; these weren’t Ari’s words. ‘But Julian . . .’
‘If he pulls the sponsorship, Kit can go solo,’ he shrugged. ‘He can self-fund.’
There was an astounded silence as Ari looked between her and Johnny with a tight smile. ‘Okay, so eleven then. See you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah. Night, Ari,’ Johnny murmured.
He glanced at her as they heard Ari’s bedroom door click shut. Another fraught silence blossomed. Their argument lingered like smoke, Ari’s dramatic downplaying of tonight’s events bordering on farcical. ‘. . . I’m going to bed too. I’m knackered.’
‘But Johnny—’
He set down his empty tumbler on Matty’s dressing table and walked across the room without looking at her. ‘Night, Clo.’
Clover stared at the wall. It stared back. She could hear the sound of taps running, toilets flushing in the others’ bathrooms. The chalet was preparing for sleep and the quietude of night whilst she sat there, both motionless and frantic. Everyone was playing roles that wore a veil of normality but the truth lay two degrees to the side; almost superimposed onto reality, but not quite. Was she the only one who couldn’t just sit there and take it?
She rose, not quite sure of what she planned to do. She only knew that they couldn’t roll into St Moritz tomorrow pretending everything was fine; something profound and terrible had happened tonight. She peered into the corridor, her gaze drifting over the closed doors and low blooms of light on the walls.
Silently, she tiptoed out and crept up the stairs. The lift would be too noisy, a liability with its distinctive ‘ping’ alerting inquisitive minds to movement. She wasn’t sure if she was more horrified by the thought of being caught by Ari or Johnny.
Within thirty seconds, her toes were burrowing into the cream carpet of the top floor and her breathing was heavier. To her left, Beau’s bedroom door was ajar, the lights off of course. To her right, they were still on. She stood outside the door, looking for shadows criss-crossing the room, but it was too large for them to fall by the threshold.
With a steadying breath, she knocked and – without waiting for a reply, before she lost her nerve – entered. Kit looked back at her; his bow tie was dangling loosely either side of his shirt, the top button undone; he too had a tumbler of cognac in his hand. Everyone was needing something fortifying tonight, seemingly.
‘Oh god, no,’ he moaned at the sight of her, half-turning away. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t deal with you right now . . . Just please go.’
She arched an eyebrow. Please? His manners made her nervous; it must be bad if he was being polite to her. She stepped further into the room. ‘I want to hear your side.’
His whole body slumped. ‘If you think I’m sitting down and doing a fucking interview with you, in the middle of the night—’
‘Not an interview. I just want to hear it from you. Is she telling the truth?’
He stared back at her in a long-held silence, as though astounded she was even questioning it. ‘Well, she must be,’ he said finally. ‘It’s in the papers, right?’ He turned away, a hand on his hip. He sighed again, then knocked back his drink.
‘Is she lying?’ she asked again.
‘What reason would she have to lie?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’
‘Well, from what I’ve read so far, she’s given a compelling account,’ he said evenly. ‘I’d sure believe it . . . The timing’s funny though, right?’ He stared at her. ‘After four years apart, her married to some rich dude . . . and suddenly she is struck by the urge to . . . come out with that.’ He gestured blankly towards his iPad on the bed, opened on the newspaper reports.
She knew what his point was. ‘We only contacted her as a matter of routine. As far as we knew, interviewing her would have been no different to interviewing Ari or Beau . . . she was someone who was close to you back then, someone who could give us insight into who you were, how you were feeling, what was going on in your life . . . How could we have known—?’
‘That I pummelled her? Beat her up? Pulled her across the floor by the hair?’
She felt herself go cold at the words.
His eyes narrowed. ‘How did you even know about her?’ She shrugged. ‘Research. Leads come up in the course of conversations . . . We weren’t looking for it . . . But why did you keep the relationship a secret?’
‘Because I was beating her up! Why else? She couldn’t leave the house with all those bruises now, could she?’ Every word burned with scorn.
‘This will destroy your reputation.’
‘What reputation?’ he scoffed. ‘I lost that long before tonight.’
Cory shimmered between them, but she blinked him away.
‘Kit, if she’s lying, then you have to say so. By saying nothing, you’re condemning yourself.’
He shrugged, pulling the tie from under his collar. ‘Well, that should please you at least.’
‘You could get arrested! Why won’t you defend yourself?’ she cried, stepping towards him.
‘Why are you assuming she’s lying?’ He threw the tie onto the floor and began unbuttoning his cuffs.
‘I . . . I’m not assuming anything. I just don’t know what to believe.’
He stared at her as he shook his head slowly. ‘Clover, whether you believe it or don’t believe it – it really makes no difference.’ He shrugged off his shirt and let it fall too. He jerked his chin in the direction of the door. ‘Shut the door on your way out.’
She watched as he walked into the bathroom, kicking the door closed behind him. She stared at it, her heart pounding against her ribs as she heard the sound of the shower starting up. There could be only one reason why he was being like this, why he wasn’t fighting back – because he couldn’t. It had to be true.
He was everything she’d ever said he was. She’d known it from the start.
He was the man who’d forced Cory Allbright into those waves. He was a man who used his fists.
He was a monster.
Wasn’t he?
The door opened.
Kit stopped, silhouetted briefly, his hand already on the light switch before he saw her, lying there.
‘. . . What the fuck are you doing?’ His voice was a croak; it was a shock too far for his body tonight.
‘What does it look like?’ she asked calmly, even though she had no idea what she was doing. She was a stranger to herself tonight. ‘I’m having a bath.’
The moonlight glinted on the copper as it fell through the glass walls.
‘. . . I told you to get out.’
‘No, you told me to shut the door on my way out. I haven’t gone yet.’
‘Clover . . .’ There was a warning note in his voice. ‘I can’t deal with your games right now.’
‘There’s no games. You told me I was welcome to have a bath here, any time I wanted. Day or night.’ They both remembered the sarcasm that had dripped from those same words the night he’d said them at the restaurant, all those weeks ago now.
He stared back at her, then closed his eyes. He looked done in. ‘Fine. Have the damn bath then.’ He switched off the bathroom light and let his towel fall, climbing into his bed. He turned off the bedside light and turned away from her.
Silence settled over the room.
Clover lay her head back against the copper bath and looked out – set now in darkness, she had a clear view through the glass wall and living room picture window, down to the town and lake. Lights twinkled prettily on the water. She could see the top of the town’s Christmas tree down by the church. It looked almost like they could hop, skip and jump their way down there on the snow-festooned roofs of the chalets that lay in tiers below them.
She sighed, forgetting for a moment the absurdity – the perversity – of the current situation. She had acted before she’d been able to think, opening up the taps and filling the tub while he’d showered; he’d been in there so long, he wouldn’t have heard anything at all of what she was doing through here.
In the silent pitch, they could hear only each other – the sound of his body shifting restlessly on the sheets; the melodic rippling of the water as she stirred too. She listened to him breathing. He wasn’t anywhere close to falling asleep. She moved her legs in the water, knowing he couldn’t help but hear the sounds of her bathing. They both knew that at some point she was going to have to get out of this bath.
‘. . . Why are you doing this?’ His voice was quiet. Flat. For the first time ever, he sounded defeated.
‘Because I don’t believe you did it.’
He sighed but offered no protest. He sounded too worn out to argue further.
‘. . . You couldn’t even look at me when I’d been beaten.’
She heard the sound of his breathing pause.
‘You apologized for bruising me just because you gripped my arm a little too hard – and you hate me, so I know how hard it must have been for you to do that, but you still did it. I remember what you said to me. You said, “I’m many things. But I’m not that.”’
He didn’t reply.
‘Those aren’t the actions of a man who did what she’s accusing you of . . . She’s lying.’
There was a long silence before he turned over to face her. The moon was shining high and bright in the mountains behind her, silhouetting her into darkness.
‘Yeah? Well, I can’t prove I didn’t do those things. And who’s going to believe me if it’s my word against hers? I’m the bad guy, and everyone knows it.’
‘Are you, though? Yeah, you once did a terrible thing.’
He waited for her to say something more. She didn’t.
‘. . . But?’ he prompted.
‘That’s right, there is a but – you did a terrible thing but there was a reason why. I know there was. Tell me why you did it? Why is Amy lying about you? Why are you letting her lie about you?’
‘No, I’m not doing this,’ he sighed, going to turn over, but the sudden sound of water splashing and trickling as she stood up made him pause. Unable to stop himself, he looked back to see her standing silhouetted in the bath.
He didn’t move as she stepped out and towelled herself off.
‘My brother said this thing to me when I stayed with him this week,’ she said, taking her time, knowing she had his absolute attention. ‘He said people consider too much the good luck of the early bird – and not enough the bad luck of the early worm. I didn’t want to hear it at the time, but I think maybe he was right.’ She looked straight at him. ‘You’re the early worm and Amy’s lying about you. Tell me what happened.’
He shifted his weight onto his elbow as he looked back at her. ‘Clo . . . I can’t.’
‘You have to. Her lies will destroy you.’
‘Fine. That’s better than—’ He stopped himself but she could see he was struggling to maintain his reserve. She was getting to him.
‘Better than what?’ she frowned, taking a few steps closer. She was almost within touching distance. ‘Kit . . . Better than what? What could be worse than this?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Let me help you.’
‘No one can help.’ He turned away from her abruptly. ‘You need to get out of here. Right now.’
He wasn’t going to tell her. She could see he wanted to, that the words were on the tip of his tongue. Something was stopping him . . . She stared down at him, seeing how his body was tense with anger and frustration, filled with words he wouldn’t say, the duvet rising and falling with his laboured breaths. What motive could be so powerful that he would let his own ship sink and not reach for the life raft? Why wouldn’t he save himself?
She stepped closer and slipped under the sheet, pressing her body against his.
She felt his sharp intake of breath. ‘Clo . . .’
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ she whispered. ‘But I wish you would trust me.’ She kissed his shoulder, once, twice, her arm caressing sadly down the length of his arm. ‘Tell me what happened.’
He turned suddenly and grabbed her, rolling her around him into the middle of the bed in a single fluid movement. He stared down at her angrily. ‘Why won’t you ever listen?’
She looked back up at him. ‘Because something . . . unjust is happening. You loved her once. And she loved you.’
‘Yeah . . .?’ He kissed her with an urgency and passion and sadness that took her breath away. She could feel he wanted to subsume her, possess her, lose himself in her. The desperation of the lost man. He looked back at her, his eyes burning with confusion. ‘. . . Then why does hating you feel better than loving her ever did?’
She swallowed, taken aback by the question. ‘Well, perhaps it wasn’t love,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah.’ His gaze roamed over her face. ‘. . . Or perhaps this isn’t hate.’