Warwick Lawton picked up the last letter he’d received from Katherine Roberts and read it again. The smile didn’t leave his face until the very end when he gave a weary sigh and scratched his chin. She didn’t know, did she? She had absolutely no idea that Lorna Warwick was a man. Why should she? The biography in the front of his novels was as fictional as the novels themselves, and nobody but his agent and publisher knew the truth because as far as his professional life went, he was a recluse, shunning the media and turning his back on book signings. Even his close friends didn’t know the truth. They were aware only that Warwick wrote ‘some drivel or other’ and never pushed him for any more information and that was just the way that Warwick liked it. Not that he was ashamed of what he wrote—certainly not. He loved his books. After all, if he weren’t passionate about his characters and their fates, how could he expect his readers to love them?
His late mother, Lara Lawton, had taught him the pleasure of reading and writing. She’d been an actress although she’d never risen to the great heights that her name and beauty had always suggested to the young Warwick. Lara Lawton. It should have been a name emblazoned across a thousand theatres, a name that dominated the cinema screen and was splashed across magazine covers. Instead she’d swum in the shallows of the world of film and television, taking bit roles here and background roles there.
‘And always a book in her hands,’ Warwick remembered. There was so much time for her hanging around sets and his mother had been a passionate reader, telling him the plots of all the novels she read and encouraging him when he sat down one day, determined to rewrite the story of Wuthering Heights and give it a happy ending that had more to do with Hollywood than Brontë. His mother had been delighted with the result and persuaded him to write some of his own stories. At first he did it to please her but he soon found that it also pleased him and that had been the beginning of his writing career.
The fact that he’d chosen to write historical romances still amazed him and he often wondered if he should turn his attention to thrillers or crime or something a bit more masculine but his mother’s early influence had been too powerful and all those evenings together spent watching Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier adaptations and films like Dragonwyck and Gone with the Wind had left their mark.
Now he was sailing high in the bestseller lists and leading a double life as a woman. For a moment, he wondered what his mother would make of it all. What would she say if she knew her little boy was known by the majority of the population as Lorna? She’d probably laugh—that lovely, silvery laugh of hers that had always made him laugh too.
His friends would laugh as well. He dreaded to think how much they’d laugh if they ever found out. Warwick Lawton writing as a woman! The same six-foot-two Warwick Lawton who went rock climbing and abseiling with his mates on weekends, swapping his keyboard for the feel of a bit of Peak District gritstone under his fingers? Surely not! But if he were honest, he rather liked the duality of his nature. It was like playing a game. One minute he was Warwick, speeding up the motorway in his latest fast car with a tangle of ropes and harnesses in his boot; the next he was Lorna researching women’s undergarments in the early nineteenth century.
Of course the charade would be even funnier if he could share it with somebody, and he often wondered if the day would come when he could tell Katherine about it.
‘And therein lies the problem,’ he said to himself. What was he going to do about his little secret?
His bags were packed for Purley Hall and his agent had sorted out a last-minute room for him and he was leaving in less than an hour but he still hadn’t made up his mind what to do about Katherine.
For a moment, he sat absolutely still, listening to the gentle tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. It was the heartbeat of the house and always made him feel calm and in control of things which wasn’t how he was feeling at that time.
‘Oh, God!’ he suddenly exclaimed. Could it be that he was a little bit in love?
He let the thought somersault around in his brain before dismissing it. How could he possibly be in love? He’d never even met the woman although he had to confess to having Googled her, discovering a photograph of her outside St Bridget’s College, Oxford, with a bunch of very stuffy-looking men in tweeds. And she was beautiful. He closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the long chocolate-coloured wavy hair, the dark eyes in a pale face, and a rosebud mouth that was smiling at the camera. Very heroine-like, he thought, instantly casting her as his next vibrant leading lady and saving the photograph to his hard drive.
He’d sat down to read through all her letters again the night before, and one thing had struck him: she was a remarkable woman and he wanted to get to know her better. The way she wrote about books, the way she spoke about—well, everything—stirred him. She was passionate about things and wasn’t afraid to express those feelings, unlike so many of the women in his past who never really had much to say at all. Take Fiona, the shopaholic: all she ever talked about was her nails and her shoes. Or Lindsay, the interior designer. Warwick had learned more about cushions and pelmets in the four months they’d been together than he’d had any desire to know.
No, Katherine wasn’t like any other woman he’d met. She was sweet and smart and had a rapier wit that tickled him pink, and they’d shared such secrets. She trusted him.
She trusted Lorna, Warwick thought. You aren’t the person she thinks you are. Would she tell you all these secrets if she knew you were a man? Would she divulge such feelings if she realised that you were a male with a string of hopeless relationships behind him?
That was the problem he had with the weekend that lay ahead. What was he going to do about Katherine?
He sat down in his office chair and surveyed the letters before him.
‘I love getting your letters. It’s so wonderful to know that there’s somebody out there who understands,’ he read from one of them.
‘I really feel that I can trust you,’ he read from another. ‘You’re a really good friend, Lorna, and that’s just what I need at the moment.’
‘I can tell you everything and that’s a real comfort. That means so much to me,’ she’d written in another.
Things had soon become intimate between the two of them and Warwick had spent mornings pacing up and down for the post to arrive when he should have been working.
‘My first big love was my next door neighbour—how clichéd is that?’ Katherine had written just over a month before. ‘I let him kiss me on our first date and it was horrible. It nearly put me off for life! But I didn’t give in until I was at university. I fell madly in love with a year-three student who seduced me in the library when he was meant to be locking up! I’ll never forget looking up at all those books and hoping that the spirits of Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë weren’t glowering down at me. Gosh! I’ve never told anyone about that before!’
Warwick smiled as he remembered the confession—it had been the first of many.
He had to admit that the letters had a strange effect on him. They’d gone from the letters of a fan to the letters of a friend in a very short space of time, but they were more than that now. Even though he’d never met her, he felt incredibly close to Katherine and he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise that.
Warwick swallowed hard. This wasn’t going to be easy. However he played it, the fact remained that he’d been replying to Katherine’s letters under false pretences and had led her to believe that he was a woman. His string of terrible girlfriends had become boyfriends. Fiona’s obsession with fashion had morphed into Tony’s obsession with motorbikes, and Lindsay’s cushions had become Lennie’s cushions (Lorna had been horrified to discover that Lennie was gay). Katherine had been sympathetic and supportive of Lorna’s hapless love life, offering advice when appropriate. ‘Lennie’s cushions sound like the perfect Christmas present for that awkward aunt of yours,’ Katherine had written. She’d put her trust in him completely, hadn’t she?
Warwick let out a long, weary breath as he thought about the strange situation he’d managed to get himself into. It was like something from one of his books, he thought. Actually, the idea of a woman writing to a man but thinking she’s a woman was a pretty good idea for a book, he thought with a grin, but then he felt guilty for even thinking about using his dear friend for the basis of his art. Still, he jotted it down in a notepad before he forgot it. A writer should never turn a good idea away just because it might offend somebody.