Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
OLIVER
“Absolutely stunning.” Lexi shields her eyes from the sun as she looks up at the waterfall that’s surrounded by lush green vegetation.
The water cascades into a large pool edged by gray rocks, then flows off through a tunnel in the rock wall on the other side.
The scent of the damp earth and the freshest air I’ve ever breathed rewind my memory, and the emotions of the first day I came here flood back.
“How does it feel?” Lexi asks as if she’s reading my mind. She hugs the blanket she carried from the car.
“Is that a ghostwriter question? Or a question from the woman who slept with me last night and would like to get to know me better?”
“Those two people are the same person.”
My brain stops for a second, like it can’t figure out how to process the factual accuracy of that sentence, even though I know all parts of it are true.
Yes, she is a reporter.
Yes, she’s the person the publisher insists on having write my story or else the book deal is off.
Yes, I want to chat with her, laugh with her, and be naked with her over and over and over again.
And yes, she’s planning to move thousands of miles away to report on some of the most dangerous regions in the world once my book is written and I might never see her again after that.
The ringing of my phone snaps me out of the conundrum of how to respond.
It’s Dane.
“Sir, are you okay?” he says when I pick up.
“Totally fine. I’ll be back in a while. No need to worry.”
He heaves a great sigh. “Sir, you employ us to be with you at all times.”
“It’s fine. I just need a break from being…well, I guess, me for a minute.”
“From what, sir?”
“Never mind. Doesn’t matter. You guys take a couple of hours off. Go into the village. Try the deep-fried battered Mars Bar at the fish and chip shop. Your arteries won’t thank you, but your taste buds will.”
I hang up, and Lexi puffs out her cheeks to make a gagging face.
“Local delicacy,” I say. “But Flora put some entirely non-fried goodies together for us.” I hold up the plastic box I’ve carried from the car. “If you put that blanket down, we can have a wee picnic.” I do my Scottish accent for the last two words.
It makes her giggle the most delighted giggle, and, oh God, why does it have to be her who is the first woman I’ve felt like this about—the first who possesses the deadly combination of making my stomach flip, my dick spring to attention, and my heart know that I can trust her totally?
She’s entirely the right person for me at entirely the wrong time in her life.
And no matter how much she enjoyed last night, I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m entirely the wrong person for her.
I pull the food out of the box. Two plates of wrap-sealed sandwiches—prawns with salad, and thick-sliced cheese with Branston pickle.
“Oooh, if you’ve not had Branston yet, you need to start with one of these.”
“Branston?”
I peel the wrap off the plate and offer it to her. “The brown lumpy stuff in here. Spectacular British specialty. And I know for sure Flora will have used the extra-sharp cheddar I love. The kind that makes your gums hurt.”
Lexi peers at the sandwiches as if she’s examining a scientific experiment. “You’re not selling it well.”
“Give it a try. I spent ages trying to find somewhere that sold Branston in New York. Finally found a place that had it, but only in tiny jars for ludicrous prices. Remind me to pack some to take back.”
“Sure.” She picks one of the crusty white bread sandwiches off the plate and takes a bite.
Her face morphs from dear God no to oh, this is pretty good in a matter of seconds.
“See,” I say. “We know how to do food here.”
I pull out the rest of the items. There’s a tub of cucumber and tomato salad, a couple of bags of crisps—plain salted and pickled onion flavor—and my favorite homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. The ones from my local bakery in New York are great, but they’re not a patch on Marjorie’s baking.
“Anyway.” I set down two bottles of water. “Now will you tell me why you despise all rich people?”
She snorts, then slams her hand over her face and waves her sandwich at the pile of napkins.
I pass her one, and she turns away to delicately clear her nostrils.
“That brown stuff came right out my nose when you said that. And it’s spicy.” She unscrews the cap from a water bottle and takes a healthy drink. “That question came completely out of nowhere.”
“No, it didn’t. I asked you last night and you brushed it away. And, since I belong to a demographic you seem to loathe and I would prefer you not to loathe me, I figured I should get to the bottom of it. Is it a secret?”
She takes another bite of the sandwich, then rests her arms on her bent knees and gazes out across the pool and up to the top of the waterfall.
“Not really,” she says when she’s finished chewing. “But you’ll think it’s silly.”
“Given what you’ve already read about me and the stuff I’ve told you and the stories you don’t know about that are still to come, I don’t think you’re the one in this relationship who needs to worry about looking silly.”
Her head turns to me when I say relationship.
“I mean working relationship. On the book. Not the being-naked thing. But I guess it applies to the being-naked thing too. Which I’d really like to do again, by the way—in case you thought I was a total arse who’d do that for kicks then pretend it never happened.
” Fuck, Oliver. Shut your loserish mouth.
“But we can talk about that another time. Right now, I just want to know why you automatically hate people like me.”
“You think I hate you?” she says.
“Tell me about it so I can try to figure that out.”
I grab one of the sandwiches and wait for her to finish hers so she can start talking.
“Okay.” She dusts crumbs from her fingers, then leans back on her hands, looks up at the blue sky, and sighs.
“My dad is a teacher. He’s always taught at private high schools.
And when I was a teenager, the one he worked at gave a full ride to the staffs’ kids.
So my brother and I got to go there for free. ”
Well, it’s already obvious what the issue is here. But also, “You have a brother?”
“Yup. Older. Works in Silicon Valley doing things I don’t understand or care about. We’re very different people.” She turns her head to look at me. “I don’t mean we don’t get along. It’s fine. It’s just that we’re not close and don’t have much in common.”
The sharpness of the cheddar stings my tongue while I wait for her to resume the story.
“Anyway, he slotted right in at the school. Played the game. Said all the right things to all the right people. Made friends with the rich kids. Went to their houses and played on their fancy computers.”
She picks up a single crisp and pops it in her mouth.
“And you didn’t fit right in?” I honestly can’t imagine anyone less likely to tolerate a situation like that than the woman sitting before me.
She looks right at me and shakes her head dramatically from left to right.
“There was this clique of girls who thought I was a loser because I didn’t do my hair and makeup for school and thought paying as much for a lipstick as would buy a family’s dinner was ridiculous.
They mocked me because I would rather organize a food drive for the homeless shelter or study for a test than hang around watching the guys play football. ”
“And they were all like that?”
“There was a handful of kids who thought the same way I did. They were super-rich like the others, of course. But they did believe in working hard and using their powers for good. Our group was definitely ostracized. No one sat with us at lunch. No one joined in with our projects. For the majority of the other kids, it was like their lack of caring and work ethic was in their genes. Then after a while, I realized why.”
She grabs another crisp.
“Are you leaving me on a cliffhanger here? I’m really not sure where this story’s going.”
“I think you know the answer,” she says.
“Try me.”
“Because when you’re born into families like theirs and yours”—she raises her eyebrows—“you don’t have to put as much effort into anything.
Unless you really want to. And some of them do have a drive and a passion and go full tilt for their ambitions, and all credit to them.
But for the lazy or entitled ones, I realized that if their families have the money to send them to the right private school, then they get into the right college, which means they then get the right job at the right company.
Or maybe their father has a friend whose uncle knows someone from his golf club who can put in a word for them at the place they want to work.
And they can drift through life without ever really having to try or fight for anything.
It gives them this inner confidence to step forward into a void and trust that a path will materialize under their feet.
And they progress in life over the heads of better qualified, more talented people who don’t have the connections they have. I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
“And it’s happened to you?”
“Yup, right out of the gate. When I was looking for my first job, I got down to the last two for a big city newspaper. It would have been an amazing place to start. But it went to a guy who hadn’t even worked on his college paper.”
“I’m guessing you did.”
“Of course.” She beams. “I’d been working on mine from day one and had a portfolio as long as my arm. A couple of my stories were even picked up by the local press.”
“And this guy got the job over you?”
“Yup. The only byline he had was one article on a football game. It wasn’t even a significant game.
And it wasn’t a sports reporter’s job we were going for.
It was like he just wrote the easiest thing he could so he had something to submit with his application.
Of course, there’s a chance I’m wrong and maybe he’d found a revolutionary new angle and it was a work of total genius. ”
“But you’re going to tell me he was related to someone significant, right?”
She nods. “Turned out his grandfather had been a really respected reporter at that newspaper back in the day and I never had a chance against someone from a family with a legacy like that.”
“And you think that life’s been like that for me?”
She rests her forehead on her knees, then rolls her head to look at me. “I think your life is an extreme version of that.” She smiles, but it’s a sad smile.
“Extreme is one word for it.”
“I don’t mean it in a bad way. I mean, it’s worse for you.”
She straightens and reaches out toward me over the food, like she wants to touch my arm to validate her compassion for my situation, but can’t quite reach.
“Those people I’m talking about didn’t have to live their lives under the scrutiny of the media.
They weren’t recognized around the world wherever they went.
They didn’t have everyone they dated put through the wringer by their family’s staff and the media.
They could do whatever the hell they wanted and just coast through life.
You can’t. And don’t. And I don’t think for a second that you would if you could. ”
The fact she doesn’t think I’d take the easy route off the back of a royal title is gratifying.
But everything she just said shows she’s keenly aware of the impact that a real relationship with me would have on her life. She knows that she and her work would be subjected to that same intense scrutiny. Knowing she’s too smart to ever subject herself to that brings a brutal twist to my stomach.
My phone rings again. “Christ, if this is Dane, he can get… Urgh, shit. It’s my mother.”
I put her on speaker, but before I can even say hello, she starts.
“The tailor’s here to make the final touches to the wedding outfits and we need to check your Prince Charlie still fits. Where are you?”
“Out for a bit. With Lexi. Showing her around. Can he come back later? Or tomorrow?”
“No, he’s tied up with the Duke and Duchess of Inverness’s christening as well.
A very busy man. You need to get back now.
You can’t go wandering off—” She sighs. “I can’t keep saying the same things I’ve been saying to you since you were a kid.
Just come back and get the measurements checked. Now.”
Then she hangs up.
I look up to find Lexi with her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking, eyes crinkled with laughter.
“Suddenly my mother being fucked off with me is funny?”
Lexi shakes her head and splutters, “You have to get your Prince Charlie measured?”
Her inability to not laugh at the schoolyard innuendo is infectious and brings the smile that talking to my mother had erased back to my face.
“It’s a bloody jacket. Not a euphemism for anything.” I throw a crisp at her, which she catches and pops into her mouth.
“But, if it had been”—I wiggle my eyebrows at her—“I’d kind of hoped you might have wanted to size it up while we’re out here on our own. Maybe up against that tree over there. Or under the waterfall with it crashing around us. But now we can’t, because we have to go back.”
She picks up the plastic wrap and starts resealing the sandwich plates. “On the way back to the car, you need to tell me more about what it was like when your bartender girlfriend ended things because of the press coverage.”
Again, I ask, “For the book, or for you?”
She concentrates excessively on folding down the top of the open crisp packet to keep the contents fresh. “Both.”
Huh.
Maybe there is a slight glimmer of hope there after all.