Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
My limbs were rigid; my feet stuck to the carpet like they were trapped in mud.
Just about to leave the kitchen and return upstairs with our champagne and croissants, Evan called up cheerily, ‘I’m on my way.’
This was like some warped dream. Evan was Fox. Fox was Evan.
I rubbed at my bare arms so hard I was in danger of removing a layer of skin.
I’d fallen for him. Hard. The man who had criticised the high-profile TV drama I’d been in. The man who had all but sabotaged my chances of securing another significant role in the near future. And I’d just gone to bed with him.
Evan had played me. He’d kept his secrets tucked away. He’d let me think he was someone else. Was his story about Sacha just a ruse to get me into bed? Or had he asked me to stay here because he felt sorry about his scathing review of Sinister? Was he trying to assuage his guilt?
Pain and anger swirled through me. My wild eyes gawped back at me from the mirror. Part of my brain was telling me I’d misread the situation. Perhaps I’d got the gist of the email wrong?
But as my attention drilled into the email and I read it over yet again, the words blurring in front of my eyes, I knew I hadn’t imagined it or misunderstood. The facts were glaring at me from the illuminated screen.
I stumbled away from Evan’s laptop and sank onto the corner of the bed. What now? Had Evan been playing some twisted game with me? Making me think he had feelings for me?
My head was stuffed with questions. My fists balled in anger in my lap. I swallowed back tears. I wanted to scream and cry and throw that bloody laptop across the room. I wanted to watch it crash and splinter, just like my heart was doing right now.
What should I do?
I couldn’t look him in the face. I didn’t want to. Evan wasn’t who I thought he was. Literally.
‘Croissants and champagne, just for you!’ Evan burst in, angling the tray in his arms. He’d even slipped a single red rose in a vase onto the tray. Talk about adding insult to injury.
I leapt up from the bed, clamping my arms around myself like a protective barrier.
He set down the loaded tray on top of his writing desk. The golden champagne popped in two flutes, and the warm, almond scent of the croissants drifted towards me.
I watched as Evan reached for the long-stemmed red rose. ‘This is for you.’ He proffered it towards me, but I shrank away from it as though it were something hideous.
‘You ok? What is it? You look pale.’
My heart was cracking in my chest. He was standing there, clutching the rose, looking irresistible. ‘You just got an email,’ I croaked. ‘From someone called Robin.’ I let my words hang there for a moment. ‘Seems like you’re late turning your Fox copy in for next week’s column.’
He suddenly looked desperate. Evan’s expression collapsed. ‘Oh shit.’ He lowered the rose. His troubled eyes never left me. ‘Daisy. I wanted to tell you myself. Jesus, I didn’t want you to find out like this.’ He scratched his stubble. ‘Nobody knows. I mean, not my family.’
So it was true. A tiny part of me had still been wishing I’d hallucinated it, or that the email had been sent to the wrong person. ‘And that’s supposed to make it ok?’
‘Of course not.’
I flung a disgusted look at the champagne glasses, the buttery croissants and the rose Evan was still holding. In slow motion, he slid it back into the vase.
‘So, what was that, Evan? Or do I call you Fox? Was it a sympathy shag?’ I was fighting with every breath to speak.
‘What? No! Of course not! You really think I’d do something like that?’
He took a couple of steps towards me, but I put up one hand. ‘Don’t.’ My lips wobbled.
Evan swallowed.
‘So, what was it then?’ Tears sprung out of my eyes. ‘Was it a joke to you? A bet maybe?’
‘It wasn’t any of those things.’ His voice was imploring. ‘I didn’t recognise you at the party. I didn’t know who you were until you told me. I mean, you wore that blonde bobbed wig in Sinister.’
‘Yes, I know I did. You don’t have to remind me.’
Evan hauled a frustrated hand down his stubbly face.
‘Like I just told you, I thought you were gorgeous the first time I saw you at the birthday lunch. Then on our road trip back to Scotland I became more and more fascinated by you.’ His face was pale and beseeching.
‘When you told me who you were, yes, I admit I felt awful about what I’d written.
I could see what effect it’d had on you, and I hated myself.
’ His voice was growing more and more impassioned.
‘But that had nothing to do with what happened between us just now. As I got to know you more, I knew I was beginning to fall for you.’
I shook my head. ‘If you keep telling yourself that often enough, you might start to believe it.’
‘It’s true.’ He raised his eyes to his bedroom ceiling. ‘You’ve been driving me to distraction, Daisy. When I realised who you were, I felt rotten about what I’d said – what Fox had said – about the TV series you were in. And then I got to know you, and by then…’
‘By then what?’
‘By then, I wanted to tell you who I really was, but I just couldn’t do it.’ He dropped his head to the carpet. ‘I was on the brink a couple of times, but in the end, I didn’t have the guts. I was terrified you’d hate me.’
I was struggling to stop the lump in my throat. ‘I don’t hate you.’ My chest ached. ‘I hate myself. I hate me for allowing myself to get used like this.’
‘I didn’t use you, Daisy. Please believe that.
’ Evan’s voice was heavy and dark. ‘You’ve got it wrong.
You have no idea how I feel about you. When I thought you were interested in Dane, and I saw him flirting with you, it was like a punch to the gut.
’ He looked like his emotions were tumbling down around him, swamping him, and he couldn’t get his head above water. Mine had already done that.
‘That’s why I seemed a bit distracted or off sometimes, and I didn’t mean to be,’ he said. ‘I was carrying this guilt around with me about being Fox, and you were here, being so lovely, considerate and kind, and that made me feel like even more of a bastard.’
My voice was confused and strangulated. ‘That idiot at the lunch; the one I thought was Fox.’
‘I think he was trying to impress the girl in the red dress. I overheard her saying she wanted to be a film critic.’ Evan looked pained. ‘He kept trying to catch her eye, and I think he thought somehow that being a bullish, loud-mouthed sod and pretending to be Fox might work.’
My head was struggling to process any of this.
‘Daisy, hear me out. Please. I know I’ve cocked everything up, but I know how I feel about you.’
But I wasn’t listening. I was already pushing past him, my sundress clinging to me and my mind reeling.
‘I’ll stay on just long enough to help get the first tour event up and running.
I promised I would.’ My head was spinning.
‘Thank goodness it’s only a few more days.
Then Grandpa and I will be gone. And do you know what? I can’t wait.’
I wheeled away and across the upstairs landing towards my bedroom. ‘I’m not letting down your parents or Cayla. They don’t deserve that, even though you’ve proven yourself to be an utter bastard.’ I let out a dry laugh. ‘And to think you have the audacity to call Dane self-absorbed.’
I dashed away a couple of tears with the back of my hand.
I wanted to let them course down my face and scream with frustration at how stupid I’d been.
How could I have let things get to this point?
I knew I should never have let my heart rule my head.
Hadn’t Leon taught me anything? I’d been so blinded by Evan that I didn’t think for one second that he’d deceive me the way Leon had.
I would never have imagined Evan capable.
I bit my bottom lip to try and stop myself from dissolving into a torrent of tears.
Evan lingered a few feet away from me looking wretched.
All I wanted to do was lock the door, crawl under the bedcovers and mentally torture myself as to how I could have been so na?ve. ‘At least Dane doesn’t try to pretend to be something he isn’t.’
I grabbed the handle of my bedroom door, yanked it open and stepped inside. I banged it closed behind me. I could hear Evan calling my name from the other side, desperation in his voice. ‘I deserve this and more, Daisy. But you have to believe me. I’ve fallen for you. Please. Open the door.’
I was emotionally spent. Hollowed out.
Evan had made me think he was someone else, when all the time he was Fox.
I threw myself on top of my bed.
Evan called out to me again. ‘Daisy. Please. Let me in. Just hear me out.’
‘Go away,’ I choked. ‘I don’t want to speak to you.’
After a few more moments, I heard his dejected feet moving away back to his own room and him clicking the door closed.
That was when the torrent of tears broke through.
And as I lay on the bed, curled up with my fists bawled into my streaming eyes, I wished I had never met Evan.
* * *
‘It’s such a mess,’ I sobbed down the phone to a stunned Jade an hour later.
‘What is, Daisy? What’s going on?’
I swallowed and wriggled upright on top of the bed. ‘It’s Evan.’
‘What about him?’
My brain kept replaying us laughing together in bed. It was torture. My voice shook. ‘He’s not who I thought he was. I mean, he is Evan Lord, but…’
‘Sweetheart, you’re not making any sense.’
I could see the early June sunshine out of the bedroom window, casting its golden hue over the tops of the trees.
Everything looked like it had been brushed with rose gold, from the leaves and breeze-whispered lawns to the towering hedgerows.
It was such a beautiful late afternoon, and yet I felt like my insides had been shredded. I was so stupid.
‘Daisy, talk to me.’
‘Evan is Fox.’
The shocked silence from Jade down the line made me wonder if she’d been cut off. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘I wish I was.’
‘But how do you know? I mean, did Evan tell you that?’