Lucky Stars Read online

  It was hard and it was cold.

  “You want to go, Belle?” he asked, she kept quiet and he finished, “Then go.”

  Belle studied him, suddenly unsure. He was holding his body stiffly as if he was stopping himself from doing something, what, she couldn’t imagine.

  She looked into his eyes, usually warm and gentle or soft and amused, now they were blank.

  She waited for a sign, any sign, that she hadn’t misread her lucky stars.

  He gave her none.

  Nothing.

  Just stared at her, his face hard, his eyes blank.

  That was it then. He was done.

  Challenge accepted, mission accomplished and he was through.

  She swallowed the lump that formed suddenly in her throat and turned. She reached down to grab her bag and walked to the door. She felt his eyes on her but she didn’t look back even as she hoped she’d feel his hand on her wrist, his arm hooking about her waist, making an effort, any effort, to stop her.

  She opened the door and walked through.

  James (as far as she could tell), didn’t move.

  Joy and Yasmin were in the hall but they weren’t far away. Miles had disappeared. There were others there, people she’d met at the party, just a few of them likely woken by the shouting, moving slowly down the hall, pretending to be on their way somewhere but looking curious.

  She ignored them and kept walking even as both Joy and Yasmin called her name.

  She just kept going, head bowed, eyes to the floor. She moved as swiftly as she could down the stairs, across the massive hall, through the huge, studded wooden doors that it took all her strength to shift even a few feet so she could slide through.

  The taxi was waiting and only when she saw it did she start running.

  * * * * *

  Lewis and Myrtle

  At the top window of the eastern-most turret, two children, a black-headed boy and a fair-haired girl, stood holding hands and looking out the window at the pretty woman wearing jeans, a man’s shirt that was way too big on her and funny-looking shoes that weren’t really shoes but they also were. They were something they heard people in these times call “flip-flops” which they both thought was very funny and they’d made a game of the words. Hiding themselves, closing their eyes and one calling “flip” and the other calling “flop” until they found themselves again.

  They watched as she ran to the black taxi shining in the sun like a rabid dog was close at her heels.

  The taxi driver barely had a chance to get out before she had the back door open. She threw her bag in then she did the same with her body and slammed the door.

  The driver wasted no time and drove off with a squeal of wheels.

  The little girl, named Myrtle, turned to the little boy, named Lewis, and dropped his hand.

  “She doesn’t look very happy,” Lewis remarked.

  Myrtle wrinkled her nose. “If Miles was my boyfriend, I’d run from the castle too.”

  Lewis grinned. “Only because you love Jack.” He put great emphasis on the world “love” and Myrtle punched him in the arm and looked back out the window.

  “She looked sweet with Jack last night when we saw them walking to the stables,” Myrtle commented.

  “Yes,” Lewis unusually concurred with his sister. Then again, he liked the look of the blonde lady, she was very pretty and she reminded him vaguely of his long since dead Mum. “Though, maybe something happened because when they came back, they were walking really quickly.”

  Myrtle giggled. “I know! He was practically dragging her.”

  “I wonder why they were in such a hurry?” Lewis asked and Myrtle bit her lip.

  “Did you see them kissing?” Myrtle whispered.

  Lewis didn’t look at his sister when he answered back in a whisper, “Yes.”

  Myrtle’s voice was worried when she asked, “Do you think Miles found out Jack kissed his girlfriend?”

  Lewis’s eyes moved to the window and he looked down the road, the taxi long gone.

  “I hope not. He can be not very nice and I don’t think he’d like Jack kissing his girlfriend,” Lewis replied and felt his sister shiver beside him.

  As he’d been doing for quite a number of years (over two hundred of them), he tried to protect his sister from anything that might distress her.

  So he leaned in, bumped her with his shoulder and shouted, “Flip-flop!”

  Myrtle needed no further encouragement. She shot up several inches from the floor and darted across the room, her ghostly body melting through the wall. She did a forward spin and headed down and through the stairs.

  Then, when she found her hidey-hole, she shouted, “Flip!”

  And some ways away, she heard her brother’s ghostly, “Flop!”

  Eyes firmly shut, Myrtle floated in his direction.

  Chapter Five

  Jack Meets Lila and Rachel

  Jack

  Three months later…

  Jack saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

  He turned his head to see his assistant, Olive, and her short, squat body. She was wearing a heavy tweed skirt even though it was the middle of a very warm summer. One tail of her blouse had come untucked. And her short, naturally grey but dyed peach (for some reason unknown to him) hair was spiked as if she’d been running her hands through it with severe agitation.

  Olive Mayfair could singlehandedly plan a successful war with multiple fronts but she wouldn’t be able to do it without displaying a great deal of tremendously disorganised, blatantly obvious stress.

  She stood at the windows to the conference room where Jack was sitting in a meeting and she was gesticulating wildly, like she was guiding a plane in to land and didn’t quite know what signals to make so she was making it up as she went along.

  Her eyes were wild.

  With one look at her Jack knew either the world was coming to an end or there was a toilet backed up in the branch of his bank located in Iowa City, Iowa.

  He looked back at the conference table at which he was sitting at the head.

  The ten people in the room with him were all watching Olive.

  “Excuse me,” Jack muttered, put his hands to the arms of his chair and pushed up. He grabbed his Mont Blanc pen, a present his father gave him when he graduated from Oxford, and his wildly expensive phone which could, if he’d take the time to programme it, likely call Mars, a present from Yasmin.

  He pushed through the door, Olive lunged forward immediately, grabbed his arm and dragged him away from the windows.

  She tugged him to a stop, looked up at him and, with a grave expression on her face, declared, “We have a problem.”

  “You don’t say,” Jack muttered dryly.

  “This is Code One!” she announced on a whispered screech.

  Jack crossed his arms on his chest and regarded her silently.

  “Lila Cavendish and her daughter, Rachel Abbot, are here,” she told him.

  Jack felt her words like a sharp, strong jab direct to the gut.

  “Excuse me?” Jack asked, hoping he hadn’t heard what he thought he’d heard.

  “Lila Cavendish and Rachel Abbot, grandmother and mother to Belle Abbot, are here. In your office. Right now.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed as his temper flared.

  Why Belle’s mother and grandmother would be in his offices in London, he could not fathom.

  He also didn’t care.

  “Get rid of them,” he demanded and Olive threw her hands out at the sides.

  “I knew you’d say that and I tried. They won’t go.”

  This surprised him. “They won’t go?”

  “No. I didn’t even let them into your office. They marched right in. Lila even made herself a cappuccino with your espresso maker.” She paused. “And your milk! Straight from your fridge!” she said this last like it was a crime punishable by death.

  “Why are they here?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. They won’t t
ell me. They’re demanding to speak to you,” Olive replied.

  “Tell them I’m in a meeting and they’ll need to make an appointment,” Jack said.

  “I did that already. They don’t care. They said they’d wait ‘until the cows come home’, whatever that means. We don’t have cows in London,” Olive noted unnecessarily.

  Jack made a decision and turned toward his office. “I’ll take care of them. Go back to the meeting. Tell them I’ll be five minutes.”

  He watched Olive nod and walked to his office trying, not entirely successfully, to control his anger.

  The debacle with Belle at The Point had made the papers. How, Jack didn’t know. But considering the number of people who saw Miles prominently displaying Belle on his arm at the party then the next morning all the shouting and finally they watched Belle fleeing the castle, it could be anyone.

  Including Miles, a manoeuvre which, if his brother arranged it, backfired.

  For an entire month, the media was in fits of glee. They picked every possibility of the Bennett Brothers’ love triangle with an adopted national treasure apart and, Jack had to admit, they did a splendid job of it.

  The Bennett Brothers rivalry wasn’t a secret and many people who only remotely knew Jack or Miles were more than happy to discuss it.

  Jack and Miles had been depicted as lascivious libertines, targeting a media darling as the spoils of a heinous contest, playing with her affections and using her body for their immoral pleasure.

  Belle had been depicted as a fragile, not entirely clever, lamb at the slaughter who fell headlong in love with Miles then Jack or both of them at the same time, depending on the story.

  At first, it had been a feeding frenzy, all three of them caught in it. No matter where they went, there were cameras, microphones and prying, insulting questions hurled in their direction.

  Jack, Belle and Miles had all kept silent. Jack, because if he let himself react, he’d likely do bodily harm. Belle, because she never spoke to the press. Miles, because he’d drawn the short straw. The press, latching onto his loss in the “competition” for Belle, rubbed his face in it constantly, something he detested.

  Miles had finally lost his patience and disappeared not telling anyone, not even Joy, where he’d gone.

  Belle, Jack noted with vague concern he would not allow to form fully, seemed to get paler and thinner by the day and she too eventually disappeared which was a mistake as that led to a week of the media speculating that she was with Miles.

  Jack didn’t change his behaviour in any way.

  Miles had returned six weeks ago when the story was well and truly dead.

  Belle, Jack noted distantly (but the press noted it far more assertively), emerged two weeks ago looking paler, thinner and far more fragile.

  Jack would not allow himself to care.

  Whatever romantic idiocy that had him in its clutches and led him to behave like a besotted fool at her merest smile, her softest giggle, the depth he’d convinced himself was in her eyes, was gone.

  Completely.

  Time, distance, absence and Belle herself had swept it away.

  If his mind turned to his behaviour that night or her unshakable belief that he would abuse her so monstrously, especially after what he thought they’d shared, or her refusal to allow him to explain, or the memory of her walking away from him without even glancing back, the fury would begin.

  But he’d learned to control it like everything else in his life.

  And he did control it. To the point where he barely thought of her anymore unless she was thrust into his consciousness.

  Like now.

  He arrived at his outer office, his gaze slicing to his secretary, Gillie, who stared at him wide eyed and opened her mouth to speak.

  Jack cut her off before she could utter a word. “Don’t. It’s not your fault.”

  “Do you want me to call security?” Gillie asked as Jack strode to the door of his office.

  “No. This is not going to make the papers. Leave it,” Jack ordered and pushed open the door.

  Two women were in his office. One he could imagine was Belle’s mother. The other looked more like her older sister.

  The elder woman was dressed all in dove grey, a flowing, light, ankle length skirt, silk woven tunic and stylish flats. Her hair was a shining mixture of both blonde and white, as if the white that would declare her age to the world was trying to win but the blonde of her youth refused to let go.

  She had very unhappy, stormy grey eyes.

  The other one was also blonde, with Belle’s thick, long hair, untethered and falling in a wild mass of waves down her back. She also had grey eyes, which, turned to him, weren’t stormy but surprised and a little curious. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, so much silver at her fingers, wrists, neck and all along the curves of her ears it was a minor miracle she could hold herself upright and a purple t-shirt that asked, bizarrely “Mummy, where’s Fluffy?” across the chest in glittery, green script.

  Jack closed the door behind him, put his shoulders to it, crossed his arms on his chest and regarded both women.

  “You’ve got five minutes,” he announced.

  Lila, who he assumed was the older one unless Belle did have a sister which could well be as Jack knew her about as far as he could throw her, said with grave affront, “Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do.”

  “Mom…” the younger one mumbled softly, her voice, Jack noted even on that one word, was the same as Belle’s, sweet and musical.

  At the sound of it, Jack clenched his teeth.

  “Ladies, I’m busy,” he told them. “You’re losing time.”

  Lila’s back straightened, her eyes shot daggers at him and she opened her mouth to speak but Rachel got there before her.

  “We agreed I’d do the talking,” Rachel said to Lila.

  Lila turned her murderous glare to her daughter and announced, “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Mom, seriously, let me do the talking.”

  “No, I’ve got a few things to say to this… this…” Lila stuttered but was so caught up in anger she couldn’t find an appropriate word.

  “Say them,” Jack clipped his invitation. “Then go. I have things to do.”

  “All right then…” Lila started, leaning forward, clearly ready to let loose a stream of invective but it was what Rachel said at the same time that caused Jack’s body to go rock-solid.

  “Belle’s pregnant.”

  Jack stood motionless at the door, his mind completely blank as the two women ignored his stunned reaction and bickered in front of him.

  “I can’t believe you just blurted it out like that!” Lila snapped.

  “Well, it’s not news you can easily cushion,” Rachel returned.

  “He doesn’t deserve cushioning but you didn’t have to just… blurt it out,” Lila fired back.

  Rachel put her hands to her hips. “How would you have done it?”

  Lila put her hands to her hips as well. “I don’t know but I wouldn’t have blurted it out.”

  “You’re just mad you didn’t get to tell him and be all,” she raised her be-ringed hands to either side of her head and shook them, “drama.”

  Before Lila could respond, Jack’s voice hit the room and they both jumped when he said, “Excuse me.”

  They turned to him and stared as if they were surprised he was even there.

  Yes, he thought, they were both very like Belle.

  “Let’s go back to Belle being pregnant,” Jack suggested in a deceptively soft voice. His mind, unusually slow, still not wrapped around this fact however he did recognise one of the feelings he was feeling.

  It was anger.

  “Well, she’s pregnant. That’s it. That’s what we came to say,” Rachel told him as if she did this every day, forced her way into men’s offices and informed them the one night stand they’d had months ago was pregnant.

  “And you’re saying you think it’s mine,” Jack stated and the
air in the room changed drastically. It was not friendly before but after he uttered his words, words he knew were unnecessary, words he also knew were a serious insult, the air became sluggish and suffocating.

  Rachel, the more pleasant one, lost all vestiges of pleasant. Her eyes narrowed and her cheeks went pink.

  As becoming as this was (the same as when her daughter blushed), Jack’s gaze moved to Lila and he saw she stood straight and still, hands clenched into fists at her sides, the daggers in her eyes had turned to deadly spears.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” Rachel muttered furiously. “Belle told us but did we listen? No, we did… not… listen. Do we ever listen to Belle? No, we never… listen… to Belle. Do we always get in trouble? Yes! We do!”

  Jack, instinctively knowing Lila was the more worthy opponent, didn’t take his eyes from her as Rachel ranted. Therefore he saw immediately when her expression cleared, the anger cooled and she looked at her daughter.

  “This is good,” Lila told Rachel.

  “How is this good?” Rachel returned sharply.

  “Belle didn’t want him to have anything to do with the baby. He doesn’t think it’s his. Belle gets what she wants.” Lila clapped her hands together like she was wiping away dust and declared, “Fin.”

  Jack watched Lila walk to his couch and pick up a sleek, expensive purse.

  Then her eyes went to the painting over the couch. A painting that had been moved from his old office to this office three years ago upon his father’s death. A painting Jack had owned for twelve years. It was the first painting Jack had ever invested that kind of significant money in. His own money. Money that he’d earned.

  Her painting.

  “You know, Belle told me you owned one of my pieces and I gotta say, it goads me you have it but I’ll let it be,” she said to the painting and then looked at him, eyes unfriendly, face unhappy. “We walk out of this room, you cease to exist. And good riddance,” she finished as her daughter walked up beside her and grabbed a square, battered, woven, tan, leather handbag with a long strap from the couch.

  They both walked toward him but he didn’t move.

  When they were forced to stop in front of him, he still didn’t move.