Everyone arrived together. Hannah with the coffee, Natalie with the make-up, and Nick with the two stunning flame-haired, pre-Raphaelite-style models. From then it was all go. Run off her feet, Maggie clicked into super-efficient mode, making changes to the clothes to suit Hannah, keeping a tight rein on Natalie to make sure that she didn’t do anything too scary with the make-up, generally trouble-shooting, and making sure that everything was absolutely fab.
At lunch they all went to a bustling café-bar near Faneuil Hall. The walls were covered with Boston Red Sox memorabilia. The place was packed. It made Maggie smile to see how the lunching office workers and shoppers made a production out of acting like they hadn’t noticed the famous Wells brothers. Not to mention the striking six-foot models they were with. Before she joined the others at the table Hannah’s assistant had reserved, Maggie ducked into the Ladies. She bolted the cubicle door, took a deep breath and dived into her handbag to dig out a pregnancy test.
“Maggie, is that you in there?”
Oh flip. It was Natalie. She thought about putting on a very deep voice and pretending to be a transvestite to get her to leave, but she liked Natalie and she didn’t want to freak her out.
“Yes,” she squeaked.
“Oh. My. Gosh. I think I’m in love. Don’t tell my fiancé, but Nick Wells is the most delicious thing on this earth.”
Maggie abandoned her mission to establish if she was or wasn’t pregnant and exited the toilet cubicle.
“Didn’t you tell me that Alex was the vampire for you – any day of the week?”
“That was yesterday, before I’d met them. Today …” Natalie sighed dreamily. “It’s Nick.”
Maggie nudged her with her elbow. “Fight you for him.”
“No way.” Natalie slicked on a generous layer of her signature red lipstick. “You can have Alex.” She paused with a minxy grin on her face. “Judging by the way his eyes were following you all morning, I’d say you have a better chance with him. And I don’t mean in your dreams.”
Maggie froze. Unless Natalie had supernatural powers, there was no way she knew what Maggie had been dreaming. Even so her words had an uncanny effect on her resolve to appear unaffected by Alex.
“You leave my dreams out of this,” she joked. “Come on, let’s get some lunch. I’m starving.”
Paralysis set in the moment she walked into the bar. The compelling rumble of Alex’s smooth-as-the-most-exquisite-chocolate voice resonated off the baseball-themed walls. The group was hanging on his every word – and so was everyone else in the café-bar.
“Maggie and I are old, old friends,” he said. “We knew each other in London, right before Nick and I moved to LA.” He stared directly at Maggie, and she stopped, hands hanging weakly at her sides. “Things moved pretty fast back then. I guess we lost touch.”
As his words trailed off Nick cut in. “The last time we saw Maggie she was wearing sparkly stilettos, red silk stockings and a verrrrry cute Santa suit! Alex had to lend her his best sweater so that she could go home on the London Underground without drawing too much attention to herself.”
“And reindeer antlers.” Alex’s cool Jago face brightened into a wide, winning smile. “Don’t forget the reindeer antlers.”
There were guffaws of laughter. All eyes turned on Maggie. The picture Nick and Alex painted didn’t exactly tally with her current blend-into-the-background image. In smart black designer jeans and black ankle boots, with a businessy white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck where she’d hooked her big, black oversized sunglasses into the vee, she aimed to look unremarkable. The laughing triggered a blush the color of a London bus – a glowing contrast to her monochrome look.
Great!
“And to avoid freezing,” she chipped in. “I’d like to point out that it was one of the coldest Decembers on record.”
“It was Christmas Eve, actually.” Alex spoke slowly. The piercing glimmer in his eyes sent shivers up and down her spine. She wished he would stop looking at her like that.
“Hence the Santa ensemble.” She made a face, shrugged, and held her palms out apologetically to the group.
Sitting on a bench seat at the opposite side of the table between the two models, Nick leaned forward and moved the things in front of him about randomly – the salt pot, his sunglasses, a coaster. He seemed to be watching his brother for a reaction. Alex didn’t say anything more. He stopped looking at her and stared off into the distance.
Maggie sat down at the table, picked up a couple of menus and handed one to Natalie, who suddenly closed her gawping mouth, as if for a fraction of a second she’d lost control of her features. Almost faint, not with hunger, but embarrassment at being scrutinized by every woman within earshot, and most of the men, Maggie’s fingers trembled. “So,” she announced, eager to close the subject. “Enough of the boring friends reunited stuff.” She rolled her eyes. One of the models sent her a sympathetic smile across the sea of drinks, menus and cutlery littering the rustic table top. “Should we order? What’s everyone having?”
The memory of her Underground journey wrapped in his sweater, scarf and oversized gloves gave her butterflies. His student house had been in North London, hers South. She pictured herself sitting on the Tube in her barely-there Santa suit and scarlet silk stockings, squished amongst the bag-laden Christmas shoppers, hung-over and smarting from her night of doomed passion with Alex. Her heart fluttered. The stops had seemed never-ending – Leicester Square, Charing Cross, Waterloo. On and on, until Clapham Common, where she shared a down-at-heel terraced house with five friends. Had she been too much of a coward to step into the danger zone and get full-on physical with Alex? Had she allowed herself to fall asleep on purpose? She’d been procrastinating, shying away from her feelings. Even so she’d been elated at the prospect of hooking up with Alex after the holidays. Friend to boyfriend. Result.
Except her grandmother’s instinct that no man was to be trusted had been right. No matter how much she’d hoped to love and love back, Alex wasn’t The One. There was no such thing. Marcus had proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. His antics with the woman from the pub had got rid of any rubbish notions she’d had about forever love. At least he’d cheated before she’d been dumb enough to marry him. The one positive that she’d clung onto was that they hadn’t had a baby. It was a plus – no child to get hurt.
Maggie pasted a chipper smile on her face and forced herself to stay afloat. She hadn’t expected to react so strongly to Alex. His aura was intoxicating. She was all out of kilter. Her body going on a bender every time she took a hit from those eyes was one thing. His magnetism sending her emotions into free fall was quite another. She’d learned to protect her heart the hard way. Letting people go was easier than complex feelings, and safer – much less risky. So how come she was sitting there wondering “what if”?
She was over that we-were-almost-an-item thing, really she was. And she was at a new place in her life – ready to have a baby, a child whose feelings she could safeguard, the same way she shielded her own emotions.
She ordered a New England crab roll. Then she sat quietly in the corner of the table and let herself drift out of the conversation. Push men away. It was the best way she knew of putting up barriers. The last thing she needed was Alex waltzing back into her life and stealing her heart again, so she closed him out.
She had a knot in her gut from wading through a quagmire of feelings. When the food arrived she only picked at it. She felt nauseous. With one more day to get through, she’d play along in her role of old friend from way back when, and then she’d wave bye-bye to the Wells brothers, this time for good.
After lunch, back at the studio, she threw herself into preparations for day two. Everyone else had gone, except for Hannah who was working on her photographs.
“Hey Maggie, come see,” she