‘Well, that explains it.’
Baxter knew he shouldn’t ask. But he did. ‘Explains what?’
‘Why you talk funny,’ Dee replied with careless rudeness.
‘I talk funny?’ He laughed at the sheer nerve of the girl. ‘Well, at least my accent doesn’t go walkabout.’
‘What do you mean?’ She glared back.
But Baxter reckoned she knew well enough. ‘What I can’t quite figure,’ he ran on, ‘is which one’s real—the cockney sparrow routine or the middle-class girl from the Home Counties?’
‘You don’t need to figure it—’ his perception disconcerted Dee ‘—because neither is crazy enough to marry you!’
He listened without expression, any insult lost on him. Mr Cool.
‘I didn’t actually ask you to marry me,’ he said at length.
Dee scowled. Perhaps he hadn’t said the words, but that was surely his intent. He was just splitting hairs now.
‘So what else were you doing? Asking me to marry someone else?’ Her tone told him that would rate as even crazier.
He hesitated fractionally before saying, ‘Whichever, it’s an irrelevancy. It would, naturally, be what’s termed a marriage of convenience.’
‘No sex, you mean.’ Dee had no time for silly euphemisms. ‘I’d kinda worked that out for myself… You need me as camouflage, right?’
‘Camouflage?’
‘You want to convince the world you’re straight, and you reckon what better way than to acquire a wife. Only you don’t want a real wife, because then she’d expect you to…well, you get my drift.’
‘I think so.’ Baxter realised she was on a completely different road, but possibly they’d arrive at the same destination in time. So why throw her off-course for now?
Dee watched the thoughts crossing his handsome face and imagined she could read them. She relented slightly, saying, ‘Look, I really have no problem with your being gay, and if you want to keep it a secret I can understand that too. But maybe life would be easier if you simply “outed” yourself. Just made a one-off declaration to the world, then just got on with your life…
Lots of people do it—TV personalities, actors, pop stars. You could almost call it fashionable… And you know what they say about honesty being the best policy and all that.’
‘I doubt it applies in this case.’ Baxter realised her sudden sympathy only applied because she thought he was gay.
‘Well, it’s your life.’ Dee decided she wasn’t in the best shape to be advising anyone else. ‘And I suppose a marriage of convenience rates one better than pretending to do it for real.’
‘Sorry?’ She’d lost him again.
‘It’s what some gay men do,’ she ran on. ‘Marry, have kids even, then, hey presto, they hit mid-life crisis and leave their wives for another man.’
‘You’re an authority on this, are you?’ he enquired dryly.
‘Not especially,’ she denied. ‘I just had a schoolfriend whose father did it… They were all devastated,’ she recalled matter-of-factly.
‘Do you know anyone with happy, uncomplicated lives?’ he asked when she’d finished this gloomy tale.
‘No—do you?’ she flipped back.
Her tone said she didn’t believe in happiness. Baxter wondered what had made her so cynical.
‘Actually, yes,’ he responded. ‘My sister, Catriona, and her husband have a marriage that seems reasonably close to perfect.’
‘Seems being the operative word,’ Dee couldn’t resist commenting. From her own experience she knew so-called perfect marriages could hide cracks the size of the San Andreas fault line. Take her mother and stepfather. The world had always seen them as the perfect couple. Come to that, the world probably still did—the perfect couple cursed only by a bad lot of a daughter.
Dee had no illusions. It was what people had thought of her. A bad lot that would come to a worse end.
‘Well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself.’ His voice broke into her thoughts once more.
‘Judge what?’
‘If it’s real, their happiness… But I’m warning you now. They do a great deal of laughing and smiling, and even kissing. So it may be hard for a world-weary cynic like yourself to take.’
He was laughing, too. At her, in this case. Dee tried to take offence, but there was something disarming about the smile he slanted her.
‘I haven’t agreed to anything,’ she said instead, then realised it wasn’t quite positive enough. ‘I mean, I can’t possibly do what you’re suggesting.’
‘Why not?’
Why not? Dee repeated to herself, and didn’t immediately find an answer. A smile touched his lips as he detected her weakening.
She shook her head. ‘You expect me to go up to the wilds of Scotland—’
‘We live about fifteen miles from the centre of Edinburgh,’ he interjected. ‘Almost civilisation, in fact.’
‘Okay, but then there’s the time.’ She raised a new objection. ‘Or are you planning for me to go up on one train, play blushing bride for a day, then take the next train home? I doubt that’ll convince anyone.’
‘No, you’d obviously have to commit to longer. Let’s say a year’s contract.’
‘A year!’
‘At the very most.’ He nodded. ‘But if things go well I’d release you earlier.’
‘Release me?’ she echoed. ‘This is beginning to sound like a prison sentence.’
‘Not quite. You won’t be on bread and water, or sewing mailbags,’ he assured her in dry tones. ‘Basically, you’ll have your own room, three square meals a day and a moderate allowance. Will that be so bad?’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ she said, but gave a visible shudder as she ran on. ‘Going quietly out of my head, playing the little woman at home.’
Baxter laughed in response. Not very wise at this stage of the negotiation, but it was just too absurd.
‘You? The little woman? Apart from looking totally unlike the part, I somehow doubt you’d be that good an actress.’
‘Thanks.’ She pulled a face. ‘So why ask me?’
Good question, Baxter had to agree. ‘There wasn’t exactly a wide choice of candidates.’
‘And beggars can’t be choosers?’ Dee threw his earlier words back at him.
‘Something like that.’ He didn’t deny it.
‘You’re crazy,’ Dee said aloud, then silently to herself. For she had to be crazy, too, listening to this.
He said nothing, but took out a pen and chequebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. Dee watched as he wrote in it, then stared in disbelief as he held the cheque in front of her face.
‘That’s what you’ll get on the day of the wedding,’ he relayed to her, ‘and then the same at the end of twelve months, or whenever I release you.’
Five thousand pounds. Double that by the end. She read and reread it, wondering if she was hallucinating and seeing too many noughts.
‘You’re kidding!’ she scoffed.
‘Scotsmen don’t kid about