Fiona Harper - Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe

She blocked out the busy restaurant with her eyelids. No way could she go through that again. And no way could she put Jack through it. He’d been too young to understand before, but he was reading so well now. What if he saw something on the front of a newspaper? She squeezed her jaw together. What kind of message was she giving to her son by lying to the world and letting Toby use her as a doormat? What kind of man would he become if this was his example?

‘Oh, my God! It’s Tobias Thornton! Can I have your autograph?’

Louise’s eyes snapped open and she stared at two women hovering—no, make that drooling —next to Toby’s chair. Toby smiled and did the gracious but smouldering thing his fans loved as he put his ostentatious squiggle on the woman’s napkin. Louise just tapped her foot.

Only when they’d finished gushing and jiggling on the spot did they glance at her. And a split-second scowl was obviously all she was worth. They didn’t even bother keeping their voices down as they walked away. Huddled over her new treasure, she clearly heard one say, ‘He is so hot!’

Toby opened his mouth so speak but, once again, his phone got the first word in. He glanced at the display, stifled a smile, then gestured to Louise that he was going to have to take this one. ‘My agent,’ he mouthed as he walked off to stand near the bar.

My foot , thought Louise, as the waiter cleared her half-eaten pasta.

She watched him out the corner of her eye as he talked. Her husband smiled and laughed and absent-mindedly preened himself in the mirror behind the bar. His agent was male, over fifty, and as wide as he was tall. No, Louise could do the maths. And the number she kept coming up with was four .

Even as something withered inside her, she sat up straighter in her chair. She demanded eye contact from Toby as he finished his call and sauntered back towards her. Now she got her smile—warm, bright, his eyes telling her she was the most wonderful thing in the world.

As he sat down at the table, he reached for her hand and brushed her knuckle with the tip of his thumb. Louise leaned forward and smiled back at him, turning on the wattage as only a former model knew how to do. Toby leaned in, clearly hoping he was going to have his cake and eat it too this evening. She should have thanked him for that; it just made what she was about to do easier.

She let the grin slide from her face and spoke in a low, scratchy whisper. ‘Toby …’ She paused, mentally adding all the names she wasn’t about call him out loud. ‘I want a divorce.’

‘What charity is this thing tonight for again?’ Tara asked as she slid into the limousine beside Louise and flicked a coil of artfully tonged blonde hair over her shoulder.

‘Relief,’ Louise said quietly. ‘They support carers—especially children.’

Tara scrunched up her pretty face. Five years younger. Three sizes thinner. She had none of the telltale lines on her forehead that Louise had, the ones that refused to disappear completely when she stopped frowning. Not that she did that much these days.

‘Isn’t child slavery illegal?’

‘It is,’ Louise said. ‘But there are tons of kids whose parents are sick and they have to take on the role of looking after them. Sometimes they have no choice.’

A different form of child slavery. One Louise knew all about. But she wasn’t going to tell Tara that. The younger woman might be the closest thing she had to a best friend in this shark-infested world she lived in, but she didn’t tell anyone about her childhood. They had enough ammunition for looking down at her as it was.

At least she could support Relief in some small way. At the end of the charity benefit she’d be writing a ridiculously large cheque. Since that dinner a week ago, spending Toby’s money had become an act of revenge.

‘You’re so good to remember all of that stuff they put on the invite,’ Tara said, fluffing her hair and looking out of the window as they sped through central London. ‘All I do is turn up and drink champagne at these things. One benefit just seems to merge into the next.’

Which was a pity, Louise thought. Relief could use someone like Tara championing them. She might play the dumb blonde, but she was nothing of the sort. She’d been to a good private school, got a university degree—in other words, had the education that Louise had only been able to dream about. Tara knew words that Louise couldn’t even spell, let alone understand, but she chose to hide that side of herself away. Didn’t serve her purpose, she said. Degrees didn’t get you much these days. Certainly not a footballer husband who earned more in ten minutes than most people made in six months.

The limo pulled up outside an exclusive Park Lane hotel. She and Tara slid out and walked down the red carpet together. Louise heard her name called repeatedly, but she practised the vague and ethereal smile she wore for these occasions, never really focusing on one person or one thing.

She wanted to rush inside as quickly as possible, but that wouldn’t do. She needed to look calm and poised as always. While she wasn’t going to cover up for Toby about this latest story, she knew that if she gave a hint of a twitch or a frown a lens somewhere would catch it and she’d see it blown up in the morning editions, with a caption reading ‘Louise’s private hell’, or some other rubbish. She wouldn’t give Toby—or his pre-schooler of a girlfriend—the satisfaction.

Oh, she’d fall apart at some point. Just not tonight, especially as this was her last public engagement before she announced her split from Toby and her retirement into private life. She was going to make it count.

But as she and Tara ran the gauntlet of the red carpet, stopping to pose for the cameras, Louise’s smile began to take on a frozen quality. Nowadays, this kind of thing was as common to her as walking down the aisles of a supermarket once had been, but Toby’s shenanigans seemed to have hurled her into a time warp, back to the days when she’d been terrified of all the noise and popping lights, when she’d half-expected to hear a lone accusatory voice above the crowd. ‘Fake …! Imposter!’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she whispered to Tara, who was taking far too long. But she’d just had her boobs done again, so Louise supposed she was happy to have the excuse to show them off. The lime-green halter-neck dress she was wearing had been deliberately chosen to showcase their new gravity-defying properties.

Tara frowned at her request, and Louise thought she was going to pout and moan, but she took one look at Louise’s flushed face and furrowed brow and gave in. Only when they were in the lobby, once they were out of earshot and camera range, did she turn to her friend and whisper, ‘I thought you were just letting off steam when you ranted to me about Toby down the phone the other day, but you’re really going to go through with it, aren’t you?’

Louise gave her a hooded look. ‘He’s cheating on me. Why would I not go through with it?’ For an intelligent woman, Tara could be really thick sometimes.

‘He loves you really, you know,’ she said, smiling brightly as they entered the ballroom. She paused to waggle her fingers in reply to someone on the other side of the room. ‘Can’t stand her,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth, and then switched seamlessly into the one subject Louise was hoping she’d drop. ‘Husbands like ours … There are some big perks, but there’s a price to pay too.’ She gave Louise a sideways look. ‘It never bothered you before.’

Louise snorted. ‘I never had anything truly concrete before, just suspicions, and my darling husband would just deny everything convincingly and make me feel stupid and disloyal for asking in the first place.’ If Toby’s on-screen performances had been as good as his private ones, he’d have had an Oscar or three by now.