Susan Napier - Mistress Of The Groom

Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of choice. Her former lifestyle had dictated very few casual clothes, and most of her custom-designed business suits and high-fashion dresses had been forfeited, along with her jewellery and extensive collection of shoes, when the bank’s valuers had swept through the Sherwood residence, spiriting off everything that was considered saleable. What was left would have fitted into two suitcases—except the matching leather luggage had gone too, and Jane had been forced to leave the house with her remaining possessions packed into plastic supermarket bags.

The black dress had fortunately been out for cleaning at the time and the valuers had been so ruthless in the execution of their duty that when Jane had later found the dry-cleaning receipt in her purse she had had no qualms about claiming it for herself. She looked on it as a symbol of hope, a small victory over the forces of darkness: a reminder that, even when the odds were stacked wildly against you, you could sometimes still win.

The black dress now hung shoulder to shoulder with off-the-peg skirts and blouses and the subdued dresses that the all-male valuers had considered ‘of insufficient interest’ to turn the quick profit the mortgagee was demanding. At least she had got to keep all her underwear, despite the famous French and Italian labels, but they had only left her three pairs of shoes, all of them flats.

Jane struggled into a simple shirt-waister with large buttons that were easy to do up one-handed and didn’t even bother trying to put up her hair.

Ever since she had moved in two weeks ago she had walked three blocks to a tiny pavement café where, for the price of a cup of breakfast tea, she could read the morning newspaper and copy out all the likely prospects from the Situations Vacant columns. Then she would return to the flat and write her application letters before starting the rounds of interviews and enquiries at the various employment bureaus. But today there didn’t seem to be much point. With her hand the way it was she wouldn’t present the image of flawless competence that she had glowingly described in her CV.

In an effort to relieve the swelling Jane tried bathing her hand in water chilled with ice-chunks chipped off the sides of the tiny freezer compartment of her fridge, but although the pain was numbed for a while it only seemed to get worse when the cold wore off, and by mid-morning she knew she was going to have to see a doctor.

When she returned the borrowed black high-heels to the girl who lived in the even pokier flat next door, Collette—she had admitted it wasn’t her real name but ‘guys think it’s sexy’—offered some gratuitous advice.

She shook her bleached head at the sight of the mangled hand, her crystal earrings clacking with outrage. ‘God, did that guy you were meeting last night do that? One of those, eh? Been there, done that, honey. Take my advice—dump him! And ignore any sob stuff—bastards like that never change...a few drinks and pow! They thump you and make you think it’s your fault.’

Jane smiled weakly. For all his ferocious temper Ryan Blair wasn’t a physically violent man. He was an expert at more sophisticated forms of intimidation...like kissing!

‘You should have used the shoes,’ Collette advised. ‘We don’t wear them just ’cos they make our legs look miles long, you know. A stiletto in the groin can give a man a whole new perspective on life, know what I mean?’

Jane nodded hastily, suspecting that the ‘we’ to whom Collette referred was a loose street-sisterhood engaged in a profession much more venerable than her own.

Having cheerfully targeted a few more choice portions of the male anatomy where application of a stiletto could produce instant indifference to the idea of violence and/ or sex, Collette gave Jane the address of the nearest emergency medical clinic. On the back of a dog-eared medical centre card, prominently promoting its STD clinic, she wrote down the numbers of the buses that Jane would have to catch there and back.

It was the first time Jane had been on a bus since her schooldays, but she was in too much pain to appreciate the novelty. The clinic’s crowded waiting room was also a first for her, and after a long, enervating wait Jane was relieved to be ushered into a bare office where a depressingly bouncy young doctor examined her and diagnosed a broken bone before sending her off to the X-Ray department ‘just to make sure I’m right’.

‘What does the other guy look like?’ he chirped forty-five minutes later, when Jane had come back with the X-Ray and he had clipped it to the light box to show her the thin, pale line unevenly bisecting one of the five long bones of her hand.

A fleeting vision of a dark, handsome face, inky hair and piercing blue eyes made her heart give a nervous skip. Thank goodness the doctor wasn’t taking her pulse. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘See this?’ He tapped the image. ‘You’ve broken the fifth metacarpal bone—the one that joins your wrist to your little finger—broken it right in the middle. Well, as far as I know there’s only one way to break this particular bone like that—with a blow. Ergo, you hit someone or something with real enthusiasm!’

‘Someone,’ admitted Jane, looking at the skeleton of her hand and wondering how such a tiny fracture could cause so much pain.

‘Any other injuries?’

‘No—I think I just split his lip. He roared like a wounded bull so I don’t think his jaw was broken or anything...’

‘I mean to you,’ the doctor said wryly. ‘Was it your husband? What did he do?’

‘Oh.’ Jane flushed at his assumption. ‘No, nothing like that...I mean, we hardly know each other. We’re just...’

The doctor’s grey eyes suddenly sparked with recognition. ‘Just good friends? Hang on a minute.’ He spun aside and walked over to pull a broadsheet newspaper out of the waste-paper basket beside his desk—a national daily. He leafed through the crumpled sections until he found the one he was looking for and smoothed it out.

‘I thought I recognised you when you walked in.’

There were two long photographs side-by-side—one a slightly blurred shot, obviously taken the moment after impact, showing Jane’s left arm at full extension and Ryan Blair, head snapped back, arms flung out, toppling across the restaurant table; the other, horribly crisp and clear, was a close-up of their seemingly steamy kiss in the street.

Some wag of a sub-editor had headlined the pictures:

SHE’S A KNOCKOUT!

And the story underneath was wittily couched as a boxing match... ‘Weighing-in’. ‘seconds out’, ‘round one’, ‘the final bell’...

Thank God the reporter obviously hadn’t bothered to go very far back in the files, for it was very much a ‘once-over lightly’ piece, dealing only with the tail-end of the Sherwood Blair feud and too full of deliberate boxing puns to be taken seriously.

As Ryan Blair had predicted there was much sly speculation about business turning into pleasure, but there was no mention of Jane being the veiled woman who had aborted his wedding—probably thanks to the Brandons, whose damage control at the time had consisted of smothering the intriguing, ‘disappearing mistress in the hat’ story with urgent bulletins on the life-threatening viral infection which had caused Ava’s untimely collapse and subsequent withdrawal from society for a lengthy period of convalescence.

Looking at the picture of herself wrapped in Ryan Blair’s bear-like embrace, her neck arched by the apparent passion of his kiss, her half-open eyes suggesting a dreamy bliss, Jane felt an unwelcome frisson of excitement.

‘Right, well...let’s fix that up, shall we...?’ The doctor became all efficiency again, directing her to sit on the edge of the examination table, drawing a wheeled trolley up beside him.