Rules for Dating a Romantic Hero (3 page)

Then she met Nick. Who, it turned out later, wasn’t a farmhand, but one of those bloody romantic heroes, a character from a novel come to life.

But the thing was, it was wonderful – all the time, either when they were alone in her crummy flat or hanging out in London with her friends. She was completely, totally happy when she was with Nick, and he was with her. So many men before had wanted only the best bits of her, or to change her. Nick wanted her to be as much like herself as possible.

He wanted to watch TV with her and join in hilariously with her attempts to bake (everyone was baking, so Laura thought she ought to try it). He wanted to sit up with Paddy, Laura’s hapless flatmate, listening to the traumatic stories of his relationship breakdown. He wanted to lie in bed with her, tracing the edge of her hand with his finger, or read her stories from the papers on Saturday mornings or sing her Johnny Cash songs in his special growly voice.

But that was in London. Up at Chartley Hall things weren’t the same, and that’s when it started to go wrong.

Eighteen months into their relationship, Laura was offered the job of a lifetime, working in San Francisco for a tech company developing children’s reading programmes. At first she’d told them she wasn’t interested. But the more she protested that she didn’t want to leave, the more she realised she had to. She had to give Nick a fresh start, a chance to meet someone new who’d be exactly what he needed. Not the person she’d become when she was at Chartley: stilted, nervous, not herself.

She still remembered Nick’s face when she’d told him she was leaving.

‘You know this place, it isn’t me, Laura,’ he’d said, his dark eyes liquid, his jaw set. ‘None of this matters. We matter. You and me. You can’t go.’

‘You said that before,’ she’d replied, holding his hand – his dear, sweet, warm hand that was strong and gentle – and her heart felt as though it would actually break, it hurt so much. ‘You said that when we got together, and it wasn’t true. It
does
matter.’

‘You’re wrong. What can I do to change your mind?’

But Laura couldn’t say, Give up Chartley Hall, let’s live somewhere else. Tell your sister Rose to leave me alone. It was her own fault she couldn’t make this work, her fault she constantly forgot the names of important people, or broke plates, or opened the door the wrong way on Tony the butler, giving him a black eye, or annoyed the staff by going down to the kitchen and making a cup of tea at night. It was her fault she still didn’t understand the strange rules and traditions.

Laura had really snapped the week before at the county show and told the reporter from the
Norfolk Gazette
that of course she was a feminist and didn’t understand why, if they were going to pass a law so that eldest daughters could become queen, they couldn’t do the same for peers of the realm. Laura thought this was a perfectly normal thing to think: after all, wasn’t it 2010?

But the headline in the newspaper (next to ‘Lowestoft: 200 Tonnes of Horse Manure Catches Alight’) was ‘Lord’s New Ladyfriend: Man-hating Revolutionary?’ Which, as Nick pointed out, was a bit of a contradiction: how could you be a Lord’s ladyfriend and a man-hater at the same time?

Rose also made it quite clear that Laura didn’t cut the mustard. Rose was there on the terrible night that Laura dropped the Wedgwood plate worth thousands of pounds. As Laura stood in the ballroom in despair, while Tony donned gloves and swept the pieces carefully up into a special polystyrene box ready to be mended, she actually said, ‘Laura, dear, where you come from it’s normal to pick up objects and touch them. Here, we don’t do that. Please be more careful with my family’s things in future.’

My family’s things.

There would be dinners with other posh people, and Laura would sit and watch, not knowing what to say, while girls like Lara Montagu, one of Nick’s oldest childhood friends, with her perfect white teeth, thick blonde hair, clear skin and total, one hundred per cent confidence would laugh and joke with each other. Lara even had a degree in Marketing and Estate Management; she might as well have had ‘Ideal Wife’ stamped on her forehead.

And Laura would think, You should be sitting next to him, not me. You should be having his babies. You should run this place and organise teas and visit vicars and understand horses and know how to automatically give commands. You can make him happy, and I want him to be happy more than I want anything else.

Laura’s greatest friend at Chartley was Charles, the estate manager, and an old friend of Nick’s. He’d been there at the beginning of their relationship and she could actually talk to him about things. After she left for America, Charles told her afterwards, Nick didn’t sleep for weeks. They could hear him pacing up and down in his room at night. Nick’s personal quarters on the top floor of the house hadn’t been touched since the time of his grandfather. Now, they remained mostly unused again as Nick was either outside or in meetings. He spent as little time as possible there and only came back to sleep in his room, a tiny grey attic with sloping windows, as far away from the rest of the house as it was possible to be.

Charles was by now married to Nick’s younger sister Lavinia, and, at the time, their bedroom was directly below Nick’s. After a week, Lavinia had gone upstairs and banged on her brother’s door.

‘Shut up with your clomping around in the middle of the night when the rest of us are trying to sleep,’ she’d yelled, unaware of the noise she was making, or indeed the fact that she’d been convicted of noise pollution twice during her hippy-boho-stallholder-with-a-Portobello-Road-flat years. ‘You’ve woken the baby up! I’m going to murder you!’

When did Laura realise she’d made a mistake, leaving Nick? Was it her third night in San Francisco, when she was in a bar with her new colleagues? ‘You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight came on the jukebox and she had to pretend she had something in her contact lens so they wouldn’t see her crying. Or was it every morning when she walked past the ice-cream parlour and thought how much Nick would love it? Or every time she went into her local bookstore and saw some quirky non-fiction book about the history of maths or something that she knew he’d enjoy? Or was it the clothes store that had a polo shirt he’d look so cute in, or the hippy tourist shop selling dreamcatchers that she always wanted to tell him about, because they both hated wind chimes and dreamcatchers almost as much as they loathed fat chips?

Maybe Laura realised she’d been wrong to leave him after allowing herself to Google him and discovering that he was now going out with Lara Montagu, and that she’d been right all along. Lara, she learned, was also an Olympic-standard showjumper. She’d actually quite liked Lara, and that only made it worse, this feeling that it was the right thing for him. Already she missed Nick so much it physically hurt. Her chest would ache as she lay in bed at night trying not to think about him, listening to police sirens and the sound of the Chinese family in the flat above her arguing. After that, she didn’t Google Nick again.

But this rage Laura felt at knowing he was with someone else, this passion she had for that dark-eyed, quiet, shy man whose hands were always warm and whose heart she had used to hear beating as she fell asleep on his chest wouldn’t go away.

She started to feel quite mad. She’d sit in cafés working on her laptop, drinking coffee and listening to the rain on the pavements and the cosy, relaxed West Coast chatter. She’d see how at home everyone else felt while she didn’t seem to fit in at all. She loved the people, the freedom, the pride everyone took in the city. She felt she could live there and be happy, but one thing was stopping her. As the months passed she realised that was never going to change.

Laura asked herself, Would she have left Nick if the job in the States hadn’t come up? Maybe not. She only knew she had to see Nick again.

Picking up her old life again in England was easy enough. Her boss, Rachel, was on maternity leave, they needed someone to cover for her. Sadly, Paddy had finally split from his girlfriend and wanted to rent a flat again. And so one spring evening back in London, Laura gritted her teeth, had a large gulp of wine and dialled Nick’s mobile. He answered immediately.

‘Laura?’

And she’d said, ‘Hi, Nick. I’m back.’

‘Thank God,’ he’d said, and his voice was hoarse. ‘Can I see you? Is that why you’re ringing?’

‘Yes, please,’ she’d said, holding back tears, because it was so damn lovely to hear him again. ‘Can you come down here? Or shall I … I can get the last train—’

‘I’m coming to you right now,’ he’d said, and he’d put the phone down and jumped straight into a car. She’d had to leave him a message giving him her new address, and when he’d arrived later that night, on the quiet street in West Hampstead, she was waiting for him.

She heard the car and leaned out of the window to see him standing there in the road, looking up at her. His hands were clenched by his sides. When she buzzed him in and opened the door to her flat, she watched him taking the stairs three at a time, as her heart pounded in her chest and she told herself what she knew would always be true:
You will never love anyone the way you love him.

The feel of his arms wrapping around her, his lips on her skin, his heart beating close to hers, and his voice saying, ‘Jesus, Laura, I’ve missed you. Don’t ever leave me again.’

‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I won’t,’ and when she looked at him his eyes were swimming with tears, and she couldn’t say anything else. Then the hours turned into days and the days to months, and they were so happy they’d found each other again.

The only problem was, of course, that nothing had really changed at all.

‘Raise your chin, Laura. Turn towards me.’ Laura twisted on the arm of the sofa, her back aching. ‘That’s it. Hold the book up a little. Now relax, look natural. Pretend it’s just the two of you, a quiet evening in.’

‘We always sit like this,’ Nick said to the photographer. ‘Just … you know, we come into the Red Drawing Room of an evening, and we plonk ourselves down on the eighteenth-century silk-covered sofa, facing away from each other, and I take up all the room while Laura perches on the arm, holding a book and just smiling. That’s how we roll.’

‘Yes sir,’ said the photographer, snapping away, not even pretending to listen. ‘Laura, love, a bit more from you.’

‘Uh-uh,’ said Laura, trying not to slide off the sofa.

‘Right, some questions then,’ said Jim Cutler, the beefy journalist who had been at the bookshop opening. He moved his recording device closer. ‘Ready?’

Nick and Laura looked at each other. ‘Ready,’ Laura said.

‘The bookshop’s been open a week now, is that right? How’s it going?’

‘Really well,’ Laura said. ‘We’ve had a great first few days. Takings are good. We’re just looking to finish the work at the back of the shop to complete the project, and we’re nearly there. In our first week our customer numbers were—’

Jim Cutler cut in. ‘So … Laura, do you help Nick with the running of the estate?’

They both laughed. Nick’s hand stole towards hers. ‘No way,’ Laura said. ‘I know my place.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Nick. ‘Remember the plans for the maze?’ He looked at Jim. ‘Laura thinks she’s more of a city girl, and I’m trying to persuade her she’s not.’

‘One day I thought the sheep in the fields were a different flock, but it turned out they’d just had their wool cut off. Been shorn. Whatever.’

Nick bit his finger, trying not to laugh. ‘Amazing technical lingo you’ve got there, Laura. Maybe you’re right. What about the time you thought you saw a camel and it turned out to be a horse?’

‘Shut up.’ She turned to him, still perched on the arm of the sofa, her eyes sparkling. ‘What about the time you cried when Pamela Stephenson came third in
Strictly
?’

‘She was so musical, though,’ Nick said, outraged. ‘Her hold with James was the best I’ve ever seen.’

Jim Cutler was staring at them in surprise. ‘OK.’

‘Anyway,’ said Laura, tearing her gaze away from Nick’s and thinking she ought to change the subject, ‘I like having something here I can help with. I’m not much good at anything else at Chartley, you see.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Nick said, lowering his voice a little. ‘I think you love this place as much as I do.’

There was a silence. She wished they were alone, properly alone, for once.

‘So you argue, like all couples do, blah blah.’ Jim was scribbling this down in his notebook. ‘They’ll love that. And Laura’s Place, the bookshop, was it your idea?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura.

‘So … you just said to your boyfriend, can you give me the money?’

‘Er, no,’ Laura said. ‘I had to write business proposals for his family’s Trust and for three other charities. I also had to apply for a loan from the bank and help from the council. It’s taken two years to get this off the ground.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Jim said. He nodded in a dismissive way. ‘What would you say, then, to those who accuse you of using your boyfriend’s money and position to open this shop?’

‘Well, I’d say yes, of course,’ said Laura. She could feel herself getting annoyed. ‘How else could I have done it?’ She knew that didn’t sound quite right and it wasn’t what she meant. Nerves made her voice rise. ‘It’s a serious business proposal. We are still short of the fifty thousand pounds we need to get the whole thing going. But it’s vital in this climate that we push ahead. One hundred and sixty libraries have been shut down in the last two years. A quarter of book-buying budgets have been slashed.’

She turned to Nick, hoping he’d back her up, but he was fiddling with his phone, and somehow this made her angrier. ‘Hey.’ She leaned down and pushed his hands.

Journalist Jim looked up, alert as a panther. Nick stuffed the phone into his pocket. ‘Sorry. Crisis in the tea-room.’

Laura knew he was lying, in that split second.

‘Great,’ Jim said, scribbling some more. ‘I’ll get that all in, thanks Laura. So … wedding bells? When’s the big day happening, hm?’