The One in My Heart (11 page)

Is it true? Did you run into Rowland and Frances Somerset?

I texted back.

You knew we were attending together.

Damaris and Bennett used to ballroom dance as partners. Revival performance tonight.

Yes, true. It was all very civil.

I didn’t mention the part about Bennett and me accidentally making out before his parents. I figured they wouldn’t either.

A new text came through from Zelda—
The boy can dance
—followed by a YouTube link. And when I clicked through, I saw the tango, captured by someone who kept whistling throughout the recording.

We put away our phones when the waiter came with our food.

“Did your mom text your sister, by any chance?” I asked.

“Good guess.”

“Here’s another good guess. Your sister texted you in return and you gave a completely noncommittal answer, along the lines of, ‘Yep, saw them.’”

“Not as accurate. My sister was asking about
you
, so I waxed poetic about how good you are in bed.”

I gave him a look.

“Fine,” he said, smiling slightly. “How good you are out of bed.”

I dug a spoon into my bowl of borscht. “Any plans for what to do next?”

“Somewhere in my head, I must have assumed that it would be like a movie: Put my parents and me in the same place at the same time, and magically all would be well. But we were all together just now and…” He exhaled. “And nothing has changed.”

I sighed. “Welcome to Life Sucks 101, in which life doesn’t work like movies.”

Or Zelda would get well and never be afflicted again.

He cut into the blinis—buckwheat pancakes—he had ordered. Then his gaze turned to me. “My offer still stands, you know. If you say yes now, I’ll date our agreement retroactively to the day after Christmas, so you get almost a month for free.”

I stole a piece of blini from his plate. “Not that I don’t think you’re a generous man, but almost one-sixth of half a mil is a lot of generosity. What’s the reason for the backdating?”

“My parents are going to the Amalfi Coast to mark their anniversary, which falls on the weekend after your symposium in Munich. If the dates don’t conflict with anything else on your itinerary, will you come with me to Italy?”

This was why I hadn’t wanted to agree to the wedding reception: It gave him another opening to reel me into his scheme. I stirred my soup. “Probably not. I have plans to explore the Bavarian countryside that weekend. ”

“I haven’t gone down on you, have I?” he murmured. “Let it be said I’m willing to devote considerable hours to that particular pleasure.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to betray how turned on I was. “If only your parents knew you were willing to prostitute yourself for them.”

He snorted.

Neither of us said anything for a while. He steadily polished off his blinis. I finished my soup. The waiter came and replenished our tea.

When Bennett was done with his food, he wrapped his hands around a large tea mug and examined a picture on the wall, his profile to me. There was something to the set of his jaw, a resignation that was at once stoic and desolate.

He’d taken my silence as my final answer, a firm no.

I was not going to be mixed up in his schemes. I was not going to disrupt the quiet rhythm of my even-keeled life. I was not going to open myself up to false pleasures that came with an expiration date.

And yet…

Could I really abandon him? It was obvious that, left to his own devices, he would continue to play the part of the blithe, uncaring son. He knew this. That was why he had wanted my help in the first place.

Without a firm kick in the pants once in a while, he would flounder. His plans would go nowhere. And all the changes he’d made, uprooting his entire life, would be futile.

“I’ll take that half mil for charity,” I said before I could stop myself. “I’ll come with you.”

HE DIDN
’
T SAY ANYTHING, ONLY
looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard.

Neither could I, exactly.

That silence lasted until we were in a cab, going uptown along Central Park West. We discussed logistics. On which day could I leave Munich? When was he setting out? And how long were we to remain in Italy?

Throughout it all, I was conscious of his gaze on me. His initial incredulity had worn off. Now his demeanor made me think of a mountain climber who had reached the Everest base camp, someone who knew that the easy part was over and the real trial was about to begin.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said as we e-mailed each other our itineraries. “I’m paying a visit to Mrs. Asquith on the way back. Would you like to come with me?”

“I would. But I bought my tickets a long time ago, and my return flight doesn’t pass through England.”

“I can take care of that for you, if you want, along with your ticket from Munich to Naples.”

“In that case, yes, thank you.”

When the cab stopped before my house, he asked the driver to wait and walked me to the door. “I owe you, Professor.”

“You’re going to be out half a mil, at least. I’d say you don’t owe me anything else.”

“I did promise to go down on you, frequently and attentively.”

Was it still January? Heat buffeted me from every direction. “That’s not why I said yes, so there’s no need.”

In the coppery light from the street lamps, his gaze was steady, curious. “Then why did you say yes?”

Zelda and I used to build houses of cards together. A well-made house of cards actually stood pretty okay on its own. But because the construction material was so flimsy, and nothing held the structure together except prayer and careful placement, any kind of disturbance could bring it down—someone walking by too fast, a fridge door slamming shut, and once, a moving truck rumbling down the street.

Bennett’s question was such a disturbance. Faced with its friendly directness, the lies that I’d told myself in the Russian café came crumbling down. I had not agreed to help him out of altruism. Or sympathy. Or even greed.

It had been fear, pure and simple.

He was consumed by his quest. If I turned him down, he would find someone else. Tonight, perhaps. Tomorrow at the latest. Maybe Damaris would get the call, maybe someone more restrained in her public demeanor. But no matter who, in two weeks’ time, when he arrived in Italy, he would have a woman on his arm.

And the thought suffocated me. I would rather face far worse heartache later on than go home tonight with this huge weight on my chest, unable to breathe for the foreseeable future.

It was, without a question, the stupidest decision I’d made in a long, long time.

“Because I finally remembered that a million has six zeroes to it.”

His gaze remained unwavering. “You deal some dope bullshit, Professor. I admire that.”

“A perk of being a materials scientist: My bullshit is well made on the molecular level.”

He laughed softly. Then he leaned in and kissed me, a kiss of only our lips, gentle, unhurried, yet unbearably sexy.

Swoony.

He pulled away, looked at me another moment, and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Thank you,” he murmured. “It’s going to be one hell of an adventure.”

I WOULDN
’
T GO SO FAR
as to speculate that Zelda had been listening at the keyhole, but she did pop out of the living room with tremendous alacrity as I walked in. “How was your evening, darling? Tell me everything!”

I omitted any and all mentions of kisses, but otherwise gave a truthful enough account, up until our departure from the wedding reception.

“So it happened. They finally ran into one another. Yes, my brilliant scheme worked.”

“
Your
brilliant scheme?”

“Why do you think I’ve been encouraging you to take the Somerset boy to the reception?”

I felt like an idiot for not realizing this sooner: Zelda knew Bennett’s parents would be there. “And here I thought you just wanted me to date him.”

“That I can only want.
This
I can do something about. Now, tell me what happened afterward. Did the boy say anything?”

“He was quiet for a long time. I mean, the encounter was really unexpected—we were already leaving.”

That was a truthful enough answer.

“And then?”

Now the lying began. “And then he was mainly trying to convince me to let him join me in Munich.”

“Really?” Zelda blinked. “For the whole conference?”

“No, the conference ends on Thursday. He wants to come sightseeing with me that weekend.”

“And you said no?”

I grimaced, a genuine expression. “I should have but I didn’t. It’s not easy to keep saying no to the Somerset boy.”

Zelda took a moment to digest this. “This calls for a pot of tea. Chamomile?”

“You go ahead,” I told her. “I had enough tea tonight.”

Zelda disappeared into the kitchen. I was almost one hundred percent sure that she’d gone to check her calendar. Sure enough, when she returned, she said, “Not that I don’t love Bavaria, darling—beautiful place, had one of the best hikes of my life there—but the beginning of February is the wrong time of the year for Germany. Why don’t you go to Italy instead? The Amalfi Coast isn’t so crowded right now, and it’s ever so lovely.”

“Amalfi Coast?” I said the name doubtfully, as if I’d never heard of it.

“Yes. Hold on just a second.” She reached for her iPad. “Here it is, La Figlia del Mare in Positano. It’s a fantastic hotel in one of the most picturesque
comunes
on the Amalfi Coast.”

“Have you been there?”

“No, but I have friends who rave about it.”

And would one of those friends be Frances Somerset, who will be there shortly, and whose anniversary date you probably checked now to make sure that it fell on the same weekend?

Zelda moved closer to me and played the slide show from the hotel’s website. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Used to be a small private palazzo before it was turned into a boutique establishment. And you can get a pretty decent rate this time of year. They aren’t officially open—February is when they train their staff for the season.”

“You know a lot about a hotel you’ve never stayed at.”

I’d met hotel aficionados who traveled with the express purpose of experiencing the best in hospitality, but Zelda had never been one of those: She was fine as long as a place was clean and convenient.

“Well, you hear things,” Zelda answered rather vaguely. “Anyway, I’ve sent you the link. Think about it.”

The kettle sang. Zelda set aside the iPad and went back to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a teapot and a plate of dried apple rings. “You know, it’s a bit ironic how things have turned out.”

“You mean that the Somerset boy and I should have met after all.”

“And that he should be completely smitten with you.” Zelda sat down and poured. “I never told you this, but I suspected for years that the Somersets had something to do with your invitation to the Bal des Debutantes.”

I reached for my cup, forgetting that I’d already had plenty of hot liquids for the evening. “Why?”

“You know your father wanted it desperately for you—well, for the prestige of the Canterburys, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves. And I really wanted it for him, as a parting gift if nothing else. But it was always a long shot—the Canterburys aren’t what they were, and I’m just a lot of people’s third cousin.

“I remember telling all this to Frances—we were getting to know each other then. We talked about you and she came away impressed. Said she’d love for her son to meet you, except that he was all the way in England.

“No one knew anything then about the older woman—we thought he was at Eton because he wanted to be. So I told her that if you were selected for the Bal des Debutantes, he could hop over for a weekend and serve as your escort, and wouldn’t that be a fun way for the two of you to meet.

“Frances agreed with me. The moment I told her of your selection, she asked if she could still volunteer her son as your escort. I said yes, absolutely. Of course, he didn’t come, but it was only after a while that I put two and two together.

“Imagine that you are Frances and Rowland Somerset and you really, really want to remove your son from that awful older woman. But you know what young men in love are like—the more you bad-mouth their beloved, the more they dig in their heels. A much better fix would be to introduce him to someone else, someone who is essentially perfect—not to mention his own age—and hope that he’ll come to see what he’s been missing.”

Zelda had an exaggerated concept of my perfection, and I’d long ago given up trying to correct her. “So the Somersets wanted to dangle me as a lure?”

“That’s my theory, at least. It was too bad his eighteenth birthday fell on the day of the rehearsal and he bailed—could have saved himself and everybody else a lot of trouble.”

“You think he’d have taken one look at me and dropped all his plans for California?”

“I thought it was—what do Americans call it?—a Hail Mary pass. But now I’m not sure everything wouldn’t have worked exactly as they’d hoped. The boy is clearly wild about you.”

I shrugged—and wished I didn’t know better. It would have been a compelling narrative: the near miss, the long years apart, the accidental meeting, the fierce, instant attraction—the wedding announcement in the
Sunday Times
supplement all but wrote itself.

“By the way, he has plans to visit Mrs. Asquith on the way back, and he asked me to join him.”

“That’s wonderful,” Zelda said immediately. “I’ll ring her to let her know you’re coming. She’s been curious about you for ages.”

We talked some more about Mrs. Asquith before we said good night to each other.

As I brushed my teeth, I picked apart Zelda’s reaction. She was happy that I’d meet Mrs. Asquith at last. Mixed in, though, was a certain strain: Was she anxious that I’d learn too much of her past from her godmother?

But as I settled into bed, my mind drifted to Zelda’s revelation about the Somersets and their possible string-pulling to get me to the ball. I couldn’t narrow it down to anything specific she’d said; nor could I put a name to exactly what I was feeling.