Well Groomed (42 page)

Muttering ‘Fuck this’ under his breath, Hugo thrust the scotch bottle at Sally and ran to the entrance, long legs eating up the ground. To even louder whoops and cheers, he clambered on to the bike behind Tash.

‘Let’s go cycling,’ he murmured into her ear.

As he wrapped his arms tightly around her waist, she tipped the bike over the brow of the hill and twisted the throttle so that it let out another great pride-leader roar. Moments later they were speeding off down the hill in a flurry of mud and churned grass, red tail light streaking away from the gate.

‘That’s it – call Mummy and let her know the wedding’s off but she can wear the hat to the funeral.’ Sophia turned to Ben and burst into unexpected tears.

He gave her a stiff hug and bit back a comment about over-reacting. He and Hugo had tobogganed that hill hundreds of times as children and apart from a couple of twisted ankles they’d survived intact. Pressing his chin lovingly to the top of her head, he let out a slight hiccup.

‘Don’t do that with your chin, Ben,’ Sophia snivelled. ‘It flattens my hairdo.’

Out in the field, mud was coating Tash’s face, her hands were freezing despite the gloves, her eyes were full of hair and scoured dry by the wind, and her heart was so far up her throat that it was doing a double-act with her tongue.

Nonetheless she was whooping with exhilaration as well as the pulse-stopping punch of fear. It was a heady, drug-fix mix – the most exciting cross-country ride ever, a mile-high roller-coaster run and great one-night-stand sex. She’d never experienced anything quite so terrifying, exhilarating, or cold.

Behind her, Hugo was laughing his head off, relishing the thrill. It was only when they sped towards the bottom of the hill perilously fast that his grip tightened on her waist.

‘It’s wet down here!’ he warned, but Tash couldn’t hear.

Still very drunk, Hugo was not the best judge of speed, but even he could tell that Tash was going to go straight through to the next field if she didn’t brake soon. At the bottom of the hill the wet, claggy clay was like an oil slick.

‘For fuck’s sake, slow down!’ he yelled into Tash’s ear as she narrowly missed a water trough and slithered around to track the rails on the left, back tyre skidding perilously close to them.

The wind whipped his words away and she sped towards a blackened coppice, avoiding it by inches and ducking to let the low branches scrape overhead.

‘Get your head lower!’ Hugo yelled, pressing a hand to her head and pushing it forwards so that she was crouching over the handlebars. His grip loosened on her waist and she could feel him frantically shifting to keep balance, his chin digging into the soft flesh beside her spine.

A huge branch came out of the gloom, too high to be caught by the headlight until the last moment, swinging towards Tash’s forehead like the boom of a yacht in a gale.

‘Ohmygod!’ she wailed as she pressed her face to the dials in an attempt to avoid it.

It was a few seconds before she realised she had lost Hugo – the bike was suddenly lighter, faster and more manageable. And her back was a hell of a lot colder.

Skidding to a slippery halt, she looked over her shoulder. She could see nothing but damp, squally gloom and the jagged black silhouette of the coppice.

Tash scoured the gloom for Hugo, terrified that he was out cold somewhere and in desperate need of medical attention. She could barely see a thing in the peaty dark and drizzle. Swinging the bike around so that its headlights were facing in the direction she had come, she saw nothing but thin, sinewy tree trunks and the raw gash of the tyre tracks splitting the wet grass.

She was about to cut the engine so that she could call for him when he loomed out of the darkness to her left, only a few yards away, reeling slightly, his breath pluming in front of him, shirt torn on the shoulder. For the first time Tash noticed that he wasn’t wearing his flying jacket – he must be frozen through. Her own jaws were chattering like wind-up teeth from a joke shop.

‘Are you hurt?’ she asked anxiously as she noticed a big graze on his forehead.

‘I’ll live.’ He put a trembling hand on the leather seat behind her to steady himself.

‘Sorry.’ She bit her lip, ‘It was my fault for going too fast.’

He looked slightly dazed for a moment or two and then managed a sudden, unexpected smile.

‘It beats an Alka-Seltzer for sobering one up. I deserved it.’ He shrugged, stretching across her thigh to reach for the key and cut the engine.

‘What are you doing?’ She gulped nervously, intimidated by the sudden silence. Her ears were still ringing from the noise of the bike.

‘We need to talk.’ He touched his forehead tentatively and winced.

Unaware of the wind buffeting around her or the hollow booming of music coming from the house up above, Tash fumbled for the key fob in the ignition. She didn’t trust herself to speak and her heart was doing a maddened dance in her chest, almost winding her. She knew she should feel angry and indignant, or even frightened, but she didn’t; she couldn’t pin down the precise emotion but knew that it was dangerously close to hope.

‘I don’t want to talk.’ She started the engine again.

His hand closing over hers, Hugo cut it and pulled out the key. Very gently, he prised the fob from her fingers and stepped back.

‘Give them back!’ Tash bleated, but he ignored her, shoulders hunched against the cold, face in the shadows.

‘I didn’t want you to do the dare.’ He played with the keys, not looking at her. ‘I wanted you to tell a truth.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She realised her heart was doh-si-dohing with her tongue once more. Her voice sounded ridiculously high and tight, as though she’d been sucking helium balloons.

He suddenly laughed – a low, husky sound that didn’t stem from amusement.

‘You once told me you’d had a crush on me – as a kid. Nothing serious, I know, but . . .’

Tash nodded, desperately defensive of her pride. ‘So?’

‘Was I truly awful to you, Tash?’

She gaped at him through the gloom, astonished that he should think to ask. But his face was still in darkness, with only the whites of his eyes glinting.

‘Pretty bad, yes,’ she managed to croak, eyeing the keys that dangled less than a metre from her hand, catching the light like icy leaves on a branch. ‘But that was years ago,’ she added dismissively.

‘Poor little Tash.’ He seemed to mock her, his voice as low and soft as a sigh. ‘You only needed to ask.’

Someone was yelling from the top of the field, but they were too far away to be audible, their words snatched back by the wind.

The keys continued glittering. Tash gazed at them, mesmerised. She was so bitterly cold that her arms and legs were shuddering as though jabbed with electric probes, her jaw clenched to stop her teeth chattering. Hugo was as still as an ice carving; despite the thin cotton shirt, gaping where it was ripped, he wasn’t even shivering.

‘Give me the keys,’ Tash pleaded, stretching out for them. She shifted in the saddle as she did so and her bare upper leg touched the hot engine casing, jerking in a spasm of pain. Unbalanced, she and the bike almost went over.

‘We haven’t talked properly yet.’ Hugo stepped back again until the keys were just out of reach once more. ‘I want to know what it felt like.’

‘What what felt like?’ she groaned in exasperation. Boy, was he going for big time humiliation here, she realised. He really wanted to make her squirm. Not content with asking her to risk her life on a dare, he wanted to punish her with a truth too. She wished she’d gone the whole hog and burned his bed now.

‘Fancying me so much when I felt nothing for you?’ he snapped through the darkness. ‘Did it really hurt?’

Not answering, Tash made a final lunge for the keys, but her oversized gloves made her grip clumsy and they flew from her fingers as soon as she pulled them from Hugo’s hand.

‘Shit!’ she wailed, only just stopping the bike from capsizing, her boot heel sinking deep into the mud to the left as she fought to hold it up.

Hugo stooped down, cursing under his breath as he fished around in the damp grass to retrieve them.

‘Now look what you’ve bloody done!’ he hissed.

‘You were the one giving me the third degree.’

‘I was just interested,’ he muttered, wiping his hands on his jeans and resting on his haunches as he peered at the muddy ground for the key fob.

‘Well, I suggest you develop an interest in something different then,’ Tash muttered. ‘Like flower-pressing.’

Looking up at her, his face was still in complete shadow, but she could just make out his eyes in the dim, steely light from the turbulent sky. They seemed to be raking her face as though searching for a completely different key. She almost fell off the bike in shock. He’s hitting on me, she realised in utter amazement. Hugo Beauchamp is hitting on me.

Tash took a deep breath, knowing that she had to act quickly to stop herself free-falling delightedly into something very dangerous and almost guaranteed to hurt everyone she loved and decimate her pride as surely as appearing naked in
Playboy
alongside Elle MacPherson. She kept thinking of the unmade bed – not made up for anyone special, but perfectly prepared for a casual screw. Old Tash had always lumped around after him like a love-sick groupie; she was keen and available and it would make Hugo feel great to lay Niall O’Shaughnessy’s future wife at the same time as his ex-wife was trying to lay Hugo. It was typical of Hugo when very drunk to choose such a childish, egotistical goal. He had already tried to humiliate her that night – why not go the whole hog and give her that big come-on she’d longed for during all her confused, hellish teenage years? He was bound to think that killingly funny. Beating her at the trials the next day would make a neat hat trick.

Still crouching on his haunches beside the bike, Hugo was looking for the keys again, his hair gleaming in the pewter light, clean and shiny. It had always been her weakness, that hair which she had once dreamed of touching – a silly daydream that had been her idea of a risqué sexual fantasy in her early teens, when details of the actual lights-out act had still been woolly and based largely on a battered copy of
Fear of Flying
that she’d bought from a jumble sale in the hope that it would cure her aeroplane phobia. Yet it was a fantasy that had stuck and still caught her in the groin with leaping excitement every time she contemplated it.

She quickly looked away, crossing her arms to hug herself for warmth, her huge gloves feeling like a stranger’s hands on her shoulders.

The next moment she realised that a third hand was joining the fray, sliding slowly and snugly up the outside of her boots and then under the nub of her knee as it headed upwards – gentle and unhurried.

For a moment Tash didn’t move as she felt a container-load of fire-crackers go off in the pit of her belly and several pulse-points she’d never known existed suddenly leapt into life as though making up for lost time. As the hand slipped up to her thigh, she realised that she’d stopped breathing and couldn’t remember how to start again.

Fighting like mad to get a grip on herself, she squeaked in a more helium-enhanced voice than ever: ‘I don’t think you’ll find the keys there.’

The fingers continued their steady ascent without hesitation.

‘Maybe not,’ he laughed huskily, ‘but I’m having a great time looking.’

Tash closed her eyes and allowed the fire-crackers a moment’s more life before dousing them in cold water and anger.

‘You’re drunk, Hugo.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve been downing scotch like a tramp all night,’ she spluttered, trying to sound logical. ‘It’s made you bad-tempered and childish and I think you should stop this before you really regret it.’

‘I thought you fancied drunks,’ he murmured. ‘After all Niall’s usually plastered – I figured I might stand a chance if I drank for England. Might be more your type. Isn’t that what you go for?’

‘Niall is not a drunk!’

‘No, you’re right.’ His hand suddenly gripped her leg tightly, almost pinching. ‘Niall is an alcoholic.’

‘How dare you say that!’ Tash howled.

‘Because it’s true,’ he said simply. ‘And you know it. Which is why you’re starting to go off him. Because, in your heart of hearts, you know that one of the reasons he drinks is you. He’s hitting the wedding Bell’s and toasting the bride until he passes out at night. Now are you going to help me out down here?’ He calmly let her go and started looking for the keys once more.

Tash wanted to kick his face in. She wanted to leap off the bike and flatten him with her heels. She wanted to drop the bike right on top of him. Because cruelly, hatefully, there was some truth in what he said.

‘I’m madly and crazily in love with Niall, Hugo,’ she spluttered, hooking the bike up on to its rest as she climbed clumsily off. ‘Now I’m going to walk back up to the house and try to track him down.’

As she walked away, he leaned his forehead against the spokes of the bike wheel. She had a horrible feeling that he was laughing.

Tash stumbled through the dark field, tripping over the uneven ground as she raced up the hill.

‘Tash, come back!’ he called behind her. Far from laughing, his voice was hoarse with guilt.

Tash blocked out the sound. All she could hear as she walked away was the squelch of her boot heels plugging her into the mud with every step. She couldn’t wait to throw them out – they had brought her nothing but bad luck.

Halfway up the hill, she did just that, walking the rest of the way on bare feet so numb with cold that she kept thinking they’d dropped off.

Catching sight of her as she moved into the light, coated with mud and bare-legged, the gathered guests raced forwards demanding to know what had gone wrong, whether the bike had crashed, where Hugo was and whether he was hurt? Tash shrugged them all off and headed indoors to warm up and collect her coat.