The Honeymoon Prize Read online

  Putting up her chin, she swept ahead of him into the house, where her ruffled feathers were soothed by her flattering reception from the three men in the kitchen. She glanced defiantly at Max. She might only appeal to gay men or those safely married to old friends, but at least some people thought she looked more than just ‘very nice’!

  ‘Now, Freya, would you like to sit here?’ said Lucy, gesturing grandly. ‘And Max, you sit beside her.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Max with a curious look as he sat down.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The last time I was here, you plonked a big dish in the middle of the table and told everyone to get on with it. Why are you suddenly being so polite? And why are we all dressed up like dummies? You’re up to something, aren’t you?’

  ‘Honestly, Max, I’ve never met anyone as suspicious as you!’ Lucy blustered. ‘I’m just trying to have a nice dinner with the people who mean most to me.’

  ‘Couldn’t we have a nice dinner wearing comfortable clothes?’ he grumbled.

  ‘No, we couldn’t. Now stop complaining,’ his sister ordered with a roll of her eyes.

  The frosty start boded ill for the success of the evening, but Pel was as ebullient as ever, and between his jokes and Steve’s dry humour the atmosphere lightened noticeably. It was a long time since she had had so much fun, Freya realised, wiping her eyes. After a while, she forgot about the photographs, and what they were all doing there, and let herself relax.

  Until she turned her head to see Max laughing.

  His teeth were very white against his brown skin, and his smile creased his cheeks and crinkled cool eyes that were alight with humour. She had never seen him look so relaxed, so unguarded.

  So attractive.

  The world tilted sickeningly, the way it had done when she’d turned on her bar stool to see him walking across the pub towards her, and her own smile faltered. Very carefully, she set the glass she was holding back on the table. She felt jarred, disorientated, as if she had walked into a wall in the dark.

  ‘I must finish my film!’ Lucy gave a well-rehearsed start and leapt to her feet.

  She had left the camera conveniently to hand on top of the fridge. Having taken one of Pel and Marco so it didn’t look too obvious, she turned the camera on Freya and Max, albeit with such a blatant wink in Freya’s direction that Freya wondered why she had bothered.

  But Max didn’t seem to have noticed, or if he did, he made no comment other than to roll his eyes which he probably would have done anyway.

  ‘Now you two,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Get a bit closer together, will you?’

  Freya and Max edged their chairs fractionally closer.

  ‘A bit more,’ cried Lucy, waving the camera around. ‘Max, can you put your arm around Freya’s shoulders? Great!’

  Freya felt Max sigh, but he had evidently decided that it was easier to give in to his sister’s insistence than to object, and his arm came round her. She was desperately conscious of the texture of his jacket against her bare skin, of the weight of his arm resting on her shoulder, of his hand which she could just see out of the corner of her eye.

  And of Pel, smirking on the other side of the table. This was all so obvious. Couldn’t Max see what they were doing?

  ‘Now, smile,’ ordered Lucy.

  She forced a smile, but it felt more like a grimace and she couldn’t believe that Max’s was any better. They would hardly look the model of a happily engaged couple, but it would just have to do.

  Max didn’t exactly snatch his arm away the moment the shutter had clicked, but he didn’t take the opportunity to keep it around her longer than was necessary. Freya picked up her glass with an unsteady hand and tried not to look as if she had noticed.

  ‘I know,’ said Pel so innocently that she knew at once that this was something else he had cooked up with Lucy, ‘let’s play the hat game!’

  He began to explain the rules to Max, while Freya directed an enquiring look at Lucy. It was a game they often played at this stage of the evening, but she couldn’t see what it had to do with her pretence. Surely they had their photograph now?

  Lucy just smiled blandly back at her, which only deepened Freya’s suspicion. Something was definitely up.

  ‘…and if you guess wrong, you have to pay a forfeit,’ Pel concluded his explanation. ‘We go clockwise, so the person on your right decides what you have to do if you don’t get it.’

  ‘You’ll pick it up as we go along,’ Lucy interrupted, correctly interpreting the wary look on her brother’s face.

  They started harmlessly enough. Forfeits were limited to drinking an extra glass of wine, singing a verse, or telling a joke, and Freya let herself relax again. It all seemed normal. Perhaps she was just being paranoid.

  Typically, Max caught on very quickly, and they were soon all laughing more at Lucy’s frustration at not being able to demand a forfeit from him than at the actual forfeits themselves.

  At last she managed to catch him out, to cheers and applause around the table. Jubilant, she sat back in her chair and pretended to think, while Max waited, resigned, for his fate.

  ‘Right you’re going to have to pay for making me wait so long,’ she warned him, only half joking ‘Ah, I know!’ she declared triumphantly. ‘Your forfeit, Max, is to kiss Freya.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘ON THE lips,’ Lucy added.

  Freya’s smile blinked off. What was going on? This wasn’t part of the plan! She tried to catch her friend’s eye, but Lucy was concentrating on Max.

  He glanced at Freya, sitting rigid beside him, and then back at his sister. ‘Freya might not like that,’ he suggested carefully.

  ‘She doesn’t mind, do you, Freya?’ Lucy didn’t even wait for Freya to reply. ‘Anyway, those are the rules,’ she told him. ‘You got the answer wrong, and now you have to pay the forfeit.’

  Max shifted in his chair to look at Freya, who summoned a smile to cover the frantic hammering of her heart. ‘Better get it over with,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘It’s the only way you’ll shut her up!’

  ‘All right.’ He lifted his hand almost absently to smooth one of the wayward tendrils behind her ear, and the brush of his fingers against her cheek made her shiver with a deep, dangerous anticipation.

  A hush had fallen on the table, or maybe it was just between the two of them. She couldn’t hear anything above the booming of her pulse in her ears. The world had shrunk to the space between them, where the air was tightening, shortening her breath, and making it impossible for her to focus on anything but the disturbing light in Max’s eyes and the feel of his hand lingering against her throat.

  Everything had taken on a dreamlike slowness. It seemed to take a lifetime for his fingers to slide round to the nape of her neck and pull her towards him, an eternity for his mouth to come down on hers, for ever as they kissed.

  For Freya, the game, the forfeit, her friends around the table, were all forgotten. She wasn’t even aware of the camera’s flash. She was adrift in a tide of dazzling enchantment, her senses zinging and tingling, and she was conscious only of the touch of Max’s lips, of his palm warm against her skin, and the terrible longing to wind her arms around his neck and pull him closer.

  When Max lifted his head, she was left reeling and disorientated. She could hear laughter, but she couldn’t work out who was laughing or why. What could be so funny? She had never felt less like laughing in her life.

  ‘OK, you can consider your forfeit well and truly paid!’ said Lucy, delighted with her strategy. ‘Your go, Max.’

  Sitting on his left, it was Freya’s turn to answer next, but she was still so dazed from the kiss that she struggled to understand what was happening. It was all she could do to keep breathing in and out, very carefully. How could Max be talking normally? He had no business kissing her like that, making her senses tingle and her skin burn, and then smiling! Why wasn’t he breathless and disconcerted and suddenly unsure? Didn’t he
have this awful bewildering feeling that the world had been turned upside down?

  Obviously not. He was calmly carrying on with the game, making her a challenge that Freya was in no condition to hear, let alone understand, and certainly not to respond. She opened her mouth and shut it again helplessly.

  ‘Forfeit! Forfeit!’ the others called, thumping the table.

  ‘You get to choose this time, Max,’ Pel told him.

  Max looked at Freya. ‘Now you have to kiss me back,’ he said softly.

  Freya could only stare back at him, like a rabbit transfixed in headlights. Her heart had stopped; everything had stopped.

  Was he joking? He didn’t seem to be joking.

  Swallowing, she managed to tear her eyes away and look around the table. Lucy was looking satisfied, the others amused. Pel grinned and gave her a thumbs-up sign. She couldn’t refuse.

  What really scared her was how little she wanted to.

  Slowly, her gaze travelled back to Max. He was watching her, waiting, his expression unreadable.

  Freya put a tentative hand to his shoulder, saw it slide round his neck as if it had a will of its own, and after that it was easy somehow. Leaning forwards on her chair, she kissed him and felt his lips move responsively, felt his arm come round her in an instinctive motion to hold her steady, felt his free hand in her hair, loosening the remaining clips so that it tumbled down around her face.

  She melted into him, her bones dissolving with the sheer intensity of sensation. It was as if the two of them were swirling together in a bubble of enchantment and, when Max’s arm tightened, Freya didn’t even try to resist. She wanted him to pull her into his lap, wanted to sink into deep, slow kisses, didn’t want to stop.

  At the last moment Max changed his mind and instead of drawing her closer, his hold was withdrawn abruptly, leaving her unsupported. Bewildered, Freya lifted languorous lashes and found herself looking into his light, startling eyes. They held an expression so peculiar that for a moment she just stared at him before a belated realisation of where she was and what she was doing hit her like a blow, and she jerked back, face flaming.

  There was a stunned silence around the table. Freya caught a glimpse of Lucy staring in astonishment, of Pel’s gaze narrowed speculatively, and Steve’s knowing grin. She didn’t dare look at any of them directly, and she certainly couldn’t look at Max!

  Nobody moved. It was obvious that nobody knew quite what to say.

  Freya moistened her lips. Shaken off balance, appalled at herself, she made herself reach for her glass with a trembling hand and drained her wine in a defiant gesture.

  Setting the glass very carefully back on the cloth, she looked around the table. ‘Great game,’ she managed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Max stopped on his way to the door and stared suspiciously at the sight of Freya busily sweeping the floor and plumping up cushions.

  ‘Nothing.’ Freya avoided his gaze, the way she had been avoiding it ever since Lucy’s dinner party.

  Part of her was grateful for the way Max made no reference to those devastating kisses, but another, bigger, part resented him for his ability to behave as if nothing out of the way had happened. She couldn’t get the feel of kissing him out of her mind. At the most inappropriate times, she would find herself reliving the sweetness, the simmering excitement, that disturbing sense of rightness she had felt.

  What would have happened if Max hadn’t slackened his grip when he did? Again and again, Freya let herself picture how he would have pulled her onto his lap. She would have wound her arms around his neck and abandoned herself to deep, slow kisses, heedless of the others. Deep down, she knew that if it had been up to her she wouldn’t have stopped.

  But Max had.

  Freya burned with humiliation whenever she remembered how he had had to remind her where they were, replaying the scene up in her mind again and again until she convinced herself that he had been forced to shove her away before she would leave him alone.

  She squirmed at the thought of how it must have looked. She must have seemed desperate, as if she couldn’t wait to throw herself at him, and she had been at pains ever since to convince him, and everyone else who was there, that this was absolutely not the case. She talked incessantly about Dan and how much she wanted to visit him in Mbanazere, so much so, in fact, that she even convinced herself that was all that she wanted.

  Because if she decided that she didn’t want Dan after all, what kind of signal would that send out to Max? He would think that she had changed her mind because of him, and Freya wasn’t having that. No, she’d endured all that humiliation just to get some photographs of her and Max together, and she was jolly well going to use them! Not only was she going to Mbanazere, she was going to fall wildly in love with Dan while she was there, and she wouldn’t have time to think about Max’s kisses then, would she?

  But first she had to get Max out of the flat. Emma, the journalist from Dream Wedding, was coming in less than an hour, and if she wanted to convince her to hand over her tickets she would have to get her story ready. She couldn’t do that with Max hanging around. She wished he would just go.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going out?’ she prompted him hopefully, picking up a duster and flicking it over the coffee table. Pel had told her that he had extracted a promise from Max to go round on Saturday morning so as to leave the field clear for her.

  ‘I said I’d take a look at Pel’s house,’ he admitted. ‘Although why he wants my opinion beats me. Why doesn’t he just get a builder in if he’s got structural problems?’

  ‘You know what London builders are like. They charge you for opening the gate. You’re a civil engineer,’ Freya went on feverishly. ‘You must have some idea what you’re looking at.’

  ‘I build roads in Africa,’ Max pointed out. ‘It’s not exactly useful experience for inspecting dry rot in Camden.’

  ‘You’re bound to know more than Pel, though.’ She looked at her watch with a feigned start of surprise. ‘Gosh, is that the time? You’d better get going.’

  He looked surprised. ‘It’s not going to take me forty minutes to get to his house.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ she said with an edge of desperation. ‘The traffic can be terrible on a Saturday morning.’

  ‘I’m going by tube.’

  ‘Oh…well, you can’t rely on them either, can you?’

  ‘You seem very anxious to get me out of the house, Freya.’ The grey eyes looked at her closely. ‘Are you expecting someone? Is that what all this housework is in aid of? It can’t be your reporter friend, because he’s in Africa. Don’t tell me you’ve set your sights on someone new?’

  ‘Honestly, anyone would think I’d never touched a dust-pan and brush before!’ she protested, throwing down her duster. ‘I’ll stop if it’s worrying you so much!’

  ‘No, no, don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I’m going. I’d hate to cramp your style!’

  He would do more than cramp her style if he didn’t leave soon. Freya had to practically push him out of the door. The reporter from Dream Wedding would be there any minute and there was still so much to do.

  She rushed around, sweeping the rest of the clutter away and dumping it in her bedroom, and putting out the flowers she had bought on her way home from work the day before. Engaged couples always had fresh flowers. She could pretend that Max had bought them for her.

  What else? Feverishly, Freya transferred a ring from her right hand to her third finger. It wasn’t exactly a diamond, but it had a vaguely African look to it, and if Emma asked she planned to say that they had bought it there.

  God, the photographs! She ran along to her room and dragged them out of the drawer where she had hidden them ever since Lucy had presented them, ready framed, with a funny sort of smile.

  ‘I must say, they do look very convincing,’ she had said, handing them over. ‘Especially this one.’ She pointed at a shot of Freya and Max looking at each other, just before they kissed. ‘You look
positively starry-eyed, Freya.’

  It was true. Freya looked down at her besotted expression uneasily.

  ‘You and Max look surprisingly right together,’ Lucy continued, craning her head to consider the two other photographs. ‘Anyone would think you were really in love!’

  Freya only just stopped herself from flinching in time. ‘I thought that’s what I was supposed to look like,’ she said defensively.

  ‘You did brilliantly,’ her friend agreed with an uncomfortably searching look. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you. Especially that kiss.’

  That kiss. There she was, captured on film, kissing Max. Freya could still feel the heart-stopping touch of his lips, the warm, shocking persuasion of his mouth. She put the frame down on the mantelpiece with a sharp click and averted her eyes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but there’s been a crisis in the office,’ she said to Emma Carter when she arrived barely a minute later. ‘Max has had to go, I’m afraid, but he’s promised to come back as soon as he can,’ she went on, ushering her guest towards a sofa. ‘I hope you’ll have a chance to meet him before you have to go.’ She smiled at Emma, keeping her fingers firmly crossed behind her back.

  Emma was disappointed, but there wasn’t much that she could do about it. ‘So this is Max?’ she said, picking up the photograph of Freya staring dreamily into his eyes and studying it critically.

  ‘Yes.’ Freya was ruffled by the other woman’s disparaging appraisal of him. She didn’t seem to be particularly impressed.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said in a non-committal voice. ‘He’s not what I expected, somehow. He sounded so romantic in your description!’

  Freya’s throat felt tight. ‘He is to me.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s love for you! Oh, that’s a better picture!’ Emma had spotted the photograph on the mantelpiece and jumped up for a closer look. ‘Our readers love photos like this. Can I take this one to use in the article?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Relieved at having passed the first hurdle of providing a suitable picture, Freya offered coffee. She had a nasty moment when Emma insisted on following her into the kitchen, and she had to whisk a very curt note that Max had stuck on the fridge out of sight, but eventually she managed to steer her back to the living room.