Boot Camp Bride (19 page)

They reached a wide landing and Ffinch stopped by a rather battered door and turned towards her, jangling his key.

‘This is mine - and that one, angel, is yours.’

‘Thank you, hun,’ Charlee replied in kind, although she felt like slapping him. And not simply because of the cloak of secrecy he and Sam had drawn over the mission - but, because of some other feeling she couldn’t quite put into words.

‘Permittez moi?’ Taking the key from her slack fingers, he opened the door, picked up her cases and put them next to the bed. Charlee walked in and closed the door on him. She’d had quite enough of Señor Rafael Fonseca-Ffinch and wanted him to know it.

She leaned back against the door and surveyed her room. Unsurprisingly, it was decorated in a seaside theme with tones of navy-blue, white and red, coiled ropes, shells, and paintings of the marshes placed around the room for maximum effect. The bedside table lamp was lit, and there were water and tea-making facilities to hand. The bed, with its pale-grey tongue and groove headboard and patchwork quilt in navy and white, looked inviting. She walked over to the low window tucked under the eaves and looked across Ship Lane towards the marshes. Not that she could see much, however, it was almost a quarter to five and the last of the light had gone.

Drawing the thickly lined curtains against the January gloom, she dropped onto the bed, pulled the quilt over her shoulders and drifted off into a dreamless sleep. Half an hour later, she woke with a headache and a feeling of disorientation and loneliness. Since Christmas Eve, she’d stayed in her bedsit (twice), her parents’ home, Ffinch’s grandparents’ mews and now here she was in another location. In three days she’d be booking into the boot camp; small wonder she felt rudderless, adrift.

She threw back the coverlet and swung her legs out of bed. Maybe if she made herself a coffee and ate some of the biscuits on the tray, the sugar rush would help her to regain her equilibrium. As she waited for the tiny kettle to boil, she let her gaze wander round the room. It was then she saw IT. She leapt to her feet, all earlier feelings of disconnection and detachment forgotten in her anger.

‘Ffinch, you bastard …’

Abandoning the tea tray she strode up to the interconnecting door between their two rooms and banged on it with her fists, like she was leading a police raid. The door opened and Ffinch stood in his jeans, stripped to the waist and with a towel draped round his shoulders.

‘Christ on a bike, Montague - is there a fire?’ he asked, slapping shaving foam from his cupped hand onto his cheeks. ‘I would have thought it was the inn’s place to inform us of an emergency.’

‘You - you . . . ’ She pointed at him, lost for words.

She found herself unexpectedly fazed by the sight of his naked torso, and couldn’t help making an inventory of his salient physical points. Chest lightly downed with just enough dark hair to be considered sexy, deliciously tanned skin, slim waist, broad shoulders and -

‘What?’ he asked puzzled, as she seemed to have come to a complete stop. He wiped the newly applied shaving foam off his face with the towel and indicated that she should enter his room, but she hesitated on the threshold.

‘An interconnecting door,’ she choked out at last in constricted tones.

‘So? It’s an interconnecting door?’

‘Don’t you remember what I said in the office, before we went undercover in the skip?’

He gave out a tired, slightly exasperated sigh. ‘Charlee - to be honest, you say so many things it isn’t easy to distinguish one from another. What’s wrong with having an interconnecting door? I thought it would make communication easier.’

‘Communication? Ha! That’s a new word for it?’ Charlee spluttered, detecting his amusement and smarting. She had dug a hole for herself and he showed no inclination of helping her out of it.

‘Lost me there, I’m afraid,’ Ffinch said, walking through to the en suite bathroom.

‘To recap . . .’ Charlee was reluctant to cross the threshold in case it meant something. Like in a vampire movie where the heroine invites the creature into her house and there’s no going back. ‘I said - I have no intention of working late, missing the last train back to town and “staying over” in some country house hotel with you. Or being shown to a suite of rooms which - surprise, surprise - have interconnecting doors.’

‘Oh that,’ Ffinch laughed over his shoulder. ‘And I called you Chelsea and said something about you not being able to keep your hands off me. Looks like I was right, doesn’t it?’ He started his shaving preparations all over again and Charlee knew that he hadn’t forgotten one iota of their conversation. He was trying to wind her up - and succeeding.

‘Why, you!’ Forgetting her earlier resolution she marched across the threshold. She suspected, whenever this incident was recalled - and she had a gut feeling that it would be, and often - Ffinch would insist that she had broken the door down, marched into his room and -

And what, she wondered?

Standing in the middle of his much bigger room, she threw back her head and let out a groan.

‘Look, make us both a coffee. And before you say anything, Montague, I fully acknowledge that you will be doing so as a huge favour to me. Because you’re my partner and not because you’re female and it’s expected. Okay?’ He shut the bathroom door with a deft backwards flick of his bare foot and went on to complete his ablutions in private.

Put that way, Charlee felt less like a faint-hearted feminist dead set against domestic duties and more like a complete idiot. Sighing, she switched on the kettle, checked out the pots of milk and his biscuit supply - which, incidentally, was better than hers. Clearly as senior partner, Ffinch had been accorded the best room. Finally, as the kettle boiled, he came back into the room wearing a hotel dressing gown over his jeans. Charlee cocked an inquiring eyebrow at the dressing gown and he laughed.

‘The way you banged on that door, I’m taking no chances. If ravishment is on your mind, can I ask a favour? Can it wait until after dinner - I’m starving?’ Charlee giggled and relaxed, acknowledging he had the power to infuriate her but could always make her laugh. She handed his coffee to him. He sat in the easy chair, crossed his legs and made a great show of arranging the folds of his dressing gown so not an inch of spare flesh was on view.

‘Okay, knock it off, Ffinch. I was just -’

‘Tired and emotional?’

‘Hangry.’

‘Hangry?’ he asked.

‘It’s a word my brothers and I made up to express when you’re so hungry that you feel angry. Never felt like that?’ she asked, dunking a highland shortie in her coffee.

‘Maybe, but not for food.’ He looked at her with the now familiar, unblinking gaze which she fancifully imagined could see into her soul. A silence lengthened between them, not an uncomfortable one, but one loaded with emotions and expectations they both knew were best kept reined in. Then he changed the subject. ‘Oh, I meant to say - we’ve made
The Times
. I picked up a copy in reception; I’ve left it open on the bed - take a look, guess we’re officially engaged now.’

Charlee put down her coffee, walked over to the bed and picked up the newspaper he’d left open at hatches, matches and dispatches.

Mr R. Fonseca-Ffinch and Miss C. Montague

The engagement is announced between Rafael, son of
His Excellency Ambassador Salvio Fonseca-Ffinch and Mrs Richenda
Fonseca-Ffinch of Killiecrankie, Edinburgh and Charlotte, daughter of Doctor and Mrs Henry Montague of Highclere, Berkshire.

The same heaviness of heart she’d experienced when Ffinch had shown her the mock-up of the announcement, overwhelmed her. It was as if they were making a mockery of love and it was wrong, somehow. Shaking her head free of the thought, she dropped the paper back onto the bed.

‘So, the game’s afoot?’ she said in an attempt at levity.

‘No shit, Sherlock,’ he confirmed, drinking his coffee in one thirsty gulp. Charlee made as if to stand up. ‘No, stay there; wait,’ he commanded. Then he crossed over the threshold of the interconnecting doors and into her bedroom. She heard him running a bath in her en suite and she came over all hot and bothered. If he thought for one minute they would be bathing a deux and playing ducks and drakes, he’d better prepare himself for a disappointment.

After some time, he returned carrying a matching dressing gown to the one he was wearing. ‘Dinner’s at eight. I’ll call for you at quarter to and we can have a drink in the bar. Don’t worry - I’ll use the proper door.’

Taking her hand, he guided her from his bedroom into her own and then softly closed the double doors and locked them.

Chapter Twenty-four
Keeping Up Appearances

True to his word, Ffinch knocked on her door at seven forty-five. Charlee paused and took several deep breaths before opening it. For reasons she couldn’t as yet fathom, their relationship was undergoing a sea change. Everything felt different. As if here, on neutral ground, emotions and feelings had shifted up a gear and the dynamic had altered.

Ffinch knocked on the door for a second time and called her name.

‘Coming -’ Giving the room one last look, Charlee opened the door.

Ffinch was standing on the wide landing with his back towards her, looking over the bannister and down into the hall. He turned round, leaned back against the bannister and smiled. Adrenalin shot up from Charlee’s solar plexus like a heat-seeking missile and exploded behind her breastbone. Taking a deep breath, she shrugged off the shiver of reaction that left her feeling weak and reminded herself this wasn’t a date, it was a business arrangement.

Nothing more.

‘You look …’ Ffinch appeared lost for words as he took in her cocktail dress in shades of blue, sheer stockings and high heels. ‘Am I allowed to say lovely, or will that offend every feminist principle you hold? Will it make my compliment more palatable if I add that you’re also the go-to civilian the local constabulary call upon when they have a particularly tricky door to batter down?’

 ‘Very amusing Ffinch - let’s settle for “don’t we scrub up well”.’ Charlee’s scornful expression hid her inner turmoil and the fact that she couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. She gave him a second, more thorough look.

‘I’ll settle for that,’ he said, giving one of his dry smiles. But there was a light dancing in his eyes and he seemed wired. Remembering Vanessa’s caveat, Charlee wondered if he’d been snorting cocaine in the en suite bathroom as well as having a shower. ‘Shall we?’ He held out his hand, and, obviously sensing she had something on her mind, added: ‘Keeping up appearances, remember?’

‘Thanks for reminding me that I’m the pantomime fiancée,’ Charlee wisecracked, but took his hand when he proffered it a second time.

They walked side by side down the wide staircase and into the hall where guests were having dinner by a roaring fire, with their black labs at their feet. Charlee’s cocktail dress with its net underskirt and Ffinch’s charcoal-grey suit, pale-grey shirt and coordinating dark-pewter tie drew admiring glances. The younger guests gave them looks of fellow feeling, while the older guests, remembering how it had felt to be young and in love, smiled at them. Feeling a complete fraud, Charlee returned their ‘good evenings’ and held onto Ffinch’s hand tightly when she felt her courage was about to desert her.

They passed through the bar where young families were sitting down to their evening meal and progressed into the formal dining room where tables were laid with white linen, candles, glassware and heavy silver cutlery. A waiter checked their name in the reservations and then escorted them to a table where champagne was chilling in an ice bucket in a stand. He seated Charlee with great ceremony, shook out her napkin and laid it across her lap. Then she was given a large menu which looked like it’d been handwritten by the monks on Lindisfarne.

She chewed her lip in deliberation and read the list of starters several times.

‘Don’t go all girly on me, Montague,’ Ffinch growled over the top of the oversized menu. ‘I won’t have my dinner ruined because you order a lettuce leaf topped by a pea, balanced on a spear of asparagus, and spend half an hour pushing it round your plate. This restaurant has a Michelin star - go for it, have what you want.’ Then he returned to perusing his own menu.

Usually, Charlee had an appetite that would put a starving horse to shame and she was puzzled that he hadn’t picked up on it, considering the meals they’d shared at the mews.

‘I am a little hungry,’ she confessed daintily. Ffinch’s expression demonstrated that he wasn’t buying her ladylike manners for a second.

‘Good! Because, in two days you’ll be existing on gruel and rice cakes - which aren’t really cakes at all, by the way. I can see you sneaking off to the loos within an hour of arriving, with a Mars bar taken from the stash hidden under your bed.’ Considering what she thought Ffinch got up to behind closed doors, eating forbidden chocolate seemed pretty tame.

‘For your information, Ffinch, the menu at the boot camp is nutritionally balanced and prepared by an award-winning chef.’

‘That’ll be two rice cakes, then.’ Ffinch apparently found the whole idea of her on iron rations vastly entertaining. She was just about to make some quip about him surviving on roots and berries in the jungles of Colombia, but stopped herself in time. ‘Eat up our kid, you’re at your auntie’s,’ he said in a cod Mancunian accent.

‘Thanks, I will.’

The sommelier arrived at their table, opened the champagne and went through the ritual of offering Ffinch a thimbleful to check it wasn’t corked. Then he poured out two glasses and walked away after draping a linen napkin over the ice bucket.

‘Sam’ll have a fit when he gets the bill for this,’ Charlee said.

‘Actually, I’m paying for the meal. And before you offer to pay half -’

‘Believe me, I wasn’t,’ Charlee cut in, ‘you’re minted and I’m an impoverished intern. Besides, it’s the very least you can do, to repay me for what I’ve had to suffer.’ She looked at him over the top of her flute, waiting for his reaction. ‘And what’s yet to come.’

‘That’s true,’ Ffinch acknowledged, holding his glass next to hers. ‘Partners, Montague.’

‘Partners, Ffinch,’ she agreed, pushing to the back of her mind the thought that their partnership was one-sided. She wondered if he’d say more tonight over dinner; maybe share the rest of his story with her. They appeared to have reached a rapprochement and she didn’t want to ruin it by forcing the pace.

 Putting down his glass, Ffinch opened his wallet and brought out a piece of paper.

‘You might need this.’ He handed her the cutting of their announcement in
The Times
. ‘When you’re at the boot camp, I mean. I thought you could put it in the back of the photograph frame which holds the shot we had taken at our “engagement party”. Put it on your bedside table to allay suspicion?’ When she didn’t respond, he appeared to run out of words and settled instead for sitting back in his chair, regarding her intently. Evidently trying to understand her swift mood change.

‘Sure.’ Charlee shrugged, determined not to make it easy for him.

Despite the splendour of their surroundings, the champagne and the delicious meal that was to come, Charlee’s heart was heavy. She was conflicted; excited at the prospect of her first assignment, but provoked by Ffinch’s refusal to divulge more than he thought necessary to ensure the success of the mission. In addition, she couldn’t quite rid herself of the crazy notion that when she eventually met her future husband, this faux engagement would take the shine off her real engagement and ruin the moment.

It was a quixotic notion, but she felt as if they were deriding something she hadn’t realised until that moment she held dear. Then she reminded herself that this wasn’t real. And as for Ffinch, he was so far removed from the faceless man in her dream who flooded her heart with love, as to be almost a different species. She needed to toughen up if she wanted to be taken seriously. It was time for her to affect the world-weariness which he wore like a badge of honour.

She reached for the scrap of paper and their fingers touched briefly. Her skin was warm and soft but Ffinch’s felt cold and dry, almost chilblained - reminding her that beneath his fading tropical tan there was a man recovering from dengue. The paper fluttered onto the starched tablecloth and Ffinch picked it up. He looked at her questioningly, apparently trying to figure out what was going through her mind.

‘I’ll keep it,’ Charlee said, back in role and hiding her inner tumult. ‘In case I forget what you look like, or why I’m here.’ She’d promised Ffinch that she wouldn’t go all mushy on him, and she’d better stick to her side of the bargain.

‘I don’t think you’ll forget for a second why you’re here, Montague. I simply meant as a means of establishing our credentials, our legend. Forget it.’ She detected anger and impatience in his voice, as though he thought her some spoiled twenty-something who sulked when things didn’t go her way. About a million miles removed from his two partners who hadn’t returned to their feather beds at the end of the mission. His expression unfathomable, he picked up the cutting and put one corner to the candle. Charlee snatched it out of his hand, extinguishing the flame by pinching it between finger and thumb.

‘Set off the sprinkler system why don’t you? Deny me my dinner as they clear the restaurant and call the fire brigade. Not to mention have everyone in the restaurant thinking we’re a couple of fruitcakes.’

‘And aren’t we? Maybe this whole thing is mad.’ For a moment, Ffinch’s guard dropped and Charlee panicked in case he was having second thoughts.

‘If I knew what this whole thing entailed, I’d be able to make my own judgment, wouldn’t I?’ She paused, and with a very direct blue stare presented him with the ideal opportunity to fill her in.

‘Concentrate on your starter, Montague,’ he said. ‘I hear that the Brancaster mussels are delicious.’

‘Do you now?’ Charlee raised her menu and hid behind it, frustrated. He’d been close, very close to letting his guard slip. Damn - maybe she should ply him with champagne and -

‘Lower your menu, Montague. The cogs in your brain are whirring so fast I can hear them. I need to see your expression then I’ll know what you’re thinking. Don’t take up the cloak and dagger business for a living, will you? You have one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen. You wear your heart on your sleeve.’

In spite of his earlier terseness it sounded like a compliment.

‘You say it like it’s a bad thing,’ she came back with. ‘Whereas you - why, I never know what you’re thinking.’

‘Then we complement each other, beautifully. Fire and ice,’ he said, touching the rim of his glass against hers.

‘Down the hatch,’ she responded as the waiter came across and hovered with his Wi-Fi notebook ready to take their order and relay it to the kitchen. Then she put down her menu and with a heavy sigh gave Ffinch a loved-up look. ‘You order for me, darling, you know what a Dithering Dora I can be.’

He gave one of his rare, quick smiles and raised her hand to his lips. ‘Would Dithering Dora like mussels, steak, salad and a bottle of Rioja?’

‘Oh, yes - and chips. You can’t have steak without chips.’

‘We serve twice-fried garlic hand cut chips rolled in parmesan, madam,’ the waiter said politely.

‘Twice-fried and rolled in garlic and parmesan, Pumpkin. How cool is that?’ she asked.

‘Garlic, darling?’ Ffinch questioned as his thumb rubbed across the top of Granny’s ring. ‘Won’t that be rather … unromantic?’

‘Depends what you’ve got in mind,’ Charlee gushed, batting her lashes at him. ‘And not if we both have it.’

‘Thank you, sir, madam.’ The waiter gave Ffinch a fleeting, sympathetic look, as if Ffinch was holding a wildcat by the tail. Then the polite mask was back in place and he walked off to take the order from another table.

Ffinch let go of Charlee’s hand. ‘If you’re going to behave badly, I’ll have to order room service and confine you to barracks,’ he said, but his lips twitched in amusement.

‘You’re one to talk - darling. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be love’s young dream and unable to keep our hands off each other?’ Charlee drained her champagne glass like a thirsty bricklayer and the sommelier was at their side in a flash to refill it. ‘I could get used to this,’ she giggled, altogether more relaxed. ‘I’m starting to feel rather chilled, if you must know.’

‘Why does that thought fill me with alarm? Well, enjoy it, tomorrow we take off with a packed lunch to explore the marshes. I need to convince the staff and other birdwatchers that I’m a confirmed twitcher, and that my being on the marshes with my camera and binoculars is nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘But, surely I’ll be the one taking photos of Anastasia? Using my digital camera or iPhone?’

‘Yes, I’m simply there for backup. In case …’

Then he did his annoying thing where he cut himself off mid-sentence, as if he’d already said too much. Vanessa had said that since returning from South America Ffinch hadn’t taken another photograph. Clearly that wasn’t the case, so what was the truth? Then she thought, to hell with questions and answers, it was enough to drive one mad. Tonight was about enjoying herself; the real business would start tomorrow.

‘In case what? The brides-to-be discover my stash of chocolate under the bed and an unseemly fight ensues?’ But she’d left it too late to press home the advantage and Ffinch had control of himself.

‘I’ll station myself on the marshes,’ he continued, as though the conversation was a run-on. ‘Ostensibly, photographing the birds and wildlife while you and the other ladies thunder past.’

‘Thunder past! Are you kidding? They weigh no more than a fly.’

‘Okay, as you thunder past.’

‘Thanks for that!’

‘I’ll be able to get some different shots of the group. If they get suspicious about your taking snaps, you can leave your phone at a prearranged spot and I can forward the photos to
What’cha!
’