“Most of my cases aren’t this
adventurous,” Catherine admitted. “And I’ve never had to smuggle
anyone out of the country under the noses of the paparazzi.”
“Then let’s hope it’s first time
lucky.”
In less than a minute, Erika had
changed out of her coat, dress and high heeled boots into jeans,
chain-store trainers and a cheap ski jacket. Catherine handed her
cleansing wipes so she could take off her make-up and a hair tie to
put her long hair into a pony tail Heavy glasses completed the
transformation and, while it wouldn’t have fooled Aiden, Erika
hoped she’d be able to cross the terminal without alerting the
bodyguards. As a final precaution, Catherine strapped the baby
carrier around Erika and covered the doll’s head with a
blanket.
“No one will give you a second
glance looking like this. Keep talking to the baby and don’t make
eye contact with anyone. We’ll have you out of here in no
time.”
Erika wondered how Catherine
could remain so calm when her own heart hammered loudly enough to
be audible above the noise in the departure hall. She held her
breath and walked out of the door, passing the queue and crossing
the sightline of hundreds of people waiting to catch a glimpse of
Erika Fenn in her red coat and high heeled boots.
But no one paid her a speck of
notice.
Following Catherine’s advice,
Erika pretended to fuss over the baby and kept her face away from
the crowd. The bodyguards, with their back to the toilet door, only
caught a glimpse of a dark-haired mother in a navy anorak, and were
more intent upon restraining the rush of women trying to follow
Erika into the loo.
Once outside the two women began
to run and Catherine steered Erika toward an ancient Vauxhall in
the short-stay car park. She drove them the short distance across
the airport to the far end of Terminal 5 where they pulled up in
front of an unmarked door: the Windsor Suite, Heathrow’s exclusive
VIP lounge, used by diplomats, politicians and anyone wealthy
enough to afford its privacy.
Erika knew she’d be safe from
Marty as soon as she made it inside and fumbled with her seatbelt,
terrified she’d be caught in the last moments and dragged back to
him. Only when she’d stepped into the glass-roofed entrance hall,
with its exotic art and air of understated calm, did she allow
herself to exhale, realising she’d been holding her breath since
they’d escaped from the terminal.
All at once, the last few
stressful days rushed in on Erika and her body lost its solidity.
She began to shake, feeling incredibly foolish, but Catherine was
beside her in an instant and took her arm.
“I need you to hold it together
for a few minutes more, Erika,” the lawyer said, her voice low and
soothing, “and then we’ll be free and clear.”
Gathering reserves of strength
from deep inside her, Erika squared her shoulders and walked with
Catherine out of the back door of the building. A black saloon took
them across the tarmac to a private jet Aiden had chartered to fly
them first to New York and then on to California.
He’d once told Erika that he’d
take care of her, even if she ended up barefoot and bankrupt. It
occurred to her that she was almost that now, climbing the aircraft
steps in borrowed clothes, with little more than a few pounds in
her purse.
If ever Erika needed Aiden to
stand by his word, it was now.
Erika ducked inside the cabin
and looked toward the far end where Aiden stood waiting, a
triumphant smile on his face. Conscious they were being watched,
she walked slowly into his arms, his strong embrace crushing out
every shred of doubt and chasing away every last drop of the fear
that had haunted her for days.
“I can’t believe we did it,” she
breathed, her face pressed into his sweater, her arms wrapped
around his waist, comforted by the warmth, strength and size of
him.
“I told you not to worry.” Aiden
lifted her chin and dropped the briefest of kisses onto her cheek,
constrained by the presence of Catherine and the aircraft’s crew.
“I wish we were alone,” he whispered.
“Me too. I’ve missed you so
much.”
The stewardess coughed
discreetly, breaking them apart. “The captain’s anxious to leave.
If we miss our slot we could be delayed for hours.”
Not wanting to waste any more
time, they strapped themselves into their seats, ready for take-off
and taxied toward the runway. Erika forced herself not to reach for
Aiden’s hand across the aisle even though the desire to touch him
was overwhelming. To the outside world, she was still Ben’s
fiancée, and they couldn’t allow the pretence to slip, even
now.
When the jet eventually lifted
from the tarmac, Erika’s heart rose with it. How different was this
departure from the last time she’d fled England?
Her future was no more certain,
but she was running toward it eagerly this time, not running as
fast as she could away from her past. Five years ago she’d been
dreadfully alone.
But now she had Aiden. Her
constant. The man who promised to kiss it all better and make her
brand new.
Snatches of lyrics for a new
song jumped into her head – a song of hope and the beginnings of
love.
The moment Catherine Walker set
foot in California, her legal team leapt into action. Before Marty
Cooper had even managed to catch a flight back from London, she’d
lodged proceedings to revoke Erika’s contract, claiming deception,
exploitation and duress. Simultaneously, she’d frozen Marty’s
fraudulent accounts in several tax havens around the world and set
about seizing assets wherever she found them.
It soon became obvious that
Aiden’s initial estimates of Marty’s dishonesty fell a long way
short of the mark and that Erika was owed at least twice as much as
they’d originally thought.
Not that Marty would give any of
it up without a fight.
He countersued for breach of
contract, claiming colossal damages and loss of royalties on the
three songs from YouTube. Although Erika had always known she’d
have a battle on her hands, she’d underestimated quite how
personally Marty would take her defection, or how fiercely he’d
denounce her to any journalist prepared to give him a hearing.
Eventually Aiden had no choice but to engage high-profile media
consultants to limit the damage caused by Marty’s increasingly
slanderous and unfair allegations.
They warned Erika not to
retaliate.
“Why can’t I?” she asked,
frustrated at having to fight with her hands tied behind her back.
“I want the entire world to know what a devious, dishonest creep
Marty is.”
“Because this is trial by
media,” the consultants warned. “You’ve always been the darling of
the press, especially now you’re engaged to Ben. Start trading
insults with Marty and you’ll be no better than he is. If you want
to win, let the lawyers and the evidence make your case for
you.”
Thinking all their Christmases
had come at once, the news-wires burned red hot with stories of
Erika’s split from Marty and a flock of reporters set up camp
outside Ben’s house where Erika had taken refuge. No one passed in
and out without being photographed, meaning Aiden was imprisoned
along with the rest of them.
Not only would Aiden’s
involvement in the case have antagonised Marty, it would also have
had him asking why Erika’s ex-boyfriend had taken up residence in
Ben Ridley’s pool house. It wouldn’t take a huge leap of
imagination to then begin questioning Ben and Erika’s relationship,
and Erika couldn’t have Ben endangered in any way.
“How the hell do you both live
like this?” Aiden demanded over lunch one day when the security
guards had advised them to keep indoors. A helicopter had been
flying over the estate all morning, trying to take long range
photographs. “There is literally nothing private about your
lives.”
Ben and Erika had looked at one
another and shrugged simultaneously. “You get used to it,” Ben
said. “It’s the price of fame. Given my time again, I’d rather be a
builder like you. Harder work, but far more anonymous.”
He’d obviously not seen the
photographs of Aiden falling out of nightclubs in the early
hours.
“Now you know why Ben and I are
such good friends,” Erika added. “It’s impossible to understand
this life unless you’re in the middle of it. Normal rules don’t
apply.”
Instead, Erika, Aiden, Ben and
Richard contented themselves with long days of relaxing by the
pool, leisurely lunches, late dinners and even later mornings in
bed. Erika loved that Aiden got on so well with her two best
friends, the four of them forging a deep, comfortable friendship
that often made words unnecessary.
In the lazy weeks over Christmas
and running up to the trial, Erika grew completely well again,
starting to regain the weight that stress had stripped from her and
exercising daily to rebuild her strength. Her breasts grew fuller,
her hips more rounded and a healthy, sun-kissed glow replaced her
skin’s unhealthy, blue-veined transparency.
Secret consultations with throat
specialists led to her voice problems being averted and she began
singing again, abandoning popular music for operatic arias that
returned her to her classical roots.
“I can’t remember ever feeling
so happy,” she said, lying beside the pool one unseasonably warm
day when it was too hot to move.
“Well get used to it,” Aiden
warned, touching her back to check she wasn’t burning and trailing
his fingertips down one arm. “Every day will be like this soon.
When all this is over, you can have your life back. Away from
prying eyes and out of Marty’s reach. I don’t think we’ve begun to
appreciate the meaning of the word happiness yet.”
So far away from the real world,
time took on an unearthly quality, days slipping by unnoticed and
hours passing unheeded while Marty scrambled to put his defence
together. When Catherine felt he’d delayed long enough, she applied
to fix a trial date, suddenly reminding everyone that they couldn’t
exist in limbo for ever and that the real world had kept turning
beyond Ben’s gates.
Erika’s stress levels rocketed,
and she grew anxious, even though she had Aiden there to comfort
her in the small hours when she couldn’t sleep. Exhausted and
unable to settle, she grew short tempered and irritable, picking
arguments with Aiden at the slightest excuse. Each day she half
expected him to pack up and leave, but he remained gentle and
loving, kissing or laughing her out of her bad moods and trying to
put her mind at ease.
A week before the trial, the
nightmares began; vivid, terrifying dreams that had Erika waking in
tears, her body shaking until Aiden took her in his arms and rocked
her back to sleep.
After one particularly
frightening dream, Erika fell back asleep around dawn and sank into
deep unconsciousness, waking mid-morning and reaching automatically
for Aiden. When her hand fell onto the cold sheet beside her she
woke with a start and sat up, for a moment terrified that the last
month had been an illusion and that Marty still had her under house
arrest in a London hotel suite.
“Don’t worry, I’m here,” Aiden
said from the far side of the room, sensing her alarm and rushing
to reassure her. He laughed. “You can’t get rid of me that
easily.”
He lay down beside Erika on the
bed and slipped his arm under her neck, pulling her head to rest on
his shoulder. His skin smelled of chlorine and sunshine and she
guessed he’d already been out for a swim.
She felt sorry to have missed
it.
“You should have woken me up,”
she said, slipping her hands under his T-shirt and running her
fingertips along the outline of his shoulder blades. His skin felt
hot where he’d caught too much sun across his shoulders and he
flinched when she touched it.
“I love watching you swim,” she
said.
“Any excuse to see me with my
clothes off.”
“It’s your own fault for having
such a delicious body.”
To prove her point, Erika
slipped his T-shirt up over his head and spent the next five
minutes kissing every inch of his chest. Aiden sighed contentedly
and sank back into the pillows.
“I’m beginning to think you only
want me for one thing,” he said, his broad, sexy smile showing he
didn’t mind at all.
“Then you’d be right. If I had
my way, I’d hold you here like this for another month until I’d had
enough of you.”
Aiden gave a deep, throaty laugh
that rumbled in his chest, making Erika’s lips tingle. “I don’t
think the judge would be too pleased.” He lifted her hair clear of
his chest so he could watch her lips travel across his skin, the
sight exciting him unbearably. “I still can’t believe we’re
together,” he said. “When I first left London to find you in
Yorkshire, I had no idea I’d soon be waking up next to you every
morning.”
“Thousands of men would kill for
the job, so watch your step,” she warned, biting his shoulder and
then screaming in delighted surprise when Aiden rolled over on top
of her and pulled back the sheet to admire her.
His lips followed his eyes and
fingers, gently kissing and nibbling her newly-tanned skin and
spreading butterfly wings of sensation through into every erogenous
zone. They moved together instinctively, rediscovering old
pleasures and igniting new sensual delights.
Erika pulled impatiently at
Aiden’s shorts and pushed them down over his hips before guiding
him inside her, desperate to possess him and bind him to her with
waves of pleasure.
Aiden moved deliberately slowly,
made harder by Erika’s breathless responses; loving the way her
soft skin slid over his and turned on beyond words by her molten
pussy, so eager to receive him.
When they came, they caught
their breath in unison, their gasps of pleasure in perfect harmony
as they lost themselves in a longing that would surely take a
lifetime to satisfy.