Public Affair, Secretly Expecting

Chapter Two

SITTING on the tube train as the leafy, suburban enclaves of west London trundled past, Juno replayed in her mind her disastrous encounter with Mac Brody—in minute detail, over and over again.

As she left Ladbroke Grove station twenty minutes later and walked to the bottom end of Portobello Road, she finally admitted the truth. Mac Brody might be an arrogant jerk who made Casanova look like a monk, but he wasn’t the only guilty party. She had to take a large part of the blame for this morning’s debacle too.

At ten past two on a Thursday afternoon with the market closed, Portobello looked like a ghost town, the empty metal frames of the stalls doing nothing to improve Juno’s mood. A couple of confused tourists who obviously hadn’t read their guidebook properly loitered next to the darkened window of The Rock ‘n’ Roller Memorabilia Emporium, but otherwise the street was deserted.

She hurried past the colourful faÇade of Daisy’s shop, The Funky Fashionista, and glanced at the window display she’d spent four hours arranging the day before. Her throat thickened with pride as she admired her handiwork—and guilt swamped her.

How could she have been so reckless and irresponsible? How could she have made such a mess of things?

She rubbed her cheek where Brody’s stubble had stung. She knew exactly how. As soon as he’d looked at her, as soon as his lips had touched hers, all her common sense and her good intentions had been burned to cinders in a blast of pure unadulterated pleasure.

Kissing him had been like falling into a sunbeam, making every single cell in her body explode with rapture. But how could her body have picked him, of all people, to respond to with such fervour? A man who had the emotional integrity of a gnat? It was against everything she knew and understood about herself. Against everything she had made herself become in the last six years.

She thrust her hand back into her pocket, turning into Colville Gardens.

Forget about the stupid kiss.

It wasn’t important. She couldn’t let it be. Mac Brody’s dangerous sex appeal and devilish good looks would play havoc with any woman’s hormones at a distance of two hundred yards—and she’d got a lot closer to him than that. That was all. Her shocking reaction was simply an accident of chemistry—and geography. An accident of thermonuclear proportions maybe. But still just an accident. It didn’t have to mean any more than that. Especially as she never intended to step into Mac Brody’s orbit again.

She gave a shaky sigh as Mrs Valdermeyer’s bedsit co-op came into view, looking like the poor relation to Daisy and Connor’s graceful five-storey Georgian next door.

Right now all she wanted to do was hide out in her room at Mrs Valdermeyer’s and spend the rest of her day off catching up on the shop’s bookkeeping and persuading herself this morning had never happened.

She took the first step up to Mrs Valdermeyer’s door. Then stopped.

‘Blast.’ The hissed expletive cut the summer afternoon like a knife.

She couldn’t do it. Six years ago she’d promised herself she’d always face up to what she’d done. This morning, she’d screwed up and let two people she loved down in the process.

Whatever the extenuating circumstances, she owed it to Daisy to come clean and then apologise.

‘I’m so glad you dropped by.’ Daisy beamed a smile over her shoulder as she led the way down the long hallway of her home. ‘The material for my bridal gown arrived from Delhi. It’s absolutely gorgeous—you have to come and drool over it with me.’

‘Great,’ Juno replied, trying to muster some enthusiasm as they entered the sunny open-plan kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Where’s Ronan?’ she asked, busy postponing the inevitable.

‘Having his nap. The little terror.’ Daisy filled the kettle at the sink. ‘Can you believe it? He woke us up at four this morning.’

Daisy’s eyes lit up as she talked about her son and Juno felt an odd pang in her chest.

‘Enough about He Who Does Not Sleep,’ Daisy continued. ‘We need to have another talk about your maid of honour gown.’ She dropped teabags into a couple of earthenware mugs. ‘There is no way I’m letting you walk down the aisle behind me in jeans and a—’

She stopped talking abruptly as her gaze landed on Juno. Her eyes widened. ‘What on earth happened to your face? Is that a heat rash?’

Juno clapped her palms to her cheeks. ‘Um…maybe.’ How much worse was today going to get?

‘Let me go get some salve,’ Daisy said.

Juno held a hand up. ‘Don’t bother. Honestly, it doesn’t hurt.’ She took a steadying breath, determined to force out her confession before Daisy spotted anything else. ‘I’ve done something reckless and irresponsible and I—’

‘Reckless and irresponsible?’ Daisy interrupted her. ‘You? I don’t believe it,’ she scoffed. ‘You’re the most cautious person I know.’

That would be yesterday.

‘I met Mac Brody at Heathrow Airport this morning and tried to give him the wedding invite.’ She rushed the words, before she lost her nerve completely.

Daisy blinked. ‘You met Mac? Connor’s brother? But…’ She trailed off, clearly at a loss for words.

‘I had this stupid idea I could persuade him to come.’ Juno twisted her hands in her lap. ‘I knew how much you wanted him there. You and Connor and after—’

‘Wait, wait,’ Daisy interrupted again. ‘Go back a bit.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Are you seriously telling me that you went all the way to Heathrow this morning to meet the handsome, charming and stupendously sexy Mac Brody, movie star? Of your own free will?’

Was that a smile wrinkling Daisy’s lips?

‘So?’

Daisy giggled. ‘So, that’s fantastic.’ Her friend zipped round the breakfast bar and perched on the stool next to Juno’s. ‘Now, tell me all about it. No detail is too insignificant.’

‘What’s got into you?’ Juno sensed a trap, but couldn’t figure out what it could be.

‘Just tell me. Is he as hormone-meltingly gorgeous in the flesh as he is in his films?’

A blush blazed across Juno’s chest. ‘You can’t say that. You’re practically a married woman.’ Was no woman immune to Mac Brody’s charms?

‘I may be practically married,’ Daisy said, not sounding remotely chastened, ‘but I’m not blind, am I? Anyway, it’s required that I appreciate him—on a purely aesthetic level—after all, Connor and he are the spitting image of each other.’

The instant Daisy had said it, Juno’s mind conjured up a picture of Brody in the moment before he’d kissed her. A picture now branded on her brain for all eternity in glorious Technicolor.

The brutal blush scorched the back of her neck.

The two brothers did look remarkably alike. Mac Brody’s features were a little less blunt than Connor’s and the colour of his eyes was a purer, fiercer blue, but both men shared the same dark, brooding Celtic beauty. The high, hollow cheekbones, the sharply defined brows, the long, leanly muscled physique and that air of casual danger. So why, apart from Brody’s gait, hadn’t she spotted the resemblance until Daisy had mentioned it?

Maybe because Connor’s looks had never made her heart race or her pulse hammer as his brother’s had.

She forced the picture to the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to start hyperventilating again.

‘It doesn’t matter what he looked like,’ she said as soberly as she could manage. ‘The point is he refused to come to the wedding, he even said he didn’t have a brother and I lost my temper with him and made things worse. I wanted to apologise to you and to Connor. Because there’s no chance at all he’ll come now.’

‘Apologise for what? We already know he’s not coming,’ Daisy said so matter-of-factly, Juno wondered if her sensitive friend had been taken over by Martians. ‘We got that letter from his agent, remember?’ Daisy finished.

‘I know, I was there. You were really upset.’

Daisy waved the comment away. ‘I was a bit at first. But after I’d thought about it I could see I was being overly optimistic thinking he’d come around so quickly. Connor was just as stubborn and misguided when I first met him. After the terrible things that happened to them both as kids, it’s no surprise Mac has hang-ups to spare.’ Daisy gave a heavy sigh. ‘It doesn’t surprise me he said he didn’t have a brother.’

What terrible things?

The question burned on Juno’s tongue but she stopped herself from asking it, and ruthlessly controlled the little spurt of sympathy that went with it. Maybe there was more to the situation between him and Connor than she’d assumed. But Mac Brody had been right about one thing: none of this was any of her business—and she’d got into quite enough trouble already trying to make it her business.

‘I’m sure Mac needs a family as much as Connor did,’ Daisy continued. ‘But it’ll probably take him a while to figure it out.’

Juno wondered if the man who had kissed her with such confidence had ever needed anybody. But decided not to mention it.

‘But enough about me.’ Daisy patted Juno’s knee, the spark of excitement returning to her voice. ‘What did you think of him?’

‘Who cares what I thought of him?’ Maybe Mac Brody wasn’t as big a jerk as she had thought. Maybe he had his reasons for treating Connor the way he had. But what difference did it make what she thought of the man if she was never going to see him again?

‘Juno.’ Daisy slanted her a long-suffering look. ‘Blush magazine voted Cormac Brody one of the sexiest men in the known universe last month. We’ve already established he’s completely gorgeous. And, according to the gossip columns, he’s currently between girlfriends.’ She gave another heartfelt sigh. ‘Surely this is one man even you could not be immune to?’

The light dawned, and Juno saw the trap Daisy had set opening like a yawning chasm beneath her feet. Ever since Daisy had fallen in love with Connor she’d been subtly trying to get Juno to consider dating again. Juno had pretended not to notice. But as Daisy waited for an answer with an expectant look in her eye the blush blazed into Juno’s cheeks.

‘Something happened.’ Daisy pointed at her triumphantly. ‘You’re blushing and you never blush.’

‘Nothing happened,’ Juno grumbled, her scalp feeling as if it had been set alight.

Daisy gasped. ‘You kissed him,’ she said with frightening certainty.

Juno gaped. What was she? A mind-reader now as well as a Martian?

‘That’s whisker burn on your cheek, not heat rash,’ Daisy announced, her voice giddy with excitement. ‘I ought to know, Connor’s left me with one often enough. And you met Mac off a transatlantic flight. He wouldn’t have had time to shave.’

Not just a mind-reader, flipping Sherlock Holmes.

‘It was a mistake,’ Juno said, trying to dig herself out of the yawning chasm. ‘He had to hide from a photographer and then…’ Then what? He kissed her into a frenzy and turned all her brain cells to mush? ‘It wasn’t anything really.’

‘Rubbish,’ Daisy said. ‘He’s the first man you’ve kissed since Tony. That means it’s not just something, it’s a megaginormous something.’

Juno flinched at the mention of Tony’s name. ‘This has nothing to do with Tony. I got over him years ago.’

‘I know you did.’ Daisy grasped Juno’s hands, her eyes warming with sympathy, making Juno flinch even more. ‘But what about what happened afterwards, Juno? And what about the fact that you’ve spent the last six years of your life paying penance for it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Juno tried to pull her hands free, but her friend held firm.

‘Yes, you do.’ Daisy gave a deep sigh. ‘When’s the last time you wore a dress?’

‘I don’t like dresses. They don’t suit me.’

‘When’s the last time you put on make-up, then? Or went out on the town? Or felt the thrill of flirting with an attractive man?’ Daisy paused, her grip tightening. ‘Why are you ashamed of kissing Mac Brody? The man is every woman’s wet dream. Why shouldn’t you want to kiss him?’

Daisy stopped talking abruptly, her head tilting to one side. A split second later Juno heard Ronan’s lusty wail through the baby monitor.

‘I better give him a quick slurp,’ Daisy said, pointing at Juno. ‘But don’t you dare go anywhere. As soon as I’ve got Ronan settled we’re going to have another little chat about your maid of honour gown.’ Daisy flashed her a quick grin. ‘When I finally meet Mac Brody I’m going to give him a great big hug—for making my best friend realise she’s a woman again.’

Juno blew out a breath as Daisy shot out of the room to tend to her son.

As if Mac Brody’s kiss hadn’t given her enough to panic about, Daisy’s heart-to-heart was making her feel like a basket case. Folding her arms on the breakfast bar, she laid her head on her hands and squeezed her eyes shut as she listened to Ronan’s cries from the monitor and tried to blank out all the conflicting emotions racing through her head.

Ronan’s angry wails turned to indignant sobbing and then cut off completely as Daisy’s soothing voice came over the intercom. Juno imagined Daisy sitting in the white rocker by the nursery’s terrace doors as she settled her son on her breast—and the strange pang she’d felt earlier tore into her chest.

She jerked upright, realising with horror she was ridiculously close to tears.

What on earth had got into her? Where had that fierce sense of longing come from? That empty feeling inside?

Glancing down at her jeans, she saw the tiny tear in the knee and rubbed her hand over it. She forced down the tears, but the uncomfortable whisper of envy refused to go away.

What if Daisy were right? She’d survived what had happened six years ago, but how could she claim to have triumphed over it when she’d been in hiding the whole time since?

No wonder kissing Mac Brody had been such a shock to her system. After six years of pretending she didn’t have a sex drive, he’d demonstrated in one fell swoop exactly what it was she’d been missing. And at the same time brought her face to face with what she’d let her life become. Not just cautious and well ordered, but mind-numbingly dull.

She stared out at the weeping-willow tree in the back garden, noticed the remnants of the breakfast Daisy and Connor had shared together that morning on the patio table. And the little spurt of envy got worse.

She’d sat on the sidelines in the last year and watched Daisy find her happy-ever-after and she’d never even admitted to herself that she wanted one of her own.

Maybe it was about time she took the next step and conceded that survival wasn’t enough any more. That dressing like a tomboy and making herself into a nun had outlived its usefulness. Would it really be so terrible to admit that she wanted more than that now?

Daisy hummed Ronan’s favourite lullaby over the baby monitor and Juno felt a little frisson of excitement and trepidation wash over her.

She didn’t have to go nuts; she could still be practical and sensible.

But why shouldn’t she let Daisy design her maid of honour gown? She’d resisted the suggestion up till now because she’d been scared of what Daisy might come up with. Given Daisy’s flamboyant dress sense and her eagerness to get Juno back into the dating game, her caution had seemed perfectly justified at the time.

But it didn’t feel justified now. She had to stop being such a coward and start easing her life out of the great big enormous rut she’d driven it into.

And, goodness, if she could snog a movie star in Heathrow Airport and live to tell the tale, surely she could let her best friend design a dress for her. Especially if she made it absolutely clear she didn’t want the dress to be too out-there.

Honestly, how bad could it be?

Chapter Three

‘DAISY, I…I don’t know what to say.’ Juno gaped at her reflection in the dressing room mirror, bronze satin shimmering over the curves she hadn’t known she had until about five seconds ago. ‘I might as well be stark naked. I can’t walk into the church wearing this. The minister will have a stroke.’

Daisy laughed. ‘The minister will not have a stroke.’ She cocked her head, considering, then crouched to straighten the hem. ‘But he may make a pass at you. He is French, after all.’

The shock had started to wear off, a little, but Juno still couldn’t muster the ability to laugh back. ‘I have a cleavage,’ she whispered in disbelief, astonished at the way the plump swell of her breasts strained against the gown’s daringly low neckline.

‘I told you hooker underwear had its uses,’ Daisy commented. Standing, she gave a contented sigh. ‘My job is done. You look sensational.’ She smiled. ‘But the big question is—how do you feel? Do you like it?’

Juno pivoted on her toes to take another quick look over her shoulder at the way the cut-out in the gown’s back plunged tantalisingly close to the upper slope of her buttocks. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

She’d never worn anything so beautiful before in her life—or so revealing. This wasn’t just out-there, it was over the hill and far away.

She studied the full effect in the mirror again. The bouncy little bob Daisy’s hairdresser had fashioned out of her haphazard thatch of blonde curls that morning; the dash of lip gloss and mascara that made her fairly ordinary features look exotic; and her slim figure enhanced by the sleek bronze satin of the gown.

Daisy had made her look and feel sexy for the first time in her life. But did she have the guts to pull it off? When she’d decided to unlock her femininity she hadn’t had anything quite this liberating in mind.

‘I feel like a different person,’ she said truthfully.

‘Different good? Or different bad?’

Emotion clogged Juno’s throat as her eyes met Daisy’s in the mirror. ‘Different scared but excited.’

Daisy grinned. ‘Excited is good.’ She touched Juno’s arm. ‘And scared is to be expected. You’re going to knock them dead.’ She plucked a tissue out of her dressing gown and folded Juno’s fingers over it. ‘But remember, no upstaging of the bride is allowed. And you mustn’t cry, or your mascara will run and make you look like a raccoon.’

A giggle popped out of Juno’s mouth, the flutter of anticipation making her feel a little giddy. ‘Good to know.’

Had she ever felt so young or carefree before in her life?

Juno clutched the bridal bouquet as goosebumps rose on her bare arms and she tried to concentrate on the heavily accented voice of the minister. The fragrant scent of blooming orchids and calla lillies perfumed the air as Daisy held Connor’s hand and repeated her vows in a clear, steady voice. The elaborate beading on the bodice of Daisy’s wedding dress sparkled in the light from the stained-glass window and made Juno think of a fairy-tale princess.

She smoothed her palm over the bronze satin of her gown and smiled, letting the buoyant feeling intoxicate her. She’d stopped believing in happy-ever-afters so long ago, but being here in this beautiful place and watching Daisy declare her love for Connor made anything seem possible. She sniffed, trying to grab a dose of reality and keep her whimsy in check.

Make-up emergencies aside, she had to control herself. Daisy had worked hard for her happy-ever-after and had found the man of her dreams against all the odds. In her experience men like Connor were rarer than fifty-carat diamonds. She needed to remember that before she got all dewy-eyed. And anyway, getting back down the aisle without falling on her bum in the four-inch heels Daisy had insisted she wear was going to be tough enough. Dissolving into tears would only make it tougher.

She frowned as the minister’s musical voice was interrupted by a round of shuffles and coughs and hissed whispers. The hairs at her nape tingled and she had the peculiar sensation someone was watching her. She risked a glance over her shoulder. Most of the congregation were craning their necks to stare at something at the back of the small rural church.

She heard Daisy’s quick in-drawn breath at the same moment her eyes focused on the shadowy figure standing by the entrance door. And every last molecule of blood drained out of her head and slammed straight into her heart.

Him? It couldn’t be.

She blinked furiously, sure she had to be seeing things. But she wasn’t. The man who had been a star player in far too many of her dreams over the last two weeks appeared to be staring straight at her. His head dipped and she could have sworn she felt his gaze rake over her figure.

‘Connor, it’s Mac. He came.’ She heard the delight in Daisy’s hushed voice as a battalion of butterflies dive-bombed into her stomach.

‘Well, now.’ Connor sounded as shell-shocked as Juno felt.

The minister coughed deliberately, a pinched expression on his face at the interruption.

‘Excusez-moi, monsieur,’ Daisy addressed him in her atrocious French. ‘Une momento s’il vous plaÎt, un personne tres important est arrive. Une momento.’

She grasped Connor’s hand. ‘We have to welcome him.’

Juno stayed rooted to the spot, watching as if in slow motion, her heart punching her ribs, as Daisy hoisted up her wedding gown and rushed down the aisle with Connor in tow.

Daisy slowed for less than a second when she reached Mac and then threw her arms around his neck. Juno thought she saw him stiffen as he accepted Daisy’s hug, his hand settling on Daisy’s back for only a moment. When Daisy finally let Mac go, the brothers shook hands and then Connor gripped Mac’s shoulder. Juno couldn’t hear a word they were saying above the curious and excited conversations around her, but she couldn’t help noticing Brody’s rigid posture—so different from his relaxed stance at the airport.