It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Eight




Normally Ellie loved having a breakfast meeting at the Wolseley, the former 1920s showroom of the Wolseley car company, once more restored to its former Byzantine glory. Every time Ellie was seated in the cavernous dining room with its immense marble pillars and arches, she felt as if she was on the set of a Busby Berkeley musical, and half expected to see a bevy of Ziegfeld Girls suddenly undulate down the sweeping staircase.

Not this Tuesday morning, though. It might have been airy and cool in the restaurant, but the tight armholes of Ellie’s sleeveless white dress were getting damp and perspiration was beginning to dot her forehead.

With one eye on the entrance, she tried surreptitiously to blot her face with her Laura Mercier setting powder. And she might just as well dab a little more Secret Camouflage concealer under her eyes because two nights of imagining worst-case scenarios rather than sleeping had taken their toll.

‘Hello?’

Of course, the lawyer would arrive in that exact moment when she’d yet to blend in the smear of concealer under each eye. Ellie reluctantly looked up at a familiar face and dropped her make-up bag. It was the man she’d met at Glastonbury! The man who’d made her tingle before they’d been so rudely interrupted. She could feel the tingles again; lifting up her hair follicles, slithering down her spine, racing all the way to her feet, then retracing their electric path back up again.

He was wearing an impeccably tailored grey suit, his tie an almost perfect match for his dark blue eyes, which were wide with surprise, and his curls had been ruthlessly tamed and submitted into a side parting. He seemed more buttoned-up than he had at Glastonbury and he was looking at Ellie in disbelief too.

Her own hair had been coaxed into a sleek, slick ponytail, her dress was tailored and form-fitting, and her only jewellery was the elegant platinum wristwatch that Sadie and Morry had bought her for her twenty-first birthday.

‘Yes! Hello! Well, this is a surprise.’ She smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, and stood there with a look of consternation, which suited him far less than the engaging grin she’d seen just over a week ago. ‘I was so embarrassed about what happened at Glastonbury. I don’t know what you must have thought of me.’

He swallowed. ‘You? You’re Velvet Cohen?’

Oh, no. ‘Um, yes.’

None of Ellie’s worst-case scenarios had prepared her for this. She watched in dismay as his face tightened. Then he looked down at the marble floor. It was like a door being slammed shut.

A second passed, then he was looking at her again and smiling. It showed off his even, white teeth and should have made Ellie feel more at ease but didn’t.

‘There wasn’t time for introductions before, was there? I’m David Gold from Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis,’ he said, and he held out his hand.

Ellie half stood up, went to shake his hand, realised her fingertips were smeared with make-up and abandoned her plans in favour of sitting back down and frantically patting the skin under her eyes with one hand as she tried to scoop up her cosmetics, which had spilled over the table.


‘Sorry. For concealer, this stuff is really hard to conceal,’ she mumbled, as a waiter pulled out the chair opposite so David Gold could sit down.

There was a stubborn streak that wouldn’t cooperate. Ellie wiped it away with an impatient hand and steeled herself to glance across to see David Gold straighten his tie, then confirm that his cufflinks were in full working order. Ellie resisted the urge to check the concealer situation again and tucked her make-up bag away.

‘This is such a weird coincidence,’ she said, because she had to say something.

David Gold looked at Ellie – took his time about it too – then his eyes came to rest on her watch and his lips twisted. She was beginning to doubt that he was the same man she’d met. Maybe he had a twin, or a doppelg?nger, because now he made a tiny moue of distaste, so fleeting that most other people wouldn’t have noticed it. Ellie, however, was scrutinising his face for a sign, some small glimmer of that connection she’d felt at Glastonbury. She couldn’t see one because he didn’t appear to share her fond memories, though that was hardly surprising with the scene that Richey had caused. Ellie held her hands to her suddenly burning cheeks.

‘Yes, it’s very weird,’ he agreed at last.

‘You have to let me explain and apologise about what happened at Glastonbury,’ Ellie said with a forced brightness just as a waiter approached their table. David Gold ordered a pot of tea. Ellie’s stomach had been tied into several gnarly knots ever since his phone call the evening before, so she ordered only a cappuccino and sat back in her chair nervously to try again. ‘Anyway, I was—’

‘What happened at Glastonbury really isn’t important right now. We’ve got a lot to get through.’ As Ellie was processing that nugget of information, he gave her another smile that was kinder and seemed to have some substance to it. ‘So to recap, a vengeful ex-boyfriend has documentary evidence proving your paternity and has sold his story.’

‘Well, yes, but—’

‘I’m really sorry that I haven’t got happier news but the papers are going to run with the story on Sunday,’ David Gold interrupted softly, as if he was genuinely sorry. ‘Well, the Sunday Chronicle is. I’m afraid that the other papers will probably pick it up in their late editions.’

Ellie hadn’t dared let herself hope that this mess could be salvaged, but it still came as a shock. Like when she stubbed her toe or banged her head on an open cupboard door, her eyes were watering and she found herself struggling to take in air, while David Gold folded his arms and looked at her from under his lashes. He was silent and still, as if he was waiting for Ellie to speak, but it was all she could do to breathe in and out. Talking wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.

‘Our objective should be damage limitation,’ he said calmly. He looked down at his tea, which had just arrived, checked the knot on his tie yet again with long, elegant fingers and when he raised his head, his smile was a little wider, showing more teeth. Then he leaned towards Ellie and lowered his voice conspiratorially. The general effect was quite overwhelming. Purists might argue that the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes but Ellie could feel herself being drawn into his gravitational pull. ‘I appreciate that this might all seem very discombobulating but everything is going to be fine.’

‘Is it?’ she asked sceptically, because nothing seemed as if it was going to be fine. Unless … ‘There’s no way you can stop this? You can’t make this all go away?’

‘I have tried,’ he said with a little shake of his head. ‘I’ve had clients in similar situations so I know the ropes and I’m going to do everything I can to get you through this.’ He took out his BlackBerry and peered at the screen. ‘Does your mother know what’s been going on?’

Ellie had momentarily allowed herself to feel buoyed up by David Gold’s can-do attitude, but now she groaned and put her head in her hands. How was she going to break the news to Ari?

‘You understand that it’s vitally important that she doesn’t talk to the press?’ David Gold said firmly. ‘Can you guarantee that?’

There was no need for him to act as if Ari was a loose-lipped loose cannon, when actually she’d never, ever spoken to the press. There had been times when no one could have blamed her for selling her story – for instance when Ellie’s father was shifting millions of units and playing sell-out stadium tours and not paying maintenance despite the results of the DNA test he’d insisted on. ‘I got the only thing I wanted from him, I don’t want his money and I’m certainly not going to beg for it,’ Ari would say, which was sweet and noble, but still, palimony would have been very welcome when she also refused to take money from Morry and Sadie, and the bailiffs were at the door, or Ellie needed new shoes and everyone else in her class was going to Brittany for a week to study the French in their natural habitat.

‘My mother would never talk to the press,’ Ellie said tightly. ‘I’m offended you even think that she would.’

He put his hands up as if he was trying to ward off a swarm of angry wasps. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that, but what we all need to remember is that Olivia is the innocent victim in all this and, understandably, she’s devastated.’ He’d lowered his voice again as if he was letting Ellie in on a secret. ‘That’s why we have to work together to weather the coming storm.’

Ellie hadn’t expected ever to see him again and never in several lifetimes could she have imagined that their connection would turn out to be more real than metaphysical; that he was her father’s lawyer and he was being conciliatory and fairly considerate, which had to be a directive from her father. She wasn’t on her own in this, although she was still about to be flung to the press. Her head was pounding with the effort to take it all in and try to ignore the painful prickling in her chest when he’d mentioned Olivia as if she was a close, personal friend of his and not just a glacially blonde woman in a newspaper photo.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he told her softly. Ellie thought his voice might be the undoing of her. ‘But you have to stay on message. Maintain a dignified silence. I’m sure you know the drill. Will you do that for us?’

Us? Us? Like she was on the same side as her father when there had always been an abyss between them. That simply didn’t ring true for Ellie. ‘I’m used to being more proactive.’ Her voice was strained, as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. ‘Maintaining a dignified silence sounds like a good idea but there has to be something more we can do.’

David Gold sucked in a breath. ‘Miss Cohen … may I call you Velvet?’

‘Nobody calls me Velvet. It’s Ellie.’

‘And you must call me David,’ he urged her. He was being really nice – friendly, even. But at Glastonbury he’d been different. He’d grinned and joked and there’d been a sparkle in his eyes. Of course, he was in work mode now and, God, he was her father’s lawyer so there was no way in hell that there could ever be anything between them, but Ellie wasn’t sure she trusted David Gold’s smiles. She actually shivered as if his ready smile was tempered with a cold, steely edge that froze everything in its path. ‘So, Ellie, what did you mean when you said you wanted to deal with this proactively?’


‘Well, I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Couldn’t we put out a statement that says … well … that we … that he …’

She faltered, then stopped altogether because much as she preferred to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, she had no brilliant plan. There was nothing to put in a statement that would pre-empt a tabloid story. Nothing to say about the non-existent relationship she had with her father that was going to give the Sunday Chronicle’s readers warm fuzzies over their tea and toast.

She slumped back in her seat. David Gold sipped his tea, then steepled his fingers. ‘You have to trust that I know what’s best for you,’ he said smoothly, though Ellie rarely gave her trust to people she barely knew. ‘So, I will continue to do what I can to smooth this over and you’ll proceed with a say-nothing, do-nothing policy.’

‘Do you even know how bad the story might be?’ she demanded, pushing away her coffee because it would choke her. ‘Can’t we sue them?’

‘On what grounds do you suggest we sue them? They have the DNA results, so we can’t really sue them for slander.’

‘But they were stolen,’ Ellie reminded him, her voice rising perilously high so the two rapier-thin women on the next table, who had each spent the last half-hour picking their way around a pink grapefruit half, turned to stare at her. ‘Every single scrap of so-called evidence they have was taken without my permission.’

‘Well, it would be hard to prove that. Very hard.’ He spread his hands wide, measured out another smile. ‘Do you see what a tricky position we’re in?’

‘I’m just saying that there has to be something we can do,’ Ellie said persistently. ‘I don’t want them printing lies about me or my mother.’

David Gold dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘No, neither do we.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It would really mean a lot to him if you were on board with this.’

Ellie stiffened. ‘He said that?’

‘I spoke to him last night. He’s very … concerned about you.’ He was negotiating the words like a horse doing dressage. ‘It’s hard for him to reach out to you given the circumstances but he has your best interests at heart.’

Ellie had tried hard from a very early age not to entertain the idea that her dad might actually think about her, let alone care for her. Because it didn’t matter how many gold stars she got at school or that she’d moved up a grade in gymnastics, he was never going to roll up on a Saturday morning and whisk her off for a matinée performance at Camden Odeon and a Happy Meal afterwards, like the absentee fathers of her friends.

Now as she sat there, under David Gold’s pinstripe gaze, the walls that Ellie had put up were crumbling at the edges. For the first time, and using a suited, smiling emissary, her father was reaching out to her – but only because he wanted something. The resentment that she always tried to tamp down reared up and she would have loved to dash her father’s hopes the way he’d dashed hers. Maybe, though, it was better to have him, and his undoubtedly expensive lawyer, on her side?

‘OK,’ Ellie said without much conviction. ‘OK. Let’s try it your way.’

‘Good. I’m so glad we’re all on the same page. Now, would it be possible for you to leave the country for a couple of weeks?’ he asked, and Ellie was so blind-sided by the question that she found herself nodding. The nodding turned into a swift and violent shake of her head that almost gave her whiplash.

‘No! No! That’s impossible! I’m curating a really important exhibition, Emerging Scandinavian Artists,’ she explained, because it would be nice if he reported back to her father that she was doing just fine without him. But then, as Ellie thought about the exhibition, which was less than a fortnight away and was in that fraught stage where half the pieces were in transit or languishing in Customs, and the catalogues still weren’t back from the printers who’d totally screwed up the pagination on their first attempt, she realised that doing nothing might not work. ‘My boss will be absolutely livid if my face gets splashed all over the papers … Look, could you not go to one of the broadsheets and get them to run something more sympathetic? Or why couldn’t he grant the Sunday Chronicle an exclusive interview about his charity work or—’

‘Absolutely not!’ David Gold’s smile slipped so all Ellie could see was the steel underneath. She flinched, and he must have realised that he was the one who’d gone off-message and also that there was only so much goodwill a girl could have to a deadbeat dad because he reached across the table, almost as if he was going to give her hand a comforting squeeze. Got as far as resting his hand on hers and, oh! That tug towards him, those tingles she’d felt at Glastonbury, increased, intensified so that Ellie expected to see blue sparks where skin met skin for that brief second before they both snatched their hands away.

Ellie folded her arms and stared stonily down at a splash of coffee on the tablecloth. No. No! No more what-might-have-beens. He was her father’s lawyer, which meant he had a metaphoric ring fence, barbed wire and ‘Danger! HazChem!’ signs around him. On a very basic level, they might be sexually attracted to each other but not giving in to one’s baser urges is what separates us from animals, Ellie told herself sternly.

David Gold had also put his hands to better use and was straightening his already ramrod straight tie again. He was also swallowing hard. ‘I can only reiterate that in my considerable experience in this area, talking to the press is never a good idea,’ he said, once he’d stopped swallowing. ‘So, let’s move forward, shall we?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Good, then we’re agreed.’

They weren’t agreed as far as Ellie was concerned, and there were still plenty of things that she wanted to say to David Gold. He still hadn’t outlined his precise plan to get the Sunday Chronicle to possibly spike the story, but they were interrupted by a waiter who was ushering Ellie’s next appointment to the table with much deference, as befitted an A-list WAG who was fake-tanned, had her platinum-blonde hair teased up into awe-inspiring gravity-defying splendour and, despite the fact she was five months pregnant, was poured into a bandage dress and teetering unsteadily in six-inch Christian Louboutins.

‘Oh, Mandy, hi,’ Ellie said weakly, as she stood up to greet Mandy Stretton, née McIntyre, WAG, spokesmodel, TV presenter, entrepreneur and owner of her own very profitable chain of express nail bars. She kissed Mandy in the vicinity of each cheek and tried to sound more enthusiastic. ‘So great to see you! You look radiant. We were just finishing up here, weren’t we?’

She turned to David Gold to perform an awkward introduction but he’d got up and was holding out his chair for Mandy to sit down, returning her smile with one of his own. This smile reached his eyes, made them crinkle up at the corners. It was much prettier than the smiles he’d directed at Ellie and made her pulse quicken.

Mandy wasn’t immune either. She fluttered her eyelash extensions as he smiled down at her. ‘I’m Mandy,’ she said. ‘I’m one of Ellie’s clients. I was using another art dealer to find someone to paint my portrait while I’m preggers. Nude but classy, like that shot of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, but he kept introducing me to painters who were, like, totes up themselves and wanted to do me all abstract with two noses or a transparent stomach …’


There was no point in trying to cut Mandy off once she started talking; Ellie would just have to wait it out and suffer a hundred agonies in the meantime.

‘… Or else they’d get really snippy when I said that the background of the portrait had to be white. I can’t redecorate the lounge again, can I? Ellie totes got where I was coming from. So, are you having your portrait done too? You have excellent cheekbones. Not like my Daz,’ she added fondly of her footballer husband, who might have scored a hat trick in the last England qualifier but was rather homely-looking.

‘Oh, you’re very kind but I don’t think my cheekbones would stand up to that kind of scrutiny,’ David said with a warmth that hadn’t been in evidence earlier that morning. ‘And I’m not very good at sitting still for long periods of time.’

Ellie realised Mandy was looking at her rather pointedly. ‘Oh, sorry. Where are my manners?’ She gestured jerkily at Mandy. ‘Mandy, this is David Gold, he’s um, a …’

‘A business associate,’ he interjected smoothly, taking Mandy’s hand, and for one awful moment Ellie thought he was going to kiss it. He didn’t, thank God. ‘And of course, you don’t need any introduction. Congratulations, by the way.’

Mandy giggled, then David Gold cracked a joke about lawyers taking a breakfast meeting with Satan that was actually quite funny and made Mandy giggle even harder. And it turned out one of his underlings represented one of Darren’s team-mates, so he slipped Mandy a business card while Ellie sat there smiling tightly.

‘I really must go,’ he said at last as Mandy ‘aw’ed her disappointment. He turned to Ellie. ‘Please don’t worry. I’ll let you know if there are any new developments.’

Both women watched him walk away with a long-limbed stride. Ellie sighed in relief, then Mandy sighed too. ‘There’s just something about a man in a well-cut suit,’ she said. ‘He had a really firm handshake. Definitely a keeper, Ellie.’

‘Definitely not my type,’ Ellie stated flatly. ‘Absolutely not.’

Mandy looked at her, aghast. ‘But he’s a lawyer! Whoever heard of a poor lawyer? OK, a lawyer isn’t a Premier Division footballer but everyone has to start somewhere.’





Camden, London, 1986

It was only ever meant to be a short-lived affair in a summerhouse in someone’s back garden.

When he wasn’t in Camden with Ari, then Billy was in W11 with his wife. It made her feel sick with shame even to think about it, and it was good that she did think about it because Ari needed to remind herself what Billy Kay was really like.

When she was with him, even when he was inside her, he held back. Kept himself at a distance. His smile never reached his eyes. He always spoke lightly and playfully to her, but never deeply.

It made Ari try harder. Made her want Billy more. Made her long to be a warrior queen who could conquer his soul. Ari was sure that somehow she could say the right words, do the right thing, find a way to win his heart, because his wife bloody hadn’t. Otherwise why would he be spending so much time with her?

Still, it wasn’t wise to give Billy everything. He took and took and if Ari let him keep taking, there’d be nothing left of her, so she held herself back too. But Billy could sense every time that Ari tried to pull away from him. Every time. And he’d peel away her clothes, take down her hair and kiss her until she couldn’t think straight.

He’d make love to her slowly and oh so sweetly, so differently from their usual frenzy and fury. Then he’d reach between them so he could press his thumb against her * and stop.

‘Tell me you love me,’ he’d say, not even blinking as Ari scored her nails down his back in an effort to get him to keep moving because she was so close. ‘Tell me, Ari!’

She’d shake her head and he’d thrust just hard enough to get her hopes up, then stop.

‘Don’t you love me, then?’ he’d ask, his thumb teasing her * briefly, and every time she’d fall apart and crumble.

‘I do. I love you.’ Ari would throw the words at him like they were stones, and she wanted to believe that they were just words she said so he’d start moving in her again and kiss her like he really meant it.

Sometimes ‘I love you’ was just a means to a beautiful end.