Page 8 of Just for December
He blinks.
‘You don’t have to pretend with me,’ Evie clarifies. ‘You don’t have to kiss my ass?’
Duke nods. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘You think I’m just saying I like your work because … I’m in it?’
‘I don’t know why,’ Evie replies, looking for the herby hollandaise she had earlier. It was delicious. There was lemon in it, capers too, but something else, something she couldn’t put her finger on.
‘I understand,’ Duke says, picking up the bowl she waslooking for like he can read her mind. He offers it up as if to say,this?and Evie begrudgingly reaches for the serving spoon to drizzle some onto her plate. ‘Why would a bloke be reading romantic comedies in his spare time? Well …’ he says, setting the bowl back down when she’s done. ‘It just so happens I’m an unabashed idealist, and I was once on holiday with Adele, who had brought along yourNo Stopping Us, and it got me hooked. She adored it, and so I read it too, my gateway drug. You write about people who meet and fall in love, yes, but there’s so much more. You have them end up so wise, and it makes me think that you must be wise. Do you get that a lot?’
‘Not really,’ Evie tells him, just about raising an eyebrow in amusement.Of coursehe’s name-dropping who he goes on holiday with. She supposes Harry Styles must have been there too, maybe Denzel Washington and Dolly Parton. Ridiculous. ‘Truly, you don’t have to do this. I write boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-suffer-setbacks, boy-and-girl-live-happily-ever-after books. “Heteronormative nonsense that could be sorted out with a proper conversation.” That’s what one particularly memorable Amazon review said.’
‘HEA, isn’t it? Happily-ever-after is HEA? Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Exactly.’ Evie nods. ‘I write HEAs and it gives people a day or two’s escape from the real world. But you and I both know half of what I write about doesn’t exist. Eighty per cent, even. What I write is as much fantasy as aStar Warsmovie.’
‘You don’t believe in a happily-ever-after?’ Duke asks her, crinkling his brow in a suspiciously unlined sort of a way.
‘Of course not,’ Evie retorts, grabbing another bread roll and deciding that, actually, she will have a glass of wine now. ‘I’m a grown-up, and adulthood sucks. Life isn’t an Ed Sheeran song and a mad dash to the airport to stop somebody getting on a flight. But that wouldn’t be a very comforting read, would it?’ she asks rhetorically. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
She squeezes by him, half-noting his woody scent but mostly just wanting tonotbe playing at networking when she’s hungry and still ruminating over Carl and her mother’s fall and the fact that she’s been awake for many, many hours now.
‘Jesus,’ she hears Duke mutter as she settles into a seat beside Katerina. ‘She’s a ray of sunshine, isn’t she?’
Evie doesn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know she’s heard, and instead tucks into her salmon.
6
Duke
It’s dark, it’s incredibly early, and the twinkling lights of a lone Christmas tree in the hotel window are currently the only thing switched on to mark the first day of December. Duke sees Evie linger by the door of the hotel and only realises he’s been waiting for her to arrive when he feels a lump of disappointment rising in his throat when she doesn’t come near him, a feeling ofoh, she’s not coming down this way.
She was rude last night, standoffish. Duke isn’t used to people giving him a hard time, which is something else he hadn’t realised until after she’d walked away from him at the meeting. He couldn’t stand to think she didn’t like him, somehow. He wanted to impress her. When he’d readNo Stopping Us, her book about two terminally ill patients who meet at a cancer support group and decide to make a bucketlist of things to do before they die – falling in love along the way – he’d laughed out loud and shed actual tears. That had never happened with a book before. He’s been low-key obsessed with Evie Bird’s work ever since, and that she’s here, on set, is something he’s been so excited about. He wants to grab a drink and ask her a million questions. Duke has been fiddling about with a novel of his own, actually, although it’s not very good. Anyway, he’s hoping for a do-over. Maybe she was jet-lagged yesterday, or overwhelmed. We all have bad days.
Duke pretends to scroll on his phone from where he’s stood by the cast and crew bus, bundled up in a coat and Ugg boots and a woolly hat with a bobble on top, looking up surreptitiously to see she’s obviously choosing to hang back so that she doesn’t have to talk to anyone – he watches the calculation in her eyes, how she sweeps over who is stood where, their proximity to the vehicle, and then casting back to see who is coming out of the door just at her shoulder. His feet start moving in her direction before his head has computed any sort of plan. He looks right at her: hair loose but tucked into a checked cashmere scarf, her breath making clouds as she exhales into the cold.It really was you on the bridge yesterday,he thinks, her expression suddenly familiar.
Evie looks up, and he points to the hotel door, opens his mouth and says, barely forming words: ‘I just forgot my …’ He trails off, cursing himself inwardly. Why is he acting so nervous? This doesn’t make sense. He hasn’t forgotten anything. He wantsher!
In response, Evie lifts her eyebrows as if to say,sure, whatever,and looks back down. Duke grabs the door as the lighting director comes through it from the other side, ostensibly tohead inside for the pretend thing he’s ‘forgotten’ before he changes his mind.
‘That’s a lie,’ he finds himself admitting (what is his problem?!), and she looks up again. Her eyes – brown, very dark brown – shift from side to side, like she’s confused as to who he is talking to.Okay then.She’s going to continue to make this hard.Got it,thinks Duke.ButI can overcome this.
‘I just wanted to come and talk to you.’ Duke smiles, and when she understands he really does mean to address her she creases up her face, bemused.
‘I feel like we didn’t get off to a great start last night and you were stood here by yourself, so—’
‘I’m just trying to get some work done,’ she interjects, shrugging. She doesn’t say it harshly or nastily, she just … says it.
‘Oh.’ Duke nods. ‘Sorry.’
She looks at him again and then continues typing into her phone. He doesn’t intend to look over at her screen, but he must have done because his head casts a shadow over her phone so she looks up again.
‘Seriously?’ she asks him, taking a step back.
He’s really messing this up. Again.
‘No, sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy. God. You make me nervous. Have you ever been told that before? That you’re intimidating?’
She doesn’t look up as she says, ‘I think that sounds like ayouproblem, not ameproblem.’
