It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Twenty-nine




When Ellie woke up, they were unsnuggled again but David was curled up on his side, one arm outstretched as if he’d been reaching towards her as he slept.

Sleep softened his face, as if someone had airbrushed him overnight. Her eyes drifted down to the easy rise and fall of his chest – she could have counted his ribs if she’d wanted to – and came to rest on his cock, which was also asleep. Ellie knew that she could wake it up, wake David up, with the barest of kisses, her lips ghosting over the length of him, and by the time she reached the head of his dick, he’d be half hard and wide awake.


It was a lovely thought but she decided to let him sleep. If he was still snoring ever, ever so gently after she was showered and dressed, she’d go out and get flaky French pastries for breakfast, because he was meant to be carb-loading, and she didn’t want to share him with Paris this morning.

He was still asleep when she tiptoed back into the bedroom to pick an outfit, but was now sprawled over Ellie’s side of the bed, face buried in her pillow, like he’d missed her. Ellie was still smiling as she gathered up keys, then hunted for her beloved Mulberry bag, which had been unceremoniously thrown across the atelier last night when David had taken it out of her hands as soon as she walked through the door so he could have his way with her. Good times.

She found her bag when it started making a ringing noise. Her phone, which had been blissfully silent for most of the weekend, was now flashing Tess’s number. With a guilty start, Ellie realised it had been days since they’d last spoken.

‘I’m a bad friend, I should have called,’ she said by way of greeting.

‘Oh, I should have called you too,’ Tess demurred. ‘But things have been crazy at work. Are you all right?’

‘Never better. Honestly, you will not believe what I’ve been up to.’ Ellie angled a glance upwards. The half-wall of the mezzanine level didn’t have any sound-blocking qualities. It was probably best that she lowered her voice. ‘Not even what. Who. And no, he’s not a lame duck. He’s like an anti-lame duck.’

‘We’ll see,’ Tess muttered. ‘I’m not going to lie, I’m jealous. My sex life is going almost as badly as my career. Ha! That’s a joke. What career?’

Ellie winced in sympathy. ‘What’s been going on? Tell me everything.’

The freelance contract that Tess had been told would become permanent now looked as if it wasn’t going to be renewed, as there were three freelance researchers on the show and only enough money in the new budget for one of them.

‘Zach sucks up to the producers like crazy and I try to suck up to them too, but why should I treat them to ice cream when they earn way more than I do? And Emily is boffing the head cameraman and I’m not boffing anyone, either in work or out of work,’ Tess finished mournfully. ‘It’s been months since I had any action.’

‘Oh, poor you. That sucks,’ Ellie said, as she frantically tried to think of some positives to the situation. ‘But, hey, you’ve got two years’ experience now on a prime-time show and you don’t know for sure your contract won’t be renewed. You might pull off something amazing like booking Madonna or—’

‘I wish. I’d even settle for Vanessa Feltz.’

‘As soon as I get back to London, you and me are going out for some hardcore drinking and some serious catching up,’ Ellie said. ‘We’ll find you a man too. Everything will feel bet—’

‘Shit! God, Ellie, I’m so sorry …’

‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry about. What are friends for?’

‘No, what I mean is I’m not phoning for a moan. I’m phoning because the shit’s hit the fan. Again. It’s half eight on a Sunday morning in England, I wouldn’t even be up, let alone calling, if there wasn’t a bloody good reason.’

Ellie had forgotten what it felt like: the fear. The icy chill that settled on her skin and raised an army of goose pimples in its wake, that churning in her belly as though her internal organs were all tangled up. She even had that rusty taste at the back of her throat. She really hadn’t missed it. ‘What’s happened now?’ she asked.

Tess sighed. ‘It would just be easier to … Are you near a computer?’ Ellie was already moving towards her laptop on the dining table. ‘I think you should sit down, then go to the Sunday Chronicle site. I’ll stay on the line.’

With shaking fingers Ellie booted up her MacBook and as she waited she wondered which one of her exes had sold his story.

Then she heard a sound from upstairs and the clamminess and the churning in her guts were nothing compared to the feeling that she might actually throw up or faint. With one hand she double clicked on her Google Chrome icon and the other hand gripped the edge of the table hard enough to hurt so she had something to focus on that wasn’t a front-page story on how she was f*cking her father’s lawyer. Except they couldn’t say that in a newspaper. No, they’d probably go with ‘Ooh là là!’ or, oh God, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?’ with a photo of them kissing on the street, because they had done that a lot – a hell of a lot – and she could barely get her fingers to type in the Chronicle’s URL.

‘You still there, Ellie?’ Tess asked. ‘Where are you up to?’

She was still waiting for the page to load and then she was … ‘Oh God … f*ck my life …What the f*ck, Tess? I mean, like, what the actual f*ck …?’

‘I’ve never heard you swear so much in one go,’ Tess said worriedly, but Ellie was all out of expletives. She was all out of words. Full stop.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE!

BILLY THE KID (YES, THERE’S ANOTHER ONE!)

THE DADDY OF COOL’S SECRET SON

Billy Kay had a son hidden away. A nineteen-year-old called Charlie. It was there that any similarity to Ellie and her secret lovechild status ended. Because, in all the pictures of Charlie, from tiny baby to tousle-haired, sulky-faced present day, he was photographed with the man who had never once acknowledged Ellie as his own.

Billy had a relationship with his illegitimate son, had bonded with him, sent him to Eton, taken him to see Arsenal, had him and his mum, a former model, over for a sodding family Christmas dinner chez Kay.

So, what did that make Ellie? Chopped f*cking liver?

Cherubic-faced Charlie is a physics genius in his second year at Cambridge where his fellow boffins have no idea that his father is one of the most famous men in the country. Turning his back on a life of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, unlike his recently discovered half-sister Velvet, Charlie prefers string theory to guitar strings and loves quiet nights in with his equally brainiac girlfriend, Kim, who’s studying Maths. He’s a son that any father could be proud of.

‘Charlie’s mum, Miranda, and Billy fell madly in love at a time when he and Olivia were having problems,’ a close family friend confided to the Chronicle. ‘Obviously Olivia was devastated at the time, but she understands better than anyone just what a passionate man Billy is. It’s to Olivia’s credit that Miranda and Charlie have always been treated as part of the Kay family. It’s a completely different set of circumstances compared to his illegitimate daughter, Velvet, who was the result of a tawdry one-night stand.’

Ellie was sure her heart had just irrevocably splintered. What was wrong with her? Why did Billy love Charlie and not her? Why was Charlie in his life when she’d been all but expunged from his history?

It was obvious why.

‘I have to go,’ she said to Tess.

‘Are you all right?’ Then Tess ‘tsk’ed herself. ‘Of course you’re not. Are you going to stay in Paris?’

‘Don’t know. Look, I really have to go. I’ll call you,’ Ellie said, and she didn’t wait to hear what Tess thought about that because she’d already hung up.


Ellie’s eyes were drawn to the galleried bedroom because the man up there had known all along she had a half-brother knocking about. She’d deal with him later.

‘Oh, hi, babycakes,’ Ari said when she answered her phone on the first ring, like she was already up and waiting for Ellie to call and that was why she sounded so wary. ‘So, have you seen—’

‘Yes! I’ve seen it. Did you know about this Charlie?’ Ellie could hardly say his name, this boy, this stranger who shared some of her DNA. She couldn’t believe that on some level she’d never sensed his existence; felt as if something nameless and intangible was missing from her life. In fact, it was even hard to believe that he was real and not a figment of a newspaper editor’s imagination.

‘Of course I didn’t, Ellie! How could I?’ Ari demanded. ‘You know that I haven’t spoken to Billy Kay in—’

‘He’s my father! Why can’t you ever call him that?’ If forcing the words out wasn’t such an effort then Ellie thought her voice might be louder, that she’d rouse the man upstairs, but all she could hear was Ari’s ragged breathing. ‘He’s not just Billy Kay; he’s my dad. This is all your fault!’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Ellie?’

‘He’d have been in my life if you hadn’t driven him away!’ Ellie bit out. ‘You might not have needed him but did you ever stop to think that I might have needed him? Might have wanted to have a relationship with him? What did you do to make him stay away? You must have done something!’

Ari gasped as if she was in pain. ‘You’re not being fair, Ellie. You weren’t there. You don’t know what went on …’

‘Because you would never tell me! I have a right to know!’ She’d never spoken to Ari like this, so belligerently, so J’accuse. Couldn’t even remember them ever having a fight. They bickered and niggled at each other sometimes, but now Ellie was so angry with her mother that it was all she could do to keep a tight grip on the phone and not hurl it across the room. ‘He kept that other woman, Miranda, around. He has a relationship with his son …’

‘You obviously didn’t finish reading the piece because that other woman lives in a f*cking granny flat in Billy and Olivia’s house. Is that what you expected me to do? To let us be the support act? To be happy that you were always going to be second best?’

‘But you don’t know that. You don’t know what my relationship with him would have been like because you made sure that he left and he never came back,’ Ellie hissed, hand cupped round her mouth. ‘Was being part of a family not punk rock enough for you? Or were you just angry that he went back to his wife?’

‘Now, you’re just being f*cking ridiculous,’ Ari snapped. ‘You don’t get to know everything, Ellie. It’s not just your story, it’s my story too and some parts of it are mine and mine alone.’

‘You are so selfish,’ Ellie told her. ‘You deprived me of my dad and made this big deal about how we didn’t need anybody because we had each other. You always made out that being poor was some kind of noble exercise in self-reliance when actually it was the f*cking pits.’

All the little half-thoughts that Ellie had always shied away from because they were so ugly were spewing out of her mouth unchecked. Even as she heard her voice saying these terrible things, made more terrible because they were a version of the truth, she was scared that she and Ari wouldn’t come back from this.

‘Oh, so you’d rather I’d have run to Morry and Sadie every five minutes like some spoiled little princess?’

‘No, I’d have rather that you called up my dad and said you were sorry and hey, guess what? I’m not as independent as I thought I was and my little girl needs her father—’

‘Stop calling him your dad! It takes more than supplying some sperm to turn a man into a father and—’

‘You don’t know what he’d have been like as a father because you never gave him that chance, did you?’

‘Now, just you listen to me, you little—’

Ellie hung up on Ari; pressed the red button and terminated the call, because there was no right way to end the conversation after she’d finished dumping on her mother’s head twenty-six years of bitterness and resentment that she’d hardly let herself feel, let alone ever articulated to another living soul.

Her heart was racing, her shaking hands were mottled underneath her tan, and part of Ellie wanted to call Ari back and say sorry but part of her wasn’t sorry at all. Even now, Ari was still holding out on her. If she’d been blameless, if it had all been Billy Kay’s fault, then Ari would have had no qualms about telling Ellie. But the fact that she never had meant that Ari had to be partly responsible for Billy not letting the door hit him in the arse on his way out of their lives.

Ellie took deep but ragged breaths. When she could feel her heart-rate slowing down to a more normal rhythm, she thought again about calling Ari. Though maybe this was the lull between storms and more terrible accusations would burst forth. They hadn’t even touched on the subject of Chester, or why Ari had never sued Billy for even the minimum palimony that she was owed by law. No, she couldn’t risk it. Not yet, Ellie decided as she heard a light tread on the stairs.

David was wearing boxer shorts and a sleepy smile, which disappeared as soon as he caught sight of the expression on Ellie’s face.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sharply.

How could he not know? How could he have carried on sleeping while Ellie’s world had broken into pieces? She angled her laptop so David could see the headline.

‘Oh, for f*ck’s sake!’ he snapped. ‘How did this happen?’

Then he was standing behind her, fingers on the trackpad of her MacBook, yet somehow wasn’t touching her, even though he was all around her. Ellie could feel the tension coming off him as he kept scrolling down, reading faster than she would have thought possible.

He stepped back from the laptop, from her, and when Ellie turned round in her chair, David had his arms folded, face grim. She was sure her face was grimmer.

‘So, it just slipped your mind that I had a half-brother.’ She didn’t want to be angry with Ari any more. There was someone who deserved her anger far more. ‘You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?’

‘Do you really expect me to believe that you didn’t know anything about this?’ David demanded.

Ellie stood up so she could face him then wished she hadn’t because he looked as cold and frozen as the sea in winter. ‘How was I meant to know? It’s not like Billy Kay told me during one of the weekly phone calls that we never had!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded approximately ten per cent less stiff. ‘I don’t know how this story even got into the papers.’

‘Is that it?’ Ellie asked incredulously. ‘A half-brother suddenly emerges fully formed in the pages of the Chronicle and that’s all you have to say?’

‘What do you want me to say?’ David asked as he walked away from her to unplug his phone from its charger on the kitchen island. ‘Really, tell me! What can I possibly say to make you feel better? Whichever way you look at it, it’s a mess.’

That wasn’t good enough. Not when Ellie had a hundred questions that she needed answers to, but all that she could hear in her head was white noise. ‘I can’t believe this. That you … you knew …’


Then the static was replaced with a ringing sound from both their phones. ‘I’m not ignoring you, but I absolutely need to take this,’ David said, and he turned away from her again to march back up the stairs, leaving Ellie to take a call from Sadie, who spent half an hour trying to find some kind of silver lining.

‘This Charlie, it doesn’t sound like you’d have anything in common with him,’ she pointed out. ‘And could you imagine having to live in that man’s spare room?’

Ellie couldn’t, even if the spare room was a wing of Billy Kay’s huge Georgian country house in Sussex. She was also forced to agree with Sadie that the arrangement seemed fantastical. ‘This other woman and his wife, are they both having relations with him? Do they have a rota? How on earth would that work?’

‘I don’t know, Grandma. I’d really rather not think about it.’ Ellie stared hard at her laptop. ‘Do you think this Charlie looks a little bit like me? Round the eyes?

‘At least the press don’t know where you are, bubbeleh,’ Sadie said finally. ‘Yes, we have a few people hanging around outside, but there’s nothing you can do about it. You have a nice holiday. Don’t you worry about us.’

Catholics had nothing on Jewish grandmothers when it came to piling on the guilt. Ellie would once have loved to relocate to Paris permanently but she had a feeling, as she heard David move about upstairs, that Paris had been ruined for evermore. Besides, Sadie’s best friend, Bernice Keonig, was happy for Ellie to stay in her guest bedroom.

Staying in David’s guest room certainly wasn’t an option. Ellie was already heartsick for the thirty-six hours they’d just spent together when it had all been so simple. No boundaries to define. No need for Serious Talks.

That was all over now, she thought sadly as she heard David’s voice drift over the half-wall. It was hard not to hear him, when he was almost but not quite shouting, ‘Billy, how many more times can we go through this? Miranda and Charlie did sign non-disclosure agreements, but it’s beyond my powers to make absolutely everyone they come into contact with sign one too. I can’t legally bar Charlie and all his friends from having Facebook accounts either.’

There was a horrible sensation creeping over Ellie’s scalp as David gave a short, humourless bark of laughter. ‘We always knew this was going to be a possibility. The Chronicle told us they had this story weeks ago. I’m sorry our plan B strategy didn’t work, but that was initially Georgina’s remit, not mine.’

Ellie was standing in the middle of the living room, hands on her hips, her face peering up so when David looked down, it was obvious she had been hanging onto his every word. He didn’t even have the decency to look away when he said, ‘I know precisely where she is and I will deal with her. And yes, I’m sure Charlie is very upset that his privacy has been compromised, but by the time he’s back at Cambridge this will all have died down.’

He’d hardly had time to hang up before Ellie was scrambling up the stairs, almost falling down them again, in her haste to get right up in his face, so close that she could have pursed her lips and kissed him if she’d wanted to, which she absolutely did not. ‘This whole thing has been a set-up, hasn’t it?’ She prodded him in the chest with her index finger, until he slowly and deliberately pushed her hand down, which should have made Ellie even angrier. Instead it made her want to cry. ‘Did you and Georgina put Richey up to it just to protect your precious Charlie?’

‘Of course we didn’t,’ David said immediately because she was asking the wrong question. ‘However, it was fortuitous timing and as far as the Chronicle were concerned, you were the bigger splash. That’s all I can tell you.’

That, right there, was the reason why Shakespeare had written the line, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’

‘None of this was a surprise, was it? Not even when I first contacted you about Richey stealing my papers.’ Ellie took a step backwards because she couldn’t bear to be so close to him. ‘I was just the … what did you call it? Your plan B strategy? You let Billy Kay throw me under the bus!’

David stood there in his boxer shorts and managed to affect the same kind of ease as if he’d been wearing one of his grey suits and a starched, impossibly white shirt. He even gave her one of his Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis tight smiles. ‘I’m very sorry, Ellie, but I can’t discuss my clients with you.’

‘You bastard,’ she managed to say, and she was shaking uncontrollably again, unable to even clasp her hands together, as if she’d lost control of all of her motor neurone functions. ‘You’ve been playing me the whole time? Keeping me tucked away in your flat … This weekend, it hasn’t meant anything to you, has it?’

‘Ellie.’ David’s face, his voice, softened and he tried to take her hand but she cowered away from him. ‘How can you think that?’

‘Because I’m always wrong when it comes to men. I actually thought you were different.’ Ellie looked up at the ornate architrave above her because she couldn’t look at him any more. ‘God, you’re just like all the rest, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve tried to do the right thing by you.’

‘You wouldn’t know what the right thing was if it was delivered to your door gift-wrapped!’ David was still far too close for comfort. Close enough that Ellie could smell his sleep-warm body and just the faintest hint of citrus from his aftershave, and she didn’t understand how she could still want him even now. ‘Did Billy Kay ask you to “deal” with me? Are you billing him by the hour for shagging the daughter he never wanted?’

‘Don’t talk about yourself like that,’ David snapped and he took hold of her icy-cold hands before Ellie had time to cringe away from him again. ‘Don’t talk about us like that.’

‘Like there was even an us!’ Ellie insisted. If she got through this dry-eyed it would be a miracle. ‘Not while you’re his lawyer.’

‘I’ve worked years to get where I am and I’m not giving that up, Ellie, no matter what I might feel for you.’ He sounded affronted at the mere suggestion.

‘How can you feel anything for me when all you’ve done is lie to me?’

‘I haven’t lied to you. I simply didn’t tell you about things that would have impinged on client confidentiality.’

Ellie struggled in his grasp but not too hard because she didn’t want to act like a girl in a really bad horror film and, God help her, this could be the last time he ever touched her. ‘You can’t work for my father—’

‘A warning before you go any further; I don’t respond well to threats or ultimatums.’

Ellie glared at David so hard she was sure she’d detached a cornea. ‘Him or me,’ she said, and she wished she wasn’t saying it because she already knew that their fun sexy times couldn’t begin to measure up to finally making senior partner, which would obviously be his reward for managing this crisis, for managing her.

‘The reason that I’m so good at my job is because I compartmentalise. There’s work, then there’s my private life, and in an ideal world there’d be clear blue water between them.’ He smiled ruefully as Ellie looked at him stony-faced because there was no way she was making this easy for him. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not an ideal world but in another two days this will be over, I give you my word, and then there is no reason why we can’t continue to see each other.’ David frowned when Ellie’s hands slackened and he had to loosen his grip.


‘I don’t want a relationship like that,’ Ellie said dully. ‘I don’t want a man who’s going to compartmentalise his feelings for me. I am worth more than that.’

‘No one’s saying that you aren’t—’

‘You are. You’re saying that you’d never take me to some fancy partners’ dinner at your firm and you’d never have a picture of me on your desk or, like, if you were standing around the water cooler with your lawyer mates, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, me and my girlfriend, Ellie, are going away on a mini-break this weekend,” would you? I’d be hidden away; your dirty little secret, because you wouldn’t want anyone to know that you were involved with a client’s daughter. Especially when you’d been colluding with that client and his press representative to drag that daughter’s name through the mud.’

David’s eyes flickered, then he averted his gaze. ‘I haven’t colluded. I may have been party to collusion but lawyer–client privilege prevents me from—’

‘Oh, f*ck you and your lawyer–client privilege!’ It was exactly what Ellie needed to hear to break free from the inertia. Standing there and trying to reason with him was useless. It was like trying to argue with one of his thick, boring legal books with the really long-winded titles and teeny tiny type. ‘Unlike you, I can’t compartmentalise the way I feel and I’d never want to.’

‘Believe me, that’s painfully evident,’ David said, and his transformation back to sneering, supercilious legal eagle was complete. ‘Having a temper tantrum won’t get us anywhere. Let’s sit down and talk about how we’re going to move forward like calm, rational adults.’

‘I don’t feel very calm and rational right now,’ Ellie ground out, searching around the room with wild eyes. ‘You want to compartmentalise? Well, compartmentalise this!’ She snatched up his brogues and threw them over the low wall where they hit something on the floor below, which crashed with the sound of breaking glass. Ellie didn’t even dare look to assess the damage.

Still David didn’t lose his temper. ‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ he told Ellie, who didn’t lose her temper either, not ever, except she’d been losing her temper a lot over the last week and always because of David Gold.

‘You want sense, then I’ll give you sense. I want you to get the f*ck out of here right now because I never want to see you again.’