A Tangled Web Page 10

  Still, it was easier now than in the beginning. Then, she was constantly on guard. Not because she thought her husband might find out whom he had married, she knew he wouldn’t, he hadn’t before. But because of the mere fact that she lived with a man, a stranger. A womanizer, which was what even their contract spelled him out to be.

  But the days went by and he had done nothing. He hadn’t touched her. Not even by mistake, after that first dinner. In fact, he kept a marked physical distance from her. And so far he had abided by their arrangement in every way.

  And it was more than that. She had expected him to not be there, in the house. To perhaps spend his nights elsewhere, with those women she had been told about, the women he was allowed to keep seeing under the contract. But he hadn’t, or at least that was the way it looked. Not only that, it took her only a short time to realize just how busy his days were, and she understood that, just as Graham had told her, he really did work all the time, that his focus was his company, not playing around. While he was in the house, too, he was always in his den, although she thought this was partially due to the discomfort of having her in his home. Other than in their meals together, she barely saw him.

  He was different than she had thought he would be. She wasn’t entirely sure what she had expected, but he wasn’t it.

  She was still sitting in the morning room, deep in thought, when she heard Graham open the front door and her husband ask where she was. A moment later he appeared in the doorway and remained standing there, contemplating her.

  “The jewelry you bought has arrived,” she said, a little disconcerted by him. This was a first. He had never come back this early, and whenever he came in he invariably went straight up to his bedroom first, then came downstairs either to his den or to have dinner with her.

  “I saw the clothes, your tastes, the images were sent to me.”

  “Of course they were.”

  He didn't react to that. “I ordered some jewelry accordingly.”

  “Some?” She’d never seen so many in one place.

  “It comes with the territory.”

  “Yes.” She sighed inwardly. “I know.”

  “You can choose any of them you wish to wear on a daily basis, if at all. However, I will help you choose both your clothes and the jewelry that would fit them whenever there’s a social function you need to attend. At least until you’re capable of doing so yourself.” He sounded colder than he’d meant to, and he waited for the objection. There was none. Good. What he was about to tell her was a problem as it was without her resisting him again. “In fact, I have already made the choice for tonight and have informed Lina. A dark green cocktail dress, I thought it might be comfortable for your first time, to get used to dressing that way. And fitting necklace and earrings, of course, Lina will show you. And you can pull your hair up or whatever, if you want, since you like that. We’ll see how it looks.”

  “Tonight.” She tried not to let the anxiety show. Or control her, for that matter. She had known this would come, she had just thought she would have more of an advance warning.

  “An invitation I’ve decided to accept. Not too formal, but it does involve quite a few people I’d hoped you will meet only at a later stage. Still, it will allow me to see how you fare. After all, such social functions are an important part of this arrangement.”

  “You're in a bad mood,” she said. He was no longer looking at her, instead busily straightening a cufflink.

  “Analyzing me is not one of your roles as my wife.” The way he said the last two words was too harsh. In fact, all the words were, and he regretted it immediately, but it was too late. The effect was clear in the eyes he now met. Angry at himself, but perfectly aware of why he was nervous, of the stakes involved, he continued. “I hadn't expected you to have to accompany me to a function of this scope this early, but it seems the decision has been made for us both. I suggest we do our best. I will guide you through the evening, naturally.”

  Saying nothing, she stood up and left to go up to her bedroom.

  He cursed under his breath and went up to his.

  By the time he was dressed for the evening—and he knew how he looked in the black suit he had chosen, replacing his customary black shirt with a white one and going with a tie this time—he thought he might just offer her the option to stay at home. It wasn't her fault that he had decided this late to attend the party. Or that this was happening, for that matter. She was in the middle of this because of his choice, his and Robert’s, and if she needed more time, he would give it to her.

  He made a business call to Tokyo in his den, and by the time he came out he had made the decision to suggest to her that she stay at home. He was even willing to apologize for having her go through the need to prepare for the evening. But then she might prefer it that way, not to join him. After all, there was no way she was ready, he was thinking as he reached the stairs and looked up.

  He stared.

  She was just coming to stand at the top of the stairs. She hadn’t abided by his choices for what she should wear that evening, any of them. Instead, she had chosen a burgundy evening dress, a rich, dark shade chosen by the Glimpse stylists especially for her. Off the shoulders, the dress long, hugging her body perfectly, with a slit up its skirt, not too high, just right, and delicate heeled sandals. And her hair was not up, it fell long and wavy on bare shoulders. She had on none of the jewels he had chosen, either, only delicate, long earrings with stones matching the dress. Beauty, accentuated with natural elegance, on a woman that had both.

  She took his breath away.

  Realizing that she was watching him, and that he was gaping, he cleared his throat. “That will do, I suppose.”

  He turned and took several steps away before he realized there was no movement behind him. Turning back, he saw her exactly where she had been a moment before, looking at him, her head slightly tilted, those gold amber eyes quiet. Waiting.

  A smile he had not expected crossed his lips and he walked back to the staircase and reached his hand out to her. “You will turn every head there tonight, Mrs. Blackwell, and you know it.”

  Her eyes, and the smile that now played on her own lips as she came down toward him and allowed him to take her arm, told him that she did.

  The Bentley came to a stop in front of the entrance of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Ian leaned back and let his wife see through the window on his side the place they would appear in for the first time in public as husband and wife. Reporters crowded the sidewalk and flanked the path the cars dropping off guests drove through, and cameras flashed at everyone who passed. Right now those cameras were aimed at their car, everyone wanting a first glimpse, a first photo, of her, of them together. Tess looked at them with some anxiety, knowing they couldn’t see her through the car’s tinted windows.

  “You will learn to disregard them.” Ian watched her, waiting patiently for her to be ready. “The business media, to them I do talk, but that’s not them, not here. Most of those who are here I never talk to. They will throw questions at you. Don’t answer, simply walk on. Some of what you hear might be meant to illicit a response from you. Don’t worry about it. They have a job to do, and some of them have an agenda.”

  She looked at him.

  “I won’t leave your side,” he said. She was clearly nervous. For him it was his first time out as a married man, and, yes, it was crucial for his plan. But for her this was her first time ever in such a milieu, and he was adamant to help her.

  “This isn’t easy for you, either,” she said, a slight furrow in her brow.

  The remark surprised him. “That’s true,” he said, glancing out. “But at least I’m used to the cameras outside, and to the people inside.”

  He turned his gaze back to her, meeting hers. Held it. “Mrs. Blackwell,” he finally said, “when we go out there, I’m bound to touch you. Put my hand on your back, hold your hand, perhaps. Stand closer to you than I have until now.”

  “It’s expected of us, I
know.” Her gaze did not waver. She smiled. To reassure him, and, no less, herself. “Don’t worry, Mr. Blackwell.”

  He nodded, with no little astonishment at the woman who was his wife.

  She looked outside again and took a settling breath in. “Right,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

  “Let’s do this,” he repeated the words and the sentiment, and motioned to Jackson who gave the go. The doorman opened the Bentley’s back door, and Ian got out. Without giving the people around them so much as a glance, he reached his hand to his wife, who took it and came to stand beside him, her head held high.

  The camera flashes intensified, and the questions came from all sides, all at once, the noise level overwhelming. But he never took his eyes off hers. She answered his reassuring gaze with one of her own. And when he put his hand on her back this time, his touch carefully gentle, and guided her inside, she was ready.

  The evening was long enough to tax her as she played her designated role for the first time, but informal enough to allow her to find her way in it. Ian barely left her side. She was his focus that evening, and no one questioned it. Those present were skeptical, some. Disbelieving, some. But respectful, all. And he himself was not propositioned, not once the entire evening. He was, after all, there with his wife.

  And that wife was most unexpected, he had to admit. She seemed calm, and was graceful in every way. Any nervousness, the little of it that did show, could easily be attributed to her being new there, in that city, among these people who were familiar to her husband but not to her. Many reacted by introducing her to others, showing kindness, which Ian initially attributed to the simple fact that she was his wife. But before long he noted with astonishment that it wasn’t only that. Most, if not all, had expected his wife to be different. Looks and little else, a prize more than anything. Proud, perhaps. Arrogant, certainly. Aware of who she was, whom she was married to. Savvy in the social game, game being the key word.

  Instead she was open, honest. Nice. She smiled at them, spoke without self-consciousness or reservation. She conversed with casualness when needed, depth and intelligence when that was called for. They would eat her alive, he had told Robert. He’d been wrong. Toasting him from across the room, Robert showed him he was seeing as much.

  She had them almost as soon as she began talking to them. By the end of the evening, although he knew his standing beside her gave her the confidence she needed, saw her eyes search for him whenever he ventured away for a moment, he knew that she would be able to handle them, handle them all.

  She was more, so much more than he could ever have imagined.

  “You were quite amazing tonight,” he said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs, when they were safely back in the house.

  “I was terrified,” she admitted.

  He knew, had felt the tension whenever he had put his hand on her, stood close to her. “And yet you hid it well.”

  She smiled at him. But she wanted to get away. This was getting too close, and tonight, being his wife for the first time, had been difficult in more ways than one.

  “Good night,” was all she chose to say.

  He watched her as she went up the stairs. “Mrs. Blackwell,” he called out, and she turned to him. “The woman I had with me tonight does not belong hidden away in a basement.” It was a question, yet another question about her that was tugging at him, and while he did not expect one, for the first time since he had met her he wanted, needed an answer for himself.

  He watched her as the veil fell over her eyes, as she took a mental step away from him, as she made sure the door between them was closed. Then she turned and walked away.

  He remained where he was for a long time, his brow furrowed.

  Chapter Nine

  Ian chose to spend the next day, a Saturday, working from the house. He wanted to be there with his wife when the reactions to her came.

  And they did, from every direction. By the end of the morning he had already received calls from a dozen of the people who had attended the party, all complimenting him about his lovely wife. Some, most in fact, tried to inquire about her, about them, about how he'd kept their relationship a secret, about the wedding that wasn’t. He deflected all their questions. Let them wonder some more.

  “You seem to have made quite an impression.” He came to stand beside his wife in front of the television screen in the living room.

  “It’s unbelievable,” she said, and changed channels to let him see. “We’re everywhere. Even in the news! And on so many websites, I must have been photographed from every angle.”

  “You’re famous now.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I don’t get it. Don’t they have anything better to do?”

  He chuckled softly. He imagined that any other woman he might have married would have been ecstatic about her new fame. Yet this one was treating it as a minor inconvenience.

  “You know, I understand quite a bit more now, I think, after actually seeing what it’s like,” Tess said thoughtfully, her eyes still on the images that showed her in the role that was now the life she lived, with the man whose life she was now publicly a part of.

  “How so?” Ian’s eyes were on her.

  “Until now everything I knew was second hand. What you told me, and what Muriel and Robert have when I asked them.” And what she’d read about him online, she didn’t want to say. She had understood she would have to know it all, if not for herself then for the arrangement she had agreed to. And so by her first meeting with her husband’s world she was already well aware of just how big Ian Blackwell Holdings was, how many companies existed worldwide that had IBH before their names, and how formidable the man who headed the company was. She knew he was respected, and that any item she would find about him in the business media would show that. She also knew he was envied and coveted, and that if she found an item about him in the society and gossip columns or blogs, that's what she would see.

  “You checked me out?” Ian was dumbfounded. It never occurred to him that she might do that.

  “Wouldn’t you?” She glanced at him.

  Yes, of course he had.

  “And after last night it’s no longer just words, things I heard. It has real context,” she said. Speaking more to herself than to him, he thought. “I get what it’s like now. But I need to know more. I need to know about the people I meet wherever we go, about their roles in your life, how to speak to them. What questions to answer and how, what I should or shouldn’t say.”

  “You can ask me anything you want to know. I’ll answer,” he said, watching her with more than a little wonder.

  She nodded. She knew he would, it was in his interest. But she wanted to be able to form her own opinion, decide on her own way in this life she now lived. And for that, she would also do some more studying about it, and about him, herself.

  As always, her husband spent the rest of the day working in his den, then disappeared there again immediately after dinner. She had been in the den once. Just once, he had shown it to her when he had first shown her the house. In an effort, she supposed, to let her feel there were no restrictions, that this was her home now, that she should feel as free to move around in it as he was.

  The den, a first-floor room that opened to the back of the house, was made up in the shades of a man, the dark mahogany desk and the similarly shaded wingback armchair standing against the opposite wall contrasting nicely with the lighter-shade floor carpeting and the white curtains that hung under heavier brown ones on the wide set of French doors that led outside. It was clearly his, meant only for him, and she had never gone in there since. He needed his corner of the house just as she did, and his hours there were, it seemed to her, his way to escape the company of a woman he hadn’t wanted to marry.

  She had her own quiet corner in this house, a place she felt comfortable in. The library, in the same part of the house where his den was, but a world away. She had instantly fallen in love with it, and it was where she spent most of her even
ings. It was an old-fashioned library, a large space that didn’t feel that way because of the sheer number of books in it. A circular staircase led up to a second floor, and antique rolling ladders were positioned against some of the shelves. All the walls were lined with bookshelves, except for a recess here and there where paintings hung, all by some known name or other, a few of whom she had heard of but even those she knew nothing about. Originals, she assumed. Ian Blackwell would have no less. The bookshelves were made of rich dark wood, which gave the room an ambience of comfort, supplemented by its specially designed recessed lights. A wide fireplace adorned the first floor, not far from it stood a sofa, and closer still stood a large overstuffed reading chair with a small round-top table beside it, a rustic table lamp on it. A comfortable reading spot on a cool evening, she could easily imagine. It was cozy and quaint and filled with the scent of books and she loved it.

  The first time she had come in here, she had walked around endlessly. Finally, she had chosen a book and had curled up on the soft reading chair beside the dormant fireplace, reading for hours until she thought she just might sleep if she went to bed, not lay awake with unwanted thoughts plaguing her mind. The days were easier, and in them she preferred either to sit outside, down by the lake or among rustling trees, or in her room, on the comfortable armchair, her feet up on the ottoman, with fresh, calming breeze coming in through the open balcony doors. But the evenings, they were hard. And so she spent every evening she could here, in this peaceful hideaway in the home that wasn’t hers.

  But tonight she had come here with a different purpose in mind. She had her tablet with her and was here to do some more research about her husband. And she was engrossed in it when the library door opened, and he came in.