Fiona Harper Read online

  ‘You, my sweet Fern, have just given us what we need to get into the lead.’

  And then, before his impulse control facilities woke up enough to stop him, he planted a big juicy kiss on her lips.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEY made the tube ride in complete silence. Josh was wearing that intense expression he always wore when he was focused completely on something.

  He’d done it again. Kissed her.

  To say she hadn’t wanted him to would be a lie. But since this was a good week for muddying the clear waters of truth, she wasn’t going to admit to that. Instead she was going to focus on two positives: number one, this time she hadn’t been actively wishing for it, practically willing it to happen and, number two: this time she hadn’t kissed him back. She’d just stood there, as responsive as the brass Nelson spying down on them from the top of his column.

  It had been more than a decade since the last…incident…and she’d obviously learned something from the previous encounter. Maybe, if he tried it in another ten years, she’d have the good sense to slap him round the face and tell him to stop mucking her about.

  She let out a huge sigh, so loud that Josh turned his head to look at her.

  ‘Okay?’

  She nodded—briskly, brightly. ‘Yes. Just tired,’ she said, trying not to cringe. Now she’d passed from sidestepping the truth to out and out ‘porky pies’. Josh seemed happy with her answer, anyway, and returned to staring out of the window into the blackness of the tube tunnel.

  Soft, fluffy feelings were floating around inside her and she let them harden into a solid ball of resolve. No, there would be no silliness this time. No repeat performance of the embarrassment after Josh had kissed her on her sixteenth birthday. At least today’s kiss had only been a peck in a moment of exhilaration, lasting no more than a second. Ten years ago, it had been a real kiss. One with honest-to-goodness fluttering and tingling that had left her sighing for hours afterwards.

  The urge to sigh must be similar to the urge to yawn because, as soon as she thought about it, she did it again. She covered her mouth with her hand and tried to camouflage it as tiredness for Josh’s benefit.

  At sixteen she couldn’t have known any better. At sixteen she hadn’t realised that fairy tales were just fiction, that there was no way that Josh, three and a half years her senior—gorgeous, dynamic and about to go off to university and unleash himself on the female population of the campus—would ever be seriously interested in a mouse like her.

  The aftermath had been too humiliating. The ‘it’s just bad timing’ speech, followed swiftly by the whole ‘age difference’ thing…She shuddered at the memory. Embarrassing at the time, but ultimately the right decision. It hadn’t been just her age and his physical proximity—or lack of it—that would have made it a bad match. Just look at them now.

  He was the high-flying businessman, jetting over the world, never stopping long enough to put down roots and she was…well, wedged firmly in her nice little rut and enjoying it. Most of the time.

  Back then he’d seen the bigger picture and had spared them both pain. The sooner her obstinate hormones cottoned on to that fact the better. Mercifully, at that moment, the tube doors sprang open and prevented her from reliving any more of those long-buried memories.

  As they ran out of the tube station and headed towards Tate Britain, she tried to get her brain back into the present. The clues. The treasure hunt. They paused on the kerb of Vauxhall Bridge Road—even Josh wouldn’t attempt to nip across four screaming lanes of traffic—and Fern plucked the clue card out of her pocket and took a look while she waited for the lights to change.

  There were plenty of Constables in the gallery, but the flowers…

  Suddenly, she became aware of engines growling impatiently, aware of Josh moving across the road and her own instinctive move to follow him.

  …four flowers, two the same…

  Someone leant on a horn and revved their engine loudly.

  ‘Fern!’ There was a hint of panic in Josh’s voice. She looked up to find that she was standing still in the middle of the road, the red man on the pedestrian crossing signal glaring down at her. She turned her head just in time to see an equally enraged taxi driver mouth something she was very glad she couldn’t hear through his windscreen. Finally her feet moved and she sprinted across the road to join Josh.

  ‘I know this is going to sound a little odd coming from me, but I really think you should pay more attention when you’re crossing the road.’

  She waved the clue in front of his face ‘I know!’

  ‘Could have fooled me!’ he said, stepping back slightly.

  ‘No…’ She batted his reprimand away with a flick of the little card. ‘I mean, I know. I know which painting we’re trying to find—the flowers!’

  Josh grinned at her, but she didn’t stop to smile back; she just started running. There was no way she was going to give him a chance to plant another kiss on her. Her hormones would just be getting mixed messages.

  There wasn’t much he could do but give chase. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately—it depended which way you looked at it—he had a prime view of Fern’s bottom as he jogged behind her. Not at all conducive to big-brotherly-type thoughts. Not one bit.

  He picked up speed until he was running abreast with her. There. That was much better. Now he could only see the faint flush in her cheeks, the slight sheen to her face and chest…Oh, hell.

  A lamppost appeared out of nowhere and he had to duck sideways to dodge it. He should be keeping his mind—and his eyes—fixed firmly forwards on the paving slabs in front of him.

  Fern seemed to know where she was going when they got to the gallery. She ran up to the desk, pulled a map of the gallery from a pile, then headed up a flight of wide white marble stairs. If the view of her rear end had been distracting before, now, from this angle, it was positively hypnotic.

  He growled inwardly. It was all his own stupid fault, this sudden obsession with forbidden fruit. If only he’d resisted the urge to kiss her earlier on. He hadn’t expected the jolt of electricity when their lips had met. It was still thrumming through his system, making him full to overflowing with restless energy. He should have curbed the desire, should have remembered just what effect the taste of her lips could have on him, because he’d experienced it once before and it had been a bad, bad idea then. Judging by Fern’s response to his impetuous peck on the lips, it was an even worse one now.

  She’d just stood there and stared at him, not like before, when she’d melted against him, had driven him wild by tentatively running her hands over his back, then bringing them up to thread through his hair…

  Yeah, this is just the kind of focus you need to win this race, he told himself. Less than a second of up-close-and-personal with Fern—his honorary kid sister, for Pete’s sake—and everything else had gone out of the window.

  He skidded to a halt, then snapped his head first left then right. Finally, he’d managed to distract himself from looking at Fern’s derrière but, in the process, he’d lost her completely. He was standing alone in a room full of sixteenth century paintings with only an unimpressed security guard for company.

  At that moment, Fern’s head appeared from beyond a large green and black marble archway at the end of the room. ‘Josh! Come on!’ she mouthed and waggled a hand to speed him up. He took off again and caught up with her in room ten, a small square space filled with Constables in different shapes and sizes. Instantly, they split up, scanning the display captions of each painting until they met up again on the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Nothing here. Didn’t you say you knew which flower painting the clue was hinting at? Do we actually need to find the Constable first?’

  ‘Yes. We wasted time jumping to conclusions the last time. This time we’re going to make sure.’ She pointed in the direction of room eleven. ‘There are more in here, by the looks of it.’

  They repeated the process in the next room and,
halfway up one side, he found a tiny canvas and knew he’d struck gold.

  ‘I’ve got it!’

  She dashed across the room and read the caption aloud: ‘“The Valley Farm. This work shows a view of Willy Lott’s house at Flatford from the River Stour…”’

  As she finished reading the caption, he pulled the map out of her hand and unfolded it. The room that is four numbers higher…

  He pointed back towards the room they had just come from. ‘Room fifteen is this way.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, giving him the first proper smile since his stupidity in Trafalgar Square. ‘I was right. I know which painting the clue is pointing to.’

  It was only a matter of thirty seconds before they were standing in a room full of Pre-Raphaelite canvases, staring at a dusky garden scene containing two little girls lighting Chinese lanterns. He scratched his head. ‘Are you sure? There are way more than four flowers in this picture. There must be hundreds.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. Look at the title: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Four flowers, two the same—get it? It’s one of my favourites, but I didn’t think of it at the time because we were assuming the clue was hinting at the National Gallery.’ She raised her eyebrows and gave him a knowing look. ‘Just goes to show where jumping in with both feet without thinking things through will get you.’

  He felt his face heat a little. Was she trying to tell him something?

  He held out his hand, a silent gesture requesting the camera. He knew she’d know exactly what he meant. But the camera stayed firmly lodged in her backpack.

  ‘Didn’t you read the small print on the clue?’

  ‘Small print?’

  ‘Always read the small print,’ she said, producing the card from her pocket. ‘We’re not allowed to take pictures in the gallery, so we need to go and get a postcard of this painting in the gift shop and take a picture of one of us holding that. The cashier will give us the next clue when we buy the right card.’

  ‘Oh.’

  So much for focus. At present, he was about as focused as one of his mum’s famous sponge puddings. He picked up speed and hurtled off in the direction of the gift shop. Moments later, Fern was standing beside him, fishing coins out of her pocket and the cashier was handing him a little paper bag with both the postcard and a red envelope inside it.

  He smiled at the cashier. ‘Are we the first ones to buy one of these cards today?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘I’ve sold three so far. One to a group of Japanese tourists first thing this morning, another to a girl and a guy like you—’ she nodded to indicate their Secret London T-shirts ‘—and this one to you two.’ She gave them an apologetic shrug.

  Fern put the stray coins back in her pocket. ‘Could you tell us how long ago you sold the second one?’

  The girl’s chin crinkled as she considered her answer briefly. ‘Five minutes, maybe?’

  He and Fern looked at each other and wordlessly sprinted in the direction of the front entrance. Once outside, he took a slightly wonky photo of Fern holding the postcard and then they ripped the envelope open.

  ‘Back to the underground,’ he muttered, and they set off running.

  Just as they turned the corner on to Vauxhall Bridge Road, he spotted a pair of red T-shirts far on the other side of the road, running in the direction of Pimlico tube station. Kate and Aidan. Fern gave a disgruntled, ‘humph,’ and he knew she recognised them too.

  A flash of red—there!—disappearing up the stairs from the tube station on to the main concourse of Waterloo railway station. Fern craned her neck to get a better look as she rode the escalator.

  ‘I think we’re gaining on them,’ she said to Josh, who was standing right behind her, but kept her eyes on the spot where she’d sworn she’d just seen a red Secret London T-shirt.

  Kate and Aidan. It had to be.

  They’d been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the other team all afternoon. Sometimes she and Josh got so close, but the other pair always managed to maintain their lead.

  She wasn’t sure what was worse: not being able to catch a glimpse of them and, therefore, not knowing how far behind they were, or being close enough to see Kate jutting her chest out and sending Josh sly smiles when she thought Fern wasn’t looking.

  The steps of the escalator flattened out and Fern ran to the barrier and slapped the touchpad with her Travelcard.

  The board on the main station concourse told them the train they needed left in just two minutes. She could now see Aidan and Kate clearly, as they raced away towards the platform. Josh started to give chase.

  ‘Wait!’ she called him back and pointed to an automatic ticket machine. ‘Our Oyster cards don’t cover the rail network. We need tickets.’

  Josh looked wistfully after Kate’s shapely, tanned legs as they sprinted out of sight. ‘But we won’t make it.’

  ‘Yes, we will,’ she said, already jamming coins into the machine. After the longest three seconds in history, it spat out a pair of identical yellow and orange tickets. She scooped them up and soon they were on the other team’s tail. By the time they reached the barrier, her lungs felt as if each new breath was slicing into them and her legs were screaming for mercy.

  Kate and Aidan were shouting at a station guard who was pink in the face and pointing back in the direction of the main concourse. She and Josh didn’t even slow down as they slipped through the barrier waving their tickets. A whistle sounded. The train was leaving. Now.

  A sudden burst of energy exploded through her and her legs pumped faster. They jumped through the hissing double doors just as they started to close, then pressed their faces against the window to look back up the platform. Kate and Aidan had stopped arguing with the guard and were just staring after them, faces like thunder.

  Josh shook his head. ‘You’ve done it again!’

  She couldn’t help grinning back at him.

  ‘It was fate that we met up at the bungee jump this week. Fate that brought us together for this race and, boy, am I glad!’ He collapsed on to a bank of empty seats and rested one foot on a seat opposite.

  The grin on her face turned brittle and dissolved.

  Fate, my foot!

  It hadn’t been fate that had brought her here; it had been Lisette’s stupid dare. Josh thought she was brave and feisty and all the things a twenty-first century woman was supposed to be, but, in reality, she was nothing but a fake.

  Oh, she wanted him to think that she was fabulous, but the reality didn’t live up to the hype. Who was she really? Rut-girl, that was who. And, although the whole ‘rut’ thing had started as a joke, she was starting to see the wisdom of the old saying: many a true word spoken in jest.

  Besides, she didn’t believe in fate. If there were such a thing as fate, it was a cruel, malevolent force, because that would mean that, somehow, for some reason, Ryan had been meant to die. And she couldn’t believe that. Wouldn’t.

  No, fate had had nothing to do with that. And it had nothing to do with the treasure hunt either. They’d used their heads and got this far under their own steam. Funnily enough, after all her grim thinking, this single thought warmed her. She’d done something exciting, acted quickly, used resources she’d buried so long ago she’d forgotten she possessed them.

  And it felt good. No, it felt great.

  This morning, she’d been happy to trail around after Josh as she’d always done, as if he was still the worldly-wise nineteen-year-old and she was the innocent, day-dreaming sixteen-year-old. She realised now that this particular dynamic had flavoured their relationship for the past decade—her idolising him and him only half-noticing she was alive.

  But, in the course of a day, things had changed. Their relationship had matured at rocket speed and he was no longer the glowing hero. No longer perfect. He was Josh. And that made him all the more appealing.

  A warm, fuzzy sensation skittered over her skin. She felt liberated. Giddy, even. The glass wall that had always been between them had vanishe
d and, if she wanted to, she could reach out and touch him now. The knowledge gave her a heady sense of power. A rush.

  Without analysing what she was doing, or why she was doing it—and that had to be a first—she flopped down next to him, half on top of him, so her back pressed against his side and her shoulder fitted neatly under his arm. She sank back into him and propped a leg up on the seat next to her so her foot stuck out into the gangway.

  It was the most natural thing in the world for him to move the arm he’d rested along the back of the seats and drape it across her body, cocooning her to him. Somewhere inside her head, only just audible, the word she’d feared all week repeated itself over and over.