Page 51 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)
“My face?” Kay shook her head, bemused. “My round, freckled face? The one Delilah Dawlish deemed round as a ginger biscuit and equally unremarkable?”
“I love ginger biscuits, I’ll have you know, so forget what the Dawlish woman said. Besides, I am a far better judge of feminine beauty than she will ever be. Have you ever looked at the woman? Face like a rocking horse.”
Kay laughed at that. It wasn’t true, of course, not really, but she enjoyed hearing it just the same.
“Anyway,” he said, setting aside the butter knife and piling ham and cheese onto his bread, “it’s not fashionable standards of beauty that make a woman attractive. It’s about what a man feels when he looks at her.”
He paused, his eyes meeting hers across the table, and something in their turquoise depths made her catch her breath.
“I looked at you, and I knew somehow that knowing you was going to hurt like fun.” He smiled a little.
“And I was right. It hurt like hell in the end, but the fun was worth every bit of the pain.”
Kay stared at him, too astonished to think of a thing to say.
“Anyway,” he went on, resuming his previous light, teasing tone, “what did you think when you saw me?”
Recovering, she picked up a piece of bread and butter.
She couldn’t tell him how she’d felt—how her knees had gone weak, and her wits had vanished.
She couldn’t tell him of the panic she had felt as he’d crossed that ballroom, or how the moment he’d taken her in his arms, she’d fallen in love with him.
She could only tell him one part of the truth.
“I’m not sure I thought anything,” she said.
“Ouch.”
“No, no,” she said, laughing a little. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that I was too stunned to do much thinking, especially when you walked over to me.” She wriggled on her seat, not quite sure how to put it. “You see, men as good-looking as you—”
“Wait,” he ordered, cutting her off. “You think I’m good-looking? I seem to recall you saying something completely different the day I proposed to you.”
Caught out, she tossed her head. “I only said that because I was still angry with you about that kiss,” she muttered. “I didn’t really mean it. Besides,” she added as he began to smile, “you are good-looking and you know it and you don’t need me to validate that opinion.”
“No, no, I really think I do,” he said, setting aside his half-eaten sandwich and leaning forward to prop an elbow on the table and rest his chin in his hand. “Tell me more.”
She tried to give him a quelling look, but it hardly had the desired effect because she couldn’t quite hide her smile. “My point is that men who look like you don’t usually ask girls like me to dance. I was too shocked to do much thinking.”
He frowned. “If you say one more word to disparage yourself, I will dump my wine over your head,” he told her. “I hate it when you do that.”
She smiled, remembering. “You always did hate that. Still, there’s no denying my looks aren’t what anyone would deem swoon-worthy, and I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a social success.
But let’s stop arguing about my looks. I want to hear the rest. You had this feeling about that land… so, did you buy it?”
“I ordered a surveyor’s report, and what I saw was favorable, so I put together an investment group, and we bought it.
I used the money from your father and my savings from my safari work to buy my shares.
I also roped in Simon as one of the investors.
He was in the army and was stationed there at the time, and we’d become friends.
We both invested every cent we had, and it paid off.
We hit an enormous vein, and within four years, all six of us had made a bloody fortune. ”
He paused to take another bite of his sandwich, then went on, “But then the mine petered out, and we closed it down. Simon had gotten out of the army by then, and he decided to go back to England, and I went back to being a wanderer. Back up through East Africa, and then I caught a boat out of Mombasa, sailed the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, and ended up in Egypt. The first time I took a trip up the Nile, I fell in love with it. The sky seems endless and the sunsets are like nothing you’ve ever seen.
They take your breath away. And to be sailing along, and all of a sudden, you come across enormous pyramids thousands of years old, just sitting there along the bank.
In Egypt, you trip over history with every step. It’s amazing.”
“It must be,” she murmured. “I’ve never been any further away than the Isle of Wight.” She felt a wistful little pang as she spoke, and she half expected him to remind her that she could have seen it—could still see it—if she’d accepted either of his proposals.
But he didn’t remind her of that, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he merely said, “Well, travel is much harder for a woman to do on her own than it is for a man.”
He ate the last bite of his sandwich, brushed crumbs from his fingers, sat back with his wine, and went on, “Anyway, coming into Cairo, I saw this tract of land right on the river, very close to the British Consulate, and I had that feeling again, so I bought it. And that’s where I built my first hotel. ”
“Why a hotel, particularly?”
“Simon had told me a great deal about the hotel trade—he’d been raised in it, you see—and something about it appealed to me.
And Britain was in charge of Egypt by then, so Cairo was packed with British tourists who were having a devil of a time finding proper accommodations.
The British, you see, want to see the world, but they also want the world to be British. ”
Kay laughed at how true that was. “What you mean is that we Brits want to see the pyramids in the morning, then have our tea and eat scones with jam in the afternoon, while we gaze out over the Nile and talk about merry old England?”
“Exactly so,” he said, laughing with her.
“I was sure a hotel that catered to wealthy British tourists was bound to make money. I also loved Cairo. It’s one of the most exciting, vibrant cities you can imagine.
So I built my hotel, and once the hotel was profitable, I built another, and then another.
I also built myself a house right beside my first hotel in Cairo.
Very modern,” he added. “Electricity, bathrooms, hot and cold laid on, all that.”
“Did you…” She hesitated, lowering her gaze to the table, tracing little circles with her finger, then she took a breath and looked at him again. “You never thought of coming home?”
He held her gaze steadily across the table. “No, Kay. Not after Giles. I felt as if we’d rather crossed the Rubicon there.”
She nodded, seeing in his eyes the same pain that still lingered inside herself. “You mean you felt I had forsaken you.”
“Yes. From what you told me, you felt the same.”
“Yes.”
They both fell silent, the past suddenly between them again like a wide, unbridgeable divide.
She wasn’t an infatuated girl, and he wasn’t a wild, adventurous youth, and they weren’t caught up in the frantic, reckless throes of first love.
That was all over, they were completely different people now, with completely disparate lives, and one could never go back.
Abruptly, he pushed back his chair and stood up. “It’s getting late. We should get on, if we’re going to tour this place before it gets dark.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
They gathered up the remaining food, put it in the basket, and left the kitchen.
They left the picnic basket by the lobby door, and for the remainder of the afternoon, their conversation was strictly professional.
But as she jotted down notes and took measurements and discussed the potential of the property they were viewing, the past still rattled around in her head, and she wondered suddenly what her life would have been like if she hadn’t been sensible.
If she hadn’t cared what her parents and friends thought.
If she’d listened to her heart instead of her head.
Would their wild, passionate infatuation have grown into a mature love that would last? Or would they have fallen into the typical stale, loveless marriages so many other people had, realizing they had nothing to say to each other and nothing in common?
She’d never know now. And to be honest, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Because regrets were a waste of time.