Chapter Four
By the time we got back to the villa, most of the other party guests had left.
Unfortunately Ryan hadn’t.
The villa might have been big enough to avoid him, but that evening Stefano announced he was treating us to a meal at his favourite restaurant. To refuse would have been rude. So I grabbed a seat in the car Ryan wasn’t travelling in and, when we arrived at the restaurant, I picked the chair furthest away from him. I’m not sure why I bothered. He didn’t look in my direction once.
The restaurant was located in one of the beautiful old Renaissance houses. We were given a table in the garden surrounded by lemon trees. The tables were decorated with lemons too. There were six of us in all. Stefano, Gina, Ryan, Luca and Luca’s girlfriend Portia, who never said very much, just gazed at him adoringly.
Hardly anyone spoke to me during the meal, although it wasn’t intentional. Gina had found a handsome waiter to flirt with. The way Portia was giggling, she and Luca were talking about something completely unsuited to the dinner table. Ryan had made the mistake of mentioning the lemon trees to Stefano, and now knew far more than he ever wanted to know about Sorrento lemons being superior to Sicilian ones.
“Sixty per cent of the local lemons are made into Limoncello,” Stefano was telling him. “And they use only the peel – soaking it in alcohol until the oil is released.”
My eyes accidentally met Ryan’s and he winked at me. I forgot myself and grinned back, and for a moment it was as though the last three months had never happened.
Stefano beamed at us. “Ryan, why did you not marry this lovely girl?”
I nearly choked on my drink.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said, and his brown eyes turned all sultry as he stared at me. “Why did we break up, Megan?”
Was he serious? “You went off with someone else!”
“Did I?” he returned blithely. “I don’t remember.”
“I’m not surprised, it was during the Grammys.” If I hadn’t been watching him closely, I might have missed seeing him wince. “Ah, so you remember the Grammys?”
“Hell, yeah!” Luca grinned, before Ryan could answer. “We had a great time.”
“I know, I could tell from the photos!”
Ryan’s sultry look turned frosty. “I do hope the reason you dropped me wasn’t because you saw my photo with Destiny in one of those vile gossip magazines?” he said. “Because that would be very sad.”
“It wasn’t the one magazine,” I protested. “It was in every magazine, and the tabloids, and all over the Internet.”
“Destiny and I had our photo taken together,” Ryan said. “That was all.”
“We were all there,” agreed Luca. “But they cut our ugly faces out of the shot.”
“That’s how it works, Megan,” Ryan said. “I thought you knew that?”
If he hadn’t been so patronising, I wouldn’t have become so angry.
“I didn’t drop you because of the photo with Destiny,” I said. “I dropped you because you had her name tattooed on your arse.”
Gina, dragging her attention away from the pretty-boy waiter, was hugely entertained. “Ryan March! You have a tattoo – on your bottom?”
“I do not have Destiny’s name tattooed on my arse!” growled Ryan.
“He doesn’t,” agreed Luca.
“How would you know?” Gina asked him.
Luca grinned. “Sadly, our band doesn’t always get the five-star accommodation it deserves. I’ve seen everyone’s arse!”
“More to the point,” Ryan interrupted, “why would you think I’d do that?”
Because I’d read it in a magazine. And yes, I knew I shouldn’t believe everything I read, but there had been an interview with the tattooist, a photograph of the studio – everything. It was pretty conclusive.
But I could hardly tell him that.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t even think you liked tattoos.”
“Luca has some lovely tattoos, all the way up his arms,” said Portia, picking a fine time to become sociable. “Don’t you have any at all, Ryan?”
Ryan hesitated.
And that was all the answer I needed.
“Excuse me,” I said, as casually as I could manage, and I headed straight for the rest room before I burst into tears.
I had hardly left the garden before I heard footsteps on the flagstones behind me. It was not the light tap of a woman’s heels, so I knew it wasn’t Gina. I walked faster, turned it into a sprint, and arrived at the rest rooms in time to shut the door in Ryan’s face.
“Megan!” he bellowed, thumping on the door. “Come here and talk to me, you coward!” And when that bit of soft-talking didn’t entice me out, “You can’t stay in there forever!”
Really? I was pretty sure I could. I doubled-checked I’d locked the door, but as he didn’t appear to want to exert himself by knocking it down, I was probably safe.
I spent as long as possible touching up my make-up. At least twenty minutes must have passed, and I did think Gina could have come to see why I was taking so long, but she didn’t. What I hadn’t considered was that when I finally did leave the rest room, everyone at our table had gone – everyone except for Ryan, who was leaning against the wall waiting for me.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said, seeing my hurt expression. “They think we need to talk.”
“I would have thought me avoiding you all day was pretty much a signal that I don’t want to talk,” I retorted, and abruptly headed for the exit. I would get a taxi back to the villa, and then I could tell Gina exactly what I thought of her ridiculous plan to get me back with Ryan. How could she abandon me like this?
Ryan caught me up. “Please, Megan? Walk around the old town with me. You used to like doing that.”
“In these shoes?”
“That’s your best excuse?”
I glared at him.
“OK, just give me twenty minutes of your time,” he said. “I’m sure you’re dying to tell me what a bastard I am and, when you’re finished, I’ll buy you an ice cream at Gelateria David.”
“Trust me,” I said sulkily, “it will take longer than twenty minutes.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said, and gave me the full Ryan March rock star smile.
I glanced nervously about, but no one seemed to have recognised him. Thankfully he was wearing the same kind of clothes he wore on stage – nondescript jeans and t-shirt – but it meant he blended right in with the tourists.
“All right,” I agreed but, before I could add any kind of proviso, he had taken hold of my hand in exactly the way he used to do and led me off down the little cobblestone alley into the old part of town.
Although it was late, Sorrento was busy and the bars, restaurants and shops were all open. Everywhere we went, we heard the same song playing, Torna a Surriento – come back to Sorrento. Well, here I was, back in Sorrento with Ryan and apparently about to make the same mistakes all over again.
It was too beautiful an evening to start an argument. I let Ryan buy me an ice cream and we wandered around the medieval streets, peeping into the cathedral, admiring the ceramics and marquetry in the gift shops and sampling the free Limoncello. Being a musician, Ryan could drink practically anything.
“You’ve got to hand it to the Italians,” he said. “God gave them lemons, and they made Limoncello.”
The liqueur was a little too strong for me but it certainly made me feel mellow enough to say, “Tell me about your tattoo.”
He raised an eyebrow. “There’s nothing to tell. I went to the Grammys, I got drunk and I called in at a tattoo studio on the way home.”
“What kind of a tattoo is it?”
“Pretty curling letters.”
The street opened out onto the Piazza della Vittoria, just above what passed for a beach. Ryan put his arm around me and for a moment we just stood there, leaning against the balustrade, watching the lights of the boats as they b
obbed up and down. I could feel the warmth of his body through his t-shirt and absolute no inclination to push him away. Yes, I certainly was making the same mistakes all over again. Limoncello had a lot to answer for.
My head was now resting against his shoulder. “What do these pretty curling letters say?”
“What would you like them to say?”
My name, I thought, but despite the Limoncello, I wasn’t brave enough to say it out loud.
His mouth must have now been only centimetres from mine, because I could feel his breath against my cheek. He only had to tilt his head to kiss me. Some small treacherous part of me was practically willing it. So why didn’t he?
Instead he sighed. “What happened to us, Megan?”
The spell broke. I pulled away from him. “You left me to conquer America!”
“You were supposed to wait for me!”
“I did!”
“You blocked my number and refused to take my calls. You didn’t trust me.”
Trust? He was a fine one to talk about trust.
“Don’t you realise how hard you made it for me?” I asked him. “I was stuck in the UK and you were touring America. Every time I opened a magazine, you’d be pictured with another girl at a party – a singer or a model. Everyone I know saw those photos and they’d be so damned pitying … ”
Except Gina. In her usual blunt manner, she’d told me to get a grip.
“That’s what my life is like,” he said. “You knew that. You were there right from the beginning. Those girls don’t mean anything to me, they never have. They wouldn’t even look at me twice at me if I wasn’t famous.”
The way he looked? I sincerely doubted that.
“In a few years’ time, or less if the next album flops,” he was saying, “they’ll move onto someone else. I don’t want a girl like that. I only wanted you. Why could you never see that?”
Hang on, had I missed something? I tried replaying our conversation in my head, but the Limoncello was making things fuzzy. Ryan wanted me? Did that mean –
“First you need to get it out of your head that musicians spend all their time shagging groupies,” he said. “Seriously, I don’t have the time. It’s all rehearsals and sound checks and gigs and interviews, and any spare moment is spent writing songs for the next album. I’d love to wake up in a hotel room and think ‘It’s Tuesday, it must be Ohio’. But lately the only places I get to sleep are on a tour bus, or a plane on the way to the next gig. Until now, the last time I slept in an actual bed was the Grammys – and, before you ask, I was alone! I’m not complaining – well, yes, I am complaining – but I’m doing what I love, so I’d only change one thing. That the girl I loved was there with me.”
I stared at him, suddenly stone cold sober. Was he saying … had he actually said –
But before I could form a reply, he began speaking again and I’d missed the moment.
“It’s got to be your choice, Megan. I know you love your work, and I would never ask you to give it up and follow me around the world – some of those places we perform in are truly dire. But I did think … Well, your work is portable. You can write anywhere. You could come with me?”
Again, he paused, and I knew this was where I was supposed to say, ‘Yes please!’ but I was so utterly gobsmacked all I could do was stare at him. The last three months, which I’d spent crying over some silly magazine headline, flipped completely on their head. I’d been an idiot! Why hadn’t I asked him about the photo? I’d never even given him the chance to explain. I had immediately assumed the worst. He was right, I hadn’t trusted him at all.
“Ryan … ”
He sighed. “Yeah, I know, it was too much to ask.”
Before I could protest, he raised his hand in the air. One of Stefano’s chauffeur-driven cars appeared out of nowhere, gliding to a halt beside us. I was far too uptight to declare undying love for a rock star in front of a stranger, so I let Ryan kiss me on the forehead and help me into the car. At which point he slammed the door, banged on the roof and the chauffeur drove back to the villa without him.
What had I done?
Or not done, as it turned out.