Colder than Ice Read online

That was the spirit. Tristan kissed her deeply on the doorstep before carrying his hand luggage out to the waiting car, and watched her wave through the heavily-tinted windows.

  Two hours out of London traffic, and the roads narrowed, embanked on both sides by high hedges that had been there for centuries. The winding drive up to the family’s estate was marked by three English oak trees all in a row; it was then that Tristan could feel the muscles in his back start to tense. Going home always meant a performance, and as the façade of the house came into view, he briefly felt the world rise up in front of him.

  What had he been thinking, coming here? There was nothing but disappointment waiting, anyway.

  Tristan pushed the thought aside. He’d been more than capable in the last year. Landed a job he enjoyed, was spending time with a woman who loved the same things he did and whom he adored more by the day, and was on track to becoming an international household name.

  Nothing in his life was worth being ashamed of—he had made the choices he’d made.

  Emerging from the car, Tristan was struck by the idea that the overall size and nature of his childhood home hadn’t changed—returning to the home you lived in as a child was supposed to be a strange experience because what had once seemed so huge in youth now seemed small in adulthood.

  It wasn’t the case with Battenmire. Kept in the family since the reign of George III, it had avoided being sold off into pieces or placed in the hands of the National Trust by the grace of God alone. Acting didn’t exactly land the Ecclestons among the peerage, but having a lovely vine-covered country manse meant something these days—they weren’t viewed with suspicion or as upstarts when the aristocratic families in the area had long since disappeared by way of bad land and worse money management. Rather, the Ecclestons were now viewed as an institution unto themselves. That had taken work, and it was a responsibility passed down through the generations.

  Denton, the butler, appeared at the front door and received Tristan’s hand luggage with an expression that betrayed no surprise at the young man’s reappearance.

  “The old room, then?” he asked the older man, who nodded without saying a word. Tristan went through to the library where he knew there’d be a tea service set out.

  What he wasn’t expecting was to see his mother on a settee before the hearth.

  “Hello, darling,” she said without looking at him. Madeleine Smyth-Eccleston had a slightly nasal but commanding voice that demanded to live among polished floorboards, footlights, and the reverent hush of an audience that had paid two hundred quid a seat just to experience seeing her in person. She’d long since retired from sharing a stage with her husband Rufus; she’d once told the Times that she despised knowing that the audience was looking at him instead of her. A pale, stout, and short woman with closely-cropped iron-gray hair, she’d once played Cleopatra in Stratford and nobody’d dared insinuate that the casting choice was anything but perfect. It had been a triumph, lauded as a newly appropriate role for the older generations of British actresses.

  Recently she’d been made an OBE. Rufus had appeared with her at the ceremony, all smiles at Buckingham Palace, but more than likely his father was writing the family biography to distract himself from his jealousy.

  “Hullo, Dame,” said Tristan. The woman turned her head abruptly to look at him as though she was surprised he was in the room, and it occurred to him that she may have thought his father had walked into the room. Had Denton simply been playing the feudal role of perfect discretion? Surely his father would have told his mother he’d be staying overnight.

  Then again, who knew what his parents’ private lives were like anymore? He hadn’t lived at home in almost fifteen years.

  “Good lord, Tristan, I thought you were Julia,” said Madeleine. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes and came over to plant a light peck on her upturned cheek. Her skin felt softer and finer than the last time he’d seen her. She was aging. The thought sank into his stomach and sat there uneasily. Madeleine gestured to the tea service on the table, and he helped himself to a cup.

  “Is she here?” He wasn’t expecting to see his sister.

  “Sometimes she’s been popping round on Thursdays before the weekend matinee schedule begins.”

  “How’s her…” Tristan couldn’t remember exactly what sorts of experimental stuff Julia was carrying on with.

  “Oh, who wants to talk about that,” his mother said briskly. “Rufus says you’ve got a new girlfriend. What’s that all about?”

  Before Tristan could open his mouth, Rufus himself strode into the room, wearing reading glasses and carrying an entire ream of typing paper in his arms. His reddish-blond hair was fading to a yellowish-white.

  “Ah, you’re here,” he said without preamble, and walked out of the room again. That was both Tristan’s welcome and his cue to follow his father down the hallway to his study. Erring on the side of caution, the young man took both his tea cup and as many digestives as could fit into his hand, and disappeared before his mother could object.

  The study was pretty much the same as the library—loads of dark wooden bookshelves with a desk made from one massive walnut tree. They’d had the room renovated when Tristan was still in school, and at great expense. Still no central heating in the entire house, but his father had a study to rival anything in the great Houses of Parliament.

  Rufus leaned on the edge of his heavy desk and crossed his arms expectantly over what used to be described as barrel-chested midsection. Nowadays it would be “jolly,” or if the writer were feeling daring, “portly”.

  Tristan stuffed an entire digestive into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully while they stared at one another in silence.

  This went on for several minutes, until his father huffed and irritated sigh.

  “Well, who is this girl, then?” He’d broken first, which gave Tristan a minor sense of victory.

  “She’s an American,” he replied after making sure the biscuit was thoroughly chewed.

  “Yes, I gathered that, thank you.” Sarcasm was never a good sign, especially this early in the conversation. The intelligent thing to do if he wanted to escape unscathed would involve being more overtly deferential, conciliatory. Making his father feel like he was asking for permission to be with Sophie.

  But the image of her writhing between his sheets, panting and twisting her hands in his hair as he applied his mouth to her rose up, and with it came a boldness.

  “And you want to know what about her, exactly?”

  His father heaved a disgusted sigh, as though his son was too stupid to understand the obvious.

  “Her name, her family, where she comes from—anything that matters, for Chrissakes.”

  “Sophie Markes, I’ve never met her family, and Omaha.”

  There was a silence before his father nearly shouted.

  “Omaha?!”

  “I believe it’s in Nebraska, if you want to look it up.” He nodded toward the massive handcrafted globe on a wooden stand in the corner.

  “I don’t need to look it up,” his father ground out. “I know where bloody Nebraska is, it’s in the middle of bloody nowhere!”

  Everything was in the middle of nowhere when you thought about it. Even New York City or Los Angeles, after a certain point. Tristan did not say that aloud. He did consider shoving another biscuit into his mouth, though.

  “Alright,” he said in a carefully neutral tone instead.

  “I cannot comprehend why you would allow a charming woman like Gabriella, who is far more suited to your lifestyle, your family history, your career, to leave like she did,” said Rufus. Tristan felt a sense of finality, as though this was it, this was where the line was drawn between civility and the possibility that he’d be heading home on the National Express in an hour.

  “You’d have to ask her,” he said, crossing his own arms over his chest and glancing at his feet before landing his gaze firmly on his father. “It was her decision.”

  “And you wer
e the one who drove her off.” His father circled around the desk, putting the weighty thing between them. “This silly business about cartoon movies and superheroes has got to stop.” He caught the flash of expression on Tristan’s face. “I’m serious. Why would people your age want to be in a children’s movie, anyway?”

  He couldn’t figure out if his father actually expected him to respond to that.

  The older man went on.

  “If you want to throw away your university education and everything you’ve done until now, gamble it all on these stories that kiddies buy at tuck shops between classes, go right ahead. But you can’t cling to it forever, and when you’re old, you’ll wish you would have gone after something with a legacy, a staying power. Now, someone who’s won awards—”

  “Sophie has won a very prestigious art award for her work,” he blurted out without thinking.

  “Well, and is she suited to a life of fame and dealing with the press long-term? Everything I’ve seen of her is a mousy little thing who looks like she can’t wait to go sit in front of a computer and daydream. Hardly the sort who’s had media training or has relationships with the press.”

  “At least she isn’t selling margarita mix to divorcees,” Tristan muttered. Gabriella’s sponsorship deals sometimes belied the prestigious nature of her career.

  Rufus looked up sharply, and when he spoke, it was dangerously quiet.

  “That doesn’t cancel out a Best Actress BAFTA. Or does that lucrative fashion campaign you’re living off of mean you’re somehow above it all?”

  Tristan inhaled and tried to think of quiet things, to center himself. He wished he had something to busy his hands, to squeeze until it exploded.

  “I can see that you’re getting angry, so I’ll just stop ranting to myself. You go do whatever it is you want to do that’s so urgent,” said his father, and settled behind the desk, shuffling papers and looking over his spectacles at the laptop screen that was so tiny against the massive slab of wood.

  That couldn’t possibly be it. Rufus hadn’t summoned him clear out into the country to dismiss him so quickly. He knew it was a feint, that his father wanted him to say that he wanted to stay, that Rufus was right, of course he was. But even knowing that this conversation wasn’t over, and that this choice would make things more difficult for him in the long run, Tristan left his tea cup on the side table and stalked out of the study.

  Upstairs in his childhood bedroom, he dug around on the top shelf of the closet, looking for that old issue of Ariana. It wasn’t there, and the room looked different. For starters, there were several framed pictures of himself, his sister Julia, and his oldest sister Beatrice hanging on the wall. There he was in the windowpane plaid suit that had been universally loved in the papers. Both Beatrice and Julia had yelled at him, and then at each other, in the limousine on the ride to the ceremony. He was lashing out at them for not coordinating his outfit better to theirs, they said, arguing that just because he’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actor didn’t mean he needed to purposely clash with the two of them like that.

  And then they had gotten out, smiling, wound their arms around each other on the red carpet, and Beatrice had told British Vogue that she loved her brother’s sense of fashion, that he’d always had such a playful yet sophisticated style. Julia had said glowingly how amazing it was to have such a wonderful pair of siblings, all supporting each other. Neither sister spoke to him the rest of the entire night. He’d been miserable, and glad to not win because it meant he wouldn’t have to lie and thank his family for anything.

  Amazing how, standing in this bedroom that had been turned into an extension of the Eccleston family shrine, that he thought of Sophie now. How even a fake relationship jumpstarted by a nasty rumor leaked to the press had yielded the most honest interactions he’d had with another person. Prasad was his best friend, but Sophie, even for her presence in the moviemaking process, hardly felt like a business acquaintance.

  Intimacy. That was what they had that Tristan didn’t have with anyone else. Prasad knew him, but not like this. Not even his publicist or stylist team knew him very well—they were people who dressed him up, told him he looked gorgeous, and pushed him out to face the world. People like Jax and Joanna understood celebrity, but that limited their connection more than it seemed to open it up. Everybody experienced fame differently. Jax enjoyed riling up everyone around him; Joanna, for all that the two of them got along, held her privacy in sacred trust.

  He opened a bureau drawer, still looking for the comic book, and rifled through several boxes of his mother’s old costume jewelry. One burgundy velvet box brushed past his hand, and Tristan paused. It opened, the hinge making a cracking sound as it did, and inside lay a real relic.

  Grandmother’s engagement ring. It was a classic—fat diamonds arranged around a huge rectangular emerald. It had been passed down from her side of the family—she and his grandfather had married for love, and Tristan wondered how Rufus was addressing the subject in his biography—and was just sitting here in a nondescript drawer, in storage.

  Tristan sat on his old bed and turned the ring over in his hand.

  What would Sophie say if he gave this to her?

  Certainly it was far too soon—he wasn’t foolish enough to delude himself into going back to London and proposing to her all of a sudden when they’d only just gotten past the concept of fake relationship—but the idea was fascinating. Especially if she was the sort of person he could be himself around. That meant something to him, coming from a family that insisted on putting forth the most perfect face and brand.

  With Sophie, it was a way of life. A way forward—a future. She was fun, and joyful, and appreciated his enthusiasm and knowledge. It wasn’t an embarrassment or somehow inappropriate: he could wholeheartedly love the wrong things in the wrong amounts, and the world wouldn’t fall apart.

  He made up his mind to hang onto it, tucked the ring back into the box, and then slipped it into a pocket of his hand luggage.

  Chapter Fourteen

  His shower had its own dedicated water heater. It was a sleek box in the corner, but Sophie was amazed that turning the dial yielded instant steam and tension-relieving warmth—she had to turn it off and hurry to undress, since she’d been expecting the London pipe system to take a while.

  The idea of a dedicated water supply just for bathing was oddly futuristic and antiquated at the same time—kind of like the heated towel rack that she seriously was going to look into when she got back to the States.

  It really was like living in a hotel, but better. She was getting used to this. The thought made her laugh out loud. She’d been surprised when Card One had asked her to move out to Los Angeles for filming, and now she was living in a celebrity’s townhouse in London. Maybe nothing would surprise her after this.

  With rivulets of blessedly-hot water coursing over her shoulders and breasts, Sophie thought back to their first day—first hours in his house.

  There had been more of the same later that afternoon, and after the street lights came on, and then again, long after the takeaway (a new word for her) containers from the curry shop on the main road nearby had been finished clean.

  It was nice, getting to this point. They fell into an easy intimacy, and the house felt like it was just enough space. She’d been with guys before where there just hadn’t been enough square footage—Sophie would turn around and there was always someone there, on the couch, in bed, in the bathroom, standing in front of the cutlery drawer. There was no way to get away, to get a second alone, somehow.

  Here Tristan leaned his long frame against the counter watching pasta boil as he stirred spaghetti. Instead of crowding her space, he passed her serving spoons the second she needed them, and knew what every cabinet held and what she would need.

  It felt seamless like nothing else ever had. Was this how people lived, the ones who married in a way that felt like a celebration but an afterthought at the same time? Was this the way it happene
d, people who came across each other and joyfully and voluntarily supported and made each other better with a strategic mission, the ones she envied with a sickness in her stomach?

  Was this what it felt like to be Ashley and Greg, a pair of warriors who lived out us against the problem instead of you against me, and we’re a recycled sitcom family?

  She paused at that thought. Tristan would be back tomorrow, but that still seemed like forever.

  Maybe she was just riding a comfortable high from having sex for the first time in… mumble-mumble years, but it certainly didn’t hurt that Tristan was so—she stood under the hot water, trying to think of the word.

  It was like he was always shining a spotlight on her while they were at a party surrounded by people who by all rights were more fascinating, more welcoming, more beautiful than she was, but when he looked at her, he turned his whole body toward her and looked into her eyes intently.

  That was the key to it, Sophie thought, stepping out and grabbing her hot towel off the rack to dry off. You could take the kind of advice from older people at weddings who’d been married for decades about not going to bed angry or adopting a team mentality, but at the end of the day, it was feeling like you mattered to someone, that they saw you and wanted to keep looking at you, that made you feel like a real person.

  The heat was nice, but Sophie didn’t want to dry out her skin. She hadn’t brought any lotion with her and made a mental note to stop into a Boots Chemist to see what they had. Given that it was Tristan, though, there was about an eighty percent chance he’d have something to tide her over, and so dug through the cabinet. Towels, some kind of bright pink mouthwash that shimmered around in the bottle like an oil spill, a box of Kleenex, allergy pills—ah, there was a bottle with a pump at the top that looked promising.

  It was smaller than she expected, and much heavier, shaped sort of like a cut diamond in a muted dark lavender. The name on the front was spelled out in gold letters, but written in Korean characters. She put a little onto the back of her hand—it smelled sort of herbal, kind of dark but refreshing, like it wouldn’t be overpowering and would fade before she could really notice it.