and was about to fall. She didn’t want to fall without knowing he was going to be holding his arms out.
‘That’s never happened. Before,’ he added the last word deliberately slowly. ‘If it happened, then everything would have to change.’
‘Do people know about this?’
‘Most of our circle know. We’re not broadcasting it, but it works for us. Matt and Josh are still so young. They think they know it all now they’re twelve and fourteen, but they’re still kids. Now they can see their parents living amicably in the same house, they’ve got stability. That’s our number one priority.’
‘I see,’ she said, thinking with a sudden flash of sadness of her life when she was between twelve and fourteen.
‘Do you?’
She nodded and somehow he instantly picked up on the fact that she’d become suddenly melancholy.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I was thirteen when my mother died,’ she explained. ‘Cancer. It was sudden too, so there was no time. Six weeks after we found out, she was dead.’ She shivered at the memory. It had taken her years to be able to say the word cancer: it had held such terrifying connotations, like an unlucky charm, as if just saying it brought danger and pain. ‘My father and my grandmother tried to protect me from that, but they couldn’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been tough.’
She nodded. Tougher than anyone could imagine. In a way, she’d dealt with it by not dealing with it: locking herself up tight inside so nothing could hurt her, not crying, not talking much to anyone, even darling Gran, who was so devastated herself and was trying to hide it for Izzie’s sake.
Dad, Uncle Edward and Anneliese had all been there for her, ready to talk, laugh, cry, whatever she needed. Only her cousin Beth – quirky, irritable, easily upset – had been her usual self. Beth had actually helped the most in the first year. She’d made Izzie cry one day by screaming at her and that simple act of one person in her life not tiptoeing around her, brought Izzie back.
‘Is your father alive?’ Joe asked gently.
Izzie smiled. ‘Yeah, he’s great, Dad. A bit dizzy sometimes; runs out of sugar and cream endlessly and has to rush over to my aunt Anneliese’s house or to my gran’s. Between them, they take care of him – not that they let him know or anything. He’d hate that. But they do. They tell me how he’s getting on.’
‘Coffee, dessert? More wine?’ asked the waiter.
When he was gone, having cleared their plates and taken coffee orders, Joe leaned forward again.
‘Tell me more about you,’ he urged.
But Izzie felt she’d revealed enough about herself. She rarely talked about her mother, certainly not to someone she’d just met.
‘Hey, that’s enough of me,’ she said, trying to sound perkier. ‘You’re more interesting, Mr Mogul. So, tell me – are you interested in buying a model agency?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you were but –’
‘But you needed to know where you stood?’
‘Convent education – it gets you every time,’ she sighed.
‘Would Sister Mary Whatever approve of me?’ he asked. She could feel his foot nudging hers under the table.
‘I think you’re probably the sort of guy they had in mind when they told us to bring a phone book out with us on dates,’ Izzie quipped.
When he looked puzzled, she filled him in: ‘If you had to sit on some boy’s lap, you placed the phone book down first, then sat. An inch of paper barrier.’
‘More like five inches if you lived in Manhattan.’
‘Don’t boast.’ She was smiling now.
‘So you might see me again, Ms Silver, now you know I’m kosher?’
‘I might,’ she said.
‘Listen, I have an art collection in my office building –’
‘You didn’t bid on that Pasha picture at the charity lunch,’ she interrupted.
‘I might have, except I was distracted,’ he growled. ‘I have to go to an artist’s studio to look at some paintings tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to come?’
Izzie took the plunge. Looking at art – where was the harm in that? ‘Sure. What time?’
‘Say eleven o’clock?’
‘You said “afternoon”,’ she said, confused.
‘He lives in Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains. We’ll have to fly.’
Izzie had never been on a private jet before. First, she and Joe were picked up by helicopter and flown to Teterboro airport where a Gulfstream sat waiting on the tarmac. Inside, apart from the crew, there were just the two of them.
‘It’s fabulous,’ Izzie said in awe as she stepped into the cabin. On the inside, it looked smaller than she’d imagined but the luxury was something she couldn’t have dreamed up. Entirely decorated in calm cream shades, there were only eight or nine vast cream leather seats.
The light oak cabinets were topped with marble instead of airplane plastic. It was luxury cubed. Even the blankets laid on the seats felt too soft to be ordinary wool.
‘Cashmere?’ she asked the stewardess standing to attention with a smile fixed to her face.
The stewardess nodded. ‘The seats are a blend of wool and leather, for added comfort.’
‘There’s nothing you can’t do on this plane,’ Joe said, sitting down and reaching out for the glass of cold beer the stewardess had ready for him, without him even asking for it. ‘Watch DVDs, phone outer space – you name it. They’ve even got a defibrillator on board. Have you had to use it, Karen?’ he asked the woman.
‘Mr Hansen, you know I can’t tell you that,’ she said, grinning.
They flew into Gatlinburg but Izzie could only glance at the pretty streets of the historic town before they were driven out of town for twenty minutes to a property set on its own in the foothills of the Great Smokies.
‘I can see why a painter would want to work from here,’ Izzie said, taking in the sweep of powerful mountains ranged all around her as they walked to the door of the ranch-style house. The greenery reminded her a little of home, but there were no mountains in Ireland like these, no giant peaks that dominated the landscape.
The artist, a man named AJ, made them drinks and ambled round his studio, talking in a laid-back Tennessean drawl. Izzie had worried that the artist might wonder who she was and she imagined an awkward conversation ensuing, but no such thing happened. It was as if, once she was with Joe, she was instantly a member of whatever club they were in at the time. She found that she liked that.
Joe wanted to buy a lot of paintings.
AJ hugged him in a loose-limbed way. Izzie wondered how much it had all cost, but decided against asking. She wasn’t sure if she could take it.
On the flight home, over Cajun blackened fish, a Gatlinburg favourite recipe that the galley staff had prepared in honour of their destination, Izzie idly mentioned her initial anxiety that AJ would wonder who she was.
‘Who cares what other people think or wonder?’ he said, genuinely astonished at such a concept.
‘No reason,’ Izzie said cautiously. ‘It’s just –’
She stopped. She was scared of so many things around Joe: how intensely she liked him, how powerfully attractive she found him. But there were all those complications to consider. Izzie felt she was on