Saving Mr. Bell

Chapter Nineteen

Rudolf

The driver wasn’t someone I recognized, and he wasn’t chatty. Either because he had limited English, or because he was pretending that was the case to get out of talking to me. It didn’t bother me. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for conversation myself, happy to sit and watch the scenery go by. Well, not happy. That wasn’t the right word to use.

“We go straight airport,” the driver announced, his first words in thirty minutes. “Closest one.”

“Great.” I couldn’t have given the word any less enthusiasm if I’d tried. “And then what? Is Jade meeting me there?”

“Jade is…” His brow furrowed. “I cannot recall word in English.” A cow? Too pissed off with me? “Besch?ftigt.”

“Ah, besch?ftigt,” I parroted without having a clue what it meant and no doubt butchering the pronunciation. “Sounds like Jade.”

“Boozy!” the driver announced proudly.

I hid a smirk at the image of Jade being so incapacitated she couldn’t get on a plane. Maybe I could put her in rehab instead. “I think you mean busy.”

“Yes, busy.” The driver slammed his hand down on the steering wheel. “English has many same words. Pronounce one way means one thing. Pronounce other, something different.”

“Yeah.”

“You have German name. You not speak German?”

I shook my head. “My mother was half German, but she didn’t speak it very well herself, so she never taught me.”

“Pity. German is good strong language.”

He was chattier after that, introducing himself as Jakob and telling me about his wife and three children. At least it made the journey pass quicker, and it distracted me from thinking about the miles I was putting between myself and Arlo. We soon left the wilderness behind, Jakob taking us through the center of Salzburg before drawing up in front of the large gray building with Salzburg Airport emblazoned across the front.

I sat and stared at it. For the last eleven days, it had been just me and Arlo. In the car, it had been just me and Jakob. Now, there were people everywhere. Coming out of the airport. Going into the airport. Getting in and out of cars. So much metal as well. And noise, even without opening the car door. “Is airport,” Jakob said helpfully with a wave of his hand, presumably in case I’d failed to notice the building.

“Yeah… It’s definitely an airport.” I unclipped my seatbelt and said goodbye to Jakob, and then there was nothing left to do but take a deep breath and immerse myself back in civilization. At least there were no photographers, either outside or inside. I stood as people rushed past me, some of them not polite enough to give me space and almost barging me out of the way in their rush to be wherever they needed to be.

“Rudolf?”

I turned to find a mountain of a man waving his arm at me. Nelson. Of course they’d send him. He’d probably been given strict instructions to pick me up and put me on the plane if I showed any signs of changing my mind. I fought the urge to walk in the opposite direction, knowing it wouldn’t do me any good in the long run. I walked slowly, though, dawdling as much as I could. How pissed would Nelson be on a scale of one to ten for me giving him the slip that night? Because I didn’t doubt he’d gotten it in the neck.

“Nelson,” I said when I couldn’t make the trip last any longer and came to a stop in front of him.

“Rudolf.” Was that a hint of a smile on his face? I couldn’t think of any reason he’d be smiling. Perhaps he had wind. He held something out and I took it warily. “Your plane ticket,” he explained somewhat unnecessarily as I stared down at the rectangle of white paper, focusing on the word Paris. “Jade has booked you a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel.”

“And you’re supposed to accompany me there?”

“I’m supposed to accompany you.”

I narrowed my eyes at Nelson, something off about his careful wording. I studied the ticket again. It felt like a merry-go-round, like accepting the piece of paper in my hand as fact would delete all the hours since I’d left that nightclub. Delete Arlo. I’d told him I’d be back, and I’d meant it. But how was I supposed to do that if I was in Paris doing Jade’s bidding? I had his number. I could call him, but that wasn’t what I’d told him, and more importantly, it wasn’t what I wanted. If I called him, I’d be making excuses.

“The gate closes in fifteen minutes,” Nelson stated. “We need to make a move.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t move, though. I just kept staring at the ticket. Then I carefully and deliberately ripped it in half. “Whoops.”

The only discernible reaction from Nelson was a slight raise of one eyebrow. “I’m guessing you have no intention of getting that flight?”

I shook my head and then I stood tall, craning my neck back to look into Nelson’s face, the bodyguard at least a foot taller than I was. “No. Do you have something to say about that?”

The glimmer of a smile again. This time, it definitely was a smile. “I do. What plane are we getting?”

“One to London.”

Nelson nodded. “I see.”

“And you can’t stop me from doing that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“No?”

Nelson shook his head. “I work for you. You tell me to jump and I ask how high.”

“Since when?”

“Always have. You were just too… distracted to notice it.”

I had an inkling he’d been going to use another word, but had censored himself. “So what if I tell you to get on the plane to Paris? Will you do what I say?”

Nelson thought for a minute. “No.”

“Right…”

“Because my job is to keep you safe, and if I let you get on a different plane, I’m not doing it.”

“I guess we’re both going to London, then.”

Nelson smiled. “I guess we are.”

We dropped lucky with flight times, a Lufthansa flight leaving for Heathrow within the hour. I bought two tickets, and we took a seat on the concourse to wait for boarding to start, Nelson somehow squeezing his bulk into a seat far too small for him. He pulled his phone out and stared at it with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “I will have to let Jade know you won’t be arriving in Paris as expected.”

I let out a hefty sigh. “If you do that, she’ll shout at you and then she’ll call me and shout at me.” I pulled my own phone out. “So we may as well cut out the middleman, which is you, just in case you’re not getting that reference.”

Nelson held his hands up. “Not going to argue with you.”

“I bet you’re not.” I stood, an upright position seeming a much better vantage point to make the call from. I paced for a few steps, gave myself a good talking to, and then pressed call before I could chicken out.

“Jade Turner.”

She sounded… pleasant. Which told me she hadn’t checked the caller ID and didn’t know it was me. Had we ever had a conversation I’d describe as pleasant? I didn’t think so. She’d exploded into my life one day and set about making it as miserable as possible. And I’d let her. Well, it was time to stand up to her. Time to stand up to everyone who thought I was nothing but a puppet to be pushed in front of a piano or a camera.

What was it Arlo had said? Something about being the captain of my destiny? He was right. He’d been right about everything. I had been spiraling. I might not have an alcohol or drug problem, but I’d have developed one eventually, given I’d been using any means necessary to avoid confronting my unhappiness. And I had needed a break. An opportunity to get my head on straight and work out where things had gone wrong. I hadn’t asked to be saved, but I’d needed it. “It’s Rudolf.”

“Oh.” It was amazing how she could squeeze disappointment, irritation, and the desire to end the conversation before it had even begun into a tiny one-syllable word. “You should be on the plane. Is the flight delayed?”

“I’m not coming to Paris.”

“You can’t—”

I didn’t give her space to finish. “I can. And I am. I’m getting a plane to Heathrow. And then I’m going home to speak to my father. I need you to get on a plane to London and meet me there.”

“I can’t just drop everything here.”

“You can’t drop looking after my interests to meet with me ? I suppose it would be different if I said my father wanted to see you.”

“Does he?”

There was a note of confusion in Jade’s voice, like she could no longer work out which was way was up. Why had I let her push me around for so long? “He does,” I lied. It was possible she’d call him, but I’d take the risk. I wanted to see her face-to-face. Not in Paris, though. It was better to kill two birds with one stone. More, if I could. “I’ll see you back at the house in Hertfordshire. Oh, and Jade.”

“Yes?”

“Get the earliest flight you can. No dilly-dallying.” I hung up before she could respond. When I turned back to Nelson, his smile stretched from ear to ear. “What?”

He looked me up and down. “What happened to you in Austria? You’re like a different man.”

I sat back down, stretching my legs out in front of me while I pondered how to answer the question. In the end, I settled for the truth. “I met a man. Well… technically, we’d already met. So perhaps I should say I reconnected with a man. He made me see things in a different light and I’m taking charge of my life from here on in. I would say no more Mr. Nice Guy, but I never was that, especially when I was drunk. So I apologize for anything mean I ever said when I was pissed. Or when I was sober,” I added as an afterthought.

“Apology accepted.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Nelson said with a grin. “Anyway, you never struck me as mean. More… lost.”

The house looked the same as it always had. Same latticed windows. Same ivy-covered exterior. Same carefully striped lawn, the gardener under strict instructions to never let the grass get beyond regulation length.

Nelson stood silently at my shoulder as I attempted to view it with the eyes of a stranger rather than someone who had grown up here. I knew I’d had a privileged upbringing, but studying the ten-bedroom house after spending the best part of two weeks in a one-bedroom log cabin made me view it slightly differently. Not that the log cabin hadn’t been luxurious. It had. I doubted there were many with a piano in situ.

“When was the last time you came home?” Nelson asked, his voice surprisingly soft for such a big man.

My brow furrowed as I thought about it. My schedule hadn’t allowed for more than a day or two off, and who wanted to spend that time on yet another flight?

I did a quick set of mental calculations, the answer surprising me. “A couple of years.”

Nelson nodded. “You don’t come home for Christmas?”

I shook my head. “Not for a while. I had a concert in Australia last Christmas Eve. It was too far to fly back, even if I wanted to. I spent Christmas day on the beach.”

“Sounds fun.”

Had it been? I couldn’t recall. Had I spoken to my father that day? If I had, it had been a quick five-minute phone call with neither of us saying much of consequence. It had been months since I’d last spoken to him, most of my news of him coming from Jade. And most of what she’d said had done nothing but build resentment. It made me wonder what she said to him about me.

Stood here though, looking at the house and remembering the good times—of which there’d been plenty—I had to wonder why I’d never questioned Jade’s version of events, why I’d never picked up the phone and spoken to him myself.

The door opened with me still standing on the drive. Not Jeremiah Bell. Jade. Of course, she’d gotten here before me. “Must have hopped on her broomstick,” I muttered. Nelson gave a snort of laughter, but didn’t comment.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she said. Her gaze drifted over me, a slight furrow appearing on her brow as she took in Arlo’s clothes. “If this is your new image, then we have even more to discuss than I thought.” I swept past her and into the house. “I thought we could meet in the dining room,” she called after me. “It has that large table.”

“No.”

“What?”

I turned to face her, walking backwards so I could still make progress toward where I wanted to go. “I said no. I must have said that word to you before?” Her expression as she trailed after me said I hadn’t. Interesting. Perhaps I’d relied too heavily on actions speaking louder than words, and finding my voice a lot earlier would have solved no end of problems.

“If not the dining room, then where?”

“My father’s office. I assume he’s here?”

“He is.” I spun round at the familiar deep rumbling voice to find myself face-to-face with the man himself. Jeremiah Bell was a stocky, dark-haired man with blue eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. Undoubtedly handsome, but about as unlike me as it was possible to be, most of my genes inherited from my mother. I might have doubted paternity if it wasn’t for us having the same shaped nose. Before I could speak, he gripped my shoulders and studied me, his brow creased in concentration. “Jade’s concerned you’re having a breakdown.”

I laughed. “Is that what she said?”

Jade sighed. “You’re behaving erratically, Rudolf. Even more erratically than usual.”

I shrugged my father’s grip off and stepped into his office. It was reassuringly familiar, all dark wood paneling and green velvet. The decor had never matched the rest of the house. It did, however, match the man who spent most of his time in here, which is how I’d known where to look for him.

Both my father and Jade followed me in, wearing matching expressions of concern. Where Nelson had gone, I had no idea. He probably figured he was better off out of it, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. I leaned against the corner of my father’s desk and crossed my arms. “First,” I stated, “I’m not having a breakdown. I have never had a breakdown. And while we’re on the subject of what I’m not. I’m not an alcoholic or a drug addict either. Or a sex addict.” My father’s eyebrows drew together at the last one and I almost laughed. Yeah, maybe I didn’t want to discuss sex with my father. “So, I don’t, nor have I ever, needed to go to rehab.”

Jade frowned. “I only want what’s best for you.”

“Not true,” I argued. “You want whatever keeps me on stage performing night after night so you can pick up your percentage and make yourself a nice little nest egg.” Before she could deny it, I turned to my father. “You were the one who hired Jade. Why her?”

“She had the best credentials out of the people I saw. She knew the most about the music business, and she had previous experience of working with classical musicians.”

“I’m very good at what I do,” Jade said, almost looking hurt by me questioning her ability to do her job.

“Maybe you are,” I conceded. “But you’re not the right person for me. I need someone who listens better and who is capable of feeling empathy.”

“I can feel empathy!”

Yeah, she was definitely hurt, but I’d come too far to back down just so she could keep her ego intact. “Just not for me, apparently.”

“What are you trying to say, Rudolf?” My father spoke with a carefully measured tone.

I met Jade’s gaze. “You’re fired.”

She blinked a few times and then looked to my father. “Tell him he can’t do that. You hired me, not him.”

My father regarded us both silently for a few seconds. “I hired who I thought were the best people for Rudolf. If he says differently, then that’s his decision. You should have talked to me about this,” he said to me. “I thought you were happy. I thought everything was going well.”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I can’t keep going the way I am, or one day I will have that breakdown. The alcohol, the drugs…” I left sex out of it this time. “They were all about not having to face up to things. If I gave myself time to think, I had to confront how miserable I was.”

“You should have talked to me,” Jade said.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Really? You never treated me like I was anything but a massive pain in the arse. You wanted a robot with no flaws who didn’t need to sleep and could work a ridiculous amount of hours.”

“I wanted—”

My father cut in, his focus on Jade. “I think you should probably leave now. You’ll receive payment for the notice period specified in your contract.”

“If it helps,” I said to her, “it’s not just you that’s fired. I want a clean slate. New manager. New publicist. New everything. And I’ll be setting my own schedule from now on. A reduced one where I have time to breathe, and time to do other things besides work.”

She shook her head. “This is going to cost you so much money.”

I shrugged. “I don’t care if it leaves me without a single penny to my name.”

My father put his hand gently on Jade’s shoulder and steered her toward the door. “Thank you for your hard work these past few years, Ms. Turner. I’ll make sure you receive an excellent reference.”

I left the office to find Nelson leaning against the wall outside as my father continued with Jade all the way to the front door. With the office door having remained open, Nelson had presumably heard every word. “I know,” he said as my father closed the front door with Jade on the other side of it. “I’m fired.”

Was he? I thought about it for a moment. I’d seen a completely different side to Nelson today now that the blinkers were off. And he’d seemed no fonder of Jade than I was. “Actually… no, you’re not. Not unless you want to be. If you can still stand working for me, your job is safe.”

Nelson smiled. “Anything you say, boss.”

My father had hired a team to come in and decorate the house to its usual high standard for the festive period. The tree was an eight-footer that almost touched the ceiling of the living room, tastefully decorated in white and gold. Yet all I could think about when I looked at it was another tree hundreds of miles away. One I’d chopped down myself that only had a snowman and a reindeer hanging from it.

Would Arlo decorate it in my absence? I doubted it. I pulled my phone out and checked my messages, but he’d sent nothing apart from the one wishing me a safe journey while I’d still been in the car. It had only been that morning, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. It was funny how being in a different country could do that to you. Like miles became days.

My father came to stand next to me and we stood and regarded the tree together in silence for a few moments. “I’m not a big fan of Christmas,” he said, “but I do this for your mother because I know if I didn’t, she’d come back and haunt me.”

I laughed. “Yeah, she would.”

He cleared his throat. “I really thought Jade was the right person to handle your affairs.”

“I know.” I’d known that as soon as he’d taken my side without questioning it. “I have to take a certain amount of responsibility for not speaking up when I should have done. We should have talked more.” Understatement of the day.

“I called you after what happened in Germany. I wanted to check you were okay.”

“You did?”

“You don’t remember speaking to me?”

I racked my brain to recall such a conversation and came up blank. “No.”

“There was a lot of music and you were…”

“Drunk,” I supplied when my father tried too hard to be tactful.

“Yeah. I’m not sure you even realized who you were speaking to. I asked you to call me back, but…”

I winced. “Sorry. I was a bit of a mess.”

My father turned his head to study me. “What changed?”

“Someone rescued me from myself.”

“Someone?”

“Do you remember Arlo Thomas?”

My father thought for a minute, a frown marring his brow until realization struck. “The documentary maker.”

“The documentary maker,” I agreed, my lips curling into a smile. “I’ve been with him for the last eleven days in a log cabin in Austria.” I studied my father carefully. When there were zero signs of disapproval, I continued. “We’re kind of a thing. Or at least I hope we are. I promised I’d go back. I just need to sort my life out first. He’s been good for me. He helped me rediscover my love of music.” And so much more.

“I see.” A guarded response from my father, which told me nothing. “Did you bump into each other?”

“You could say that.” There were definitely times when the truth didn’t help anyone, and this was one of them. If I told my father that Arlo had pulled some strings to find out my movements, tracked me down to a hotel in Austria, and then waited for me outside a nightclub, my father would be justified in telling me to stay away from him. If everything turned out the way I hoped, I doubted it would be a story we’d be telling people when they asked how we’d gotten together. “Why did you pull the plug on the documentary back then?”

My father reached out and poked one of the tree ornaments—a bell, ironically—to set it swinging, and we both followed its movements. “You were growing too enamored with each other.”

“And you wanted me to be straight?”

He turned his head and pinned me with his gaze. “You might not believe me, and I might not always have gone about it in the best way… Ms. Turner’s appointment is proof of that, but I’ve never wanted you to be anything but happy. Man… woman… donkey… It’s all the same to me.”

I snorted. “Well, the good news is I’m definitely not into donkeys. If it wasn’t the gay thing, what was it?”

“You were too young. And you were both too ambitious at that juncture in your lives. How do you imagine it would have gone if you’d gotten together?”

I gave it some thought, picturing the Arlo I’d met six years ago. I hadn’t been a virgin, but I hadn’t exactly been brimming over with sexual experience either. “I don’t think we would have lasted.”

My father turned to face me. “And do you think you’ll last now?”

I pictured Arlo’s face—the slight lop-sided way he smiled; the way he rolled his eyes; the slight flush that suffused his skin when he got aroused; how he threw himself into any activity, whether it was sledging or playing cards; the way he couldn’t use an axe for shit. “I really hope so.”

My father pulled me into a hug, and I went willingly. I really had been blind for the past few years to believe he was the enemy. I vowed to do better from now on. With everything. My career. My family. And my boyfriend, assuming Arlo would have me. My father rested his chin on top of my head. “I’ll look forward to meeting him. Perhaps he’d be good enough to pretend it’s the first time.”

I laughed. “Temporary amnesia that only affects one period in his life. I’ll tell him, and I’m sure he’ll be happy to oblige.”

“I have one piece of advice for you,” my father said. “Something you might not want to listen to.”

I pulled back so I could see his face. “What?”

“You’ve just sacked your manager and all the other people who work for you.”

“Not all,” I argued. “I still have a bodyguard.” My father’s expression wasn’t quite an eye roll, but I suspected he’d thought about it. “Most,” I conceded.

“So before you disappear again, you need to put things in place. Someone to pick up the pieces if you’re serious about making your own decisions from here on in. Or your reputation might not recover enough for you to have that luxury.”

Just because I didn’t want to hear it, didn’t mean he wasn’t one hundred percent correct. Perhaps I’d been a little hasty in firing Jade, but it had felt too damn good for me to truly regret it.