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Taggie hates her mother’s parties.
When she is little, they feel like magic: the house alive and sparkling with laughter and music and dancing. Her schoolmates go to bed at eight on Saturdays, but Taggie stays up until the wee hours of the morning, curled against Patrick in the corner of the sitting room, watching her parents revel in a real-life fairy tale. Those nights, Maud smothers Taggie with champagne-scented kisses and tells her she loves her. My darling girl. My precious baby.
(Those nights, it feels like she means it.)
As Taggie gets older, the spell wears off, and she’s left with the ugly truth: unpaid bills, vomit-stained rugs, strange drunks asleep—or worse, fucking—in her bed. The yelling before and after, as her father tears into her mother for her fecklessness, her frivolity, as if he isn’t caught in her thrall every time the party begins, and she rages at him for trapping her in this house, this marriage, this family, as if she isn’t drawn to him time and time again. They scream themselves hoarse and fuck themselves hoarser, and the cycle repeats.
By sixteen, Taggie is catering the parties herself. No one pays her any mind in the kitchen, and it saves money they didn’t have to spend. Her mother basks in the glow of her admirers, her father chief among them, Patrick dazzles with his precocious poetic genius, Caitlin watches raptly from what used to be Taggie’s corner of the sitting room, and Taggie ensures nothing is broken and everyone has a cab and all the sick is cleaned by morning.
By twenty, she’s tired of it.
The party is still raging at half-two and Taggie is up to her elbows in suds. The dishes they hired have to be returned by ten and her family will all be in varying states of stupor by five, so it falls to her, it always falls to her, even though she’s been in the kitchen since six this morning, slaving over dinner for two hundred bloody strangers—
She loves cooking, her mother announces to anyone who will listen. Only thing the girl’s good at, we’d all but given up on her—
“Christ, you just can’t stay away, can you?”
Taggie flinches. For the second time this evening, Rupert Campbell-Black lounges against the door frame like he’s posing for the cover of Tatler. His cravat is undone. The effect is somehow more devastating. Taggie hates that she’s aware of it, hates the force in the pit of her belly that tugs whenever they’re in the same room.
“Piss off,” she mutters without looking up from her mound of dishes.
“Come on, Taggie.” She feels him approach, a predator stalking its prey. “You’re young. Live a little.”
Come on, Tag, it was just a joke.
Christ, Taggie, don’t be so serious. It’ll give you wrinkles.
Why do you always have to ruin the fun?
Deep inside, the last brittle fibre of her patience snaps.
“Live a little?” Her voice sounds shrill to her ears, hysterical. “Live a little? While Mummy and Daddy are drunk and will be well into the morning, and possibly the afternoon? While Caitlin is upstairs doing God only knows what? While there are two hundred strangers asking me to take their plates or refill their champagne glasses or what to do about the sick on the upstairs sofa? While there’s a mountain of dishes to wash before morning that no one else will think to clean?” She laughs humourlessly. “Someone has to be an adult while the rest of my family is living a little. So unless you’re going to help me wash up, you can kindly fuck right off.”
For a moment, there is deafening silence. Taggie’s chest heaves like she’s run a marathon. Rupert is still and blank-faced. Humiliation creeps in a slow tide from her toes to her scalp as reality sinks in: oh god, she told Rupert Campbell-Black to fuck off. An apology stutters on the tip of her tongue, but before she can force it past her teeth, Rupert is shedding his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves.
Taggie watches him deftly remove his cufflinks, transfixed, for a full thirty seconds before she comes to her senses.
“What are you doing?”
“You said that I could either help, or fuck off,” he replies nonchalantly. “Budge up. I’ll wash; you dry.”
Taggie opens her mouth to protest, but no sound comes out. She’s hallucinating. All these hours in the kitchen must have made her delirious, there’s no other possible explanation—
His lips twitch, amused. “I do know how to wash dishes, Taggie.”
“You do?” She widens her eyes, the picture of innocence. “Forgive me, Minister, I had no idea.”
His laughter, surprised and delighted, floats like champagne fizz in her chest.
Rupert, true to his word, does know how to wash up: each plate he hands her is spotless. Taggie will later be surprised at how seamlessly they fall into a rhythm, how quickly she loses herself in its easiness. It’s never like this with strangers, and even less so with devastatingly handsome men old enough to be her father—and yet, there is a quiet steadiness about him that loosens the giant knot tangled in her brain.
Case in point: she doesn’t even notice she’s humming until Rupert says, “Joni Mitchell?”
Taggie barely manages to grasp the plate he’s handing her, face flaming because she completely forgot he’s here, and it was probably out of tune, and she wouldn’t object if the floor opened her up and swallowed her whole, truly. “Erm, habit. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He’s grinning like she’s a dog that’s performed an endearing trick. Somehow, it makes the humiliation worse. “I’m quite partial to her myself.”
“Really?”
His eyebrow creeps upward, like her surprise offends him. “Really. ‘River’ is one of my favourite Christmas songs.”
It’s Taggie’s favourite, too. The softness in his eyes when she tells him as much tastes like victory.
It takes another ten minutes for the absolute absurdity of the situation to strike her, walloping her like the rugby balls Patrick used to pelt at her under the guise of practising with his mates as she’s drying her nan’s warped roasting pan: Rupert Campbell-Black, Minister for Sport, Rake of Rutshire, who should by all accounts be the jewel of the party, who should be in the hall plying her mother with the adoration she so desperately desires, is in her kitchen, washing his own silverware as Meat Loaf howls distantly about being barely seventeen and barely dressed. She laughs.
“What?” He glances at her, sidelong. It isn’t the coy sort of look he’d have given her before, and that makes her heart flutter all the more.
“I just—” She shakes her head. “You aren’t what I thought.”
His mouth quirks mirthlessly. “Aren’t I?”
I see myself quite clearly in your eyes, and I’m not so sure I like it.
“No,” she insists. She doesn’t quite know what he is yet, but she’s certain her first impression was wrong. “I thought at first—”
“That I was an irredeemable rake? All of England will agree with you on that score, angel.”
“No.” She shakes her head again, frustrated that he won’t listen, that he’d rather brush this—whatever is happening—off with a joke. Taggie herself still isn’t convinced she isn’t imagining their whole interaction, but nothing about it is funny. “That’s not what I— Mummy had an affair last year.”
Beside her, Rupert stiffens.
She doesn’t mean to confess it, only it suddenly feels very important that he knows, and the rest comes tumbling out like water from a storm drain in a winter rain. “It went on for m-m-months before Daddy found out. It broke him. He was— he hasn’t been the same since.” Nothing has been the same since. “She told me, after a week. She loved Daddy, she said, and she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just needed attention and Daddy was never—” Taggie stumbles, searching for the right word. Around? Enough? “That was the worst part. I think Daddy expected the affair; he didn’t think I would lie for her about it.”
“And I remind you of that,” he says quietly. She sneaks a glance at him, but his face is dark, unreadable, gaze fixed resolutely on the champagne flute dangling perilously between his fingers. “Of her.”
“You did.” The difference is important. “You don’t anymore.” A smile curls at the corner of her mouth. “I don’t think she’s ever done the washing up.”
The joke has its intended effect: he chuckles and some of the gloom dissipates from between them. Outside the doorway, a pair of twenty-something girls spy Rupert and dash off, shrieking with laughter. Taggie thinks of Caitlin mooning over black and white spreads in the Scorpion, doodling CCB in the margins of her schoolwork. A sly smirk curls at the corner of her mouth. “Are you certain you don’t want to join your adoring fans?” she teases.
She regrets it instantly: Rupert leans in close, eyes twinkling with devilish mirth. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Taggie O’Hara,” he murmurs. His breath ghosts across her cheek, champagne and the faintest hint of mint. A shiver ripples down her spine. “I quite like doing the washing up.”
She leans closer without meaning to, her mouth an inch away from his, his eyes dark and fathomless and utterly mesmerising—
Rupert pulls away so suddenly her head spins. “You have to promise not to tell, of course,” he continues breezily, as if they’ve been discussing the weather or the latest news from Westminster. “I do have a reputation to maintain with my adoring fans.”
He winks, and Taggie laughs until she’s breathless.
Later, he will find her in the great hall, hunting after forks and spoons, downing half-empty champagne flutes to stay awake, will put her to bed with promises to pay the DJ and sort out the vomit-stained sofa and chase down an incriminating roll of film, but now he is standing beside her in companiable silence, elbows-deep in warm, sudsy water, and for the first time in years, Taggie feels the magic sparkle.