PAPER WIFE

CHAPTER 1

CELIA

The first time I set eyes on Mark Winthorpe was the summer I turned sixteen.

I was with my parents at Monaco to celebrate my sixteenth birthday; my parents were more excited than I was, truth be told. The Breakfast Room was crowded with people much like us, the elite and the moneyed, and everything proceeded much the way it always did: my father dug into his scrambled eggs and sausages with gusto --- a creature of habit, he stuck to the same perenially good old English breakfast regime wherever he went, unlike my mother, who was more adventurous, and wasn't adverse to trying out new foods and new flavours. Me? I was fine with anything. Unlike that proverbial surly teen who snarled at her parents and lapsed into moody sulks, I was quite the opposite, to my parents' relief. I was a happy teenager, I loved my parents, I had many friends and many admirers, and I enjoyed turning sixteen; there was a kind of heady thrill to the knowledge that I was able to command the attention of the cool boys in my private, very expensive, school, and I was experimenting with the newly discovered skill of flirting: the light, playful, back and forth banter, that certain glint in a boy's eyes that signalled his interest in me, the smiles, the smirks, the body language. It was a whole new world for me, and it was fun, it was exciting. I was sixteen, the world beckoned with endless, exciting, possibilities, and I was ready to embrace it.

I was munching my cinnamon roll when there was a stir to my right.

Looking up, I watched the manager of the hotel usher in a new arrival to his seat, a table at a secluded corner, and directly within my line of sight. From the way the manager was fawning and bowing, this was obviously a very important guest. Was he royalty? I wondered idly, before my mother broke into my thoughts, hissing, "Henry, it's him. Oh, my goodness."

My father blinked at her, his mouth full of egg.

"Him who?"

"Shhhh," she leaned across the table to him, her eyes bright with excitement. "Not so loud. Over there at that corner. To your left, behind you. It's Mark Winthorpe. You know, that Mark Winthorpe --- "

"Oh. Yes, yes. It's Mark, all right. Joseph's son." My father was looking at the man, now seated at his private table. A waiter was placing a breakfast tray in front of him. My father turned back to his eggs, picked up his fork. "Poor boy..." he sighed.

"Hardly a boy, dear," my mother said, still in that strange, hushed voice. "He must be, what, twenty-seven? Are you going to say hello to him?"

My father was quiet for a moment.

"No. Leave him be. He seems to want to be alone."

I stared at the man that was the subject of my parents' interest.

The waiter had left, and I had my first clear, unobstructed view of Mark Winthorpe.

His chair was at such an angle that he remained half enveloped in shadows.

He was dressed all in black.

The crushing blackness of his suit gave him a tragic air, and all put together, there was a melancholy, a mystery about him that appealed to the romantic in me --- I spent an inordinate amount of time gorging on vampire and mafia books and gothic novels where heroes with white, drawn faces and dark, hard eyes drifted through the pages and into the hearts of the hapless, lovestruck heroines.

There was an oppressive heaviness that hung about him, a silent bleakness that sat upon those broad shoulders that was unsettling. I thought, for a strange, baffling moment, that if I paid close attention, I would be able to hear his heart beating, and it would be devoid of life, a mechanical, wooden rhythm.