Love & Freedom

by Sue Moorcroft

  His headlights picked her up straight away and he pulled up beside her, rolling his window down. ‘Are you running uphill for the sake of your beautiful bottom? Or would you like to climb in here with me?’

  Surprise blazed across her face as she laughed. ‘I think I’ll just climb in there with you.’ She tugged the large door open. ‘I let one of the ladies at the self-defence class show me where to catch the bus. Unfortunately, it was a bus that only came as far as Rottingdean before looping back.’ She hopped up into the passenger seat. Then paused, blinking at him, as if suddenly unsure.

  He gazed back into those gooseberry eyes. Then let his eyes drop to her pretty mouth. ‘This is where you kiss me,’ he suggested.

  With a strangled laugh, she threw herself into his arms, as well as she could above the steering wheel, and hugged him as if she were a child. Hugging him and hugging him, hugging him hard, desperately.

  ‘That’s almost as good,’ he murmured, wrapping her up in his arms and pressing his lips to her hair. But he frowned. What was with such desperation? Had her lips trembled? He stroked her neck, her shoulder, followed her spine with the palm of his hand. ‘You OK?’

  She withdrew slightly and he was able to see that she was gathering herself. ‘Sure.’ She smiled. ‘It’s just good to see you.’

  Her smile was a fake if ever he saw one. He lowered his lips to hers, taking his time, letting his fingertips follow the shape of her arm, her fingers, then back up to trace her jawline. ‘Ru not with you?’

  A shadow dropped across her face.

  So it was something to do with Ru. Surprise, surprise.

  But as traffic was having to squeeze past the BMW, pulled up inconveniently at the side of the road, he just kissed the tip of her nose and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ In a few minutes he was turning left into her drive, the bungalow perched above them.

  He flicked off his seat belt and went to give her a comforting hug. But she turned her face up for his kiss and suddenly he was all over her, her smooth lips and hot tongue passing a thousand volts through his heart and his groin. He savoured the heat of her body, the incredible softness of her skin, ignoring the centre consol digging into his knee as one of her breasts pressed tantalisingly against his chest.

  Her fingers fastened in his hair and he groaned aloud. ‘It’s so hot when you do that. How about we take this indoors? Even a big car can get tricky for a tall guy, however horny.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she agreed, but kissed him again. Slowly, sloooowly.

  His hands slid up and inside her T-shirt, skimming the smoothness of her back, discovering the clasp of her bra, fighting the urge to find a way, right now, right here.

  Five steps from the road? With supreme effort, he controlled his hands, breathing faster than if he’d been for a five-mile run. ‘Let’s get inside. Before something explodes.’

  ‘Always better to get inside before exploding,’ she agreed, groping behind her for the door handle.

  He couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. Tricky with his arousal to work around but he caught her halfway up on the steps, threading his hands back under her T-shirt, heading for that bra strap. She laughed and put in a wiggle to make his job harder.

  He had to put in a giant stride to get his hands around her waist and spin her around and catch her up against him, so that he could possess her mouth again as he steered them up the last couple of steps and slowly across the patio, lifting and trapping her between himself and her door while she wrapped those shapely legs around him. He couldn’t drag his mouth away, couldn’t stop holding her against him while he settled snugly exactly where he wanted to be. ‘Where’s your key? Get us through this door.’

  But self-preservation did make him turn his head when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. Because, like a harbinger of doom, a dark figure was rising up from the wooden lounger at the side of the patio.

  And the harbinger of doom had a voice. It said: ‘Say, buddy, you want to take your hands off my wife’s ass?’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Honor found herself deposited suddenly on to her own two feet.

  She closed her eyes. She was falling down a lift shaft. She opened them again. Nope. She was still here, the figure was still there and she had to force suddenly frozen lips to work. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  Thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his blue jeans, Stef strolled closer. ‘Getting here in the nick of time, seems to me.’ His voice was deceptively lazy.

  Martyn didn’t move or speak. Honor felt as if her insides had turned to worms and every single one of them cringed away from how he must feel about being caught in exactly the situation he’d been trying to avoid from the first. She touched his chest. ‘I have to speak to him.’

  Slowly, he turned his eyes to her. His expression was unreadable as the last of the light began to leach from the clear summer sky. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, stiffly, as if he actually didn’t think so at all. ‘I’ll wait in the car so I know you’re OK.’ He nodded, shifting his weight, ready to step back.

  Stef laughed, stepping out of the shadows so that his face caught the light from a street lamp. He was harder, thinner and looked weary. ‘Why wouldn’t she be? She’s my wife! Listen, you’re really not needed here. I don’t know what Honor let you think but, believe me, I know her. She’s mad as hell at me, right now, but she’ll cool down and come home. I know her.’ He rocked on and off his heels. ‘Didn’t I know exactly where to find her, right here in liddle ole England? As soon as she left town on her high horse I knew she’d be heading here to meet her long lost mommy. So, what’s she like, Honor? This Robina Gordon?’

  And Martyn let go of her hand.

  His shock was like a cold breath between them, curling and chilling as fog. ‘Your mother’s Robina?’ Even through the twilight, Honor could feel his disbelief.

  She nodded, miserably. ‘I was going to tell you, tonight.’

  Stef laughed again. ‘Oh, pardon me. Was that a secret?’

  ‘Why hadn’t you told me already?’ The disbelief became anger, sharp as a blade.

  ‘Because – because she’s–’ Honor was horrified to feel hot tears spilling from her eyes. ‘I was so disappointed. All my life, I’d thought that she’d love me like a proper mom and would have some fantastic, justifiable reason for leaving me when I was a baby.’ The tears tracked down her cheeks and her heart began to beat in huge great thuds. ‘But when I met Ru I began to realise that biology and maternal instinct are not the same. She lets Ru down in so many different ways.

  ‘And she’s your stalker for goodness’ sakes!’ she finished, shakily. ‘That made it a little awkward.’

  ‘But you’ve known all the time that you’ve been living in Eastingdean?’

  Honor opened her mouth but Stef beat her to it. ‘She’s known a hell of a lot longer than that.’

  Martyn turned to him. ‘How?’

  Stef shrugged, scuffing closer. ‘Years. It’s the kind of thing you can find out on the internet for fifty dollars. Every so often she’d talk about coming out here to meet her mom and I’d tell her what a bad idea it was, how they probably wouldn’t even like each other.’

  Martyn was looking down at Honor as if he wasn’t liking what he saw. ‘Why didn’t you want me to know?’

  She made herself confront the pain in his eyes. It was hard but she wanted him to see she wasn’t trying to hide anything, now. But she couldn’t prevent her voice from emerging tight with tears. ‘To begin with, I didn’t want anyone to know, in case it got back to her before I figured out what I wanted her to know. My dad warned me off ever searching her out. He said that I would be hurt, that Robina was nobody’s happy ending. He called her a flake. When I traced her and her son, Rufus, everyone was against me coming here and making her real. So I didn’t.

  ‘Then … I lost my job,’ she glanced at Stef, ‘and I had my severance money and I thought I’d come and do it anyway.’

  ‘It was a “fuck you
”,’ stuck in Stef.

  ‘No, it wasn’t! It was for me,’ she fired back. ‘I just pleased myself for once, OK?’ Shakily, she turned back to Martyn, forcing the tears back, wanting and not wanting to crumble, to fling herself into his arms. Good guys tended to console crying women. But if Martyn hadn’t read that memo and pushed her away …

  With superhuman effort, she swallowed the sobs down. ‘It seemed possible and reasonable to come here and just get a look at Robina. At my mother.’ She had to swallow again. ‘To maybe get to know her and judge for myself. After all, the Robina my dad knew was no more than a kid. It was thirty years ago that she left me and I knew that she could have found me, but what if she hadn’t just because of all the same doubts I had? What if, when we met, we had gotten along?’ Her voice was wavering but she held her gaze steady. ‘So I came. I took a look at her. I found a way to get to know her a little. I planned that, afterwards, I would probably just go on home with my curiosity satisfied and pull my life back together and move on.’ She found herself clutching Martyn’s hand, willing him to understand. ‘All these years, all my attention had been focused on her and I didn’t think properly about Ru. He was the one with the real mom, right? He was the lucky one.

  ‘Turns out I was wrong about that. Turns out he could really use a hand from his big sister. And I felt something for him that I really didn’t feel for his mother. Our mother. It complicated things! Should I tell him? Should I tell her? Could I tell one without the other? It seemed safer to tell no one, at least for a while. And,’ she went on because she couldn’t let him speak before she confessed the whole mess, ‘she knows about me and you. And she fired me. Which was unexpectedly painful.’

  Slowly, he nodded. Computing but not commenting. Probably he saw his stalker getting a dose of reality as unimportant right now. Or he just thought that Honor had been served right. His eyes were unreadable. ‘Now I see why you didn’t want me to call you Freedom.’

  Stef looked at him sharply. ‘My, you have gotten intimate, haven’t you? That’s something she doesn’t tell everyone.’

  ‘It seems as if there’s a lot she doesn’t tell everyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I was going to tell you about Robina.’

  He sighed. ‘Maybe you were.’

  ‘I tried to talk to you about her just before you left and you said–’

  ‘I remember what I said. A nice easy out for you, wasn’t it?’

  Chapter Thirty

  Martyn’s SUV backed out of the drive like an angry badger. Honor felt an agonising pull as it gunned up the road and away, as if it were attached to her heart by a thread. She gazed at her husband, standing calmly, here on her patio in England, gazing back, tense but not letting his emotions take charge of his mouth. For once. His hair was short for the first time since high school. The smile lines bracketing his mouth had deepened into grooves, making him look uncompromising.

  Anxiety slithered down her spine but she moved coolly past him, lowering herself on to one half of the lounger and gesturing to him to take the other.

  He sat, without arguing. Also for once.

  ‘How did you know which yard to hang around in?’

  That laugh again. It was beginning to make Honor wince. Stef used to laugh all day long – but it never used to be a bitter punctuation to his conversation. ‘Babe, this place is minute. All I had to do was buy myself a beer. I told some guys at the bar how I was in trouble because I’d come here to meet my wife and must have left the address on the train. And could anyone save my ass by telling me where an American woman called Honor was living? They sent me right along here.’

  ‘Right. And your release is scheduled for November 2ndbut you’re here on August 1st because …?’

  ‘I made full restitution and one of the charges was reversed on appeal. Straight release with no conditions. I’m a free man.’ His smile was chill.

  Honor, the daughter of a lawyer, translated, ‘Your dad paid them off.’

  Again, the laugh. ‘You know better than to use words like pay off, babe. I made the victim whole again. Or, rather, my dad did. At first he said I’d just have to serve my jail time but when he saw me all caged up like that, the old man finally came through.’ Then he added, deliberately, ‘Of course, you never saw how miserable I was in jail, crawling the walls and hating the entire world.’

  She ignored the barb. ‘Your poor dad. That must have nearly wiped him out.’

  A sharp breath. ‘I’ve paid him back a little already. But, you know, I needed to keep enough money back to come chasing after my wife and I haven’t had a pay cheque in a while. You made things pretty tight, disappearing like that.’

  She settled her back on the wooden slats, cool now the last of the sun was dipping into the sea. ‘You’ve cleared out our savings account and you’re here after my severance cheque?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ But he didn’t deny it, either. More softly, ‘I came to find you, babe. I miss you. And I’m not giving up on you.’

  She made her voice soft. ‘I’m sorry, Stef. But you have to. I told you, when you got yourself put in jail.’

  ‘You sure did. Right around the same time that your ring came whizzing through the air.’ His elbows were planted on his knees, hands hanging loose, as relaxed as if this was a summer Sunday out by the lake. ‘What you omitted to mention was you were going to sublet our apartment, store our furniture and dump all my gear in the loft over my dad’s garage.’

  She hugged her knees against the ocean chill rolling up over the cliff. ‘If you’d been released on time, the tenants would have been out of the apartment. Whether you moved your gear back in would have been your decision.’

  Slowly, he nodded. ‘And would your stuff be in there, too?’

  She stared. ‘No. I told you.’

  Silence. Then, ‘You’re really that mad at me? Shit.’ He let out a long sigh that seemed to come right up from his boots. He glanced at the bungalow’s front door. ‘Would you mind telling me what we’re doing sitting out here in the dark and the cold when your rental’s right there?’

  The bungalow was her refuge. Damned if she was going to take what she was running away from right in there with her. ‘I think you need to find yourself a room somewhere.’

  ‘Are you shacked up with that guy?’

  ‘He doesn’t live here, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Her voice shook, though she told it sternly not to.

  ‘I don’t know, Honor. Is that what I’m asking? Or am I asking you whether you and him are having sex?’ He paused. His voice hardened. ‘I guess I don’t have to ask. The way he had your ass in his hands and his tongue down your throat pretty much tells me all I need to know.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Honor hated hurting Stef, no matter what he’d done; marriages begun with joy shouldn’t end in pain. But it was beginning to seem as if there was no other way.

  He shook his head. For the first time his voice softened and he sounded more like the Stef that Honor used to love. ‘I would never have believed that you’d cheat on me.’

  She didn’t try to explain that she saw it more as leaving him than cheating on him. ‘And I would never have believed you’d become a criminal. So neither of us got what we signed up for.’

  He snorted. ‘Babe! I’m not a criminal. It was a prank. You know about me and pranks. You know.’

  Weariness settled heavy hands on her shoulders. ‘Stef, identity theft is a felony in the state of Connecticut. You used someone else’s credit card details to buy a shit load of embarrassing stuff for the guy.’

  He couldn’t quite hide the laughter in his voice. ‘Exactly. For the guy. Billie’s boyfriend. It all went straight to his address, so how is that theft? It was a prank, not a crime – I’m not a criminal – I’m a prankinal.’

  ‘You know damned well–!’ Automatically, Honor prepared to explain how it was immaterial where the goods went; it was buying with Billie’s boyfriend’s credit card that was the issue. But she clam
ped her lips shut on the hot words. An argument was just what Stef wanted. He’d make her laugh and cajole her by saying it was just a joke. Funny. Ha ha. Everybody ought to be able to take a joke. Jokes were Stef’s way of dealing with everything. Even when she could see from his eyes that he was really hurting.

  She took a breath. Let it out. Slow. Slow down, Honor. Keep calm. ‘OK, so you’re a prankinal. Here’s the thing, Stef – you’re the only person in the world that recognises the word. Your prank got you 180 days in county.

  ‘And that wasn’t nice for me. The good people of Hamilton Drives didn’t want their investments handled by the hands that had been given in marriage to an inmate. And half the town thought you’d just made a fool of yourself over Billie and the other half thought you were actually sleeping with her.’

  Stef shrugged it off. ‘That didn’t happen between me and Billie.’

  ‘Before all this happened, whether you did or whether you didn’t would have been important.’

  He frowned. ‘So it’s not important, now?’

  ‘Why you chose to punish Billie’s boyfriend so thoroughly has always been a mystery. The fact is that you did. I don’t know if you did what you did for Billie but, sure as hell, it wasn’t for me. I’m just the poor fool who suffered.’

  He inched closer, until he could lay his hand on hers, warm and remembered. Yet no longer familiar. ‘So, you cheated on me. You had to get back at me. I think I understand that. It’s a hard thing for me to get over, but I will get over it.’ His voice was a plea, trying hard to make her see things his way. ‘Same way you’ll get over me doing jail time. I guess we’ll have to find a way to forgive each other.’

  Gently, she slid her hand out.

  Courtesy of the street lamps that marched up the hill, she could read his expression. The wanting. The determination. The certainty that Honor belonged with him and he might have some grovelling to do, but everything was going to be OK.