‘I’ve just had a shower—I thought I’d do that while you were out so the water had time to heat up again for you. Tea?’
He dragged his eyes off the gaping V of her dressing gown. ‘Please. Is there a dress code for this place tonight?’
‘Not really. Smart casual? What you’ve got on would do. So, how did you get on with Annette? Did you recognise her?’
He smiled. ‘Oh, yes, of course. She’s hardly changed. She spoke very highly of you—and she showed me the wedding photos. They were—well, amazing, really. They took me by surprise. I had no idea you were so gifted.’
She gave him a level look. ‘Have you ever checked my website? You probably didn’t even know I had one.’
He felt a prickle of guilt, ‘I did, but I haven’t looked at it.’ Avoided it, more like, as he avoided anything to do with her on the grounds of damage limitation, but she didn’t know that and she took it as disinterest, if the expression on her face was anything to go by.
‘Ah, well, there you go. Perhaps you should have done,’ she said tartly. ‘Here, your tea.’
And plonking it down in front of him, she took hers and disappeared upstairs with it, closing her bedroom door firmly.
He made a mental note to check her website, and retreated to the sitting room—not the room at the front which he had used and which he saw now she was using as a study, but the room at the back, overlooking the pretty little courtyard garden. She’d made it quite lovely, he realised, a lush little oasis. It was filled with pots and tubs, and although it wasn’t the sunniest, the late afternoon sun slanted in and filtered through the leaves of the nearby trees, dappling it with a soft, gentle light.
He’d always loved the garden, and they’d intended to put in doors from this room. They’d talked about it years ago, when they’d first met, and he wondered why she’d never done it. Money? Or because she still felt as if it was his house?
He frowned. That was so silly, but also so typical. She’d always been very sensitive to atmosphere. Maybe she’d never really liked the house?
In which case she should have sold it and moved on.
He sighed, took his empty mug through to the kitchen and then went upstairs. Her door was firmly shut, but she was probably getting ready. Good thing. That dressing gown was just a quick tug away from leaving her naked, and even the thought was enough to scramble what was left of his brains.
He went into Jenni’s bedroom, opened his case and found his wash things, then went to have a shower.
A cold one.
She had no idea what to wear.
Jeans and a top? A long, casual skirt? A smart little dress? Or the khaki…?
Jeans, she decided. She was pretty sure the restaurant didn’t have a dress code. Although if they did…
OK, not jeans. Trousers? Not a pretty little evening dress. Not something that would leave her legs on show.
She opened the wardrobe and there was the wedding outfit, hanging there in its exclusive little garment bag, tormenting her. It’ll blow Dad’s socks off! She grabbed her plain black trousers, shut the door hastily and leant back against it.
Right, so, trousers, and—a jumper? She had a pretty one, but it wasn’t really dressy and it might be too warm. A blouse? She had a new one she’d never worn.
She put the trousers back in the wardrobe and pulled out the long linen shift, in a muddy khaki that went with her eyes. It skimmed the tops of her feet, covered the legs that definitely didn’t need to be on display—he’d always had a thing about her legs—and she could wear a little cardi over the top. It was her favourite garment at the moment, the thing she fell back on when all else failed. She could dress it up or down, and it was clean. Always an advantage.
She pulled it over her head, zipped it up and dragged a brush through her hair, then looked at herself. A touch of make-up, perhaps—not much, she didn’t tend to wear a great deal, but somehow none at all was unlikely and at the very least she always wore tinted moisturiser and mascara.
With a resigned shrug, she put on what she would have worn for a night out with the girls, and stood back, eyeing herself critically. Hmm. She wouldn’t want him thinking she’d made too much effort. So just a touch of lipstick. And a spritz of cologne.
Necklace? No. Beads—chunky beads, burnt orange ones to go with that little cardi she’d picked up the other day.
She eyed herself again, then nodded. Job done. She was reaching for the door knob when there was a tap on the door.
‘Maisie? I’m ready when you are. Are we going in the car, or is it nearby?’
‘It’s near,’ she said, opening the door. ‘We can walk.’
‘Good.’ He ran his eye over her and smiled. ‘You look lovely.’
So did he, but it would have choked her to say so.
‘It’s just an old dress,’ she said dismissively, ridiculously pleased and refusing to show it because she was still mad with him for never having checked out her website, and she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. Oh, no.
She took a step forward to leave her room and walked into the space he’d occupied a second earlier. A space filled with his fragrance. Oh, he smelt good. Citrus and spice and raw male. Thankfully they were walking and she wasn’t going to be trapped inside a car with him!
But as she locked the front door behind them and set off for the restaurant at a brisk pace, he fell into step beside her, and with her first breath her hopes of escaping that subtle, sexy scent were blown instantly out of the water.
‘So—the wedding,’ Maisie said when their food had arrived and she was picking through the pasta with a fork. ‘You wanted to talk to me about it?’
He put his fork down and picked up his wine, swirling it slowly in the glass. ‘Yes. Nothing much, just a few details I don’t want to trouble Jenni with. Timings, really, and I thought you’ve been to lots of weddings, presumably, so you know how they work.’
She nodded. ‘OK. I can give you a rough timetable—is this for the caterers?’
‘Yes, and the ceilidh band. Oh, and I wanted to talk to you about catering. We had the food tasting.’
‘How was it?’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not sure. Very good food, but I wasn’t sure about the balance of the dishes. Jenni and Alec couldn’t agree, and they gave me the casting vote, so I thought when you’re next up there, perhaps we should go and check it out and you can tell me what you think.’
That sounded to Maisie like another dinner date, but she didn’t argue, just nodded agreement and let it go. ‘OK.’
‘And we were wondering about canapés with the reception drinks. We’ve got two hours to fill. Do you think we need them?’
‘It’s up to you. I think they’re nice, but they can be expensive.’
He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. ‘We aren’t talking about a cast of thousands, and in the great scheme of things it’s just a drop in the ocean. So I’ll email you a list of the options, and could you give me your thoughts?’
‘Sure. Is that it?’
‘Flowers.’
‘Ah. Did Jenni and your mother sort themselves out in the end? She was so set on the monochrome thing, and I don’t think she’d even considered having a colour in the flowers. I know she’s settled on creams and lilacs now, but was it an amicable compromise in the end?’
He sighed and gave a weary smile. ‘I think so. My mother wasn’t being awkward, you know, she was genuinely upset.’
‘I know that.’ Maisie sighed. ‘Rob, I don’t think your mother’s a bad woman. We just didn’t hit it off, we both made harsh judgements about each other and it’s going to take some time to heal the wounds on both sides.’
‘I know. Thank you for trying. I do realise she isn’t always easy.’
That surprised her, and maybe it was why she let her guard down, because after that they moved on and Rob asked her about her photography, how she’d got into it, how many weddings a year she did, how many she turned down.
‘
Lots,’ she told him. ‘My real job’s with the paper, doing my weekly column and features for them. I call it my jobby—sort of a cross between a job and a hobby. I mean, it is a job, and I make sure I treat it as one, being professional and doing things on time and not letting people down, but on the other hand it’s my passion, my love, and it really is a hobby. It’s had to be, because of Jenni. I would have been a photographer—that was the way I was going at college, with the journalism thing. But life as a female photo-journalist is a tough one, and it’s not suited to motherhood, and I’m not sure it’s really suited to me.’
‘So you turned to weddings.’
‘Not for years. I did some photography with my newspaper job as part of my features writing, but then someone asked me to do their wedding because they’d lost their photographer, and I stepped in to help them out. And then another friend of theirs saw them and asked me, and it sort of grew from there. It’s great fun, and it tops up what I earn from the paper so I can have a few luxuries and do a bit to the house.’
He swirled his glass again, watching the wine intently, then set it down, very slowly and deliberately.
‘Talk to me about the house,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t believe you still think of it as mine. It’s yours, and you should be doing things to it—the French doors, for instance. That was why I put it in your name, so you could do what you wanted with it, but you haven’t.’
She tried to smile, but it was hard with him being so obviously troubled by her admission. Instead she reached out a hand and laid it over his, the one that wasn’t now carefully pushing a few crumbs into a neat, orderly row.
‘I haven’t been unhappy there, Rob,’ she told him softly. ‘It’s been a great house in many ways—handy for everything, lovely for Jenni growing, a good school—I couldn’t have wanted more, so it would have been ludicrous to move. And to be fair, I haven’t had the money for wholesale alterations.’
‘You wouldn’t take it.’
‘I didn’t need your money, Rob. I was fine. I had the house. That was more than enough.’
His hand turned over, enclosing hers in its warmth. ‘But you don’t feel as if it’s yours.’
No, she wanted to tell him, I feel as if it should be our house, as if you have a place there, will always have a place there. But of course she couldn’t. ‘Ignore me,’ she advised. ‘I was just being silly.’
‘Because you didn’t want me to stay.’
It wasn’t a question, and she sighed. ‘It’s—’
She broke off and he put in, ‘Difficult?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. There just seems to be so much going on under the surface, so much we haven’t talked about, so much that we’ve left undisturbed for so long that we can’t even remember it, but it’s still there, simmering away under a huge pile of dust. And if we disturb it…’
His thumb stroked idly over the backs of her fingers, testing the softness of her skin. ‘Maybe we need to open the windows and blow the dust away, Maisie,’ he said, totally forgetting his earlier decision to leave it alone, at least until after the wedding. ‘Get everything out into the open. Talk about the things we haven’t talked about.’
‘Such as?’
He gave a soft laugh and sat back, releasing her hand before he gave in to the urge to press his lips to that soft, smooth palm. ‘Well, if I knew that, I’d be halfway there,’ he said, his mouth tilted in a wry half-smile. ‘Look, forget it. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’ll stay at a hotel.’
‘Don’t be silly. Your things are all there now, it’s pointless. Anyway, I can always lock my bedroom door.’
Why, oh, why had she said that? His head came up and he speared her with those extraordinary slate-blue eyes. In the candelight—how had she known the place had had a makeover and gone romantic?—they seemed to glint with fire, and he shook his head slowly.
‘You don’t need to lock your door. All you need to do— all you’ve ever needed to do—is say no to me.’
‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ she said without thinking. ‘I don’t seem to be able to.’
His eyes became shuttered, and he leant back a little further. ‘You used to manage it. After Jenni was born, the hatches were well and truly battened down.’
She let out a small, shocked breath and looked away. ‘That was different. I was—I don’t know. Afraid. You’d been away, the birth had traumatised me in all sorts of ways—I wasn’t really myself. And you seemed different, too. Indifferent, even.’
‘Indifferent? Maisie, I was never indifferent! I was trying to give you space.’
‘Really?’ She gave a tiny huff of laughter, and rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. ‘It didn’t feel like it. It felt like you couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me.’
‘I was afraid to touch you,’ he admitted, his voice low as he leant towards her again, his eyes troubled. ‘Afraid I might hurt you. Mrs McCrae had taken me on one side and made it clear that you’d had a dreadful time. I had no idea what that might even mean—’
‘You never asked.’
‘No,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t know how to.’
‘You could have just held me. Hugged me. Taken me to bed and held me in your arms all night—except, of course, after I had Jenni, you didn’t seem to want to know. And when I was feeding her, you avoided me like the plague.’
‘I didn’t want to embarrass you.’
She laughed, staring at him in disbelief, and then realised he was serious. ‘Rob, you were her father,’ she said softly. ‘You knew my body like your own, and I knew yours. Why would I be embarrassed? I thought you were embarrassed.’
He gave a low, tired laugh and looked up, catching the waiter’s eye. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘I need some air.’
They left the restaurant and walked slowly back along the river, pausing by the spot where they’d picnicked earlier, and he turned to her, taking her hands in his, staring down into her eyes. His were shadowed so she couldn’t read them, but his mouth was unsmiling, almost sad.
‘Maisie, I’m sorry. If I could turn the clock back, I would, but I can’t, and we’re stuck with where we are now. And, really, I’m not sure anything’s any different, is it? We still don’t know each other. We still live at opposite ends of the country. Maybe we should leave the dust alone.’
‘Maybe we should,’ she agreed, but as she said it, she felt tears well in her eyes. They were laying their love to rest, but it had never died, just starved and withered as surely as if it had been flung into the dungeon at the castle, and just like the smell of food drifting through the slit high in the wall to torment those early prisoners, there had been the bitter-sweet, constant reminders of Rob over the years—phone calls and visits to Jenni, discussions about matters concerning her, every birthday and Christmas a disappointment for one or other of them. The wedding was just another one, more bitter-sweet than any other, and after the wedding would come grandchildren—christenings, Christmas, more birthdays, more babies. More reminders of all she’d lost.
She freed her hands and turned away, heading blindly back towards the house, and he followed her, a step behind, in silence.
‘Coffee?’ she asked as they went in, trying to be civilised, but he shook his head.
‘No. I think I’ll turn in. I’ve got a long drive tomorrow.’
‘You haven’t given me the wedding invitations yet.’
‘No. I’ll do that now. There’s a disk with all the names and addresses on, so you should be able to print labels from it to save you writing them by hand.’
‘There aren’t that many, are there? I might do it now, and you can take the Scottish ones with you.’
‘There are all the inserts to fold.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘Rob, it’s only ten. Unless you’ve changed your habits drastically, you never go to bed before midnight. We could make a start on it together. I can fold, you can write, because your writing’s better than mine.’
‘It’s illegible.’
That was true. It was interesting, individual, but you had to know it to understand it.
‘OK, you fold, I’ll write,’ she said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. Or you can go to bed and I’ll do it on my own.’
‘I thought you wanted me out of your hair?’
‘Not so badly that I want to do the invitations on my own.’
He smiled at that, and went to get them while she boiled the kettle.
‘Tea or coffee? Or do you want something alcoholic?’
‘Coffee,’ he said, resigned to a long and sleepless night anyway, and thinking that a clear head might not be a bad idea, to stop him getting up and breaking down her door.
By the time she brought it through to the dining room-cum-study, he’d spread the stationery out in piles on the table, so that she could be writing the names on the envelopes and invitations while he collated and folded the other bits.
‘Right, let’s see this list,’ she said, settling down beside him so that her warm, delicate scent drifted across to him and tunnelled ruthlessly under the hatches of his self-control.
He pulled it up on his little notebook computer, propped it in front of her and turned his attention to folding.
‘Wow. Finally!’ she said, handing him the Scottish stack. ‘Stamps?’
‘Of course.’ He pulled a sheet of stamps out, and they stuck them on their separate piles, then he looked up and met her eyes. ‘Thanks.’
‘No, thank you. I did offer, and you ended up doing it anyway.’
‘Consider it penance for all my endless failings.’
‘I don’t think you had any more failings than me,’ she said quietly, picking up the tray and taking it back to the kitchen. He followed her, propping himself up and watching as she put the mugs in the dishwasher and rinsed out the cafetière and turned it upside down. Then she wiped her hands, turned back to him and raised a brow. ‘More coffee? Or tea?’
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