by Hazel Osmond
‘Ah, dear boy,’ Edith said, patting his chest, ‘such lovely manners.’
Ellie couldn’t help giving a little snort and Edith speeded up her exit, pleading some prior social event at the pub that was news to Ellie and probably to the pub as well.
When she had gone, they sat with the dirty plates in front of them. The air was heavy with the smell of the honeysuckle on next door’s fence, and a bee was fussing around the flowers. It would have been lovely if all Ellie’s nerve endings did not feel as if they had been rubbed up the wrong way. She was so sick of this grumpy wall of testosterone. If Jack wanted to tell her it had all been a horrendous mistake, why didn’t he do it? Why string out the torture?
‘I think you had better go, Jack,’ she said, even though every part of her was screaming out for him to stay.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he shot back.
‘Well, you could have fooled me.’
‘Why? Why could I have fooled you?’
‘Because you’re acting like a bad-tempered jerk again.’
‘I gave you a new dress.’
‘You can have it back.’
Jack looked exasperated. ‘That’s pretty ungrateful.’
‘I’d like you to go now, Jack,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ll go and get the dress. You can take it away with you.’ She paused, trying to hang on to her anger, which seemed to be disappearing with every word. ‘I don’t want you here again. It’s too … too unsettling. You’ll still be in New York when I get back to work, won’t you?’ She saw Jack nod. ‘Well, that will give me a few days to get back to normal. Get sorted. We’ll never mention this again, Jack.’
She left the garden and went upstairs. It had been a good parting speech, except that she hadn’t meant a word of it and now she was really struggling not to bawl her eyes out.
How dull was life going to be from now on without that body to hold? Without that complicated, taciturn, reckless man down there wanting her.
She took the dress from its hanger and shoved it back in the carrier bag. Why did he have to come round at all? Why did he have to keep reminding her how gorgeous he was, how he made her want to hold him and care for him?
Ellie took a deep breath and, turning to leave the room, walked straight into Jack. She stepped backwards and he caught her by the arm, ripped the carrier bag out of her hand and pulled her into him. Then he was kissing her hungrily and she could not help responding. The parts of her not preoccupied with feeling and touching and yielding sneered at how easily she had caved in again. But soon she was down on the floor with him and then wrapped around him as he hammered into her as though it was some kind of cure for his bad mood.
She lay there on the floor afterwards in a patch of sunlight, staring up at the open window. Way off in a garden somewhere, children were giggling and shouting. Normal life was going on all around, but she didn’t know what it meant any more.
Was it normal to be lying on the floor with a man who obviously didn’t want to be here? With someone who seemed to be blaming her for something?
It would be so much easier if he told her what he expected of her.
She turned her head to look at him and saw that he had his eyes screwed up tightly as if he were in pain.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Jack, or is this how you normally conduct your relationships?’
The speed with which he got to his feet surprised her. ‘Relationship?’ he said with a deeply sour expression. ‘Oh, it’s a bloody relationship now, is it?’
That felt like another punch.
‘Tell me what’s wrong, Jack. Please.’
She heard him sit on the bed.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Leave it. I’m a bad-tempered swine sometimes.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘No, that’s not good enough. You weren’t bad-tempered with Edith. You were all smiles and laughter with her. It’s me you have a problem with. Even when I made that joke about Anne Boleyn you acted as if you wanted to rip my head off.’
‘I said leave it, Ellie.’ His tone was sharp and he got off the bed and started to pick up his clothes. Ellie went back to staring out of the window, and when she looked at him again, he was getting dressed.
‘I can’t leave it, Jack,’ she said. ‘When I think I’ve made some headway with you, when I think there’s something real under all this sex, you treat me like some kind of irritant.’
Jack went on knotting his tie, checking the ends of it were the right length as if that were the most natural thing to do when a naked woman was asking him to tell her what was going on in his brain.
Ellie did the only thing she knew would get a reaction from Jack.
‘Been anywhere nice recently?’ she said with a cheesy, earnest expression.
He didn’t disappoint her. His head shot up and he said tersely, ‘What is this, “get-to-know-Jack night”?’
‘No, only the normal kind of conversation that normal people have. Remember, you asked us earlier where we’d been today and now I’m asking you if you’ve been anywhere nice recently. Of course, because you’ve got some deep psychological problem with me, it’s bugged the hell out of you, but hey, at least you’re talking.’
She saw his shoulders rise and fall as if he were sighing, but he did answer her: ‘All right, I had a quick trip to see my parents, just overnight.’
‘Lovely. And where do they live?’
‘In a house,’ he snapped.
That was it. Ellie stood up, ignoring the way he was glowering at her from under his brows. She’d tried; she’d really tried to find out what was wrong and to make things better. How dare he come round here and treat her like a piece of meat. And how dare she let him. It was like he was only nice to her when he wanted to have sex. No, when he was having sex.
‘Tell you what, Jack,’ she said softly, ‘why don’t you simply pay me for sex? Why don’t we start being honest? You come round, pay me, we’ll have sex, and then you won’t have to do all that messy pretending that you think I’m a person worthy of your conversation. Even better, we’ll have sex first and you only pay me if you think I was good enough.’
Jack continued to keep his head down. No reaction at all. The tension between them was like some ugly, uninvited guest in the room.
Ellie bent down and gathered up her discarded clothes and then walked out of the room and went and locked herself in the bathroom to dress. Her limbs felt like they were someone else’s and she had to force them into her clothes. She turned on the cold tap, putting her wrist into the water and waiting for it to cool her down.
The cure for being obsessed with someone was easy. You got to know them well and then the mystery went. But what if the person you wanted to get over didn’t want to tell you anything? What if they insisted on remaining a mystery? Managed to keep you hanging on with a perfect balance of disinterest and passion?
She turned the water off and heard a knock on the bathroom door.
‘Go away, Jack,’ she called, and started to clean her teeth. When she turned the water off this time, she heard him say something. ‘What?’
‘Scarsdove,’ he said through the door. ‘My parents live in a place called Scarsdove. It’s a market town between Leeds and Halifax.’
Ellie put her toothbrush back in the cup and kept silent.
Jack’s muffled voice came through the door again. ‘My sisters, all my family, they still live around that area.’
Ellie pressed her lips together.
‘Ellie, are you still in there? Ellie?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, I see. You’re not talking because you’re sulking again. Well, I didn’t have you down as a sulker.’
Ellie knew she was being played, but she couldn’t stop herself from answering back. ‘Really, that surprises me. Didn’t you tell Rachel I liked a good old sulk? Anyway, you’ve got a nerve. The man who looks as though he could sulk for Britain. Mr Granite-Faced Yorkshire Bastard himself.’
Ellie heard Jack laugh a
nd it did that thing to her stomach that it always did, even through a door.
‘How many sisters?’ she asked.
‘Two. Older. They’re called Grace and Louise.’
‘I have three brothers. I mean they’re great, but a sister would have been wonderful.’
Nasty then nice, she knew that it was happening again, but the fact that he was actually confiding in her made her grin like an idiot.
Ellie heard Jack move, and the next time he spoke, it sounded like he was sitting down. Ellie sat down too.
‘Older or younger, your brothers?’ he said.
‘All older.’
‘Right.’
Ellie put her fingertips to the door as if she could feel Jack’s heat through it. ‘They must have spoiled you, your sisters, what with you being the baby and the only boy.’
‘A bit. When they weren’t getting me to run errands for them or teasing me, yes, I suppose they did.’
Ellie leaned her head against the door and imagined Jack as a little boy. She wondered what he had looked like before he grew into his nose.
‘So you weren’t brought up by wolves?’
There was another laugh. ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘Wish my brothers had spoiled me. They always used to put me in goal or make me wicketkeeper. Or get me to keep an eye out whenever they were doing anything bad. And I was always the one they pushed forward to take all the flak. They said I could get away with more, talk my way out of it.’ Ellie put her cheek against the wood. ‘Must be nice going back to the family home, going back to Yorkshire. We sold the house we grew up in when Mum and Dad died.’
There was a pause and she heard Jack move.
‘Both your parents are dead?’
‘Yes. Dad had heart problems for years, so, well, we were expecting it, but Mum got ill not long after he died. I think she’d been ignoring all the signs, concentrating on Dad. She died within a year of him.’ Ellie felt tears come into her eyes and that horrible lumpy feeling in her throat.
She’d had years to get used to her mum and dad no longer being around and now she had to cry in front of Jack. She was always crying in front of Jack. She didn’t know whether it was because he made her feel vulnerable or because she wanted him to comfort her.
She waited for Jack to say something gruff, something that would get her back to her original anger. She needed to start disliking him enough to see that this was going nowhere. He’d be nasty again in a minute and then ignore her for days, and God knew how he would treat her back at work. She had to start putting all this behind her.
‘Open the damn door, Ellie,’ Jack said. ‘You shouldn’t be alone and talking about this. You should have somebody holding you. Don’t stay in there being sad.’
Ellie stood up quickly, slid back the bolt on the door and Jack came in and without a word wrapped his arms round her. Ellie disgraced herself totally by blubbing all over his shirt. When she looked up into his eyes, his expression was so kind that she felt she would tell him anything if he would only ask her.
Jack let her cry for a while and then led her by the hand back to the bedroom and sat her on the bed and began kissing her gently, starting with her mouth and telling her how beautiful it was. Every part of her body he kissed and told her why he particularly liked it. He started to undress her, gently, slowly, kissing every inch of her that he uncovered and she lay back on the bed and let him. It felt like being bathed in warm honey, and every now and then he would move back to her face and look into her eyes and murmur how much she turned him on, how he couldn’t get enough of her, how she made him want to hold and protect her. It made Ellie ache, but she could not have said where the ache was centred; it was simply a longing for him and for this moment to continue indefinitely.
When she was completely naked, Ellie helped him undress and, as she did, she knew she had to tell him how she felt. It all came tumbling out – how she had fought the feelings she had for him, how he made her feel so sensual and wanted. And then, before she could bite it back, how she suspected that she was falling deeply in love with him.
When he finally took her, it was slow and tender and in bed. Not on the floor or spread across a chair or on a table, but deep down in the bed with her hair tangling on the pillow.
Afterwards Ellie sat up to look at Jack and knew she was completely lost. It had been like falling into quicksand; she had fought and fought to get out, but in the end she had been sucked down into him.
She’d said things to him that she couldn’t take back now. She didn’t know what would happen when they were back at work together, but it didn’t matter. She would cope; they would cope. She loved him. And what she saw in his eyes told her that he felt the same way. She might not know much about men, but she knew the difference between lust and love, and that was a loving look.
She lay back down and felt his arm round her, protective and strong.
Jack lay with his arm round Ellie and knew he was in deep, deep trouble. She loved him and he was damn sure he loved her because it felt like the last time he’d been in love. He thought all the way around that and tried to swallow down the panic that was winding up from his stomach.
This had all been inevitable somehow; there was nothing to be gained from beating himself up about it. Ever since that presentation when that swine Hetherington had savaged her. That’s when it had started. That had made him feel like looking after her and opened the door to all those other feelings. When he should have been retreating, he’d advanced.
She was exactly the kind of woman he’d done his best to avoid all this time. She was his ‘sort’: feisty, bright, funny and with a direct link to his libido. It was like she’d tied a string round him and could drag him away from wherever he was in London to bury himself in her.
He hadn’t even meant to come here tonight. How many times had he said that to himself over the last two weeks? Where she was concerned, it hadn’t worked. And this evening had been a nightmare. He’d come all prepared with his speech about it being great but being over, how they had to be adult about this, blah, blah, blah, and she’d wrong-footed him at every turn. Everything she’d done had cranked him up another gear. Jack closed his eyes. Why did her parents have to be dead? That did it. Lost.
His innards squirmed as he went back over all the loving things he’d said to her. How much worse was that going to make what he was going to do to her next?
There was no getting away from it; the whole thing was a great big mess. A mess he needed to sort out quickly.
He opened his eyes again and thought with anguish of that look she’d given him just now. It had been pulled right up from her heart. And why had he said all that stuff about wanting to protect her? The very thing he was unable to do.
But it didn’t matter. He was going to run. Let her think it was because he couldn’t handle a relationship with someone he worked with.
She need never know he couldn’t handle a relationship full stop.
Jack lay there a bit longer, relishing the way Ellie’s leg was lying between his own and the feel of her hand cupped on his neck.
He should really tell her to her face that it was over, but there was no way he could do that. He’d be down on the floor with her five minutes later and back to square one. Keeping on confusing her was a bastard’s trick anyway.
He felt Ellie’s other hand move lazily on to his stomach and then relax, and suddenly, appallingly, he was crying. He blinked furiously and got himself back under control.
Well, her being lovely and loving didn’t count for anything in the long run. In fact it made it worse.
He wasn’t leaving himself open to all that crap again. To all that pain.
The Sophies and Leonoras of this world were the ones he should be concentrating on. Shallow, self-obsessed, put-downable, safe.
Jack ran his hand over Ellie’s hair and heard her sigh. He bent his head to kiss her and said softly, ‘Ellie my darling, I am so, so sorry.’
She was already
half asleep and just mumbled, ‘What for?’
‘Everything from here on in,’ he said into the dark.
CHAPTER 29
The text Ellie had just received from Jack made her frown. She had heard nothing from him since he had flown to New York, and now all she had was this one-word message: Fine. Two days, one word, and she’d had to drag that out of him by sending him a text first. She’d tied herself in knots composing it, trying to strike a light, jokey tone. Finally she’d come up with, How is the city that never sleeps? when what she really wanted to say was, I miss you. I love you.
She’d comforted herself yesterday with thinking that he was probably too busy to call, but then Ian had been going on and on about the long chat he’d had with Jack on the phone and how he was off to a party at the Waldorf Astoria. That’s when she’d felt the first stirrings of unease.
She was aware that there was a silence in the office and Lesley was shaking her head.
‘You haven’t been listening to a word, have you?’ she said. ‘I’ve been pouring my heart out, telling you how Megan’s family won’t even talk to her now and you’ve been more interested in that phone.’ Lesley picked up her bag. ‘I have waited and waited for you to get back so that I could talk to you about it. I wanted to ring you up at home, but I thought, No, let her have her holiday. Now you can’t even be bothered to listen. Thanks a bunch, Ellie.’ She got up and left the room.
Ellie put her head down on the desk. Coming back to work had been fine on Monday. She had held the secret about all that she and Jack had shared like a lovely bright jewel in her palm. Nobody knew Jack like she knew Jack. But as Tuesday came, the reality of who Jack was and who she was had started to crowd out the memories of that lovely last night in bed.