How To Mend A Broken Heart

by Amy Andrews

  And she grabbed on for dear life.

  Her mouth opened beneath his and the harsh suck of his breath echoed around them. Her tongue reached out tentatively, seeking his, and she felt his deep groan reach right down inside her to places she’d long since forgotten existed.

  Places that were coming to life with a roar, not a whimper. Heating and liquefying and pulsating.

  Fletch’s hand slid from her jaw to the back of her head, angling it so he could deepen the kiss. Tess obliged, letting him in a little more, sighing against his mouth. He slid his hand to her back, gathering her closer, their chests touching, their hips aligned, their legs brushing.

  She wound her arms around his neck, the motion squashing her breasts against his chest, and Fletch could feel their softness and the twin points of her aroused nipples that told him more than her sigh ever could.

  His head spun, his pulse tripped. Her lips tasted sweet and every time he drew in a breath the aroma of Tess, imprinted on his DNA, filled up his senses.

  It was intoxicating. She was intoxicating. And it had been so damn long.

  He didn’t know what was going on but right now he couldn’t have cared less. All he knew was that he needed this, needed her, with a gnawing, aching desperation.

  Tess could feel her body igniting. From the sealed heat of their mouths, liquid warmth oozed like quicksilver into her marrow. Into every muscle and sinew. Into every cell. Pushing forth into areas that had been shut down for a decade. Where she’d felt cold and bleak for a decade.

  She felt Fletch’s hand at her breast and she moaned into his mouth, arching her back, pushing herself harder into his palm, her hips moving more intimately against his. She felt the thickness of his arousal and rocked herself into it. The guttural sound he made at the back of his throat fuelled the flames licking through her blood and the urgent hand he clamped against her bottom, where cheek met thigh, pressed her closer. She had no idea what she was doing. All she knew was it felt good. And in the storm of sensations she’d found a new way to reach the oblivion she craved.

  Respite from thoughts of Ryan that had been hammering at her skull ever since Jean’s clueless ramblings.

  Suddenly she wasn’t a grieving mother or a failed wife. She was a woman. And she felt whole again.

  Whole.

  The word was like a glacial hand on her neck and Tess froze in his arms. Since when had she needed a man to feel whole?

  Especially this man, whom she’d loved too much and knew too well?

  She’d moved to the other side of the world to get away from him, to get the emotional distance she’d needed just to survive. And she hadn’t so much as looked at a man in a decade. Yet one touch from Fletch and she was practically climbing on top of him?

  Undoing all the hard work. Knocking down all the emotional barriers she’d erected to survive in a world that had been turned upside down.

  What was she doing?

  She couldn’t need Fletch to feel whole again. She just couldn’t. She had a life to go back to. A life that worked.

  A life without him.

  She wasn’t here for this. She didn’t want this.

  She didn’t need it.

  Fletch realised suddenly that Tess had stopped responding. He drew back, his heart racing, his breath ragged. ‘Tess?’

  She could see desire turning his silvery-green eyes all smoky. Her chest rose and fell in the same agitated rhythm as his. She pushed against him. ‘Let me go.’

  Fletch blinked. Huh?

  She pushed harder. ‘I can’t do this. Let me go,’ she said, more frantic this time.

  Fletch felt like the bed had been yanked out from under him as she wrenched away. ‘Tess. No.’ He grabbed for her but she’d removed herself from the arc of his reach.

  She shook her head as she scrambled to the farthest point of the bed from him, her back against the headboard again. She yanked her oversized shirt down over her drawn-up knees until only the tips of her toes were visible.

  As a physical deterrent it was fairly flimsy but symbolically it screamed Keep out very effectively. She hunched into it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t.’

  Fletch fell back against the mattress, suppressing a roar of frustration. His pulse hammered, his breath rasped, his erection strained.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said after a few moments, staring at the ceiling.

  Even though it wasn’t. Even though déjà vu was pressing him into the mattress with the weight of a hundred bitter memories. Reaching out for her on too many occasions and being rebuffed. Desperate to hold her, to reaffirm their love, all met with stony resistance.

  And whilst she may not have flinched away this time, her sudden change of mind was just as gutting. Because for the first time in a decade she’d needed him.

  He’d never been surer of anything.

  She’d needed him.

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ Tess said.

  Fletch’s obvious wretchedness added guilt to the mix of her ricocheting emotions. The need to explain herself took her by surprise.

  Fletch shut his eyes. ‘It’s fine,’ he dismissed again.

  But it wasn’t. She didn’t want him to think she was playing games. ‘I haven’t… I don’t… It just…took me away. Before I knew it, nothing else existed.’

  Fletch shoved a hand through his hair as her meaning sank in and he felt cold all over. So she had needed him.

  As a distraction.

  A sudden surge of anger boiled away the ice.

  She’d used him.

  Tess realised what she’d said as he rolled out of bed. ‘Wait, Fletch…I didn’t mean… It’s not like that…’

  Fletch looked across the rumpled bed at her, anger simmering in his veins. ‘Yes, it is, Tess,’ he said quietly, his jaw locked tight, keeping rigid control of his response. ‘It’s exactly like that.’

  And before he could say something he regretted, he did what he’d always done, turned away and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TESS lay awake long after Fletch had left, staring into the darkness. He didn’t come back to bed and she knew in her bones he wouldn’t. She fell asleep as dawn was breaking across a velvet sky and didn’t wake until the sun was high.

  Even then she couldn’t move. She just lay on her side and watched a vapour trail leave a white streak across the slice of sky she could see through the bedroom’s large windows, her thoughts full of Fletch.

  And their kiss.

  It was time to admit to herself that living in such close quarters with him had loosened the lid on feelings she’d thought long suppressed.

  She was attracted to Fletch.

  It was simply undeniable. It had been there from the first moment she’d spotted him at the cemetery. Fletch had improved with age and there was a sexiness to his maturity that pulled at her in places entirely different from those the first time around.

  And to someone who hadn’t felt attraction or desire in such a long time, who’d actually shunned it, it wasn’t an easy admission.

  It was made worse by the answering flicker she’d seen in him. From the moment he’d looked at her bare thighs that first night to the way she’d caught him looking at her in unguarded moments, it was obvious he felt it too.

  It had been wrong of her, stupid actually, to think they could just pick up where they’d left off—two human beings going through the motions, shells of what they’d once been—with this attraction raging between them.

  But she hadn’t meant to use him.

  It had just been so good to forget for a while after Jean’s unintended stirring-up of their past.

  Her stomach muscles tightened as the kiss played in her head again and for a fleeting moment Tess regretted pushing him away last night. Maybe she should have just got lost in him, like she used to. Let him and the magic she knew their bodies could make obliterate everything.

  The time between going to bed and falling asleep was always the hardest—last nig
ht particularly—and he could have helped

  with that.

  But she just…couldn’t.

  She’d known she was getting herself into dangerous emotional waters, a torrent she’d barely survived the last time, and she just hadn’t been able to let go.

  Her life was too regimented for that.

  She’d tried to live her life simply and on a level emotional plane ever since they’d separated. She’d moved far away and started anew. She lived modestly, kept friendships light, actively discouraged men. She worked and she slept and in between times she kept herself busy in her garden or doing online research for the local historical society.

  She didn’t even have a pet.

  Jumping head first into a sexual liaison with Fletch as a way to keep the memories at bay during her stint in his apartment was a huge leap and one that was pure folly. Pretending they were happily married for Jean’s sake was enough of a lie without throwing sex into the mix.

  Because even she knew with their history and this latent attraction, it could never be that simple.

  And she didn’t want to need Fletch again like she once had. Ten years of separation had afforded her a true sense of self. She didn’t need anybody these days and that was fine and dandy as far as she was concerned.

  Because when she was done here she was going back to England, back to her perfectly fine life in a small Devonshire village where everyone knew her name and no one knew her pain.

  Just the way she liked it.

  But first she had to get through the next weeks and to do that she had to get out of bed and go and talk to Fletch.

  * * *

  Fletch squinted against the harsh morning sunshine reflecting off the river as he stood at the railing of his deck. He and his mother had just come back from taking Tabby for a walk along the river path he could see snaking down below.

  He took a long swallow of the ice-cold berry smoothie they’d whipped up together on their return. Tess had stocked the freezer with frozen berries, quoting something about their antioxidant properties being good for Jean’s memory retention.

  He was pretty sure it wouldn’t stand up to any rigorous scientific testing but the nutritional value of berries was well documented and blended with ice and a little cream they went down very well on a hot morning.

  He yawned as his lack of sleep caught up with him. His neck ached from hunching over the laptop at the coffee table, pretending to work, while his brain had turned the incident with Tess over and over until he’d thought he was going to pass out from the spinning.

  He’d been angry with Tess when he’d walked out on her last night. And it hadn’t been from some thwarted sexual fulfilment. Or the fact that she had been using him to forget for a while.

  Well, not entirely anyway.

  It was her rejection of his closeness, her continual refusal to let him in, to talk to him, that had steam blowing out of his ears.

  It was déjà vu.

  By the time his mother had woken at seven he had been angry with himself. For a start, he’d been foolish to believe he could just share a bed with Tess and not want to get her naked. Despite their history he was still dangerously attracted to her and he’d known that from the first night when she’d put her hand on his thigh.

  Secondly, he was angry because he should have never given up on her.

  On them.

  He should have insisted on counselling instead of the gently-gently approach he’d taken. Demanded she come with him. Picked her up and carried her there if necessary.

  Maybe they’d still be together.

  He should have said no when she’d asked for the divorce.

  But things had been so dark and bleak for so long and he’d just done something utterly and completely unconscionable. Sure, there had been a thousand excuses and justifications but he hadn’t believed any of them then and the passage of time hadn’t made them any more palatable.

  It had been too hard to look at her, and impossible to look at himself.

  And she’d given him the perfect out.

  Walking away had been the only option. Because telling her hadn’t been.

  Just as starting something with her while she was here wasn’t an option either. Not with so much unsaid between them.

  Fletch drained his glass and moved inside, his eyes instantly grateful. His mother was washing up at the sink and she smiled at him as he placed his glass into the soapy water and picked up a tea towel.

  ‘Tess on an early today?’ she asked.

  Fletch shook his head as he’d done the last six times she’d asked. ‘She’s on a day off. She’s having a lie-in.’

  It had been hard for him, watching his mother’s memory slowly regress. Worse for Trish who had done more of the hands-on caring over the last couple of years. That she’d remembered Ryan last night had been completely unexpected. And if she’d been in her right mind Fletch knew his mother would have been mortified by what she’d said.

  He wished he knew what was going on inside her head. He wished he knew so he could fix it. But there were just some things that couldn’t be fixed.

  He knew that better than most.

  He turned to put the glasses away in the cupboards behind him and he smiled at the little sticker that had a picture of a tumbler and had glasses written in neat black print. Thanks to Tess, nearly every single surface in his apartment bore labels—cupboards, light switches, electrical appliances. Her handiwork was everywhere.

  She was everywhere.

  In a short space of time she’d made such a huge difference—cupboards and drawers had symbols on them, labels above power points reminded Jean to turn the power off when she was finished with it. Tess had added to the book that Trish had instigated containing basic but important information like name, age, address, appointments, etc. A map and directions back to home had been included and Tess wrote in it each day what they were going to do so it had become a communication tool as well.

  She’d bought Jean a journal and encouraged her to write down her thoughts and ideas, to use the book each day as a way to keep her mind exercised. She’d even made an appointment for Fletch at the family lawyer to review and update the legal and financial documents that he and Trish and Jean had put into place five years ago when his mother had first been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

  And then, of course, there was the dog.

  There was no doubt about it—Tess had made herself indispensable. And his mother was more settled, more content than he’d seen her in a long time.

  But her presence was a double-edged sword.

  It reminded him of what he’d had. What had happened.

  And how badly he’d screwed up.

  * * *

  Tess took some deep, cleansing breaths as she walked down the hallway to the lounge area. She could hear the clinking of dishes and Fletch and Jean chatting as she grew nearer, and it felt so domestic she wondered if she hadn’t been caught in some kind of bizarre time warp.

  The urge to pack up her things and return to her isolation on the other side of the world grew with each footstep closer. But she’d told Fletch she’d stay until after Trish’s baby was born and she wouldn’t go back on her word.

  Fletch looked up as Tess appeared in the kitchen. She was wearing above-the-knee denim cut-offs and a tank top. Her hair was damp and spiky, her feet were bare and she wore no make-up.

  She looked utterly gorgeous. A soothing sight for tired eyes. A decade ago he would have teased her about sleeping in. Hell, a decade ago he would have been right in bed beside her.

  But their kiss from last night stood large between them and he gave her a polite smile instead. ‘Morning,’ he murmured. She gave a wan nod in reply.

  ‘Tess, don’t you have an early today?’ Jean asked as she squeezed out the dishcloth.

  Tess shook her head. ‘Not today.’

  Fletch watched as she stood there looking awkward. ‘Berry smoothie?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘I can get it.’
>
  Fletch was already halfway to the fridge. ‘It’s fine,’ he dismissed. ‘Why don’t you go out to the deck and I’ll bring it out to you?’

  Tess acquiesced. She figured it was best to get the inevitable out of the way and try and move forward from the awkwardness of last night.

  Bright sunshine enveloped her as she stepped outside and headed straight for the railing. She shut her eyes and turned her pale face to the source of the heat, revelling in it as if she were an unfurling flower. The hit of UV was so intoxicating she didn’t hear Fletch approach a few moments later.

  Fletch was engrossed by the image before him. Tess on his deck, her face raised to the sun in silent supplication. He wanted to stroke the ice-cold glass down her bare arm, drop a kiss against her nape. What had happened last night had changed things between them and despite her rejection of him, he still wanted to touch her.

  ‘Here,’ he murmured, holding out the glass to her from a safe distance.

  Tess opened her eyes reluctantly. She’d forgotten how good it felt to be deep-down-in-your-bones warm. ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the offering but avoiding his gaze.

  Fletch took up position beside her but not too close. He leaned heavily against the rail, waiting for her to take a couple of sips before he said what he’d come out to say. ‘I owe you an apology over last night.’

  Tess shook her head, her gaze fixed on the river below. ‘It’s okay, Fletch.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I was rude.’

  She shrugged. ‘You were right.’

  Fletch glanced at her sharply. He hadn’t expected her to say that.

  ‘I was using you,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the wide expanse of the water below. ‘Not intentionally…but deep down…’

  Fletch looked at her for a long moment before glancing at the view below. Her candour vindicated him but it didn’t make him feel any better. ‘I’m sorry things got so out of hand, Tess. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to turn tail and run.’

  Tess looked up for the first time. ‘I told you I’d stay until after Trish has the baby and I will.’

  He glanced at her again and their gazes meshed. ‘Thank you.’