One Day in December: The Christmas read you won't want to put down

by Shari Low

  However, a couple of years ago, he’d come back here full-time, and now that he’d taken early retirement, Mum had undergone a personality transplant, embraced an outdoor sport, and was so busy with Dad that there was no time left for Lila.

  Lila didn’t understand it. Louise didn’t do golf. She did girlie lunches on Lila’s expense account on a Friday, sometimes a mani-pedi if Lila could finish early. She didn’t do bloody golf with a father who had suddenly become a full-time presence in their life and monopolise his very willing wife. What was she thinking? Traitor.

  ‘Look, I have to go, another call coming in.’ She hung up before her mum had a chance to reply, determined not to let Louise’s desertion kill her buzz.

  She pressed the touchscreen on the dashboard a couple of times, until it took her to her call list. There he was. His name. Right at the top.

  Ken Manson. Press.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr Manson, this is your favourite rep, on her way to meet you. I went for black and slutty.’

  She knew he’d be trying desperately to keep his tone steady. His wife was probably right there in front of him. Poor cow. The thought actually added to the thrill.

  ‘Okay, prep O.R. three and tell them I’m on my way in. I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘I might have to start without you if you’re going to be that long. A mistress has needs.’

  ‘No, no worries at all, you didn’t disturb me, I was just leaving anyway.’

  ‘Well leave quicker. You don’t want the party to be over before you get there.’

  ‘That’s fine. Okay, I’ll be right there.’

  Her grin lasted all the way to the Starbucks drive through – a cappuccino for her and a skinny macchiato for Ken.

  She turned up Clyde on the radio, and sang along to a throwback song from Simple Minds. It was her dad’s favourite song, and Ken liked it too – a bit weird but not entirely surprising given that they were almost the same age. Not that they’d ever met. Lila had never told her parents she was seeing a married man. What was the point of admitting that someone wouldn’t leave his wife to be with her? At least, not yet.

  If this was a Greek tragedy, she had no doubt that there would be some profound theory that she was attracted to older men because she’d missed her dad so much as a child and never really felt his closeness or approval. But what did the Greeks know? All that mattered was that she loved Ken, and when they’d been apart, she missed their meetings. Missed feeling like this. Missed him.

  She’d met him on her first month on the job, bumped into him a few weeks later at a medical conference, and been in bed with him by midnight. Since then, it had been an excruciating seven years of secrets, promises, pleasure and pain. They only ever met in hotels, at quiet meeting points in remote locations or in his office. The closest they’d come to anything resembling a normal relationship was when he travelled to compete in marathons, or to medical conferences, and she’d go with him, and there, out of sight, they could eat, and drink, and hold hands and be like every other loved-up couple. That was the pleasure. The pain kicked in when the jealousy crept up on her, when he broke another promise to leave his wife, or when she just desperately wanted to tell the world that she was his girl. She wanted to be Mrs Kenneth Manson. It was like an addiction that she just could not break, no matter how many times he let her down or how hard she tried.

  When they’d split the last time, she’d been sure it had been for good, had tried to convince herself that was the case. They’d been in a gorgeous suite at the Blytheswood hotel, courtesy, once again, of her company expense account, and they were well into their second bottle of wine when she’d pushed him to leave his wife, pressed him for a time frame for them to be together, accused him of keeping her dangling on a string for years, reminded him that she wanted to be married by the time she was thirty next year.

  He’d refused. Given her the same old line. He’d leave his marriage when the time was right and only he would decide when that would be. She’d cried. She’d raged. But he didn’t budge, so she’d stormed out of the hotel room, gone to the bar, and when she was pulling out her key card to charge her drink to the room, she’d come across the business card that cute guy in the menswear shop had given her that afternoon. On impulse, she’d called, he’d come and picked her up, and she’d cut Ken out of her life.

  For a while.

  The truth was, much as she tried to make it work with Cammy, he wasn’t her guy. Gorgeous, yes. Funny too. But he didn’t have a shred of Ken’s maturity or come close to his intellect. That’s what turned her on. His brains. His presence. What a cliché. The beautiful young blonde and the distinguished older doctor. She was a trophy wife waiting to happen, if only Ken would bloody hurry up and realise it.

  When they’d met up again at the convention in London a few weeks ago, she’d immediately sussed that he’d missed her as much as she’d been lost without him.

  She’d worn the red dress he loved in the hope that he’d be there, and it didn’t let her down. By midnight, it had been discarded on the floor of a room at the Dorchester – God bless the company credit card – and by dawn, he was promising her they’d make it work.

  It was going to happen. She knew it. She hadn’t gambled seven years of her life to walk away with nothing.

  In the meantime, she hadn’t had the heart to tell Cammy it was over yet. What was the point? So she could lie alone every night, thinking about what Ken was doing, visualising him sleeping with his wife? Cammy was fun, easy on the eye, and good enough in bed that she didn’t think of Ken every time she orgasmed, so she’d been happy to hang on to him.

  Now, it was time for that to change. It had to. Time to move on. Seal the deal on the next stage of her life.

  She pulled into the parking space outside the hospital and made her way through the complex maze of corridors and lifts to Ken’s office on the fifth floor. Private hospital of course. Ken had given up working for the NHS years before, although that wife of his was still nursing over at Glasgow Central.

  His secretary, Marge, was already parked at her desk, her face a mask of efficiency and disapproval. Over the years, Lila had given up trying to win her over. Thankfully, she was screwing Ken, not Marge, so what did it matter what the old boot thought of her? She’d soon change her tune when she was Mrs Lila Manson, wife of the esteemed cardiac surgeon. Then, metaphorically, Marge could kiss her slutty black-knickered arse.

  Lila chirped a cheery ‘Good morning’ to the bitter crone as she passed, long having established that she didn’t have to wait to be announced.

  The noise of the shower in the office en suite told her that Ken had probably only just arrived before her, no doubt having cycled in. She loved that he kept himself in such good shape. He was over twenty years older than her, but his body – while it didn’t compare to Cammy – was that of a man ten years younger. The age difference didn’t even factor for her though. She’d always had a thing for older men, as her sixth year biology teacher had found out, when she bumped into him a year or two later when he’d visited her uni to give a guest lecture to the science students. They’d spent the next two nights in his South Side flat doing things that they’d probably once covered in human anatomy.

  The sound of the shower stopped, followed a few moments later by the click of the door. Ken smiled when he saw her, sitting on his desk.

  ‘Calling me this morning? Naughty,’ he told her, but she could see he wasn’t annoyed. He liked her boldness, just as long as it didn’t actually go as far as getting them caught.

  A familiar thought ran through Lila’s mind. Surely Bernadette must know? She must. How could she not have guessed, not have questioned all those nights when he was with Lila instead of going home to her? Surely, for her own dignity, she should walk away and allow Ken to be with someone who was a perfect match for him?

  Lila pushed the question aside, deciding to address the more pressing matters in front of her right now. She held up the coffee.
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  ‘Room service,’ she announced, flashing a smile that came from the best cosmetic dentist in the city and had set her dad back ten grand. Not that her father had come and held her hand, but a BACS transfer was the second best thing.

  Ken took the lid off, dipped his finger in, then trailed a slick of warm coffee from the middle of her neck down to the space between her breasts. She gasped as he leant down and followed the caffeinated path with his tongue. Lila threw her head back, lost in the double pleasure of his hand moving up her thigh.

  She opened her legs wider to allow…

  The buzz of the phone interrupted the crescendo of ecstasy that was working its way from the toes of her Louboutins upwards.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ she whispered, biting his earlobe, holding him there.

  ‘You know I have to,’ he said, yanking his head away, all business again now.

  The ecstasy was immediately swept away by a tsunami of irritation. That bitch Madge. She’d probably timed that, waiting for what she reckoned would be just the right moment to disturb them.

  Ken picked up the phone, slipped it under his ear and pulled his tie on while he spoke.

  ‘Yes? Okay, I’m on my way. Tell them to go ahead and get him into pre-op.’

  When he put the phone down, Lila looked at him quizzically.

  ‘So you do actually have a surgery this morning? I thought you were just saying that as an excuse to leave home early. Didn’t you only have an afternoon surgery scheduled today?’

  ‘An angiogram. Came in late last night.’

  She couldn’t hide her disappointment. She’d booked out an hour slot for him this morning on her work schedule – her bosses didn’t need to know that the wealth of orders that came from Ken’s department required five minutes of conversation and fifty-five minutes of the kind of demonstration that hadn’t come from her company presentation manual. So far today was turning out to be a complete bust. Unless…

  ‘Will you be finished for noon? I was supposed to meet my mum for lunch but she got a better offer. We could…’

  ‘River Hotel,’ he said, briskly, pulling his jacket on and making for the door, already in fully fledged ‘doctor’ mode. Lila got a flutter of a thrill just from watching him.

  God, he was sexy. She felt no guilt about their affair, but even if she had, this feeling of desperate attraction would have been enough to muffle it to death.

  ‘I’ll have a couple of hours before afternoon surgery.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Lila asked, exaggerating the petulance.

  He smiled – that gorgeous, square-jawed smile that made him look like the doctor in an American soap.

  ‘That’s all,’ he repeated, running a tantalising finger down the side of her cheek. ‘But I promise we’ll make it count.’

  That was the moment. The moment that she decided that she wasn’t going to wait any longer, couldn’t bear not to have him. Enough of playing to his timescale. A plan had been forming in her mind for a long, long time, one that took bottle and a bit of subterfuge, and sure it risked backfiring in a major way, but Lila just had to have confidence that it wouldn’t. She wasn’t prepared to spend another Christmas hoping he’d get away to call her. She definitely didn’t want to spend it pretending to Cammy that they were love’s young dream.

  She wanted Ken. And her. Together. Waking up on Christmas morning, swapping the kind of gifts that involved nudity.

  No more procrastination. Ken would thank her when it was done and they were together.

  By the end of the day, she decided, Ken Manson would be all hers. He just didn’t know it yet.

  10 a.m. – Noon

  Chapter 5

  Caro

  The old man was snoozing now, or perhaps just resting his eyes as her granddad used to say. Her granddad on her mother’s side. Caro couldn’t ever remember being curious about her grandparents on her father’s side. There was no conversation that she could recall, no big discussion, only the knowledge, for as far back as she could remember, that her dad’s parents had died before she was born.

  A memory, from a long time ago, surfaced into her consciousness. Her mum, Yvonne, brushing Caro’s hair before bedtime. She’d been about five, maybe six. Her dad sleeping on the sofa. There had been something wrong with him, but Caro hadn’t understood it at the time. He’d been ill and before he came back they’d gone to visit him somewhere. In hospital perhaps? Her forehead crumpled as she tried to pull out more details from the dusty recesses of her childhood. Nothing. Just a feeling that she’d been afraid, and that her mother, Yvonne, had been too.

  ‘We’re all he’s got,’ her mum had said, almost wistfully, as she ran a huge paddle brush through Caro’s hair. ‘That’s why we have to take such good care of him.’

  Her mind turned the volume up on another conversation from long ago. This time she’d been eight or nine. It was in the summer holidays, and her dad was home for a few days, before heading off somewhere else with his Very Important Job.

  She didn’t often get bored – there were always more books to read, more stories to write – but on this day she was missing the company of her school friends.

  ‘I wish I wasn’t an only child,’ she’d announced over a banana sandwich lunch.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Dad had responded, in what she could see now was feigned shock. ‘That’s the best way to be! Can you imagine sharing your Christmas presents with someone else?’

  She’d thought about it and immediately decided that being an only child maybe wasn’t so bad after all. Dad was okay and he had no brothers or sisters either.

  Except… perhaps now she did.

  Lila Anderson.

  Her name floated on the tip of her tongue.

  Lila Anderson. My sister.

  Hi, I’m Lila’s sister.

  Nothing felt right about it.

  Anderson was a pretty common name. Although, the fact that Lila Anderson had a dad called Jack, who just happened to share a birthday with her own father, and look exactly like him, was stretching the powers of coincidence way too far.

  She’d searched the blonde’s face for any similarities, but if they were there, she couldn’t see them. Sure, they were both blonde, but even then, they were at opposite ends of the fair-haired spectrum. Lila was a light, baby blonde, tumbling in waves that fell halfway down her back. Caro was naturally dark blonde, cut in a long bob that just past her shoulders. Usually, she wore it tied back in a ponytail, so it didn’t get in the way when she was writing on the blackboard, or marking jotters. Low maintenance, that was how she would describe her look. Not a trait that was shared by the woman, sister or not, in the photos. This was obviously someone who loved to be the centre of attention, who was star attraction of any occasion. Caro couldn’t think of anything worse. Not that she was a shy wallflower, but she definitely preferred to be more low-key than the extrovert in the Facebook photos.

  Her phone buzzed and she picked it up quickly, before the noise woke her travel companion. ‘Hey,’ she whispered, desperately trying not to be one of those people who shared their whole life with every other passenger on a train journey.

  Todd dispensed with the fripperies. ‘Are you there yet and have you been arrested for stalking? Only, I haven’t had a chance to set up a Crowdfunding page for the bail money.’

  ‘Not there yet, no arrest and you’ve still got plenty of time. We got held up for a while somewhere around Dundee – leaves on the line, they said – so we’re just coming into Perth now,’ she told him, trying to keep her tone light because this whole thing was so ludicrous it couldn’t possibly happen. Could it? She changed the subject. ‘Is everything ok?’ she asked him. ‘Have you called?’

  ‘I’ve called and everything is fine,’ he promised her. It had been her one request, that he call the hospital and check on Mum for her every couple of hours. Actually, it wasn’t so much of her request as his order. He’d decided she had enough on her plate with one stressful parental situation, so had
insisted he help with the other one. Caro knew he felt better because he was doing something productive, so she let him win that one.

  ‘Thank you. So… what are you up to today?’

  It was one of those questions that usually made Caro think she had to make more of an effort to enjoy life. Todd never stood still, never had an off day, and he and Jared were on a mission to make the most of their lives. They went rock climbing. They took spontaneous trips. They went clubbing on a work night. They jet-skied on sunny days. They worked hard and played hard, though the two of them worked in different salons, having decided that they could get too much of a good thing. Todd was tall, athletic, and totally confident in his own skin. He’d always been that easy-going, non-stressy kind of kid, and now he balanced out Jared’s boundless enthusiasm and fondness for drama by being an easy-going, non-stressy kind of adult. Caro loved him. Loved them both.

  ‘Took the day off for a rugby tournament this morning. Travelling team from New Zealand. We’ll get hammered, I’ll get hypothermia, and I’m fairly sure some of my internal organs will be moved to a new location.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Yep… oh, and Jason will no doubt ask about you.’

  Todd’s best friend, and until two months ago, her boyfriend of three years. They’d split – her decision – after her mum’s health deteriorated and she found Lila’s Facebook post. She couldn’t explain why. Something shifted. She didn’t have the energy to give anything to him, when every waking moment was about caring for mum and doing the best job she could as a teacher.

  ‘You didn’t tell him where I was going today, did you?’

  ‘Are you kidding? He already thinks you’re certifiable for ditching him, so this would only add weight to the theory.’

  ‘Thanks. I think,’ she smiled again.