Her brain finally caught up with her vocal cords. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was just passing by,’ Theo drawled. ‘Thought I’d look in.’ He looked lazily past her and then right back at her, his face a study in self-contained impassivity.
Abby, on the other hand, was struggling to breathe.
‘You can’t be here,’ she whispered incredulously. ‘You don’t know where I live.’
‘I knew where you lived the minute I found out where you worked. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to make a call to an office and dig out relevant information.’
‘Personnel would never have given you my address!’
‘And why not? You forget that I’m Michael’s brother. I don’t suppose you want to invite me in but you are going to have to, you know, because I don’t intend to stand out here having a conversation, however nice the weather.’
‘You’re seeing Michael next week. He told me. Why do you want to see me now? Why?’
‘Oh, but you know why. If you don’t move I’m going to have to pick you up and move you.’
Abby looked at him with dismay. He had managed to stick his foot just inside the threshold. If she tried to slam the door on him it would entail a struggle and she would lose. She was no match for Theo Toyas. She stood aside and watched him walk into her house and look around him with curiosity and interest.
The house was the smallest of two-bedroomed properties. She had bought it six years previously, taking out the largest possible mortgage she was allowed and, by being sensible, she had managed to sustain it. It was on a small development close to a primary school and there were just about enough amenities to make it a first time buyer’s first port of call on the property ladder. The houses were like boxes, but pleasant enough boxes and, depending on size, all had a pretence of a garden. In her case, it was a small patch of grass outside her back patio door which she cultivated with creative zeal.
She would have liked to have been bold with her décor inside the house, maybe have some unusual colour schemes to lift it out of its bland mediocrity, but her original forays into reds and deep greens had been a disaster. The house was too small to take kindly to unusual colour schemes and, in the end, she had regretfully settled on whites, creams and a very adventurous toffee in the hallway. Only the bedrooms reflected any real vibrancy. Jamie’s was a high, attractive turquoise and she had taken time to paint the flat-packed bedroom furniture in a wonderful shade of yellow. Her own room was cream but all the soft furnishings were in deep shades of crimson and red. When the curtains were shut she felt as though she was an exotic princess reclining in her very own boudoir.
‘Shall I get in touch with Michael?’ Abby asked, looking at the way he was surveying her house and feeling appropriately invaded. ‘I know where he is. I’m sure he’d love to come over and see you.’
Theo didn’t rush into an answer. Instead he continued looking around him for a few more seconds before turning to her. He could have waited, could have seen his brother in a few days’ time and found out what he needed to know, whether she had obeyed his instructions or not. In truth, he had no doubt that she would have. He had, after all, given her the choice of leaving with her reputation intact or leaving in disgrace at being exposed as a woman happy to be engaged to the one brother and make love to the other.
He had come to see her personally because in the past few weeks he had thought about her more than he cared to admit. It was a nuisance.
He looked at her now, staring up at him with those clear brown eyes, eyes that should have been matched with brown hair but were thrown into sharp, unusual relief by that exquisite thick vanilla-blonde hair.
‘I wouldn’t have come here if I had wanted to talk to my brother. No, I came here to see you.’ He felt sudden annoyance and disgust with himself that he had made this trip to see this woman who clearly didn’t want him in her house. ‘I take it you’re still in communication with my brother?’ Beyond the small hall he could see the kitchen and he began walking towards it. ‘You know where he is, right at this precise moment in time. This is not what I wanted to hear.’ He had reached the kitchen. It was only a few paces from the front door, and he stopped. Stopped and stared, barely aware of her behind him. He filled up the doorway.
The kitchen was small but pretty. Grey speckled counter surfaces, pine units that looked cheap but functional, a very small oblong kitchen table that could sit four people provided they had no objections to being in very close physical contact with one another. Everything was on a very small scale. Small fridge freezer, small cooker, just sufficient units to store the bare essentials needed to make a kitchen actually work.
Theo, however, wasn’t staring at the dimensions of the room. He was staring at the pictures on the fridge, magnets holding them up and at the little notice-board on the wall by the kitchen table. More pictures.
He stepped aside and Abby slipped past him, drawing in a deep breath as she took in the direction of his gaze. It was crazy. Jamie wasn’t a secret!
‘Interesting artwork,’ Theo said, moving towards the fridge and inspecting the drawings tacked on it. One was some version of an underwater scene, another was of the family, which was comprised of a gigantic stick figure with lots of white hair and a much smaller one with a large smiley face, and then there were various attempts at writing.
Abby had no idea why she felt so nervous. She licked her lips and tried to relax. ‘I think so.’
‘Yours?’ He removed the underwater scene and looked at it with exaggerated interest before holding it up for her to see.
‘My son’s.’
‘You have a son. It’s not…’
‘No, it’s not Michael’s.’
The shutter had come down over her eyes. Theo watched and felt that flame of intense curiosity lick through him. He carefully adhered the picture back on to the fridge and then turned to her. ‘Mind if I sit?’
‘It’s late.’
‘Have you broken off the engagement? No, of course you haven’t. The ring’s still on your finger.’ Not only did she fail to deny it, but she didn’t rush into any apology. His dark eyes hardened. ‘You may think I’m playing games with you, but let me assure you that I’m not.’
‘I won’t let you attack me in my own house,’ Abby told him, folding her arms protectively over her. God, she felt so nervous and so intimidated and, amongst all this, so hungrily drawn to the man sitting in her chair, in her kitchen, for all the world as though he had a stake there. Only seeing him there, in the flesh, made her recognise just how much he had been in her head and how disastrously easy it was for all those hidden feelings to spring back into life against all common sense and reason. They were raising their heads now, reminding her how treacherously good it had felt when he had kissed her, taken her in his arms, touched her breasts…
Abby closed her eyes briefly and then looked at him. ‘Jamie wakes up easily. I don’t want to have an argument with you here. This house has walls like paper.’ Bring Jamie into the conversation, she thought, and remind herself about reality instead of letting herself float off on some pathetic whimsical cloud of nonsense.
‘Ah. Jamie. I thought so.’
‘What does that mean? That you thought so?’
‘The handwriting on the piece of paper on the fridge, and those on the notice-board. He’s learning how to write his name. How old is he?’
‘Five.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘Why are you interested?’
‘I’m curious. Why didn’t you mention him before? To my mother? Our relatives? You had every opportunity.’ His eyes narrowed on her pinkened face.
‘I didn’t think it was the right time…’
‘Give me a clue as to what you think the right time would have been? Maybe sitting in a restaurant somewhere? My mother asking whether you had any little kiddies in tow? A natural question any prospective mother-in-law would pose to her son’s fiancée?’
‘You’re not f
unny!’ Anger made her voice rise a couple of decibels. Her blasted hair kept brushing her face and, without thinking, she flicked the hairband from her wrist, something she always kept handy, and roped it back into a ponytail.
‘Maybe you decided that you could win Michael over to playing daddy to your little boy but breaking the news to the rest of us would be a more uphill task. Is that it? Build up to it in stages, maybe, rather than risk us all seeing the obvious.’
‘And you’re about to tell me that obvious, aren’t you? Not that I can’t guess where you’re going!’ Her small hands were bunched into fists and she was leaning forward, every nerve in her body stretched to breaking-point.
‘It makes sense!’ Theo thundered. He slammed his fist down on the table with such ferocity that Abby jumped. ‘I wondered about you! You didn’t seem like a money-minded gold-digger, but then I wasn’t in possession of all the facts at the time, was I? How much do you earn?’
‘How much do I earn? That’s none of your business!’
‘Enough to support yourself, I presume! With a little left over for small luxuries! But a child? Enough to support a child as well? I may not have children, but I know they are a commodity that doesn’t come cheap. Is that why you decided that having a little financial help in that direction might be a good idea? And Michael would have been an easy target, not the sort of man to be put off by a child in the background. Did you string him along with some sob story? Make him feel sorry for you?’
‘Children are not commodities!’
‘Where is the boy’s father? Does his maintenance not come up to scratch?’
‘Stop it!’ Abby shouted. ‘How dare you walk into my house and start shouting at me? You insulted me when I was in Greece, when I was on your terrain, but don’t you dare walk into my terrain and think you can continue doing the same thing!’
She stared at him, white-faced with anger and in the still silence it took a few seconds to register that he was no longer looking at her but beyond her, towards the door. She slowly turned round to find her son standing there, staring at them with bewilderment and fear. Mummies didn’t shout. Ever. Abby had never shouted in front of him in her life before. She couldn’t even remember ever shouting, not for years. Not until now. It was as if all the emotions she had carefully tidied away over the years had found some kind of nightmarish release and were now bursting out of their restraints. She was shaking when she stooped down to look at Jamie.
‘Hi, kiddo. What are you doing up? You know you should be in bed. School tomorrow.’
‘I heard shouting.’ His eyes slipped past her to look warily at Theo. ‘Who’s that?’
‘No one.’
‘I am Theo, Michael’s brother.’
Abby could feel him behind her, then she was aware of him stooping down next to her, the man who had accused her of sobbing her way into his brother’s affections, playing on her status as a single mother to twist Michael into sympathising, into offering her marriage and his fortune as a way of protecting her. His voice was soft but he was still the same man who had admitted seeing children as commodities. Abby protectively pulled Jamie in to her and glared at Theo over her son’s head. She was gently pressing him into the comfort of her shoulder, but already Jamie was wriggling, eager to continue his inventory of the stranger in his mother’s kitchen. He managed to squirm free and proceeded to sit cross-legged on the floor, with Abby’s hands loosely covering his chubby ones.
‘You look like Uncle Michael. Doesn’t he, Mummy?’
‘I can see one or two differences,’ Abby said through gritted teeth.
Theo felt his lips twitch. She looked like a small, frustrated, enraged angel. He had to remind himself that after his logical examination of the situation, after his concise conclusions about her behaviour and her motivations, she was anything but angelic, whatever the layout of her features.
‘Can you?’ Theo said innocently. ‘People say we look very much alike. Aside from the small height difference.’
‘People say adders look like garden snakes. Aside from the small difference in toxin levels.’
Theo did his utmost not to grin. ‘I struggle to find the compliment in that,’ he said gravely and was entranced to see the angel glare even more ferociously at him. She was positively throbbing! Like a steam engine that should have been going full pelt but was temporarily derailed by circumstances beyond its control, in this case the restraining presence of her son.
Jamie had brightened up at the mention of snakes and had now launched into a convoluted account of snakes he had seen at the zoo, which confusingly seemed to be tied in to a school book his teacher was reading to them in class about magic carpets. Theo didn’t have a clue where the story was leading but he was enraptured by the childish enthusiasm and the striking similarity the boy had to his mother. The hair was a dirtier shade of blond but he had the same eyes and nose and mouth.
Who was the father? Where was he? Was he on the scene, maybe even still sleeping with her? That thought made him feel sick and he instantly thrust it away.
The angel had swivelled her son to face her and was now giving him a stern lecture on going to bed, at which point Theo was amused to find a process of bargaining kick off, with Jamie tentatively striking out for chocolate, the unspoken bribe being that some chocolate would see him happily heading back to his bed, and Abby forced to negotiate along liquid lines as an alternative, moving up from a glass of milk to finally settle on a carton of juice.
He stood up and edged back towards the table, watching silently as mother scooped up boy in one arm and efficiently located a carton of juice from the cupboard with her free hand. His presence was forgotten by both of them. She was entirely focused on her son, on getting him upstairs and Jamie was now absorbed in the fundamentals of trying to unstick the straw from the side of the carton.
Had Michael been drawn in by this? Theo wondered. He listened abstractedly to the sound of footsteps disappearing up the stairs. Had his brother found this charming sketch of mother and son just too difficult to resist? Add to the equation the fact that the mother in question had the face of an angel and a body which she denied him and had it been just too impossible to walk away? Something in the picture didn’t make sense, but when he tried to analyse what that something was he found his mind wandering. Wandering to the look of her when she had been holding her son, to the way those slender arms could also be strong and supportive, to the way her brown eyes had been proudly assured as a mother and equally defensive. He clicked his tongue in frustration and dragged his mind back to the task at hand, which was to find out why she hadn’t broken off the engagement and what she hoped to gain by temporarily thwarting him.
He had made them both a cup of coffee by the time Abby returned to the kitchen.
‘You’re still here,’ she said, standing in the doorway, arms folded.
‘You didn’t really expect me to have left, did you?’ Theo asked silkily. ‘I’ve made you some coffee. Milk, no sugar. Is that how you take it?’
Abby didn’t answer. Instead, she sat down on the chair opposite him, the furthest away from him, and sighed wearily. ‘I can’t fight with you any more,’ she said, propping her chin in her hands and staring at him.
‘I don’t want a fight either, whatever you might think.’
‘I know.’ Abby gave him a watery smile. ‘You just want me to clear out of your brother’s life so that I don’t get my greedy little paws on his millions.’
Theo flushed darkly. She was only saying what he had been thinking, after all, but put starkly like that it made him out to be the villain and her the sacrificial lamb. But she looked exhausted, that much was true. Rather than plunge headlong into another attack on her temerity in disobeying his orders to end her preposterous engagement, Theo decided that it wouldn’t do any harm to slow the pace a bit. A clever negotiator knew that timing was the key thing. He sat back, cradling the cup in his hands, and looked at her lazily.
‘You have a cute son.’
‘Don’t you mean a cute commodity?’
‘I apologise for that. It was simply a mistake of speech.’
‘Was it? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.’ She sipped some of the coffee, which was surprisingly good. Or maybe she was surprisingly unsteady and anything hot would have tasted fine. She could feel those clever, searching eyes boring into her. The fluorescent light in the kitchen made everything stand out in sharp focus and right now Abby didn’t need it. He was perceptive enough without the additional aid of bright lighting. She stood up, coffee in one hand.
‘I’m going into the sitting room. I’m going to drink this coffee and then you are going to leave.’ She didn’t give him a chance to answer. Instead, she spun round and headed directly to the little room which was just off the hallway. The light had faded and she drew the curtains then retreated to the sofa, curling up at one end of it and watching warily as Theo took the plumply cushioned chair by the door.
He was only a few inches taller than his brother, but he seemed to drown out her little house in a way Michael never did. Maybe it was because there was nothing restful about him, even when he wasn’t actually doing anything.
‘I’ll break off the engagement.’ Abby was the first to break the silence and there was resignation and regret in her voice. The wretched engagement had been a foolish idea in the first place, even though it had served both their purposes admirably. She looked defiantly at the big, masculine figure on the chair and saw Theo nod imperceptibly.
‘He is not the man for you,’ he murmured.
‘No, no maybe he isn’t,’ Abby said bitterly. There was no man for her. She had closed her heart off to them a long time ago. Only Theo had crept through an unseen chink and made her respond, but that had just been the response of a healthy young woman aching for a physical touch, something she had not even been aware of having missed. And through that chink she could feel all sorts of other things creeping, all sorts of questions raising their ugly heads, looking for answers. ‘Maybe no one is. For me, I mean. It was stupid to think…’ Damn and double damn! She could feel her eyes beginning to fill up, going past the point where she could rapidly blink the tears away.
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