Through the shiny mist of unwanted tears she was aware of Theo breaching the distance between them, coming to sit on the sofa by her, reaching forward, handing her something—a hankie. Abby took it gratefully and wiped her eyes, mumbling an embarrassed apology, not daring to look directly at him for fear of seeing his revulsion at this display of emotion. Maybe he would imagine that she was putting it on, trying to wrest some sympathy from him. It would be just like him to imagine the worst of her.
‘Stop apologising,’ Theo murmured. He brushed his thumb over one wayward tear struggling down her cheek and Abby shuddered, helplessly drawn to him and furiously aware that she shouldn’t be.
‘You should go now,’ she whispered, looking down. ‘You’ve heard what you came to hear and you have my word. About the engagement.’
‘What did he do to you?’
‘Michael? He didn’t do anything to me…’ Puzzled brown eyes met steady black ones and she knew instantly what he was referring to.
‘Does he know that he has a son?’
‘It’s time for you to go.’
‘You should let it go. Holding on to the past is a dangerous game. The past can be a cruel master.’
‘How would you know?’ Abby threw at him. ‘You were born into privilege! Oh, don’t tell me…you learnt from a young age the hardships of knowing that you could just snap your fingers and get anything you wanted! Poor Theo. Such misery to overcome!’
‘Some might say that having your destiny worked out from the day of your birth was a pretty rough ride,’ Theo said quietly, allowing himself the ridiculous luxury of confiding in someone else. Where had that come from? Baring his soul had never been something high on his list of priorities. In fact, it had never featured there at all. All that self-indulgent confessional nonsense was, as far as he was concerned, a Western disease. ‘Michael may have had the freedom to do what he wanted, but as the heir to the empire I had no choice,’ he continued shortly. ‘Which isn’t to say that I spent my life moaning about it.’
‘I don’t moan about my past,’ Abby muttered. ‘I’ve learnt from it.’
‘What did he do to you?’ Theo asked curiously. ‘Do you still see him? You must, when he comes to take his son out.’
‘He…He’s never seen his son,’ Abby blurted out. She watched Theo’s expression harden into disbelief and the bitterness she had believed to have put to rest flooded her system like bile. ‘Well, you have to understand that when a married man suddenly discovers that his mistress is pregnant it isn’t exactly music to his ears…’
‘You were involved with a married man?’ Why, he wondered, did he feel so disappointed?
‘Don’t tell me it would surprise you if I was,’ Abby said caustically, reading his mind. Then she sighed and drew her legs up so that she could rest her chin on her knees. ‘I didn’t know he was married when I got involved with him. I was nineteen and he was just a fantastically sexy man ten years older than me. Things were beautiful for eighteen months or so until I made the mistake of getting pregnant.’
‘At which point your knight in shining armour revealed his feet of clay,’ Theo filled in.
‘He told me that he was married, that what we had had been nothing but a spot of fun, something to do in London during the week because he always returned to the Home Counties on the weekends to be with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. In fact, I wasn’t even the only one! Although he was kind enough to tell me that I had been the only one to have stayed the course as long as I had. There. You wanted to know and now you do.’ She sprang up and edged away from him. ‘Now go. Before you tell me that I deserved what I got!’
Theo vaulted up but she was already rushing outside, rushing towards the front door.
He heard it before he had time to make it further than the sitting room door. Her sharp cry of pain followed by a muffled groan…
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABBY felt as though someone had decided to take a swing at her ankle with a hammer. How had it happened? One minute she was dashing to the front door as if the hounds of hell were at her heels, and the next minute she had flung open the door and taken one step, one small step and bang! Down she had gone, missing her footing on the shallow step down to the front path. The same shallow step she routinely warned Jamie to be very careful of.
Naturally Theo would have heard her cry out and she didn’t bother to look up as she heard him cover the distance from the sitting room to the front door, where she was sitting inelegantly on the ground outside, clutching her throbbing ankle.
‘What happened?’ He knelt down to her level and Abby gave him a jaundiced look.
‘What do you think?’ she snapped. ‘I tripped. But I’m fine.’ She made a valiant effort to heave herself up and immediately collapsed back down.
‘Don’t be a fool.’ Without waiting for a retort, Theo scooped her up and brought her back into the house, kicking the door shut with one foot, then making his way to the sitting room where he proceeded to gently deposit her on the chair. ‘Right. Let’s have a look.’
Abby didn’t have to look to know that her foot was already beginning to swell. Instead, she stared ahead and tried to fight down the urge to blub like a baby from the pain. She only risked a glance down when she felt his fingers gently inspecting her foot. Her instinct was to yank the offending foot away but just the thought of moving it made her wince.
‘Not good,’ Theo said, looking up at her briefly. Well, it certainly made a change having him literally at her feet, but she was in too much pain to appreciate her own humour. Her fists were balled, fingernails digging into the soft flesh of her palms.
‘Thank you for that opinion,’ Abby said through gritted teeth, ‘but, believe it or not, I had reached the same conclusion myself.’
‘I’ll get you some painkillers then we’re going to have to take you to Casualty.’
‘Have you forgotten the small matter of a five-year-old boy sleeping upstairs?’
‘Is there anyone who could stay with him? A neighbour, maybe? Whoever looked after him when you were out in Greece playing the loving partner to my brother?’
Abby ignored the taunt tacked on at the end. ‘I don’t know any of my neighbours. At least not well enough to ask any of them to come and look after Jamie overnight, and Rebecca lives in the centre of Brighton. She stayed here for the week as a favour to me but she’s not within easy travelling distance.’ She grimaced. ‘I really need some painkillers. They’re on the kitchen counter.’
Theo stood up, frowning, and when he returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of water and two tablets he had worked out the only solution.
‘We’ll just have to wake your son up, in that case, and take him with us.’
‘My foot can wait.’ The hammering had subsided into nasty shooting daggerlike stabs instead. With any luck the tablets would take the edge off, enough for her to get some rest and then make her way to Casualty the following morning. She began telling him but he was already shaking his head before she had reached the end of her speech.
‘This foot needs to be seen to now, tonight. If you can’t or won’t go to a doctor, then a doctor has to come to you.’
‘Fat chance of any doctor doing a call out on a Sunday evening! The painkillers should help me get through the night…’
‘The painkillers are designed for headache relief, Abby, not a possible broken ankle.’
‘It’s not broken!’ Abby wailed. She couldn’t afford to be immobile, not with a lively five-year-old needing to be taken to school and fed and watered and bathed and amused! Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes as a catalogue of impossible obstacles loomed in front of her. This was the final reckoning of the single mother with no convenient relatives close by and friends who were all young, free and single. Self-pity merged with frustration. Holding down a full-time job had meant that she had no social contact with any of the other mothers at the school. Jamie stayed until four, when she collected him. On the odd occasion when she
had been unable to arrive on time his best friend’s mother took him home with her, but she hardly knew the woman. They chatted politely enough and made arrangements for the children, but that was the extent of their acquaintance.
‘What’s the number of your surgery?’
Abby dully gave it to him. She knew it from memory, not that she had ever had to access that information in an emergency. She was too preoccupied with the ever increasing list of reasons why she couldn’t have a broken ankle to be fully aware of Theo snapping open his mobile phone and dialling the number. Of course the surgery was shut but there was an emergency number given on the recorded message. The doctor on the end of the line didn’t stand a chance of refusing to pay a home visit, not once Theo had swung into action. There was urgency in his voice, but also the unspoken assumption that Dr Hawford would not hesitate to abandon his bed on a Sunday evening and make his way to her house so that he could inspect her already swollen foot.
‘Painkillers working yet?’ he asked, snapping shut his phone and dragging the low stool by the television so that he could position it right next to her and sit down.
‘Thank you for phoning the doctor,’ Abby said. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to be on your way now. It’s late and London isn’t just around the corner.’
‘Too true.’ Theo flicked his hand out and glanced at his watch. ‘After ten. No point heading back to London. I’ll have to stay here.’
‘Here?’ Abby squeaked, horrified. ‘You can’t stay here! Have you forgotten about Jamie? And, besides, my house is too small! There are only two bedrooms and both of them are fully used! If you put your foot on the gas it shouldn’t take too long to get back to London!’
‘Are you advocating that I break the speed limit to accommodate you?’
‘I’m telling you that you’re not staying here!’ She briefly forgot the horrendous pain in her foot under the even more oppressive thought of having Theo under her roof overnight. She had visions of him sharing her bathroom, shaving at her basin in the morning, using her towel to wrap around his body when he was through with his shower. She felt sick.
‘I wasn’t proposing to spend the night in your house,’ he clarified. ‘I was proposing that I stay with my brother.’
‘You can’t do that.’ The words were out before her brain had a chance of editing them. ‘I mean you can’t do that without calling him first. Michael keeps weird hours. You might show up to find he’s not in and then you’ll just be left kicking your heels outside his apartment for hours.’
‘On a Sunday?’ he asked mildly, puzzled at her immediate rejection of his idea. He looked at her flushed face narrowly. ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t want to be left kicking my heels outside an empty apartment for hours. I’ll call him now. He’ll want to know about your little accident anyway, I’m sure.’
Before Abby had time to offer an opinion on this idea the wretched mobile phone was being flicked open again and this time her ears strained to hear every segment of the conversation.
She was only privy to one side of the conversation, but it wasn’t difficult to hazard an intelligent guess as to what was being said on the other end of the line. Or even to picture Michael in the club, his phone glued to his ear, walking towards his office at the back so that his brother’s voice didn’t have to compete with the sound of voices and music.
There was a brief explanation of what Theo was doing in her house, which he managed to successfully waffle his way through with some phoney excuse about expecting to find Michael there. Abby almost snorted at this. Then there was a brief account of the ankle, tellingly lacking in all details as to how she had managed to trip in the first place.
‘But now I’m here,’ Theo said, ‘it seems somewhat ridiculous to make my way back to London at this hour. I take it your apartment sleeps more than one?’ Theo frowned at whatever response met that question, although she knew that Michael had expressed delight at having his brother stay with him. She had heard his exclamation from where she was sitting! Perhaps it had been that fractional hesitation before he responded. Too bad.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ she heard him say in the voice of someone wrapping up a conversation, ‘so sorry to hear that the engagement is off…’
‘How dare you?’ Abby fumed, as soon as the phone was tucked back neatly into his pocket. ‘How dare you?’ Her cheeks were bright with colour. This man was proving a far more effective painkiller than any tablet. Who had time for focusing on a minor thing like pain when her brain was fully occupied with searing fury?
‘I just thought I would circumnavigate the possibility of you not sticking to your word. After all, you had weeks to do it yourself, but you somehow didn’t seem to manage it. Funny, Michael didn’t react quite as I had expected him to…’ He fixed his amazing eyes on her flushed face.
‘What do you mean?’ Abby asked uneasily.
‘He was silent for a few seconds, but then he immediately expressed regret. No shock, no surprise, no offer to rush over here to talk things through, which I might have expected from a man suddenly confronted with a bombshell.’
‘You had no right to say anything.’
‘You left me no choice. Why did my brother take the news so unquestioningly, do you imagine?’ Something wasn’t adding up. Nothing added up. All his presumptions made perfect sense in theory, but in practice it was like a puzzle missing a few key pieces.
‘I…we…I hinted over the past few weeks that perhaps being engaged wasn’t right for us…’
‘Why didn’t you mention that to me?’
‘Because it was none of your business!’ Abby flared. She looked away, praying that the doctor would do something useful like pull up, and for once her prayers were answered because she heard the sound of a car pulling up to the house, followed by a door slamming and footsteps clicking up the path. Her body sagged in mute relief when the doorbell rang.
She had no doubt that Theo would have liked nothing better than to pursue the conversation until he had obtained one or two answers that at least made sense, but as it turned out he had no choice but to sigh with impatient frustration before disappearing to let the doctor in.
‘Right.’ Dr Hawford was a mild-mannered man in his early fifties, good with his patients and reassuringly efficient. ‘Let’s have a look, Miss Clinton.’ He squatted by her foot and gently manipulated it, asking her to tell him when it hurt and how much, running through his standard questions in a quietly soothing voice.
In the background Theo hovered like a predator temporarily denied its prey. At least, that was how Abby felt.
‘A class two sprain,’ the doctor said, pushing himself up and then moving to sit on the sofa with his little black bag. ‘You’ve done a good job of tearing some of your ligament fibres, hence the swelling and the pain. The good news is that there is no hospital intervention needed for a sprain such as this. The bad news is that you’re going to be off your feet for a few days, possibly as long as a week.’
‘I can’t be off my feet for a few days, Doctor.’
‘Have you informed your foot of that?’ He looked at Theo. ‘Fetch some ice, or something cold if there’s no ice in the freezer. A packet of frozen peas will do nicely instead. It’s important we try and get the swelling down. Now, my dear…’ having dismissed Theo, he looked at Abby not unsympathetically ‘…I know you’ve got a little boy but there is no way you are going to be able to carry out your normal duties for a few days, and if you try putting weight on this foot too soon you could do some quite severe damage that would have you out of action for far longer.’
‘But…’
‘Absolutely no room for manoeuvre, Abby. Now, I’m going to prescribe some anti-inflammatory drugs which will help with the pain and the swelling.’ He pulled out his prescription sheet and Abby watched in numbed silence as he scribbled on it. ‘You get your young man to fill this in first thing in the morning.’
‘He’s not my young man,’ Abby said through gritted teeth just as Theo was walking ba
ck into the room with a bag of frozen vegetables in one hand and a clean tea towel in the other.
‘And you might want to think about getting some strapping to fit over the injured ankle,’ the doctor continued, looking at Theo from over the rims of his reading spectacles. ‘Any good chemist will stock what you need. But, my dear—’ he looked at Abby and stood up ‘—don’t overuse any taping. Might feel comfortable but you don’t want that ankle to become lazy! As soon as you can, probably tomorrow, you can start trying to exercise it. Which does not mean applying it to the clutch and brake pedals of a car!’
‘I think I’m going to have to cancel my arrangements with Michael, don’t you?’ was the first thing Theo said once he had shown the doctor to the door and returned to the sitting room.
Abby just looked at him in miserable silence. ‘I can manage,’ she said eventually, something that was so patently untrue that Theo didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he simply walked towards her and, ignoring her protests, picked her up.
‘I’ll lock up and turn off the lights after I’ve got you into bed.’
‘You will do no such thing! I can manage perfectly well on my own!’
‘As we all can when we can’t walk.’
‘Look—’ Abby breathed in deeply and decided to go for the mature approach ‘—once you get me into bed I’ll be able to manage just fine for myself and I can call Peter’s mum first thing in the morning so that she can come and collect Jamie for school. It won’t be a problem sorting out transport arrangements for him and I’m sure Rebecca wouldn’t mind coming across some time tomorrow evening with some foodstuff. It’s a bit of a trek for her, but she’ll understand.’ She could feel the muscled hardness of his torso against her and bit her lip nervously. ‘I mean…’
‘Which one is your bedroom?’
‘The one on the right. Did you hear a word I just said?’
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