‘Oh, darling, don’t worry about that.’ Carefully, his mum cut her sandwich into four triangles. She lowered her voice. ‘Dad’s in his room. He hasn’t asked if I want anything and I’m starving, so I’ve helped myself. Do you think he’ll mind?’
‘But are you?’
His mum sank slowly into a chair, her eyes shining as if she was about to cry. ‘I suppose I am.’ She began to explain something boring about Darren’s business.
‘But where’s my stuff? Our stuff?’ he interrupted.
‘In storage. One of Darren’s mates came with a van and took our personal things to his lockup. I got a house-clearance firm to come and give me a price for the furniture, so I’d have some cash.’
‘What about Darren?’
She shook her head and dragged out a bit of tissue to blow her nose.
Curtis sat down right in front of her so she couldn’t not look at him. ‘So you’ve come to live back with Dad?’
His mum pulled the sandwich towards her again and toyed with it. ‘We’ll have to see. I mean, yes, for now. But Dad …’ She gave a tremulous smile. ‘Presumably that was his girlfriend who was here? Leah?’
‘Oh, she’s just staying next door on holiday.’ Curtis found himself dismissing any link between his dad and Leah, no matter how much he, Natasha and Jordan had agreed they liked one another. After all, he’d never so much as seen them kiss or hold hands. ‘What about me?’ He tried to laugh. ‘Am I half-homeless?’
She stroked his hair out of his eyes – which really got on his nerves, actually, as he grew it that way on purpose. ‘Your dad wouldn’t let that happen!’
‘He wouldn’t let anything happen to you, either.’ As he said it, Curtis realised it was true. The only time his dad had failed him was in unaccountably letting his mum get together with Darren.
But now she was back Curtis realised how much he wanted her to stay back. He even put his arms around her, and repeated, ‘He wouldn’t let anything happen to you, either.’ It gave him a feeling of solidity and warmth, of fear receding from his world.
Chapter Eighteen
Leah woke feeling as if a lump of lead had formed in her tummy, reminding her that something bad had happened.
It took only a second for yesterday’s debacle to come crashing back. Ronan had turned from hot heaven to hard heartache. Selina was here: pretty, blonde, in trouble, and Curtis’s mum.
On a masochistic impulse she checked her phone. 3 messages.
Scott: Chin up. You’ll be home before you know it. x
She replied:
Leah: I know. Sorry for the long whiney conversation last night! And thanks for not saying I told you so. Even if you did tell me so. x
The second message was more surprising:
Bailey: Is Michele OK? Shes not answering texts. Shes not being sick again is she?
She left that unanswered until she could talk to Michele, and turned to the message she’d deliberately left till last:
Ronan: Now the dust has settled on the bombsite that yesterday evening became, can we talk? xx
She stared at his words. She showered and dried her hair and read the text again before she allowed herself to reply.
Leah: I’m sure we’ll bump into each other before I leave but I don’t think there’s any point in more.
Then she went in search of Michele, locating her sipping fizzy water and nibbling dry crackers in the kitchen. Leah showed her Bailey’s text. Michele sighed, propping her pale cheek sadly on her fist. ‘I told him I didn’t want to get involved in long heartbroken messages. It only prolongs the agony.’ Her voice was thready with tears.
Out of the blue, Leah found herself experiencing empathy with Bailey’s sore heart. ‘But shouldn’t one of us text him to say you’re OK?’
‘I will.’ Michele gulped. Then she turned a sympathetic eye on Leah. ‘But what about you? Last night … well, Curtis said his mother arrived. That was a shock, I take it?’
‘Yup.’ Leah swallowed a lump in her throat. ‘I don’t know the full story because I didn’t hang around. I want to steer clear of Ronan today but I don’t know how best to do it. If I take the kids out it will leave you with Alister; if I take you and the kids it will leave Alister on his own. I suppose we could all go out together if you can put up with each other but Alister has to wait in for the nurse to arrive and give him his injection.’
Michele pulled Leah into a tight, squeezy, sisterly hug, the kind that made you hug back really hard. ‘Or you could take yourself off for the day and leave us all to fend for ourselves. You’ve certainly earned it.’
With a gush of relief Leah realised that to be alone, to brood miserably and come to terms with the hollow horribleness of what had happened was exactly what she wanted. To get completely and utterly away from other people and the responsibilities, undercurrents, hopes and disappointments that had invaded her life this summer. ‘Wouldn’t you mind? I love you sometimes, Shell.’
Laughing ruefully, Michele gave her a final squeeze. ‘You love me all the time, which is why I was able to put on you so disgracefully. Go on, jump in your pose-mobile and clear off.’
Leah was already reaching for her bag.
In other circumstances, she would have adored her day, beginning with a long drive through villages dotted along country lanes like beads on a necklace, stopping to breakfast on two croissants and two cups of espresso at a pretty pavement café with green wooden tables and an extravagant number of flower tubs.
Breakfast over, she drove on, following the Porsche’s long nose through towns, villages and countryside, crossing the Canal de la Bruche via a stone bridge. But for once the throaty hum of the engine and the power beneath her right foot failed to soothe her so she circled back to Muntsheim with the intention of catching a sleek silver tram into Strasbourg in time for lunch. She’d do something touristy like walk by the river or take a boat ride to gaze at the picturesque buildings decked with window boxes bubbling with blooms. She could even go up inside the cathedral.
Shying away from the memory of that being Ronan’s suggestion she found herself parking the car and, changing her mind about Strasbourg, mooching through La Place de la Liberté, thinking vaguely that she’d never had the leisure to properly explore the town centre. She strolled past the fountains towards a row of arches with shops beneath. There, tucked away in a corner, she discovered an English-language bookshop café, Le Café Littéraire Anglais, its window display bright with guidebooks and holiday reading. Assailed by sudden homesickness, she pushed the door and went in. A very British snack menu was chalked on a board with ploughman’s lunch as the day’s special. ‘Pork pie,’ she breathed, suddenly longing for something so totally and unmistakeably British.
A cheerful girl with ‘Kat’ embroidered on her black apron paused in delivering two fat white teapots to a crowded corner table to nudge out a chair invitingly. ‘Pork pie, Branston pickle and extra mature cheddar with Jacob’s cream crackers, if you want.’
‘Sold.’ Leah’s spirits lifted a few degrees as she dropped down at a table, its placemats depicting English countryside scenes of hay carts and shire horses.
Kat returned. Her dark curls, caught up by a black bandana, trembled like springs atop her head.
Leah didn’t have to browse the menu. ‘Ploughman’s and a big pot of builders’ tea, please.’
The meal was bliss. The cheddar cheese nestled against fat shiny pickled onions as well as the promised Branston and the precisely perfect amount of jelly joined the meat to the pastry in the pork pie. She was wiping up the last crumbs from the Jacob’s cream crackers when Kat brought her a fresh pot of tea. ‘You’re a new face. Are you an expat? Or just visiting?’
Leah responded easily to the open, friendly smile. ‘I’ve been holidaying with my sister’s family in Kirchhoffen but we leave on the twenty-ninth.’
Kat’s face fell. ‘Shame. It would be nice to know someone my own age here. I love it,’ she added, hastily, ‘and Graeme and Katherine, t
he owners, have a lovely lot of friends. Just …’ With a sly look at the occupants of the corner table she mimed bending over a walking stick and clutching her back.
A howl of outrage went up from the group. ‘We are not old! We’re like the cheese – mature!’
‘Or crumbly,’ Kat teased them.
Though Leah joined in the laughter, English voices exchanging English banter only intensified her feeling of homesickness.
She lazed away the afternoon wandering around what Muntsheim had to offer – churches, a park hosting an open-air concert, half-timbered buildings and a food market.
Leah was soaking up the sun over coffee at another pavement café, reading a paperback purchased from Le Café Littéraire Anglais, when the real world intruded in the shape of a text.
Michele: Do you know when you’ll be back? There’s a big surprise waiting for you.
Leah: Nice surprise or horrible?
Michele: Nice!!! Come back, I’ll make crepes for dinner.
Although she suspected that Michele’s real motive was to get Leah to make the crepes, she was intrigued enough to drink up her coffee and close her book. Less than an hour later she drove up the hill to the gîte and hopped out of her car, aiming to hurry safely indoors without looking over to Chez Shea.
Before she’d taken more than a few strides, her ‘surprise’ came lounging around the corner of the gîte. It had spiky mouse-brown hair and a wide grin.
She halted in her tracks. ‘Scott!’
Laughing, he threw his arms wide and in a second Leah had dived into them, fighting an absurd urge to cry at the sight of his dear, comforting, lop-sided smile. ‘It’s great to see you! But what are you doing here? When did you arrive?’
He hugged her nearly breathless. ‘This afternoon. I’ve come to hang out for a few days then share the driving home.’
‘Oh, Scott! Seriously? You’re such a million-watt star. And I’m just so glad you’re here.’ To her horror, she found her throat closing, the disappointment of the previous evening surging up in a hot well of tears.
‘Hey,’ he chided gently, stroking her back. ‘You didn’t think I’d let you leave the Porsche here and make a double trip, did you? No, I’m going to make you drive The Pig while I drive your Porsche.’
Leah swallowed her tears and laughed ruefully. ‘You are one of the few people I’d make that deal with.’
Then the door of Chez Shea thumped open and Ronan shot out.
He stopped short when he saw Leah in Scott’s arms. ‘Oh. I was going to …’ For several heart-thuds his eyes clashed with Leah’s.
Swiftly Scott set Leah free and approached the fence, offering his hand. ‘Scott Matthewson.’
‘Ronan Shea.’
Though he shook Scott’s hand, Ronan looked stiff and pained, making Leah wonder if his shoulder was hurting. Shocked that she’d begun to observe him so minutely she watched the two men sizing each other up, conscious of having feelings for them both.
But such different feelings.
She swallowed any unsteadiness in her voice. ‘Right. Well. Apparently Michele’s cooking so–’
Ronan returned his dark gaze to her. ‘Do you have a minute first? Please.’
‘You heard what she said, man.’ Scott hooked his thumbs in his pockets. ‘It’s dinnertime. Maybe your other half’s cooked for you?’
‘I don’t have an “other half”. Just an ex-wife. Not that it’s any of your business.’ Ronan’s voice was low and inflexible, the way he spoke to Curtis when he didn’t expect to be messed with.
Leah hesitated, wanting to keep a safe distance but no less drawn to Ronan than she’d ever been. Maybe, in order to be able to keep that distance, she had to give in one more time to her compulsion. She looked into Scott’s dear, pugnacious face. ‘Do you mind giving us a little space?’
Scott looked as if he did mind but he shrugged and vanished back around the house.
Ronan waited until he was out of earshot. ‘Take a walk with me?’
‘I suppose so.’ Silently, sadness skulking between them like a third person, they walked without talking up the lane and away from the village, birdsong from the hedges adding an incongruously cheery note, until they reached a stile leading onto a footpath.
Leah propped herself against the wooden rail and Ronan positioned himself squarely in front of her, gaze level, stance open as if trying to reassure her that he had nothing to hide. ‘I had no idea that Selina was on her way. It was as much a shock to me–’
‘I know.’ She smiled to take the sting out of cutting him off, attempting to project a calm it was hard to feel. ‘I don’t suspect you of lying or cheating. I’m just not going to get involved in your family.’ She injected into her voice all the finality she could muster.
‘But nothing’s really changed.’
‘Your wife’s in your house.’
For an instant his lips tightened but he corrected her with calm deliberation. ‘Ex-wife.’
Leah closed her eyes, reading the hurt in his. Hating it. Wanting him. ‘But she’s here and it’s made everything way too heavy for something that was only ever just for the holidays.’
Then his body heat was touching hers and she popped open her eyes to find him right in close. ‘But the thought of calling it quits is chewing me up.’ His breath brushed her cheek like a caress. ‘We live only a couple of hours apart. That barely counts as a long-distance relationship. It’s half an hour in a helicopter!’
Mute with shock, Leah stared at him, at his rueful expression. ‘Are you completely going back on everything we’ve talked about? You don’t do long-term relationships.’
‘I haven’t for a while,’ he acknowledged. ‘And the reason for that is currently an uninvited guest at Chez Shea. Your friend Scott just called Selina my “other half” but she was never the other half of me. We shared a home and we share a child but it went no deeper. Make me understand why you won’t give me time to deal with Selina’s situation and give us a chance.’
Closing her mind to the exhilarating vision of him whizzing through the skies to be with her, to the temptation of giving herself a chance to see whether he was going to prove the exception to her rule, Leah knew exactly how to make him understand. It meant trusting him with her secret but maybe he deserved that. ‘It’s because of what happened with Tommy,’ she blurted, before she could change her mind.
‘Tommy lied about being divorced. I didn’t.’
‘I know. But I didn’t tell you the whole Tommy story. It’s … unsavoury.’
Surprise flashed in his eyes.
She took a long breath. ‘When Tommy’s wife turned up … well, I might not have known about her but she knew all about me.’ Leah paused, seeing in her mind’s eye the woman whose name she’d never known, salon-blonde, gym-toned, sly triumph all over her perfectly made-up face. ‘She thought it was funny that I hadn’t caught on. That she had to explain that they were one of those couples who get their jollies by going off on sexual adventures and then sharing the juicy details with each other. Tommy even had a blog called “The Sexpeditions of a Salesman” and everything we’d done was recorded there, in lurid detail. The only saving grace was that he’d referred to me as Lily instead of Leah.’
Silently, Ronan took her hand.
She laughed without humour. ‘She described me as a naïve little mouse being played with by two sophisticated, libido-driven, manipulative cats. That she, the strong queen cat, was the one who decided when they were going to move on to fresh prey and Tommy would now simply look around for something else to stalk. The name Tommy was a joking reference to being a tomcat and I hadn’t been given his real name.’
Ronan had become totally, unnervingly, still.
She swallowed, miserably. ‘I went round in a daze for weeks. Then I realised I might be pregnant. Maybe I panicked or perhaps I was immature enough to use the possible pregnancy as an excuse to try and contact Tommy. After all, he hadn’t told me we were over. The woman had. What if it was
all lies, what if she wasn’t even his wife …? I might have paid for pigs to take flying lessons if it would’ve provided an explanation other than Tommy being a lying, cheating creep. So I emailed to tell him that there was a chance he was to be a father.’ Her stomach twisted at the memory of the old humiliation. ‘When the email bounced, I texted, and left voicemail on his phone. Nothing. Then my period arrived so l stopped clinging to pathetic hope and faced the fact that not only was I dumped but he’d changed his contact details so I couldn’t talk to him. I suppose he and his wife were experienced at having their perverted fun then cutting themselves free of possible repercussions.’
Ronan’s hands were tight on hers now, fury darkening his face. ‘The cruel bastards. I can see why you’re so wary! But that was Tommy, Leah. Not me. It’s not how life normally is.’
‘Yeah. I realise.’ Rather than face the sympathy in his eyes she gazed over his shoulder to the long grass and wild flowers, to the hills turning to shadows in the early evening. ‘I grew up a lot after the Tommy episode. And thinking, even for a couple of days, that I was pregnant, taught me something: I like being childfree. I like being unmarried.’
He dropped her hands to slide his arms around her. ‘Nobody says you have to be anything else but–’
Hands against his chest she fended him off, scared to feel him against her in case she couldn’t let him go. ‘But, though a baby wasn’t what I wanted, I would have taken on the role of single mum. I would have done what was best for the baby because it would have deserved it. Like I did my best for Natasha and Jordan these last few weeks. Like you’re going to do what’s best for Curtis.’ A picture of Curtis swirled in her mind’s eye, man-sized but very much a boy. ‘And now you and Selina are sharing a home again, with the son who belongs to both of you, you’ll have to go through the Selina leaving thing all over again.’
Ronan hunched his shoulders. ‘Bullshit. She’s only in my house out of desperation. When she’s straightened herself out, we’ll return to our separate lives.’
Just for the Holidays Page 22