Hendrix stared at the two people in the room. Chloe, steadfastly ignoring him, and Ellie, so sweet and trusting, curled up like a tiny bear on her mum’s stomach. It was as though a blade was slicing through his gut. He looked, and he looked, and he saw for the first time everything that he’d lost.
Because of the past.
He walked slowly, quietly, and crouched in front of Chloe. Still, she kept her gaze focussed out of the window.
Her face was set resolutely, her skin pale. Her hands were shaking slightly as they moved rhythmically over Ellie’s back.
He felt a physical ache to reach up and touch her. As though his arms were being controlled by something other than him. Only a massive burst of willpower kept him from engaging her physically. He looked at Chloe, and all he saw was the broken wings of a beautiful butterfly. Crumpled and damaged. He hoped against hope that her hurt would pass quickly.
Kneeling before her, he could only stare fixedly upon the betrayal that was cloaking her like a shroud. Minutes passed without either of them speaking. Finally, Chloe wrenched her eyes to meet his. And her heart lurched. Her blood thrummed. She looked away again.
“Chloe,” he needed, so desperately, to speak to her. “I was wrong. What I did today was wrong in every way.”
Chloe drew in a shuddering breath. Why bother replying? There was nothing she could say to argue the point. He was right. He had erred in a way that she would never forget. Nor forgive.
Mistaking her silence for a willingness to listen, he continued, “The idea to use you to hurt William came to me out of nowhere. I didn’t know you then. You were just a pawn to me. I told myself that I would still help you divorce him. That you would get what you wanted, and I would get what I wanted. It was a stupid, callous decision, to use you like that. And I will regret it forever.”
Still, Chloe didn’t look at him.
His voice was gravelly, rendered thick from desperation. “When it happened – the accident – I tried everything I could to make him pay. I was fixated for a long time on hurting him. And then, when I thought it was all in the past, and I’d moved on, you walked into my office. Provenance had handed revenge to me on a platter. I wish I had been a strong enough man to employ common sense. But instead, I listened to my heart. A heart long ago turned over to vengeance and grief.” His words were thick with emotion. “A heart you brought back to life, by making me love you, and Ellie.”
Pain was like acid just beneath her skin. “Don’t,” she whispered, finally dragging her wretched gaze back to his face. “Don’t talk to me of love. What you did …” She broke off, her throat too sore to continue the thought. She swallowed. “What you did was the act of a truly hateful, cruel person.”
He winced at the cold rejection in her tone. “I know,” he put a hand on her knee, but she glared at him as though he were burning her. So he released his touch, and felt himself falling through a crack in the earth’s surface. “My sister was …”
“Your sister wouldn’t have wanted this.” Chloe stroked Ellie’s head, loving her and taking love from her at the same time. “If she loved you, and was proud of you, as you’ve told me she was, then she would have been devastated to learn what you’re capable of.”
Hendrix was sinking, lower and lower, towards the earth’s molten core. He was hot and cold, fear and desperation.
“She would have been ashamed of you.”
“Yes,” he agreed, picturing his Ellie’s face for the first time since the whole debacle had begun.
“I’m ashamed of you.”
A muscle moved in his jaw as he absorbed the full force of her rage.
Chloe felt her daughter stir in her arms, and she stood, carrying her through to her room. She settled her in her bed, then gripped the door knob for strength before returning to the lounge.
Hendrix was leaning against the window, his dark gaze lingering on something beyond. Chloe paused across the room from him, not willing to move closer. She fidgeted with her fingers, her blue eyes unable to meet his. “I need you to leave.”
He noted that she didn’t say she wanted him to go, or that she’d like him to go. She needed him to go. And for the second time that day, he was willing to put her needs beneath his own.
“I can’t,” he responded, his voice a deep, throaty promise. He turned to look at her properly, but was at least wise enough to maintain a distance.
“You wanted to use me to hurt William. And you’ve done it. You can’t expect me to assuage your conscience, and make you feel better about being such a monumental asshole.”
“No. I know that’s not possible. But I needed you to know that it wasn’t make-believe. I started off wanting to seduce you to hurt William. I wanted to take someone valuable from him, as he did from me.”
Chloe closed her eyes but the words still hurt, as they soaked into her already desperate heart.
“I’ve had a lot of meaningless sex in the past, Chloe, and I didn’t expect this to be any different. But it was.”
“Because you ‘fell in love’ with me?” She retorted with fiery sarcasm.
“Yes.”
“Bullshit.” Her temper was Medusa like. “If you loved me, you would have told me the truth. You would never have let me find out … like that … in front of a stranger, and my ex-husband … that he cheated on me with your sister. That he got another woman pregnant. That he killed her. That I nursed him better after he’d ended her life. That I named my daughter after his dead lover. Your sister.” The facts of the situation had chased one another around her head all day, and now they were tumbling out of her, like tiny shards of glass digging into the picture of the future she’d been hoping for.
“I thought …” Hendrix groaned and dipped his head forward, dragging his hands through his dark crop of hair.
“Yes?” She tapped her foot impatiently. “What did you think?”
“I kept telling myself that I owed it to Ellie. My Ellie.”
“And what did you owe to me?” She spun away from him, finding it hateful to gaze upon the man she had thought she loved. “God, Hendrix, I welcomed you into my life. I thought you were different. You’re the second man I’ve been with. I married the first. You talk about casual sex as though it’s as easy as buying bread or washing your hands. I don’t do this. I brought my daughter to live with you. And the whole time – when we were making love, and eating dinner together and reading the papers on the couch, and laughing at stupid movies – you were frothing at the mouth, waiting for the chance to wield me as an instrument of revenge.”
“No,” he denied. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t think about it when we were together. I tried to keep it separate in my mind.”
“How lovely of you,” she snapped. Her eyes were stinging. “I need you to go.”
Again, he ignored her request. “I’m telling you I love you, Chloe. I love you and I love Ellie, and I want you in my life. I want to go back.”
“To go back?” She whispered, lifting her fingers to her lips. “We can never go back.” Her stomach rolled with grief. “You asked me to trust you. Again and again, you told me to trust you. And I did.” She turned to him slowly, her face as pale as a sheet of paper. “I would never make that mistake again. I doubt I’ll ever trust anyone again.”
Hendrix could hardly breathe now. The lava was engulfing him. A fine bead of sweat had broken out on his brow. “I fucked up! I’m telling you that. I have hated him for so long that I stopped thinking clearly.”
“Poor you.” She had to be strong. Not just for her, but for her daughter.
“I can’t leave you, Chloe.”
“You will leave me, or you’ll be just as bad as William. I’ve finally broken free of one controlling bastard who used me for his own needs. Don’t tell me I’m going to have to do the same with you.”
The comparison to the man he hated most in the world was the final straw. He stood up straighter and shook his head. “I’m not like him.”
“No,” she agreed wit
h a concise nod. “You are so, so much worse.”
“I love you.”
“So did William,” she shrugged, shocked at how focussed she was being. How easy it was to argue with him when her heart was splintering beyond recognition.
“What can I do to show you how much I need you?”
Chloe straightened her spine. “I don’t frankly care if you need me or not. I’m sick of thinking about other people and their needs. I have spent the last two years devoted to my daughter. And I was happy. I love her. She’s all I need.” She stepped towards him, confident now that she was close to ending it. “And one day, when I’m ready, I might meet someone else. A man who is all of the things I thought you were. Someone who is as kind, and decent, and honourable and trustworthy, as you brilliantly pretended to be. And that’s who’ll deserve me. Not a shadow of that man, like you.”
Hendrix thought he’d scraped rock bottom, but her words proved him wrong.
Because she was completely spot on. She deserved a better man than he was. He closed his eyes against the realisation. “I want to spend the rest of my life being what you need. You talk about being happy? Having you and Ellie with me made me happier than I thought possible. For the first time in my life, I was part of a family. A beautiful family. I fucking loved waking up beside you, and watching movies with you, and watching you while you read the paper, or while you played with Ellie. I loved tickling Ellie until she couldn’t stop giggling. I loved reading her stories and watching In the Night Garden with her, even though it’s seriously psychedelic. I even loved standing on her goddamned Duplo pieces. I lost a piece of my mind when my sister died, and today, I realised just how mad I’d become. How utterly, batshit crazy. It was a train wreck.”
He took another step towards her. “An absolute unmitigated disaster. I heard myself speak, and it was as though I was outside of my body, shouting at myself to stop, to shut up, not to do this. And yet still, I threw it in William’s face, knowing what it would do to you. I’m not stupid enough to hope you’ll forgive me for that. Ever. It’s unforgivable. I’m only asking you to understand that everything else was real. Everything else you felt, and I felt, was separate to that. It was real. It was all real. Every bit of it.”
Chloe’s breath was burning in her lungs. She pulled at her necklace and made a strangled noise of anger. “I can’t listen to this. You’re a great lawyer, and you could probably win any case in the world, but I can’t do this. I should have been smarter after William. But I fell in love with you, and I went too fast. I let things go way too fast. You think you were crazy? That was me. To gamble with my daughter like that … I don’t know what I was thinking. But I had blind hope then. I trusted you. Without trust – which there can never be again – there can’t be love. There can’t be a future. There can’t be anything.”
Hendrix moved to stand directly before Chloe, and his eyes were suspiciously bright. He put his hands on her hips, and she was powerless to move. “Feel me, Chloe. Feel the man standing before you, and tell me you don’t want this. Tell me your heart isn’t screaming at you that we make sense. Despite what happened today.”
“My heart?” She shook her head sadly. “What heart?” For it was broken. Absolutely shattered.
“Please,” he groaned, dipping his head forward and kissing her lips. Her face was wet with tears. “Please give me a chance to earn you back. To at least try to show you that I know how badly I stuffed up. Please leave me just a tiny crack in the door.” He stroked her cheek. “I know we can’t just be what were. But at least don’t close me out completely. I can’t lose you, Chloe.”
She sobbed now, too overwrought to bother hiding it. “You should have thought of that. You can’t have it both ways. You wanted your revenge, and you got it. But you lost me in the process.” She moved out of his reach and dabbed her eyes with fingers. “It’s done. It can’t be undone now, no matter how badly you wish it.”
Hendrix swore under his breath. He paced across the room, and paused just outside the kitchen. “I know I ruined it. I’m just asking for a chance …”
“You don’t deserve one.” She walked passed him and flicked the kettle on. “You didn’t just say the wrong thing, or hurt me by mistake. You set out to seduce me, for the sole purpose of what happened today. You told me to trust you, but you were playing a part the whole way through. You didn’t come to earlier meetings with William because it would ruin your dramatic moment. And so you let me suffer through them without your help. You haven’t been there for me, Hendrix. Not really.” She sloshed boiling water into a cup then fished a peppermint tea bag out of the canister.
“You made a thousand decisions this whole time, and each one was leading up to what happened today. So don’t act as though this wasn’t what you wanted. What you expected.”
His stomach was in knots. “What I want,” he groaned, “would be to take away every bit of hurt you’ve ever felt in life.”
“And when you’re the one who inflicted the worst of it?”
“I want to take it all away. I can’t … I’m lost. I need your help to figure this out. Because I believe, like you, that what we have is worth fighting for.”
“No.” She sipped her tea, pleased when it scalded her tongue, because it took away from the rest of the pain she was feeling. “We have nothing except a stage for disaster. But,” she put her teacup down pensively. “Do you really want to take away my pain? Do you really want to know what you can do to help me heal?”
“Yes,” hope flared in his chest for the first time since arriving at her flat.
“Then I need you to go.” Her eyes had a bleak ache in them. She lifted her fingers to her heart and rubbed, as though it could relieve the painful lurching. “I need you to walk out that door and never, not even if you think your life depends on it, contact me again. Don’t you dare call. Don’t you dare message. Don’t you dare send me flowers, or insult me with any other crappy romantic gestures. I will not let you hurt me again.”
“Chloe…”
“Do you know what I keep thinking about?” She changed the subject swiftly.
“What?” A reprieve? Hope renewed.
“Vous étiez tout ce que je serais attend. You were everything I’d been waiting for.” She closed her eyes. “I thought you meant that you had fallen in love with me at first sight, as I probably had with you. The minute my bag snapped and everything went scattering across your floor…” She shook her head to clear the memory. “Of course, you only meant that you’d been waiting for a chance to get back at William, and I’d come right to you.”
His tone was gravelly. “You were so much more than that.”
She fingered the rim of her teacup. “Not in the end.”
“Yes. In the beginning, the middle and the end. You are everything to me. You and Ellie. Please let me show you.”
“You have shown me. That’s my point. It’s very easy for you to stand here now and use these lovely words to try to convince me that you really are sorry. But you showed me today. You showed me just how you value me today.”
“I …”
“What would you do if Eleanor were alive, and this had happened to her? If some guy had done to Eleanor what you’ve done to me, what would you say? If she was falling madly in love with a man who intended to use her in the most vicious and heartbreaking of ways? If she had fallen in love with a man who knew a dreadful secret about her past, and her marriage, who intended to use that secret against her? What would you tell her to do?”
“Jesus!” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “I know! Everything you’re saying is right. You’re right. I’m not asking you to give me another chance because it’s the smart thing to do. I’m asking you to forgive me because I am in love with you.”
But Chloe had heard all of this before. Not from Hendrix, but from another smooth talking, far too handsome man. “And William?” She pushed, her tone cold now. “When William hit me the first time, and begged me to forgive him? And I did. I forgave hi
m. I believed he was sorry. And it didn’t make sense, but I gave him a second chance. And then, when he hit me again? I forgave him again. I finally learned that someone who hurts you, who’s prepared to hurt you, will always hurt you.”
Hendrix’s skin was ash grey beneath his tan. “I would never hit you.”
“Perhaps not.” Her smile was wan. “But what you did today hurt me far more than William ever did.”
And though he’d loved her for a long time, Hendrix was beginning to understand exactly what a person of value Chloe truly was. She was brave and she was unbreakable, and she was strong beyond belief.
“When I first left William, I bought a poster from the Seventh Street markets. It said, She needed a Hero, and so she became one. I hung it above my bed so that it was the first thing I saw in the mornings and the last thing I looked at each night.” Her eyes locked to Hendrix’s earnestly. “I wasn’t going to be a victim ever again. And I was going to teach my daughter that lesson too, by making good decisions.” Chloe’s voice snagged on unexpected tears. She pressed a hand into his chest, feeling his warmth and hating that she had to push him away. “I do love you, Hendrix. But I need to be rescued from you, and what you can do to me. I’m being my own hero.”
He wanted to beg her to be his hero, too. To rescue him from the wreckage he’d wrought from the most beautiful relationship he’d ever experienced. But he knew he loved her enough not to do it. He stroked her cheek gently, and then took a physical and mental step back. “You are the meaning of my life. If you ever change your mind, I will be waiting for you. If you ever need anything, I will be here for you. I will never forget you, and I will never stop wanting you. You will always be the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”
He kissed her forehead and left, before he lost the strength to do the one honourable thing he could.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The silence had become a deafening drone. His loft was a cavity, devoid of life and love now that Ellie and Chloe were no longer there. Every single room taunted him with the memories of what they’d had. What he’d had.
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