Page 25 of The Price of Love
I wriggled again, aware of his gaze leaving the road to play hotly over my exposed legs. Slowly and deliberately I bent one knee and rested a high heel on the edge of the seat so that the dress fell away to reveal the tiny thong I’d chosen purposefully to go under it. ‘Sounds delicious.’
We broke the speed limit all the way to Pickering.
Chapter Thirteen
When Luke dropped me back at the house, it was past midnight, and Flint had gone to bed, which was just as well. My asymmetric dress was now far more asymmetric than it had been when I left, more creased and crumpled, too. My knickers were in my bag and one of the pink heels was decidedly wonky. But it had, all in all, been a very satisfactory experience.
As I turned to push the door closed behind me my foot slipped across the doormat and I sprawled untidily into an attack of the splits. Hauling myself to my feet, I found that I had stepped onto an envelope, the resulting lack of friction being the cause of my skid.
It was plain brown, no name or address, the sort of envelope pushed through unwary letterboxes by door-to-door double-glazing hitmen, or those selling unspecified insurance, although those missives were usually unsealed and addressed to The Householder. The absence of any identifying name made me wonder, so I slid a finger under the flap and tore it open.
‘You can’t have everything you want.’
That was all the sheet of paper said, the words written in large, curly letters, like the handwriting of a fifteen-year-old girl who has only recently stopped dotting her i’s with little love-hearts and forming the lower loops of g’s and y’s into spirals.
Paranoia bit deep. What couldn’t I have? Yeah, I’d got the money, but that was properly mine. The only other thing I had was my job, but not even the very bitterest of disillusioned hacks would hold that against me. Managing ads for the local free press is a bit like pole-dancing, but without the healthy exercise.
My hand shook. I felt a kind of shame at receiving such an obvious and tangible form of someone’s hatred, and I had the urge to tear the paper into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. Then, as I became numb to fear, it was replaced bya curious elation. Why, exactly, did I assume this note was for me? But then, that begged the question, who was it for? Had Flint’s sudden urge to throw up his extremely lucrative Beijing post and replace it with skulking under a skylight and playing The Smiths been the result of a misplaced love affair? The script looked feminine, but that didn’t really mean much, and some of Ash’s scorned exes had been given to snidey little notes like this. A little voice in my head whispered that I’d never seen Cal’s handwriting, although I couldn’t imagine anyone less the type to send anonymous letters than Cal. He’d just be weird at you until you took out a restraining order.
No, I decided. No one could be harmed by a note they hadn’t even seen and I became surer by the second that it wasn’t aimed at me. In fact, I thought as I lurched up to bed in my one-and-a-half stilettos, maybe it wasn’t even aimed at this house. Neither we, nor next door, where three young science teachers lived in a hotbed of physics intrigue, had conspicuous numbers. By the time I’d showered and fallen into bed, I was absolutely convinced that the whole thing was a complete mistake.
Having been spark out at one a.m., I was a bit confused to find myself wide awake and sweating at three.
I was gettingmarried? How the hell had that happened? My treacherously anti-sleep brain replayed the proposal moment over and over again, with added close-ups. And I’dsaid yes!Did I even want to get married? My parents had never bothered, drilling into us that ‘marriage was a symptom of the patriarchal oppression of women’ — because of their views Bree and Paddy had married secretly in the Caribbean. I’d been grateful about that, it had spared me the ordeal of being the dumpy bridesmaid among their tall, elegant friends. Were my fantasies — closely guarded since I’d entered my teens — of a big wedding and a future brood of children playing outdoors in a sort of Blytonesque 1950s style, really just my way of rebelling? It hadbeen quite hard to rebel against Iain and Sophie’s permissive parenting, maybe Bree and I had chosen the same path? Now my reading material was made up of articles on outdoor catering and big pictures of spot-free women wearing whipped cream and curtains. It wasn’t natural.
I turned onto a cool patch of sheet.
We’d only been dating for, well, since we only usually met in the evenings, but factoring in the weekend in the Lakes,hours. But he said he knew, said he’d known from the moment he set eyes on me again in the Grape and Sprout, that I was The One. And how could henotbe The One for me when he’d been my obsession throughout my twenties?
My heart was steadying now. After all, it wasn’t some nobody from the back of beyond. It wasLuke Fryasking me to marry him. He of the violet black eyes and the sexiest little bottom this side of aStrictly Come Dancingprofessional. How could we fail? He loved me with, let’s face it, quite a lot of passion. And I loved him with . . .did I?Oh, yes, I loved him. How could I not? Of course I did, with a ten-year back-catalogue of longing. The sex was great, we laughed, when we did laugh, at more or less the same things, we both wanted our lives to be a success — compatibility was assured.
With this thought comforting my mind, I turned onto my side and floated off into fluffy dreams of white dresses and rose petals and Luke inexplicably taking close-up photographs of me.
Chapter Fourteen
The next week further advanced my opinion that Luke and I were right together. He rang me at work several times a day, and the real clincher was thathe didn’t ring to say anything. I got the collywobbles every time the phone rang now, thinking of him standing in the midst of the showroom renovation (apparently the place was a wreck) thinking of me enough to whip out that cutting edge phone and dial, to say hi and exchange no factual information at all.
Katie, of course, was mad-on jealous and now refused to answer the phone on the grounds that it was bound to be some limpid-eyed man wanting to simper at me. I thought she was being grossly unfair because the only men ever to call were Luke and occasionally Cal, whom she’d never met, and was therefore not in any position to pass opinion on the limpidity of his eyes, which I had at first taken to be an insult until I got home and wrestled my dictionary down from the shelf, to find that I had been thinking of limpets.
‘What onearthwould I be meaning, saying “limpet eyes”?’ Katie asked. It was our usual Friday night and we were well stuck into anything that came in a bottle in the Grape and Sprout. Which was rather a lot. Jazz swore they sold bottled spit to visitors.
‘How should I know? That’s just what I thought you said.’
‘Could be kind of, you know, sticky, hanging on to you like limpets hang on rocks.’ This was Jazz’s contribution.
‘Luke does not have sticky eyes,’ I pouted. ‘He’s wonderful. In fact, he’s taking me away for the weekend again in a few weeks, that’s how wonderful he is. Cornwall, before you say anything.’
Katie made a face. ‘So, how come he’s never around at weekends? He’s all over you all week and then come Friday nighthe vanishes, unless he’s whisking you away to some expensive hotel, where the only view you get to see is the bedroom ceiling.’
Jazz made a ‘that’s not fair’ noise in his throat, his mouth being full of beer.
‘He works all day at weekends.’ I poured myself a hefty glass of wine. ‘Sometimes he goes back to Wales to visit his dad.’ Katie and Jazz gave each other A Look, and I turned down the corner of my mental page to bookmark this for future reference. ‘Or sometimes he has to go to Boston to check up on James. He knows that I’ve got stuff that needs catching up with at weekends, too. So we’ve agreed, for now, to keep our weekends apart.’
Katie sniffed. ‘When Dan proposed to me, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight until we’d got up that aisle.’
‘Yeah, but you were living in that tiny little house in Acomb at the time. Hecouldn’tget out of your sight, not without climbing into the understairs cupboard.’
‘So why aren’t you and Luke moving in together yet? Surely you’re not going to marry him without living with him for a while first? That’s so old-fashioned, it’s . . .’ She groped for the right word. ‘Well, actually it’s quite sensible. That way you’re safely hitched before the disillusionment can sink in.’
