Page 29 of All We Want for Christmas
His forehead furrowed in surprise. ‘You don’t have to share anything about your personal life that you don’t want to.’
‘I know, but when you told me about your ex and the way she wasn’t what you thought – that she’d been keeping secrets … Well, I didn’t say anything at the time because it touched a nerve with me. We probably have more in common than you think.’
‘We do?’ Intrigue lit his eyes.
‘I was seeing someone while I was at my previous job. He was the lord of the manor, to be honest. Literally.’ She sighed. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
Flynn winced and said, ‘Ouch.’
‘Yes. Ouch.’ She paused, recalling the pain, and the effects that had lingered far longer than she’d ever expected. Hopes crushed. Dreams shattered. A loss that she hadn’t thought she deserved to mourn. She could never forget her mother’s well-meaning words when she broke the news that she was leaving the manor and why.
‘That’s love,’ her mother had said, kindly.
Yet Lara doubted it had been love – and definitely not on Rob’s side – and if sacrificing her independence and having her heart shattered was the price of that kind of ‘love’, she wasn’t sure she could ever risk it again.
‘You don’t have to tell me this if it’s making you feel bad,’ Flynn said, his words like a soothing balm on a raw wound.
‘It isn’t making me feel bad to tell you. The way I was treated at the time made me feel bad. Remembering it used to make me feel worse, but you were honest and open with me about Abi and I held back in the café. I want you to know what happened.’Some of what happened …Lara felt she should return his trust by sharing some of her own story, but she was still determined to keep back one part that still felt too raw to reveal. She wasn’t sure Flynn would or even could understand.
‘Rob’s family had owned the place since the seventeenth century and he’d inherited the title. He was a baronet: SirRobert, to give him his full title, and I promise you he liked to use it. I was only allowed to call him Rob when we were on our own. Not in front of the staff or visitors.’
Flynn snorted in contempt. ‘He sounds like a right tit.’
‘He did turn out to be a bit of a tit. I wouldn’t say we were going out officially, because he didn’t want to go public, but we were very close.’
It had meant sleeping together and going out for dinner or lunch from time to time when they could both get away and Rob thought no one would see them. That had seemed romantic at the time. Clandestine, a thrill … Lara was in love with him.
‘After a while I began to get fed up with having to creep around as if our relationship was shameful. I couldn’t see why Rob wouldn’t go public about us. He said enough of the right things in private to make me believe he was serious about me.’
In fact, he’d as good as proposed. He’d told her he’d love to spend the rest of his life with her. He’d even joked about walking her up the aisle at the family chapel and whether his dog – a golden retriever, obviously – could be a bridesmaid.
Flynn cut gently into her thoughts. ‘This doesn’t end well, does it?’
‘It depends on what you define by an ending,’ she said. ‘I certainly didn’t get the kind of happy ending I’d expected. Perhaps that was my big mistake: expecting anything of Rob. I’d been there two years, and we’d been seeing each other for eighteen months, and he kept saying we’d be a great partnership – which I took to mean as a couple, as …life partners.’ She stopped and took a breath. ‘Then he went away for four weeks to manage some business interests in Dubai.’
‘Business interests?’ Flynn echoed. ‘They sound dodgy.’
‘They were – kind of. The day he came back, he called me into his study and said he had something important to say. I thought – well, let’s not dwell on what I thought. What he wanted to tell me was that he was engaged to the daughter of a business acquaintance.’
It was the same day that Lara had also planned to share some news with him. It was news she never got to tell him, but perhaps, in the end, that had been a good thing. He might not have believed her anyway. Time had helped her realise that.
‘Engaged? And he’d never mentioned this other woman before?’
‘It turned outIwas the other woman – not her,’ Lara said. ‘Rob told me they’d been university friends and they’d dated before I started working at the manor, but they’d split up when she’d moved to Dubai.’ She halted because telling Flynn was like probing at a freshly healed wound: the shock and disbelief of that conversation, standing in front of his desk while he sat behind it, barely able to meet her eye. All the time bearing her own secret. ‘He said that while they’d been together in Dubai, they’d realised they should never have broken up and they’d decided to get married.’
‘Tit is too good a word for him! How did he have the balls? Actually, it sounds like he had no balls.’
Despite the painful memories, Lara managed a smileat Flynn’s attempt at sympathy. Rob may have had noble ancestors, and Flynn humble ones, but, ironically, it was Flynn who was the true gentleman. ‘He said that one of the reasons he’d never got round to asking me to “formalise” things was that he was worried he was still on the rebound from his ex. He thought it was a good thing we’d never made things public, because it would have made things so much harder for me.’
‘People make up any excuse to justify their actions when it suits them. What a tosser.’
‘I’ve come to realise that now, but, for a long time, it hurt.’ She’d shed so many tears lying in her bed in her cottage on the estate, knowing that Rob was withher– his fiancée. ‘What really hurt, though, was when he told me it might be less painful for me if I were to look for a new opportunity elsewhere.’
‘The bastard.’ Flynn snorted in contempt.
‘Yes. I felt I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book or that I was living in some cheesy historical saga where the hired help falls for the lord of the manor and he lets her down. Except fortunately these days we have a thing called education.’
‘He still forced you to move jobs, though,’ Flynn said.
