Page 60 of Bedding his Innocent Mistress

“You know, when you walked out on me, I was so devastated. I really did love you.” She dropped her hands from the coffee, resting them in her lap. “But it wasn’t … the right kind of love. It wasn’t a grown-up, I can’t live without you love. It was a love of familiarity and gratitude and convenience.” She shook her head slowly. “I think you know that, and I think you knew it then. I think it’s why you left me. I’m… I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m glad you ended it, Steve. You had the courage to face up to something I would have kept ignoring.” She reached for her bag, pulling out a ten pound note and dropping it onto the table. “I don’t want to be with you. I … want you to be happy, I really do, but our relationship is ancient history. And… I think that’s a good thing.”

She burst out of the café as though she’d run a marathon, sucking in the cool morning’s air as she simultaneously lifted a hand skywards. A cab pulled over almost instantly.

She gave Rafe’s address, a pang of panic and despair making her lean forward in the seat the whole way, watching as London crunched past, until finally, his building loomed into sight.

“Thank you,” she said breathlessly, tapping her credit card against the reader and stepping out.

She tapped her fingers against her hip the whole elevator ride into the heavens, thinking of how often she’d made this trip now, always so full of anticipation and pleasure. How happy she’d been knowing she was going to see Rafe.

And how badly she’d screwed up with him; how badly she’d hurt him.

She pressed the buzzer to his apartment, with no idea what she would say to him, how she could tell him how badly she’d behaved, how sorry she was. She wanted, more than anything, to go back in time to two days earlier. She wanted to slam the door in Steve’s face when he’d arrived, and to push him from her mind once and for all.

But maybe it had taken this for her to realise that. Maybe she had to have every option open to her to see which one she wanted.

She made a groaning noise of impatience, banging on the door harder now, before resting her forehead against it. Tears slid down her cheeks.

She stayed like that for several minutes, waiting, listening, hoping. But it was no good.

She swore softly and turned around, moving back towards the elevator. She’d call him. She lifted her phone from her pocket and jabbed the lift button impatiently.

When it opened, it wasn’t empty. One of Rafe’s drivers emerged, his expression as implacable as always.

But Ivy didn’t care that the man’s face hardly invited conversation.

“Oh!” She exclaimed, knowing she must look like a wreck and unable to mind. “Please! Do you know where Rafe is?”

The man was wary, but apparently, he sensed Ivy’s desperation because after a beat, he said, “Mr Santoro flew to Spain last night.”

Ivy squeezed her eyes shut. “Thank you.”

Just the thought of Rafe on a different land-mass, a flight away, made her lurch painfully. But she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She had to go back in time – and because she couldn’t, she would fix the mistakes of the past. She would reach for her own future, the future she wanted. “Thank you,” she said again, breathlessly, stepping into the lift and pressing the button for the ground.

She was almost jumping out of her skin with impatience by the time it pulled to a stop. She jogged out of the elevator, across the foyer of the apartment building, and through the sliding glass doors.

There were always taxis nearby and it only took a minute or two for Ivy to flag one down. “Heathrow,” she said hurriedly, and lifted her phone out, using a flight app to scan airfares. There was nothing for several hours, and it would mean two connecting flights, but she didn’t care.

Rafe was at the end of those flights, he was at Diego, the beautiful Spanish house with the vines that kissed the sand and sea, and she would be there with him soon. Nothing mattered more than that.

*

The sun was low in the sky when she drove the car through the gates to his estate. After several hair-raising moments, driving on the wrong side of the road and taking mistaken turn-offs, she’d finally remembered the way – no mean feat given her general lack of navigational sensibility.

She held her breath the whole way up the winding hill, her eyes torn between the house and the vines, desperate for a sign of Rafe.

She had barely stopped the engine before she was alighting, running to the house and banging on the door. There was no answer. She knocked again, then pushed the doors inwards and tore through the house, looking from room to room, her heart clutching when he wasn’t there.

The driver had said Rafe had come to Spain, but didn’t he have an apartment somewhere else? What if he wasn’t here? What if the driver was wrong?

Ivy spun around, knowing, deep in her heart, that wasn’t the case. He was here somewhere.

She was running on autopilot, through the vines, down the hill, towards the sea, looking left and right as she went. And when she didn’t see him, she called for him, “Rafe!” Loud and full of her desperate, aching hope.

“Rafe?”

Where was he? Panic was flooding her, anger, despair, desperation. “Rafe?”

Her feet landed on the sand and she kicked her shoes off, looking up and down the beach until finally – yes. It was him.

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