Page 39 of A Bed of Broken Promises

It took a huge effort to move his legs but he closed the distance between them. He lifted his hand and ran his finger down the soft flesh of her cheek, but she jumped back, as though he’d tried to burn her.

“Don’t you ever touch me,” she said, her voice high pitched. “I can’t bear it.”

He looked confused; lost. A bit like Maxie sometimes when he woke up in the middle of the night and wasn’t sure if he was still in his dream or back in the real world.

“What’ve I done?”

“Don’t. Don’t play the innocent. You knew what you were doing from the moment you knocked on my door.”

“It wasn’t like that. I did not plan this.”

She rolled her eyes. “Stop it! Don’t treat me like an idiot. Even more than you already have done.”

“Why did you go there? To his house?”

She shook her head convulsively. “Can you believe I wanted to tell you that I loved you?”

He closed his eyes, his face was grey beneath his tan. “God…this is worse than I thought.”

“Oh, yeah, I can believe that now.” She looked around his apartment, for the first time taking in the deluxe fittings, the expensive furniture, the carpet so thick it was like standing on a cloud. “What a joke. For you, bloody you, to be slumming it with a single mum from the south of England. How you must have laughed at me! And I thought we were meant to be together, despite that awful last night.”

He shook his head, pain immediately searing the back of his eyes. “I didn’t laugh at you, Katie.”

She felt sadness run through her at the futility of it all. As Andrew walked back into the room, carrying a couple of mugs of coffee , she clawed into her hand bag.

“Here.” She pulled out the slightly dog-eared paper she’d been carrying around all week. “Here’s your bloody contract. Wadeford House is yours. I hope you think it was worth the cost.”

She didn’t even bother to acknowledge Andrew as she fled from the apartment, but when she heard footsteps on the ground behind her, she was disappointed to see it was him, and not Marcus. “Hey, wait up! Look, about my brother. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened between you, but if it’s any consolation, I’ve never seen him like this. Not even when we lost Bryan.”

She shrugged, miserably. “No consolation, no.”

“It’s Iraq. It messed him up.”

She expelled a long breath. She wanted to know. She was desperate to know. But she was above asking Andrew for information. If she just wanted to know the deal, she could probably find it on the internet. She had wanted Marcus to trust her enough to confide in her. And that horse had bolted.

When Roberto had left her, she’d thought she was miserable. But it was nothing compared to this sense of soul-destroying grief. Because even though she thought he was the worst kind of liar, and even though she’d seen for herself that he’d picked up his bachelor lifestyle in the blink of an eye, she still couldn’t hate him. And that made her hate herself. Because he deserved nothing from her. Nothing. Not sympathy. Not lust. Not longing.

She told herself that for the whole next day, while she tried to get through a normal weekend with her mum and some London friends. But still, he was there, in her mind. The whole drive south, with Maxie curled up asleep in the back, and only staticky radio for company, she thought of him. And when she returned to the home that had started it all – the home she’d sold to him – she couldn’t help but think of him. He was everywhere.

The sofa they’d sat on, night after night, kissing like a couple of high school teenagers in the throes of their first hormonal romance. The kitchen they’d shared breakfasts in. The bathroom they’d had their fight in. And he was in the pictures she had taken, staring back at her. And while she knew she should have deleted them, she couldn’t. It was like scratching an itch, except infinitely more painful. His beautiful face, before she knew that it was a face capable of such deception, stared artlessly into her camera, and those eyes were so filled with passion that even now, through the veil of time, they took her breath away.

“Maxie,” Katie balled her fists by her side the morning after they’d returned from London. His little face looked up at her earnestly, but his fingers kept twitching with the Lego pieces in his lap, and she knew his mind was focused on reattaching the light saber to Luke Skywalker’s little Lego paw. “Maxie,” she said again, kneeling down in front of him and taking his hands in hers.

“Yeah?”

“Darling, I have something to tell you. Something exciting, I think.”

“What is it, mummy?” His eyes lit up at the mention of excitement and she cringed inwardly. No doubt he expected a promise to an ice cream parlor or something, not the news she was about to deliver.

“I’ve decided it’s time for us to have a change. Maybe move a bit closer to Grandma Rose. What do you think?”

His brows knitted together as he digested her sentence. “Like a holiday?”

“More permanent than that.” She

cleared her throat awkwardly. “You remember David, who stayed with us a few weeks ago?” God, how had she managed to sound normal? Her pulse was racing at the memory.

“Yeah. I liked him. He was fun.”

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