скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Not really. Why don’t we just draw a line under it and start again? As you said, it was warmer today. It’ll thaw soon. We just have to get through the next day or two. I’m sure we can manage that.’
‘I’m sure we can. I thought you might be hungry, so I threw something together.’ He cut the sandwiches in quarters as he spoke, stacked them on a plate and put them on a tray. Glasses, side plates, cheese, a slab of fruit cake and the remains of lunchtime’s bottle of Rioja followed, and he picked the tray up and walked towards her. ‘Open the door?’
She opened it, followed him to the sitting room and sat down. This was so awkward. All of it, everything, was so awkward, pretending that it was all OK and being civilised when all they really wanted to do was yell at each other.
Or make love.
‘George, don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
He sat down on the other sofa, opposite her, and held her eyes with his. ‘Don’t look like that. I know it’s difficult. I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, I’ve just made it more uncomfortable, but—we were good friends once, Georgie—’
‘We were lovers,’ she said bluntly, and he smiled sadly.
‘We were friends, too. We should be able to talk to each other in a civilised manner. We managed last night.’
‘That was before you kissed me again.’
He sighed and rammed his hand through his hair, and she began to feel sorry for it.
‘The kiss was nothing,’ he said shortly, ‘you know that, you said so yourself. And I’m sorry it upset you. It just seemed—right. Natural. The obvious thing to do. We were playing, and then there you were, right under the mistletoe, and—well, I just acted on impulse. It really, really won’t happen again. I promise.’
She didn’t challenge him on that. He’d promised to love her forever, and he’d driven her away. She knew about his promises. And hers weren’t a lot better, because she’d promised to love him, too, and she’d left him.
What a mess. Please, please thaw so we can get away from him...
She reached for a sandwich and bit into it, and he sat forward, pouring the wine and sliding a glass towards her.
‘You didn’t tell me what you thought of this wine at lunch.’
‘Is it important?’
He shrugged. ‘In a way. I’ve got shares in the bodega. It’s a good vintage. I just wondered if you liked it.’
‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ She sipped, giving it thought. ‘It goes well with the goose and the cranberries. It is nice—really nice, although if it’s fiendishly expensive it’s wasted on me. I could talk a lot of rubbish about it being packed with plump, luscious fruit and dark chocolate with a long, slow finish because I watch the television, but I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. But it is nice. I like it.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t need to know anything else. You just need to know what you like and what you don’t like, and I like my wines soft. Rounded. Full of plump, luscious fruit,’ he said, and there was something in his eyes that made her catch her breath and remember the gaping towel.
She looked hastily away, grabbing another sandwich and making a production of eating it, and he sat back and worked his way down a little pile of them, and for a while there was silence.
‘So,’ he said, breaking it at last, ‘what’s the plan for your house? You say you can’t sell it at the moment, but what will you do when you have? Buy another? Rent?’
‘Move back home.’
‘Home? As in, come back and live with your parents?’
‘Yes. I’ll have childcare on tap, they’ll get to see lots of Josh and I can work for my boss as easily here as I can in Huntingdon.’
He nodded, but there was a little crease between his eyebrows, the beginnings of a frown. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have your independence?’
She put down the shredded crusts of her sandwich and sighed. ‘Well, of course, and I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t feel like independence, really, not with Josh. It’s just difficult. Every day’s an uphill struggle to get everything done, hence watching the television when I’m too tired to work any more. There’s no adult to talk to, I’m alone all day and all night except for the company of a two-year-old, and after he’s in bed it’s just lonely.’
The frown was back. ‘He’s very good company though when he is around. He’s a great little kid.’
‘He is, but his conversation is a wee bit lacking.’
Sebastian chuckled and reached for his wine. ‘We don’t seem to be doing so well, either.’
‘So what do you want to talk about? Politics? The economy? Biogenetics? I can tell you all about that.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘A bit. I don’t really do anything any more. I just collate stuff for them and check for research trials and see if I can validate them. Some are a bit sketchy. It’s an interesting field, genetic engineering, and it’s going to be increasingly useful in medicine and agriculture in the future.’
‘Tell me.’
So she talked about her work, about what her professor was doing at the moment, what they’d done, and what she’d been studying for her PhD before she’d had to abandon it.
‘Would you like to finish it?’ he asked, and she rolled her eyes.
‘Of course! But I can’t. I’ve got Josh now. I have other priorities.’
‘But later?’
She shrugged. ‘Later might be too late. Things move on, and what I was researching won’t be relevant any longer. Things move so fast in genetics, so that what wasn’t possible yesterday will be commonplace tomorrow. Take the use of DNA tests, for example. It’s got all sorts of forensic and familial implications that simply couldn’t have been imagined not that long ago, and now it’s just accepted.’
His heart thumped.
‘Familial implications? Things like tracing members of your family?’ he suggested, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. It can be used to prove that people are or aren’t related, it can tell you where in the world you’ve come from, where your distant ancestors came from—using mitochondrial DNA, which our bodies are absolutely rammed with, most Europeans can be traced back down the female line to one of a handful of women if you go back enough thousands of years. It’s incredible.’
But not infallible. Not if you didn’t know enough to start with. And not clever enough to give a match to someone who’d never been tested or had their DNA stored on a relevant database. He knew all about that and its frustrations.
Tell her.
‘So, tell me about this bodega,’ she said, settling back with a slab of fruitcake and a chunk of cheese, and he let the tension ease out of him at the change of subject.
‘The bodega?’
‘Mmm. I’ve decided it’s a rather nice wine. I might have some more when I’ve finished eating. I’m not sure it’d go with cake and cheese.’
‘I’m not sure cake and cheese go together in the first place.’
‘You are joking?’ She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. ‘You’re not joking. Try it.’
She held out the piece of cake with the cheese perched on top, the marks made by her even teeth clear at the edge of the bite, and he leant in and bit off the part her mouth had touched.
He felt something kick in his gut, but then the flavour burst through and he sat back and tried to concentrate on the cake and cheese combo and not the fact that he felt as if he’d indirectly kissed her.
‘Wow. That is actually rather nice.’
She rolled her eyes again. ‘You are so sceptical. It’s like ham and pineapple, and lamb and redcurrant jelly.’
‘Chalk and cheese.’
‘Now you’re just being silly. I thought you liked it?’
‘I do.’ He cut himself a chunk of both and put them together, mostly so he didn’t have to watch her bite off the bit his own teeth had touched.
Hell. How could it be so ridiculously erotic?
‘So—the bodega?’
‘Um. Yeah.’ He groped for his brain and got it into gear again, more or less, and told her all about it—about how he’d been driving along a quiet country road and he’d broken down and a man had stopped to help him.
‘He turned out to be the owner of the bodega. He took me back there and contacted the local garage, and while we waited we got talking, and to cut a long story short I ended up bailing them out.’
‘That was a good day’s business for them.’
He chuckled. ‘It wasn’t a bad one for me. I stumbled on it by accident, I now own thirty per cent, and they’re doing well. They’ve had three good vintages on the trot, I get a regular supply of wine I can trust, and we’re all happy.’
‘And if it’s a bad year?’
‘Then we’ve got the financial resilience to weather it.’
Or he had, she thought. They’d been lucky to find him.
‘Where is it?’ she asked. ‘Does Rioja have to come from a very specific region?’
‘Yes. It’s in northern Spain. They grow a variety of grapes—it’s a region rather than a grape variety, and they use mostly Tempranillo which gives it that lovely softness.’
He opened another bottle, a different vintage, and as he told her about it, about how they made it, the barrels they used, the effect of the climate, he stopped thinking about her mouth and what it would be like to kiss her again, and began to relax and just enjoy her company.
He didn’t normally spend much time like this, and certainly not with anyone as interesting and restful to be with as Georgie. Not nearly enough, he realised. He was too busy, too harassed, too driven by the workload to take time out. And that was a mistake.
Hence why he’d turned off his mobile phone and ignored it for the last twenty-four hours. It was Christmas. He was allowed a day off, and he intended to take advantage of every minute of it. Tomorrow would come soon enough.
He peeled a satsuma from the bowl and threw it to her, and peeled himself another one, then they cracked some nuts and threw the shells in the fire and watched it die down slowly.
It seemed as if neither of them wanted to move, to call it a night, to do anything to disturb the fragile truce, and so they sat there, staring into the fire and talking about safe subjects.
Uncontroversial ones, with no bones of contention, no trigger points, no sore spots, as if by mutual agreement. They talked about his mother’s heart attack, her father’s retirement plans, his plans for the restoration of the walled garden, and gradually the fire died away to ash and it grew chilly in the room.
‘I ought to go up and make sure Josh is all right,’ she said, although the baby monitor was there on the table and hadn’t done more than blink a couple of times, just enough so they knew it was working.
But he didn’t argue, because they were running out of safe topics and it was better to quit while they were winning and before he did something stupid like kiss her.
He got to his feet, gathered up their glasses and put them on the tray with the plates, made sure the fire guard was secure and carried the tray through to the kitchen.
She was getting herself a glass of water, and he put the tray down beside the sink and turned towards her.
‘Got everything you need?’
No, she thought. She needed him, but he wasn’t good for her, and she certainly hadn’t been good for him. Not in the long term. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, and then hesitated.
His eyes were unreadable, but the air was thick with tension. It would have been so natural, so easy to lean in and kiss him goodnight.
So dangerous.
So tempting...
She paused in the doorway and looked back, and he was watching her, his face shuttered.
‘Thank you for today,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s been really lovely. Really lovely. Josh has had a brilliant time, and so’ve I.’
‘Even the kiss?’
She laughed softly. ‘There was never any doubt about your kisses, Sebastian. None at all.’
‘Wrong place, wrong time?’ he suggested, and she shook her head.
‘Wrong time.’
‘And the place?’
‘You can never go back,’ she said simply, and with a sad smile, she closed the door and left him standing there in what should have been their kitchen, gazing after the woman he still loved but knew he’d lost forever.
‘Damn,’ he said softly.
It was a fine time to discover that he still wanted her, that he still loved her, that he should have done more to stop her leaving. But his head had been in the wrong place then, and hers was now.
You should have told her.
He should. But he hadn’t, and now wasn’t the time.
It was too late. She’d moved on, and so had he.
Hadn’t he?
He poured himself another glass of wine and left the kitchen, retreating into his study and the thing that kept him sane. Work. Always work. The one constant in his life.
He turned his phone on, and it beeped at him furiously as the emails and messages came pouring in. Even on Christmas Day. He was obviously not the only workaholic, he thought drily, and then he opened them.
Greetings. Christmas greetings from family, friends, work colleagues.
And he’d meant to contact all of them, and so far had only rung his immediate family.
