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‘I think you’d better go.’
She needed space. Time. Privacy to examine the wounds, the scars of which had just been ripped off.
‘Not until you tell me what’s the matter.’
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ she said flatly. ‘You got what you wanted. Now go.’
He blanched at the bite of her tone. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t wait.’
As if that was what was upsetting her. ‘Forget it.’
‘No.’
‘Look, I was wrong,’ she said, bracing herself and looking up at him. ‘This was a mistake. An awful mistake that should never have happened and now I’d really like it if you went. Please.’
He must have heard the finality in her voice, must have sensed her weariness or something else, because for a long time he just looked at her. Then he nodded. ‘OK, fine,’ he said with a frown. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
And with that, he turned on his heel, opened the door and left.
* * *
Lily was avoiding him. That was the only explanation for it.
Kit sat at his desk in his office in the penthouse apartment of his London flagship hotel and the place he called home, and glowered at his phone, which might have been broken for all the use it had been so far.
All morning he’d been trying to get hold of her, but infuriatingly her home landline just rang and rang before the answer machine eventually kicked in, and her mobile went straight to voicemail. The brief email he’d fired off asking her to call him had also gone annoyingly unanswered.
Rubbing a hand along his jaw, Kit reflected back to the way things had ended last night and thought he could sort of understand why Lily might not want to speak to him. He’d had the time of his life and she hadn’t. She must have been disappointed. Frustrated. Exhausted. It had sounded as if she’d had a busy night even before he’d shown up, and what with such an anticlimax perhaps everything had simply got too much.
In his albeit out-of-date experience, Lily’s way of dealing with an emotional overload had always been to shut down, so actually the way she’d responded hadn’t been all that unusual.
Nor had the way he’d responded to her. As he’d done so often in the past, he’d given her the space he thought she needed and left her to it, even though he hadn’t really wanted to.
But that wasn’t the right way to play it. With hindsight it probably never had been. It was entirely possible that the fact that she’d always withdrawn whenever things had got too heavy going and he’d basically let her, under the guise of giving her space, was how things had got so bad so quickly between them.
He should have been firmer all those years ago and insisted that they face things together, however hard. Lily had been right when she’d said that they’d neither talked nor listened; they hadn’t.
Well, whatever had happened in the past, things were going to be different now, he thought, clicking on his inbox for the dozenth time in as many minutes to see if she’d replied. Now he was going to insist on both talking and listening, and that was why her going off grid was so frustrating.
Because apart from deciding that their inability to communicate needed to be fixed, over the course of the night he’d been struck by a truckload of realisations, reached a dozen new conclusions and had come up with a whole load of questions, some of which he wouldn’t mind putting to her.
Such as, what had Lily meant by saying that if he’d asked she might have given him an apology for what she’d done? Why had she let him think that she was going out with someone when she wasn’t? And why the abrupt change in her demeanour in the minutes before he left? One minute she’d been all warm and soft and then next she’d gone all cold and frigid on him, and he wanted to know why.
Mainly, though, he’d realised that whatever he felt for her, and whatever she felt for him, they weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
Setting his jaw, Kit reached for the phone again and was about to hit the redial button when he paused as a thought occurred to him. Despite it being a public holiday, maybe Lily was at work. Maybe that was why there was no answer from home. Maybe she was on the tube and her mobile out of range of a signal. Maybe she was in a meeting. It could be that she wasn’t avoiding him. Merely busy.
Filling with renewed resolve, he looked up her company’s details then punched the number into his phone and sat back to wait while it rang. His stomach churned and his mouth went dry, but that was probably down to the fact that it had been a while since his last coffee and he’d been too preoccupied to bother with breakfast.
‘MMS, good morning.’
‘Zoe?’ he said, recognising the voice of his former sister-in-law.
‘Yes. How can I help?’
‘It’s Kit.’
There was a long silence. Then a faint, ‘Oh.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Yes. Good... Kind of surprised to hear from you, to be honest.’
‘It’s been a while.’
‘You can say that again. How are you?’
‘Fine. Happy New Year.’
‘You too.’ She paused. ‘So...were you after Lily?’
‘Is she there?’
‘No. But then I’m at home. The office is closed today so your call was diverted to my mobile.’
‘Right.’ He frowned. That blew his theory that Lily was at work out of the water. Of course she wasn’t. Who was? It was New Year’s Day. So was she avoiding him after all?
‘Is there a problem or something?’ asked Zoe and he snapped back to the conversation.
‘She’s not answering either of her phones or replying to emails.’
‘No, well, she wouldn’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s on a plane.’
Kit frowned, a bit taken aback. A plane? She hadn’t mentioned anything about going away. Not that she’d been under any obligation to, but still... ‘When will she be back?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks.’
A couple of weeks? He wasn’t sure he could wait that long. Patience had never been his strong point—probably one more contributory factor to the breakdown of their marriage—and right now it was wearing increasingly thin.
‘Right. I see,’ he said, switching to his agenda with a couple of clicks and seeing that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be moved or dealt with by someone else for a couple of weeks. ‘Where is she?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, she’s on a job and the work she’s doing requires a certain degree of anonymity and a low profile.’
‘And for another?’
‘And for another I don’t think she’d thank me if I told you where she was. Do you really think she wants to see you after everything?’
Kit set his jaw and took a deep breath. ‘She was happy enough to see me last night.’ Which was a slight stretch of the truth, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
There was a pause. ‘Last night?’
‘We spent it together.’
‘Really?’
‘Part of it.’
He heard Zoe blowing out a breath. ‘Jeez.’
‘I need to talk to her, Zoe.’
‘She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. You can talk to her then.’
‘I can’t wait that long.’
‘After five years, you can’t wait two weeks?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Do you still love her?’
Kit felt the totally unexpected question hit him like a punch to the chest.
Did he?
He’d spent the last five years thinking he didn’t, but who knew? Seeing her again last night had thrown everything he’d always assumed about their relationship and his life for the last five years into question, so how he felt about Lily or anything for that matter was now up in the air.
The only thing he was sure about was that they weren’t done. Quite apart from all the questions he had for her, he hadn’t apologised for what he’d done all those years ago and for basically blaming her for it. He hadn’t told her of the guilt he carried or asked her for her forgiveness, and the need to put all of this right burned inside him like a hot coal.
Last night had opened doors he’d never imagined would ever open again, and now—even if they were only slightly ajar—he wasn’t about to let them close. Not only did he seek redemption, he also had the feeling that he was hovering on the brink of a second chance with Lily here, and even though it had never crossed his mind before, had never been something he’d thought he wanted, he now realised he wanted it more than anything, and if that didn’t tell him that he still had feelings for her he didn’t know what would.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, erring on the side of caution because how he felt about Lily still needed further analysis. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, there are things we need to figure out. Please, Zoe.’
There was another long silence while Zoe presumably weighed up the pros and cons of telling him and he held his breath.
‘Oh, OK,’ she said eventually and Kit felt the tension drain from his shoulders. ‘But look, she really is working so you can’t go barging in there right now.’
‘When, then?’
‘She finishes next Sunday. Afterwards she’s staying on for a few days’ holiday until the following Saturday.’
He rubbed a hand along his jaw while his brain raced. He could wait a week, couldn’t he? It would give him time to think. Plan. Delegate. Figure out exactly what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it, and how he was going to persuade her to give them the second chance he thought they had. And actually, neutral territory, without any association to the past, might be just the thing.
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait. You have my word.’
‘Hmm,’ said Zoe, sounding as though she didn’t think his word counted for much.
‘Where is she, Zoe?’ he said, ignoring the sting of his ex-sister-in-law’s scepticism because right now he had more important things to focus on.
‘On her way to the Indian Ocean. Santa Teresa Island. She’s staying at the Coral Bay Lodge.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Look, Kit, Lily hasn’t had a holiday in years. She’s really looking forward to it. It took her ages to get over you. Tell me I’m not going to regret having told you where she’s going.’
‘You won’t regret it.’
He’d make sure of it.
FIVE (#u65326248-a3b6-5a84-8522-6e9c2cd8cf25)
As jobs went, this one hadn’t exactly been a hardship, thought Lily, settling on her sun lounger and preparing herself to test the customer service levels of the beach-bar staff, although this time for her own personal pleasure.
Some were, some weren’t. That was the way it went, and had gone, right from the start. MMS had started off offering customer satisfaction surveys before expanding to include services such as employee performance analysis, consumer demographic studies and bespoke training programmes, all in the name of driving service excellence. Their clients came in all shapes and sizes and temperaments.
This particular—easy—client had been with them since their inception and had grown with similar speed. Somehow, as the by-product of a much larger deal they’d ended up with a portfolio of assets that included the island of Santa Teresa. They’d offloaded the assets they didn’t want, but had decided to keep Santa Teresa with its once five-star luxury resort to see what they could do with it. They’d hired MMS to conduct a thorough analysis of how to turn the business around on the consumer side of things.
Normally MMS contracted the fieldwork out. In their business anonymity was key, and employing a small band of discreet, trustworthy, reliable freelancers to go wherever they were needed allowed Lily to concentrate on the marketing, sales and client side of the business and Zoe to focus on the numbers and data analysis.
On this occasion, however, the woman they’d hired to spend a week assessing the performance of staff and the overall consumer experience at the Coral Bay Lodge had slipped on ice and broken her ankle over Christmas and couldn’t fly. At such short notice, especially over the holiday season, they hadn’t been able to get anyone else so Lily had taken on the job.
Actually, she’d been heartily grateful for the distraction. January in London was typically on the quiet side and if she’d been there twiddling her thumbs she’d have had hours in which to dwell on everything that had happened on New Year’s Eve. Instead she’d been so busy working, concentrating on the details and reporting back to Zoe with her findings that she hadn’t given Kit a moment’s thought.
Well, hardly a moment’s thought, she amended, picking up the cocktail menu and wondering whether five in the afternoon was too early for a sundowner.
He had slipped into her head on the odd unguarded occasion, but whenever he did hot on the heels of it came the instant realisation of just what a bad idea Sunday night had been, how much what he’d done still hurt and how stupid and deluded she’d been to even imagine that him showing up on her doorstep might mean anything other than the need to scratch an itch.
Thank goodness the sex had been lousy or she’d be in serious trouble, she reflected, glancing down the long list of cocktails. If it had been as mind-blowing as she knew it could be, she’d now undoubtedly be wondering what she’d been missing all these years. What she’d been thinking when she’d decided to pursue relationships with men who didn’t affect her pulse rate.
She might also well be letting good sex get in the way of good judgement and telling herself that maybe she’d overreacted on Sunday night. She might be thinking that perhaps everything that had gone on between them before was now water under the bridge and why on earth shouldn’t they try again?
Despite the heat of the day Lily felt a shiver run down her spine. Wow, what a lucky escape she’d had.
And continued to have because thankfully since the day following the night before she hadn’t heard from Kit. Oh, that Monday he’d called. Repeatedly. At least, she assumed it had been him; she didn’t have his number in her phone, but he’d said he would, and she couldn’t think of anyone else whose number her phone didn’t recognise who would keep popping up with such persistence.
By the time the tube to Heathrow had emerged above ground, she’d seen she had half a dozen missed calls but, feeling too tired and too emotionally on edge to deal with the conversation she could imagine he’d want to have, she’d switched her phone off.
