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Rachel lifted her artfully darkened brows and released a theatrical sigh, but didn’t press the point.
‘If you say so,’ she said, wincing as she rubbed first one aching foot and then the other against her slim calves. ‘Now, what shall we do tonight?’
‘I fancy an early night, actually.’
‘Early night! You’ve had early nights for the past week.’ She looked her friend up and down through narrowed eyes, mentally chucking the top Lily was wearing in the bin—no self-respecting charity shop would want it—and getting her into something, preferably low cut, in a pastel shade maybe…? A nice soft smoky blue would bring out the incredible shade of her eyes.
‘It’s definitely time you let your hair down, Lily. It’ll do us both good,’ she contended.
Lily guiltily noted for the first time the lines of fatigue around the older woman’s eyes. ‘Bad day?’
‘Sometimes I wonder why I ever became an accountant,’ she admitted.
‘The six-figure salary…?’
Rachel grinned. ‘I get that because I’m brilliant at what I do. And I won’t bother trying to explain to someone who can’t even add up with a calculator that numbers are sexy. Now, about tonight. Dan has this really sweet mate…single, solvent…admittedly he’s no Brad Pitt, but then—’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers…?’
Rachel adopted an expression of mock gravity. ‘Well, I was going to say, Who is? But now you mention it women who don’t exfoliate regularly, Lily, have to be realistic.’ She turned her frowning scrutiny on the younger woman’s fair-skinned face. ‘Actually, considering your skin-care regime consists of splashing a bit of soap and water on your face, you have the most disgustingly gorgeous skin,’ she observed enviously. ‘A bit of decent foundation would totally disguise those freckles,’ she prophesied, frowning at the bridge of Lily’s small, tip-tilted nose. ‘Still, some men like freckles. Shall I ring Dan and—’
Lily knew one man who had said he liked her freckles, though she suspected they, like everything else about her, would disgust him now.
‘No!’ Rachel’s eyebrows lifted and Lily added more moderately, ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to do, I really do, but, to be honest, a man is the last thing I need right now.’
It was easy to figure out what she didn’t need—blind dates featured pretty high on this list. What she did need was a much more difficult proposition!
‘Need and want are not always the same thing.’
‘This time they are,’ Lily insisted quietly.
Rachel looked exasperated and glanced absently at a message on her mobile phone before sliding it back into her bag. ‘What are you going to do? Take a vow of celibacy?’
Lily ignored Rachel’s question. ‘Actually, I was thinking it might be time for me to go home.’ Home…but for how much longer?
Lily deliberately pushed the subject of her uncertain future to the back of her mind.
It wasn’t easy. Her marital home was on the market, and according to the agents a couple were making interested noises, which, considering their viewing, was nothing short of a miracle.
Lily’s thoughts drifted back to the occasion three weeks earlier. Rachel had unexpectedly arrived when she had been halfway through showing the prospective purchasers around. Her friend had taken one look at her, and had calmly informed the startled pair that they would have to come back another day. She had then proceeded to escort them firmly off the property.
Rachel had then packed Lily a bag, arranged a sitter for the cat and asked a neighbour to water the plants. Lily had just sat there and watched her. She supposed her listless inertia had been a symptom of whatever Rachel had seen in her face.
The break had served its purpose, but now, despite the tears this afternoon, Lily was feeling less fragile. She no longer felt so…disconnected. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. Being grounded was painful, you had to think about things you’d prefer not to and make decisions…For months now, she realised, she’d just been drifting. She hadn’t even begun to look for somewhere to live. All she’d done was sign everything that Gordon’s solicitor had sent her.
Yes, it was definitely about time she stood on her own feet.
Rachel didn’t agree.
‘You can’t go home yet. I’ve got things planned.’
Lily, who didn’t like the sound of ‘things’ frowned suspiciously. She really wished that her friend hadn’t taken on the role of social secretary with such zeal. ‘Things…?’
Rachel acted as if she hadn’t heard. ‘God, but these shoes are murder,’ she complained, picking up the culprits, stilettos with black and pink bows.
‘Then don’t wear them.’ It seemed the obvious solution to Lily, who liked clothes but wasn’t as much of a slave to fashion as her friend.
‘Are you kidding? They make my legs look hot.’
Lily looked at the legs in question and observed honestly, ‘Your legs would look hot in wellingtons, Rachel.’ She glanced down at her own legs, currently concealed under denim. They were pretty good as legs went, but they weren’t in the same class as Rachel’s, which stopped traffic on a regular basis.
‘Yes, they would, wouldn’t they?’
Lily smiled. There was something oddly endearing about her friend’s complacent vanity.
‘But enough about my legs.’ With a little pat of one taut, tanned thigh through her short summer skirt, she turned her attention to Lily, who in turn looked wary, an expression her friend had observed always appeared when the conversation got even faintly personal.
Such tight-lipped reserve was something Rachel found hard to understand. If she had been through hell and back like Lily, she would have wanted to get it off her chest, but all her attempts to encourage Lily to let it out had failed miserably.
‘Don’t you think you’d feel a lot better if you talked about it?’
They both knew what ‘it’ was: Lily’s divorce—the ink was still wet on that—and her miscarriage earlier that year.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR a split second Lily was tempted to tell Rachel; the urge quickly passed.
Rachel didn’t know half the story and the truth was so shocking that she couldn’t predict how even her broad-minded friend would react to the unvarnished version.
Besides, the habits of a lifetime were hard to break and ‘sharing feelings’ had been encouraged during Lily’s childhood about as much as spontaneous hugging!
If she had let her feelings show, her grandmother’s impatient response had been, ‘Nobody likes a whiner, Lily.’ Lily had learnt not to whine. Her crying had always been done behind closed doors.
‘Nothing to talk about.’
‘Nobody does the stiff upper lip these days, you know, Lily. All that being reserved does is give you an ulcer.’
‘My stomach feels fine.’ Lily placed her hand against the curve of her belly and discovered with a sense of surprise that she had lost a lot of the soft, feminine roundness she had always hated.
The softness that Santiago had professed to find sexy and feminine.
She knew from experience that there were times when fighting the flashbacks did no good, that it was easier on those occasions just to go with the flow. Lily, dimly conscious of Rachel’s voice in the background, felt her eyelids grow heavy as she allowed the bitter-sweet memories to wash over her.
She had perfect, total, painful recall of the heat in his incredible eyes as he had tipped her face up to his and smiled a slow, sexy smile as he had drawn her against him, fitting his hard angles into her softer curves and murmuring throatily in her ear.
A woman should be soft and round, not hard and angular.
It was humiliating, but a full twelve months after that first scorching kiss and she still couldn’t think about it without getting palpitations.
‘Well?’
Rachel’s impatient voice acted like a lifeline back to the present. Lily grabbed it and held on. While she was fixated on the past the chances of her rebuilding her life were nil.
She dabbed her tongue to the beads of sweat along her upper lip and gave a strained smile as she rubbed her damp palms against her jeans.
‘Sorry, I…’ Am pathetic and living in the past? Can’t get it into my thick skull he never loved me? All of the above?
‘You weren’t listening. I could tell…’ Rachel considered her friend’s flushed face. ‘You look a bit…?’
‘I’m fine.’ Smile fixed, Lily pushed the intrusive images away without acknowledging them or his presence in her head.
‘What you need is a nice glass of wine,’ Rachel decided. ‘Just don’t move,’ she said, padding over to the big stainless-steel fridge in her bare feet. A moment later she returned with a bottle of Chardonnay and two glasses, which she filled.
‘A nice night in…yeah, I can live with that,’ she conceded, handing Lily her glass. She curled up comfortably on the sofa and reached for the newspaper. ‘I wonder what’s on the telly tonight?’ Turning over the pages, she suddenly stopped and lowered the broadsheet to the table. ‘Now there,’ she observed with a lascivious smile, ‘is something I wouldn’t mind finding in my Christmas stocking.’
‘I thought you were in love with your delicious Dan.’ Lily laughed, looking over her shoulder to see what hunk her friend was drooling over.
‘I’m in love, not blind. Now, there’s a man who doesn’t use a shoebox to file his returns. Look at that mouth and those eyes…’ she enthused.
‘You can tell about his filing system from his mouth?’ Lily teased.
‘No, that I can tell by the attention the financial pages give him on a regular basis. I wonder if he’s that sexy in real life?’ She slung a comical look of entreaty over her shoulder. ‘And please don’t spoil it by saying it’s just good lighting. You’re such a disgusting cynic.’
Lily went cold as she looked at the half-page photo showing an unsmiling, dark-eyed man. It was a standard moody black and white shot of an incredibly attractive man. Lily knew that the lighting couldn’t begin to do justice to just how sexy the man was in real life. It didn’t reveal the aura of raw sexuality he projected like a force field.
Aware that some sort of response was expected of her, and hyperventilating wasn’t it, Lily cleared her throat. ‘He does have something,’ she admitted, reading the headline above that pronounced MORAIS LEAVES THE OPPOSITION COUNTING THE COST AGAIN.
Me too, she thought.
‘Something!’ Rachel squealed. ‘He is off-the-scale gorgeous. That man,’ she said, poking the page with her finger, ‘not only looks like he could be quite deliciously bad in bed—’
Never again will I mock Rachel’s instinct, Lily decided. Of course, Rachel’s instinct only told part of the story—as well as being deliciously bad he could also be breathtakingly tender and passionately unrestrained. Lily pressed her hands to her stomach as the muscles deep inside tightened.
‘He’s also a genuine financial genius. His name is Santiago Morais.’ Rachel’s smooth brow furrowed. ‘He’s Italian or—’
‘Spanish,’ Lily inserted in a flat little voice. ‘He’s Spanish.’ And I am so over him, she thought, pressing her hand against her sternum to ease the tight feeling in her chest.
‘Yeah, you’re right. Since when did you start reading the financial pages, Lily?’
‘He makes the gossip columns too,’ she said, struggling to keep the bitterness from her voice as an image of the pop star Susie Sebastian, her pouting lips aimed like heat-seeking missiles at a willing male mouth, flashed into her mind.
‘That figures. You know, I think I’ll spend my next holiday in Spain. You never know, I might bump into Mr Gorgeous. He would carry me off to bed and make mad, passionate love to me.’
Lily half closed her eyes, and saw sun-dappled shadows dancing over a lean golden torso as the breeze stirred the leaves of a tree outside the window. ‘For five days straight?’
Rachel angled an amused look at Lily’s face. ‘Hey, get your own fantasy!’ she protested.
Lily blushed, which made Rachel chuckle. ‘You have hidden murky depths, girl.’
You have no idea, Lily thought.
For a while after she’d come out of hospital Lily had thought she would never feel anything ever again. Now she wasn’t so sure that would have been such a bad thing! Oh, when were things ever going to get back to normal? So she could get on with being a librarian who lived in a Devon seaside town.
She knew that it wasn’t healthy or constructive to go down the ‘what if?’ road, but she couldn’t help wondering what her life would be like now if she hadn’t gone down to the pool that morning all those months ago. It had been such a small decision, but the consequences had been life-changing.
An early-morning swim hadn’t seemed sinister or significant, just a good way to clear her head after a long, sleepless night alone in the decadent honeymoon suite of a Spanish five-star hotel, which, rumour had it, had been fully booked up for the next decade or so.
It would have been understandable if the thoughts that had kept her awake had concerned her absent husband. Her husband who hadn’t been answering her calls. The same husband who had texted her the previous morning to say the problem at work that had forced him to leave her at the airport at the start of their holiday had turned into a crisis and, no, he wouldn’t be joining her after all.
Gordon wasn’t to know that, following his text, determined to make the best of her holiday to this enchanting area, Lily had booked herself onto an excursion to the charming nearby Renaissance town of Baeza. Places like this were part of the reason she had fallen in love with Andalucia.
She hadn’t immediately placed the middle-aged man and his wife bearing down on her as the tour guide was in full flow. Then as she’d looked beyond the shorts and garish shirt she’d recognised a colleague of Gordon’s and his wife. She’d vaguely recalled meeting them on a few social occasions.
‘Matt…Susan.’ She called out to the couple.
They did the usual ‘small world, fancy meeting you here’ stuff, and then the older man looked around expectantly. ‘Gordon not with you?’
‘No, he couldn’t get away, I’m afraid.’
If he had, there was no way she’d have got to take this excursion; Gordon wouldn’t have budged from the five-star luxury of the hotel. If she had suggested that they go and see the real inland Andalucia, with its olive groves and rolling hills, he would have thought she was crazy.
‘Not surprised,’ the other man confessed. ‘He must be up to his eyes in it with his new venture. I couldn’t believe it when I heard on the grapevine he was leaving. I admit, I thought Gordon was a permanent fixture like me.’
Miraculously Lily’s smile stayed superglued in place. ‘So did I, Matt.’
‘And he was a sure bet for that promotion.’
Lily nodded in agreement. ‘He did mention that.’ One of the few things he had mentioned, it seemed.
‘But good for him, I say. You need to be a risk-taker sometimes.’ He looked across the square. ‘Is that your group moving on?’
‘Yes, it is. Lovely to see you.’
Blissfully oblivious to the fact that with a few words he had revealed her marriage to be a total joke, Matt shouted cheerily after her, ‘Remember me to Gordon and wish him all the luck in the future.’
He’s going to need all the luck he can get when I get hold of him. ‘I will,’ Lily promised with her best sincere smile.
Of course, she had known for some time that their marriage had problems, but she hadn’t suspected until now that they might be insurmountable.
My husband is leading a double life! What the hell is he up to?
At the first opportunity Lily slipped away from her tour group and sought refuge in the town’s delightful flower-filled plaza. She sat in a pavement café and ordered coffee, then, changing her mind, asked instead for wine in her clumsy, faltering Spanish. The proprietor brought a bottle.
She sat sipping the rich-bodied red and thinking about what she was going to do next. Didn’t a woman in her situation need a plan of action?
She could run up a credit-card bill, one guaranteed to bring tears to Gordon’s eyes. It wouldn’t be hard. Gordon had a deep, almost spiritual connection with his wallet—in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he was as mean as hell!
Then again, she mused, she could take the direct approach and get the next plane home, tell him straight if he didn’t want her to walk he’d better come clean about what he’d been up to. But was it a good idea to confront him when she wasn’t even sure any more if she wanted to save their marriage?
