Weddings Collection. Кэрол Мортимер

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      ‘Then, we’ll make do with those.’ He produced a multi-purpose penknife from his back pocket, opened out the corkscrew and set to work on the bottle of wine. ‘Plates?’

      ‘Paper ones.’

      ‘Chopsticks?’

      ‘We’ll have to make do with plastic forks.’

      He grinned. ‘No fighting over the washing up, then.’

      ‘Good friends don’t fight, do they?’

      ‘No?’ He pulled the cork. ‘Maybe not. But then, we never did fight.’ He filled two of the plastic cups she produced from a cupboard. ‘We always had better things to do.’ Willow turned swiftly away, checked the food. ‘How is it?’

      Painful. She’d been such an idiot. They could have been in Mike’s flat right now. Or hers. Curled up together with nothing better to do than be together. If she’d just stayed put that Sunday night, for once indulged the man she loved. But no, that would have been breaking her own rules.

      She’d thought she was so damned smart. But she wasn’t smart. She was arrogant and stupid and now she was paying the price. Now and for ever.

      Mike had obviously never really wanted marriage or he wouldn’t have beaten a hasty retreat from the church. He’d just been carried away by the heat of his libido.

      But what was her excuse? Hot grey eyes that promised her the earth? And delivered…

      ‘Another few minutes to be on the safe side, I think.’ She fixed a smile to her lips, then turned and took the cup of wine he offered, spilling a few drops as his fingers brushed against hers. ‘So, what’s the toast, Mike?’ she asked brightly. ‘The great escape?’

      For a moment the muscles in his jaw tightened, then he too managed a smile. ‘Sure, why not?’ But he took little more than a sip of the wine before putting the cup down on the draining-board. ‘Why don’t you show me round while we’re waiting.’

      ‘There’s not much to see.’ The holiday centre had been converted from a row of artisans’ cottages and the rooms all opened from a single corridor, with a staircase at each end.

      ‘Downstairs there’s the kitchen, dining room, day room, quiet room.’ She led the way, opening doors without stopping, taking the stairs swiftly to keep a pace ahead of him, so she wouldn’t feel his breath on her neck. ‘And upstairs, two big rooms that’ll have bunk beds for the kids,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Showers and wash basins. Girls here. Boys there. Toilet facilities. Two small bedrooms for the carers.’

      He pushed open doors and looked in as she whisked past. Noted her sleeping bag laid out in one of the small rooms. The bag she’d packed before taking to the hills. It looked lonely all by itself. The second small room looked even lonelier.

      ‘It’s a heck of a lot for one woman to paint.’

      ‘It’s not just me. There’ll be other people. I’ll bet Emily’s phone has been ringing off the hook all day,’ she said defiantly. ‘Please don’t think you have to stay.’

      ‘I don’t. I don’t have to do anything. I’ll stay because I want to.’

      Mike looked down into the face of the one woman he’d ever wanted to keep so close to him that it hurt. To win her, keep her, he’d compromised his life, pretended that he was someone he could never be. And somehow she’d known. Not in her head, maybe, but in her heart where it mattered, she’d known that something was wrong.

      This time he would do it right. If she was going to walk away from him, she’d walk away from the man he was, not the man he’d tried to be.

      ‘I promise you, Willow, from this day on I will live my life on my own terms.’ And just for a moment he thought that a quiver of desperation blurred the fierce determination of her face, giving him heart. ‘No more fudging, no more compromise.’

      Willow’s grip tightened on the door handle. ‘Was that how our relationship was for you?’ she asked, her face betraying a world of hurt. ‘A fudge? A compromise?’ He reached out, wanting to reassure her that he hadn’t meant it that way. ‘The truth, Mike.’

      The truth. He wanted to tell her that the relationship was the one thing that had been true. But that wasn’t what she was asking. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I was compromising, doing stuff I didn’t want to do. You?’

      ‘Yes, of course I was.’ Then, because if they stayed where they were another second she’d probably burst into tears, she said, ‘The food will be thoroughly reheated by now.’ And she turned and half stumbled down the stairs in her haste to put some space between them.

      ‘This is excellent.’ Willow, sitting cross-legged on the cottage’s floor, speared a prawn. ‘Where did it come from?’

      ‘Maybridge. There’s a little place down by the lock where the food is quite special.’

      She glanced up. Maybridge? What had he been doing in Maybridge? Going back? Picking up the threads of the life he’d had before his father’s ill health had brought him home?

      ‘It’s pretty there, along by the river,’ she said.

      ‘I always meant to take you…’ He shrugged. ‘Still, you’ll have the whole of London to choose from when you’re working on the Globe.’

      She didn’t care about London. She wanted to know about Maybridge. ‘You worked there…’ she couldn’t stop herself ‘…before your father was taken ill?’ He looked at her as if assessing where her question was leading. Then he nodded. ‘You’ve never talked about it.’ It wasn’t that she hadn’t been interested in his life before she’d known him. It was just that her curiosity had encountered an invisible barrier. He’d turned the conversation away from the past, distracted her. He was good at that. ‘You quarrelled with your father, didn’t you?’

      ‘Was that what the office gossips told you?’

      It was her turn to nod. ‘Yes.’

      ‘I didn’t quarrel with him, Willow. It’s just that I’m not excited by balance sheets, cash flow, advertising revenue. I needed something else. My father couldn’t understand that, so it was easier if I stayed away.’

      ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Mike? In Maybridge.’

      ‘Some of it.’ He looked up then. ‘Then I came home and found the rest.’

      His eyes assured her that she was everything he’d been missing. But it hadn’t been enough. It scared her that she could have been so inattentive, so self-absorbed in her own problems these past few weeks that she’d been oblivious to whatever had been eating away at him, bringing him to the point of flight.

      Mike, sitting with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up to balance his plate, returned his attention to his food. ‘You never talk about yourself, do you?’ she persisted.

      ‘It’s a most unattractive habit.’

      She was on a fishing expedition, he realised; dangling СКАЧАТЬ