One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December. Kat French
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Название: One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December
Автор: Kat French
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
isbn: 9780007577637
isbn:
‘Alice, I’m so sorry,’ he said, suddenly urgent, crossing the room and pulling out the chair beside hers. He sat facing her, his kneecaps against hers, close enough for Alice to smell the familiar scent of his favourite shower gel. ‘It was nothing. She doesn’t mean anything to me.’
Alice looked down at his strong, tanned hands as they closed over her clasped ones in her lap. Hands that wore the wedding ring she’d placed there, hands that she’d trusted to hold her heart safely, hands that had held another woman when they should have been holding her. She didn’t say anything. It’s difficult to speak when your heart suddenly fragments into a million pieces. She could feel it splintering, and it physically hurt all the way from her scalp to her toes.
‘It was one night, baby, a stupid, stupid mistake.’
His words washed over her skin, scalding, not in the least bit soothing. Did he imagine that it would be less of a betrayal if he said it had only happened once? Which it hadn’t, of course. Lots of little things had happened over the last few months that hadn’t quite added up, a dinner receipt here, an inconsistency in Brad’s recollections there, and each time Alice had allowed herself to sweep it under the carpet, or had at least looked for innocent explanations instead of jumping to the worst-case scenario. This though … these pictures … there wasn’t a best-case scenario to find here, only the ugly truth of deception and infidelity. Those warning signs did nothing to deaden the blow of evidence; hard facts turned out to be a lot harder to swallow than suspicion. Dread prickled cold and clammy beneath her skin and her morning coffee rose bitter in her throat. She knew that what she said next mattered. Go, or don’t go.
‘Tell me what I can do, Alice. I need to make this right again.’ Brad squeezed her hands. ‘You name it and I’ll do it.’
Was it really her responsibility to tell him how to right his wrongs? And why did he assume there was something he could do to balance the scorecard again? Even so, finding the strength required to say the things she needed to say next was the most difficult thing she’d ever done.
‘There’s only one thing you can do now, Brad. Pack a case. Leave.’
‘No! I won’t.’ Urgent desperation thickened his voice. ‘Alice, please, we can work through this. I love you, and I know you love me.’ He gripped her hands tighter still. ‘Our marriage is worth that, surely?’
Oh, he had no idea how badly he’d just screwed up. She nodded, digesting his words slowly, fury heating her blood.
‘You didn’t think it valuable enough to stop you screwing Felicity Shaw, yet I’m supposed to think it’s worth fighting for. Is that what you’re saying?’
She lifted her eyes to his and watched him scrabble for the right words when there weren’t any.
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ he said quietly. His phone buzzed in the pocket of his jeans. They both glanced down, knowing in her eyes, guilt in his.
‘You better get that,’ Alice said, keeping her voice even as she stood, scraping her chair back on the flagstones. ‘I’ll go and find you a suitcase.’
Throwing Brad out had hurt like hell. Gwyneth Paltrow had been way off the mark when she’d used the term conscious uncoupling for separation. Alice felt more like she’d had her heart amputated without anaesthetic, or all the life sucked from her body by an industrial-strength Dyson. It came as a surprise most mornings when she looked in the mirror and found herself still standing up.
‘I cancelled your newspaper delivery yesterday,’ Niamh said, handing Alice a mug of coffee before taking a seat alongside her on the garden bench out the back of Borne Manor. The sun hadn’t long risen, and there was that chilly hint of new-day promise in the pale blue sky.
‘Did I ask you to?’ Alice said, frowning. She couldn’t recall doing it, but that didn’t mean much lately. She talked to Niamh most mornings and could barely remember what they’d said within half an hour of her leaving. And it wasn’t just Niamh. It was everyone and everything since Brad had left. Her brain was soup. And not a silky smooth consommé, either. It was more like yesterday’s leftover dinner liquidised into a thick unappetising gloop, trying hard to work and failing.
Niamh shook her head. ‘Nope, but I did it anyway. You need more pictures of Brad the Cad and Felicity-no-knickers like you need a hole in the head.’
‘But …’ Although Alice knew that Niamh was right, anxiously scouring the papers and magazines for images of him had become part of her post-Brad daily routine. He’d taken out a costly subscription to all of the nationals when they’d moved to Borne; Brad had taken pleasure and pain from searching for mentions and reviews of his performances.
This was just another form of that, really. Alice didn’t enjoy it. In fact she had to brace herself for it and her shoulders didn’t drop from around her ears until she’d closed the last page of the last newspaper, but in another way she kind of relied on it, in the same strange way you can come to rely on visiting a sick relative in hospital because the alternative of losing them altogether is even worse. By cancelling the papers, Niamh had kicked the power cable out of the life support machine of her marriage. She’d argue, but Alice knew that any doctor in the land would have pronounced it dead anyway.
‘But what?’ Niamh said, leaning down to find a stick to throw for Pluto, her rescue dog turned loyal companion. ‘You’d rather torture yourself slowly than go cold turkey? If I had a bullshit buzzer I’d press it right now, Alice.’
They both watched an ecstatic Pluto hurtle down the frosty lawn and career off towards the woods in search of the stick. He’d be gone a while. He was the dearest of dogs, but he was blind in one eye and his good one wasn’t brilliant.
‘I bet Davina had a field day, didn’t she?’ Alice muttered, picturing the owner of the local shop-come-post-office. Dark haired and sly eyed, Davina was the village ear to the ground and man-eater. There was always talk of scalps on her bedpost amongst wronged wives after a few gins in the local. She wasn’t exactly what you might call a girls’ girl; she’d happily gossip with mums at the school gate in the morning and try to bed their husbands in the afternoon. She’d had plenty of cracks at Brad since they’d moved into Borne Manor a little over eighteen months ago, a fact which he’d always reported back with glee to Alice. She hadn’t been concerned, back then. The fact that he told her all about it meant he wasn’t interested, right? Looking back, Alice wasn’t so sure. Maybe if Davina had caught Brad at a weaker moment he might have accepted more than a book of stamps and a punnet of strawberries.
Niamh laughed beside her. ‘Oh, she tried to fish. All doe eyed, twisting her hair around her fingers as she asked after you and Brad. Proper concerned she was.’
Alice sipped her coffee and watched Pluto mooch about at the edge of the woods. The gardens and land that came with Borne Manor had been one of its big attractions; Alice had imagined kids building forts and camping in the woods, and Brad had pictured rolling garden parties and summer balls attended by the rich and famous. He was a man who’d let his fledgling fame go straight to his head – in his mind’s eye he was already one good dinner jacket СКАЧАТЬ