The Reunion Lie. Lucy King

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СКАЧАТЬ tremble and her body tensed and Dan went still, every instinct he possessed telling him to get away from her right now because, while he might have been wrong in his assessment of her motives earlier, he didn’t do damsels in distress—however attracted to them he was—and he didn’t do help, and nothing good would come of changing his mind about any of that now.

      But although his brain was waving great warning signs alerting him to the possible dangers of sticking around, something was keeping his mouth from forming a parting shot and something was keeping his feet from moving. To his alarm he was rooted to the spot, strangely transfixed and unusually bothered by the desperation she was emanating, and he was mystified as to why. Surely he couldn’t actually be interested in hearing her out, could he?

      ‘What kind of a fix?’ he muttered since he could hardly carry on standing there in silence.

      ‘See that bunch of women over there?’ She smiled over his shoulder at them and gave a little wave.

      He winced as one of them shrieked with laughter. ‘They’re impossible to miss.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘What’s the occasion?’

      ‘School reunion.’

      ‘Fun?’ He couldn’t think of anything worse, but then he’d hated his school years.

      She shuddered. ‘Absolutely horrendous.’

      ‘So what are you doing here?’

      ‘I thought it would be cathartic.’

      ‘And is it?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Then why not just leave?’

      ‘Another excellent question.’ She sighed and bit her lip and his gaze dipped to watch, his mouth going dry as he involuntarily imagined nibbling on that lip himself. ‘You’d think that would have been the sensible thing to do, wouldn’t you? The logical thing... But tonight my common sense and logic seem to have deserted me.’

      Dan cleared his throat and thought that the same could be applied to him. ‘How unfortunate,’ he said and told himself that it might be a good idea to try and stay cool and aloof if he was ever going to extricate himself from the mess he seemed intent on submerging himself in.

      ‘It is. Very. It’s never happened to me before.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t normally go around kissing strange men, you know.’

      ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ And oddly enough he was. ‘So why did you?’

      She tilted her head and regarded him contemplatively, as if mentally debating whether and how to continue. ‘Have you ever been to a school reunion hoping to impress everyone with the success you’ve achieved?’ she asked eventually.

      ‘No.’ Hell would freeze over first. And besides, if anyone was interested they could read about it in the papers like everyone else seemed to want to.

      ‘Well, I was.’ She sighed. ‘But it turns out that none of them could care less about any of that. All that any of them can bang on about is their husbands and children.’

      At the resignation and disdain in her voice Dan couldn’t help feeling a stab of sympathy despite his intention to remain detached, because he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of that kind of conversation. ‘Now that does sound bad.’

      ‘It’s awful. I have neither and there’s only so much chat about school league tables and the importance of baby violin classes I can stomach, which is, I’ve discovered, not a lot.’

      ‘I’m not surprised. How on earth does a baby get to grips with a violin?’

      ‘I didn’t dare ask.’ She closed her eyes briefly, pinched the bridge of her nose and gave her head a shake of what looked like hopelessness. ‘And they’re the most appalling snobs.’

      ‘Really?’

      She nodded. ‘I’ve never seen such one-upmanship and as for the name-dropping, well, if that were an Olympic sport there’d be golds all round.’

      ‘Then why do you want to impress them?’

      ‘It’s a long and tedious story,’ she said, before pulling her shoulders back and lifting her chin. ‘Let’s just say that I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl at school and I ended up with the bruises to prove it.’

      As the implications of that sank in Dan’s jaw automatically tightened and his hands curled into fists because he knew about that too. His sister, Celia, had been bullied, and even though, unlike this woman, she’d eventually managed to deal with it, it was still a cause for regret that he’d been too busy dealing with the way he’d felt about their parents’ divorce to realise what had been going on.

      ‘I wanted retribution,’ she added.

      ‘I see,’ he said, wishing not for the first time that he could string up every bully who’d ever existed and flog them to within an inch of their lives. ‘So you were aiming for the living-well-being-the-best-revenge kind of thing?’

      ‘Something like that.’

      ‘Then what’s the fix?’

      She blushed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other and then took a deep breath. ‘It didn’t have the impact I was hoping for.’ She stopped. Winced a little, he thought.

      ‘And?’ he prompted.

      ‘And so I invented a boyfriend.’

      His eyebrows shot up. ‘What?’

      She went red. ‘Please don’t make me say it again.’

      ‘OK, but why?’

      ‘Because I figured that that’s the only thing they deem impressive.’ She sighed. ‘It’s totally pathetic, I realise, but I seem to be sixteen all over again and, well, you know...’ She tailed off and shrugged.

      ‘Don’t you have a real one?’

      She flashed him a look of exasperation. ‘If I did I wouldn’t have had to invent one, would I?’

      ‘I suppose not.’ Although why she didn’t when she looked like that and felt like that he had no idea.

      ‘And I certainly wouldn’t have been kissing you.’

      Which would have been a shame, he thought, briefly distracted by the memory of her mouth moving against his. ‘Did it work?’

      ‘Like a dream. Or should I say a nightmare? Things have got a bit out of hand.’

      ‘How?’

      She shook her head as if utterly unable to comprehend what was going on. ‘All I did was mention that I had a boyfriend, but I guess I should have realised they’d descend on that piece of information like a pack of starving hyenas. They started bombarding me with all these questions about what he did and where he was from, and things just kind of snowballed. They even СКАЧАТЬ