LITMIR.BIZ

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he’d asked her to marry him just weeks after they had first been introduced at a dinner party by a mutual friend. Love. She had mistakenly imagined he loved her as she loved him—had loved him, she corrected immediately. Had.

      The warm evening was redolent with the faint smells of cooking from various open windows, along with the strains of a popular chart hit and bursts of laughter from the house next door. Marsha watched Taylor wrinkle his aquiline nose. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked quietly, his eyes tight on her face.

      She would have liked to have said no and turned on her heel, but it really wasn’t an option. She nodded, allowing him to take her arm as they walked a few steps to where his Aston Martin was parked. He had changed the model in the last eighteen months, she noted silently, although the other car had only been six months old when she had left him. This one was sleek and dark and dangerous—very much like Taylor.

      He opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the expensive interior with a gracefulness she was pleased about, considering the way her stomach was jumping and her legs were trembling. That was the trouble with Taylor, she thought irritably. However much she tried to prepare herself, he always got under her skin.

      Once he had joined her in the car, she steeled herself to glance at him as though his closeness bothered her not at all. ‘Where are we going?’

      ‘Surprise.’ He didn’t look at her, starting the engine and then manoeuvring the powerful car out of the close confines of the parking space. Her eyes fell on the thick gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, and again her heart lurched. Did he wear his wedding band all the time, or had he donned it specially for this evening? she asked herself, before answering in the next breath, what did it matter anyway? The ring was just an item of jewellery if the commitment it was meant to signify wasn’t there. Her own hands had been ringless from the moment she had walked out of their house and out of Taylor’s life.

      The car purred along the busy London streets, passing numerous pubs and wine bars where folk were sitting outside drinking or eating in the dying sunshine. In the interim between leaving university and meeting Taylor Marsha had often enjoyed summer evenings with friends in this way, but since the breakdown of her marriage she hadn’t wanted to go back to the old crowd. She still saw one or two of them occasionally, but it wasn’t the same—not for her. They were still all relatively fancy-free and into having a good time, but she felt she had passed that stage and couldn’t go back—certainly not while she was still legally a married woman anyway. Stupid, maybe, she admitted a trifle bitterly, considering the way Taylor had behaved, but she couldn’t help it.

      She glanced down at her hands, which were tight fists in her lap, and forced her fingers to relax, uncurling them one by one as she breathed deeply and willed her pulse into a steady beat. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she said clearly, as though Taylor had just spoken that moment rather than all of ten minutes ago. Ten minutes of ragged vibrating silence.

      She kept her gaze on the windscreen as the tawny eyes flashed over her tight profile before returning to the road ahead. ‘Shame,’ he drawled smoothly.

      ‘So, where are we going?’ And then, as the car made another turning, she knew. He was taking her home! No, not home—home was now her tiny sanctuary in West Kensington. ‘Stop the car please, Taylor,’ she said as evenly as she could.

      ‘Why?’

      His tone was so innocent she knew she was right. ‘Because you told me you were taking me out to dinner,’ she said stonily.

      ‘I am.’ He gestured with one hand at the immaculate dinner suit he was wearing.

      ‘Taylor!’ She paused, warning herself to take care not to lose her temper and give him the satisfaction of winning. ‘I recognise where we are,’ she said more calmly. ‘This is a stone’s throw from Harrow.’

      He nodded, totally unrepentant. ‘That’s right, and Hannah has been like a dog with two tails knowing you were dropping by tonight.’

      Dropping by? Was the man mad? And then the thought of the buxom, middle-aged housekeeper who had mothered her from the first moment she had been introduced to her melted Marsha enough for a lump to come into her throat. She bit down on the emotion, saying, ‘I have no intention of going to your home.’

      ‘Our home, Fuzz.’ His voice was suddenly dangerous. ‘And although you might be able to cast people off as though they have never existed, Hannah can’t. Mad as you were with me, it wouldn’t have hurt you to have dropped her a line or arranged to meet her somewhere. Even a phone call would have been something. You damn near broke her heart.’

      She couldn’t stand this. Didn’t he know that any reminder of him, however small, had crucified her in the early days, and if she had seen Hannah all her resolve to be strong and make a new life would have been swept away? She had missed the woman who had become the only mother she had ever known nearly as much as Taylor. And then, because she was working on sheer emotion, and without the necessary protective shields in place, she spoke out the thing which had hurt her as much as his betrayal with Tanya. ‘If you were so concerned about Hannah’s feelings, why didn’t you contact me after I’d left?’ she bit out harshly. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about casting people off.’

      ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he growled, raking back his hair with an angry gesture which spoke volumes. ‘I came home after three days in Germany which had been pure hell to find you already packed and waiting to leave. You came at me all guns firing and accusing me of goodness knows what, and when I tried to make you see reason you walked out of the door. I followed you to your car to prevent you leaving and you slammed the door on my hand, breaking several bones in the process.’

      ‘That was an accident,’ she defended quickly. ‘I said so at the time, if you remember. I didn’t know you’d got your hand in the way of the door.’

      ‘It didn’t prevent you from driving off though, did it?’ he reminded her heatedly.

      Marsha took a moment to compose herself. He was turning this all round, as though she was the one who had had an affair! ‘Hannah was there to take care of you—’

      ‘Damn Hannah,’ he said furiously, as though he hadn’t just accused her of being unfeeling. ‘I drove after you, if you remember, and do you recall what you said when we stopped at those traffic lights? If I didn’t stop following you, you’d drive into a wall. Tell me you didn’t mean that.’

      She had meant it. She had been so desperate and hurt that night it would have been a relief not to have to think or feel ever again.

      He nodded grimly. ‘Quite,’ he said, as though she had just confirmed what he’d said out loud. ‘So I let you go. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought I’d rather see you alive than dead.’

      ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought there were two in a marriage, not three—or more.’

      She saw a muscle in his cheek twitch at her direct hit, but his voice was suddenly much calmer when he said, ‘Tanya again.’

      She ignored that, continuing, ‘And my point still remains the same. You did not contact me after that night.’

      ‘Not physically, maybe, but surely the letter counts for something?’

      ‘Letter?’ She hadn’t received a letter and she didn’t believe for one moment he had written one. Whatever game he was playing, she wasn’t going to fall for it.

      ‘Oh, come on, Fuzz,’ he said wearily. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t receive my letter.’

      His tone brought her temper to boiling point once more. ‘I never pretend,’ she said hotly, ‘and I don’t lie either. I did not receive a letter, although if I had it would have made no difference whatsoever to how I felt—feel. You had an affair with Tanya West and there had been others before her. I have that on good authority. You shared a double room in Germany reserved under the name of Mr and Mrs Kane. Don’t lie to me about that because I phoned the hotel myself to check.’

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