LITMIR.BIZ

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is the bit where you say “what happened?”,’ he said, handing her a glass of water.

      ‘What happened?’ she questioned, propping herself up on her elbows to gulp it down, achingly aware of him and his proximity.

      ‘You were sick and now you’re better.’

      Fragments of the night came filtering back. The way he’d pushed away those strands of sweaty hair from her brow. The way he’d carried her. She tried to push the image away. To think about things which wouldn’t make her realise how much she’d missed him. ‘I do remember. You gave me something disgusting to drink.’

      ‘I agree that taste-wise it’s not up there with nectar,’ he said wryly. ‘That was what we call a Dimdar. It’s an old desert remedy made from the sap of a rare cactus which grows in the Mekathasinian Sands, and which desert warriors have been using for centuries to treat their ailments.’

      She was horribly aware that the inside of her mouth felt gritty and stale. ‘I need a shower.’

      ‘I’m not stopping you.’

      But she felt horribly vulnerable as she struggled out of bed. As if she’d been caught with all her defences down and she wasn’t sure how best to erect them again. Grabbing an armful of clothes, she went along the corridor to the communal bathroom, but the face which stared back at her from the mirror confirmed her worst fears. She touched the sweat-soaked tendrils of her hair, which hung around her pinched face. Murat had seen her like this. Unwashed and pale and looking nothing like the woman he had once lived with.

      She told herself she was no longer his arm-candy, nor was she trying to impress him. Nonetheless, she spent a long time in the sputtering shower, half expecting him to be gone by the time she returned to her room. He hadn’t, of course, and she blinked at the scene which greeted her. He had made the bed and boiled the kettle and was now pouring boiling water into two mugs, in which bobbed a couple of teabags. It made such a comforting yet incongruous image, that for a moment she felt as if she were right back in the middle of her delirium.

      He glanced up as she walked in, his black eyes lingering on her for a moment longer than was necessary. ‘You look better,’ he commented.

      ‘That wouldn’t be difficult. I feel much better.’ She put her damp towel in the linen basket, knowing what she needed to say. But it felt strange to be doing so without her arms looped around his neck or her lips brushing against that unshaven jaw. ‘I want to thank you for what you did.’

      ‘It was nothing.’

      ‘Yes, it was.’ She tried to concentrate on the situation as it was, rather than what she wanted it to be. She suddenly realised why he’d once told her that he wasn’t in the habit of seducing virgins. Their dreams are still intact. And hers had been, hadn’t they? No matter how hard she’d tried to convince herself that she didn’t do the dream stuff—she could see now that she had been deluding herself. She’d believed that she was immune to emotion because she had wanted to believe it and because it had allowed her to buy a ticket into his life. He’d wanted a no-strings affair and she’d convinced herself that she was happy to go along with that. But maybe at heart she was just a woman who’d been longing for him to commit to her all along.

      ‘I’m very grateful for all you’ve done, but I won’t take up any more of your time,’ she said, watching him squeeze out a teabag. ‘There must be something important needing your attention.’

      ‘I can take care of my own timetable, Cat,’ he said, handing her a mug of tea. ‘I want you to tell me about your mother.’

      She felt her cheeks growing red. ‘I told you everything last night.’

      He shook his head. ‘Not really. You spoke in terms of a problem, but not in terms of a solution. Has she ever tried rehab?’

      ‘Rehab’s expensive.’

      ‘So that’s a no?’

      ‘Of course it’s a no!’ she bit back. ‘We’re ordinary people, Murat. Where do you suppose we could find that kind of money?’

      His eyes didn’t leave her face. ‘You could have asked me.’

      ‘But that would have involved telling you—and I didn’t want to tell you, for reasons you can probably understand.’

      ‘I’d like to meet her,’ he said suddenly.

      ‘Well, you can’t.’

      ‘What are you so scared of, Cat?’

      Surely even he knew the answer to that. She didn’t want to see the disgust on his face when he saw just how sordid her home life had been. And it wasn’t fair of him to want to intrude on her life like this. Because this wasn’t what happened in their particular relationship. They had separate lives. Separate futures.

      Yet as she saw a familiar look of determination glinting from his eyes, she wondered what she was trying to protect herself from. She didn’t have to try to impress him any more. It was over. It didn’t matter how many of her dark secrets he discovered, did it?

      ‘If you want to meet my mother then we’ll go and meet her,’ she said. ‘When did you have in mind?’

      ‘How about now?’ His gaze searched her face. ‘That is, if you’re feeling well enough.’

      Her throat constricted. ‘She won’t be expecting us. She won’t have had time to tidy the place up.’ She said the words as if she came from a normal house. As if she had the kind of mother who had ever bothered tidying up.

      ‘I don’t care,’ said Murat. ‘And before you say anything, I’d actually enjoy making an impromptu visit for once. Do you have any idea what usually happens when I plan a trip somewhere? How entire rooms are repainted and new furniture bought?’

      ‘You’re unlikely to get anything like that at my mother’s house,’ she said flippantly. ‘You’ll be lucky to get fresh milk, let alone fresh paint.’

      His expression didn’t change. ‘Shall we go?’

      ‘Well, you’ve asked for it,’ she said as she looked round the room for her shoes.

      She locked the door behind them and followed him down to the hotel car park, where his two black limousines were inciting a lot of interest.

      In no time at all they had left the little seaside town and were driving past fields blurred with rain and dotted with the dripping forms of motionless sheep. She saw the grey buildings of villages and sometimes the fluttering of the distinctive Welsh flag, with its proud scarlet dragon set on a green and white background. The car picked up speed as they headed south, until tall columns of factory chimneys began to appear in the distance.

      At last their small convoy entered a street which was barely wide enough to accommodate the width of the two cars. Rows of tiny identical houses lay before them and Catrin tried to imagine what they must look like to Murat’s eyes. Did he see the stray piece of garbage which drifted over the pavement, or notice the peeling paintwork on her mother’s front door?

      She dreaded what the inside of the house would look like. If her sister was still here, then at least she could have relied on the place looking halfway respectable. But Rachel was now back at Uni and, while grateful that she was out of the inevitable firing line, Catrin was a mass of nerves as she rang the doorbell.

      At first there was a pause so long that she wondered if her mother was down at the local pub. And didn’t part of her pray that was the case? So that they could just go away and this awful meeting would never happen? But she could hear the distant sound of the TV, and the slow shuffle of footsteps which greeted Murat’s second ring told her that her hopes were in vain.

      The door opened and Ursula Thomas stood there, swaying a little as she peered at them—her stained and scruffy clothes failing to hide a faint paunch. Her once beautiful features were coarsened and ruddy, and the emerald eyes so like her daughter’s were heavily bloodshot. And just as she did pretty much every time she saw her,

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