LITMIR.BIZ

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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 supposition in the hope that he would give her the reality. He’d not been very forthcoming about what he’d been doing for the past few years but, then, she hadn’t been very pressing.

      No, that wasn’t fair. She been interested, he’d been the one who’d always changed the subject, uncertain of her reaction. Self-preservation had kept his mouth shut, even when he’d wanted to pour out his heart and soul.

      He lifted one brow, to let her know that he was on to her. ‘Is that it? End of interrogation?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said. And her acceptance, reluctant though it was, left him oddly disappointed. He wanted her to demand answers, insist on them. But why would she? She had another life all planned out. One that didn’t include him.

      No, Willow thought, chasing a prawn about the plate. He’d told her nothing. But maybe it was too late to fill in the gaps. They should have been doing that weeks ago, except that when they were together he hadn’t wanted to tell her.

      Now they were apart she was damned if she was going to betray her regrets by asking questions he had no intention of answering.

      ‘I am sorry, Mike…’ she made one of those helpless little gestures that she so loathed in other people ‘…about messing up your takeover of the company. Will your father still be prepared to go ahead and transfer the paper to you?’

      ‘I’m afraid so. Armstrong Publications is more important than a little public embarrassment. He’ll need a week or two to convince himself that you were to blame for what happened today before he’ll admit it, but it shouldn’t take longer than that. He’s good at deluding himself.’

      ‘Don’t be cruel! He loves you.’ Then she said, ‘A week or two? That’s all it’ll take?’

      ‘He has an infinite capacity for self-deception.’ Maybe it was hereditary. He’d followed Willow in the belief that it was possible to win her back. He wasn’t doing much of a job, probably because he understood so well what was driving her. All his life people had wanted him to do what they wanted. He wouldn’t, couldn’t do that to her. If she really wanted London, the Globe, then she must have it. He wanted his life in Maybridge. Somehow he had to find a way to fit them into a life they could share. ‘Do you want some more of this, or shall I finish it?’

      About to apologise again, try and make him see why she hadn’t been able to go through with the wedding, Willow stopped herself. He was as much to blame as she was for his fall from grace. He’d asked her to marry him. She hadn’t twisted his arm. Her only mistake had been to say yes. Everyone knew you shouldn’t say yes straight away—not that it would have made any difference. If she’d thought about it for a second or a year, her answer would still have been the same.

      ‘Willow?’

      ‘What? Oh, no, go ahead. Finish it all. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought. In fact, I think I’ll take a shower and then try and get some sleep.’

      ‘Will you be all right up there on your own?’

      Mistrusting the concerned note in his voice, still sure that he was would try and move the ‘just good friends’ goal posts a little—this was the jilting man, after all, who’d suggested they could still go on honeymoon—she rounded on him, determined to put him right about that. But he looked so serious that she stopped pushing the food trays back into the carrier bag.

      ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

      ‘No reason.’ Then he added, ‘Just give a shout if you need me to evict that spider from the shower room.’

      She swallowed. ‘Spider?’

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