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Speechless, Star watched him as he walked into her kitchen and re-emerged carrying his discarded jacket. She waited for what felt like a very long time after he had gone before walking unsteadily to her door to lock and secure it.
Nothing in her life, in her experience, had prepared her, could have prepared her for what had just happened... Nothing and no one.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I’M REALLY sorry you had to miss the barbecue, you would have enjoyed it,’ Sally sympathised as she handed Star one of the mugs of coffee that she had just made, settling herself onto one of the pair of garden chairs that she had drawn up on the patio overlooking her garden.
Star had planned to spend the whole day working but a phone call from Sally halfway through the morning, inviting her over for a coffee and a natter, had changed her mind.
‘How was your mother?’ Sally added solicitously.
She was fine, Star was about to say, but then she shook her head and admitted quietly, ‘I never went to see her. She...she... There was a mix-up over the arrangements and—’
‘Oh, Star, why on earth didn’t you come round?’ Sally chastised her.
‘I...I wasn’t really in the mood... I...I’m having a bit of a problem with this campaign for Brad...and I—’
‘But you were so excited about it,’ Sally reminded her.
‘Yes, I was,’ Star agreed, ‘but that was before...’
‘That was before you realised you’d be working so closely with Kyle?’ Sally suggested. ‘Oh, Star, I wish you could... I wish the two of you had hit it off better,’ she amended tactfully. ‘He was a real hit with everyone on Saturday.’
‘Really?’ Star tried to keep her voice flatly uninterested and non-committal, but she knew that she had failed when she saw Sally frown. Part of her itched to tell Sally the truth about her precious, wonderful Kyle, to tell her how he had come straight to her bed, her arms from Lindsay’s, but another part of her—a new, unfamiliar, illogical part of her—shrank from revealing to even so close a friend as Sally just what had happened.
‘Mind you, I still haven’t managed to find anyone for Kyle,’ Sally admitted ruefully. ‘I introduced him to Lindsay and the two of them were chatting for simply ages. I even saw Lindsay fling her arms around him and give him a kiss at one point and I thought... She disappeared shortly afterwards but Kyle stayed on, although not for much longer.
‘However, Lindsay rang me the day after to tell me that, thanks to the heart-to-heart conversation she’d had with Kyle, she’d realised how much Miles meant to her and how much she wanted to save her marriage and so she had gone straight home and telephoned him to tell him so.
‘He apparently had been feeling exactly the same way and the upshot of the whole thing is that they’ve decided to give their marriage a second chance. She was even talking about them starting a family,’ Sally added slightly wistfully.
Kyle had been having a heart-to-heart with Lindsay about her marriage. Kyle had not taken Lindsay home... Lindsay had kissed him out of gratitude and happiness. Kyle and Lindsay had not been lovers. He had not come straight from Lindsay’s arms, from her bed to her own.
‘Star...what is it? Are you feeling all right?’ she heard Sally asking her anxiously.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ she assured her friend.
‘You look dreadful. I thought you were going to faint, you went so pale,’ Sally told her.
‘I...I’ve just been a little tired; this campaign...I’ve been...’
‘Why don’t you talk to Kyle about it?’ Sally suggested practically. ‘Perhaps he could—’
‘No.’ Star cut her off sharply, firmly changing the subject by asking her, ‘Have you managed to change Chris’s mind yet about the two of you starting a family?’
It was no secret to Sally’s friends that she wanted a baby.
‘I’m still working on it,’ Sally admitted. ‘I know we both agreed that we wanted several years together before we even started thinking about a family, but since both Poppy and Claire have become pregnant... It isn’t that Chris doesn’t want children; it’s just that he feels we’re not ready for them yet. I know what he means, but I just feel so...’
‘Broody?’ Star supplied for her dryly.
‘Well, yes,’ Sally confessed. ‘We’re off to Italy at the end of September, Poppy and James are lending us the villa for a month and I’m hoping to work on him then.’
‘Perhaps he feels that having a baby is becoming more important to you than he is,’ Star suggested.
Sally looked shocked. ‘Oh, no...he couldn’t think that...could he?’
‘You have become rather obsessive about it,’ Star pointed out.
‘Mmm...a bit like you with this thing you’ve got about men in general and poor Kyle in particular, do you mean?’ Sally came back slyly.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Star told her quickly, and finished her coffee. ‘I’ve got a deadline to meet...’
‘So have I,’ Sally said mischievously. ‘I want to be pregnant by Christmas...’
After she left Sally, Star didn’t go straight home, despite the fact that she had spoken the truth when she had said that she had work to do. Instead, she drove aimlessly along the country lanes outside the town, trying to bring some kind of order to her chaotic thoughts.
Even she couldn’t refuse to accept that Sally had been telling her the truth. An unfamiliar feeling of panic seized her, her hands literally shaking as she held the steering wheel, a sense of foreboding and unease rushing threateningly towards her like thunderclouds in a summer sky—menacing, obscuring, gathering on the horizon.
It just wasn’t possible that she had been wrong about Kyle. She couldn’t have been. She knew that. All that rubbish he had mouthed about needing love and commitment, about finding sex empty and meaningless without them—it was just a clever way of tricking a woman into lowering her defences; she hadn’t been wrong about that. She couldn’t have been. Her whole body was trembling now, fear invading her like a black miasma. But fear of what?
She remembered how badly her body had ached after Kyle had left her, how she had woken at dawn with it still aching and shreds of misery-inducing dreams still lingering painfully in her mind—dreams from her childhood in which she had been left abandoned and fearful, knowing that she had done something dreadfully wrong as she cried out after the angry, disapproving faces of the adults around her, who ignored her pleas for them to remain, turning instead to leave her...to punish her.
She had rationalised her feelings, of course: her aching body had quite simply been the result of sexual frustration. It had, after all, been a long time since she had last had any sexual satisfaction and she had never been embarrassed or ashamed about acknowledging her body’s needs before, she had reminded herself angrily, so why should she be so now, just because it was Kyle who had aroused her? And as for her dreams... Well the cause of those had quite obviously been the letter that she had received from her father.
She still hadn’t replied to it; the letter itself had disappeared and although she couldn’t actually remember doing so she imagined that she must have thrown it away. She would have to acknowledge it, of course, and with the formal ‘regrets’ card and a wedding-gift cheque—after all, she already knew, didn’t she, that her money would be far more welcome than her actual presence? It was just as well that the rest of her commissions had gone so well recently, she decided tiredly as she turned the car around and headed for home.
