All she had to do was tell them she’d bottled the scent of the Highlands, capturing its very essence. Craveable luxury and Scottish authenticity in a bottle.
She touched her fingers to the thin leather bow around the bottle’s neck, just below its round glass stopper. Freshly cut leather, the scent of Murray’s beaten-up biker jacket. The entirety of her Scottish experience refined into something she could hold in her hands, anoint her body with, sink into.
Hiding the bottle from the execs’ prying eyes, she pulled the stopper out. The wave of scent hit her fully and the room spun around her. She heard the fires crackle and spark in the willow craft school, she tasted the whisky in the clan chief’s chamber and felt it burn her throat, and she relived the sensation of tramping the wet, white shards on the coral beach where the air pockets inside the slippery seaweed popped beneath her feet as she trod upon them, and she missed – no, she craved – the whole place and everything about it, and, most of all, she craved Murray who she hadn’t even said goodbye to. The man who’d tried so hard to save her career, who’d biked her all over the coast to gather materials and ingredients for their coral beach fragrance, the person who’d brought together their collective, their little gang of makers.
Even if he loved this Polly, even if he’d been running away from her and now they were reunited, she still wanted to save whatever was left of their collaboration, of their friendship. That would just have to be enough. If she couldn’t have the whole of him, she’d take the essence.
She’d take his kindness and the way he saw her and not just the exhausting chameleon performance she’d perfected over the years. She’d take that and a great big dose of longing and heartache any day of the week if it meant she got to talk with him now and again, and if it meant they could keep working together. It wouldn’t matter if it still hurt like it did now. She just wanted him close.
She stoppered the bottle. Her eyes snapped to the board members. ‘I’m sorry… I can’t. You asked me to prove my worth. I think I’ve done that, and not just on this trip, but over the last three years.’ She replaced the bottle inside the box and covered it with the lid, gathering it protectively under her arm. ‘I don’t have anything here that you would value.’
‘Where are you going?’ Luke said, standing up, his eyes firmly on the box under her arm.
‘I’m going home,’ she said.
Chapter Thirty-six
Time to Talk
Ruth had been pacing the floor of the Princess room all afternoon. A second day had passed when Mark had disappeared before breakfast having told her he didn’t have any specific plans for the day. He’d kissed her on the lips, told her to enjoy her cooking class, and wandered out of the inn.
Rain had fallen steadily all day and Ruth hadn’t had any appetite for lunch. She’d tried phoning her husband’s mobile and had been told her call couldn’t be connected four times before she gave up.
So she paced and fretted, wondering if, when confronted, he’d tell her straight or whether he’d try to wheedle his way out of it. Would he lie? It would be worse if he lied. She tried to imagine him saying it; he didn’t love her, he was sleeping with someone else, he was leaving.
The thought of being abandoned after everything she’d done for him and his children made her heart heavy with sorrow, and yet she was angry too. Angry that she’d given him everything she had to give and kept so little for herself for so long, and now that she was ready for the knacker’s yard, he had found some other woman. He must have!
Who could it be? She tortured herself picturing the mysterious woman. There was that membership secretary from the golf club, the one with the lipstick on her teeth, Jean, or possibly June something or other? Ruth had thought she was pleasant to talk to at the Christmas dos, but you would be, wouldn’t you, if you were barefaced shagging someone else’s husband? You’d have to be nice when confronted with the wife.
There was always Mark’s accountant, of course, Mrs Dorkins. Brown bobbed hair, Peter Pan collars. She didn’t look the type for extra-marital nonsense in her neat little office over the chippy on the high street, but they never do, do they?
She’d read an article once that said men are more likely to cheat with women who are the polar opposite of their wife. Yes, it could be her.
She knew she was really reaching when she started imagining which of her own friends it might be. Maybe they were all at it, like some great sordid wife swap. Their little corner of rural Yorkshire might be rife with it.
Ruth was getting exercised now, and very, very hot. She threw the windows open, then drank two glasses of tap water one after the other.
Men who cheat give themselves away though, don’t they? They suddenly get interested in buying their own underwear for the first time in their entire life, or they start swanning around like aTop Gearpresenter in double denim and aviators at the age of fifty-nine. Mark hadn’t done any of that. He plodded around wearing the clothes she always bought for him, having his hair cut at appointments she made for him, driving the same old Jag he’d had for eighteen years now, washing and waxing it every Saturday morning even when it was raining. He hadn’t really changed at all.
Ruth looked in the bevelled mirror on its stand by the bath in the corner. She’d changed, that was for sure. Short-sighted, red-cheeked, elasticated waists, big knickers, night sweats, and the menopausal rage that sneaked up on her at stupid times and, now and again, sent her frothing with fury at the cold callers who’d bother her at home when she just wanted to get on with the ironing and watchingMidsomer Murders.
Worse than the rage, her hormones would send her into awful patterns of sleepless nights where she’d grip the bedsheets and whip herself up into panting anguish at the thought of her son in danger overseas, or driving too fast, or vulnerable and too trusting in their own home. They needed her and she wasn’t there to help them.
On nights like that she couldn’t talk herself down so she’d get up and mope around in the dark, drinking tea at four a.m. and trying not to look at the frames on the walls where her baby boys grinned gummily, or waved at her on their first day of school with grey shorts and skinny white legs, beaming and holding hands because they were going on an adventure together like big boys, and she couldn’t face the snaps taken in the garden by the flowerbeds or at Filey or Scarborough on summer holidays when they were small enough to clamber on her lap and squash their faces against hers as though they wouldn’t be satisfied until they were under her skin, as though their hearts might burst they loved her so much.
She’d changed all right. She’d become a tired, cross, bored woman, irrational with creeping night-time fears and weepy with daytime hormone and sugar crashes.
She turned away from the mirror to stand by the window. Three years and six GPs it had taken to find one who’d take her seriously and prescribe her the right tablets and creams. Maybe the prescriptions had come too late when she could lose herself in panic like this? Maybe she’d lost the plot completely and no amount of long baths, Radio Four and HRT could bring her back from the brink? Was it any wonder Mark had gone AWOL on their first holiday alone together since before the twins?
She caught sight of him out of the window then. Mark, walking – no,running– through the rain under the street lamps towards the inn, and behind him followed that daft inn dog, Echo, barking and wagging his tail. He hadn’t taken an umbrella and was, most likely, as drenched as that dog. She was glad she’d bought Mark that waterproof jacket. No, actually, she was furious she’d had to select a winter coat for a grown man who must be perfectly capable of deciding when his old coat’s knackered and needs trading in, if he’s capable of realising his wife is.
Her legs carried her of their own volition, a wave of pure anger and emotion whisking her out of the room and down the stairs. He wasn’t setting foot in their bedroom. They’d talk downstairs in the bar, away from the fire preferably, and where there was a supply of Gordon’s and tonic in easy reach.
She was going to confront him. She was going to get it all out tonight. All her cards on the table. All the unsaid stuff.
Holding hands, compliments and kissing – they could still do all that stuff just fine, it turned out, but they didn’t mean a thing when she still felt like this.
She waited, breathless and shaking at the foot of the stairs, rubbing her hands over her face, shoving her damp hair back – even though it just spiked straight up with the body heat she was generating – and she went to meet him.
