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She would never forget him but eventually the terrible pain would leave her. The scar tissue on her heart would grow hard, letting her get on with her career because that was all she had, with never a hint that she had once been capable of any kind of emotion.
And she knew what she had to do to get the process started.
She wiped the moisture from her cheeks with fingers still sticky from the paintbrush and said with a calmness that belied all the anguished turmoil inside her, ‘You can go now. I’m fine. I don’t know why I passed out.’ She gave the hint of a tight, impersonal smile, a small hike of one shoulder. ‘It’s not something I’ve done before. Probably down to the paint fumes.’
And being unable to eat, nor sleep; and seeing him again, coupled with the brief resurrection of hope and it’s inevitable demise. But she certainly wasn’t going to mention that.
‘Then, perhaps we should open some windows.’ And he moved around the flat, doing just that. Caroline got wearily to her feet. When he’d finished he’d leave, nothing surer than that. Her legs felt unsteady and she had to hang onto the door frame when she’d tracked him down in the kitchen.
Please go, she whimpered, in her mind. I need to start the long, slow, agonisingly painful process of getting over you again.
He was taking in the frantic muddle: the opened tins of paint; emulsion brushes soaking in her stainless-steel washing-up bowl; the ones used for gloss paint standing up to their necks in white spirits; the old dusters she’d used to wipe up all the splodges she’d made screwed up on the floor. And the pizza she’d ordered ages ago and hadn’t been able to eat because just looking at it had turned her stomach.
‘When we met again, that evening, I would have staked my last penny against you ever deigning to get your pretty white hands dirty.’
Which was why he’d taken one look at her, her make-up a perfect mask, not a hair out of place, her designer suit a statement of her status as a cool, efficient career lady, and had sent her to grovel in the dust of the Langley Hayes attics, she thought with a reluctant inner salute for his ability to cut her down to size.
Caroline merely shrugged. It seemed to take the last scrap of energy remaining to her, but she managed to say, ‘You can go now.’
Ben ignored her. He turned his back on her, filled the kettle and plugged it in, searching for mugs and tea bags. There was no milk, just a curdled couple of inches in the bottom of a carton. He tossed it into the pedal bin. ‘Empty fridge, an untouched pizza wearing a mouldy wig—you certainly know how to look after yourself.’
He moved aside a pile of old newspapers, a roll of masking tape, the ancient pizza, and put two mugs of milkless tea on the small square table. Pulling out two chairs he ordered, ‘Sit.’
She complied because it seemed easier than arguing, but she told him, ‘There’s no need for you to do this—make tea, hang around. I can look after myself.’
‘Obviously!’ His tone was dry. Then, his voice lower, gruffer, he admitted, ‘I don’t like to see you like this—washed out, exhausted.’
His words made her heart contract and twist, but she wasn’t going to let herself read anything into them that wasn’t there. Lifting her mug in both hands she took a sip of the strong, hot brew and then another, and felt for the first time since he’d walked in on her just a fraction more than half-alive.
Revived enough, she asked the question that had been lodged in the back of her mind. ‘Who is the father of Maggie Pope’s daughter? Did she tell you?’
‘You’ve already decided I am,’ he reminded her brusquely and pushed his mug to one side with an expression of deep distaste. Whether for the milkless tea or for her, she didn’t know. The latter, she supposed.
‘No.’ Her mug had left a damp circle on the surface of the table. She rubbed at it with her forefinger. ‘Not now, not after you told me what she’d said, that Dad had paid her to tell that lie. I do admit,’ she went on tiredly, ‘to believing her twelve years ago, and going
on believing her. When he—my father, that is—said he’d given you money to go away and stay away, I couldn’t believe it, not of you. I thought you really loved me, the way I loved you.’
A final rub with the heel of her hand and the ring of moisture disappeared. ‘Then, of course, came the final blow. He suggested I ask Maggie who had fathered her child. Maybe I shouldn’t have done, but think what it was like—I was only seventeen, all churned up emotionally. You’d disappeared, Dad had planted those doubts in my mind. I had to know. Well, you know what she said, and why she said it. She was very convincing.’
Caroline lifted her eyes to find Ben watching her, his burning gaze roving over her face. She felt the muscles in her shoulders relax. Even if he had no strong feelings for her now because her lack of trust had killed them stone dead, it felt good to get it all off her chest.
She pulled in a deep breath. ‘That awful day—when I’d said I couldn’t marry you because I couldn’t trust you—after you drove away I went to see Maggie and get the truth out of her. The real truth,’ she stressed. ‘You’d told me to listen to my heart, do you remember? And I did. My heart told me you’d been telling the truth, that you were nowhere near callous enough to betray anyone. The only question was, why had Maggie lied? I was going to drag the truth out of her. But it started to pour with rain and I sheltered at Dorothy’s. We saw the three of you. Maggie, you and the child. Dorothy was looking at you and talking about the child’s father, talking as if I knew him.’
‘And that put me back in the frame?’
‘Not entirely.’ She shook her head. ‘I went back to the house to wait for you. Michael had phoned, he was in the area, and was to drive me back. I knew we didn’t have much time, I knew we had to talk, and I knew—’ she met his eyes, willing him to believe her, ‘—that I would believe, implicitly, whatever you told me. You were still angry, but you did say we’d talk before I had to leave. But you’d gone when I came down after changing.’
For long, aching minutes he didn’t respond, the silence putting her nerve ends on the rack. She stood up jerkily, clearing the mugs for something to do to end this nail-biting stasis and Ben shot to his feet.
Caroline’s teeth bit into her lower lip. He was leaving. Her garbled attempt at self-justification, apology, had cut no ice. But then, had she really expected it to, she thought wretchedly. She half turned away and Ben took the mugs from her clenched fingers, dumped them back on the table and pulled her round to face him.
‘Jeremy Curtis is Angela’s father. Presumably that was why Dorothy was talking as if you knew the man. That’s the drill when it comes to serious village gossip—name no names. Simply imply. Don’t run the risk of being sued for defamation of character.’
Jeremy? Oh, sweet heavens above! He’d been having an affair with the unsuitable Maggie while her father and his had been planning her own marriage to the Curtis fortune! Jeremy would have gone along with it because she, Caroline, was suitable-wife material and poor Maggie wasn’t. It might have been funny if the consequences hadn’t been so devastating.
The hands that had gripped her upper arms gentled. His thumbs stroked her skin beneath the sleeves of her T-shirt, hypnotic, holding her immobile, her power of speech wiped out by the hot pressure of emotion building up around her heart.
‘It was a shock when I saw you were getting ready to leave, presumably without hanging around long enough to say goodbye,’ Ben admitted rawly. ‘I’d finally got the truth out of Maggie and I was determined to get you to accept it, trust me enough to be my wife. But I left because I couldn’t bear listening to young Weinberg for a moment longer. The things he was saying did my head in. I would have smashed his teeth through the back of his neck if I’d stayed,’ he said roughly.
