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She spent the next few weeks lying low. She wore nondescript clothes and no make-up and kept her eyes down when she went out. As she had intended—no one recognised her. If you were a good actress, then no one should. It was more than just appearance. You could slope your shoulders and make your body language as low-key as possible.
She knew she ought to start trying to rebuild her life as a single woman, but her high-profile marriage had affected the way people saw her. She was famous now—and that had a knock-on effect on everything she did. She could no longer have normal friendships, because people wanted to know her for all kinds of different reasons. These days their motives had to be scrutinised, and Jennifer hated that. Fame separated you—left you lonely and isolated.
And going back wasn’t easy. There were people she had been at drama school with, but she hadn’t seen them for years. She’d just been so busy, with film after film, and she’d been living on the other side of the world. Fame and money changed your life—no matter how much you swore they weren’t going to.
And then, before she could relaunch herself on the world, she began to feel peculiar. From being full of energy, she found that she could hardly drag herself out of bed in the mornings.
And her appetite increased. When she’d first met Matt she’d had the normal rounded body of a healthy young woman, but he’d taken her to Hollywood and she had realised that wasn’t good enough. It was stick-thin or nothing. She had trained her appetite to be satisfied with sparrow-like portions, but suddenly they were no longer enough.
Now she found that she simply couldn’t control her hunger, and it was scary to find herself wolfing down a bowl of porridge for breakfast every morning—and covering it with golden syrup!
She blamed the syrup for the nagging tightness of her jeans. But even when she cut out the syrup and dragged herself down to the exclusive gym in the basement of the apartment complex there was no marked improvement. In fact, quite the contrary.
When it hit her, she realized she’d been very stupid. She wasn’t comfort-eating at all. But of course she had denied it—as she expected women who’d taken risks had done ever since the beginning of time.
Except she hadn’t taken any risks!
Telling herself it was hysteria, she upped her sessions at the gym and began to wear more forgiving trousers.
But there came a day when her warped kind of logic refused to be heard any more. And that was the day she sent her cleaning lady out to buy a pregnancy testing kit.
She didn’t really need to sit and wait to see whether a blue line would develop. She had known for weeks and weeks what the result would be.
Jennifer sat down on one of the sofas and buried her head in her hands. In that moment she had never felt more lost or more alone. But it wasn’t as though she was going to waste time worrying about what she was going to do.
There was only one thing she could do.
She kept putting it off. And meanwhile time was ticking away. Her shape was changing and the appetite which had consumed her had now deserted her. Maybe that was a blessing in disguise—because she didn’t dare venture out to the local stores. Thank God for online shopping.
But she couldn’t put off telling Matt for ever—and one morning, when the bright blue of the early-autumn sky seemed unbearably poignant, she hunted down her phone and found Matteo’s programmed-in number. It rang for a while before he picked up, and his voice was wary in a way she had never heard it sound before. That in itself was a shock—the thought that Matteo was moving on, changing and growing and leaving her behind, while she remained stuck firmly in the groove of the past.
‘Jennifer?’ he said slowly. ‘This is very unexpected.’
Was it really? Didn’t it occur to him that she might want to discuss what had happened between them in France? Unless the caution in his voice was there for a more pragmatic reason—because she was disturbing him in the middle of…
Her words came out as if someone was strangling her. ‘Can you…?’ She swallowed. ‘Is it all right for you to talk?’
He frowned. ‘Sure.’
He wasn’t giving her any kind of help—but then, why should he? She was the one who had instigated this conversation, and soon all his ties with her would be severed completely. She bit her lip. Except that they wouldn’t. Not now.
‘Matteo, I have to see you.’
His voice hardened. ‘No, Jenny.’
The room swayed. ‘No?’
‘There isn’t any point.’
Jennifer felt the blood drain from her face as she realised that she had put herself in a position to be rejected. And that only increased her pain. ‘Matt, you don’t understand—’
‘Oh, but I do—believe me, I do. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’ More than he’d wanted to. More than he could bear to. Matteo closed his eyes, wishing that he could blot out the memory of her legs laced tightly around his waist while he thrust deep inside her. Or—even more poignant—the memory of her blonde hair spread all over his pillow in Cannes. But their frantic coupling had been nothing but a mockery of a simple and tender intimacy which was gone for ever. Well, he would tolerate it—but he would not be used as some kind of stud to satisfy his ex-wife’s sexual needs!
He kept his voice terse. ‘What happened between us proved that we’re still sexually compatible. That’s all. Nothing more. That’s not enough basis for a relationship—and it would destroy even the memory of what we once had.’
In her outrage and her shame Jennifer nearly dropped the phone. He thought she was ringing him in order to get him back! He thought she was begging him to come back into her life! Trying to resurrect a relationship that was dead!
She wanted to hurl the phone hard against the wall—to finish this conversation and all future conversations with the arrogant and egotistical bastard in the most satisfyingly violent way possible.
