AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Coffee would be perfect,’ he drawled in Italian, and allowed the corners of his mouth to lift in a smile which made the woman’s eyes dilate with undisguised pleasure.
And he sank down into the comfort of the First Class lounge, while the stewardess fussed round him like a hen.
After he had gone, Kate behaved like a woman bereaved—not wailing or crying, but going from room to room to try to hang on to what she had left of him before it disappeared forever.
The scent of him on her pillow, and on the towel which she fished out of the laundry basket. Even his half-drunk cup of coffee she foolishly felt like preserving. But soon the pillowcase and the towel would go into the washing machine, and the cup in the dishwasher and then there would be no trace at all left of him—save the red roses he had bought her last week, and which were already beginning to wilt.
She buried her face in the flowers. Their bloom was fast-fading but the petals were still velvety-soft, and there remained the last sweet, lingering trace of scent. She breathed in deeply, as though that could bring new life to her, but the pleasure she gained was only fleeting, and she wondered how long the dull ache in her heart would last.
She sat staring at the bouquet for a long, long time, and only when she thought that the threat of wayward tears was safely at bay did she pick up the telephone to speak to her sister.
‘Hello?’
‘Kate?’ Her sister’s voice immediately filled with concern. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said, in an odd, flat voice which didn’t sound like her voice at all. ‘He’s gone.’
‘I’m on my way up!’ said her sister grimly.
Determinedly Kate stripped the bed while she waited for her sister, and assigned all the temptations of the dirty linen to the laundry basket—because what good would it do her to mope around after him and keep reminding herself of him? That would have only served a purpose if he was coming back.
And he wasn’t.
When Lucy arrived, she frowned. ‘Are you OK?’ The frown deepened. ‘Stupid question. Of course you’re not OK.’
Kate bit her teeth into her bottom lip. ‘Is it too early for wine, do you think?’ she asked huskily.
‘Nope! In fact you look as though you could use a drink,’ said Lucy and followed her out into the kitchen. ‘So tell,’ she said, still in that same grim voice, ‘just what your Sicilian stud had to say for himself before he left!’
‘Please don’t call him that,’ said Kate crossly as she took a bottle of white wine from the fridge and pulled the cork out.
Lucy glared. ‘Still protecting him, are you, Kate—even though he’s treated you like a concubine for the past fortnight?’
Kate shook her head. ‘He has treated me beautifully over the past fortnight,’ she defended, her voice softening with memory. ‘And I walked into it with my eyes wide open. I wanted it just as much as he did.’
‘Well, I hope it was worth it,’ said Lucy, accepting the proffered glass.
Kate sipped and thought about it. Had it been? ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘All I know is that I couldn’t resist it—him—at the time, and yet it wasn’t enough to carry on with.’
‘But you weren’t given that option, were you?’
Kate gave a small, rather bitter laugh. ‘Actually, I was. Giovanni offered to carry on the affair—with him taking the occasional trip to England and us making a weekend of it.’
‘The bastard!’
Kate shrugged. ‘Not really; you can’t blame him for trying—’
‘Kate, will you stop being so damned understanding?’
Kate put her glass down with a shaking hand and turned to look at her sister with tears threatening to spill out of her eyes. ‘What alternative do I have?’ she whispered. ‘At least this way I can remember it with fondness. If I call him every name under the sun—won’t that just make everything that we shared seem worthless?’
Lucy shot her a look of understanding. ‘You seem to really like him.’
Kate shook her head. ‘I don’t know if like is a word you would use in connection with Giovanni—he isn’t a man it’s easy to get close to. I don’t know if there’s a word in the dictionary to describe the way I feel about him.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, why didn’t you plump for what he was offering you?’
Kate bit her lip. It wouldn’t make sense if she told her sister he would lose all respect for her if she opted for the continuation of the affair—because Lucy probably thought that Giovanni had zero respect for her anyway. And she couldn’t blame her. Viewed from the outside, she must look like the world’s biggest fool—letting a man like that into her home and her life and her heart on a purely temporary basis.
